Yesterday morning I hit the Close button in the elevator over and over to shut the door even though I saw a woman with luggage and windblown hair struggling toward me and I wasn’t rushing to get to anything important. God, I hate mornings.
It has gotten to the point that if I don’t take a picture of something, if I don’t record it online in some way, I feel like it hasn’t actually happened.
I have negative thoughts about everyone I meet. How did I become this angry? How can I stop?
I met her stepping onto an escalator. Twenty seconds later I stepped off into a different world. Nothing will ever be the same again.
I did the math. At this rate I will be paying back my high-interest student loans until I’m sixty. So I got drunk last night and burned my college diploma on the roof of my building, screaming “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the top of my lungs.
I’m not afraid my life will end. I’m afraid it will never begin.
While I didn’t pluck up the courage to share my first “truth,” I knew I needed to write to Scott. It was easy to find his e-mail address on Verity’s “The Truth About Us” page. My fingers tapped out a message to him, dancing across the keyboard with a mind of their own:
Scott,
You might remember me as the girl from the December Bender who should be running an intelligence unit. Or maybe I shouldn’t if it took me this long to locate your coordinates. I’m a lousy spy but I’m a very good cocktailer. How about we meet at a place with top-notch drinks to do some more people-watching (and heckling) this Saturday evening?
Yours,
M.
His reply landed in my inbox a few hours later:
M.,
I did expect your intelligence skills to be sharper but look forward to another round of heckling with you nonetheless. Minetta Tavern, Saturday—7:00 p.m.?
Scott
It really was that simple. And so we were sitting beside each other on a Saturday night in Manhattan sipping tall glasses of green. I blushed to feel his gray, automatically knowing eyes on me. Unlike so many of our contemporaries, Scott knew how to hold a stare—he didn’t sneak glances down or away, overtly or covertly, at a tiny screen or a doorway or a bustling crowd in search of a new distraction, a better thing or person on the horizon. The last guy I had dated took to whipping out his phone at fifteen-minute intervals to check on the all-important state of affairs elsewhere. When I finally questioned him about it he claimed he was only checking the time—in our digital age he felt no need to wear a wristwatch. But every fifteen minutes? Scott, on the other hand, sported a utilitarian Timex with a striped and sporty knit band that he paid no attention to. He seemed perfectly content with the here and now. It was mesmerizing.
“I’m impressed you were able to see past Manhattan’s cover story on The Brothers to read my interview in the first place. That article must have whipped you guys up into a real frenzy.”
“We can’t buy a break with the press lately,” I admitted, biting the tail off a chili to silently set my mouth on fire. “It hasn’t been much fun at the office.”
“How long have you been with them?”
“Let’s see, four years?” I reached for my swizzle stick that stabbed my two remaining green chilies straight through their hearts. “I never really thought I’d stay past two.”
“You’ve overshot a bit. So what do you want to do next?”
The baseline assumption of his question threw me. After our first two-year contracts expired, Jeremy and I talked about not wanting the firm to be it for either of us. In my heart I always expected my job there would be a step to the next, greater thing—something of value, something not-yet-named but an accolade I could truly call my own. I subscribed to Escape the Street, an online forum that shared inspiring ideas for talented and motivated professionals in search of “doing something different that makes a difference.” Scott may have even posted Verity job openings there. The site touted all sorts of unconventional opportunities: running business development for an Italian gelato dessert start-up, managing the books of a microfinance charity focused on empowering South American women knitting alpaca sweaters, or, for the more desperate to flee, operating a safari lodge in Uganda or tutoring a family in Sary-Tash, Kyrgyzstan, an alpine village tucked above the three-thousand-meter mark in the Pamir Mountains. I scanned the listings expecting the answer, the epic next thing, to fire at me like a flaming comet—shooting out from the computer screen to scorch me right between the eyes.
