Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “The Bender is tonight, gentlemen!” Chase Breckenridge announced with his customary disregard of the two female colleagues sitting within five feet of him. His voice was posh and bright as he swiveled around in his desk chair, taking an elegant swing at an invisible target with a phantom polo mallet. “Let the rabble-rousing begin! ’Tis the season, as they say.”

  I rolled my eyes. It didn’t need to be Christmas to be Chase’s season. Year-round he dodged and weaved readily between work and play. He was as comfortable caught midgallivant on Page Six as he was spinning his office chair in front of the Bloomberg screens blinking a multicolored, ever-shifting spectacle in front of him. There was an undeniable continuity about Chase. No matter how much time ticked by, he stayed firmly stuck in the headiest days of his early twenties.

  Before he could finish hatching his plans for the evening’s Bender—in his mind, the unofficial firecracker setting the Christmas season off with a proper bang—Piggelo’s minion Drewe materialized alongside our row, dressed in his head-to-toe neutrals. He was an empirically attractive fellow—or would have been—but his lack of personality deadened his eyes and gave his face the blankness of a hockey mask. And no one could comprehend what the extra “e” in his name was all about.

  “Your Green Lists. We need you to keep them accurate. We’re watching.”

  I nodded back to him and let loose a gigantic internal sigh. We were required to track our prospective clients—those wildly wealthy people we cold-called and sweet-talked and spent hours lurking after in parking lots—on what they called our Green Lists, named after the forests of dusty dollars we were tasked to pull in for the firm. This helped Piggelo et al keep tabs on our every move and prevent embarrassing overlaps. Piggelo had been more on edge and vigilant than usual—one of our most coveted alternative investment funds UNIVERSAL ALPHA had recently imploded, blindsiding on-staff Ph.D.s and partners alike. When markets got choppy or an investment tanked, we were told to creep closer to our clients and prospects and, in turn, she drew uncomfortably closer to us. Some days I couldn’t venture into the ladies’ room without fear of Piggelo looming outside the bathroom stall, asking me whether I was using the downtime to mentally prepare for my next client call.

  Chase snorted as Drewe moved on to the next row of desks.

  “I’ll bet he’s watching, like a bloody zombie with those dead eyes of his.”

  “Have you ever noticed he doesn’t actually move his arms when he walks?” someone threw in.

  “Exactly. The tragic thing is he’ll probably make MD next year. Piggelo likes the look of him.”

  Our entire floor gossiped about Piggelo’s irregular tastes: the lover (gender unconfirmed) she was rumored to keep standing by in London, her motivation for installing a glass staircase in her East Seventy-First Street town house where only socks or house slippers were permitted, and her curious fascination with her chief-of-staff Drewe and his spiritless beauty.

  At the end of our row, behind four cubicle walls papered lovingly with black-and-white 5" × 7" head shots of Grace Kelly, our team assistant Leezel Bartholomew whinnied. The loops of her giant hair bow bounced with her laughter until she rose up from her cubicle to reveal the full extent of her peroxide blond head and spandex-covered form, one hand clasped over her mouth to contain her amusement.

  “Totally bonkers, isn’t it, Leezel?” Chase coaxed her.

  She nodded at him, eagerly. Any form of Piggelo bashing delighted Leezel. She was still reeling from her downgrade to our desk after serving as Piggelo’s PA for eight years. To help soften the humiliation, Piggelo erected a custom-made cubicle to wall Leezel off from our row of open desks. The cubicle helped Leezel dwell in her own world of truncated workdays, catastrophic spelling, Chanel No. 5 spritzes, special exceptions, nips out of the office to secure midmorning brioches or triple-cream-pasta late lunches, early departures to attend museum champagne socials, birthday party planning modeled on Marie Antoinette’s Versailles bashes, and hourly perusals of auction house Web sites. When someone would catch her in an online daydream, trolling images of Hermès Birkins or the lot listing for Christie’s upcoming “Parisian Bijoux” sale, she had a smart answer at the ready.

