rebecca carter had two reputations: that within the industry, and that within our newsroom. Within the industry she was blazingly competitive, never hesitating to flatten anyone who got in the way of an exclusive sit-down or a big get. She was a shark, our competition at CNN and Fox said with suppressed admiration. As ambitious as they come. If securing an interview meant that Rebecca herself had to camp out in the front yard of a subject’s home, groveling and showing obeisance, she wouldn’t hesitate for a second. How else were you going to get the ratings?
But within our newsroom, she was like a mother hen. The lack of resentment she engendered was remarkable, because resentment seemed inevitable. She was a celebrity and a multimillionaire who attended state dinners and had appeared in Vogue. The rest of us were overworked and exhausted, pickling ourselves in sodium-rich takeout. But Rebecca knew how to prevent jealousy from taking root. When a senior producer was sleepless because of her colicky newborn, Rebecca hired her a night nurse. When someone’s parent or child or spouse was ill, Rebecca paid for the best medical care. When someone was burning out, Rebecca sent them on vacation to a lavish Caribbean resort and banned them from e-mail.
But this warm and fuzzy reputation wasn’t, in fact, a contradiction of the harder reputation. They went hand in hand. Rebecca’s generosity didn’t stem from some nurturing impulse. It was politics, plain and simple. She knew that, in order to win, she had to keep the proletariat on her side.
The best example of this came at Christmas, when Rebecca hosted a party for Frontline employees at her Park Avenue penthouse. Jamie told me that she gave each employee a personalized gift, hand-selected with their interests in mind. Rebecca’s assistant actually did the research and the shopping, but the fact that Rebecca beamingly played Santa Claus was what counted.
“This is what you learn when you work in TV long enough,” Jamie said, on yet another Friday night. Halfway through his second beer and he was getting philosophical. “It’s all manufactured. Even the serious stuff. You think 60 Minutes doesn’t use clever editing and camera angles to get their point across?”
“Oh no,” I said. “Jamie. Are you actually a conspiracy theorist? Are you about to tell me the moon landing was faked?”
“Well, why haven’t we gone back?” he said. Then he laughed. “No. Here’s what I mean. Even if the story is manufactured, even if it’s contrived a certain way, the reaction isn’t fake. If a viewer starts to cry, or laugh, or get angry—that emotion is real.”
“So we’re manipulating them? We’re tricking them into feeling something?”
“You have to make them feel something. Your goal can’t be pure verisimilitude. If you just served up the news with no editing or storytelling or tension, the viewer wouldn’t feel a thing. And that’s bad for them. That’s bad for the world.”
“Treat the news as advocacy. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Treat it as a story. Use the tools at your disposal. Viewers need us to make them care.”
I waved to the waitress, signaled for the check. “You ever think about writing this stuff down? Turn this into Journalism 101. Professor James Richter.”
“I’m selective about my students,” Jamie said. “Gotta make sure it’s worth it.”
On the night of Rebecca’s holiday party, a Saturday in December, Jamie texted to see if I wanted to head uptown together.
Sorry, no can do, I wrote back. Having a wardrobe emergency. Original, right?
Sounds dire. Want company and/or help? he wrote.
Sure, I wrote, then gave him the address and told the doorman to let him up.
My wardrobe could stretch through a workweek. Cotton dresses that didn’t require dry cleaning, layered with cardigans and tights in cold weather, scarves and accessories from thrift stores. But the invitation to the party had said “Dress Code: Festive” and there was nothing in my closet that came close to festive. I could show up in one of my Monday-to-Friday dresses, put on some red lipstick and dangly earrings, and that would be fine. But was it a crime that I wanted to feel pretty? This was another TV trick. You dress for the role. The outfit is part of the story. When Rebecca was interviewing strongman dictators, she wore tailored black suits. After a natural disaster, she was in khakis and field vests. With a teary-eyed widow, she wore pastels in soft textures. Tonight, I didn’t want to look like my regular self. I wanted to look like the person I was becoming.