The trouble was that the unconventionality, the quirkiness of the opportunities, and the escape they promised intrigued me but distressed me in even greater measure. Everything felt so extreme. I started connecting totally unreasonable dots, wondering whether leaving Wall Street would rip me off a safe track to success and dump me on some remote Kyrgyzstani peak, sporting one of the microloan borrower’s alpaca sweaters as I tended to an unruly flock of mountain goats in an attempt to start my own organic goat milk frozen yogurt enterprise. I still perused the Escape the Street site weekly, but one day, and I wasn’t quite sure when that day actually came and went, the idea of actually leaving The Brothers shrank into an abstract thing that I could pull out of my desk drawer and fantasize about from time to time as my guiltiest of pleasures. The firm had somehow become the foreseeable rest of my life.
“Despite all the bad press, I don’t think The Brothers is planning to close up shop anytime soon.”
“Not until hell freezes over,” he agreed, “but that’s beside the point. You don’t think you’re a ‘Bartholomew Lifer,’ do you?” He made exaggerated quotation marks in the air as he referenced the phrase that was regularly mocked by outsiders. It would hardly have been an original choice—many Bartholomew Lifers did exist and they brandished the label like varsity athletes sporting those stiff, leather-and-boiled-wool letter jackets. People who left, these Lifers believed, simply didn’t have the chops to stay. Our CEO Bill Withers was one of them, frequently issuing public remarks about never wanting to leave his post and being perfectly happy to die at his desk. He grew a silver-specked beard, sending another signal to the market that he was settling in for the long haul like a lumbering bear cozying into an insulated den.
“God, I don’t think so,” I yelped, but my stomach knotted into a confused tangle of conflicting emotions. A twinkle flickered in Scott’s eye from a nearby light fixture that, all at once, sent me floating away from myself, up toward the ceiling of the dreamily lit tavern to teeter on a lampshade and listen to our slightly shy, softly electric banter buzz back and forth between us. I noticed how much I overused my hands—a bad habit I maintained despite Piggelo’s repeated warnings that it implied violence and would frighten our clients. And I saw that, predictably, The Brothers had found a way to weasel in and snag a center-stage position on my first date with Scott. The firm followed me everywhere—weddings, cocktail parties, corner stores—an albatross of excellence that raised expectations and fascination levels. I had recently stopped at a newsstand to buy some gum and handed over the wrong amount of change for the pack. The vendor’s eyes darted between the incorrect change and my deal bag before lighting up, hysterically, as he slapped his thigh:
“Lady, you work at Bartholomew Brothers and you can’t even do the math to buy a stick of gum? You pullin’ my leg?”
I was asking for it, toting the damn logo around in the first place. But they did that to you—hand-sculpted your excessive pride in your workplace only to leave you dangling in spells of solitary self-loathing. Though there wasn’t a Bartholomew logo in sight at the Minetta Tavern, one thing was clear: I didn’t want to talk about them anymore.
“You know, I’m getting a very good deal here—a career coaching session along with this incredible Green Mary,” I said, arching an eyebrow in his direction.
“You’re right, you’re right, mea culpa,” he said, shrugging his shoulders apologetically. “I’m just interested.”
I cocked my head to the other side.
�
�Interested? I have to say this is a first.” I smiled and heard the metallic ding of the triangle sound again.
“It’s partly because I’m an alum,” he admitted.
“You’re a what?”
“A Brothers alum.” The firm distinguished between people who left of their own volition and the sorrier souls who were forced out by calling the former lot alumni. “I was an investment banking analyst for two years right out of college, 2004 to 2006.” He recited the dates somberly, as though reading the etching of a nearby tombstone. I was mortified.
“I had no idea,” I choked out, feebly. We probably overlapped for a few months, maybe even waiting in the same lunchtime stir-fry line in the hangar-like vastness of the House of Bartholomew cafeteria. “Why didn’t you say anything before?”