  “It’s part of my job,” she would snap back, plump hand resting on her heart, in mild offense. “I’m staying versed on the tastes and preferences of our client base. Frankly, isn’t that what everyone should be doing?”

  Her arm would sweep out in front of her to indicate the hoi polloi at the foot of her cubicle fortress, in particular Jeremy Kirby and me, who were polite but never pandered to her. From the moment we joined the firm, Leezel despised us for being so pointedly disconnected from the current fashions and for seeing straight through her spectacle. Following her demotion she displayed a singular loyalty to Chase and Chase alone on our desk. He had a habit of leaving a blazer slung casually over the back of his chair to give the illusion of presence regardless of his whereabouts. Leezel guarded that blazer like a rabid pit bull who had missed breakfast. She would reach over in a surprisingly acrobatic arc to jostle Chase’s mouse and revive his computer whenever his flashing screens blackened in dormancy.

  After a number of years, everyone stopped asking Leezel what it was she was actually getting up to at her desk—or with Chase’s mouse. Her surname gave her a wide berth. As a Bartholomew, was she actually a descendant of Henry Q. Bartholomew, founding father of Bartholomew Brothers? It remained a mystery, and so everyone had no choice but to handle her with a particular pair of kid gloves.

  “How the hell could they let Piggelo do it?” Chase snarled, redundantly. “Give Managing Director to Drewe—a man who’s named after the past tense of a word that means to close the curtains. I don’t even want to discuss the tragedy of that extra ‘e.’ The guy is essentially her PA—I mean, he’s non-revenue-generating.” Chase’s mobile phone buzzed, forcing him to give up his bone and issue his standard phone greeting:

  “I’m slammed and this phone is about to die, what do you need?”

  As Chase played automatic defense with his incoming caller, Leezel answered a persistently blinking light on his office line with a laborious sigh.

  “Chase—Annabelle says she’s five minutes away and she’ll meet you downstairs!”

  Chase reddened. Everyone but Leezel knew how much Belle Bailey turning up at the office on one of her errands atop her otherworldly red bicycle infuriated him. It blurred his various worlds uncomfortably—as did my friendship with her, I’m sure, which he still did his best to ignore, just as he’d ignored my existence since our notorious game of darts. He was never one to bother hiding his disdain. After one of Belle’s visits he announced that she might as well have been sodding Mary Poppins wandering onto the trading floor with a carpetbag, spilling unwelcome sunshine across the Bloomberg terminals and Barron’s back issues. And of course none of us could forget the day Belle had a large box containing Savile Row pajamas (reading in unmissable all-caps type: PAJAMAS INSIDE) delivered to Chase at his desk. The delivery man had burst onto our floor, panting and heartbreakingly triumphant as he located Mr. C. J. Breckenridge, marching up to him and declaring:

  “Here are your pajamas, sir!”

  The episode was totally unacceptable. It was the only time I can recall Chase losing his temper with Leezel, karate-chopping a meaty hand into the air somewhere around his chin and bellowing:

  “Oh for God’s sake, Leezel, I’ve had it up to here with this nonsense! Take control of things for once in your bloody life, woman!”

  Leezel assumed a look of horror then scampered off the floor, fluttering both hands by her sides like a seal trying to achieve forward momentum with its flippers.

  If worlds collided, Chase insisted he be the one colliding them, using his bare hands as if crushing two skulls together. Because of this, it was easier for Belle to use deliverymen. She didn’t want to go upstairs any more than Chase wanted to descend. On quite a few occasions she told me that the idea of The Brothers, and the tradin
g floor most of all, filled her with a particular feeling of dread—the stained carpets, the nasal blare of the squawk box, the twinge of male perspiration mixed with the unshakeable odor of day-old burrito. She said she pictured mousetraps lining the walls in grim ten-foot intervals, with an additional cluster near an obese trader who chucked lunch refuse over his plump shoulder and cooled down with a gigantic fan pointed straight at his perpetually sweating form. Save yourselves, she would whisper to the creatures scurrying through her imagination, you don’t want to be in such a place. The mousetraps and the obese trader did exist, but I never told Belle just how close to the mark her imaginings were.

