Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  A few weeks after Commencement, with the College and its towering pines and term papers and toga parties a hazily happy memory—a bewitching place that we may or may not have just dreamed up in our mad young minds—I marched into New York’s southernmost canyons with all the totally unfounded confidence of twenty-two. Like hundreds of thousands of pastel souls before me, I presented myself at the iconic corner of Wall and Broad Streets, lifting my chin toward the Stock Exchange as though it had unfurled a gigantic American flag across its pillars that morning just to tip its hat at me—splaying out that canopy of stars and stripes to welcome and wish me all the success and prosperity in my new life. I know that I imagined this—I know that I urged it all forward. I allowed my most noble visions of work and productivity and accomplishment to puff up like bright balloons, ready to be twisted into miscellaneous animals a clown might assemble in his menagerie. Once I accepted my first-year analyst offer at Bartholomew Brothers—The Brothers is what everyone called them—once I genuflected at its doorstep on my first day of employment, a railroad switch locked into place, directing me down a slick and steely and peculiar track. In retrospect, I marvel at how little I knew about where I was heading. But all the same, lifting my knee from the pavement, dusting off my right trouser leg, inhaling my two pale pink lungs full of ashy downtown air, and walking through the firm’s almighty front entrance, I had an acute understanding that there would be no going back.

  I went to work in The Brothers Private Bank, the division dedicated to managing the wealth and legacies of high-net-worth individuals and families. One hundred of us had been hired to help expand the firm’s private client base by finding and cold-calling people with a lot of money. On our first day we were handed an intricate map of the firm’s downtown “campus,” an employee identity card, and a branded canvas duffel bag. Then we were marched into a training classroom where we’d spend the next six months learning everything we’d need to know about the business. We were taught to scour everything from IPO listings to obituary pages in order to find wealthy people’s phone numbers, then, worst of all, call a few hundred of them each week. They recommended certain hooks to reel the rich in—inquiring about a person’s current cash or municipal bond position or whether they had a strategy in place to avoid the aggravations of probate in the event of a family member’s sudden death.

  To toughen us up mentally—and emotionally—a cornerstone of our training was a theatrical production called an “open meeting” that happened multiple times a week. This involved a drill sergeant of increasingly senior rank materializing at the front of the room and commanding someone to stand up and tell a joke or sing a soul-swallowing, solo rendition of The Five Satins’ “In the Still of the Night.” Or demanding answers on the current angle of a yield curve or gold movements year-to-date or the color and pattern of the Hermès tie a particular partner had worn the day before until whichever foot soldier was in the spotlight cracked and fell to pieces in front of his chortling classmates. It all thrived on an intravenous line of schadenfreude. The most agonizing sessions involved Piggelo, our senior partner in charge, who would burst into our training classroom and—like a sturdy bazooka heaved over a combatant’s shoulder to eliminate ill-placed and drifting enemy tanks—fire some of the most distressing questions at any one of the hundred glazed faces gaping before her. What a lesser-known Matisse sold for at auction the previous week, the approximate weight of a Boeing 707, how many square feet of pizza are consumed per annum in the Western Hemisphere, or how one would, if shrunk to the height of a nickel and trapped in a blender with blades guaranteed to start moving in sixty seconds, go about getting out. Failing to deliver the answer earned you an immediate ejection from the classroom, like a disgraced biblical figure banished into the wilderness to wander and die alone.

  Piggelo heightened our insecurity any way she could to ensure we’d never, ever stop cold-calling. She stationed metronomes on our desks as a reminder that the clock was always ticking. Every second we sat idle was another string of potential clients lost, she said, another second we could have been calling on a prospect and asking for the order. Tick-tick-tick-tick-tick. Piggelo’s henchman Drewe—an emasculated chief-of-staff type—loomed behind the metronomes and over our shoulders, tracking our activity in his beige-covered logbook. Years later, I would wake up in a cold sweat some nights at the image of Piggelo’s sausage-link index finger waving back and forth to the steady percussion line of Drewe’s pencil scratchings and those metronomes.

