Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “Very fine weather we’ve been having!” Jeremy croaked pointlessly into his headset to open the call, jamming his sweating fists into his trouser pockets so forcefully I was sure he’d tear through the bottom seams. The prospective client responded with a string of vivid expletives. Chase Breckenridge sat in the front row, all of two feet away from Jeremy, his bruising form lacquered in a deep walnut tan. As Jeremy sputtered on, Chase flapped his sculpted arms in a light and obnoxious fluttering motion, cueing malicious snorts around the room. We all knew he was reasserting his belief that Jeremy was our class’s very own flying fairy. Piggelo rolled her eyes and stepped forward to abort the call with a push of her pudgy finger.

  “At least you had the sense not to mention the firm’s name,” she barked at the white-lipped Jeremy. “They’ll think it was some blubbering imbecile up at Sullivan & Co.”

  To The Brothers’s credit, despite that awful display, they saw something in Jeremy. Or they were unwilling to let go of certain things he brought to the table. On a full scholarship, he had achieved the highest marks and citations at his largely unheard-of tiny upstate college. During all four undergraduate years he held a job in a men’s apparel shop—learning the correct amount of dress shirt to reveal beneath a jacket cuff (half an inch) and the standard length of suit trousers (with a one-inch break)—while squeezing in his studying from 8:00 p.m. to 2:00 a.m. And during our training days our employee card turnstile swipe data was analyzed weekly, recording our movements in and out of the office, so the firm knew Jeremy was always the first to arrive and last to leave. He was useful proof that the firm did draw from a hardworking, blue-collar lot. Plus there was one more thing that mattered. If the firm lost Jeremy they could no longer boast that their battalion of private bankers included not only three Olympic medalists and one Pulitzer Prize winner, but also a hot air balloonist. Jeremy had been ballooning since he was a boy and had once been the youngest person on record to fly solo in a hot air balloon. He flew from Rochester, New York, to Battle Creek, Michigan, where he landed to the roar of his grandfather plus a million other spectators gathered for The World Balloon Invitational. A few years later, his record was shattered by a nine-year-old. But that could be overlooked. While at first glance hot air ballooning may have seemed like a dandy’s hobby, in reality it took spunk and guts that instantly appealed to risk-taking billionaires. It could be the ultimate clincher in any beauty contest.

  For these reasons they didn’t want to cut Jeremy loose, they just needed to manage the fact that he wasn’t cut from front-office cloth. He was totally comfortable two thousand feet high in a levitating wicker basket but could never be client facing, sweating it out in the hot seat every time he pitched a tactical tilt to liven up the portfolio of a long-standing client. Jeremy was far too honest to ever be a salesman.

  The solution was to transfer Jeremy into the Compliance Department, guaranteeing he would never have any direct contact with clients. And so he left us to begin a separate anticorruption and compliance training program, across the river in New Jersey.

  Many of our classmates were convinced he had died.

  “You just don’t leave the program,” one declared, eyes darting around the training room and mouth lightly foaming. “You’re either told to leave or something very grave has happened to you.”

  Someone raised a cryptic index finger toward the window, pointing it straight at the glass outline of Jersey City where The Brothers’s back-office building glistened with second-tier blandness across the Hudson River.

  “Back office?” The group gasped, collectively.

  “Does it get any graver than that?” another trainee observed, casting a quick, impassive glance at the distant building before turning away, as though locking eyes on the firm’s support structure for too long could turn any revenue generator into stone—or worse still, into a cost center.

  “Well, it did for Spencer Wallace when he sat front row on day one of orientation and power-yawned right into Bill Withers’s face.”

  Withers sent a follow-up e-mail to make sure the trainee hadn’t swallowed his tongue before instructing him to hand in his employee card and head uptown to join the lesser ranks of Sullivan & Co.—his services were no longer required by The Brothers.

  “What about Krissie Kaufmann faking a family death as a get-out-of-jail-free card?”

