Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  When dating Chase, she had received little more than disdainful rebukes about her online efforts. Quit faffing around and put that bloody camera away—it feels like I’m sleeping with the goddamn paparazzi. She had to replace her phone on one occasion after Chase had smacked it clean out of her hand to land in a metallic mess of coils and springs in the grime of a TriBeCa gutter. Most often he’d simply walk away from her, abandoning her wide-eyed on stoops or squares or at store windows around the city without so much as a “good riddance.” If you were downtown and you looked hard enough some evenings, you could have picked her out as a lonely silhouette, bony knees in their trademark seesaw motion, pink mouth a firm line of resolve, cycling home or cycling away in search of some breathing room from Chase’s berating.

  Jeremy, by contrast, was a force field of nourishment and support that didn’t leave her side. I knew this because I had seen so little of him outside the office since they had become a pair. I missed my friend but reminded myself that this, above all things, was what he had always wanted most. As primary witness to Belle’s escapades, he never complained once. He would never criticize her lunging, her prying iPhone lens, her circuitous trips down cobblestoned lanes to capture a meaningless photograph of an overflowing window box or a bewildered pup with its leash tied to a telephone pole. Once in a while—and I couldn’t stop myself from cringing at these moments—I saw him actually encouraging her habit, standing on guard while she trespassed for the sake of a shot: Don’t you worry, Belle—just zip in there and take your picture. I’ll keep watch.

  Whatever it was that sent her running, she earned automatic praise from her followers. Since taking up with Jeremy she had reached a whole new level of popularity as an online “it” girl—a shining modern swan leading a bevy of lesser birds who flapped and strained and preened in the hopes of emulating some piece of her. Anything she posted—whether it was a new pair of peep-toe heels or the hundredth shot of the ginger jars atop her fireplace mantel—would earn her a thousand “likes” and hundreds of “reblogs” within an hour. I stubbornly resisted all forms of social media, but I did know that meant she received positive reinforcement on an hourly basis. A constant stream of virtual encouragement—one of our millennium’s most deep and dangerous strains of addiction.

  As time passed, however, I noticed the conundrum Belle created by making Jeremy so central to her blog. She found ways to loop him in to most of her postings, featuring pictures of Jeremy gently whacking a croquet ball through a wicket in Sheep Meadow or surveying her apartment wall of vintage volumes to pull the perfect spine from an inset shelf for a Saturday-afternoon read. After taking a trip to Montauk with Jeremy on a stark and windy March day, she posted reams of enchanting snaps of the two of them carving B + J and J + B with their index fingers into the sandy coastline in every font type and size they could dream up. She even convinced him to host La Belle Vie’s first-ever live tour, leading a gaggle of her followers to a series of “Secret New York Treasures”—hidden and enchanting places you’d inevitably stride right by in the monotony of your daily grind. I didn’t participate—striding briskly by was clearly more my thing—but I did see some of the photos. There was the abandoned rail corridor running beneath the Waldorf Astoria as FDR’s old secret passageway to the hotel, and the Whispering Gallery in Grand Central telegraphing confessions across an unmarked tiled archway in front of the Oyster Bar, and, particularly incredible I thought, the rooftop of 77 Water Street that boasted a grass-colored airstrip and a World War I fighter plane that you could picture swooping in ghostly loops whenever night fell on the financial district. Jeremy looked pleasant and polished as he addressed the riveted women in these romantically shadowed corners of Manhattan. But, beneath the brown sheen of his eyes, I’m sure I could pick out something slightly sad—a look that admitted by revealing these hidden places he was playing an instrumental part in ruining them. That broadcasting a sacred thing meant it could never be the same again. Though the inaugural tour had been a massive success—Jeremy had always been a natural and generous tour guide—Belle nipped the whole thing in the bud without offering an explanation. Her followers responded with an outcry for more Jeremy. I guessed that would have delighted and annoyed her in equal measure. Maybe it made her aware of the beautiful beast she was creating—maybe she started fearing that Jeremy’s old-fashioned allure could, if not managed carefully, run the risk of usurping her. She would have figured out early on that his earnestness was both his greatest gift and his most glaring fault. People could see it and smell it a mile away. They either adored him for it or wouldn’t forgive him for it. As a blogging phenom, Belle’s touch, on the other hand, was light as a feather. Every move she made seemed like pure whimsy. Her artistry was in trying mightily but never allowing anyone to catch on to it. And perhaps that’s what drew her to him most of all—her unspoken admiration of his fundamental honesty, the truest part of herself that she had let go.

