Maybe it was an unkind thought, but I half-wished Chase himself would burst into the bar area to take some of the wind out of Jeremy’s sails. That you, Kirby? I didn’t know it was Vanderbilt’s community outreach day again. It would have reminded him of what he was up against—who he’d be confronting head-on if he actively pursued Belle. But Vanderbilt sightings of Chase were a rarity. He had a collection of other, loftier memberships at his fingertips around town and in the country—the Union, the Racquet and Tennis, the Knickerbocker, and Piping Rock. And of course by that point in the evening he was already sitting opposite Belle at Per Se, inhaling a fatty succession of Oysters and Pearls and truffle-stuffed chicken thighs from dinnerware made of pure white Limoges porcelain. And so Jeremy stayed unwitting and blissful, wearing his pair of invisible blinders and only seeing the possible.
The evening was getting on and I felt a restlessness, a need to get the business of the Bender over and done with. Outside the front doors of the Club, I said I wanted to take a cab—it was still so grim and damp out—but Jeremy insisted that we walk.
“It’s such a beautiful night,” he observed, pleasantly, as a pair huddled together a few feet in front of us was lashed by a miniature tsunami sent flying from beneath a yellow cab’s spinning wheels.
“Are you sure? Frank is a champ at tracking down cabs in the rain.” I smiled appreciatively at the doorman who nodded back at me, crisply.
“No. Yes. Definitely—let’s walk.”
Frank handed me back my WOWS golf umbrella, his right eyebrow steeply arched as he struggled with its vast dimensions. Jeremy, ever the gentleman, insisted on holding its wooden handle to shelter us. He trudged slowly up those twenty-five blocks, each step leaden with moisture and meaning. It was clearly a stall tactic—he was as eager to delay his arrival at the party as he was to actually arrive. Or maybe it was all the expectation that was weighing him down. In the course of eight hours I guessed that he had injected his visions of Belle with so much meaning his sandy head was close to exploding.
We bypassed Madison and took the gaudier path of Fifth going north. Through the rain it was sprinkled with twinkle-lit snowflakes and other nondenominational shapes strongly implying but good God not actually saying Christmas.
“FAO Schwarz is all lit up for the kids!” he boomed, uselessly, finger pointing off to the right at a window swarming with Santa-hatted teddy bears. I caught a few quizzical glances from doormen guarding The Pierre who may have noticed the two thin coils of steam rising steadily from both of Jeremy’s ears as we passed them by. It should have been unattractive—were men ever supposed to, permitted to, look nervous?—but on Jeremy it only managed to endear, hinting at the enormity of emotion stored up in his chest. Nerves are like yawns, passing readily from person to person. And though I’m fairly hard-shelled, I always felt more porous around Jeremy, so I was nervous as hell that night. It was a relief to turn off Fifth onto East Sixty-Ninth Street and finally arrive at ground zero—the site of the December Bender. I nodded toward the numberless facade, which I knew to be the mansion, despite looking totally lifeless from where we stood on the sidewalk.
“Well, I guess it isn’t happening,” Jeremy concluded, turning on his heel to leave.
“Don’t be silly, they just keep it all under wraps.”
I spun him back around by the shoulder and pointed him toward the front door, sending him straight into an enormous slab of stationary flesh looming in the shadows.
“Can I help you?” the slab uttered. It was capped with a feathered fedora and veiled in multiple bolts of waterproof gabardine.
Jeremy blinked back at the thing. He peered up to inspect the walls of the house, as if gauging the effort required to leap past the slab, superheroically scale the wall, and find a rear entrance in. Touching Jeremy’s shoulder lightly, I stepped toward the slab that emerged from the shadows as a gargantuan man. I reached out to shake his hand, pressing down firmly on his second and third knuckle in quick succession with my thumb.
“All the Sad Young Men.”
“The two of you enjoy your evening, you got it?”
The front door swung open and slammed shut in our wake, clipping Jeremy’s right heel.