  “A total disgrace,” someone scoffed. “She got zinged by that kindergarten-level Sharpe ratio question in an open meeting and it was game over for that uppity one. You know what they say—if you can’t take the heat … get back into the kitchen!”

  The young men ricocheted forced gasps of laughter off one another and bounced nervously on the balls of their feet. I heard all about those uppity girls trying to escape the kitchen since joining the firm—with their high-flying notions of careers and vice presidencies and hideous charcoal pantsuits, always ill-fitting, to help them feel more like one of the boys. They insisted on crossing their legs with one ankle perched jauntily over the other knee in a tragic attempt at masculinity. Piggelo was masterful at the ankle perch. I made sure the guys would never bucket me into that unsavory lot. I never ankle-perched and I always wore properly tailored trousers. I was also a complete liability in any kitchen, painting yet another blue brush of sadness on my mother’s heart.

  * * *

  Not long after Jeremy’s transfer, Piggelo announced she was running an open meeting to test us on our knowledge of world history rather than capital markets. Though the prospect of it made my blood run cold—the shame of my previous classroom ejection was still so fresh—I was cautiously optimistic that my undergraduate history major could finally offer up some degree of real-world utility.

  “I didn’t prepare for this,” the boy next to me hissed. “I would have spent Sunday at the Met instead of memorizing what the damn S&P 500 has done year-to-date.” He stared down at his open-meeting crib sheet—the symmetry of its numeric columns and yield curves almost beautiful—and for a second I thought I saw tears in his eyes.

  Piggelo read us a passage in her terrifying monotone that lasted twenty minutes and was riddled with the acronym PRB. After two minutes, many trainees tuned out and the most careless let their eyes visibly glaze over, figuring they were toast either way. Then, without warning, Piggelo stopped.

  “Who is capable of summarizing for the group the passage I just read to you?” A single cough sounded like a plaintive foghorn from the middle of the room. “Anything at all you remember? What about the PRB—can anyone tell me about the PRB?” The cocksure boy on the other side of me jotted four words down—Pabst’s Ribbon of Blue?—and nudged his notepad an inch in my direction. I recoiled, as though mention of bottom-shelf beer in an open meeting was tantamount to his standing up and mooning the class. Do not tempt Fate, I jotted back.

  “Does anyone even know what the PRB is?” Piggelo continued. She was gaining momentum. “I told you in no uncertain terms to stop me if you heard anything you didn’t understand. If a client drones on in a meeting about something you haven’t got a clue about, what will you do then? Sit there like sponges and nod your way out of more share-of-wallet? Do that and you have entered into a spiral of shame—for yourself and for the firm whose calling card you have the privilege to use.”

  Piggelo referencing her “spiral of shame” theory was the worst possible sign. American history was more my forte—the PRB rang bells but none compelling enough to justify my raising my head above the parapet. At The Brothers I learned just how golden silence could be. They drilled it into us, teaching us the art and value of the “pregnant pause”—staying deathly quiet during a cold call or in a pitch meeting ten seconds too long to magically turn the tables of power. The unwelcoming prospect would turn meek and apologetic, stuttering and stammering just to fill the uncomfortable silence—or confirm the line hadn’t gone dead—and that’s when we were taught to strike.

  The silence filling our training room that day with Piggelo was more pathetic than pregnan
t. Just when I was certain she had given up on us, a voice took elegant flight from the front row, foreign and erudite—as though a country squire, named something like Willoughby or Knightley, had been summoned from an Austen novel to trot in on horseback and salvage his modern and dumbfounded surroundings. I was shocked to realize the voice was Chase Breckenridge’s, opining on the early doctrines of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Who was this imposter? At Dartmouth, Chase was better known for his frat basement beer-pong stamina and fearless table sliding—not his lecture hall brilliance.

