Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “You know you’re somewhere between pretty and beautiful,” he remarked, scanning me up and down with cold-blooded confidence. “I just can’t tell which way you’re skewing.” He tossed his dark, golden head back with the remains of his tea, keeping sly eyes trained on me.

  “Well, don’t strain yourself to figure it out. It’ll tire you for the rematch I’m sure you’re going to demand—though I’ll pass on that, thanks,” I sassed, reaching over to pluck my drink from the bar. As I turned to make my way back into the fray with my brimming glass, I tossed over my shoulder, “I think we both know how it would end.”

  “You cheeky little bitch,” he slurred, pulling me into his expansive chest with an easy sweep of his arm. With my drink knocked to the floor, he backed us into a shadowy side corridor, around the corner and out of the crowd’s sight. “How would it end, M.? Hmmmm?” He had me fixed against his chest and was still grinning at me, crookedly, less than an inch from my nose. I could almost taste his excessive cologne—he was a human sprinkler fanning Acqua di Parma in an obnoxious semicircle around his epic torso—until he emitted a thick, Long Island Iced Tea burp into my face that I’m certain he thought he’d disguised. “You’re right, we’re done with darts for the night. But I think there’s something else you’re wanting to take dead aim at?” He grabbed one of my wrists with enough force that, based on instinct alone, I brought my right knee up then down to grind my right heel into his meaty left foot. It was the first and only time in my life I regretted not owning a pair of stilettos. “Jesus, you DYKE!” he howled, limping his way into the men’s room down the corridor. He never apologized—and of course neither did I—charging all of our interactions from that point on with an undercurrent of hostility.

  I never told Belle about that game of darts. She and Chase spent the rest of that autumn speeding around the Upper Valley in his vintage racing green roadster. And of course Chase took the noble approach of pretending I didn’t exist, even when I had the misfortune of running into him with Belle in situations that revealed their surprising, adult-like intimacy—on a weekday picking up mail together from their Hinman postboxes that fatefully sat next to each other thanks to their “B” surnames, or on a weekend stashed cozily in a booth at Lou’s Bakery in town, Chase powering through his “Big Green Breakfast” as Belle carefully paged through the New York Times Styles section, leaning into his sturdy shoulder and whispering in his ear as she, every minute or two, pointed out an item of shared interest. I’m not sure it would have mattered if I had revealed everything to her. I always guessed she would leap to his defense. (“Oh, M., REALLY? I just don’t see it. You know you’re not Chase’s type AT ALL and you were playing darts. Your judgment gets so cloudy when it comes to anything competitive.”) Despite his sweeping faults she saw Chase as an ideal partner who, like her, didn’t give a toss about his future. He didn’t have to—his father, his surname, his family fortune mapped it all out for him with easy and opulent precision like a preeminent architect’s skyscraping blueprints.

  Beyond joyriding with Chase, Belle studied very little and spent the rest of her senior year high-stepping around campus snapping photographs for a new lifestyle blog she was building called La Belle Vie. She said it was one of the first of its kind and featured a collection of pretty sights and musings that I could plainly see filtered out everything foul that she couldn’t bear facing in her life. I saw less and less of her. Whenever I did see her, I noticed she was riding her red bicycle again, but something about all of it—Chase, La Belle Vie, her reborn enthusiasm that seemed to be a tinny, inauthentic version of her warm old spirit—just didn’t ring true to me. Maybe I should have paid her more attention; maybe I shouldn’t have let her start drifting away so elegantly and adeptly. But, like everyone else, I had plunged myself headlong into the deep end of corporate recruiting. As I had wanted to tell Belle on Gilman Island, none of us had a choice. It was all part of the serious business of finding a good job. The next hoop of excellence we needed to jump through. And by preoccupying ourselves with that all-important task, there was no time for introspection. College was slipping away so quickly—the pine-guarded place that had protected us for three years began nudging us toward the door with sudden and semiabrupt gestures that added up to one clear message: It’s been such a hoot having you here and we really don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve got to make room to give a new bunch their shot. Translation: You’d better get a move on now and sort out the rest of your life.

