Anna Pitoniak - Necessary People

That fall turned into a long, dark, trudging winter. January, February, March. I bought earplugs so I could sleep through the night without hearing them. I wondered if it would be better to leave—find a new city, a new industry, or at least a new apartment, where I wasn’t constantly in the shadow of Stella Bradley. But at the same time, I was doing well at KCN. I got a raise, and then another. With my cheap rent, I was saving plenty of money. Rebecca and Eliza gave me more responsibility. They liked my pitches. I had that news instinct, they said. I loved the work.

And what was the issue, anyway? Why couldn’t we both succeed? I had no desire to be on camera. I had no desire to date Jamie Richter. So what was it to me if Stella succeeded in those arenas? But any attempt to be happy for her was an intellectual exercise. And there was no one to talk to about this, because I had lost my two closest friends to each other.

Rebuffing Jamie had been easy for me, because what he was offering—love, affection—didn’t seem necessary. But that’s because I already had love—I had it from Stella. It was such a given that I didn’t even think about it. Not until Stella and Jamie started dating did I realize the comfortable assumption that had formed my bedrock for so long: Stella wasn’t the type to settle down with a man, and I was too busy with work to meet anyone. It was perfect. It would be just the two of us; we were all the other person needed.

Now, that assumption was smashed to pieces. The resentment was suffocating. I mean this literally: muscles clenched behind my breastbone, making it difficult to breathe and drink and swallow. And along with this I felt guilty, too. Why couldn’t I be a better friend? Wasn’t that what friends were supposed to do—support one another, love one another, take pride in one another?

There was this economics class I’d taken in college. One day, we learned about the concept of a zero-sum game. “Of course,” the professor said, standing at the front of the room, “not every situation is zero sum. Most situations aren’t. The real world is infinitely more complex than this abstraction. And the more complexity there is, the less likely it is that zero sum obtains.”

That lecture lodged in my memory: the dusty chalkboard, the professor in her black sweater and gray slacks. She was pretty, young, on the tenure track. A diamond ring glittered on her left hand as she paced back and forth across the front of the room. But what I remember most was walking out of that classroom and thinking: she doesn’t get it. Of course the world is zero sum. Every gain demands a loss. The loser may not be aware that she is a loser. But the loss will reveal itself at some point. This pretty young professor was the type of woman to bake cookies for faculty meetings, to write thank-you notes after dinner parties. The type to believe that she didn’t have to be like the other guys—selfish, cutthroat—in order to get ahead. That there was such a thing as a win-win, as a rising tide.

I looked her up online after graduating. She had been denied tenure.

During the broadcast one night in mid-May of that year, my phone buzzed.

It was over two years ago, during that week between Christmas and New Year’s, that I had first read the Danner Pharmaceutical story. None of the employees had been willing to talk at length, but I’d kept in touch with one person: Darla, a former cafeteria worker. She was the kind of sweet older woman who you worried scam artists might rip off. She texted me pictures of her dogs and grandchildren. “It’s like buying lottery tickets,” Jamie said once. “You cultivate sources. Most of them go nowhere. But hey, sometimes you hit it big.”

I read and reread the text from Darla. Then I called her after the broadcast wrapped.

“And he’s not worried about getting sued, like you were?” I asked.

“Oh, honey, of course he’s worried about that. But he’s so young.” Darla coughed wheezily. She was prone to seasonal allergies. “He’s got a lifetime to pay back legal bills. Not like me. This debt is following me to the grave.”

“Don’t say that, Darla,” I said. “You’ve got plenty of time left.”

“George always stood in my line at the cafeteria, even when the other lines were shorter. He’s a good boy, Violet. You’ll talk to him, won’t you?”

“Of course. If that’s what he wants.”

“He needs to get it off his chest. That’s what he said to me. He said, ‘Darla, I need to get this off my chest. I can barely stand it anymore.’”

“And this thing he needs to talk about—this is what got you in trouble, too?”

Darla was silent. I could hear the faint sound of her breathing, in and out.

“Fair enough,” I said. “I’ll call him right now.”

The next night, I met George at a bar several blocks away from the KCN radius. I spotted him at the bar—brown hair and blue tie, as he’d described—and he sprang up when he saw me approaching.

“Thank you for meeting me,” George said, pumping my hand eagerly. Darla had said he worked in sales at Danner.

“I’m glad we’re getting the chance to talk,” I said, taking the stool next to him.

“What are you drinking?” He waved at the bartender. There was a nearly empty wineglass at his elbow. “This chardonnay is good. Are you a chardonnay fan?”

“Just a club soda, actually,” I said.

“Oh,” George said, his smile deflating slightly. “Sure. That works, too.”

George was good at small talk: sports, weather, television, what I was reading. Nearly thirty minutes passed, and he showed no signs of slowing his chatter. He’d probably remain in salesman mode all night if he could.

“George,” I said finally, interrupting his spirited analysis of last night’s Yankees game. “Darla said you had something you wanted to tell me.”

“Isn’t Darla the best? I remember this one time—”

“Look,” I said. “George. If you’re not ready, we can do this another night. I’ll just get the check and be on my way. Excuse me?” I started waving for the bartender.

“No—wait.” His smile disappeared. “I’m sorry. I’m a little nervous, I guess.”

“That’s understandable,” I said. “But tell you what. We’re off the record. I won’t even write this down. We’re just having a conversation for now, okay?”

He hesitated for a moment. Then he sighed. “I’m going to quit,” he said, his voice low and defensive, so different from his good-old-boy twang. “I am. It’s just that I have these student loans, and my mom needs the money—my dad’s out of the picture—and this job pays really well.”

He was quiet for a while. “There’s a but, isn’t there?” I prompted.

“But I can’t do it anymore,” he said.

“Can’t do what?”

“You know how pharma works,” he said. “Our customer isn’t really the customer. It’s the doctor. That’s who we’re selling to. We need them to write prescriptions for our drugs. So you’ve got guys like me, your district sales managers, to wine and dine the doctors. Tell them how great this new drug is, so they can tell their patients the same thing. That’s what the system hinges on. But guys like me—well, we weren’t getting the results that Danner wanted.”

George sat up a little straighter. “I went to Georgetown, you know. I majored in marketing. I’m good at my job. Danner used to pride themselves on their sales force. But suddenly the people they’re hiring—not so much. They laid off the guys I’d worked with and they replaced them with four very pretty girls. And do you know what else those girls had in common?”

I shook my head.

“My team—me and those four girls—we’d take a group of doctors out to dinner. It’s just business, right? Then we’d wind up at the hotel bar, have a few nightcaps. The numbers always worked out. After a while, each of the girls would lead a doctor upstairs. Two by two they left. They were former call girls. High-end. Slick. It felt totally natural. And then I’d wait in the hallway, in case anything happened. Do you know what that makes me, Violet?”