“Jiminy Cricket!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet.
His tasting glass, the Châteauneuf-du-Pape bottle, his white star buttonhole, their just-placed amuse-bouches—all was lost in the flood, except for Belle who stayed dry as a bone.
“Monsieur! O mon Dieu, monsieur!” the waiter grieved, clasping his hands to his heart as though the downpour had dislodged one of the young man’s limbs. There was an immediate scramble of horrified waiters and busboys tossing fresh towels in Jeremy’s direction from various angles. As more waiters pirouetted toward the toweled Jeremy, one cupping his drowned buttonhole flower tenderly in an attempt to nurse it back to its former splendor, Belle couldn’t contain her laughter—letting gales and gales of it fly, from their drenched table off the ripped awning above them, bouncing along the gleaming pavement of East Sixty-Third Street then looping up and up to the heavens to entice the moon out from behind his dark cover to come see what all the hilarious fuss was about. Look, sir!—it cried—that nice young man is utterly soaked and he and that lovely girl are falling in love.
When the waiters had dispersed and the pair was finally alone again, the evening had reached a surreal enough pitch that it made little sense to try and begin again on a more conventional note. The collapse of the awning—and Belle’s amusement over all of it—evaporated the last of Jeremy’s heightened nerves. Swathed in a terry-cloth toga and turban to match, he collapsed back into his chair and crossed one leg over the other, cheerily.
“Since I’ve already gone swimming, we might as well hit the water properly.” He grinned at her roguishly and held out his hand to her. “Come on, Belle, we’re going sailing.”
Assuring the humiliated maître d’ they would be back for a pardon-the-pun rain check dinner, they wandered north along the sharp, skeletal edge of Central Park, stopping at the hot dog cart in the upper Sixties on Fifth where Jeremy was greeted with a familiar “What’s up, boss?” and two of his usuals ready and waiting for them. Despite her usual macrobiotic diet, Belle scarfed down her sauerkrauted frankfurter with greedy delight.
“Gosh, I should pick up one of these more often!” she exclaimed, dabbing the corners of her mustard-covered mouth with a paper napkin. She had designated her first date with Jeremy a blog-free evening, the highest level of respect she could grant it, but made a mental note of the cart’s location to come back the following week to share this hidden gem with her followers. I’ll be frank, ladies, these dogs are delish! “I honestly can’t think what might happen next.”
Jeremy, a few steps ahead, beckoned her to follow him inside the park. The weather was so mild that the ponds hadn’t yet managed to freeze over that winter. The pair strolled up and down the hills and dales along the low East Seventies—each lamplight pricking to life just as they skipped past it—until they reached the Conservatory Water.
“Are we being filmed?” She threw her head back, stretching her arms wide, and spun herself around in cinematic circles.
In the distance, skyscraping buildings faced them from Central Park South as high-rising, radiant-cut diamonds gouging glittering tear marks through ink-dyed cotton draped low with the persistent possibility of rain. It was the most dramatic and dangerous kind of night the city could have unleashed from its jewel box—the kind that convinced the most naïve and desperate and believing hearts that all of the towering lights, all of the pretense of magic, were there just for them—an electric, larger-than-life stage set that only existed to realize some urgent destiny in their lives.
“Heya, Jer!”
An older man masquerading convincingly as a hobo with no sign of upper teeth stood at the pond’s edge, seeming as charmed by it all as they were. He waved his arms at Jeremy in an enthusiastic pattern of giant crosses as though guiding a taxiing aircraft. “Come on down! I’ve got you all set up over here!”
The hobo gestured excitedly toward two model sailboats—mainsails and jibs hoisted and ready—bobbing in the moonlit water. When they reached him, Jeremy shook his hand warmly.
“This is perfect, Hank.”
“Aw, don’t even mention it!” he answered, shyly handing over two remote controls to the pair. Jeremy made the introductions but Hank was eager to leave the couple to their own adventures.
“Who was that man?” Belle asked, once he had tipped his flat cap good-bye and disappeared behind the trunk of a nearby hornbeam.
“A nice fellow who has just had a few bad turns of luck,” Jeremy replied.
