“The French Table!” Belle frowned as she rustled around in her tote bag in search of some piece of verifying evidence—a scribbled entry in her fuchsia-pink day diary, a tattered verb conjugation book. “… I’m quite certain it’s tonight.” I knew she was referencing the conversational French group she sometimes dropped in on at the Club to keep her vocabulary up to scratch but hadn’t a clue when or where it was meeting.
“Try the Tap Room?” I offered, with the speculative shrug of a shoulder. “Don’t those sorts of things usually happen up there?”
“The Tap Room! Yes, right!” she exclaimed, nodding gratefully to me and then to Jeremy. He was sitting bolt upright beside me, a white-knuckled convict grasping the arms of an electric chair as he awaited the next, unimaginable jolt.
“How rude of me,” I apologized, as Jeremy turned enormous, moonstruck eyes in my direction. “Jeremy, this is Annabelle Bailey. We’re old pals from College.” Making matters decidedly worse, Jeremy leapt up like a shot, taking Belle’s white-gloved hand in his and mumbling something genteel but inaudible to me.
It was odd that Jeremy and Belle had never met before that point. Dating Chase meant she cycled by The House of Bartholomew periodically, especially in the giddier early days when Chase displayed much more interest and lenience. I could have introduced them at any point but I had always been reluctant, sensing it would be better to shield Jeremy from her wiles and whims. Plus, my friendship with Belle was strange in its isolated quality—we had never done things together with other people; it had always been just the two of us. Though she still preferred to avoid the pervasive elbow patches of The Vanderbilt, she did use the library and the concierge desk and participated sporadically in cultural activities like the French Table. She could have easily fluttered in on any one of the nights I had invited Jeremy for a drink. But it had only happened that once.
“Well, à tout à l’heure!” she cried, blowing us an exaggerated kiss that bounced from floor to ceiling in romantic diagonals that zipped and ricocheted and tore a hole straight through Jeremy’s chest.
Though he was too shy—or too stricken—to say much to me about his instant infatuation, I could hear a fizzing and popping in the tentative questions he asked me about Belle from time to time. Worst of all, in the whole kerfuffle about the location of the French Table, it wasn’t clear that Belle had actually registered Jeremy’s existence. I would stammer something about her and Chase, never quite sure how to describe the two of them, and he would pull at his sandy hair then embarrassedly change the subject. I could plainly see that Belle—who turned even finer and fairer in Jeremy’s mind as more time passed after their first meeting—had become a twinkling axis upon which his existence spun. He was ridiculously old-fashioned about it. He was convinced he needed a sign, some kind of assurance that he had a chance before he would make a romantic gesture in her direction.
And now, Fate was re-presenting her as a white apparition on a rainy December day—a batch of celebratory balloons unleashed from ceiling netting to bounce down on him once the clock struck midnight. I couldn’t crush Jeremy by formally introducing them again on the sidewalk.
“Jeremy, of course you remember Belle Bailey,” I offered, idiotically.
“How d’ye do. Do you work with M. and Chase?” she asked him, brightly and blankly—stark confirmation that he was a complete and utter stranger to her. Her white glove extended across me to take Jeremy’s bare hand.
“Yes, I do,” Jeremy answered with an ardent nod. “It’s such a pleasure to see you.”
“Chase can’t steal away, can he?” It was more of a statement than a question and I saw her long neck droop ever so slightly with the already anticipated disappointment. “Would you mind bringing him this?”
She handed me a brown paper package, tied with twine, and stamped with a red and ornate “BB.” Belle was a great believer in the monogram—partly because of the aesthetic and partly out of pride. She said she knew who she was and wasn’t ashamed to say or show or stamp it. All of her coat linings were stitched and all of her stationery was engraved with them. I had a growing collection of my own, thanks to birthday and Christmas gifts from Belle over the years, and I did appreciate the crisp efficiency of an identity boiled down to uppercase letters. In reality, I had been embracing the monogram in my own deeply personal way since age eight when I insisted my parents call me “M.” as a way to disguise my mortifyingly old-fashioned first name. That was one of the first times I remember seeing my mother physically deflate with disappointment in me; she viewed my unofficial rechristening as a black bellwether signaling all the unfeminine things I would go on to be in my life.