  “What can I mix you this afternoon, M.? A Pink Gin? Violette Royale? Benedictine and Brandy?” Belle chirped at me from her living-room bamboo bar cart, startling me back into focus.

  For the bar cart and many other reasons, being at Belle’s always felt like an indulgence to me. It was the one time I permitted myself to leaf through glossy magazines and down a daytime cocktail, for saying no was never an option when Belle was offering. She was known for mixing masterful—and masterfully strong—cocktails in her impressively provisioned apartment. I had no idea what back alleys she frequented to stock it, but she used obscure and long-since-forgotten ingredients lost over the years with too many changings-of-the-bar-guard at the Savoy and the Ritz. The concoctions she suggested were all vividly named—like the Hock Hobbler and the “Hoop-La!”—or when feeling most defiant and bitter about her past, the Burnt Fuselage.

  “It’s three o’clock in the afternoon,” I appealed. “Just a sparkling water, Belle. Seriously. Please.” My request appeared to have stunned her.

  “I operate an open-door and open-bar policy here. You of all people know that, M.! And it’s Saturday. It’s practically a holiday.” I knew there would soon be a commotion of bottles better suited for an apothecary’s cabinet and a frosted glass produced in front of me with an almost audible “Huzzah!”

  “It will be your new favorite,” she’d declare.

  That afternoon she decided on Blue Moons. According to Belle, correctly produced versions of it were as rare as the lunar phenomenon after which it was named. As she fussed and fiddled at the bar cart, I lounged on one of her enormous ivory sofas. I reached over to the coffee table to find suitably brainless reading material and, shuffling through a stack, was surprised to see Manhattan Magazine’s latest cover gawking at me:

  THAT OLD BARTHOLOMEW

  MAGIC

  IS BARTHOLOMEW BROTHERS

  THAT GOOD? OR IS IT TOO

  GOOD TO BE TRUE?

  My almighty firm, under the microscope again in the mainstream press. A murky wave of loyalty surged inside me. It was an article about the lingering mystique of Bartholomew Brothers, America’s most admired, loathed, feared, misinterpreted dark heart of capitalism. I picked up the magazine, smirk fixed across my face, ready to read the most egregious sections aloud in scoffing disbelief. Ice rattled cleanly in a cocktail shaker across the living room and I came to my senses, remembering where I was and Belle’s fiery intolerance of anything Brothers related.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Belle said, looking over her shoulder as she jostled the shaker, nodding at the magazine in my lap. “You know on principle I would have recycled it immediately but it has an excellent review of that new exhibition at the Met, Unsettled Beauty: Women of the Gilded Age. They say we’re living in a second Gilded Age now, you know.”

  “Wait, let me guess! Hedge fund managers as the new robber barons?”

  “Don’t be snide, M.,” she said, gravely. “There’s a financier in Australia who is rebuilding the Titanic as we speak.”

  “Is he not aware
of how that story ended?”

  “Maybe he wants to rewrite it.” She spoke evenly, concentrating on sifting liquid back and forth through a stainless steel bar strainer. Belle believed life called for such creative liberties—rewriting history and great tragedies and present circumstances and future endings in search of the most crowd-pleasing versions possible. “Anyhow, the Met exhibition is supposed to be wonderful. I know it’s all a massive bore to you, but at least take a look at the review while I fix these drinks.”

