Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  Muttering that he was probably right and that I was very sorry for it all, I left Jeremy behind to head uptown and face the music with Scott. Stripped of his lucky charms and of me, what would be left to defend Jeremy in New York? As I passed through that black archway of security wands at the front door, I looked back to see him drowning in the deep blue lighting of the magnificent Bartholomew Brothers lobby, retracing the same circles over and over again, searching fruitlessly for the defiant Belle and her contraband camera phone.

  ADIEU, NEW YORK

  Two days later, on a cruel and gorgeous Saturday in late October, Scott and I met in a scenic corner of the Metropolitan Museum’s rooftop garden. At the end of that weekend, the roof would be closing for the season, making it feel as though we were convening on an elevated platform of borrowed time. As we leaned out over the hedged railing, a gargantuan branding iron seemed to have swung down from the sun and scorched a rectangle of fire into the earth in front of us. That day, and the sight of the breathtaking red rectangle of the park, should have been full of bewitching possibility. But instead, the air was tainted with a feeling of injustice—the knowledge that something new and deserving was ending well before its prime.

  After Hologram Henry and the revelation of the paper cobra, after learning about my relocation to London, I rushed uptown to share the news with Scott, knowing how he’d receive it but still holding out hope he would understand. I was a fool, thinking it was totally reasonable to expect the best of all worlds—that nothing needed to change. That I could be loyal to my firm and move overseas and keep the boy and look out for Jeremy and still be top seed in my squash bracket. Scott did have two pairs of chopsticks and the sashimi spread waiting and was in the process of moving it all into the living room when I rushed out the news. As he put the chopsticks and platter down his freckles jumped up from his face, rotating around in a confused game of musical chairs as they waited for some kind of resolution.

  “So I move in January…” I trailed off, feeling as trite and hollow as a Halloween pumpkin, guts freshly scooped and ready for carving. We stared at each other in silence and, after three or four beats, he broke into a grin and tackled me down onto the couch with a playful roar.

  “Jesus, M., you almost had me going there for a second,” he laughed, pinning me against a pillow and tickling my ribs in the way he knew I found most agonizing. “How much of that Brothers Kool-Aid did you chug after I left?”

  “Scott!” I managed to gasp. The tickling intensified and for a few seconds I thought I might faint from the torment of his misunderstanding and my inability to correct it. “Listen to me, damn it!” I was finally able to lever myself up and summon sufficient force to push him off me and onto the floor. He dropped to the carpet with a thud and looked up at me with honest eyes, both elbows resting on his knees. “This isn’t a joke,” I whispered.

  His smile evaporated and his freckles finally landed back on his cheeks, rearranged into a pattern of the worst kind of disappointment—the kind he hadn’t seen coming.

  In a torturously even tone, he told me he needed a day or two to think things through. So we agreed to meet that Saturday at the museum in the more reasonable light of day, without the distorting fog that lowers itself over conversations and life moments any hour past midnight.

  “I want you to give me one good reason you’re going,” he said, plainly, looking straight ahead to the handsome pinpoint spires keeping watch over Central Park West. A new physical distance had marked itself between us with phantom orange pylons, and I didn’t have the courage to kick them over in an effort to get nearer. I was at a legitimate loss. I was looking ahead, too, and stared hard at that cloud line of flaming foliage in front of us. Heaping insult onto injury, to our left a recently engaged couple clung to each other as a photographer high-stepped around them to capture the most iconic of all engagement photos soon to be submitted for prime boasting rights in the New York Times Styles section.

  There were many reasons I felt I had to go to London, but none of them sounded terribly compelling when I said them out loud. I tried to stammer out a few but only managed to say the most regrettable thing clearly:

  “At the end of the day, I suppose I’d rather end up alone than be a failure.”

  “Are you hearing yourself?” he said, incredulous. “This is insane. Not going to London for The Brothers doesn’t mean that you fail.”