“Of course I’ll bring it up to him. He was on a client call, you know,” I lied, lamely, accepting the package from her. Why I felt the need to make excuses for Chase of all people was beyond me, though I knew it had something to do with my long-standing habit of sparing Belle’s feelings.
With a sense of purpose and panache, a bowler-hatted man took advantage of the awkward moment to bustle by us briskly, searching for the shingle of some long-since-vanished trader pawning promissory notes on Pine Street. Belle whipped out her iPhone and stripped off her white gloves, sashaying along behind him, polka-dotted umbrella bouncing atop her shoulder, to steal a few shots of his cane and his hat.
“Oo-ooh! I didn’t realize those were de rigueur again down here!”
The century-old stock character was unaware that in a few hours he would metamorphose into La Belle Vie’s homage to Old Wall Street style, braces and spats in the manner of a pre-Crash banker in giddy upward swing. This was precisely the sort of thing Chase couldn’t bear to come downstairs for. But spending time with Belle, you learned to ignore the frequent outbursts—it was her job, she argued. And besides, she never censured us for frantically fishing for our Brothers BlackBerrys at the first tingle of a vibration, middinner, midmovie, midheartfelt conversation. Belle had been an early adopter of the iPhone, and it became her faithful appendage. She contorted herself into curious and compromising positions to take pictures with it, never thinking to apologize for the unmannerly conduct. Her blog—her following—demanded it. Belle Bailey wasn’t just a person; since College she had blossomed into a brand. Michelin-starred dinners and museum artifacts and tastefully covered wall sockets all needed to be freeze-framed at the correct angles as though she were revealing to her fans buried pirate’s treasure that had been staring straight at them all along, if only they had been looking and digging in the right smuggler’s cove. Belle knew where to look and dig, just as she knew how to make it all look so easy. It was skillfully choreographed carefree living.
“Central casting actually sent him,” I kidded as the bowler-hatted man disappeared down an unmarked alleyway. “They knew you’d get a kick out of it.”
“Well, I certainly did,” she murmured, tapping away at her iPhone screen. “Ralph Lauren actually included a few bowlers in his spring collection.…”
Jeremy, staring in silent wonder, opened his mouth to utter his second sentence of the conversation when his tuna sandwich broke clean through the bottom of his drenched lunch bag to land with an audible splat on the sidewalk. The sandwich—or maybe it was the artless act of dropping it—seemed as humiliating to him as a smear of facial acne in plain daylight.
“I’ve—ahh—been meaning to have a word with them about their bags,” he stammered, frowning down at the waterlogged wax paper. He extended an oxford to toe the offending thing into the gutter but, thinking better of it, scooped it up off the ground. It was Chase who was the great litterer—he frequently claimed the Breckenridges were philanthropists, only littering to create jobs.
Belle’s face contracted into a soft frown and then expanded with an idea.
“Packaging has gone downhill everywhere, I’m afraid. Take mine!” she cried with insistence. “I always make mine in the morning.”
By admitting she packed a brown-bag lunch every day, she might as well have told Jeremy sh
e was taking after-school piano lessons—it was that endearing and incredible to him. In his imaginings, women like Belle didn’t pack their own lunches. They breezed in and out of fashionable cafés that served truffle chicken atop pale green clouds of frisée with fine-looking waiters in tailored shirts darting in perfect diagonals toward them like black-and-white radiuses hand-drawn by a compass.
“Oh no, really I couldn’t,” he said, waving his soaked sandwich bag around in gentlemanly protest. “What would you do?”
“Oh, there were piles of macarons at this morning’s photo shoot—I’m already stuffed.” She put a hand to her flat stomach and puffed out her cheeks to indicate bulk. “Take it. Please.”
Belle pulled a perfectly knotted canvas tote from her bicycle basket that was completely untouched by the elements. In one fluid motion, she swapped hers for his and for whatever reason didn’t look repulsed when his tuna monstrosity, plucked from a street gutter before her very eyes only moments before, landed with a wet thud at the bottom of her basket. Jeremy clutched Belle’s canvas carrier but didn’t ask what was inside. I guessed that was deliberate. He wanted to keep a handful of her dream-dust dry—unveiling it as a surprise at his desk in between a particularly bleak string of e-mails so he could close his eyes and then open them, pretending to experience her white-gloved magic for the very first time.