  They promised they would be watching us, always watching us, and without warning would round us up in a side room like a pack of overeager bull terriers corralled into an undersized ring.

  “How many calls did you make in the past twenty-four hours?” Drewe would probe, raising a pale finger toward a random trainee’s glistening forehead.

  “Fifty-five?”

  “Josef to your left made triple that number—twenty-five calls per hour during the trading day,” Drewe would fire back, without needing to consult his logbook. “Can you explain to the group why you are lagging so far behind? Did you leave the office to catch a Broadway matinée?”

  It was all pretty grim stuff—a far cry from the cerebral and substantive lines I had penciled into my mental sketches of Wall Street during the more dizzying moments of corporate recruiting. Obituary announcements hadn’t factored into my picture. As time passed, I would never be entirely sure what I’d become a part of. But it wasn’t what I had actually chosen, was it?

  * * *

  As I engaged in my all-consuming egg-beater kick far downtown at The Brothers’s headquarters—The House of Bartholomew, we called it—trying to keep my head above water as an early-days trainee, Belle Bailey was busy primping and preening and building La Belle Vie. We made sincere efforts to keep our friendship afloat in New York City. Though we were no longer undergraduates, and though we dwelled in opposing urban galaxies, we both insisted on sticking to our old Lost Girls traditions—or at least trying to re-create more sterilized metropolitan versions of them. During our first city summer, instead of Shattuck Observatory trips, Belle picked fashionable rooftop bars for us to meet at on Wednesday nights, with plenty of top-shelf cocktails but no sign of any high-flying constellations, all choked to black by the city’s greedy glare. And instead of moonlit canoeing down the Connecticut River, on two weekends we settled for pointing a two-man kayak off the Seventy-Second Street dock through the gray-green thick of the Hudson River.

  “What a stunning day!” Belle cried on both occasions, waving her oar at the sky looming low and flat above us, leaving me to do all of the paddling. I kayaked us through colonies of used Q-tips and unraveled plastic leis and even a cracked, powder-pink toilet seat but Belle acknowledged none of the refuse, though once she did break down with a “Well, we won’t let this rain on our parade!” when a bloated seagull carcass bobbed sadly by to our right. We were a very long way from New Hampshire. No matter how upbeat Belle’s attitude, no matter how zealous the wave of her paddle or sky-high the arch of her eyebrows, one fact was clear: a beautiful door really had shut behind us. No matter how brightly Belle battled, we could never go back. Things could never be the way they used to be.

  By the end of that first summer, Belle was blogging with increasing intensity—I didn’t fully grasp what she was doing, but it involved her flitting and flickering up and down the island like a highly social lightning bug. I, by contrast, found comfort in staying fixed. The Vanderbilt Club—a private member’s club on Vanderbilt Avenue alongside Grand Central Terminal—became my turf outside the office. Being Dartmouth alumni granted us the privilege of membership and I viewed it as a safe haven smack-dab in the center of the city—comfortingly collegiate and slightly threadbare, with rooms that hadn’t been refurbished since the Reagan Administration. The Vanderbilt boasted four squash courts, a forty-thousand-volume library with a gold-coffered ceiling, dozens of hardwood captain’s chairs engraved with Ivy League crests, and stiff cocktails crafted lov
ingly by Theo the bartender at the second-floor Main Bar. Where did Club-less people go? I honestly didn’t know what people in urban centers did without the vital third space of a Club—a refuge outside the competitive sterility of the office and the postage-stamp confines of Manhattan apartments. My life would have seemed a vast blank to me without the presence of The Vanderbilt squash bracket alone, which had become an easy, real-world substitute for my old varsity squash team. I spent most of my free hours on those Club courts, warming up, practicing, playing, and cooling down, so I could keep hold of my top-seed standing.