  “Did she say what she needs?” Chase frowned, terminating his mobile call without a good-bye. “Didn’t you say our dinner reservation at Per Se is for eight thirty?”

  “Eight thirty, that’s right. This is an unannounced visit. She says she’s dropping something off and that it’s important.”

  Even though “five minutes away” in Belle’s vernacular could have meant she’d arrive in five, fifteen, or fifty-five, it should have been Leezel’s cue to bound downstairs and wait for the delivery. Instead, she took a personal call of her own, holding out a swollen, plum-nailed forefinger in Chase’s direction to quiet him. With a shrug of his bulky shoulders he spun back toward his desk and began squinting at his lower-left-most screen that he devoted to monitoring the Arsenal football scores. After a minute or two, Leezel finished her call and stood up, drifting off in the direction of the pantry from which the unmistakable smell of cinnamon bun had started wafting. Chase, giving a rat’s ass about all of it, squinted an inch closer to his Arsenal screen.

  “Cripes, Chase, I’ll go down,” I sighed, no longer able to stand the disinterest. In an unseasonal twist, it was pouring rain outside, which I knew killed any possibility that he would leave the building. I suddenly felt a pang of sorrow for Belle and for all of the disappointing things—the unending arrogance and apathy within the four walls of the firm—she would never be privy to. “I’m going to pick up lunch anyhow.”

  Jeremy had left only a few minutes earlier and I figured I could catch him at our sandwich cart. And besides, it had been ages since I’d last seen Belle.

  “Attagirl, M.!” Chase roared. He pounded a brawny fist down on his desk, keeping his eyes trained on the football scores. “You girls can have a bit of a natter.” He made a squawking motion with one hand as he started dialing out with his other.

  A chrome elevator zoomed me down forty-plus floors, spitting me out into the main lobby that hummed as a splendid contradiction in terms. Futuristic bodies with cyborg-like handsomeness and efficiency moved over slick floors of pink Knoxville marble, beneath a three-story vaulted ceiling regularly pointed to in architectural magazines as a shining example of Art Deco brilliance. A four-headed sculpture, often mistaken by members of the press for Cerberus guarding the gates of the Underworld, peered down at all passersby from one corner. On our first day of orientation, we learned that it was actually a mountain lion that had four heads to represent ITSI, the four central values of Bartholomew Brothers: Industry, Thrift, Security, and Integrity. We scribbled down these truths on our branded notepads, never pausing to question whether mountain lions were in fact creatures in the animal kingdom known for their industry, thrift, security, or integrity. Decades before us, Henry Q. Bartholomew II famously scratched out the ITSI principles on his own notepad—unbranded and lemon yellow—in a state of near depletion on his deathbed. That time-weathered page was preserved under glass and wheeled out at firm celebrations and major client events. All of these traditions and more were outlined in A Benchmark of Brilliance, the book the firm distributed to all new hires, recounting its corporate history that had, over the decades, built The Brothers into a superlative twenty-first-century enterprise. (A Benchmark of Brilliance was the only reference text that mattered, or was permitted—Bill Withers was rumored to have spent $150,000 anonymously purchasing all remaining copies of a competing tome written by a scrappy young journalist who focused more on the firm’s warts than its wins.) As trainees we had been expected to memorize key passages from A Benchmark, from the offering prices of milestone IPOs to nineteenth-century courtship rituals resulting in marriages and mergers that eventually led to the founding of the firm. Partners could and did stop us in hallways, answering a chipper “Good morning!” with a pop quiz on where May Osgoode first met Newland Bartholomew (answer: at the Grand Ball welcoming the Prince of Wales held at the Academy of Music on East Fourteenth Street in 1860) or what they named their firstborn child (answer: Bethuel) or what ailment clipped his young life so tragically short at eighteen months (answer: whooping cough).