In college, Stella let me borrow clothes, but only on her terms—these were her things, and she hated it when I didn’t ask in advance. There was no time for that now. If I texted her, how likely was she to respond? So I selected several options from her closet and laid them on the bed. Rich silks and velvets in jewel tones and elegant blacks, infinitely more beautiful than anything I owned. There was a plum-colored wrap dress with a subtle gold pattern that fit me well. In Stella’s en suite bathroom, I cranked up the shower and hung the dress from the rod to steam loose the wrinkles. I was considering her array of shoes and jewelry, humming to myself, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
“Fuck!” I said, jumping several inches.
Jamie raised his hands in apology. The shower had covered his footsteps. “Just your friendly neighborhood wardrobe consultant,” he said. “This is what you’re going with?”
I glanced down at my leggings and T-shirt. “Yes, Einstein,” I said.
“Is this your room?”
“My roommate. I’m raiding her closet.”
“That’s nice of her.” Jamie stuck his head in the closet. “Is she rich?”
I laughed. “Excuse me?”
“I’ve been in enough dressing rooms to know how much those cost.” He pointed at a pair of high heels with signature red soles. “More than any normal person can afford.”
“She is rich,” I said. “But I’m guessing the apartment tipped you off already.”
He smiled. “I like to give the benefit of the doubt.”
“I need another ten minutes,” I said. “There’s wine in the kitchen, if you want.”
The bathroom was steamy from the shower. I rubbed clear a circle in the fogged mirror and examined my reflection. The dress looked good on me. The wrap accentuated my waist, and the neckline plunged to just the right point, highlighted by the delicate gold necklace I’d found in Stella’s closet. I slipped into a pair of her nude pumps, and spritzed on her perfume for good measure. I felt like an entirely different person. I felt confident and attractive—and, at the same time, ashamed of my own vanity. Wasn’t it worrying, how much I’d grown to like these trappings? The clothing, the jewelry, the fancy parties?
Jamie was in the kitchen, leaning against the counter, a glass of wine in one hand and his phone in the other. Until this moment Jamie had only existed in the office, or extensions of the office. It was jarring—strangely and suddenly intimate, like his life had superimposed itself over mine. Jamie was, I realized, the only person I’d ever brought into the apartment.
He glanced up from his phone. “Looks good,” he said, giving me a thumbs-up, with no special affection. I felt a private relief: he’d come over as my friend, nothing more.
The elevator opened into the foyer of Rebecca’s apartment. It was a small room with colorful wallpaper, a gilt-edged mirror, an umbrella stand, a table holding a miniature Christmas tree. Through the front door I saw a much larger Christmas tree in the living room. It had to be at least ten feet fall.
The party was in full swing. There was a jazz trio, waiters with hors d’oeuvres on silver trays, a crowd at the bar. The living room was a long rectangle, with windows facing south toward the Midtown skyline. The décor was tasteful, the art expensive-looking. Everyone was dressed up and sipping carefully, mindful of the carpets and furniture, not yet buzzed enough to forget that this was the boss’s apartment.
The party had self-segregated by occupation. The camera guys and editors were over by the couches; the ladies from hair and makeup were laughing by the bar; the writers were huddled in a serious-looking conversation. Even the producers broke down into distinct groupings: the live producers, who tended to be extroverted and chatty; the field producers, who were adrenaline junkies with intricate war stories; and the tape producers, who had a hard streak of independence. The assistants were scattered throughout the party, identifiable by their timidity. By rights I should have been with them, but instead I stuck with Jamie.
Beneath the ornamented tree was a pile of wrapped boxes and gift bags. “Remind me what she got you last year?” I said.
“A first edition of The Sound and the Fury.”
I rolled my eyes. “Is that really your favorite book?”
“No,” he said, grinning. “But Light in August is.”
“Are you trying to impress me? Because it’s not working.”
“Liking Faulkner is a requirement if you’re from the South.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“Ironic, huh?” Jamie tilted his head. “Violet Trapp, always rejecting her roots. But isn’t Faulkner the one who said that the past isn’t dead, it isn’t even—”
“Hey, look at that!” I said, as a waiter walked by with a tray of pigs in a blanket. “Excuse me, sir? Could we please try those?”