  I admit, part of me felt like we were just practicing the manners and the gestures of adulthood—that at any second the curtain would fall and we could all, with a grateful sigh, change out of our business attire, slide back into our broken-in khaki and fleece, and resume our old College lives. But Labor Day came and went with no indication we’d be making any sort of grand, on-campus comeback. It was a naïve notion, but I thought that together Belle and I could compensate by making The Vanderbilt our new city clubhouse of sorts. She had become a member and even admitted to adoring its library—escaping into one of its bookshelved nooks to read and write in peace when no one was looking. She also used the Club’s concierge desk as a handy place to leave printed and bound copies of her La Belle Vie posts for me to read, along with an accompanying note card, saying something like:

  M.,

  Here’s a bit of life and a break from that god-awful Barron’s! Don’t you ever get BORED?

  B.B.

  In my depleted, post-squash-match state, my scans of her stories were cursory at best.

  But in public, and to me, Belle dubbed The Vanderbilt a categorical bore—a cobwebbed old haunt that was better suited to the over-fifty crowd.

  “How about after-work cocktails at the Main Bar tomorrow night?” I suggested to Belle by phone one Thursday in early September. “Theo makes a mean gimlet and on Fridays they serve those spicy wings from five o’clock on.”

  “Wings at The Vanderbilt?” Her shudder was almost audible across the line. “There are enough elbow patches in that building to canopy a small village, M.,” she drawled. “A big gang is heading up to Dorrian’s—I’d say you should join but I’m afraid venturing socially beyond the East Forties might cause you to spontaneously combust.”

  “Right,” I retorted, stung by her backhanded noninvitation. It was early evidence of the difficult distance elongating between us. “It may not be worth the fire hazard.”

  Fine, then, I thought—I’ll make The Vanderbilt my personal, Lost Girl (singular) stronghold. But even within its fortress walls I wasn’t safe from reminders of the other, breezier twentysomething existence many of my contemporaries seemed to be leading out in the world. Young women superficially similar to Belle popped in and out regularly. Many busied themselves with aesthetic pursuits, working in public relations or event planning or at prestigious galleries and auction houses, all hinting that The Vanderbilt wasn’t their final destination—that they were only whisking through, to grab a fizzing cocktail or tug at the arm of a sharply dressed young man, and spoke in ringing and excited voices about the other, more fashionable addresses they were hurrying on to farther uptown or downtown, for no one actually stuck around in Midtown. Where exactly were they going? When they glanced over to me at my usual corner table in the Grill Room, eating my club sandwich on wheat and immersed in the weekend papers, at times I could see a thought bubble puffing to judgmental life above their heads: Oh God, are you still here? Don’t you have anywhere else to go? They were alien objects rotating mysteriously as they floated by—and I’m sure they felt the same way about me. We orbited around one another in mutual incomprehension and I didn’t let them disrupt the steady conditions of my atmosphere, except on the odd occasion.

  Like that otherwise nondescript Saturday, when a pink-cheeked girl in one of those fashionable quilted jackets with its collar upturned sauntered out of the elevator onto the squash floor, gently angling her head and tossing her glossy hair over a shoulder in search of her beau who was stretching out a hamstring in front of the court next to mine. Homing in on her target, she strolled nonchalantly toward him just as I was exiting my court, swinging her handbag to her left to unwittingly slam the glass door back against my forehead. I saw stars and the floral silk scarf that was tied to her bag’s handle waving at me dismissively from the other side of the glass. Through my slightly blurred vision I watched the young man wipe his right temple with a wristband and break into a wide, goofy grin as soon as he caught sight of the girl—the universal sign of being completely and unabashedly smitten with someone. Later that afternoon in my apartment, sitting on my couch with an ice pack pressed against my brow, I couldn’t stop picking the question apart: What did it take to win one of those goofy grins? I honestly thought I’d been doing all of the right things—going to the right schools, working at the right investment bank, believing that my sincerity and reliability would somehow stack higher and higher to take the form of a mighty crane that could pivot right and left and mechanically pluck and drop into my lap the most essential things: validation and admiration and love. Someone, the right someone, would eventually come along and see everything I was, wouldn’t they? But, glancing over at the trusty row of flats and athletic shoes poised for action beside my apartment door, I wondered whether all of my effort had unintentionally made me too masculine—what with my interested scans of the FT’s salmon-pink pages in The Vanderbilt’s lounge, my preference for broken-in Belgian loafers over high-fashion heels, my squash court prowess, my Bartholomew Brothers employee card and branded canvas bag. Whether I had become invisible—an accepted but uninteresting piece of furniture in the Old Boys’ World I inhabited.

