Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  Going back to the town house off Fifth was like returning to carnival grounds that had been long since abandoned and boarded up for winter. It was an unsettling thing, standing alongside Jeremy as we gazed upon an empty shell that had, only a short while before, housed such happy things. The day was gray and damp again though you could feel the air begin to turn into something sharper—something that should have frozen all of the pervasive puddles into a salty network of iceways for pedestrians to skate and weave along as though caught in a giant urban edition of Chutes and Ladders. I stayed a few inches behind, off to the side and partially shielded as Jeremy knocked on the door. His movements were delicate, as though not wanting to wake resident slumberers. Miraculously, a few beats later, the great door swung open a foot. Instead of the raincoated slab, instead of Scott, an ashen figure in a butler’s uniform stepped into the threshold.

  “Good day—is Pierpont here?” Jeremy asked, puffing his slender chest forward to project confidence. A blank stare answered as a visual incarnation of the question Who? “He threw a party here last night. I’ve lost something inside … something very valuable to me.…”

  Jeremy’s chest and neck strained past the uniformed specter to try and catch a glimpse of anything beyond. A velvet curtain, a cardboard megaphone, a wilted poinsettia petal, a discarded tin cup—any tangible proof that the prior night had not been only his wildest of dreams. The silence was torturous.

  “Party?” the figure uttered at last. I reached for Jeremy’s upper arm, ready to pull him away. I knew what the next line would be, more or less. “I can’t think what you mean. There hasn’t been a party thrown in this house since the Longports were residents in 1963.”

  THE LAST TRUE ROMANTIC

  “I don’t know where on Earth you’ve been hiding him all these years, M. I might go ahead and marry him one day, you know.”

  The lilt in Belle Bailey’s voice was playful across the table from me but I caught a wisp of something more serious. She traced an index finger lightly along the rim of the Bellini flute in front of her, clockwise, counterclockwise, and clockwise again. She was looking down at the peach drink and smiling. This was the sort of statement Belle made and generally got away with—but then she had a knack of getting away with most of the statements she made. Belle never asked permission for being who she was and I had always admired that in her.

  It was late Saturday morning the day after Belle’s first official date with Jeremy Kirby, exactly two weeks after the surprise twist of the December Bender. A text message pinged in to wake me at dawn’s first crack—you wouldn’t expect it but Belle was actually a morning person—summoning me in my weary state uptown to Serafina’s on Madison and Seventy-Ninth for the necessary debrief and her usual chicken peck at their chopped salad. I had slept poorly though it wasn’t the buzz of my bedside BlackBerry that had done it. We were in the midst of our quarterly client portfolio reviews—Piggelo was five hours ahead of us in The Brothers’s London office and needed to compensate for her physical absence by bulldozing us with an around-the-clock stream of ALL-CAPS messages:

  Subject: I NEED YOUR EYEBALLS ON THIS NOW

  Subject: THIS SHOULD HAVE BEEN EXPLAINED TO ME TEN MINUTES AGO

  Subject: WHAT??????

  Or the perennial favorite:

  Subject: DISAPPOINTED

  (The message would contain only this subject line.)

  Rattling back half-somnolent answers certain to disappoint her—for everything inevitably disappointed Piggelo—I worried for Jeremy. I had been worrying for him since we first became friends—maintaining our unspoken rule that we would never compete over work or anything to do with The Brothers. There were some things, we agreed, we wouldn’t allow it to touch. He always contended there was so much more to talk about, so much more that he was hoping for in life. So I knew he had thrown his whole self into choreographing his first evening on the town with Belle. That was him in a nutshell. It wasn’t—it could never be—just a dinner date to Jeremy. Not with anyone, and certainly not with Belle Bailey. And so he tore straight past the target of a second date and was taking dead aim at till death do us part.