  “I really thought you of all people would understand,” I said, glumly, my chin lowered, though really I knew he had been setting the exact opposite example for me all along.

  “You deserve more than this—more than what you choose to keep giving up for them. You know that, right?”

  The hint of my being a victim, and my facilitating that victimization, made pins of anger begin to prickle, hot and unforgiving, across my forehead. I had always been fiercely independent, and it was impossible to swallow the most offensive suggestion that I was staggering under some kind of influence, that I wasn’t fully in control of my faculties or my Fate.

  “If that’s what you believe,” I said, slowly, “then maybe you don’t understand me. Maybe you don’t know me after all.”

  “I think the actual problem, M., is that you don’t know yourself. You’re overturning your life for a bank and you can’t even articulate a single reason why. I’ve been through it before. I know how it works. They may want you to believe it, but you aren’t going to self-destruct if you leave Bartholomew Brothers. Take it from me. Everything I’m proudest of in my life—everything I’ve started to build for myself—has only happened because I broke away from all of that. I honestly think if you leave, you’ll have a chance to come into your own. What happened to the job with that investment fund? I’ll bet you didn’t take the meeting. You probably didn’t even return their call. Am I right?” He paused to await my answer. He was right. I hadn’t gotten back in touch with Bridges Capital. Something vague and nagging stopped me from running at the opportunity full speed. Or running at all. And when Piggelo presented me with her king cobra and issued her command it felt like the decision had been made for me. I told myself they needed me. But I said nothing so Scott boiled everything down to one fundamental question: “What the hell are you so scared of, anyhow?”

  “Scared?” I scoffed. The young couple beside us began playing out a ridiculous scene in which the woman pretended to swoon back over the railing and the heroic man caught her by the small of her back to stop the unthinkable from happening. The photographer took delighted bunny hops around them, clicking his camera and issuing a steady, stomach-turning repetition of “Oh yes!” and “That’s it!” Just one gentle push of a shoulder, I thought, and that woman would tumble straight over the top, probably laughing with residual happiness all the way down to her final splat.

  “Yeah, scared. Terrified is more like it. And it’s making you stick to an embarrassingly small-minded definition of success.”

  Something reverberated deep within me like the string of a double bass that had just been masterfully plucked. The note rattled inside me, exposing a truth that hurt like hell.

  “Right. I see. And of course you’re the great authority on success, Mr. ‘Top 30 under 30.’” Manhattan Magazine had just released its annual ranking of the top thirty rising young stars in New York—wunderkinds who were breaking molds and blazing new trails. I hated myself the moment I mentioned the list. I was filled with nothing but admiration that Scott, age twenty-nine, had been picked for founding Verity.

  “This has nothing to do with me, M. This is all about you. I think you’re shortchanging yourself and I can’t be part of a situation—even if it’s from across an ocean—that has you always putting yourself second. When I left The Brothers the decision was easy for me. But I know it’s not easy for everyone. No one can hand you the answer. You’ve got to figure out what you actually want. Is it The Brothers or is it something more?”

  “I can’t believe you’re actually handing me an ultimatum.”

 
“That’s the thing about life,” he said to me, a blue sheet of melancholy draping low and close over his voice. “Like it or not, pretty much everything in it is an either-or.”

  Scott’s question was a simple one: Do you pick the firm or your life? I stayed angrily silent, not wanting to admit that I could no longer tell where one ended and the other began. Just the other week I had mindlessly flashed my employee card at my doorman on the way into my building after a late night in the office; a few days later, I tried swiping it at the register to pay for an Americano at my local coffee shop.

  “I may run Verity but I don’t post truths very often,” he shot off in a new direction. “Everyone has their own way of doing it. I only write about things that really, really matter to me. So I’ve only posted three truths so far: when we took the site live last year, when my family dog died a few months later, and when I met you at the Bender. Do you know what I wrote when I got home that night?” I looked at him, still speechless, with tears gathering in my eyes. “‘Tonight I met a girl who I know will become the girl who got away. I watched her walk away. I let it happen. I’m an absolute idiot.’”