“It’s not what I tend to lead with when I meet new people,” he laughed. “And I guess it didn’t mean that much to me in the grand scheme of things. I knew right away it was not what I wanted to do with my life. Going into that office felt a bit like going to war every morning. Twenty-hour workdays, an intravenous line of caffeine, never-ending ‘fire drills,’ learning never to make promises to friends or family because I’d never be able to keep them. The stale smell of the bullpen. The girl in the cubicle next to me used to say it was the odor of atrophying souls.” The image of an unemotive Drewe, cloaked in neutrals, floated blandly through my mind. “It was pretty damn tough to get out of bed in the morning. I was so pale I could have been an extra in one of those teen vampire movies. So after my contract was done I jumped—into something that I was actually excited to get up in the morning to do. I joined a tech start-up and a few years later I decided to start my own.”
“Someone who left The Brothers and lived to tell the tale,” I marveled, jokingly, though in reality the confession had brushed Scott with a mythical quality. Here was a guy who had shaken off the pressures and expectations, saw what he wanted—and most importantly what he didn’t want—and went for it, never looking back. Bartholomew Brothers was just a place where he had worked once. A place he had written off. As far as I was concerned this made him the gallant protagonist in an unlikely urban legend.
With that massive cat out of the bag, a weight lifted and I lost track of time and my nerves completely. Our phalanx of Green Marys evolved into dinner at the bar—secretly, my favorite place to dine in any restaurant. High atop a bar stool was the best place to perch and people-watch, in my opinion, front-row balcony seats to an ever-shifting Broadway review. To our right in a booth, a supermodel with a household first name widened her mouth into cartoon proportions to take a mammoth bite of a black-label hamburger. To our left at the bar, a man with an impeccably waxed mustache—ends curling into glorious loop-de-loops—sat bolt upright and toyed sadly with a circle of dressed prawns.
“Do you think he was hoping his prawns would be better dressed?” I asked Scott.
“Considering the effort he made to get his mustache to look like that, I think we could have all put a better foot forward this evening,” he pointed out, stroking his invisible whiskers.
“He’s probably lost,” I suggested. “The rest of his barbershop quartet darted off down Washington Place, found a rip in time, and left the poor guy here to fend for himself.”
“Where there is one, there are always many,” Scott assured me, as the mustached man stood, dabbed the corners of his hidden mouth with a starched napkin, and moved stiffly toward the velvet curtain insulating the front door of the tavern. “I’ll prove it to you.”
It was Scott’s idea to follow the wax-tipped man to Hudson Street for a nightcap at a hideaway where he said sporting a mustache with curling ends was a prerequisite for all staff.
“I certainly hope it’s an all-male staff?” I retorted as we moved into the shifting darkness of the bar. It was yet another resurrected Art Deco joint, part of the city’s unstoppable homage to beautiful yester-eras. Scott hadn’t exaggerated—authoritative figures in immaculate white chef’s jackets moved briskly behind the bar, clutching wooden mallets and industrial-looking bar implements while refusing to crack a smile. All had trimmed and waxed facial hair odes to Kaiser Wilhelm I or Wyatt Earp or any one of Alexandre Dumas’s musketeers.
“You never know. It’ll keep us on our toes,” he said, ushering me to a side table. “And keep you off your Brothers BlackBerry.”
“I haven’t looked at it once!” I cried, raising two outraged hands in the air. “Go ahead, confiscate it! You’re the tech guy! I couldn’t care less about that thing.” A cluster of guilt-inducing molecules swarmed around me, miniature rounds of Piggelo’s ruddy and disappointed face interspersed with one or two tiny hockey masks representing Drewe.
“All right,” he agreed. “This will be an interesting experiment.”
