I was surprised and disappointed, but I made an effort to justify Anna’s boredom, dismissing her blasé attitude as a symptom of her youth and privilege. After all, in some crowds one must appear bored to be “cool,” and enthusiasm is often the mark of a rube.
The young server returned. I hadn’t even glanced at the menu, but he clearly wanted to take our order. I was overwhelmed with menu indecision.
“Capelli d’angelo alla carbonara for the princess?” he suggested.
“Sounds great,” I replied.
“Oh, we should have a bottle of wine,” said Anna, still scanning the menu.
“I told myself I’d clean my apartment today, and I should really do some work,” I said, mostly to acknowledge these facts aloud to myself. “But that does sound good . . .”
“It’s only, like, two glasses each. We don’t have to finish it.”
“Oh, whatever—let’s go for it,” I agreed.
I liked having someone push me in this way. Anna made it feel as though choosing to indulge wasn’t a yes-or-no, all-or-nothing decision. It happened one step at a time. She even made it sound reasonable. Her sense of logic was at times so different than mine—like her choice to live in a hotel rather than an apartment—but it made her worldview all the more transfixing.
New York attracts such a wild range of people: artists and bankers, immigrants and transients, old money and new money, people waiting to be discovered and others who never want to be found. Everyone here has a story to tell—some more elaborate than others. But without exception the people have texture, and texture is character, and character is fascinating.
Anna was a character—I knew this already but had forgotten just what it was that made her so distinct: the exotic way she spoke in that pan-European accent and how casually she chose to have, say, and do whatever she wanted. In the mood for the carbiest, creamiest, most truffle-covered pasta on the menu, she had ordered it without offering a single excuse, and with zero discernible trace of guilt. I, on the other hand, was the complete opposite.
It would be a long lunch. Emboldened by my tipsiness, I decided to broach the subject of Anna’s family, which she hardly ever discussed. When I asked her whether she was close to her parents, she said that their relationship felt rooted more in business than in love. This was hard for me to fathom, on so many levels. Business? What did she mean? Were they disinterested in her as a person, doling out money with no affection? Or did they use their money as leverage and demand that she meet their expectations? She didn’t strike me as someone who’d been to boarding school (her interpersonal skills were too . . . brash), so I pictured her at home, emotionally neglected in a country manor outside of Cologne, some drafty old house with so many rooms that days could pass before Anna might see another soul. That would explain her autonomy, I reasoned, and it made me feel sorry for her.
Her father worked in solar energy, Anna said, but their family’s money came from her grandfather, who had died when Anna’s mother was young. Her parents didn’t understand her world and ambitions, she went on, but they trusted her to make her own decisions. Business aside, it appeared there wasn’t much else on which they could build a relationship: “I mean, like, what are we supposed to talk about? They don’t really get what I am doing.” Anna didn’t see the point. When she hinted that her mother had expressed some sadness at their distance, I sensed a fleeting wistfulness in Anna’s tone.
“Well, what about siblings?” I asked, hoping for something more cheerful. She said that her brother was twelve years younger, so, in essence, she was raised as an only child. Her mother had been careful to keep them totally separate, she explained, to prevent Anna from becoming inconvenienced or jealous.
Anna said this as though it was normal, as if her mom had done a particularly good job of governing sibling relations, and perhaps she had. Maybe Anna’s temperament didn’t mix well with others. However, it gave me the sense that Anna was troubled.
She reminded me of a girl I’d known in elementary school. We’ll call her “Sarah Jean.” Sarah Jean had it rough. Her mom was the leader of my girls’ choir—at least, she was until the other parents noticed her difficulty with anger management. It was a performance at Christmastime that finally sealed the deal, when, in front of an audience, she screamed at us, “Put a smile on your faces! This is joyful!”
Sarah Jean had a hard time fitting in with the other girls. She was slovenly and obtrusive. She craved attention and her behavior made the other girls uneasy. To make matters worse, she was the first one of us to hit puberty, so her awkwardness was a step ahead.
