“By all means,” I said, unmoved. “I’ll wait.”
She didn’t make a phone call. Instead, we sat side by side in the clubby bar beneath the hotel atrium. Our table was patterned like a chessboard. True to form, Anna ordered oysters and a bottle of white wine and signed the bill to her room. I sat in silence, sending work emails from my phone, largely ignoring Anna but keeping a watchful eye on her and asking periodically for an update. Aside from our waiter, I didn’t see her interact with anyone—no hotel staff, no more phone calls or meetings. To prove a point, I stayed until eleven p.m., when I finally left in anger, telling Anna that I would be back in the morning at eight a.m. so that we could go together to the bank. She agreed. “I hope you had fun, at least,” she chirped, with an impish grin.
“No, this was not fun. This is not okay,” I stammered, incredulous.
The next morning, I arrived at the hotel on time and texted her.
Me: Hey I’m here.
Anna: Im not there.
Me: I told you I was coming. . . . where did you go???
Anna: Im picking up all stuff.
Me: I’ll come meet you where are you. This needs to be over with this morning before I go to work.
Anna: I thought you’d text me before showing up.
Me: I thought you’d be sleeping. Where can I meet you? I’ll come up town. Doesn’t matter. Need to get this done.
Anna: I woke up like at 6 to get this done.
Me: Then why isn’t it done? I’ll meet you.
Anna: I’ll text you once I have everything.
Me: No anna. If you woke up at 6 let’s do this now. I have plans today. And I must make sure this is done. I don’t feel I can trust you to do it. It’s been too long. Come on. I’ll meet you and make it easy.
Anna: I’ll drop it off at OTC.
Me: Or I can go pick up the items . . . This is shady. Come on.
Anna: I’m out picking it up whats shady?
Me: Then let me come meet you now. I’m not going to the office to wait. Too much waiting.
Anna: I’ll text you once i have it.
Me: I will come meet you now. Where are you? I can’t wait for you to text me. I will not be in the office. I can’t believe you’re not here. Anna. You said we’d go to the bank this morning. I am losing my ability to trust you.
Anna: Im not at my hotel, I’m picking up things from my lawyers.
Me: That’s great then I’ll come meet you now. Just tell me where.
Anna: I thought you’d at least text me before showing up.
. . .
Me: Then I will come meet you to get it. I do not trust that you’re on it.
Anna: I thought you’d ask me first.
Me: I told you very clearly last night when I’d be back. And now you won’t tell me where you are. And I do not trust that you’re doing what you say.
. . .
Me: I want to come meet you and we wait or we go to the bank. You’re stalling. I will come meet you now Anna come on. Do not ruin our friendship over this it’s fucking stupid. Step up and deal with this now. Let’s go to the bank. I feel like you’re just sitting in your hotel room avoiding me. What am I supposed to think. Do you even have the money? Anna??????? Did you ever even get a check? What ever happened to the wires? Why am I having to chase you? This is not how this should work. You should pick up the phone and have a conversation with me.
Anna: If you don’t believe I’m not in my room you’re welcome to wait for me there, and I’ll come pick you up once I have everything.
Me: I have better things to do with my time. Just follow through and stop making excuses.
Chapter 11
Gear Shift
* * *
Enough was enough. Patient to a fault, I had tried for so long to find logic in what, by design, was nonsensical. I lost all faith that Anna would solve this problem on her own. It was time to look elsewhere for answers. One of the benefits I had as a Condé Nast employee was limited legal coverage, and on Friday, June 23, I finally got up the nerve to request a list of in-network attorneys. I began investigating what was really happening with Anna. I reached out to anyone who might know something about her I didn’t.
I contacted Ashley first. After she and Mariella had stopped hanging out with Anna, Ashley had told me that Anna was “crazy.” I thought I had understood what she meant, that Anna was slightly off socially, and I’d made an effort to overlook it. Now, thinking back, I saw I was mistaken. I should have taken Ashley at her word.
Ash. Of course I’ve gotten into a shitty situation with anna and she owes me money. You mentioned once that someone knows how to reach her parents? I’m getting to that point. It’s been over a month and she hasn’t reimbursed me and it’s an absurd amount of money (long story) . . . I’m considering legal counsel but don’t want to go there unless I have to. Such a fucked up situation. Can’t say you didn’t warn me.
Ashley suggested I contact Tommy Saleh, who was at Happy Ending the night I met Anna. Apparently, he had once loaned Anna money and might have a way to reach her family. Tommy was someone I had often encountered in the New York party scene but didn’t really know. I sent him a text, and he and I met in a beer garden in Williamsburg on Saturday afternoon.
He was German, like Anna was, and he’d known her since she was an intern for Purple magazine in Paris, where he also used to live. In Paris, she had a big apartment and lived a lavish lifestyle, he said, full of fashion shows and parties. In vivid detail, he described the Anna that I, too, had known. But then he told me something new: Anna received around $30,000 at the start of each month and quickly spent it on shopping, hotels, and food. That’s when she’d ask friends for loans, he said—friends like himself. She’d always had problems with money in this way.
“And did you get your money back?” I asked.