“I should probably be getting on,” Belle hummed. She pulled back the cuff of her jacket to check the time on the old wristwatch she wore faithfully though it was chronically forty minutes behind or fifteen minutes ahead. It had belonged to her grandmother and the sweet sentimentality of wearing a family treasure wrapped around a pulse point trumped any practical necessity like being on time. “Do you happen to have the time?” she asked, searching Jeremy’s eyes almost helplessly. She knew how irritated I was that she wore a watch that never worked so directed her question at him.
“Just shy of one o’clock,” he answered as he gazed down at the timepiece with softening brown eyes. “That’s a beautiful watch.”
“Isn’t it?” she glimmered back, delighted by his compliment. She held out her wrist and tilted her blond head so they could both get a better look at it. “It was my Granny’s. I’ve taken it to a dozen places but no one seems to be able to fix it properly. And I just can’t bear the thought of not wearing it.” She cocked her head farther to the side then pressed the watch against an ear, listening intently for a clue or a lost instruction from her beloved Granny, whispered from the afterlife through its faulty gears.
“I understand,” he whispered. “I actually know a man who might be able to fix it.”
The current in the air quickened at that moment and, as he gazed at her and her neck lengthened toward him as a newly discovered object of curiosity, I could see the tender look in Jeremy’s eyes morph into something different. When he first met Belle at The Vanderbilt, he was still young enough to assume that the loud-mouthed, golden-haired trust funders—the guys roaring around in racing green roadsters with pom-pommed sets of golf clubs tossed into the passenger seat, so cocky and so cavalier—were the undeserving cads who would always get the girl. But the stars aligned—or misaligned—on that rainy December Friday to tell him that maybe it could all play out differently. The world was full of surprises and here was a brilliant one, dressed all in white, pedaling downtown on a basket-clad bicycle to flash him the critical sign he’d been waiting for. Here was a girl who packed her own sandwich lunches and wore her Granny’s pearl-faced watch and could be cut from the same cloth as him—a girl who in the end would pick him over all the glitter and glare and girth of a Chase Breckenridge.
He couldn’t take his eyes off her.
“What time did you say it was?” she stumbled, so obviously tangled up in the waving tentacles of his brown stare. “Golly, I really better get a move on!” she exclaimed too loudly, before he had the chance to repeat his answer. “I’ll see you both tonight, then?”
I glanced at Jeremy, who seemed to be standing seven feet tall, with boyish cheeks on fire, before remembering he would be the last of all people likely to be attuned to the social workings of Young Manhattan.
“Tonight?” I asked.
“Ye Olde Bender—the December Bender,” she clarified, regaining her composure. “It isn’t really my cup of tea, of course, but you know Chase’s old school chum organizes it so I can’t give it a miss.” Belle never gave things a miss, though she frequently pretended to. No, she was always right there in the fashionable thick of things like—
“You betcha we will!” Jeremy blurted out. He swayed to one side, dodging the spray of a passing bus, and looked almost as surprised as I was by his outburst. Yet it was obvious what drove it—he was fueled by the hope she had planted in him and wouldn’t miss seeing Belle Bailey again for all the stacks of gold stored in The Brothers’s three-story underground vaults. I couldn’t have cared less about the December Bender. It was one of a series of interchangeable and totally juvenile evenings that dotted winter in the city—fraternity-house shenanigans revived in black tie. But I remembered Jeremy’s reaction to missing out on the Bender a year ago thanks to Chase’s roaring recap in the office the day after—it was a sad pang of exclusion he felt acutely, even 365 days later. Blizzard be damned, we all threw on snowshoes and stomped our way there! Where were you, Kirby? Couldn’t tear yourself away from your knitting?
“Oh, wonderful—then I’ll put you in charge of steering me clear of that dreadful bathtub gin. It goes straight to my head and I’d very much like to avoid cartwheeling through The Carlyle lobby again.” Belle paused, glancing down at her package, and I could see a slight strain in the green of her eyes. “But first, you’ll see that Chase gets that right away?” At moments, it seemed the world was her ever-ready concierge.
“I’m heading straight up,” Jeremy interjected. “I’d be happy to do it now. You still need to get your lunch, M.” He reached over and lifted the parcel out of my hands. She looked him straight in the eye and placed her right white glove on the brown paper. Her fingers were spread out, extending toward him—as though a lovely hibiscus flower had hitched a ride with a tropical ocean liner up the eastern seaboard and cascaded straight from New York Harbor to bloom in our cobblestoned midst.