  Not a wingtip was unpolished, not a Windsor knot was askew, not a strand of hair was out of place within those lobby walls—giving you the sense of leaving a lesser world behind. Even the security detail looked impeccable, appearing to have just transferred over from a competently handled shift at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I remembered leaping out of a taxicab too quickly one morning, my button-down shirt partially untucking at the back as I pulled my deal bag out behind me. Before opening the front door for me, a guard eyed my visible shirttail with distaste and asked: “Don’t you think that sort of display belongs up at Sullivan & Co.?” I half-expected him to pull off his prosthetic mask to reveal the sweating pink round of Piggelo’s face glaring in beady disappointment. That rare slip aside, I really did savor the orderliness of it all. And the competitiveness—being part of The Brothers, entering the mechanical lavishness of that lobby each day, made me feel like I was, simply by being allowed to show up, a member of the winning team.

  Peering out from behind the glass lobby doors that day, I looked for Belle through the atypical December downpour only to spot the incoming smudge of Jeremy. He was raincoated and bent forward at a forty-five-degree angle, pitching himself against the elements. Instead of an umbrella, he clutched a soaked paper bag containing a sure-to-be-soaked tuna sandwich. It was the lunch order he insisted on daily though it consistently triggered an exaggerated “Jesus almighty, who ordered the fish?” from Chase, who only emitted odors of Acqua di Parma and general manliness. (Of course it helped that Chase walked from his TriBeCa loft to the office every morning, bypassing the unforgivable stink of the subway that on certain days could be many leagues worse than tuna fish.)

  That early-winter rainstorm was all the more strange with its heightened humidity—steaming and violent with thick clouds of condensation gathering and billowing as a soupy smoke along the city sidewalks. A summer storm in our Christmastime midst—a signal that the impossible was permitted to happen.

  In an instant, I saw a streak of white peal past Jeremy, sending a murky puddle skyward. It was Cupid’s Arrow—and atop it Belle Bailey cycled with cartoon-like pedals, her bony knees exaggerated in their seesaw motion, her bike’s wicker basket offering up a bunch of wild daisies as though it were a cotton-clouded June day. She screeched to a halt at The Brothers’s main doors and leapt onto the asphalt. Dressed in an ivory knickerbocker suit, she had no doubt just shot a spread for La Belle Vie on the merits of winter whites. I had to admit it gave a winning impression, as though she had smartly traded the gloom of Lower Manhattan’s streets for the exotic sands of North Africa. The small tangle of a frown knotted her brow as she struggled lightly with her umbrella—red, strewn with an innocent flurry of white polka dots. I stepped out of the building just as Jeremy tried to shake a thousand magnetic raindrops off his coat, stopping dead in his tracks as he clapped eyes on Belle. His brain was clearly trying to wrestle with the fact that there was actually a girl left in New York City whose primary mode of transport was a basket-clad bicycle. On that ordinary lunch hour, he had watched her cycle past, absorbed her splash, and now looked practically punch-drunk—as though contemplating in amazement what could have happened, but by some wild chance hadn’t. That if he had placed his sandwich order at the new cart farther down the lane or stopped to post his weekly letter home
, he would have missed her. I knew he would never get over a moment so momentous—one that distilled the undeserved happenstance, the miraculous rhapsody, the dumb luck of life.

  When the three of us converged, Jeremy hovered on the periphery, just far enough away not to take cover under the canopy of my golf umbrella. I had won it with my second-place finish in The Brothers–sponsored Women on Wall Street (WOWS) for Women on the Street charity golf tournament and—though I sensed resentment in other pedestrians yielding to its titanic surface area—a petty piece of me still liked using it to tout my win. Jeremy stood sufficiently close to the curb to be hit at cheekbone level by a continuous fine spray taking aim at him from the undercarriages of passing traffic. But he was miles away from such discomforts. I had been bracing for this kind of scene ever since Jeremy first saw Belle a year earlier at The Vanderbilt. We had been minding our own business, sipping our cucumber and tonics at the Main Bar, when she blew up the central staircase like an untimely spring rain shower. Slightly out of breath and inevitably rose-cheeked, she unwrapped her never-ending red stole and jerked her long neck around like a confused llama that had wandered onto a freeway.

  “Is the French Table not happening here tonight?” she demanded, beaming me with an alarmed and accusatory look.

  “I beg your pardon?”