Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“Neither do you,” Stella said. “You have to tell me your secret. And, oh my goodness, I love your earrings. Where are they from?”

Ginny touched the diamonds dangling from her earlobes. The most remarkable thing about Stella’s charm wasn’t just the force of it; it was the way she turned it on from zero to sixty in a second flat. No one could have guessed her bad mood of moments ago.

After a while, Ginny noticed that I was hovering awkwardly. With a practiced smile, she turned to me. “Hello,” she said, extending her hand. “Are you a friend of Stella’s?”

A small part of my chest collapsed. A pinprick, air hissing out. Stella looked too amused to offer clarification. “Violet Trapp,” I said, keeping my head high and voice steady. “Actually, we’ve met before. I’m an associate producer at Frontline. ”

“Oh!” Ginny said. “Of course. Of course, you look very familiar. But you two are friends?” She touched Stella on the forearm. “What a small world.”

“Violet always makes her work at KCN sound so interesting,” Stella said. “Much more interesting than my job.”

“It’s a calling, really,” Ginny said, nodding.

“You know, I’ve been thinking,” Stella said. “Fashion has been fun, but it’s not really for me. I’ve been considering a career change. Maybe getting into news.”

“You have? ” I said, my hand jerking, nearly spilling my glass of wine.

“What a splendid idea!” Ginny clapped her hands. “Oh, you’d be perfect for it.”

Stella looked like a cat that ate not just one canary, but an entire cage of them. “Do you really think so?” she said in a saccharine voice, her eyes fixed on Ginny.

They spent most of the night sequestered in the corner, their heads tilted together. When the party ended, Stella slipped her arm through mine. As we rode the elevator down and hailed a cab on Fifth Avenue, she said, “Don’t be mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?” I said, but I closed the car door harder than I needed to.

“Don’t be like that. You should be flattered. You heard what I said.”

“Why haven’t you mentioned this before?”

She shrugged, muting the TV in the back of the cab. “It never came up.”

“That’s awfully convenient.”

“And,” she said. “You don’t exactly have the power to hire me.”

“ What? ”

“Ginny set it up. I have an interview on Monday. What should I wear?” She got a faraway look in her eye. “I should go shopping tomorrow.”

“Stella, this is crazy. Have you even thought about this?”

“Why can’t you be happy for me? This is fun. We’re going to work together!”

What I wanted to say was you don’t have the job yet. But that wasn’t really true. With Ginny as her backer, Stella’s hiring was basically guaranteed. The interview, the résumé, the references, it was just a paper trail. Plausible deniability against charges of nepotism.

“Aren’t you coming?” I said to Stella, when the cab stopped at our apartment.

“We’ll be making a second stop,” she said to the driver. “I’m meeting some friends downtown. Let’s have brunch or something tomorrow, though?”

“I’m busy,” I said, and this time I slammed the door before she could respond.

The alarm clock glowed red in the darkness. The raindrops struck the air conditioner in my window with a pinging pebble-like noise. I was too hot with the duvet, too cold without it. I couldn’t sleep. Eventually, around three thirty, I got up.

The apartment was dark, Stella’s bedroom empty. She often spent the night elsewhere, in the bachelor pads of the men she slept with, or with friends whose parents had housekeepers to cook them breakfast. I thought this was abnormal, but sometimes I wondered if I had it backwards. We lived in an elegant prewar building on one of the few quiet blocks between Union Square and Washington Square. It was some of the most expensive real estate in the world—and yet I rarely saw the other residents of our building. Passing through the lobby, it was often just me and the doorman. I’d never seen another person taking out the trash, carrying groceries, fumbling with keys. When I walked down our block at night, most of the windows were dark. The richest parts of Manhattan were emptier than they appeared.

In my childhood home, I’d hated the thin walls, the sound of my father snoring at night. My mother’s bleached hair collecting on the floor and clogging the shower drain. I’d hated how the kitchen was constantly infested with carpenter ants, and the bathroom was always damp, and cars backfired on the street outside. But too much quiet could be just as exhausting as too little.

When I was restless with insomnia, I liked to bake. Bread, cakes, cookies, anything. In those 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. hours, I could look at the clock on the oven and imagine that I was doing this for a reason. Rising early with the invisible fellowship of other bakers, so that the world could have their muffins and scones ready in time for breakfast.

That night, I made soda bread. I measured and mixed the ingredients, kneaded the stretchy dough, brushed the rounded loaf with milk. The waiting, the actual baking, was my favorite part. Here was the only thing I had to worry about: sitting on a stool in front of the warm oven, the timer ticking, watching to be sure the bread didn’t burn. Music playing in the background (Billie Holiday, that night), the dishwasher swishing quietly. Cooking was improvisational, but baking was precise and predictable. The sweet, life-giving scent of bread was a product of my own two hands. It was rare to feel this way—to stand still and enjoy it, for a minute.

Especially in New York, especially in this business, getting ahead was the cost of entry. Working was a way of being. Time not spent in pursuit of a larger ambition was time wasted. When asked whether I liked my job at KCN, I always said yes, but I thought, Why are you asking that question? Why is liking the metric? The job was both more than that and less than that. It wasn’t a source of peace and contentment, that was for sure. But it was my means of survival. It paid for rent and food and clothing. It propelled me further and further from the life I’d known before.

The timer went off, and I slid the loaf onto a rack to cool. There was the misery of having too little, but there was also the misery of living among those who believed there was no such thing as too much. Surely there was an in-between. If I were a different kind of person, maybe this could have been my life. Live in a village in the French countryside, apprentice with a local baker, eventually open my own B&B, where I’d bake bread to serve with soft cheese and wine, and keep bundles of lavender in every room. I’d learn to be content with the simple pleasures of life itself, not tortured by the notion that I wasn’t keeping up. This, by the way, is the fantasy of every person who has spent too many late nights at the office under buzzing fluorescent lights.

Perhaps Stella suffered from the inverse fantasy. She had spent the past year living the dreamy life of a glossy magazine. She stayed out late, she slept in, she met friends for languorous meals. She spent money like it was water, her bank account one small tributary that flowed into the coursing river of Manhattan commerce. Taxis, bottles of wine, bouquets of flowers, new dresses, new shoes, massages, facials, haircuts, highlights, spin classes. And those were just the basics. Her days were a chick-lit fantasy come alive.

A lot of my mental space was taken up by the slicing and dicing of my paycheck into rent and loan payments, groceries, occasional savings. But look how frictionless it was for Stella. Look at how much spare time she had to think. To let her mind wander. To plan her next move.