“Handle with great care,” she told him. It seemed an overly grave thing to say but then again Belle swung to unpredictable extremes—at times overly formal and antiquated, at other times a petulant child flushing with anger and stamping her foot after not getting her way.
“It’s my personal motto.”
The line sounded playful but it was, in point of fact, the words I knew Jeremy lived by. Handle with great care. It was the invisible tagline embroidering every article of his clothing, the heated branding iron that seared all of his earnest gestures. Her saying it gave him the stricken look of a bull’s-eye stabbed at dead center.
With that, her errand was done and we could resume our lives. Or at least I thought we could. Jeremy stood fixed, his chin uplifted and cheeks still illuminated, like a sinking ship using two crimson flares to pointlessly signpost its whereabouts above a gray and pin-striped fleet of uninterested passers-by. Cupid’s Arrow was upright again and, in the blink of an eye, Belle was a bright white spot pedaling north, her red polka-dotted umbrella latched onto her basket to cocoon her beautifully from the December rain.
WATCH YOURSELF WITH THE YAK-YAK
I suggested Jeremy meet me for a drink at The Vanderbilt Club—our opening gambit before heading the twenty or so glistening blocks uptown to a numberless mansion off Fifth Avenue where the December Bender would be rioting behind shuttered doors and drawn curtains in full Prohibition-like secrecy and splendor. Since meeting Belle earlier that afternoon, Jeremy had maintained the same stricken look—I nearly suggested he go lie down in one of The Brothers’s “resting rooms” situated on every floor and equipped with a very grim folding cot and flattened hypoallergenic pillow to ease and encourage in-office all-nighters. It was one thing to
let him fumble around the office uselessly for a few hours. But I knew that in his dazed condition, descending on the Bender alone in search of Belle, beating heart a wide-open target ready to be bludgeoned, would be disastrous. He needed reinforcement. And—though I was looking forward to the Bender as much as one might look forward to stepping down barefoot on a thumbtack—I would be there for him.
When I cycled through The Vanderbilt Club’s revolving door, Jeremy was already inside the lobby, seated a few lonely feet from the concierge, waiting for me. His sandy hair was combed perfectly with an immaculate side part. He wore a poinsettia buttonhole—so giant that it looked a bit like a clown prop ready to squirt unsuspecting bystanders in the eye. I knew he would have taken great care that evening dressing and preparing for the party, investing extra time with his second shave of the day, though Jeremy’s five o’clock shadow was always nonexistent. His bowl, washcloth, soap, safety razor, and fine-grade badger-hair shaving brush would have been in a meticulous semicircle around him at the bathroom basin. There would have been other rituals, too—the careful buttoning of his braces and final buffing of his broken-in oxfords, the application of his beeswax pomade to keep his unruly hair at bay, the meticulous filing of his nails to try and disguise their torn and ragged edges.
“Well, aren’t you festive,” I greeted him. He smiled boyishly and, standing up to meet me, pulled at his meticulous hair in a sudden upward motion—one of his nervous habits that made it stand immediately on end.
“You, too, M.” I looked down at my ensemble. In line with my usual no-black rule, I was uniformly midnight blue with black-watch plaid flats as the only two concessions to Christmas cheer.
“I wouldn’t let you down,” I laughed, leading him up the winding main staircase. “Time for a drink, I think.”
We stationed ourselves at the Main Bar. As Theo poured the gin and muddled the cucumber in front of us and we heaped tiny side plates full with spicy wings, something stopped me from coming right out and asking Jeremy about his intentions toward Belle. Maybe it was fear that pinned me back—one of startling a disoriented, wild animal with too abrupt a movement. He sat beside me, ignoring his wings and using his swizzle stick to conscientiously pound his cucumber into a fine pulp in his tumbler. A glow had spread across his cheekbones, set off by his giant poinsettia. It was optimism—and it blanketed him like the five fresh inches of snow that should have fallen on the city streets around us that December night. The light press of her white-gloved hand against his bare skin and the extraordinary bite of the Camembert, pear, and walnut sandwich she bequeathed to him permitted him to ignore Chase’s presence in her life.
Fake Plastic Love Page 8