  “But I didn’t walk away,” I protested. “I found you again. Scott, I’m not walking away now.” I could hear my voice wavering with unintended hypocrisy.

  “No, you’re not—you’re flying away.” With a shake of his head, he threw off the blue sheet and suddenly sounded sharp and perfectly pragmatic. “I really hope I’ll hear from you when you know what it is that you want, M. I just hope it won’t be too late.”

  The sprightly photographer began a series of exaggerated backward lunges, snapping the engaged couple’s next predictable pose, until he crashed right into me.

  “For the love of God!” I screamed at him, and with that, I stormed off the rooftop, secretly hoping it would rain heavily on the couple’s wedding day.

  * * *

  A few months later and it was that surreal first stretch in January when nothing has clicked into place quite yet. The year was still wobbling precariously on its new legs and Piggelo’s plan was still intact—I was London-bound in two days. On the Saturday before my pond-crossing, Jeremy was seeing me off with one of our old wistful walks around town. We hadn’t gone on one in what felt like years; it had actually been more than a year, before he and Belle had become a pair. As I set out from my building to meet him, I thought about our first spontaneous stroll together so many moons before that sealed our friendship for good. It made me long to be standing flush faced and insecurely triumphant on that Midtown sidewalk meeting Jeremy, to stumble into his Cole Porter ghost story and clap eyes on his scarlet buttonhole for the very first time. In a strange way I was pining for an earlier version of the world, of Jeremy and me and our anxieties—for a time when everything was an urgent matter of life and death only because we had absolutely no idea how much harder it would all keep getting. It’s with good reason they say we’re never as ancient as we think we are in our early twenties.

  Jeremy and I met at the eternally cinematic corner of Fifty-Ninth and Fifth, where filthy carriages drawn by ill-treated horses jerked starry-eyed tourists along for a Grimm Brothers’ version of the fairy-tale scene they had always dreamed of playing out. I looked past those dismal details to see that it was, in point of fact, a sparkling and blue-skyed winter’s day ripped straight from an illustrator’s caricatured version of New York City at its most cracking. Everything should have felt sad and sorry with all the twinkle lights and mistletoe and jingling bells yanked down unsentimentally as soon as the Twelve Days of Christmas were through, but New York, as it often did, rose up and managed to outdo itself. We walked north and it felt slightly surreal to wander the sun-speckled streets of the city with Jeremy again, without Belle’s ballerina walk as his invisible dog leash and without Scott’s gray eyes sharpening otherwise irrelevant objects around me into focus. It was just the two of us. So in a way it was as though we had shuttled back to our early New York life with all of the future highs and lows marked like avoidable topography lines on a hiking map.

  We stuck to the vicinity of Central Park, stopping by Jeremy’s Fifth Avenue hot dog cart just like we used to do. I didn’t have much of an appetite so passed on my usual, surprising and concerning Jeremy. As we wound our way up and back down the East Eighties and Cleopatra’s Needle was stabbed into the ground just ahead of us, the emptiest feeling of all set in, as though someone had positioned a smoke machine at the edge of the park’s outer loop shooting a dense and depressing vapor straight at me. But it wasn’t a smoke machine, and the vapor wasn’t anything I could wave away with a few swings of an impatient hand. This was the closest I had been to the Met since that late October day, and I avoided it as a place marred by memories still too sad and raw for me to think about squarely. So I put up no fuss—and asked no questions—when Jeremy suggested we move south of the park and loop around toward Broadway, into the neon circus of the Theater District.

