Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  The four of us sidestepped over to the nearest bar. I leaned toward Scott and asked him to please go easy on Jeremy. Fortunately I didn’t have to worry about him provoking Belle. Such a whopping dose of early-twentieth-century elegance had her in a trance—so much so that she had forgotten that Scott was there and that she was standing in an inner chamber of the capitalist engine that she deplored with every fiber of her being. It was a quality she shared with Jeremy—her monolithic love of a thing enabling her to effortlessly tune out the rest of the humdrum world. The difference was in duration. Belle skipped briskly from fixation to fixation while Jeremy’s devotion had an undeniable permanence about it.

  The bar we found was nestled between a larger-than-life Rodin-inspired ice sculpture and an industrial vat of foie gras. A floppy-haired, pocket-squared banker was in front of us, attempting to procure his own very particular flute of bubbly.

  “Have the champagne bottles been sabered?” he asked the bartender. Scott looked over to me, one eyebrow raised skyward.

  “I beg your pardon, sir?” the waiter asked, wearing a fierce look of concentration as he positioned champagne flutes on the bar top to spell out the mighty initials B.B.

  “Sabered. Lanced,” the banker clarified, placing one hand on the small of his own back and thrusting forward with an invisible sword to provide a visual aid capped with a Renaissance flourish. “Because I only drink champagne out of bottles that have been sabered. Anything else just feels wrong.” He looked from side to side and, turning back to sift his gaze over Jeremy, sniffed, conclusively. “Like wearing a double-breasted blazer.”

  Scott checked his lapels to ensure a security guard hadn’t slipped him into an offending jacket at the door. Belle’s mouth draped open in amazement. It wasn’t the saber rattling that did it—she couldn’t pull her stare from the bar and the bubbling double-B monogram that flew so extravagantly in the face of her own. Jeremy—who was not in fact wearing a double-breasted blazer nor had ever done so as far as I knew—stepped forward to, one by one, pluck four already filled flutes from the linen as the banker watched, quietly in awe of the less discerning arrivistes beside him who demonstrated no interest in whether their champagne had been uncaged via saber or spoon or a pedestrian twist-and-pop.

  With Belle settling in with her first dose of champagne, Jeremy excused himself to the gents.

  “Steer clear of Saber Man, ladies,” Scott warned Belle and me, ushering us away from the bar. “That situation probably won’t end well.” A few moments later we heard the explosion of glass—followed by a muffled cry—somewhere behind us in the throng.

  Shifting closer to the pastry table brought us into Leezel Bartholomew’s line of sight. She beelined straight toward Belle, a dusting of powdered sugar dotting the same place Marie Antoinette once applied her fake facial mouche.

  “Have you managed to find Chase, darling?” Leezel did her best to ignore Scott and me while she placed an inflated hand on Belle’s pipe-cleaner arm. She was blinking eagerly, clearly oblivious to Belle’s break with Chase and her newer ties to Jeremy. “It may be difficult to see him in the swarm—he has to bat the analysts away with a stick at these things. The first-year female analysts literally cling to his form.” Scott elbowed me lightly in the ribs.

  Leezel was cut off by a xylophone that sounded hypnotic scales over the loudspeakers as though summoning all partygoers to return to their seats for the climactic Act III of La Traviata. We all rotated in harmony toward the west side of the lobby. A stage was erected there, next to a special table filled with Diet Snapples and KIND bars for Bill Withers and other executive committee members struggling through the same no-sugar diet that didn’t seem to make their physiques any less pear-shaped. Harry Connick Jr. had emerged from beneath the mountain lion and was standing with odd prominence at the foot of the stage. The bearded Withers strode to the podium grinning with our president and vice chairman trailing a respectful foot behind.

  “Billy’s beard game is on point,” Scott commented to me. “He looks so fatherly.”

  “Can you hear the cogs squeaking?” I asked. “Everyone frantically trying to calculate the combined net worth of the three guys at the podium. Saber Man’s head is about to explode.”

  As Withers opened his formal remarks with meaningless pleasantries—so obviously abandoning his talking points and slaloming off-piste as he was prone to do at any speaking engagement—Jeremy returned from the gents to resume his place at Belle’s side, resting his hand on the small of her back again. Leezel’s face collapsed with displeasure.