“What in God’s name was that?”
“The way in.”
He didn’t appear convinced. I couldn’t blame him—we were standing in a shadowy foyer with great walnut doors shut firmly on either side of us. A bookcase lined with leather-bound volumes faced us definitively like a full stop bringing a sentence to a bracing halt.
“How do you know about all of this, M.?”
I didn’t want to make a big show about knowing these uptown trade secrets but privately wanted Jeremy to be impressed—as much from my quiet competence as from my possessing the knowledge.
“Oh, you know.” I shrugged. I traced my finger along a row of Fitzgeralds in search of All the Sad Young Men. I found it and pulled its wrinkled spine toward me. With a cryptic thud and grinding noise, the bookcase began sliding open to reveal a velvet-curtained threshold and the muffled whoop of revelry a tantalizing arm’s length away. Passing through the secret bookcase, we pulled the curtain back and were in—swept up instantly by the raucous swell of a jazz band and a room full of Christmas carousers swathed in textured reds and satiny greens dotted with the intermittent crackle of gem stones. A slide whistle swooped up and down like an audible roller-coaster car, daring guests to take equally daredevilish plunges. Trays levitated before our eyes offering mysterious tipples—tin cups and chipped china steaming with liquid nitrogen that promised hazy escapes and happy endings. I picked up what looked something like a gimlet. Jeremy snatched a bourbon concoction and tossed it back energetically. His poinsettia buttonhole had wilted considerably on the waterlogged walk uptown. It sat on his lapel like a gaping red apology though he didn’t look the least bit sorry. A fire had dialed up in his eyes as he surveyed the transcendent scene around us. What might have once been a drawing room had been transformed into a raging blind tiger—with Art Deco fixtures lining the walls and a claw-foot bathtub splayed like a beached white whale in the dead center of the room. I remembered that Belle had said to us earlier this wasn’t her cup of tea, which was a bald-faced lie. These sorts of covert gatherings—hidden behind secret bookcases and trapdoors and telephone booths with rotary dial pay phones—happened regularly around the island and each had her anachronistic BB monogram stamped crisply all over it.
It was a manner of merriment stolen from another era.
We were a bifurcated generation and nothing new would ever be debonair or jaunty enough for those who attended affairs like the Bender. They preferred transistor radios to Bose sound systems, scuffed ocean liner trunks to gleaming Rimowa hard shells, fountain pens to BlackBerry keyboards, restored old roadsters to eco-friendly hybrids, the idea of an uncovered shuttle across the Sahara by Gipsy Moth to intercontinental long hauls via Airbus A380s—the unsmudgeable guarantee of old illusions to present-life ones, tinny and certain to disappoint. There wasn’t an ounce of practicality to any of it. They took great pains to store the things they believed served as proof of their history and humanity—bulging filing cabinets and ribbon-tied letter bundles and rows upon rows of perfectly aligned hardback books. If you steeped something with enough personality—papered it with enough monograms and inscriptions and engravings and dedications—maybe, just maybe, they believed, you could make it live forever. Our generation’s other half predicted that space-saving technology—hard drives and e-readers and digital communication that stripped language down to a bare-minimum Morse code of acronyms—would lead to the disappearance of these totally unnecessary tangibles. They knew that a letter could be set on fire or ripped into a million pieces but any sent e-mail was immortal. I was a member of this latter lot. I had always believed in streamlining and trying my best to avoid the balls and chains of sentiments and stuff. So we faced off as the Romantics versus the Realists and it occurred to me on those surreal evenings that for wha
tever reason I often found myself on the losing side, surrounded by Romantics and lonely in my abandonment of the beauty and the baggage of what once was.