His response was alarming and reassuring in equal measure. After weeks of pestering, he had gotten his money back by threatening to involve her father. “Her dad is a Russian billionaire,” he said. “He brings oil from Russia to Germany.” Anna had once told me that her parents worked in solar energy. Tommy went on. Anna had stood to inherit $10 million on her twenty-sixth birthday, which was the previous January, he believed. But because she was such a mess, her father had arranged for the inheritance to be delayed until September, just a few months away.
Aha! Well, that would explain her stalling tactics, I thought, clinging to hope. But why couldn’t she have just said so? Had she been embarrassed? I imagined she was battling with her family to gain early access to her trust. Perhaps the postponement had been a result of mental health issues (I’d begun to suspect she had a personality disorder), or maybe her general recklessness was to blame.
I worried that Anna was using her bankers and lawyers to negotiate disbursements, rather than going to her parents directly. Could she not see I was in a state of emergency? Maybe this time she had so drastically exceeded her means that fear of her parents’ retribution outweighed any concern for my well-being. Would her overspending be reason enough for her father to again postpone her inheritance? Would he cut her off altogether? I didn’t care. It had all gone too far! If there was a pattern to this behavior, she needed help.
I would need to convince Anna that there was only one option: to come clean. And if I couldn’t convince her, I had a list of lawyers who could.
* * *
The evening after I met with Tommy, I decided to tell Anna I was considering legal action. I really didn’t want to involve lawyers—I assumed the process would be costly—but I hoped the threat alone might spur her to finally pay me back. At the same time, I didn’t want to spook her, and was wary of her potentially leaving the country. So while I took a firm approach, I tried to be compassionate as well.
Me: Anna I will need to have a lawyer involved next week if this is not resolved on Monday. I literally cannot withstand anymore delay. I don’t want to go that route (at all) but you’re leaving me very little choice. I’m run
ning out of options. I don’t know if you need to talk to your parents or what but this is a huge deal in my life and I cannot keep on this way forever waiting for you to sort this out. I’m just fundamentally unable to support this debt for any longer.
Anna: K.
Me: I really, really hate this. I’m sorry. I hope we can sort it out.
Me: I wish you’d just be honest if you don’t have or can’t access the money. By making excuses or stalling it makes it impossible for me to trust what you’re saying. And I feel completely powerless to actually get through to you to convey how serious this is for me.
Anna: [It] makes little sense for me not to have any money and [get] myself into this position on purpose.
Anna: I assumed that [it] was almost done with [the] check, and I have a lot of things going on. One thing came on another at the same time, especially yesterday.
Anna: What did I gain out of this?
Anna: You think im that stupid.
Me: I am not calling you stupid and I don’t think you did this for personal gain. I am only trying to convey the severity and urgency of the situation . . . This needs to be resolved on Monday.
Anna: K.
* * *
Monday morning on the forty-first floor of One World Trade Center, I sat at my desk, distracted. There were conference calls (“Yes, we have talent from noon to three thirty”) and emails (“Are you attending the meeting this morning?”). Photo department business as usual. I ducked out to meet Kathryn at Annie Leibovitz’s studio, where we would review plans for the New Establishment Summit—Annie would look through the Wallis Annenberg scouting shots from my recent trip to LA and select an area for her group portrait.
The minute the meeting was scheduled to begin, Anna called, but I didn’t pick up. Her text messages affected my composure, each one striking with a jolt, and the idea of a phone call seemed even worse. Either she’d fixed the situation or she hadn’t. I’m in a meeting - can text, I told her, an invitation she quickly accepted. Despite my legal threat, Anna continued to make empty promises. She also wanted to meet me for lunch. The Beekman was sold out for the night, she said, and she was waiting to hear if there was availability at the Mercer. I couldn’t understand the relevance of this last information. What did her hotel have to do with me? I was too busy to pause for lunch, I told her, but I could pick up a check whenever it was ready.
My problem with Anna was only getting worse. By threatening legal action, I had hoped to instill a sense of urgency—I had agonized over telling her that a lawyer might be involved—but she batted away the threat as though it were nothing. She appeared completely unperturbed. There were no desperate pleas or offers of apology from her, only more of the same.
Back in the office, I weighed my next move and turned to Kathryn for support as I’d done countless times before, though never for anything of this magnitude. I don’t remember if we were next to her desk when I explained the situation or if we stepped away for more privacy, but I’ll never forget the unflinching way that she looked at me as she immediately offered a loan. With tearful gratitude, I told her I expected the wire to come through any day; there was no need for a loan quite yet. But knowing that it was an option was of immense comfort, second only to knowing that I was not alone.
Anna called me crying the next day to say that the wire would be coming from a German account. I wondered if she was crying because she’d finally told her parents. Her next move made me think that perhaps I was right. She sent a screenshot of a Deutsche Bank wire confirmation, which I forwarded to Kathryn’s husband, Mark, who speaks German, to translate. Everything appeared legitimate. So, once again, I waited for the funds to arrive.