  On a bleak winter morning, a few dozen equally clueless seniors and I were bused away from the rolling idylls of New Hampshire down to the brassy blare of New York City for final-round interviews with a few of the big investment banks. We were assaulted with questions about the number of Ping-Pong balls that could fit into Madison Square Garden, or how we would go about valuing a coffee and bagel cart in Union Square. And we were assigned young alumni “buddies” who toured us around each bank after the interview goring was complete. I sensed it right away. There was some intangible thing binding these young professionals together—an upward angle of the chin, an authoritative edge to the voice, a precocious choice of cuff links. Leading us into a conference room or onto a trading floor, they strode with such implied authority and purpose and polish. They were twenty-four-year-olds behaving like bombastic old veterans—all pocket squares and after-hours bourbon old-fashioneds. I remember turning a corner in one office and recognizing a boy I knew from College, a few years older than me, rocking back in his desk chair and snarling so nasally, so dismissively into the phone—“Fly Delta? To be clear, did you just suggest that I fly Delta?”—that I marveled at how someone could hurl so much open disdain toward another person, about an airline no less, before completing his first quarter century on the planet. For better or worse, these cues left an impression. For as long as I could remember, being first mattered intensely to me—crossing the three-legged race finish line ahead of the pack, having the most immaculate Brownie uniform stitched with the widest array of badges in all the troop. I approached my search for my first job in the same way I had approached my undergraduate applications—I was looking for a team to join and I wanted it to be the winning one. By joining a bank this seemed to be a certainty. I would jump straight into the rush and the hum—into the inner chambers of our country’s beating capitalist heart—and move in lockstep with my highest-achieving contemporaries.

  I took the direct route when it came time to break the news to my mother. Campus recruiting had wrapped up and—against all odds—as a history major I had received the most coveted job offer of them all, a first-year analyst position with Bartholomew Brothers, the most iconic of the New York investment banks.

  “Mom, something amazing has happened,” I announced to her by phone. “I’ve found a job at a bank!”

  “Oh, how wonderful, dear—wherever did you meet him?” My mother had taken the call in the kitchen where she was in the middle of making dinner, the extractor fan roaring with industrial force in the background. I imagined her as an aproned, spatula-bearing figure pitching itself forward bravely in the center of a wind tunnel. She crudely covered the receiver, hissing “Jim!” to summon my father from his study. “At a party? A sorority house social?”

  “No, Mother,” I answered, flatly. She knew full well I had never rushed a sorority. “I didn’t meet a banker.” I cleared my throat. She issued a horrified gurgle, anticipating my next line. “I’m becoming one.”

  * * *

  In an indiscernible flash, it was June and it was Commencement Day and our undergraduate curtain call was upon us. Our class stood—en masse and mildly stunned—with a poignant fog hanging low around our gowned shoulders on the crisp stretches of the campus Green. How was it all over before it had barely begun? The College had transformed its central lawn into a launchpad to catapult us, formally and finally, into adulthood. It was fitted with a stage and a lectern in the deceptively friendly shape of an old pine trunk and a lone piper on the sidelines who sounded a s
harp song of sorrow into the mist. I stood in the middle of that grassy launching site, looking ahead to the vast, flat unknown of wherever it was that I would land. The piper finished, staying silent and reverent as Baker’s bells started clanging out alternating notes of melancholy and promise. So many of my classmates were doubled over at the now unavoidable reality of leaving College—around me they wore green, queasy looks advertising their shock or their hangovers and in all cases were convinced that the most epic hangover of all was on the brink of hitting. A passageway to everything foolhardy and wonderful and high-spirited was sealing shut behind us forever. Out in the real world there would be no rousing alma mater to urge us forward, no lunatic rioting around sixty-foot-tall bonfires or accidental afternoon naps in battered old leather armchairs or spontaneous snowball fights when the heavens shook down the first silver flurries or toga parties or term papers returned heavy and lovely with the perfume of pipe smoke or the warmth and safety of knowing you were tucked in behind sky-high gates made of towering pines. I knew this and I wasn’t the least bit happy about it. But on that last afternoon, I was determined to hear the promise, not the melancholy, in Baker’s bells—to look up and past its storybook spire and think that maybe, just maybe, this wasn’t an elaborate hoax. Maybe they called it Commencement for a damn good reason; maybe the best years of my life could still be ahead of me. As I hopefully transferred my tassel from the right to left side of my mortarboard, ready to race toward all of that best-still-yet-to-come, my parents greeted me on the lawn.