“Nice save,” Jamie said.
“Can’t talk,” I mumbled through the crumbs. “Mouth full.”
A while later, I was ordering a drink at the bar when Rebecca appeared next to me. She was dressed like an off-duty Jackie Kennedy or Audrey Hepburn, barefoot in slim black pants and an oversized white sweater, hair pulled back in a bun. It was a power move. In a room of people wearing their best dresses and high heels, suits and ties, Rebecca’s unadorned beauty stood out.
“Your first holiday party,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Are you having a good time?”
“Yes! Thank you. Your apartment is beautiful.”
“I can’t bring myself to care about interior decorating. Eric did most of it. Where is he?” Rebecca started scanning the room, but then she stopped and frowned. “I hate the jazz trio. I truly hate them. We’ve hired them five years in a row, mostly out of pity. I think they’re getting worse. Do you like jazz?”
“I…I don’t really know.”
“Eric is always dragging me to these awful places in the West Village. He loves it and I have no idea why. Where is he?” She stood on her tiptoes, which wasn’t much help for a petite woman in a room full of high heels. “Eric! Come here.”
The man who appeared from the crowd was tall and lanky, with thick dark hair and matching eyebrows. Eric was a novelist, a literary man-about-town, often appearing on panels and giving talks at the 92nd Street Y. He and Rebecca had met as undergrads at Harvard and had been together ever since.
“This is Violet,” Rebecca said. “She’s new. She’s a star.”
I felt a flush of pride, an electric sense of self-possession. Although, just as quickly, it faded: Rebecca probably said this to everyone. Compliments were cheap. Why not toss a few bread crumbs from your balcony? Rebecca liked the reciprocal adoration that came with making other people feel good.
“Lovely to meet you, Violet,” Eric said, shaking my hand.
Rebecca touched my arm. “Excuse me. See that guy? He’s in charge of our budget for next year and he needs a little sweet-talking.”
Across the apartment, one of the KCN executives was about to leave when Rebecca blocked him from the door, prying his coat away and handing him a freshly procured drink. He obeyed, looking nervous, as she pushed him into a quiet corner of the dining room.
“The poor man,” Eric said. “He doesn’t stand a chance.”
I nodded, confused, and made some general noise of agreement.
“Apparently your corporate overlords want to keep a tighter leash on travel expenses,” Eric said. “But it’s hard to say no to Rebecca Carter. You must know that by now.”
“She’s very talented,” I said. “Well, obviously, yes, I don’t need to be telling you that. I meant—”
“They really ought to give them training,” Eric continued, ignoring me. “The way the CIA trains their officers to resist interrogation. Those poor men need some mental toughness. Otherwise it’s not a fair fight. She’ll get her way, and he’ll run tuck-tail back to the fortieth floor. Then they’ll have to fire him, and hire someone new. On and on the orchestra plays.”
“Um,” I said. “Yeah.”
We struggled through small talk for several minutes. I kept thinking Eric would find an excuse to end this painful conversation—didn’t he have other people he wanted to talk to? Finally, as a last resort, I said, “I read your piece in the Times last week. It was great. I thought it was such a brave stand to take.”
He smiled. No, he beamed. The op-ed had been completely forgettable. An argument for preserving the freedom of the novelist, as if there was some campaign being waged against it. But it worked. Eric lit up as he told me about the high-minded reason he had written it. Then, with growing animation, he started on the rumors and gossip of the literary world. By the time I finished my drink, Eric was laughing so hard he was wiping tears from his eyes. Rebecca returned, raising an eyebrow. “Are we having fun?” she said.
“Oh, Becky, this one’s a keeper,” Eric said, as if I was the source of his uproarious laughter for the last twenty minutes.
“Right,” she said. “I’m just going to borrow her for a minute, okay?”
Rebecca steered me toward the bar. “You’re a trouper,” she said. “Thanks for babysitting him. Pretty dress, by the way.”