  But double-sidedness had always been his bag. In New York, he was still that curious type of pedigreed Englishman who mystifies his countrymen by crossing the ocean in search of American success and validation. Chase’s father was a Mayflower descendant who did his postgraduate studying as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Moon-drenched in white tie, he met the future Mrs. Breckenridge, a red-haired English rose wrapped in Givenchy embroidery, at one of the university’s June Commemoration Balls. Chase, their first, was born in London but embraced his American heritage from a young age, summer-camping at Raquette Lake where he discovered his love of horses. He didn’t think twice about following in his father’s footsteps to attend his old green-flushed Ivy League College where Belle Bailey and I came to meet him. Chase’s dual-edged lineage gave him versatility and, though some viewed his pinky signet ring with family crest as a dead giveaway, he got a kick out of keeping people guessing. To throw them off his scent, he loved peppering his speech with the occasional “Goddamn!” or “Hell yeah!” which coarsened his lofty English tones with down-home allegiance to the stars and stripes. He could play it either way—back in England, be the cowboy, here in America, be the peer. Though his sartorial tastes leaned more toward Jermyn Street than Madison Avenue, all agreed Chase looked undeniably American. Maybe it was the hearty Mayflower stock that had enabled his ancestors to weather that first grueling winter back in 1620. He channeled that heft and was a great bronzed Adonis with charmingly loose curls blooming at the back of his eternally slicked-back hair, wet from a shower following his regular speed-bag session stolen at noon in The Brothers’s on-campus gym.

  In our training classroom that day, Chase was no doubt playing the peer. He sounded learned, considered even. In business, just as in life, only a handful of those moments are required if they are timed properly. It was clear then that Chase would go on to become the Jedi Knight of the pregnant pause—and so much more—at Bartholomew Brothers. At several crucial points during his monologue he stopped talking, grinding everything to a halt and staring straight ahead like a well-polished, testosterone-steeped android whose Pause button had been pressed. His pause filled the room with nail-biting suspense while showcasing his remarkable, if eerily robotic, sangfroid. From that moment on, he might as well have kicked back and thrown his buffed Church’s wingtips up on the desk for all remaining open meetings. Piggelo’s beady eyes regarded him with a pride typically reserved for young parents watching their firstborns stumble forward in an initial attempt at walking. He had ingratiated himself with her completely. Granted, it was an easier feat for him as she always fancied herself an Anglophile at heart. She was a hefty woman—or “unit,” as the boys described her—and had her custom suits made by Gieves & Hawkes care of the keen eye and steady hand of the first female head cutter in the history of Savile Row. Piggelo limited herself to invisible acts of female solidarity.

  When the New Year had broken and our training days were done, I couldn’t seem to shake the guy. Maddeningly, Chase and I were assigned to the same client team and given back-to-back desks on the floor. My saving grace was still Jeremy, who thankfully didn’t tread far from me once he finished his substitute training program in Jersey City. In his new role as an anticorruption and compliance analyst, he was tasked with reviewing and rubber-stamping correspondence bankers sent to their clients, and was assigned to a window desk at the end of our row. Most people in the office took little notice of him. Those who did were disdainful of either his surveillance role or his stylistic quirks. On the latter point, many scoffed that the standard gray three-piece suit he wore most days—so obviously scored from a pawnshop or borrowed from an encouraging great-uncle—dwelled in as low a league as a handlebar mustache or thumb ring.

  “You’d better take care, Jez,” Chase cautioned Jeremy regularly, jabbing his thumb in the air toward Jeremy’s antiquated attire. “Dress that sharply and people will mistake you for a banker.”

  The fact was, Jeremy Kirby would never look like he belonged on Wall Street—or in the fast-moving flash of our new millennium, for that matter. His posture was too graceful for a boastful banking type. And no matter how much beeswax pomade he used to tame it, his hair stood slightly on end—sandy and toddler-like. But his greatest anomaly of all was the sentiment that drove him, the bright red, beating heart he so proudly brandished on his sleeve. So many people our age couldn’t be bothered to stick, while if Jeremy did anything in his life, it was to bother and to believe and to stick. I was amazed at how little credit he received for it. When he used creativity and doggedness to earn his job offer at The Brothers, people said it all came down to totally undeserved happenstance—a hot air balloonist unwittingly seeking an audience with the only Wall Street tycoon who had a secret penchant for antiquated modes of flight. They claimed he didn’t have a clue that Bill Withers chipped fragments off his elephantine year-end bonuses to restore a squadron of forty World War II Spitfires uncovered in the tangles of the Burmese jungle.