  After their December Bender kiss, Belle had dropped her calling card into Jeremy’s pocket which he discovered at home later that night:

  BELLE BAILEY

  La Belle Vie

  She had folded the top left corner of the card and lightly traced the initials P.R. and the Bender’s date, December 4, 2009, on the back. Jeremy seemed as delighted as he was perplexed by the card and its mystery acronym. He guessed, in the manner of many old social graces, the initials might be French—pour revisiter, pour rêver, pour romancer … the possibilities were practically limitless. Whatever message she was trying to send him, she had dropped him her card and signaled her interest above and beyond the fluttering flash of their dance floor kiss. It was one of the reasons Jeremy would always believe she had been the one to start it all between them. I had seen many of Belle’s calling cards over the years and knew the P.R. actually meant pour remercier—to express thanks—but I didn’t have the heart to tell Jeremy this was her standard form. It was odd that she wrote P.R. at all, or didn’t vary the acronym. But perhaps she did want to thank him, for their cinematic kiss and most of all for giving her respite from Chase, if only temporarily. The Golden Couple must have been in yet another one of their off-again phases, but I didn’t confirm that point with Jeremy either.

  Victorian calling cards may have been stylish but they didn’t earn points for practicality. With all contact information absent from her card, Jeremy had to ask me for Belle’s phone number. He showed me the card and its inscription with great ceremony, using the opportunity to ask me for date ideas—hoping to mine them from the vaults of my longtime friendship with Belle.

  “Why not take her up in a hot air balloon?” I asked him, half-joking, on a lunchtime trip to our sandwich cart near the office. I pointed an index finger high in the air in a mock eureka! gesture and Jeremy stared at it intensely before answering.

  “I haven’t been up in one for years. And it’s the off-season. Winter flights can be very cold,” he explained, looking away from my finger and clutching his brown-bagged tuna sandwich with regret. “Maybe in the spring…? Do you know if Belle has any issues with heights?” I told him I wasn’t aware of any—she was generally a fearless type. At that, he set down his brown bag and pulled out a small notebook from his raincoat pocket, making a notation with an undersized green pencil.

  “More than anything, it can’t be ordinary,” he said, stowing away the notebook and pencil. The folded corner of her eggshell-colored calling card hung over his notebook’s edge. Stashed in his inside pocket it sat as close to his chest as possible, a slipcover for his beating heart.

  “How could it possibly be ordinary?” I asked, shaking my head at him and smiling. His schoolboy cheeks lit up with gratitude.

  At Serafina’s Belle would confirm just how ordinary or extraordinary she thought the date turned out to be. As I strode briskly up Madison to meet her—in unofficial competition with myself over how few steps it would take me to bound across each cross-street, trying to beat my personal best of five and a half—I thought how incredible it was that she still treated me as her default confidante given the increasing irregularity of our friendship. And given our many fundamental differences that seemed more pronounced than ever before. While intrigue and gossip and the gadabouts behind it were so boring to me, they were interlaced with her existence. The long-lashed, doe-like Belle spilled saga and drama and scuttlebutt with every letterpress calling card she littered around Manhattan. I cherished any evening that had me tucked into bed before eleven o’clock. Eleven o’clock, on the other hand, was one of multiple witching hours in an average Belle Bailey day. There was no such thing as a quiet night at home for her—any kind of flatlining was an impossibility. The simple act of pouring herself a glass of wine and opening a paperback on her sofa sounded some invisible siren that sent a heartsick Loth
ario swinging in from a nearby rooftop, crashing through her living-room window to whisk her away to a more suitably animated location. She was always the glowing pink epicenter of some smitten boy’s universe. Something about her—something unarticulated but insistent—drove men to believe that saving her was paramount.