“It wasn’t—he was so nice, it just—”
“Of course. He’s wonderful. I do love that man. But Jesus, can he talk. Have you read any of his books?”
“Well…no.” My cheeks reddened.
“Most people your age haven’t. He’s a little, let’s say, vintage. Had his only big hit over fifteen years ago. But his is the kind of business where you can dine out on one hit for a long time.” She laughed. “If only we had it so easy, right? We have to reinvent the wheel every single goddamn night.” Rebecca clinked her glass against mine. “Enjoy the rest of the party, Violet.”
Jamie and Eliza were across the room, near the windows. “I see you met Eric,” Eliza said. Her eyes twinkled with amusement. “And you’re still standing?”
“Remember last year?” Jamie said. “When he buttonholed that assistant?”
“His mistake,” Eliza said. “That kid should have known better.”
“What happened?” I said.
“He told Eric that realism in the novel was dead,” Jamie said. “Whatever that means.”
“And Eric spent the rest of the party jabbing his finger into this kid’s chest, telling him that unless you’ve actually done it yourself, you don’t get to comment upon the form.” Eliza smirked. “That’s what he said, right? Comment upon the form.”
Jamie rolled his eyes. “Which is rich, because you know who considers himself the real executive producer of Rebecca’s show?”
“It’s like clockwork,” Eliza said. “We do a segment on the latest celebrity divorce and within thirty seconds, he’s e-mailed Rebecca and copied me. Eric likes to remind his wife that this tawdry stuff is beneath her dignity. That she should overrule her producers. Because Rebecca is in charge of her own show, not me.”
“Wow,” I said.
Eliza laughed. “Have you seen this apartment? That Brioni suit he was wearing? Like he doesn’t love the life that Rebecca’s ratings pay for.”
It was 1 a.m. by the time the party died down. When a subway finally arrived at the Lexington Avenue station, it was nearly deserted. Jamie, who was splitting a cab back to Park Slope with a colleague, was worried about me getting home by myself.
“I’m a big girl,” I said. “I’ll be fine.”
“But you’re still new around here,” he said. “Text me when you get home.”
On rare days when it was relatively quiet at work, Jamie and I would take our lunch break together. Him with a plastic container of salad, me with my packed Tupperware, sitting outside if the weather was good. Jamie took to removing his watch and laying it between us. Otherwise, talking and talking, it was easy to lose track of time. We’d come back inside, eyes readjusting after the noontime glare, and I’d feel refreshed and happy. But then Jamie would run into Eliza, or Rebecca. My happiness looked like a cheap imitation compared to what Jamie had with them. A different depth. A sense of trust.
Jamie had stopped asking me directly about my childhood. He saw that it made me uneasy. Instead, during one of our lunches that fall, he described the family vacations they’d taken to Florida. It was a clever technique, a way of drawing me out.
“My brother was fifteen and I was thirteen,” he said, shaking his container to disperse the salad dressing. “My parents let us wander Ocean Drive by ourselves. My brother convinced some older girls to buy beer for us. You know what they got us? A six-pack of O’Doul’s.” He laughed. “We didn’t know any better. And the weird thing is, I actually felt drunk. We lay on the beach and talked for hours. It was so much fun.”
He had a dreamy look in his eyes. The place he remembered was the Florida of ultramarine Miami skies, candy-colored midcentury architecture, forests of sleek glass condos. Palm trees and fast speedboats and mouth-puckering ceviche. As Jamie kept talking, I had a dizzying, vertiginous realization: he thought that this was common ground. He thought we had the same picture in our minds.
But I had only seen pictures of places like Miami. I grew up in a shitty town that could have been Anywhere, America. The beach wasn’t a factor. The beach was for rich people, or nice families who took vacations. And the one time we attempted a family vacation, I could tell there was something weird about this beach. On the Gulf side, there were no crashing waves or cool breezes. Just a flat blank canvas of gray-greenish water, stretching into the void. Water that had gone limp and surrendered to the heat, overtaken by the creeping, ticking life of the state. Mosquitoes thickened the air. Stingrays clustered in the shallows. The day was a bug-bitten, sunburned disaster. “I was trying to do something nice,” my mother snapped, slamming the trunk after we packed the car up. My father laughed. He was good at drinking just enough to ignore her moods, but not so much that he couldn’t drive home. “Nice costs money,” he said. As he turned the key in the ignition, he caught my eye in the mirror. “How ’bout you, girlie? You got any money?” My mother snorted. Laughing at me always made her feel better.
