Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “Let’s get a move on, then—it’s fer-eezing out here.”

  I was still trembling from my sighting of the ghoul-like Belle and Chase when Jeremy and I settled in at The Vanderbilt’s Main Bar with our usual tumblers of cucumber and tonic.

  “I know it isn’t forever, but I can’t even imagine this place without you,” he said, referring to The Vanderbilt or The Brothers or maybe all of New York.

  “Oh, you haven’t gotten rid of me yet, Kirby,” I answered. “I’m sure I’ll be back and forth a decent amount.” I said it in the casual way our generation described careening over oceans as though we were taking a crosstown bus, but the thought of going did hang on my heart with the unshakeable heaviness of leaving things that matter behind.

  “How has your mom taken the news?” he asked, thoughtfully.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call her response altogether positive.”

  “How did you break it to her?”

  “I knew there was no use beating around the bush. When I was home over Christmas I explained that the firm tapped me for an opportunity and it was important that I take it.” It was easy for me to recount the conversation for him—it still stung with the redness of a freshly administered slap.

  “What is it that you’ll be doing in London, dear?” my mother had asked me over Christmas Eve lunch. She clung to her silverware in a state of poorly veiled crisis, willing herself into sounding something resembling pert. In reality, the only pert thing about her that day was her remarkably festive reindeer sweater, a twelve-gauge woolen declaration of her nonexistent Norwegian ancestry.

  “Oh, the same kind of work, it’s just a new market and a chance to help build a new business.”

  “I see, but what is it that you will be doing?” she persisted with unusual interest in how I spent my days amidst the shadowy investment banking mills that had seduced me, chipping away at any last likelihood of my ever marrying. I began to understand that her interest was provoked by her realization that my going away meant I was going away from Scott Bosher. The news of my dating Scott had kick-started my mother like an obnoxious alarm clock shaking Rip van Winkle into action. When I discovered that, after less than five months of our dating, she had already put holds on a series of possible wedding dates at the University Club and St. Chrysostom’s in Chicago, I called in my father to help put the brakes on the madness.

  “Helping bring in new clients and managing their portfolios. You don’t want the dull details, do you, Mom?”

  “But your only contact in England is my second cousin Caroline, the librarian. I’m afraid she’s unlikely to bring you any business.”

  “Oh, it’s fine, Mom. Most of our business comes from fresh solicitations.”

  “Fresh solicitations? I’m afraid I’m not following.”

  “We track the news and build lists of contacts so when we find what we call ‘money in motion,’ we call on people to offer our services.” For a moment, I thought she had swallowed a turkey bone. “Mom?”

  “You mean cold-calling,” she said, gravely, putting down her knife and fork.

  “I suppose that’s one name for it.”

  “My word, M.,” she breathed in astonishment, dabbing at the corners of her lipsticked mouth. “Is this what it’s all come down to? Cold-calling? First you told us that you were going to work for a bank and then you told us you’re moving to London and leaving a gorgeous young man behind in pursuit of it and now I discover my daughter is nothing but a traveling saleswoman. Jim, were you aware of all of this?” With shell-shocked eyes she turned to my father, who was leaning back in his dining-room chair in the hopes of hearing some distant echo of the Bears game from the family room. “Our daughter, sacrificing a husband to pawn products like an oily vacuum cleaner man.” To my mother, traveling saleswoman and oily vacuum cleaner man dwelled in a league as lowly as sometime shoplifter or female escort. I couldn’t totally disagree with her. I wasn’t proud of certain aspects of my job. I despised cold-calling with every fiber of my being. But it was the approach the firm insisted on using. Piggelo thought I was a natural because my nervousness, my very dislike of it made me seem more authentic to prospects and clients. No one could ever accuse me, dry-mouthed and apologetic, of being a shark. My being female only made it even more compelling. I was one of only two women left from the original twenty that had started in our training class of one hundred.

  Any allusion to cold-calling still made Jeremy just as dry-mouthed as me.

  “Will they use the same business model over there?” he asked me, swallowing with discomfort and reaching for his drink.

  “I assume so,” I sighed. “Piggelo says she’ll appoint a London head of team soon so I’ll know the way forward at that point.”

  “It would have been helpful to meet your new boss before you moved all the way there, don’t you think? I suppose Piggelo didn’t think you deserved that courtesy.”