“Do you go sailing with him often?” she teased.
“Not as much as I’d like. Which is a shame because I love spending time with Hank. We met up through the mentoring program for homeless adults Bartholomew Brothers runs.”
“The Brothers has a mentoring program to help homeless adults?”
“Not everyone participates.…,” he said. “When I took Hank to a Rangers game last week, I mentioned our evening to him and he wanted to do something special.”
Whether or not it was Hank’s doing, there was without a doubt something special crackling quietly in the air. The moon was sufficiently intrigued by the couple softly hovering together with their matching remote controls to stay out from behind its cover, casting everything around them in floods of milky blue. A meteor shower, twinkling and white, washed in from the north to take a front-row peek. Belle fiddled hopelessly with her remote for a minute, handing Jeremy the excuse to put his down and step behind her in order to show her the way. His lean arms wrapped around her and he set her boat sailing. She breathed in his smell of moonlit clean.
“Is it what you always wanted to do?” she asked him, relaxing slightly into his arms.
“This?” Jeremy tacked her boat sharply so it zipped along the right bend of the pond at an impressive keel. “Yes”—he smiled—“at age eight I had great plans to circumnavigate the globe in a tall ship.”
“Very admirable for a third-grader,” she played along. “But I actually meant did you always want to work at an investment bank?”
A strange smile hugged one corner of his mouth as he uprighted her boat and glided it to a halt.
“It’s not exactly building railroads or sliding down firepoles, is it,” he answered, handing her the remote and placing his hand on the small of her back, encouragingly.
“Then what did you dream of doing—when you were a boy?”
It was easy to picture Jeremy as an eight-year-old, slightly confused and cowlicked over a breakfast bowl of Froot Loops, or hunched over a giant three-ringed binder, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as he scribbled out his after-school homework.
“I always wanted to be a pilot. Just like my granddad. But I had to put that on hold and be more useful to my family so I did everything I could to be hired by a bank out of college.” His still-toweled head was bowed thoughtfully over his own remote. As he spoke, a rush of tenderness swept over her—telling her she needed to protect him and his well-meaning heart that seemed to be such a strange reverberation of hers. “Did I say something wrong?” He stopped fidgeting with the remote and looked up with concern.
“Oh no—not in the least. I’m just trying to decide whether or not you’re pulling my leg.”
“Why would I do that?” He blinked at her, uncomprehending, as his terry-cloth turban sagged heavily to the left.
“I have no idea why. It’s just uncanny. I wanted to be a pilot as far back as I can remember,” she explained, reaching over and carefully recentering his turban. Then she turned pondward, skimming her excited green glance back and forth across its surface, connecting invisible dots to spell out an answer she had been searching for all of her life. “When I was ten I read about Amelia Earhart and thought she was the woman—beautiful, trailblazing … you know, the works. I suppose it’s silly.…” She paused to pull out her trusted iPhone from her clutch and flipped it over, gazing down at its protective cover. She held it up to show Jeremy the four words emblazoning the plastic: LET’S BE ADVENTURERS, DARLING. Belle had recently made the case
s available as part of a merchandise push in La Belle Vie’s new online shop and they were selling like gangbusters. “In seventh grade our teacher told us that a group of explorers were planning another expedition to find her lost plane in the Pacific. I was desperate to help. I packed a bag and was ready to leave for the train station to try and join them when my mom walked into my room and put a stop to the whole thing. She said you’ll have plenty of time for adventures—you have your whole life stretching ahead of you like one great winding question mark of possibility.”
As she spoke to him, she saw the question mark inflating to life above them, floating up from the shimmering pond water, over the park’s leafless canopy then bursting into an invisible shower of confusion over a yellow cab speeding south on Fifth Avenue.
“And did you do it?” Jeremy asked, holding his breath in readiness to be dazzled.
“Learn to fly? No. No, I’m afraid I never did.”
“And what about the adventures?”