  “That’s my girl,” my father glowed, engulfing me in a bear hug. “Look out, Wall Street, this one’s whip smart and barreling your way!”

  My mother rolled her eyes and pushed herself between us to face me and issue her perverse version of congratulations. With a sniff and a downward sloping of the right corner of her mouth, she wasted no time to remind me that I had failed to follow her one instruction.

  “Maybe it’s not all lost,” she wavered, uncertainly. “If you play your cards right, button, being at that bank may actually work in your favor, with so many eligible men right at your fingertips.” She said the word bank in the same tone she generally reserved for words like bookmaker and brothel.

  As my mother took a deep, preparatory breath to continue her reprimand, Belle Bailey skipped up just in the nick of time, her own mortarboard a black T-shaped cocktail hat sloped stylishly to one side. She was by herself and I couldn’t spot any of her relatives—interested aunts, uncles, or godparents—hovering with decorum on a nearby patch of grass. My mother tried to compensate by dotting her with an even-more-enthusiastic-than-usual Pantone palette of compliments. This time she focused on Belle’s crimson shift dress that apparently looked just precious, my mother’s highest grade of approval, though its exact meaning has always been lost on me. I certainly hadn’t received the same praise for the forest-green suede loafers I decided to wear that day as a nod to our College colors—the emptiness of her stare as she gazed down at my shoes told me she had slotted them into the same stylistic genus as a pair of surgical boots. Belle in red, standing out from a crowd, sparking applause, was not unusual. She could never be seen without some bright-red accessory—an urbane cloche, a fluttering scarf, thick and juvenile red mittens. In time I would come to see those red accents for what they actually were: props in Belle’s daily magic show. Like a waving silk scarf or a startled puff of smoke they were special effects intended to distract and deflect. Looking down, I observed that the skirt of her dress pleated in a way that suggested an inverted tulip. Her left leg was placed in front of her at a gentle angle—an elegant and suntanned stamen. My mother also liked describing Belle as floral—isn’t she such a floral girl? And when she stood tapered and tall, you had to agree it was as if the petals of a flower opened up at you—flattering you by implying you were the sun she was extending herself toward in search of nourishment.

  “Here we go,” Belle said to me, reaching over to squeeze my hand as though we were jointly attached to a bungee cord, about to take the greatest headfirst leap of our lives together on the count of three. “Off into the wild blue yonder!”

  “Or steely-gray yonder? It is New York we’re moving to.”

  Belle didn’t respond—her eyes had drifted up to the clock on the library bell tower and I could see she had retreated behind a gossamer veil of reminiscing.

  “How did it get so late so soon?” I heard her whisper to herself, or maybe to the mischievous spirit of a young Dr. Seuss, who’d been launched from this same graduation lawn back in 1925.

  “My goodness how the time has flewn,” I chimed in, supporting her with another line of his verse.

  “How did it get so late so soon? Really, M.—how did it?”

  “Sure beats me, Belle. But here we are.” A lump had formed in my throat, tightening my voice into a strange and frog-like quiver.

  She pulled herself away from the bell tower and inhaled bravely, looking to my mother and to me with giant cartoon eyes that were shadowed and glassy with contradictory sentiment. Then she tamped all that feeling down and presented us with her warmest gradient of smile—the kind that opened her face up completely and welcomed us into the grief-stricken folds of her beauty.