  “If you can’t make any headway at that desolate office of yours, I can’t understand why you aren’t able to find a nice young man at the Club!” my mother would exclaim, regularly, after making inquiries about my dating prospects. “What about the men’s squash bracket? Anyone catch your eye at the round robin? Or, better still, did you catch anybody’s? I really can’t fathom what could be going so horrendously wrong.”

  The office was a romantic write-off—my being attracted to someone in my training class was about as likely as my being amorously drawn to a bellicose bull, angled back on its haunches and ready to gore as it expelled steaming air through its flared nostrils. And though there were handsome men aplenty moving briskly through the Club corridors or atop varnished squash courts alongside mine, the girls in the quilted jackets with the glossy hair seemed to have skipped in to snag all of the good ones—and all of their goofiest grins—before I had even made it to match point. So I lived the daily repetition of that all-too-common refrain: the ones who noticed me didn’t interest me, and vice versa. When I had nothing to say, when I reported to my mother that there were no prospects, a weary sigh would rush through the line. She started sending me unsolicited packages in the mail, each a conspicuous attempt to dial up my femininity: a pair of kitten heels or an on-trend handbag or Jackie Onassis–inspired sunglasses—as though she were helping me pack my bags in preparation for a spontaneous sojourn in Capri. The arrival of each package had an antagonizing effect on me. Turning each feminine artifact around in my hands, I felt as though I had opened a time capsule from the era in which she came of age as a 1960s Chicago debutante—one of dutiful housewives with slippers and freshly stirred cocktails and understanding smiles at the ready when their husbands returned home ragged from the daily grind. Or maybe it was a starter kit to help me be more like one of the glossy-haired girls. Either way, my mother was urging me to play the correct part—a part that was never meant for me—and was showering me with a selection of suitable props. I would use the purse and sport the mammoth sunglasses on weekends, but I would spend an extra hour or two in the office as silent proof to her that I was made of more serious stuff. If love wasn’t in the cards for me—because I was starting to understand that it just isn’t in the cards for some people
—I thought I could devote myself to something else, something that was consuming and inspiring in altogether different ways, and give myself to my work.

  By my first autumn in the city, I’d become notorious for delivering the wrong answer to any young bachelor’s icebreaker—in the East Forties and beyond, for sometimes, though Belle would declare me a liar, I did socially venture outside of Midtown.

  “Now what do you get up to during the week, young lady?” a cute and rugged fellow asked me at a boozy rooftop gathering somewhere down in Chelsea.

  “It’s been a bit hellish this week, actually. We were long on ethanol so put a tactical tilt on our client portfolios but the corn bet bombed and the whole thing blew up in our faces. TGIF, right? Ha ha!”

  He would have been looking for eye batting and coy. Well, wouldn’t you like to know, mister! The young man issued a thin-lipped smile and cleared his throat. Then he spun the plastic cup in his hand in a counter-clockwise circle, looking down and counting rapidly dissolving ice cubes. Let’s get down to business, shall we?

  “Who are you with?” The playful lilt in his voice had vanished.

  “Bartholomew Brothers.”

  A subtle raise of the two furry caterpillars he called eyebrows.

  “The Brothers? Well.” The thin-lipped smile spread into a grin revealing a chipped front tooth from a hockey injury he never wanted to have repaired. “They have to be careful about maintaining their female quota, don’t they—you know, with the lawsuit and all that bad press a few years back.” He said nothing about his failure to get past round one of The Brothers’s infamous twenty-tier sweat-inducing ladder leading to the most coveted offer on Wall Street. He didn’t need to—it was written on his face, plain as day.

  With that, the young man disappeared down a spiral staircase in the direction of the men’s room. Repeating a familiar pattern, he popped back up a quarter of an hour later on the other side of the roof with a fresh smile, a fresh pair of cocktails, and a fresh debutante laughing beside him.