“Well, now I run a blog that tells pretty girls how to do pretty things even more prettily.” She rolled her eyes in self-deprecation. “I daydream about Paris, I write love letters about Rome … I’ve taken trips to so many incredible places in the world but always feel I’ve never been anywhere—or done anything. Does that make any sense? Yesterday I showed my followers how to go green by converting empty sixty-dollar Diptyque candleholders into makeup brush receptacles. It’s not exactly the epic quest I pictured back then.” She sniffed and crinkled her nose. “But I’m doing something. If it isn’t epic, at least it’s something. It’s my something.”
It was an odd thing but she said it was easy to tell Jeremy things, to blurt out some of the essential stuff she guarded deep inside her chest, curious and cobwebbed. It had been largely impossible for her to confide in Chase. The closest she had ever come was letting him see her left baby toe that inexplicably stuck in the air higher than her other toes—unavoidable on their first tropical vacation together in Mustique. He had pointed and laughed and she had immediately regretted it, keeping a towel flung over her left foot for the remainder of the trip.
“The world needs more pretty,” Jeremy stated, with conviction, resting his hands on the sides of her trimmed waist and looking her honestly in the eye. “It’s an ugly enough place a lot of the time.”
Belle paused her story and I pushed my minestrone bowl away from me an inch. I knew her talk of Amelia Earhart—and the coincidence of their shared childhood interest in flying—would have handed Jeremy yet another golden sign.
“You don’t look convinced,” she said to me. Disappointment flickered somewhere in the hummingbird bat of her eyelashes. Immediate, positive reinforcement had always been important to her. But in recent years, with the burgeoning success of La Belle Vie, it seemed to have elevated to the critical status of lifeblood. “He told me that I’d fly one day. That we could do it together. Can you believe that? We’ve only just met but somehow he knew how much that would mean to me.” Delight smothered the disappointment and her green eyes widened again. Oh God, I thought, she’s picturing pushing the throttle lever forward on a restored red Lockheed Vega and he’s talking about lazily floating her up in a big old hot air balloon.
“Now you really don’t look convinced.”
“Come on, Belle, what do I know about this sort of thing?”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right. You really don’t have a clue, do you?”
I sat up straight at that verbal pinprick, motioning to our waiter to clear our table and close things out with two espressos.
“Maybe not, but I do know Jeremy—and he’s a far cry from Chase Breckenridge, don’t you think? What does Chase have to say about all of this, anyhow?”
“You tell me,” she retorted, shooting me a withering look across the table linen. “You’re both betrothed to The Brothers, aren’t you?”
I arched my right eyebrow. An unbecoming shade of charcoal lowered itself onto her brow. Though I wasn’t aware of any official breakup taking place between Belle and Chase, people like them never bothered with any kind of formalized messiness, preferring to let implications hover persistently enough to eventually become reality. The society press clippings Leezel kept scattered around her cubicle informed me that Chase had been spotted around town canoodling with the newest Baltic modeling sensation Milana. (Leezel had revealed her hopes that the connection would improve her seat allocations at New York Fashion Week runway shows.) However it had happened, for the time being Belle and Chase were no longer a pair. It had been low of me to mention him even if it had been part of my default reaction to protect Jeremy. By doing it, I reminded myself that Belle despised The Brothers as much as she despised the version of herself she tended to become when she was with Chase.
“I haven’t seen much of him lately, now that you mention it,” I fumbled. “He’s been on the road a lot, spending time with a very demanding family office upstate.…” I trailed off, knowing she wouldn’t let me off the hook that easily. That one syllable—Chase—had clouded the crystal-clear reverie of Jeremy she had been swimming in for the last twelve hours.
“You mean the family that owns the polo farm? Has he pried himself away from those horses to give a damn about anything else?” I knew from heated phone calls taken at the desk that Chase, with guidance from his client, had in fact imported a polo pony from Argentina, and had been more unavailable than usual for months. “You know he gives such a massive damn about me that he threw away the package I dropped off at your office a few weeks ago. And I know for a fact that Jeremy delivered it to him.” I pictured Jeremy in a chocolate-brown UPS uniform, holding a clipboard out to Chase in search of a verifying signature that he would later produce to an astonished Belle.