I had witnessed my mom take an active interest in Sarah Jean’s well-being. She made a special effort to pay attention to her, to listen to her opinions, and to treat her with extra kindness and warmth. She had encouraged me to do the same. Years later, when I asked my mom why she had done this, she said that she “could see the damage unfolding in that little girl.”
“It takes a village?” I suggested.
“It takes individuals who are willing to look,” she said. “Girls need special care.”
There were glimmers of Sarah Jean in Anna. The parallel made me step closer where I otherwise might have stepped back. I thought I could be there for her in a way that others were not. Anna’s self-assurance could be excessive, but I came to see it as a testament to her resilience. I didn’t have a trust fund, or even any savings, but my family had given me all of the love and encouragement in the world—and still, chasing dreams was an unending and treacherous business. It blew my mind to think that Anna, who I now knew to be three years my junior, had conceived of a dream as big as her art foundation and was working to make it happen, all by herself.
A warm plate of angel-hair pasta appeared in front of me, steaming through a lattice of grated Parmesan. I took one bite and put down my fork. It was my fault for not being more assertive: I was lactose intolerant and my dish was covered in cheese. It would have been rational to wave down our server and simply explain the misunderstanding, but that’s not what I did. Not wanting to cause a fuss, I decided to make a quick run to the nearest pharmacy for a box of Lactaid pills: voilà, easy solution. Anna rolled her eyes and smiled when I told her my plan. I excused myself and slipped out the door.
After fifteen minutes (and fruitless searches of two different stores), I found myself in a quaint local pharmacy on Centre Street. Nestled between the Gas-X and Tums, I found my target: Lactaid Fast Act—bingo! One box left. I paid in a hurry and hustled back to Mamo, wondering what Anna and the waiter must think.
Anna was in the process of de-boxing her new phones when I walked back into the restaurant. As I sat down, she excused herself to the restroom and the waiter approached holding a dish. In my absence, Anna had taken the liberty of explaining my predicament, and the kitchen had prepared a fresh plate of pasta without dairy. Clearly, it hadn’t been the most sensible solution to run around town while my food grew cold. I appreciated that Anna had taken the initiative to speak up on my behalf.
After we finished eating, the waiter brought over a dessert bowl of cut strawberries dusted with confectioners’ sugar, along with his phone number on a small slip of paper. “He wanted to know if you were single,” Anna said, “and I told him to ask you for himself.” Although I wasn’t interested, it was true that Nick and I were going through a rough patch. We’d gotten into a fight around the time of my birthday, and shortly thereafter—having recently left his job working for Annie Leibovitz—he took off for a month-long sojourn in Costa Rica and had since been bad at keeping in touch. It was an in-between period where we were neither fully together nor fully split up. So, no, I was not available to date the server, but I was especially glad to have Anna back in town, just when I needed a diversion.
When the check arrived, Anna put down her card and pushed mine away. Because she had invited me, she insisted on being the one to pay. I argued, relented, and thanked her in earnest.
By the time we left the restaurant, it was a
lmost five o’clock. We walked toward Anna’s hotel, and she invited me in for a drink. We passed through the hotel’s modern lobby, heading straight for the steel spiral staircase to the left, which swooped twice around a thick column, rising to the floor above. On the second level, we entered the Library, a stylish lounge that was like an outpost of the Soho House (a private members’ club for creative types)—only better, because it felt undiscovered and we had the place to ourselves.
The room’s design had distinctly Scandinavian overtones. Every element of its décor, from furniture to lighting, was a work of art. There was a concierge desk to the left as you entered, staffed by two employees sitting at laptops and answering the phone. The rest of the space was divided into pockets of seating areas: a sculptural sofa and lounge chairs surrounded a Nordic-looking coffee table; minimal two-tops punctuated the right side of the room, nestled between chairs with wide seats; in the middle of the space, next to the windows, was a round six-top table, overwhelmed by a tall branch-filled floral arrangement; and beyond that, in the back, was a long wooden dining table beneath a chandelier that looked like a toy jack.