I couldn’t blame Jamie for not understanding. I hadn’t told him anything about it. Most of the time, it didn’t matter. We were in New York, we worked in television news, and life was crazy enough that we had plenty to talk about. It was comforting to think how childhood shrank in the rearview mirror of time. That proportion of my life, that giant black hole, would only get smaller and smaller.
As Rebecca’s party had worn on, it had segregated itself in a different way: not just by occupation, but by tenure. The old hands, like Jamie and Eliza, kept to themselves. They had different things to talk about. They had seen it all before. I found them so much more interesting than the interns and assistants. When Eliza and Jamie told war stories, their laughter was sanguine. Problems diminished in the long view. Experience could be a breakwater against seasonal storms.
I wanted that. I wanted nostalgic stories in common with Jamie and Eliza, a shared history. Recently Jamie had taught me the phrase “salad days.” At first, stupidly, I thought it was a reference to what he ate for lunch. Then he clarified: it meant his earliest years of naive inexperience. “But you seemed to skip those,” he said, one day. “How’d you get to be such an old soul?”
Practice, I thought. Years spent with the Bradley family, observing their refined art of omission. In good Wasp fashion, they never dwelled on the bad parts. It worked for them, and I figured it could work for me. But that answer was too depressing, so instead I shrugged and said, “No TV or internet in our house. Only the radio. I grew up like it was the 1940s.”
Jamie laughed. Clever enough, and it threw him off the scent. See, I could be like other people. I could toss out occasional filigreed details from the past. And this detail happened to be true. I didn’t have to explain that my mother shoved our TV to the floor during an argument with my father and it never got replaced. That our internet was cut off after the bills went unpaid.
“Violet,” a voice said. And then louder, “Violet.” I thought I had dreamed it, but when I opened my eyes, the voice was in the room. A hand on my shoulder. A draft of air from the open bedroom door.
“Jamie?” I said. Because I realized, half awake, that I’d forgotten to text him the night before. Illogically, I thought maybe he’d gotten worried and came to check on me.
“Who the fuck is Jamie?”
I rolled over. She was standing in the doorway, backlit by a brilliant ray of sunshine from the living room. Heeled leather boots, skinny black jeans, oversize cashmere hoodie, and blond hair piled into a messy bun. “Oh,” I said. “Stella!”
“Surprise,” she said, flatly. She was oddly stiff when I stood up and hugged her.
“When did you get in?” I said. “Just now?”
“A little while ago.”
“What is it?” I said. “Is everything okay?”
“You didn’t even bother to ask,” she said, turning abruptly.
“Ask what?” I said, following her across the hall and into her room.
“This!” she said, flinging her arms wide. “All my shit!”
There were skirts and dresses scattered across the bed from last night, shoes arrayed on the floor. My stomach twisted into a knot. Pure sloppiness on my part.
“Shit,” I said. “I’m so sorry, Stell. I should have asked. But there was this work party last night, and it was an emergency, I had nothing to wear, and—”
“You’re making it worse,” she snapped. She started shoving everything back into the closet. “Are you trying to make me feel stingy? Well, I’m sorry, but this creeps me out. Like, I have no idea what you’ve been doing this whole time. Do you do this every day? Do you dress up like me?”
“Stella,” I said. When she didn’t turn around, too intent on jamming her high heels back into the shoe rack, I said louder, “Stella Evelyn Bradley.”
It was an old joke, our way of puncturing a petty argument. You triple-named me, we’d say, laughing. No fair. For some reason, the mock sternness always worked.
She whipped around. There was a twitch in her upper lip. “Really?” she said. “We’ve only been together five minutes and you have to pull that out?”