Whatever our differences, we were all time travelers packed into the same spectacular capsule that night. Within sixty seconds of our entrance I recognized a handful of faces around the room, distorted and wild and sharp-angled in the dim lighting, which I would do my best to avoid. Every girl in sight seemed to be draping herself over something—a dapper chap or a plush banquette or a foot-long cigarette holder. I held my gimlet like a cross, hoping to keep the vampires at bay. It helped that the acoustics in the house were appalling, ruling out the possibility of superficial conversations from a guarded arm’s length. Belle was nowhere to be seen—but this was to be expected, as she was never one to arrive first or fourth or even fortieth at a party. At dos like the Bender she floated in at the three-quarter mark, planting herself like a late-blooming addition to salvage an otherwise lackluster garden. Jeremy and I hung back at the room’s edge, out of the fray but strategically hugging the top curve of the waiters’ figure-eight pattern shuttling fresh cocktails around the room.
“The package!” Jeremy shouted to me, without any kind of lead-in.
“The package?” I blinked in thought. “You mean the one Belle dropped off today?”
He nodded back to me, plucking a second tin cup off a tray floating somewhere to his left. I was relieved he had brought her up at last because it gave me the chance to issue my warning.
“You gave it to Chase, right?”
“Yes!” he yelled. The tin cup lingered against his lower lip, thoughtfully. His brown eyes wavered. “But he didn’t care.”
“I’m sorry—what?”
The jazz band’s frontman had produced a cardboard megaphone that he was wailing into, turning Jeremy into a soundless illustration, lips moving pointlessly in my direction. I stepped a few inches closer to him and breathed in the comforting scent of soap—Jeremy’s fastidiousness meant he always smelled of clean.
“I said he didn’t care!” He leaned closer to me, his breath a bourbon-mint whisper just a trace from my ear. “He never opened the package, M. I put it down on his desk and he barely glanced at it. He just left it there.”
“Well, that’s Chase for you! He’s ignored Belle’s packages ever since she had those pajamas delivered.”
Jeremy was still leaning close.
“That may be true, but I can’t believe he wouldn’t care—to that degree.”
“I’m sure Belle asked him about it when she saw him tonight.” I shrugged.
He shook his head. “What would he have said? It was still on his desk. Untouched. And you heard what Belle said—to handle with great care. I was very clear on that point with Chase.” That instruction, those four solemn words, must have been bouncing around Jeremy’s bewitched brain all day and they assumed a startled quality, toppling into a speech bubble that expanded insistently into the fizzing party air around him.
“I told you they’re a funny pair,” I commented, impatiently. “Always have been.”
“I suppose I didn’t realize Chase was the one-woman type,” he commented, shyly toeing the edge of the Oriental rug we were standing on.
It was my opening to give him more of their tawdry backstory that I guessed would be verbal sandpaper to his ears. Downing another drink, I explained that during College, Belle’s secret shame had been her periodic trysts with Chase. She would tiptoe across the campus Green under the cloak of night to meet him in his fraternity house, or slink away with him during parties when the bluegrass band was so loud and the beer pong playing so manic that no one except me took notice. He would never go back to her place. They would retreat to Chase’s room on the second floor of his frat house that was a curious aquatic space called the Fish Bowl with murals of sea life and a turquoise wooden loft that produced the general effect of a submarine’s berthing area. Their more official relationship only started after Belle lost her parents in the crash, after our Lost Girls Summit on Gilman Island—and so from the start there was some ominous connection between the loss of her family and her unlikely liaison with Chase in his underwater surroundings. It was as though one morning she woke up and decided to embrace her deepest and darkest embarrassment. Once her parents were gone, fleetingness and departure, disinterest in the future, a fixation with the past, and a tendency to shortchange herself became bad habits watermarked across her heart. Chase’s noncommittal attitude fit the bill perfectly. They were both constantly on the verge of leaving each other and that mutual precariousness somehow added up to something resembling stability. I was one of the few who knew it was more style than substance—not really the stuff of a Great Romance.
“So he really isn’t the one-woman type,” I concluded. Jeremy’s alert face relaxed with relief at that confirmation. “But I’ve got to tell you, Jeremy—”
“There’s something so authentic about her,” he interrupted me. “Something so fresh and authentic.”