My eyes scanned the setup and stopped on a photograph that hung in a frame across from the concierge desk, a black-and-white image of an empty theater—part of a series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto. Light emanated from a seemingly blank, rectangular movie screen, casting its glow out from the center of the composition onto the empty stage, seats, and theater. Sugimoto used a large-format camera to capture a movie’s thousands of still frames within a single image. The result was otherworldly. Looking at his work always reminded me of Shakespeare, a play within a play. It captured kinetic energy, portentous and alive with emotion and light. The viewing experience was meta and inverted: I was the audience, looking into an empty theater, beneath a blank screen.
Anything was possible, or maybe it had already happened. Maybe it was all already there.
* * *
Freshly resettled in New York, Anna had an agenda: she wanted to establish a personal fitness routine. I’d recently canceled my gym membership in order to save money (I barely ever went anyway) and was feeling out of shape. Anna had heard about an app that allowed you to book personal training sessions on demand, so we decided to try it together. We scheduled our first workout for Wednesday of that week.
On Wednesday morning, I woke up earlier than usual. I pulled on a sweatshirt and skipped down my building’s four flights of stairs feeling energized and enthusiastic. After a ten-minute jog, I reached Anna’s hotel, and I sent her a text to let her know I’d arrived. While I waited for her response, I studied the lobby of 11 Howard. In the early-morning light, it struck me as cold, full of hard surfaces, minimal, and modern—much less inviting than it had seemed on Sunday evening. There was no word from Anna, so I pinged her again and finally got a response: she told me to come to her room.
The ninth-floor hallway was dimly lit and its carpet muffled all sound. When I knocked on the door of Room 916, Anna answered. Her face looked puffy. She was wearing some sort of high-performance, ridged scuba suit fresh from Net-a-Porter that was nicer than my work clothes. Standing there in my old soccer shorts and oversize T-shirt, I realized that I’d misunderstood the dress code.
“Come in,” she said.
Once inside, I noticed a bathroom to my immediate left. I saw that every inch of its marble-topped sink was covered with high-end beauty supplies. Her bedroom itself was small, and also cluttered with stuff. Hard-shell suitcases were pushed into the near-left corner, behind an oval table, which was buried beneath papers and a cluster of shopping bags from Supreme and Acne Studios. On the far side of the room, in a small gap between the bed and the window, Anna had wedged a metal rolling rack, on which hung the feathery jacket she’d worn on Sunday and other garments in shades of black. So this is what it looks like to live long-term in a hotel, I thought. On the console beneath her television, I noticed empty boxes from Net-a-Porter and Amazon, along with workout equipment in clear plastic bags—a jump rope embedded with LED lights and an agility ladder like the one I’d used for soccer footwork drills—that she’d clearly purchased online. It was obvious to me that Anna ordered room service, designer clothing, fancy-pants workout gear, and anything else she might want with only the push of a button.
Anna grabbed her water bottle. Its contents were cloudy—a beauty elixir, I assumed. Then she picked up her key card and we left, the heavy door clicking shut behind us. That morning’s workout session with Anna would be the first of many. Inside an empty room that the hotel used as a multifunctional space, a trainer guided us through sets of pushups, lunges, squats, and crunches. Anna was semi-serious as we went through the exercises. She followed instructions, up to a point, but focused on speed more than form. She also focused on her cell phone, which she used to play music. That was when I discovered Anna’s passion for Eminem, an affinity I hadn’t seen coming. Its randomness made me laugh. “Lose Yourself,” that song from the 2002 movie 8 Mile, played at full volume.
To me, it was a throwback; to Anna, it was an anthem.
At Anna’s invitation, the trainer and I joined her for breakfast in Le Coucou after the workout. She was clearly dead set on trying the restaurant—and luckily, at this hour, we had no trouble getting a table. It was a decadent place to start the day—stunning natural light poured in through tall windows onto our white tablecloth as we sipped coffee from china cups. I did feel slightly self-conscious to be sitting in sweaty clothing on such a gorgeous, velvet-upholstered Thonet chair. Nervous about getting to work on time, I excused myself before Anna left the table. I texted her afterward to ask if I could split the $85 cost of our workout session. No! she wrote back, as I’d assumed she would, though I’d have been equally happy to pay. I was thankful for her generosity.