“Give it up,” I said. “You’re not actually mad. You’re just hungry, right?”
Her veneer of annoyance receded, and then dropped completely. She laughed and said, “God, Violet. You know what I like about you? None of those bitches I’ve been hanging out with ever have enough to eat. We go to dinner and we split, like, two salads.”
I laughed, too, although there was a subtle sting in that comment.
Stella flopped down on the bed and began rummaging through her purse. Her moods had a liquid quality. She was now fixated on something else, muttering to herself. “I’m out,” she said. “Where’s my phone?”
When she found it, she pressed it to her ear as she walked into the bathroom. “Hiii,” she said sweetly. “It’s Stella Bradley. Remember me?”
The conversation was short and cryptic. After, she tossed the phone onto the bed. “That’s what I like about New York,” she said. “People never leave.”
“Who was that?”
“This guy,” she said. “Don’t worry. He just helps me get Adderall.”
I furrowed my brow. “I thought you had a prescription.”
“Well, yeah, but they’re so stingy with it. You know, you should really get a prescription. It’s amazing. And if you don’t like it you can give it to me.” She was now on her knees, emptying her suitcase, piling clothes on the floor. “I really need to do laundry. Do you send it out somewhere?”
“So what’s the story?” I said. “Are you back for good?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sitting back on her heels. “But it’s Christmas next week. I can’t ditch my family at Christmas. Do you think they’re pissed I’ve been gone so long?”
“Let’s do this over breakfast,” I said. “Come on. I’ll cook.”
She had no plan beyond the present moment. Maybe she was back for good. Maybe she’d leave again after the holidays. The only thing she knew was that she needed some rest. A break from the cycle of travel and party-hopping, and the relentless performance of fun. A few weeks of peace and quiet—was that too much to ask?
“But that won’t satisfy Anne,” I said. “She’ll want specifics.”
“Anne is a pain in my ass,” Stella said. “This is good. What is this?”
“Parmesan and thyme.” Simple omelets were a staple. On a budget, eggs were a miracle. “See, I could tell that was just the low blood sugar talking.”
She laughed. “I missed you.”
“So stay,” I said, with a surge of hope. “Remember the plan? The two of us, together in the big city?”
She wrinkled her nose, folded her napkin into a careful rectangle, stood up and started rinsing our plates. Neat behavior was her method of avoidance. Stella once scrubbed our entire dorm bathroom to postpone breaking up with a clingy boyfriend.
“Or not,” I said. “That’s cool, too.”
“I just don’t know what I want,” she said. She stood at the dishwasher, plates in hand. Instead of slotting them at the edge, she put them in the middle of the empty bottom rack. This was the behavior of a sociopath, or someone who grew up with housekeeping staff. “You’re lucky,” she added. “You always knew.”
“Lucky?” I said. “I’m barely making minimum wage.”
“But you love it. I can tell.”
“How?”
“Come here,” she said, and dragged me into the living room, where a mirror hung above the mantelpiece. We stood in front of it, side by side. “Look. Your skin is clear. You lost weight. You’re not biting your nails. You look tired and you need some concealer for those under-eye circles, but that’s easy to fix.”
In the mirror, I saw that she was right. I hadn’t noticed it myself. Stella and I had always existed at distant ends of the continuum. Roughly the same height and the same coloring, but she was a hundred times more beautiful. Exquisite features and perfect blond hair, compared to my plainness and dirty-blond hues. A vast gulf remained, but the past five months had brought us slightly closer together.
“Well?” she said. “You must be happy there, right?”
“I guess so.”
“See?” She cocked an eyebrow. “And therefore I have to hate you.”
In the afternoon, a guy showed up at our door: the person Stella had called that morning. He was tall and preppy, a cable-knit sweater beneath his faded Barbour jacket. Stella explained that they’d gone to Rye Country Day together, and now he worked in finance. “This is Violet,” she said to him. “Don’t worry. She’s cool.”
Stella dipped a key into the bag of white powder, sampling the wares. She sniffed a bump of cocaine, smiled, and widened her eyes. The preppy guy lined up several small plastic bags on the coffee table, along with half a dozen orange pill containers. After counting Stella’s money, he looked satisfied and impressed with his own efficiency.