  A page in the center of the Manhattan issue was dog-eared. Why hadn’t Belle just ripped the review out? She could have skinned what she needed and discarded the offending feature article like a hunter hatcheting out the prime cuts and tossing away the rotting carcass. Yet there it sat, intact on her coffee table. I bypassed the magazine’s written tirade against The Brothers—the firm to which I had devoted upward of fifteen thousand hours of my life (not that I had been counting…)—and skipped ahead to the folded corner. And, just like that, I found myself staring into a pair of slate-gray eyes framed by smart tortoiseshell glasses offsetting a scattering of freckles. Scott. It was the Scott. The very one I had met at the Bender. Scott Bosher, tech entrepreneur, apparently. An interview with him discussing a start-up he had founded sat on the page facing Belle’s Met exhibition review.

  Well, I’ll be damned, I mouthed, heart thumping as I looked over to see whether Belle had taken notice. I was safe—she was on bended knee snapping artful shots of her cocktail creations from a multitude of angles. I traced a finger affectionately across his picture. A caption beneath it read:

  Let’s be honest: Entrepreneur Scott Bosher founded the Web site Verity as an online platform for people to say what they’re really thinking.

  I had thought of Scott often after our funny first encounter at the Bender, wondering who he was and whether he’d been serious in saying he hoped we’d meet again. And that I would know how to find him. But wasn’t that just a clever line? We hadn’t met again and I had put limited effort into trying to find him. I did a few online searches using ridiculous strings of key words like Scott Pierpont 2009 December Bender New York or Scott UES Manhattan freckles yielding nothing but dead ends and a general feeling of shame. At moments, thinking back, I wondered if he even existed, or if he’d been just another state-of-the-art hologram Pierpont projected to wow and win over his tipsy and teetering partygoers. So I put my head back down and focused on my work—it was easy to, for it was always there, only a BlackBerry stroke away, ready for me, wondering what had taken me so long to return to it, to step into its close, possessive shadows and assume my rightful place. Unflattering stories about The Brothers were popping up in the press more regularly about our consistently exceptional earnings and Piggelo was jittery, leaning on us hard to pull in new clients and assure our old ones. Though I wanted to find a way to see Scott again, weeks clipped by and I didn’t even notice myself getting lost again in the workings of that fast-moving and familiar machine.

  I looked up to see that Belle had materialized directly in front of me, humming a lost melody, two celestial-blue drinks in hand. A twist of lemon zest curled from each martini glass in miraculous spirals heading straight for a distant galaxy.

  “Now I can guarantee this will be your favorite.” She held a glass out to me and stood her ground, waiting expectantly for my first sip and reaction. Her wide smile and the ethereal look of those cocktails and the sudden reappearance of Scott all converged to overwhelm me. I took a sip and promptly swallowed the wrong way, flying into a fit of coughing. “Or not—gosh, M.!”

  “I’m all right, I’m all right,” I assured her, shaking it off and waving away her attempts to pound my back. “For a second there I thought that mile-long lemon twist had lassoed my neck. It’s a work of art in and of itself.”

  Belle looked delighted—she had been working on perfecting her twists for ages. But she wouldn’t let the compliment distract her.

  “So, this begs the question…,” she said, slowly, eyes flashing down to the magazine resting on my lap.

  “Yes?” I gulped, meekly.

  “Have you gone to an art exhibition like you promised me outside the Warhol show?”

  Though months had passed, and though she often recanted on the things she agreed to, Belle was never one to forget a promise someone made her. She directed her question at me, squarely, keeping her eyes locked on me as she took a long sip of pale blue. I had said that I would try and I plainly hadn’t.

  “Not exactly,” I answered, amazed that she hadn’t picked up on my happy panic over rediscovering Scott.

  “Well, here’s your chance, M.,” she said, leaning forward and tapping a manicured nail on the magazine, in disconcertingly close range of Scott’s picture. “Have you ever considered the dashing fellows you might be able to meet if you’d ever be willing to yank yourself away from Vanderbilt Avenue and Wall Street? Aren’t you tired of those dreary old scenes?” I stared at her tapping fingernail then looked over to the photo of Scott then up at the sanctimonious lines of her mouth moving in her critique of me. We all carve out little worlds for ourselves—it’s the universal survival tactic—and she had no right to imply I was the only one who did it. Belle may have covered more zip codes than me, but she lived in none of them. From the moment she founded La Belle Vie, she filtered out everything unwanted and curated a prettier oasis that she chose to inhabit. And besides, I had stepped off Vanderbilt and Wall the night I met Scott at the Bender right before her eyes, when she was too caught up in the movie-picture workings of her own drama to notice. Syllables clustered in my throat, closing it off and rendering me mute. “Oh, you could at least feign interest, M.,” Belle implored, waving her glass in the air.

