“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.
Chapter Five
the plan was for Stella, who had been home in Rye a few days already, to pick me up from the station on Christmas Eve. When the train left Harlem, the buildings along the track blurring as we accelerated, I texted Stella to remind her. She didn’t respond, but I wasn’t worried. We’d talked just that morning.
“Hurry up and get here,” she’d said. “They’re driving me insane.”
“They’re your parents,” I’d said, my work phone pinned between ear and shoulder. Using the landline at my desk made it look like I was busy with actual work, even when I was just talking to Stella. “That’s what they’re supposed to do. Anyways, cheer up. It’s Christmas.”