“Men have it so easy,” Stella said, after he left. “Did you see him? Everyone trusts a guy who looks like that. That’s why it’s so easy for him to get refills.”
“Really,” I said, watching as she cut a line of cocaine. “Is that the story.”
“Plus both of his parents are doctors. I would kill for that. Easy access.”
I laughed. “Your father literally runs a pharmaceutical company, Stell.”
It wasn’t that I was innocent to her habits. She’d done plenty of this in college—at parties, to sober up, to help her endure all-nighters. But it wasn’t even 3 p.m., the living room bright with sunlight. Whatever her reasons, it didn’t seem like she was doing this for fun.
“Stop it,” she said, wiping her nose as she sat up.
“Stop what?”
“Stop giving me that look. You’re so judgmental, Violet. Has anyone ever told you that?”
“You have, plenty of times.”
“Do you know what our problem is?” She went into the kitchen, filled a glass with water and ice, and took a long drink. “Violet, do you know what it is? I just realized it. Take a guess.”
“I have no idea.”
She pointed a long index finger. “You’ve got the dirt on me, but I don’t have any on you.”
“Oh, come on.”
“I’m serious,” she said, her color rising. “You see me doing bad things, but what about you? You’re so perfect. You never do anything bad. You could blackmail me if you wanted. But I could never do that to you. This is fucked up, Violet. The power dynamic is all fucked up.”
This was Stella on the upswing of a buzz. She drew connections between disparate dots and then got excited by her own intelligence. It was like a game to her. My job wasn’t to be offended. My job was to play along. I kept a straight face, because if I smiled she would think I was mocking her. But I was happy. This dynamic felt strangely like home.
“Explain it to me,” I said. “Between the two of us, you’re the one without any power?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes, that’s exactly right.”
“Even though your family is worth, like, a billion dollars?”
“That’s not the point.” She tipped the last of the water into her mouth, crunching on an ice cube. Her phone vibrated. She scanned the screen, then glanced out the window. “Actually, this is perfect,” she said. “The weather is perfect, and we have time to walk.”
“To where?”
“Dinner,” she said. “My friend who lives in Brooklyn Heights. He’s having a dinner party and we’re going. We can walk across the bridge. Just in time for sunset.”
“I’m not sure,” I said. “It’s a school night.”
“What?” Stella squinted, like I was speaking another language.
“Work tomorrow. I have stuff to catch up on tonight.”
“You said they barely pay you minimum wage. You can’t be that important.”
I laughed. “Harsh.”
“Come on,” she said, tugging my arm. “I’ll let you borrow something to wear.”
Stella’s friend lived in a brownstone that backed up onto the Brooklyn Heights promenade. The older woman who owned the building liked that this young man was an artist, that he reminded her of her bohemian days. He rented the top floor, with its gabled windows and creaky floors and spectacular views of Manhattan, for a pittance.
While Stella made the rounds, kissing the cheeks of friends-of-friends, I wandered into the kitchen to get glasses of wine. The counter looked like an old master still life: verdant vegetables, a pile of lemons, bundles of rosemary, a chicken on the cutting board. The host was in the other room, talking about his new work. Dinner was still hours away.
These friends knew me, dimly, as the girl who lived with Stella. They were polite enough, but I always found the conversation slippery and difficult. The usual questions—where you live, what you do—went nowhere. You couldn’t effort your way into their world. But even though Stella had been away for months, her reabsorption into the group was instant. No one at the party bothered her with the tedious details: What’s the plan? Are you back for good? What are you going to do? To them, it didn’t matter. Their intimacy was elastic. Stella was Stella, no matter where she was in the world.
“You stayed at Le Sirenuse when you were in Positano?” one girl asked.
“Of course she did,” another girl responded. “I told her she had to.”
“Loved it,” Stella said.
“What about Morocco? Did you make it to Marrakech?”