  “Saving from what?” she once snapped at me in a tipsy antiwhisper. We had been out on one of our Lost Girls Wednesday nights at a rooftop bar floating high admidst the electric cloud line of Midtown Manhattan. She was on her third champagne cocktail and I, in a failed effort to keep her in check for the night, was close behind. Though we were fifty flights up, she seemed to be seeking greater altitude, teetering precariously on 120-millimeter red-soled Louboutins that handed her a good few inches on most of the men at the bar—and a stealth pair of weapons in case of sudden kamikaze attack. Her scarlet dress was modish and oddly geometric, hanging box-like on her frame yet somehow still making her appear longer and thinner. She looked like a couture-clad beanstalk. “What exactly is it these buffoons insist I need s-s-saving from?”

  She was swaying noticeably and her skyscraper heels asked for trouble planted so close to the inadequate railing a few feet away from us.

  “Belle, why don’t you take off your shoes?” I pleaded.

  “Women who go barefoot are vile,” she remarked then leaned toward me conspiratorially, switching to sotto voce. “And you know I don’t like being low to the ground, M. It makes me feel vulnerable to their attacks.” By their, she might have meant the buffoons, but I think her statement was more sweeping than that. Belle made sure she was never low to the ground. She was tall and willowy but had a steeliness about her—always stretching upward in brassy defiance of the altitude that had stolen her parents from her so heartlessly.

  In the thick of the East Seventies, I weaved up through the last few blocks of weekend obstacles cluttering my course to Serafina’s—manicured poodles and foot-high stacks of the weekend papers and vividly colored driving moccasins milling in all directions. Passing Cupid’s Arrow leaning at a welcoming angle alongside the doorway, I took the restaurant’s staircase two steps at a time. When I got inside, Belle was already seated at a table by the window, looking out expectantly toward something farther north on Madison. A fresh Bellini zipped and sparkled in front of her. Her thumb and middle finger pressed against the stem of the flute as though propping up the delicate neck of a peach-colored calla lily. I was hardly an expert but one look into her giant eyes and it was immediately clear Belle was not categorizing Jeremy as one of the usual buffoons. She was distracted—as I approached her across the restaurant with my deal bag swinging from my shoulder, she didn’t grimace at the sight of it. Typically, it would have prompted her to snap something like: If you refuse to do something with that mousy bob of yours, can we please do something about that bag? You could’ve at least had the decency to fling the hideous thing into the coat check. But today, she said nothing as I stowed the battered canvas beneath our table, just bashfully glanced down at the white table linen, acting cryptic and coy in the manner of any girl caught in the earliest, loveliest steps of stumbling over the pastel precipice of falling for someone.

  I glanced at my watch and saw that it was getting close to noon. I had an important squash match at two o’clock that my top-seed standing was riding on.

  “Just spill it, Belle!” I cried. “How’d it go, anyhow?”

  An almost painful-looking plate of shredded salad and a steaming minestrone bowl were set down in front of us. She just needed to start talking and then, I told myself, I could blur myself into a quiet place and tune out with thoughts of forearm rotations and backhand volleys fading across the middle of the court. The sweeps of her body language alone would tell me whether the date had been a success or failure. It was certainly looking promising—Belle’s neck was extending very far to the left. I took this as a sign of interest until I realized she was in search of our omni-absent waiter to top up her emptied flute. She had never been one to shy away from the fortifying effects of champagne. “A splash of champagne during the day hands you an afternoon with an extra twinkle in its eye,” she explained in the recent blog entry she printed for me titled “Just Batty for Bubbly!”

  “Do you want the abridged or unabridged version of the date?” Belle asked me. She was finally ready to go, her Bellini freshened and her voice elevated on stilts of giddiness. It was an irrelevant question—abridged, nonabridged—it would all be the same version in her romantically charged state.

  “How about something in between?” I tried, pushing my soup spoon away from me, methodically.

  Her chopped salad limp and untouched, she began her story.

  Jeremy had chosen well: Le Bilboquet—at the time, an impossibly cozy Upper East Side nook, with pale-yellow walls and starched white table linen and a town car always idling with low and drowsy elegance alongside its sidewalk, periodically producing or enveloping chic older couples swathed in an abundance of neutral cashmere. Though Christmas was only a week away, Belle said Jeremy insisted on dining al fresco. It had been raining persistently all morning, but in a burst of optimism the maître d’ commandeered the setup of two intimate outdoor tables and the rolling out of the bistro’s striped awning in the early afternoon.