* * *
When I was seven years old, I went with my family to Kiawah Island, South Carolina. I was building drip castles by the ocean when I noticed a girl around my age walking across the beach straight toward me. Shy and introverted, I’d kept my eyes down and prayed in silence that she would pass. But the friendly, freckle-faced girl came right up to me and landed at the water’s edge with a plop. We sat side by side in the surf, two tiny dots against the horizon. We reclined, legs outstretched, cradled in the sand. Then all at once she flattened out.
“Lie all the way back,” she instructed, eyes squinting in the sun.
I paused and studied her carefully. “But my hair would get sandy,” I said.
She propped up on her elbows to look at me. “Well, whaddya come to the beach for?” she exclaimed.
That afternoon I stood in the shower and watched lines of sand form in the tub. The warm water stung against my skin, but I was happy. I’d made a new friend. This sequence of events is stamped into my memory: an act of trust, letting go, full immersion, no regrets.
Twenty years or so later, Nick and I drove in a rental car along the oak-lined roads that led back to Kiawah Island, my happy place. It was the week of July Fourth and we would meet my family at the beach.
Without question, I knew that I could tell my family anything and count on their support. But I wasn’t willing to do so. It has long been my style to box up my emotions and work out my problems privately. It doesn’t make me easy to be close to, but it’s part of my nature—a way I’ve found of holding myself together under stress. I’ve learned from experience that when something bad happens, like a breakup or a car accident, I can keep it together until a loved one gives me a hug. That’s when I break down and cry. So that’s what I was trying to avoid. The emotions I was feeling about my experience with Anna were packed so tightly inside, I was afraid that opening myself up to them would induce a sort of hysteria.
On a more practical level, even if I wanted to explain the situation to my parents, how could I? How could I explain Anna? They would listen to my attempts, and they would come out feeling sad for me and stressed about what I should do next. It would just make me feel more vulnerable. I’d also need to keep them updated from that point forward, which I didn’t have the energy to do. Getting through each day without losing my mind was taking all the strength I had.
They were busy enough as it was, and keeping my problems to myself would spare them the worry. My dad was running for Congress as a Democrat in a district that had been Republican since 1855, before the Civil War. Though he’d never previously held public office, having worked in health care for more than thirty years, he saw the effects of policy on people’s lives and he wanted to help. As for my mom, she was working full-time, helping with campaign events, and frequently driving back and forth between Knoxville and Spartanburg to be with her parents, who were both in their mid-nineties and still living at home. My mom and dad had enough on their plates. I knew they would be there when I needed them, but I hadn’t hit a wall yet. I still had options. I was finding ways to contain my emotions, and move forward.
Swallowing my secret, I swam in the ocean, played games on the sand, and tried to regain my balance. Between activities, I snuck glances at my cell phone. Monday, July 3, was overcast. I walked to the middle of the empty beach and took a photo of the soft, low-lying clouds. When I got back to my folding chair, I logged in to my bank account. Still nothing.
Were you able to get tracking info? I messaged Anna. My sister saw me holding my phone. “Hey, Rach, will you take my picture?” she asked. I walked with her and her boyfriend out to the ocean and shot a few frames. A half hour later, Anna responded: Yes, getting back to you this afternoon.
Yeah, right. I tried to beat my brother in a ball game. He’d met Anna once, when she tagged along to a family get-together, joining Noah, my uncle David, and me at the Westville on Hudson Street for a casual dinner. They had liked her, they told me later, even though we all agreed she was quirky. After Morocco, I told Noah the same true (but incomplete) thing about Anna that I had said to my parents and sister: “I don’t think we’re going to be friends anymore.”
After losing the ball game for a second time, I rested on a beach towel and turned my attention to the book I was reading, All the Light We Can
not See. Leaving our stuff behind, we put on sandals to walk through the hot sand, up the boardwalk, and back to our bicycles. We then biked down the road to our rental house, made sandwiches for lunch, applied a fresh coat of sunscreen, and biked right back to the beach.
Me: Still nothing.
Anna: Im getting on a call with your and my bank.
Anna: I requested tracking from german side since its been so long and your bank doesn’t see it - they will reach out to me with response
Anna: Sorry its such an unfortunate timing for payments to get delayed. It’s supposed to be [a] one-time thing and shouldn’t be happening in the future.
Me: I can’t imagine I’ll be in this situation again so am just concerned about getting this settled.
We returned to the rental house. Our sandy shoes and beach bags stayed by the door. Inside, my family showered off and then gathered in the living room. My sister had brought a Hula-Hoop with her, so we took turns doing tricks. (No one could do anything half as well as she could.) We worked on a jigsaw puzzle in the living room and snacked on chips and salsa before dinner. I continued to give no indication that anything was wrong.
The next morning was July 4. Across the island, kids were taping red, white, and blue streamers to their bicycles for a parade around the town. Others were on the beach, using shovels and pails to make mermaids, castles, and turtles that would be judged in the afternoon’s sand-sculpting competition. I was in my bedroom, steeling my nerves to withstand another day of stress. I had checked my bank account the moment I woke up but nothing had changed.
I made it to the beach around noon, and sent a text to Anna.
Did you get tracking? Still nothing has posted, I wrote.
My Friend Anna Page 16