Stella nodded as she refilled her wineglass, and mine. She was wearing a loose silk tunic with a vibrant tropical pattern that should have been all wrong for December but was somehow perfect. As the dinner party coursed around her, Stella brimmed with a serene worldliness, like an advertisement for the restorative power of globe-trotting.
“La Mamounia or the Royal Mansour?” the host asked.
“Both,” she said. “Three nights at each.”
He clinked his glass against hers. “That’s my girl.”
As the conversation moved on to other geographies, I said quietly to Stella, “I thought he was a struggling artist.”
“He is,” she said. “And apparently a struggling cook. Where’s dinner? I’m starving.”
“Then how can he afford to travel like that?”
She laughed. “You heard his last name. Take one guess.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
The shabby apartment, the rickety table and chairs, his boasts of cheap rent, his paint-stained T-shirt and frayed jeans: they had fooled me. When Stella reminded me who he was—more to the point, who his parents were—suddenly it made sense.
“Isn’t it depressing?” Stella said. “Fast-forward ten years and all these people will be having the exact same conversation. Nothing will change.”
“I thought you liked them,” I said.
“I do like them. The trick is you can’t think about it too much.”
I’d missed her more than I realized. Stella was so good at these parties. I let her fill my wineglass, again and again. She’d touch my arm, she’d catch my eye, she’d laugh at anything. She was at ease in this world, but she hadn’t made the mistake of so many: she hadn’t forgotten that this world was finite. That other people lived across the border. She could lean her head close to mine, with a perfect sotto voce observation, and suddenly she was back in my world.
We didn’t eat until 10 p.m. The meal was long and leisurely, and there were no movements toward the door. A countdown ran in the back of my mind: in ten hours, I’ll be at the office. In nine hours. In eight. There was dessert, more wine, cigarettes by the gabled windows, cold air from the December night. The festive feeling of a weekend, even though it was Sunday. Around 1 a.m.—seven hours, creeping panic—I said to Stella, “I really have to go.”
“Aren’t you having fun?” she said.
“I have to get some sleep,” I said. “You can stay.”
“No, it’s fine.” She sighed. “I’ll come with you.”
When I woke up the next morning, my alarm blaring at 7 a.m., I had a pressing headache. My mouth was foul and cottony from the wine, my eyes gritty from exhaustion. While I was waiting for the shower to warm up, there was a knock on the door.
“Gatorade,” Stella said, handing me a bottle. “And Advil.”
“Why are you awake?” I said, twisting off the lid. Lemon-lime flavor—my favorite.
“Jet lag,” she said. “I’ve been up for an hour.”
After I’d showered and dressed, I found Stella in the kitchen. She spread her arms and said, “I made breakfast! Well, I bought it. Same thing.” There was coffee, and a bagel wrapped in wax paper. “Milk, no sugar. Everything, toasted, with cream cheese. Did I get that right?”
“You’re my hero,” I said. “Seriously. Thank you.”
While I unwrapped the bagel, still warm and fragrant from the toaster, Stella removed a stray hair from the sleeve of my sweater, straightened my necklace so the clasp was at the back. These tiny, attentive gestures meant she was about to ask for something. “Do you really have to go to work?” she said.
“That’s pretty much the deal.”
She pouted. “But I’m gonna be so bored.”
By the time I got to the office, the headache had loosened its grip only slightly. There was also the nausea, and the general malaise. Enduring the next twelve hours with this hangover seemed impossible. Jamie saw me and said, “Late night?”
“Is it that obvious?” I said.
I was off my game. It took forever to complete a routine fact-check. I brought the wrong script to Rebecca and had to sprint upstairs to get the right one. I hated doing shoddy work, I resented the fact that I wasn’t myself. At the end of the day, I’d missed several calls and a dozen texts from Stella. She wanted to make plans for that night—a late dinner, drinks? No, I texted back. I’m dead from last night. Going straight to bed.
She wrote back right away. PLEASE?
Some of us have to work in the morning, I wrote.
It was an unnecessarily mean thing to say, an eruption of irritation after a long and shitty day. But it was true, and it worked. She didn’t bother me again.