“Sure I can believe it—you’re a great writer and you deserve it,” I said, and meant it. For so long Belle had focused on nothing of substance and I admired that she was persevering to overcome a hurdle that mattered. “So what happens next?”
“Well, I have a lot of revising to do. Apparently the manuscript needs more character progression and I need to make the ending more concrete. Right now it’s ambiguous … I wrote it that way because I haven’t actually figured out how I want my story to end.”
“I’m sure Jeremy could make some suggestions,” I teased, sending a rush of rose charging into both of her cheeks.
“And there’s one more thing,” she added, picking up her empty martini glass and anxiously tracing a finger along its rim. “The agent wants me to publish a more serious piece on my blog. Because the manuscript is not quite as, ahhh—light—as La Belle Vie, he wants to show publishers my readers will respond to a story with a bit more weight to it. To tell you the truth, that’s the part I’m most nervous about.”
“You were a newspaper reporter back in College—you have it in you,” I urged her, though I doubted that a feature on the 1958 Winter Carnival Queen of the Snows’s cold cream regimen qualified as a weighty piece.
“That was forever and a day ago,” she said, her eyes suddenly emptying. She resigned from the paper and gave up so many things when the news of the crash shattered her world. It slashed a jagged black line in the idyllic sand of her College days. And when she emerged from the shadows of her mourning—at least ostensibly—she founded La Belle Vie. And took up with Chase. Both were hallmarks of the side of the jagged black line she chose to live on.
“But it’s there,” I insisted. “It will always be somewhere inside you, even if you need to dig deep.”
“Maybe,” she answered, tentatively. “But all the same, could you keep this to yourself? Could you not tell Jeremy for the time being?”
“You haven’t told him?” I asked with genuine surprise.
“Oh, I don’t want to get his hopes up if nothing comes of it. We just spoke about how he can get carried away—about me, I mean.…” She gestured at several example flower arrangements. “It’s terribly sweet and I’m so touched by it, but I don’t know if I could handle disappointing him. The look in those puppy-dog eyes would be too heart-wrenching.”
“You know you could tell him anything, Belle. He’d still think the world of you.”
“Would he?” She paused to consider, tilting her head a few reflective degrees—then she pirouetted into her kitchen like a swirling electric current, putting down her glass and plucking the ice bucket off the bar cart on her way through the door.
And so Belle continued to churn out her Blue Moons as we bopped around her living room to a dozen big band hits on the Victrola. Our mood had turned so buoyant and celebratory that I didn’t even frown in puzzlement when Belle stayed dressed in her head-to-toe polka dots when we bounded out the door to meet Jeremy, already more than half an hour behind schedule.
We exited her building and I realized something was afoot when Belle led me briskly in the direction of Perry Street.
“Aren’t we meeting Jeremy at Moustache? In that direction?” I was under the impression we were heading to their favorite Middle Eastern restaurant, where I knew they loved lingering with hummus and hardbacks at their usual copper-topped table. “We’re going for dinner now, right?”
“Please don’t be such a pill, M.,” she instructed, impatiently, lengthening her stride down the block. “I don’t know why you always insist on acting so positively geriatric.”
“Wanting dinner makes me an old lady?”
She didn’t honor the question with a reply. With a sinking feeling, I knew then that she was leading me straight to Gardenia Bakery. Belle lived by yet another baffling creed: cupcakes are always a good idea. I couldn’t bear the types that lingered in those frilly urban cupcake shops, cooing statements like ooooh, butterscotch and the vanilla icing is TO DIE FOR as though describing a religious experience. Gardenia had been temporarily closed by the New York Department of Health due to its mouse-friendly basement, yet Belle and the rest of New York wouldn’t hold it against them. Over those dark months of closure, someone had fashioned a makeshift banner to hang outside its door reading “SAVE GARDENIA!” as though the survival of Western civilization hinged on its cupcake production line. With its doors miraculously reopened, the crowds flocked in even greater numbers. I had been useless at gymnastics growing up but would have rather attempted back handsprings across Bleecker than line up at that cupcake shop, where queues were known to snake on for blocks.