I retrieved the BlackBerry from my purse. As I held it out to Scott ceremoniously in my open palm, its screen illuminated with an incoming all-caps text message from Jeremy:
HOW WAS THE HOT DATE WITH YOUR NEW TECH HUNK, MISS M.?—BB
There was no helping it—our eyes froze on the illuminated message. Like a vivid insult spat out after one too many drinks, the letters presented themselves garishly then darkened in disgrace. Belle was no doubt out on one of her Saturday-evening escapades with Jeremy. They could have been bowling strikes in the hidden hardwood alley glossing the basement of the Frick (deliberately left off Jeremy’s first and only La Belle Vie “Secret New York Treasures” tour), or buzzing at the center of a high-spirited crowd, tossing back clams casino and Champagne Cobblers at the Monkey Bar in Midtown. When she reached a crucial tipping point of tipsiness, she would have stripped off her white gloves and commandeered his phone to drop me a line. Belle had christened her red Pashley Cupid’s Arrow in honor of one of her personal mascots. Her sidewalk scratchings declared in pink chalk that, above all things, she believed in L-O-V-E. But I knew that, just like Cupid, Belle carried two types of arrows in her quiver: sharp, gold-pointed ones that inspired passion and desire, and dull, lead-tipped ones that transferred feelings of aversion and insecurity. At the arrival of Belle’s message, traced with a derisive dust that only I could recognize, the percussion section that had trailed me all evening suddenly collapsed into a mess of snare drums and cymbals concluding with one great, humiliated gong.
“Well, this is rather awkward,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the darkened screen sitting at the end of my extended arm. I could feel Scott’s gray eyes smiling amusedly in my direction.
“I’ll take tech hunk,” he said, as I finally looked up. “Only I’m not sure, er, Jeremy will really be my type.”
“He’s the boyfriend of my friend Belle,” I explained, hurriedly, hoping to justify the message and clarify Jeremy’s heterosexuality all at once. Despite my embarrassment I could still see how portentous the moment was. For the first time I described Jeremy as being someone else’s—Belle’s—not as my best friend. With that rushed-out sentence, I had let go of him in a way. A torch had passed. I had admitted he was no longer mine to protect. “And as you can probably gather, that message was from her, not him.”
“Belle Bailey, is it?” he chipped back, inquisitively.
Hearing her full name audibly materialize from Scott’s freckled lips across the darkness was jarring—she might as well have come crashing through the bar’s front door on Cupid’s Arrow, overturning chairs and tables as she kept on laughing and pedaling, obnoxiously bouncing red balloons off imbibers’ heads in her wake.
“That’s right,” I confirmed, as coolly as possible. “We’re friends from College. Let me guess—you’re a La Belle Vie man? It’s always the ones you wouldn’t suspect.”
“Ahhh, not quite … though we do reference her blog in our investor presentations as an example of what we’re trying to battle against with Verity. I actually met her through her boyfriend, Chase. He and I played intramural rugby together at The Brothers for a few months just before I left. He was a helluva number eight. That guy is huge.”
“Chase is huge,” I agreed, hazily, feeling a few paces behind a fast-moving plotline.
“It’s funny, though—it’s been quite a few years since I met Belle after a rugby match, and she called me up out of the blue yesterday. She mentioned you, which seemed like quite a coincidence since I was seeing you tonight. For a moment it almost felt like she was sniffing me out on your behalf.”
“That’s clearly what I asked her to do,” I laughed back, falsely.
Belle hadn’t mentioned a thing to me about knowing Scott through Chase—let alone calling him up and blabbing about our date—and I felt my whole being physically prick with a feeling of intrusion. It had been a giant leap forward for me to summon the nerve to contact Scott in the first place. Who else did he imagine I had broadcast our low-key evening to? I suddenly felt like a loud-mouthed adolescent, snapping my gum and speed-dialing my girlfriends to brag about my dreamboat date to the prom.
“She wants to interview me for a story about Verity,” he went on. “Why the genuine matters more than ever in the digital age.” I stifled a snort. Belle was about as interested in presenting “the genuine” online as I was in learning the six surefire steps to creating a smoky eye. “It’s ironic, I know, but I think it will prove an interesting point. She’s coming to our office next week.”
Fake Plastic Love Page 17