  “It’s going to be a magical night.” Bill glowed at us, sweeping a stiff arm around the expansive room unconvincingly. “And while an important part of tonight and our 150th anniversary is about all of you—saying a sincere thank you to you, the people that make Bartholomew Brothers the superior machine it is today—of course we all know who the real star of this show is,” he said, revealing two oversized rows of blindingly white capped teeth. I saw Harry Connick Jr. make an instinctive move to spring onto the stage but a miscellaneous arm bolted forward to block him. That cued a sorry soul from the Event Management department, struggling in a formfitting pencil skirt and wildly impractical stilettos, to appear at the edge of the stage. She used all of her bodily force to wheel out Henry Q. Bartholomew II’s famous yellow paper outlining the firm’s ITSI principles, preserved under meticulously Windexed glass. The woman was pitched at a forty-five-degree angle and issued an audible grunt as she threw her back into hauling the artifact under the spotlight. Was the thing framed in diving weights? Though we were too far back in the mob to do anything, I could see Jeremy straining forward with his intrinsic desire to help. In the meantime I counted three dozen or so men within three feet of the stage who didn’t even twitch with the thought of lending the poor girl a hand.

  “Screw the yellow paper. I’m surprised they don’t wheel out ol’ Henry himself for these things,” a familiar voice boomed. I turned to identify it as Chase, who had successfully pried the clinging analysts from his body and was taking a thoughtful sip from a crystal tumbler just behind us. Belle was only a few feet away but stared straight ahead of her, not even flinching at his unmissable blare.

  “They have him embalmed, you know,” Scott leaned back to add. Chase disguised any surprise at seeing his old rugby teammate again, issuing him a coolly confident fist pump along with his standard male greeting of Wotcha—dude.

  “Seriously—embalmed? You don’t say!” another chap exclaimed, as though playing a round of golf with the resuscitated tycoon was now a distinct possibility. I glanced back to see it was Saber Man from the bar, standing next to Chase and holding a flute of what I could only guess was freshly sabered champagne.

  “The Bosh is right. Henry’s kicking it down in the third level of the vaults,” Chase confirmed, pointing a buffed and meaty index finger to the marble floor. “With all the bars of gold. It’s like a gilded Lenin’s Tomb down there, for Christ’s sake.”

  “Shit,” Saber Man answered, unable to mask his enchantment.

  They had no idea what we were all in for. The champagne was so free-flowing that night that no one in attendance—even more objective partygoers like Scott—could have told you exactly when it happened. But like a bolt ripping through the atmospheric blue, an alarmed voice pealed out through the lobby with a cry imitating a frenzied Lennon sighting at the height of Beatlemania:

  “There he is! It’s him! I can’t believe it! It’s actually him!”

  The crowd crackled with disbelief as the rickety figure of Henry Q. Bartholomew II rose up from the floorboards and began slowly pacing the stage with the famous, arthritic stoop we all knew he had assumed in the later years of his life.

  “One day, when I was bathing—yes, right there in the bath—it struck me,” he said to us, with great deliberation. “As Bartholomew Brothers continued to grow, we needed some way to ensure our people would be indoctrinated with the principles that defined us. So I wrote them down.
In the first instance, I drafted ten principles, but someone gently pointed out that might be too reminiscent of the Ten Commandments.…” At that line, the crowd thundered with an overly hearty chorus of laughter. “So I collapsed ten into four, which was a terrific solution. They are the four points of our corporate compass. They show us the way, unfailingly.”

  Everyone was mesmerized.

  Around us necks strained forward a number of inches to ogle the historic figure as though we were witnessing Jesus Christ in the process of folding his burial cloth before leaving the tomb.

  “I think this may be a whole new level of crazy,” Scott whispered in my ear.

  Once again, it took me a few seconds to clue in but, watching the decrepit figure gesture at us with an almost accusatory, bent index finger, I noticed a tiny, pixelated flicker.

  “It’s a—hologram,” I whispered back to him in amazement. Yes, there we all were, gazing at a remarkably lifelike hologram of Henry Q. Bartholomew II, just like the ones Pierpont used to dazzle Scott, me, and the rest of his dazzle-proof guests at his December Bender. And that remarkable technology—procured by the firm at the expense of its shareholders for a sorely needed employee morale boost—meant that, for one night only, the past charged forward convincingly, in spats and a cutaway coat, and was suddenly there, shoulder to shoulder with us, telling us that with enough money and insistence everything old could be made new again.