“Or whaddyasay we just scrap the food and go dance on some furniture instead?” I tried in a frantic, last-ditch effort. “Wouldn’t that be a better way to celebrate?”
“First we’ll have dessert, then we’ll dance it off,” Belle corrected me. Clearly there was no way I could pull back on the throttle. “Besides, I need to blog about Gardenia’s May cupcake special—the blond buttercream. Harriet said she coined it in honor of me. How, quite literally, sweet is that?” It was the farthest cry from the serious piece the publisher was looking for, but Belle raised her chin proudly and set off for Gardenia’s blue awning with her long-limbed, outward-pointing ballerina stride.
Though she and Jeremy frequented a variety of cupcake shops together, Belle claimed she was hooked on Gardenia’s particular brand of buttercream frosting. In reality, I think she was hooked on the owner Harriet’s gushing reaction every time she saw Jeremy and Belle walk through her shop door together.
“Well, aren’t you two the most adorable things I have ever seen!” Harriet would cry, clapping flour-dusted hands in front of her. “Just look at you, lighting each other up like fireflies!”
The woman might as well have taken an oversized tin watering can and sprinkled a miracle tonic down upon Belle—she physically elongated whenever she repeated Harriet’s words to me. She couldn’t have scripted it more perfectly herself. For it reinforced Belle’s great hope that she tried to reflect in all of her blog entries. That hand in hand, she and Jeremy scattered a confetti-like air of Love and laughter—happily-ever-after—wherever they tread.
We found him waiting patiently at a lime-green bistro table beneath the Gardenia awning, his sandy head bent thoughtfully over a jacketless hardback. A yellow carnation bloomed from his buttonhole. The words THE PERFECT ENDING were stenciled poetically onto the shop window above his right shoulder. It was a lovely image—one that couldn’t go uncaptured. Belle held an arm out to block my path as she trained her iPhone on the erudite form of Jeremy, whispering to herself, “Raise your head just a trace.” Though Jeremy was immersed in his book and beyond earshot, his sixth sense steered him right and he raised his head half an inch. “Perfect.” The picture was taken, Belle lowered her arm, and we were able to resume our evening.
“Meeting someone special?” she asked in a husky voice, sneaking up to pluck Jeremy’s flower from his lapel. I watched him stand up to kiss Belle, wrapping his arms around her and lifting her a few inches off the ground. He set her back down and they both turned to face me with two sets of startling eyes. Together, Jeremy and Belle—with their clean lines and oversized features and milky complexions—could have easily slotted into a Disney production as animated characters all the chirping forest creatures scramble to devote themselves to. Each looked five years younger than their ages, and together the effect seemed to increase exponentially. Looking at them took you back to a simpler, more contented time—one of innocent afternoons scampering back and forth through the cold, clear spray of a front-lawn sprinkler.
“I’m sorry we’re terribly late,” she said to him, pouting girlishly. “We cranked up ole Violetta and time just slipped away from us.”
The thought of her making use of his grandfather’s gramophone, with or without him, visibly pleased him. He hadn’t minded spending the better part of an hour waiting for us.
“I’m glad you girls had fun,�
�� he winked at both of us. “I suppose I shouldn’t even ask how many cocktails you worked your way through?”
“Cocktails?” Belle answered, coquettishly, fixing his carnation into her messy chignon without needing a mirror. “I can’t think what you mean, Mr. Kirby.”
She had been giddy but largely fine on our short walk over to the bakery but the sparkling sight of Jeremy swirled with the strength of her one-too-many Blue Moons to suddenly intoxicate her. I couldn’t imagine being dishonest with him and was suddenly worried the tipsy Belle would open her rouged mouth and spill the beans about my not-yet-scheduled first date with Scott Bosher. But, as was the case so often, her focus was elsewhere.
“Once more unto the breach, dear friends!” she cried, punching her right fist skyward. Then she pounced past us and vanished through the bakery door, leaving the sound of a bell twinkling behind her like an audible cloud of fairy dust.