  As he nudged us right onto West Fifty-Second Street, I saw a hopeful, multicolored colony of jockeys guarding a soaring windowsill in the distance and knew we were heading straight for the ‘21’ Club. Though I knew how averse Jeremy was to pricey cocktails, I guessed he wanted to end our walk somewhere that would shoot me across the Atlantic on a great wave of American urban lore, helping convince me to boomerang back to him from my travels abroad sooner rather than later. Or maybe the teetotaling Jeremy just needed a decent martini to take the edge off. Since The Brothers’s 150th anniversary party that autumn, faint spider veins started to appear on the surface of his relationship with Belle. She had disregarded his pleadings to put away her camera and delete her pictures of the festivities. I couldn’t guess what she had done with those photos—by that point I had little access to her life. I assumed they ended up buried in the back corners of her Mac’s hard drive alongside pointless pictures of Verity’s office Ping-Pong table, miscellaneous puppies, and hundreds of untouched restaurant entrées.

  As Jeremy and I strolled toward the restaurant, the sun had begun its early winter’s descent and was a great glittering thing burning the squinting eyes of anyone daring to look west. As it blazed unforgivingly at us, a town car hummed discreetly past and pulled up in front of the jockey-lined stairwell of ‘21’ not fifteen feet ahead of us. Jeremy had turned in the other direction, fumbling in his trouser pocket to hand a few coins to a pleading panhandler, just as I saw Belle spill out of the town car followed briskly by Chase Breckenridge. She was wrapped in some kind of fabulous Old Hollywood fur, her shining head capped by a scarlet wool beret. For Jeremy’s sake, I wished more than anything that the two figures, hands lightly clasped to confirm their coconspiracy, were yet another pair of holograms, but I knew better. My heart dropped. The sight of them would have physically scalded Jeremy, who still had his back turned as he exchanged pleasantries with the grateful panhandler. Chase was oblivious to us and continued trying to bustle Belle down the stairs leading underground into ‘21’. But Belle looked over, yes, I’m sure of it, she looked over at but straight through us—a clean shaft of winter light cutting through dust. Chase had a muscular but gentlemanly hand placed on her lower back and, as he leaned forward to whisper something closely into her ear cueing one of her wide and playful smiles, I knew then that Jeremy did not factor into the picture as even a pixel in the greater gleam of that outwardly Golden Couple.

  I also knew it was one of those rare moments of portent we all run up against at some point or another. If Jeremy had seen them together again, bathed in that beautiful winter light, it might have all ended there. He might have seen Belle for all the things she wasn’t and quietly given up the fight, folding his vibrant old visions into a sad, neat square that he would carry with him in his back pocket upstate. He’d spend his days firing up his balloon and floating serenely over the pine trees and placid waters and high peaks of his childhood. Up in the sky he would pull out the square and look down at it as a tactile symbol of the saddest suspicion a man can have: that he h
ad misunderstood everything. Foolishly thinking I was in a legitimate position to stop it, to throw a wrench into the inevitable workings of things, I told myself I couldn’t let it happen to him.

  “You know what, Jeremy? ‘21’ feels all wrong.”

  I was shaking head to toe with surprise and nervousness and anger and I fastened my coat more tightly, hoping Jeremy would blame it on the unforgiving cold.

  He spun toward me, hands in pockets, cheeks bright and boyish, rocking back gently on his heels, just as the blond heads of Belle and Chase—luminous and silken under the persistent rays of that setting January sun—vanished down the stairs and ducked through the ‘21’ front door out of sight.

  “All wrong? But you love the framed dollar bills from all the treasury secretaries they hang on the wall.”

  “You’re right, I do love those bills. But I actually looked at them a few days ago. I promise all the sad business with Scott hasn’t turned me onto solitary drinking but I snuck in by myself for a highball. Why don’t we head over to The Vanderbilt? You know I’ll miss it most when I’m gone.”

  There were a number of reciprocal clubs I could use in London—the Lansdowne and Caledonian and Royal Air Force Clubs—but none would be able to match the place that had carried me so safely, so sturdily through the lonesome sea of my twenties.

  His eyes wavered with sympathy as he knew how much I would miss my dear Vanderbilt. “You’re the boss, M.”