  “We’ll always be here for you, Belle,” my mother clarified with emotion, reaching over and interlacing Belle’s fingers with hers. “Anything you need. You just call. Day or night. Never hesitate for one second. Not for one second, you sweet girl.”

  Despite the profound loss she had already endured in her life and how solitary she seemed that day—lost and swimming in the abundant fabric of her cap and gown—Belle would never face anything completely alone. I always knew independence was an irrepressible part of me. For Belle, it was so different. Not once could I recall a moment when she wasn’t propped up by positive reinforcement, by some expression of unconditional support, by an anguished boy tumbled head over heels in love with her. Can that type of existence haunt a person, too? She had shrugged off the insistent pressures of corporate recruiting and decided to become a photographer or a writer or both—I was never quite sure what to call it, but after graduating she planned to manage and market her new lifestyle blog La Belle Vie. That guaranteed her need for external validation would only keep deepening. I suspect there were times that Belle, if she took an honest look inward, would have longed for some space, a grain of autonomy that would allow her to inhale and exhale in her own right, as her own person, sheltered from the prying and expecting eyes of others, if only momentarily. To determine if she herself was truly happy with who she was and what she had become.

  I felt confident about what I was becoming. Telling someone where I was going to work yielded nothing but sets of raised eyebrows and acclamatory remarks like Look at you, smarty-pants or Well, we always knew you weren’t exactly a dummy. I stockpiled these comments and felt reassured about my path.

  The crowds were beginning to disperse, so Belle decorated each of us with a pair of farewell kisses and started to walk away. But then she paused, turning back to hold my stare and issue me a last good-bye stamped with something enigmatic and sad:

  “I’ll see you on the other side, M.”

  Then she was gone, and my parents and I crossed the grass toward the Hanover Inn to sit down for what would be, by a large margin, the most anticlimactic lunch of my life. I lifted my mortarboard off my head and took my first step off the graduation Green, half-expecting some kind of startling event—a land mine detonating under my foot or a gale-force wind ripping me off the ground or my mother looking on in horror as my green loafers metamorphosed into cloven hooves. Proof that, from now on and for always, everything would be different. Nothing exploded or mutated—the universe didn’t seem interested that I could no longer call myself a student—but I did stub my toe on the pavement edge, flying forward and swinging myself around a parking meter a few feet away.

  “Look sharp!” my father cried.

  I regained my balance as my mother shook her head a
nd tsked toward my shoes.

  Looking sharply was the last thing I’d been doing. I simply wasn’t looking. I had donned a pair of blinders as the only way to block the ache of leaving the first place I had felt real happiness—the certainty of belonging, of being exactly where I knew I was supposed to be in the world. We reached the inn and my father opened the front door for my mother and me in one gallant swoop. Celebratory sounds floated in our direction from the restaurant—popping champagne corks, clinking stemware, nasal bursts of laughter.

  “Magna cum laude earns you a cocktail, jelly bean.” He winked at me. “And I don’t mean a Shirley Temple.”

  He bustled us inside, humming happily beneath his breath. Everything will fall into place, I thought, trying to pick out his melody. I will figure out my new place. Belle and I will reunite as Lost Girls again. Things would pick up right where they had left off, I was certain—on the other side.

  THE CITY

  What are the dreams people dream—I dreamed—of Wall Street? So much importance imagined into storms of ticker tape and winding, gusting cobblestone alleyways and the frantic clang of the Stock Exchange’s opening bell. In 2006, new graduates like me were the last disciples of that shiniest, original version of the American Dream. Many of us believed almost anyone could be a success if they put their mind to it—and that people who made a fortune by and large deserved it. We couldn’t help ourselves. As by-products of a duty-less age, we could never fathom taking up arms for our country, but we could devote ourselves to a different calling. We could power up a BlackBerry, thumb through a copy of Liar’s Poker, and submit ourselves to the infantry of finance—at the time, the most ambitious, All-American thing Ivy League alumni could do.