“I honestly might pass out if I don’t eat dinner,” I told Jeremy, slumping myself against an outdoor bakery chair for support. “Belle made us Blue Moons. Multiple Blue Moons. You’ve got to admit, for someone who’s prepared for everything she’s seriously weak on bar bites. I know, I know—peanuts and pretzels are beneath her. Or maybe it’s part of her strategy? That bar cart of hers could qualify as a lethal weapon.”
“Violetta seems to get her all wound up,” he observed, not attempting to hide his boyish excitement over it. “She didn’t play any Henry Mancini, did she?”
“No, it wasn’t Mancini, it was the whole thing about—” He blinked at me eagerly and my promise to Belle about her manuscript flashed before my eyes. “Yes.” I switched tacks, gravely. “Come to think of it, I’m afraid she did play ‘Moon River Cha Cha’—twice.”
“It looks like we’re in for quite a night, then.” We both knew the Breakfast at Tiffany’s score had an adrenaline-like effect on Belle, setting her heart racing and her illusions soaring. “You know, I’m not exactly desperate for another cupcake myself,” he added, putting an arm around my shoulder and ushering me gingerly toward Gardenia’s door. The pavement outside was eerily empty and I wondered, secretly hopeful, whether the basement mice had staged a victorious comeback and shut the whole operation down for the rest of eternity. “Belle brings me here all the time. And she only eats the icing—the prettiest part, as she calls it—so I end up eating double the cupcakes, every time.”
“The things we do for love,” I remarked, dryly. He nudged me gently in the ribs. We turned to face each other outside the shop door and I couldn’t deny it, Jeremy looked almost incandescent in the latter half of that spring twilight.
“Come on, M., just play along, will you? For me?”
He held the door open for me and, giving him a steady glance of consent, I walked inside. We were greeted with a state of pandemonium. Fifty or so people were jammed into the shop that had capacity for twenty. Windows sweated densely with the condensation of overheated bodies and aggravated breathing—Belle’s camera training on Jeremy and THE PERFECT ENDING made us both miss the warning sign of a heavily perspiring front window. I looked around and found it difficult to register what I was seeing. For a bakery specializing in cupcakes, it seemed to be entirely void of the things. Instead, the shop was filled with various sounds and decibels of human distress. A cluster of hysterical toddlers, bedtimes badly breached, issued open-mouth wails from one corner. Their scavenging mothers swept the premises—wings out and talons down, ready to ravage any cupcake that might appear in their midst.
“Twelve red velvets! I preordered twelve red velvets!” a woman sobbed over the counter. Her husband grunted his way through the mob to plant himself beside her.
“Can’t you see my wife is hysterical here? We preordered the red velvets and if we can’t leave here with the preordered red velvets there will be hell to pay!” As far as I could tell there was no one standing behind the counter to hear or act on his red velvet grievance. He shook a fuming fist at nothing at all.
“Incoming!” a staff member suddenly roared, rumbling through a back door with an industrial vat of batter that could have housed any number of drowned rodents by the look of it.
“Wide load!” another employee bellowed, bulldozing through the mob to deposit an extrawide tray of cooling cupcakes on a side table. The tray was ravaged bare in a matter of seconds.
“Wide load? Oh, the irony,” I whispered to Jeremy as we took shelter in an opposite corner.
“Just hang on tight, it will be over soon,” he assured me.
A tall, older gentleman with an eye patch served as a beacon of hope, waiting calmly alongside Belle in the thick of the throng. I could only assume the eye patch was the result of a previous Saturday-night trip to Gardenia. Belle loathed crowds and any sign of human neediness, so I knew the scene would have appalled her. Yet she wore a forced look of pleasant patience on her face that would have convinced anyone but me. It was the high arch of her eyebrows that gave her away. She had insisted on this outing and she would not admit error—or defeat. There was a sudden surge forward on both sides of the crowd, as though the eye-patched gentleman had commanded his troops to pursue a flank attack on the counter.
“I said wide load, lady! Give way!” The oversized employee reappeared with another extrawide tray and with a mighty elbow, edged everyone out of her path. The willowy, polka-dotted Belle folded onto the floor as people around her leapt for the replenished tray of cakes.
“Rudeness for the sake of a cupcake?” she screamed in disbelief, picking herself off the tiles as I pitched myself into the fray to help her. “And we’re supposed to pay for this? I will not endorse this! And I intend to have a strong word about this on my blog—just you wait! Harriet! Where in God’s name is Harriet?”