  “I am interested!” I blurted out at last. “And you can cut it out with the lectures about ways I can meet a man.” I drained the rest of my Blue Moon but Belle had a dividend at the ready to top me back up—one of her signature and alcohol-laced acts of magic. “Because I’ve met one. This one, actually.” Now it was my turn to tap the magazine, indicating Scott’s picture with my unpolished but neatly trimmed nail. “And we have a date this Saturday night.”

  “A date? Who has a date?” Belle asked, genuinely confused.

  “Me and Scott Bosher!” I shouted, more loudly than intended, waving his interview before her enormous eyes. Maybe it was the Blue Moon talking, or the Blue Moon that had clarified things so perfectly in my mind, but suddenly I felt the need to drive a stake into the ground, claiming the person that in however abstract a way mattered to me, letting her know that she couldn’t have it all, that she needed to leave some of the bright things in this world for the rest of us.

  “Oh!” She cocked her head to the side and snatched the magazine from my hands, squinting at the copy keenly. “The man who founded Verity? People post so much grim stuff on that site—I honestly can’t bear to look at it. Is he one of your clients?”

  “No, for God’s sake, Belle, Scott Bosher isn’t a client. It’s social.”

  “It’s social,” she repeated, blankly.

  “A date. Scott Bosher and I are going on a date!”

  “Well, aren’t you a sly little so-and-so!” she finally cried, her rose-petal mouth agape. “Your mother really should give you more credit. You don’t seem to need my help at all. Look at you, locking in a date with a dapper man all by yourself! Where on Earth did you meet him?”

  “Sound the trumpets!” I erupted. “Hear ye, hear ye! Miss M. has locked in a date with a dapper man all by herself!” Ignoring her question, I craned my neck back and pressed imaginary trumpet keys with my right fingers. My cheeks were burning with emotion. Belle set her glass down on a monogrammed coaster and doubled over with laughter.

  “What, may I ask, is so ridiculously funny?” I would have leapt to my feet but was wedged in the depths of her billowing sofa. Between that and the paralyzing effects of the Blue Moon, she had me trapped.

  “I’m laughing…”—she paused to gasp
in a breath—“I’m laughing because this is the most animated I’ve seen you since that fluke upset with your squash bracket a few years ago.”

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” I huffed, crossing my arms over my chest and in the process jamming myself further into the sofa. I didn’t want to let Belle distract me from why I was so furious—for lowering myself to telling such an unnecessary lie, for twisting my secret daydreaming about Scott into something it wasn’t to prove Belle wrong. By trying to correct her, I had made her an official part of it all.

  “And most of all,” she continued, “I’m laughing because I’m really so excited for you.” She was upright again and skipping lightly to the other side of the living room where she began winding the Victrola. “Pick out your favorite over there.” She pointed to a wicker basket sitting next to the sofa, chock-full of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw 78s. “I think this calls for some proper music, wouldn’t you say?”

  Our dinner date with Jeremy was fixed, and he had expressed such excitement about finally having the chance to spend time with his best friend and his best girl. For his sake, I would play the role of loyalist instead of rebel, no matter how much the latter appealed.

  “Now I don’t want to steal your thunder, M.,” Belle said to me, slowly, leaning over and carefully placing Violetta’s needle on the first 78 I’d randomly pulled from the basket. A warm, comforting static filled the air around us. “But I have a bit of news that no one else knows about yet. I want you to be the first person I tell.” Flattery had always gotten her everywhere. Her confiding in me coupled with our ample daytime drinking to soften the edges of my irritation. “Someone is interested in my manuscript,” she revealed. “In Clipped Wings. I mailed it to hundreds of literary agencies and only received a stack of those ghastly form-letter rejections. But suddenly, out of the blue, an agent responded and said he thinks it has some actual promise. Somebody picked my needle out of the haystack, if you can believe it.”