  “This weather!” Jeremy marveled as they took their seats beneath a checkerboard cover of charcoal and sapphire sky. He wore a bright-white stephanotis buttonhole, luminous and star-shaped as an earthly echo of the half-covered constellations above. “We should be jingling all the way but instead it’s like we get to relive the first day of spring over and over again.”

  Those sorts of simply poetic statements would have made Belle feel in the presence of Keats or Wordsworth after the guttural nonlyricism of restaurant time spent with Chase. Bourbon. Hendricks. Dom. Prat!

  Like so many people our age, Belle believed in her heart she was meant for another era, not the twenty-first-century mess of hyperconnectivity and bored bacchanalia she found herself in. No matter how vast her online following, she knew she was better suited to an offline time that would have fully appreciated and embraced her quest for etiquette and elegance, her dedication to artful language and the swoony, old-school principles of Romance. Even I had to agree that things in our present day had reached an unprecedented pitch of impersonality—firm handshakes and looking people straight in the eye were old habits fading fast—and shared a trace of the same eternal lamentation: nothing was quite the same as it used to be. Jeremy may have been our generation’s Last True Romantic. Belle said spending time with him handed her a strange feeling that things could be how they used to be, how she had always dreamed they should be.

  “I’ve always been a fall person,” she said to him in hushed tones, leaning forward across their table as though passing along a naughty secret. “I’m not exactly sure what’s so dreamy about a season that’s dying but it’s intoxicating, don’t you think?” She rested her elongated fingers over her heart—covering its syncopated skipping and fluttering—then, finger by finger, removed her white gloves.

  Jeremy was sitting upright and smiling, his hair perfectly parted and slicked with the help of his reliable beeswax pomade. His motions were jittery, assuring her that he was the happiest sort of nervous—that at that moment there was no place on planet Earth he would rather have been.

  “I used to be that way, but the older I get the more I appreciate spring. It’s always looking up. And it makes promises that it always manages to deliver on. Nights like this are beyond compare, wouldn’t you say?”

  He winked at her and the head waiter reappeared with a flourish to take the sweet young couple’s order. Belle immediately wondered if the waiter—smiling dreamily down at them—could see they were falling in love and was duly caught under their spell. Jeremy ordered for the two of them with gentlemanly decorum. The waiter nodded approvingly—issuing a laudatory mmmmm at several key moments—and Belle looked on as though one of her iPhone photo filters had flushed everything
a pale and perfect pink.

  “Do you think he can tell we’re on a first date? Are we that obvious?” She giggled, color swirling in her cheeks like airy loops of cotton candy. The waiter had bustled away and she was behaving like a mischievous grade-schooler whose teacher had just left the classroom. Jeremy’s nervous energy had him tapping his loafer on the sidewalk beneath the table and the question, like a doctor’s reflex hammer, sent his right leg kicking forward sharply to trip up the capable busboy tidying the vacated table beside them. The boy picked himself up off the pavement, brushed off his uniform, and turned back to Jeremy, flashing him a brave smile. It was all okay—there were no hard feelings. The world was on their side.

  Their night was paging forward seamlessly. The waiter returned to present the wine bottle to Jeremy with great ceremony—so much so that he nearly flung it over his left shoulder in a frenzy of enthusiasm.

  “Sir, may I present the 2001 Bosquet des Papes Châteauneuf-du-Pape à la Gloire de Mon Grand-Père?”

  “Yes, magnificent,” Jeremy answered, carefully swirling the deep basin of his red wine glass on the crisp tablecloth. As he angled the glass to his nose, there was a sharp gust of wind and just like that, the striped awning above their table gave way, sending the ten gallons of New York City rainwater that had stored up all morning in its invisible canvas pockets charging down onto Jeremy’s head.