  It was too much for some to bear. All at once, Leezel’s knees buckled and she swung heavily toward the marble floor. Whether or not she was a descendant of Henry Q. Bartholomew was of no consequence to Jeremy, who lunged forward to catch the back of her skull just in the nick of time. He used his second hand to pull something from his inside pocket— he didn’t actually carry smelling salts around with him, did he?—that he waved beneath Leezel’s flared nostrils. She came to, with Jeremy still cradling her peroxide-blond head, her enormous bow billowing toward him like an airbag that had faithfully inflated.

  “Chase?” she asked, woozily. In the commotion Chase had bolted, or had been rendered invisible by a new wave of analysts leapfrogging onto him. And though he had disappeared, he still managed to feature prominently as the default, wrongly assumed knight in shining armor. “You would never let me down, Boo-Boo.”

  “Boo-Boo?” someone honked from the sidelines.

  Scott and I smirked and Belle laughed with affront.

  “You’ll be just fine, Leezel,” Jeremy assured her, brushing a trace of smeared powdered sugar from one of her cheekbones. He would be the eternal gentleman, even in the least deserving of circumstances, and I was proud Scott could finally see him at his best and truest.

  “Can we give the lady some air, please, people?” Scott commanded the circle of suited figures looming around us, all gawking and all totally unhelpful.

  “Somebody call Health Services!” I added, towing Belle to the side as she watched Jeremy quietly save another person’s life. She wore the sort of expression first-time trapeze jumpers might assume when standing atop a twenty-foot-high platform and suddenly realizing there is, in fact, a safety net splayed out below to catch them no matter how wild or faulty or self-indulgent their leap.

  Leezel was wheeled off by Health Services, her bow limp and deflated, one bare knee exposed through a circular rip in her opaque stockings. Jeremy accompanied the stretcher thanklessly, even thinking to pluck a spare mille-feuille from a banquet table as they passed, just to make sure Leezel would keep calm.

  “Well, that was all very dramatic,” Belle remarked, shaking herself out of her spell and widening her eyes toward Scott and me.

  “Drama is one word for it,” Scott agreed.

  “Well, we don’t usually get holograms and close brushes with catastrophic head injuries at the same firm event. You’ve picked a winner, Belle.”

  Leezel’s swoon had cut Hologram Henry’s speech short, though Bill Withers announced that he—Hologram Henry, that is—would be on hand for the rest of the night for souvenir photos in front of a backboard stamped with hundreds of miniature Bartholomew Brothers logos.

  “Just being inside this gorgeous lobby is winning,” Belle said, opening her clutch to remove her iPhone. Its screen reflected the back lighting to wink at us, playfully. “And I haven’t even taken a single photo yet.”

  “They let you bring that in here?” Scott asked with surprise. He rustled around in his pockets. “I was stripped clean at the door.”

  “My phone is practically an extension of my anatomy,” she laughed at him, darkly. “I don’t know how they missed it in my cavity search.”

  Belle began waving an arm in breezy arcs as she sprang off to snap pointless photos of her general vicinity. It was then that I felt the pressure of two disappointed beads scorching a pair of laser beams in our direction. Without needing to identify the source, I knew that Piggelo was watching, and that Piggelo was not in the least bit happy. When I managed a glance over, I saw Drewe hovering phantom-like just behind her left shoulder, whispering something into her ear. I turned to Scott.

  “I’m really sorry but I need to deal with this—with Belle, I mean. You don’t want to take ten to snag a picture with the hologram, by any chance?”

  “Very tempting,” he admitted, “but I think my Brothers paraphernalia days are done. Plus, that guy gives me the creeps,” he added, casting troubled eyes over to Henry. “One line of code goes wrong and who knows what he could do.”

  “I’m with you,” I agreed.

  “Out of curiosity, what do you think would happen if I karate-chopped him through the chest?”

  “Immediate, high-voltage tazing by one of the guards? I’m sorry to subject you to all of this again.”