Jeremy had vanished from my side and before I knew what was left or right, what was coconut or red velvet, Jeremy had a supportive arm around Belle, towing me along with them, and walked briskly out the door, cupcake box in hand. His motions seemed so natural, so confident and at ease. Did he even realize he had, no matter how small and trivial and provoked a thing it was, stolen something?
Back at the front door of her building, Belle’s face was lit up in a different way—it blazed with an angry crimson.
In the hopes of soothing her, Jeremy opened the small box, monogrammed with an ornate G, to reveal four cupcakes—coconut or vanilla or banana or buttercream, with an untrained eye it was impossible to tell. A thick strand of black hair was draped diagonally in dramatic contrast across the icing. The roof of my mouth began to sweat.
“Did people in the Gilded Age lose eyes over hair-covered cupcakes?” I asked Belle, my eyes staying fixed on the coarse black strand.
“No,” she answered, sullenly, closing the lid and depositing the beautiful box in a nearby trash receptacle. “No, they most certainly did not.”
* * *
The cupcake fiasco canceled the furniture dancing so I was able to make it home and climb into bed just past the stroke of eleven. I stopped at a newsstand on my way back to Midtown and, like a giddy preteen sneaking after-bedtime reading under the covers, opened Manhattan Magazine to page forty-two where Scott Bosher’s interview about his start-up Verity awaited me:
FORGOING THE FILTERS: MEET THE MAN WHO’S BETTING WE ALL JUST WANT TO TELL THE TRUTH.
I had been waiting for the last eight hours to read the interview quietly, in private, without Belle’s prying eyes and authoritative chirping clouding my focus or making me feel like I was ogling a dirty magazine.
Q: Why are your users so devoted to Verity?
SB: I think a lot of people are fed up. When we go online and use social media, for the most part we see heavily filtered versions of other people’s lives. We see carefully curated highlight reels that are essentially movie trailer versions of realities that don’t exist. Many of us feel exasperated. And it can start warping the opinions we form about our own lives, whether we realize it or not. Verity serves up reality, pure and unfiltered. It gives peop
le a platform to share and read the truth. We’re starved to hear what people are actually thinking and doing and feeling instead of what they’d like us to believe. Authenticity in the digital age is a rarity and authenticity is exactly what Verity is all about.
I rested the magazine on my duvet, running Scott’s lines back and forth through my head like bright thread embroidering a swatch of pale cloth to forever alter its texture and color. Authenticity. Was that what Scott saw in me at the Bender? Was that what I’d sensed in him? I turned my head right to stare through my bedroom window up at the invisible film of stars that must have been burning gently some unknown distance above the metropolis. I could suddenly feel the thrilling intimacy of the city. I had never thought of New York as small before—a hemmed-in, towering neon village with everything so close at hand to reach for, to smash into, to snatch hold of. But somewhere, within only a few electric square miles, under the same rectangle of illuminated sky was Scott—on his living-room couch tapping away on his tablet, hailing an elusive yellow cab, in the arms of a staggeringly beautiful woman, I could hardly guess.
My BlackBerry buzzed on my night table. Piggelo would be expecting an answer from me—or Drewe on her behalf. I stretched and rolled over onto my side, ignoring the series of irritated drones that followed. I tucked the magazine beneath my pillow. It was time to sleep. The next day was Sunday, the day my overdue search for Scott Bosher would begin.
BREAKFAST AT PIGGELO’S
But before reuniting with Scott, there was a significant—and significantly unpleasant—test I needed to pass. The following Thursday, all female associates in The Brothers Private Bank had been summoned to cook breakfast at Piggelo’s town house on East Seventy-First just off Park. Breakfast would begin at 7:00 a.m., which would require a 6:50 a.m. arrival given the firm’s unwritten rule that arriving on time meant arriving ten minutes early. Certain partners were known to lock meeting-room doors to bar the entrance of pitiful, damp-shirted stragglers. The breakfast would no doubt be some form of evaluation—evaluating what, and to what end, we could only guess.
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