“Yes, he did.…,” I replied, slowly. “Did Chase really throw it out?”
“Well, he claims it vanished but he’s fed me that pretty line before. Vanishing is Chase’s code for throwing something in the shredder. And that stung, because it was very important to me. It was a manuscript, you see.” She sniffed.
“A manuscript … by you?”
“Yes, by me, M. Please don’t sound so alarmed! It may come as a shock, but there’s more to me than blogging about bows and bibelots.”
“Don’t be silly—of course I know that. I just didn’t realize you were writing … I mean, beyond your blog, which you know I’m totally devoted to.” She issued an incredulous laugh but managed to perk up at my joke. “This is different,” she said. “It’s not one of those horribly premature memoirs but I suppose you could call it autobiographical fiction. It’s about my parents and their crash. It’s about the life I think they would have wanted me to be living now. I’m calling it Clipped Wings.”
I was never comfortable treading into deeply emotional territory but I was impressed, despite the farcical working title of her manuscript, and wanted to show her my support.
“It’s a real accomplishment, Belle, and your parents would be proud. Whatever happens, just finishing it is something you should be proud of.” She didn’t seem to have the internal chip that drove so many of my own decisions—the intrinsic need to achieve.
She smiled, sadly.
“I don’t know what I was thinking, printing Chase a copy in the first place. The longest thing I’ve ever seen him read is Wimbledon’s Official Programme.”
“Oh, I don’t know, I saw him thumbing through the latest Jack Reacher Leezel loaned him the other day. I think she invited him to join her book club, which to be clear is about the booze, not the books.”
“Well, it hardly matters anymore, now, does it,” was her prim conclusion. “What matters is that if I’d been out with Chase last night and he’d been drenched by Le Bilboquet’s awning, he’d have run that darling little bistro out of business.”
“Chase would have never tolerated it,” I agreed. I flashed to a news story I’d seen that morning of an irate diner biting off the tip of a sorry waiter’s finger when denied permission to drink his own
bottle of home-brought hooch.
“Argh!” Her cry was exasperated but still managed to sound daintily feminine. Our espressos arrived, steaming with promise on the crisp linen white. “New topic! Now what about you, Miss M.?” I often felt I would always be Miss M.—always be a Miss, that is—to Belle. “Do you have your eye on any of the strapping young bulls charging down there with you on Wall Street?”
She knew I had only attached myself to one young Wall Street bull in my time. We dated for an unfulfilling year or so—work demands downgrading most of our dates to late-night pints and nachos at Ulysses in the looming shadow of the office, our eyes gazing devotedly at our respective BlackBerry screens instead of each other—before the relationship fizzled to nothing. From then on, I held firm in my belief that bankers weren’t like doctors—it generally didn’t work to pair off with your own kind.
“Good grief—no. Well,” I reconsidered, “unless you count that one MD whose pectorals ripped through his Charvet shirt the other day when he handed me a water bottle in the cafeteria…?”
I could have told Belle about meeting Scott at the Bender. I had wanted to right away that night, hoping to seek her and Jeremy’s confidence and counsel, but never got the chance. They had tuned me and everything out, sweeping themselves away on a jazzy wave atop the hardwood dance floor. And I’d thought about Scott since the party—his thoughtful and watchful gray eyes, that scattering of freckles, his astute observations—but the bottom line was I didn’t want to share him with Belle. Articulating it, revealing our quirky introduction and his very existence to her, would have made it officially second fiddle to the whiz and spark of her skyrocketing Romance with Jeremy.
“Sounds … interesting?”
“All very difficult to resist,” I said, drolly.
“Oh, you are such a mess,” she teased, her head tilting sideways and eyes crinkling in the way that told me she was being her least genuine self.
It was a line she tended to repeat—oh, M., you’re such a mess—though I knew I was anything but. I should have just laughed it off as I had always managed to do, but this time, on the inside, I flinched. I flinched because something was different. Serafina’s looked the same, the minestrone tasted the same, but something invisible yet crucial had shifted and it meant it was no longer okay, that it had become a decidedly personal thing to say.
Fake Plastic Love Page 12