  “Cut it out. I wanted to come. Hey, why don’t we grab a sashimi doggy bag and bust a move out of here?”

  “I really can’t leave yet,” I said, regretfully. “As you can see, Belle’s acting wild and I may be the only one who can contain her.”

  “Let Jeremy handle Belle,” he cajoled. “It’s his job. Trust me.”

  Scott was making his best effort to convince me but—as Piggelo’s beads burned toward me and Belle darted to and fro like an increasingly erratic toddler—my sense of duty kicked into high gear. I didn’t think I could abandon the scene.

  “Give me thirty minutes,” I said to Scott.

  “I seriously can’t convince you to come with me?”

  “You head home now and I’ll be with you in thirty minutes. I promise.”

  “I think you’d be much better off coming with me.”

  “Scott…” I trailed off. “Thirty minutes.” I brushed his cheek with a kiss, wondering how Piggelo—observing me so closely—would react to a conspicuous sign of human affection. When Scott shook his head and walked away, the multicolored aura he brought with him condensed under the doorframe and whisked out into the night, flinging me back into the dry, flat desert of the party without him.

  “Can you please stop being so cavalier with your phone?” I pleaded when I finally found Belle. Infuriatingly, my question prompted her to shoot off in another direction. She was quicksilver decorated with tulle. Of course movement—or the impression of movement—had always been Belle’s specialty. That made you feel your time with her was precious, that she had just arrived and would threaten to pick up and leave, red scarf flying, at any second. It often produced a softly dizzying force—like the effects of a too-stiff first cocktail on an empty stomach—leaving you unsure of what exactly had hit you. We all felt it, but no one felt it more than Jeremy. He was desperate to introduce the notion of permanence into Belle’s life and our inability to rein her in at this party demonstrated the futility of those efforts.

  “You’re really not supposed to have a personal phone in here,” I explained. “It’ll reflect poorly on all of us if you keep flashing it around.”

  But Belle was already distracted by a colony of molded chevrons and starbursts adorning a lobby wall and was fiddling with the settings on
her phone to snap close-range pictures of it.

  “Mmmmm?” she murmured, absorbing none of what I said.

  Jeremy reappeared and I grabbed him by the arm to share the red alert.

  “The camera,” I hissed to him. “It has got to go. We’re being watched. Belle won’t listen.”

  “Dead eyes?”

  “Well, yes, but beads, too. Shining, menacing beads. And they have missiles locked on Belle.”

  I didn’t need to say more—Jeremy understood. He gently ushered Belle away from Piggelo’s stare to take shelter at the champagne bar, which was about as effective as donning a wool overcoat to disguise something from Superman’s X-ray vision. I took refuge at the nearby vegetarian spread where, idiotically, I ran straight into Piggelo herself, who was trembling over the table with her plump thumb and middle finger serving as pincers that held a single red pepper.

  “It just occurred to me that I haven’t eaten in twenty-four hours,” she murmured in my direction. I thought back to the gentle, soup-bearing man in her office from earlier that summer—in the unlikely event that he still had his job, I wondered how many appendage burns he had endured in attempts to serve Piggelo unsatisfactory food she would never consume. If no one ever saw her eat anything, what was responsible for her girth? A gland issue? Clandestine tiptoeing down her glass staircase for midnight raids of her twenty-second-century fridge? Standing beside me now, Piggelo was irritable as usual but something—perhaps it was gut-twisting hunger—seemed to have mellowed her. It was as though a security guard had converted one of his wands into a giant human file to gently round all of her edges on her way through the front door. Make no mistake, she was still terrifying. But she was somewhat less terrifying than usual, particularly at such close range, where I could see a thin line of perspiration gathered on her upper lip and the pitiful tremor of the red pepper between her two darkly polished digits.

  She took a nervous, rabbit-like nibble of the pepper and, her mouth twitching ever so slightly, looked past me toward Bill Withers and Hologram Henry, who had their heads bent together in thoughtful conversation. And suddenly I understood. The presence of Withers and his Chairman’s Office counterparts and even Hologram Henry had her quivering like a frail leaf. They had that effect on her and so she ensured she would do the same to all of us. It was the legacy of fear passed down the chain of command at Bartholomew Brothers—you bred insecurity in your underlings because it was exactly what was bred in you.