* * *
It was quiet in the Vanity Fair office that day. We were wrapping up our April issue and a sizable portion of the staff had already flown out to Los Angeles for the magazine’s annual Oscar party, which would take place on Sunday. My flight wasn’t until later in the week. I wanted to get a pedicure before my travels and wondered if Anna might like to join me. It was nice to have a friend who didn’t keep normal office hours and lived downtown. I sent a text message to see if she was free.
I’m about to see apartments in SoHo, she responded. Want to join? Yes, I need [a] pedicure, she added. [We] can do that after.
The front door of 22 Mercer Street made a buzzing sound as it opened. I passed a doorman and took the elevator up one floor. Apartment 2D was easy to find. Its gatekeeper was a suave Realtor in an immaculate suit. Everything about him was symmetrical: mouth, ears, eyes, hair—like a factory-made appliance. I eyed him distrustfully as he led me down a long entry hall lined with white shelving and colorful objects. We passed the open door of the master bedroom—the softness of its curtains and a button-tufted headboard gave it a feminine feel—and then, farther down the hallway, there was a large window, through which a tiny courtyard was visible, more ornamental than functional, with a giant red apple sculpture in its center. For photo shoots, dinner parties, and trips with friends to visit their families, I’d been in apartments this extravagant before—even ones far nicer—but never with a friend my age who was looking to buy one for herself. I felt honored that Anna wanted my company, maybe even counsel, to help make such an important and personal decision.
The Realtor and I entered the loft’s open kitchen, and I saw Anna, on the opposite side of a long counter, next to a wall of lacquered white cabinets, looking focused and right at home as she took in her surroundings. She was wearing all black, as usual. A leather tote bag hung from the crook of her left arm. That’s when I noticed another couple in the adjacent sunken living room, talking to a different broker.
“That’s Fredrik Eklund,” whispered the Realtor. I didn’t know who that was, but I nodded in feigned understanding.
Anna greeted me while opening a kitchen cabinet. Together we peered inside and
discovered ceramic jars, uniformly spaced, each labeled according to its contents.
“Is this apartment staged?” I asked the Realtor.
“No, a famous actress lives here,” he replied.
It felt like a movie set. Where was the dust? Where was the mess? Everything looked brand-new and kind of sterile. I kept my opinions to myself, not knowing Anna’s taste. After all, if she was used to living in hotels, maybe she cared more about amenities than character. (I would later learn that the apartment belonged to Bethenny Frankel from The Real Housewives of New York City, and that the apple sculpture in the courtyard was a nod to the TV show’s logo. I also learned that Eklund was a reality TV personality who costarred with Frankel in a show on Bravo.)
We continued on our tour, not speaking, while Anna’s Realtor diligently opened doors and pointed to important, marketable details with catchphrase narration: arched windows, imported marble, built-in storage, walk-in closet. Anna wore a poker face while taking stock of every detail.
After ten minutes, I could see that Anna was bored and her attention was rapidly expiring. Seeming to sense this as well, the Realtor gave us a quick peek at the building’s basement gym before we returned to street level. Anna summoned an Uber. When it pulled up, we piled in—all three of us—and set off for the next location.
“Do you have an aux cord?” Anna asked the driver. He passed back the cable that would allow her to plug in her phone to play music. The song was “Tunnel Vision,” by Kodak Black, and Anna cranked the volume to a level inhospitable to conversation.
Anna was interested in one more listing, an apartment at 1 Great Jones Alley, a building that hadn’t actually been built yet. Instead, we saw an architectural model, renderings, and a mockup suite in an adjacent property housing a sales office.
At the end of the tour, back on the sidewalk, the Realtor handed Anna a plastic bag of glossy pamphlets for various multimillion-dollar properties. She accepted it reluctantly and promised to keep in touch. The moment he was out of earshot, she complained about the bag of garbage she now had to lug around. It was a nuisance, I agreed, thinking that would end the conversation. But Anna went on: “Ugh, like why would I need this? It’s so annoying!” She hated unnecessary stuff, she explained. It was an attitude related to her lifestyle. Living in a hotel, she had space only for the essentials.
My Friend Anna Page 6