It must have been the distorting effects of the megaphone or the slide whistle—he hadn’t called Belle authentic, had he? In my friendship with Belle, I had always viewed myself as the authentic one, the honest and reliable one, while with time she’d become the chameleon, the crowd-pleasing flatterer. I relied on my position as the introverted foil facing off against her unending quest for positive reinforcement, for universal popularity. It didn’t bother me. I wasn’t interested in beauty contests and never wanted to be crowned Queen of the Snows. I was the steady one who worked behind the scenes and had seen this happen countless times before—Belle’s siren-like effect on a boy inducing a starry-eyed stupor. Over the years I’d been trailed around campus and town by her suitors, all wild-eyed and desperate to crack her inexplicable code. Once I’d even been cornered in my building’s laundry room. Halfway through folding my underwear, a breathless boy popped in out of nowhere to spew his heartsickness at me across the row of dryers. Had the sad fellow climbed out of the garbage chute? While it had happened countless times before, it had never felt quite like this. Jeremy was twenty-seven. Until that point, no one had managed to capture the storybook workings of his heart. Though I wasn’t in search of a fairy tale, it somehow reassured me that neither of us had managed to find love yet. But in one fell swoop, that all changed. With scarcely an effort, in the few turns of a pair of bicycle wheels atop a slick Lower Manhattan street, Belle had intertwined herself with Jeremy’s most heart-stirring notions of what it meant to be lucky and young and in love. And with it he took a sideways step away from me onto the grass of an out-of-bounds lawn where I had no power to protect him.
He must have clocked the annoyance knitted across my forehead.
“What I mean is, nothing seems to have tainted her. Don’t you think?”
He was right—as the years rolled by, Belle looked unchanged and untouchable. The funny thing was he looked scrubbed and bright in a similar kind of way, appearing far younger than his years, which was so often the kiss of death for people working in finance. His schoolboy complexion made Chase’s sun-beaten skin—exposed to the elements on so many back nines and baselines and back bowls and starboard planks—resemble the leather of a well-loved catcher’s mitt.
“Yes, I’ll give Belle that.” It wasn’t the time or place to split hairs with him.
The lights suddenly flickered and dimmed a notch. It was a cue—the band began swinging with abandon and the trumpeter arched back and pointed his horn to the moon. Their top hats were all flung into the shifting crowd, bouncing up and down from body to body like beach balls floating along a sun-kissed seaside. The key change sent Jeremy beelining nervously to the gents to mat down his hair and consult his lucky dollar, leaving three withered poinsettia petals spiraling to the ground behind him.
I barely had time to scan the room again when the perpetual person-of-the-hour snuck up behind me.
“Psst—this is a raid,” Belle hissed into my ear.
She stood half a foot beh
ind with her swan’s neck and impeccable finger waves hooked around me like a pretty Jazz Age periscope, locking me on her radar. I jumped to the right, sending my gimlet flying leftward in a lime-laced curve. I couldn’t help but burst out laughing. Chase had arrived with her, but didn’t bother with a hello. He grumbled darkly with a teacup of single-malt scotch alongside the bar and shouted authoritatively at whoever happened to find themselves beside him.
“What’s got his goat tonight?” I asked Belle.
“Ugh, where to begin!” She waved a hand in the air, dismissively, bringing it down to rest on the ruby choker circling her neck. The necklace sat gleaming just above her collarbone, which looked more angular than usual, casting strange black shadows across the base of her throat. It looked like she was losing weight again, no doubt a result of her macrobiotic diet with a regular side of Chase-induced nerves. “It must have been my turning up at the office earlier? He gave me hell about it over dinner. Why bother taking me to Per Se—or anywhere at all—if you’re just going to bark at me the entire time? Though I suppose he wasn’t barking at our server. Quite the opposite as I saw him jot down his phone number for her on the bill. You brought me dinner … now how about I buy you a drink sometime? Chase xxx.”
“Really, Belle?”
Fake Plastic Love Page 9