Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Like, in that meeting the other day. The way people were looking at you, Violet. The way they were listening to you. I don’t have that.”

I smiled, gently. “That’s not because they like me. That’s because they respect me.”

“Well, fine,” she said. Irritation crept into her voice. “Whatever.”

The waiter placed our food before us. Stella cut into her omelet, and I twirled the pasta around my fork. The smoky pancetta, the rich coating of egg. It was overpriced and unoriginal, but it tasted good. It tasted great, in fact. I took a deep breath. Even with Stella at KCN, maybe everything would be okay.

“It took me a long time to get there,” I said. “And, you know, it’s still not exactly easy. I’m still not sure if I’m actually any good at this.”

“What do you mean?” Stella said.

“I keep striking out,” I said. “They haven’t liked any of my pitches. Not a single one. I don’t know if I’ll ever manage to get an idea through.”

“Well, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

I laughed, confused. “What?”

“It’s obvious they think you’re smart,” Stella said, pointing at me with her fork. “So what if they haven’t liked your ideas? They’ll like the next one. Or the one after that.”

“You don’t know that.”

“But that’s the way the system works, isn’t it? Or, what, do you think every producer above you has some magical special talent that you don’t have?” Stella reached her fork across the table and twisted pasta around it. “I’m planning to eat at least half of this,” she said. “Carbs don’t count when they’re on someone else’s plate, right?”

Partway through the meal, Stella spotted a friend. They air-kissed and traded pleasantries, and the whole time, Stella looked radiantly beautiful. Her hair in the perfect messy bun, her smile relaxed and confident. The thorny romance, the insecurities we’d just been talking about: none of that was visible. For Stella, a restaurant like this was a clubhouse. It was a place to be among her own kind, but that also meant she couldn’t show a single crack. These people would notice.

It was places like this, this stretch of Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side, that made me keenly aware of how different our lives were. Restaurants served food that was too expensive for anyone but the one percent. Stores sold goods that theoretically served a practical purpose—baby clothes, candles, bed linens—but wealthy shoppers insensitive to price had caused these objects to attenuate into pure signals of luxury. Walking to the restaurant, we had passed stores selling leather jackets for toddlers, sheets too delicate to sleep on. There was one time my mother came home with a new handbag, and when my father found out what it cost, he went ballistic. “You spent fifty dollars on a bag? A goddamn bag? ” he sputtered, right before she slammed the bedroom door in his face. At the boutique across the street, handbags started at seven thousand dollars.

So how was it possible, the two of us coming from such different worlds, that Stella often had exactly the right answers to my questions? That’s the way the system works. It was a key slipped right into a lock. This was her strange intelligence. Stella tended to be terrible with the details. But, maybe as a result, she saw other things. She saw the connections that the rest of us missed.

The next week, Stella came by my desk with a paper in hand, looking worried. I was on a phone call, taking hasty notes. After several seconds of my ignoring her, she waved the paper at me. “Hello? Violet?”

Jamie sprang to his feet. I half listened as he said, “She’s busy. What’s up?”

“Oh,” Stella said. “The archive. Do you know how to use it?”

“I think I can remember,” Jamie said. “Show me what you need.”

Last week, when I’d snapped— you want to take a turn helping her? Be my guest —I hadn’t meant for Jamie to take the suggestion literally. After hanging up, I watched the two of them across the newsroom: Stella at her computer, Jamie standing behind her, pointing over her shoulder. Jamie was a senior producer, and therefore way too valuable to spend time teaching an intern the ropes. But he was also a nice guy, and he genuinely liked helping people.

“Jamie,” I said, walking over to Stella’s desk. The two of them looked at me in unison. “I can help her with this. You don’t have to.”

“I got this,” he said. “I needed a break, anyways.”

“And you’re a good teacher,” Stella said, twisting in her seat to look up at him.

“Um, okay,” I said. They looked so cozy, Stella pleased to have his attention. “Don’t forget we have that meeting in ten minutes. Eliza wants new pitches from everyone.”

“I’m finally getting somewhere on that Medal of Honor story,” Jamie said.

“The guy whose brother defected to Russia?”

“Two brothers, working for two enemies. Can’t you see the movie already?”

“This sounds interesting,” Stella said. “Can I come?”

“Sorry,” I said. “It’s for producers only.”

Her eyebrows arched. The hardness in my voice caught both of us by surprise.

“You can come,” Jamie said, and then he looked at me. “What? She can come. I need help on this story, anyway. It’s going to take a lot of legwork. You’re okay with that?”

“Of course!” Stella said.

“Well, good. Then you should be in the room when I tell Eliza about it.”

Later, after the meeting ended and Jamie and I returned to our desks, Jamie said, “It’s nothing I didn’t do for you, too, you know. I brought you along to those high-level meetings, back when you were an intern. Don’t you remember?”

“That was different.”

“Why?”

“Because I take this job seriously.”

“And she doesn’t?”

I thought about Stella sipping her cappuccino, kidding-but-not-kidding about her early retirement. “How about this? Ten bucks says she’s not working here at this time next year.”

Jamie shook my hand. “You’re on.”

“You seem awfully confident,” I said.

“I’m imagining how I’m going to spend that money.”

Stella was now across the room, talking to a male assistant who, like most of the guys at Frontline, had an obvious crush on her. She leaned back against his desk, her long legs emphasized by her heeled boots and short dress. He propped his feet on his desk. The two of them were laughing, indifferent to the mounting chaos that occurred every afternoon as we approached airtime. Our show was a well-oiled machine, and it was impossible that this machine wouldn’t chew her up and spit her out. “What are you seeing that I’m not?” I said.

Jamie glanced up from his computer and followed my gaze. “I’m seeing the exact same thing as you,” he said. “I’m just more realistic about it.”

SO MUCH OF the first two years of climbing the ladder in cable news was simply about surviving. The elimination burned slowly but consistently. I was the only person who remained from my class of interns. Most of the old assistants were gone, too. The ranks thinned as one moved up. There were fewer producers than assistants, and fewer senior producers than producers, and at the very top there were just two people: Rebecca, the star, and Eliza, the executive producer.

Climbing that ladder, I began to have a sense of my strengths and weaknesses. What I was good at: I was detail-oriented, thorough, consistent, reliable. My assignments got more interesting because I was trusted to carry them out. What I was okay at: I was still shy about networking and developing sources. It took a delicate touch, and more than anything, it took time. Jamie always reminded me of this. Trust was our currency with sources, and to gain that trust, you needed to put in the time. Weeks and months, not minutes and hours.