  By judging Jeremy so sharply, most people missed seeing all of the things that made him so remarkable. His belief that Cole Porter’s ghost haunted his most cherished landmarks around Manhattan. The middle-life platitudes he clung to, though he was a decade or two too young for them: summers used to be longer, kids used to be politer, people used to show greater respect by dressing up for an occasion. His determining the outcome of each day by consulting the lucky silver dollar his grandfather had given him as a boy, kept eternally polished and at-the-ready in his inside jacket pocket. His secret, sacrilegious ambition to leave finance as soon as possible—as soon as he was able to prop his parents back up to a financially viable position—and be a full-time balloonist if he could swing it.

  I often wonder how things might have turned out if Old Belle, the New Hampshire version of Belle Bailey, had crossed paths with Jeremy—a man who seemed to have been hand-assembled using cottony tufts pulled straight from her untainted, undergraduate imaginings. The New York version of Belle should have sided with Chase in the camp that judged Jeremy swiftly and unfairly, writing him off and leaving him in peace. But when their lives converged one rainy December day, three and a half years into our city lives when I was still foolishly fixed in my assumption that nothing would ever change, when something exciting happening to me seemed about as likely as a spruce tree spontaneously sprouting a flailing human arm from its trunk, she didn’t—she couldn’t—and that, for better or for worse, altered the course of everything.

  HANDLE WITH GREAT CARE

  The Christmas season descended upon New York City like a great string of twinkle lights flung from skyscraper to skyscraper in mile-high ropes of merriment and wonder. Chestnut vendors near Grand Central and along Fifth Avenue dug their heels in for winter—counting on an ever-replenishing supply of tourists unaware that the smell would always be so much better than the taste. Far downtown, there was no sign of holiday cheer at The House of Bartholomew, nor need there have been. With so much uplifting self-belief, the firm didn’t need caroling or tinsel to feel the spirit of the season. Only one assistant was bold enough to perch a small, drooping pine on her desk. Located just across from Jeremy Kirby’s desk, many assumed the meek tree was his as they clipped by on their way to the forty-second-floor pantry or the corner office occupied by Piggelo. The display was tolerated as a reminder that there were legions of Charlie Brown types in the world—lovable losers drawing down from ever-brimming and idiotic balances of hope. Where there is
hope, there is opportunity to be carved out.

  Our building gave us a bird’s-eye view of all incoming opportunities. It was a limestone fortress perched ominously in Art Deco magnificence on that windiest stretch along the bottom southeast edge of Manhattan. At our doorstep, ferries shot into New York Harbor’s foamy green to trace noble, arching paths to Ellis and Liberty Islands, or chugged more pragmatically due south to Staten Island. We all knew the location of the firm’s epicenter was not an accident—it was positioned deliberately at what could be called the most blusteringly patriotic vantage point in the American universe. The building guarded over Lady Liberty, an almost petite coppery speck across the watery distance—a third the size at a mere twenty-two stories. They began digging The House of Bartholomew’s three stories of underground vaults, the foundation of the firm’s new headquarters, only months after the Crash of 1929. When asked about the timing of the build, founder Henry Q. Bartholomew famously told the press: “We won’t take this standing down!”—as though the market’s crash had been the result of a giant decade-long caper hatched at the hands of bandana-masked jewel thieves. Eighty years on, despite another Earth-rattling tremor in 2008 that brought most of the financial industry—and the country—to its knees, The House of Bartholomew was still standing strong. While the financial crisis left most of Wall Street rocking like ocean-liner passengers green and seasick with no shoreline in sight, at the end of 2009 another best-yet Bartholomew Brothers’s fiscal year was winding down. And that meant another rip-roaring Christmas party season was kicking into gear.