  “I know, but I keep telling myself that it can’t be worse than the one-two punch of Piggelo and Drewe, right?” I had forced myself into believing that, though I had always been a person who insisted that you can never let your guard down—you can never get complacent because any situation can always get worse. “Can it?”

  As always, Jeremy was at the ready with a squirting syringe full of optimism.

  “You’ll shine, M., you always do, no matter what you have to fight through to do it.” My face warmed into a smile. “Gosh, M., do you really have to go?”

  Our tumblers were drained and it was time for me to reimmerse myself in that particular sadness of constructing and packing cardboard boxes. We wound our way back down The Vanderbilt’s main staircase and my heart gained a number of ounces at the realization I was actually leaving—it had been a largely abstract thing in my mind until Jeremy expressed his regret at my going.

  “No matter how exciting the next chapter, isn’t it awful when something comes to an end?”

  We retrieved our coats from the lobby check and Jeremy’s sandy head was tilted to the side as he seriously considered my question.

  “Something coming to an end?” He held my coat for me and I slid each arm into it, buttoned myself up, and turned to face his solemn eyes. “It’s the worst thing there is.”

  * * *

  I was spending my final New York day with Belle Bailey, which felt nothing short of disloyal after my startling, secret sighting of her with Chase the day before at ‘21’. But I forced myself to keep our date, telling myself it would be a chance to confront her about what exactly I had witnessed—and what the hell she was doing to Jeremy. I had been the one to rise above and reach out to her in the first place. After The Brothers’s anniversary party, our silent stalemate had continued until Christmas was approaching and the jingling of bells and twinkling of tinsel made me feel more generous. I called her up one night in December to share my news about moving to London.

  “London! Well!” she cried, her voice shrill with false enthusiasm. She followed this up with a few more exclamations but it felt as though the city’s iconic fog had migrated thirty-five hundred miles westward and clouded her voice into a vague and unconvincing air horn sounding at me through the mist. I can honestly say it was the first time in our friendship that I suspected she might actually have envied something I had, or would soon have—something she did not. All at once, I was the risk-taking adventurer while she was staying put and playing it safe. She had always devoted a portion of La Belle Vie to her eternal wanderlust, her inexhaustible reveries of just whisking away. Two of her stock interview questions were: Where would you live if you had the entire universe to pick from? and What era would you live in if you had all of history at your fingertips? She operated with a baseline assumption that everyone would rather be transported away to some sweeter clime, or back to some other, grander, sepia-toned time. I was the practical one, the boringly present one, toiling away to make the best of the here and now. I don’t think it ever occurred to Belle that I could be the one to pull the trigger
and actually leave. “I have so many questions I honestly don’t even know where to begin.”

  That last line was laced with mild affront—though Belle showed little interest in and periodic disapproval of my Wall Street and Vanderbilt Avenue. existence, it was amazing to think she still expected me to keep her closely versed on everything in it. She had long since stopped returning the favor. Beyond what she published via her La Belle Vie megaphone, I knew so little about what she actually got up to, what set her ticking day by day. Things between us had been thinning for so long but her secret interview with Scott, touting him as one of her Most Eligible Men in the Universe no less, had stamped out my willingness to be open with her. I no longer offered up a ready recap of happenings in my life like a bedside book she could keep earmarked with a bright-red ribbon and open at her will. But still I felt I owed it to our friendship, the undeniable depth of our history, to say good-bye.

  She told me to meet her at The Vanderbilt—Sunday at high noon—where she promised she’d have “a dazzling surprise” in store for me. I assured her I would bring my sunglasses. At the designated time, I was sitting on a Vanderbilt lobby sofa, mummified in woolen layers and scanning my FT Weekend. Like an elegant tornado, an apple-cheeked Belle rushed out of the cold through the revolving door, capped with the same poppy-colored beret I had seen her wearing the previous day outside of ‘21’. She might as well have come somersaulting through the lobby door draped in an executioner’s hood. The sight of the damning beret confirmed my worst fears that it really had been her—that what I had seen was real—causing a little seam to split open somewhere deep in my heart. But there was no time to dwell on it. With a pointed toss of my newspaper onto the floor—“we certainly won’t be needing that”—she whisked me ten blocks south to the foot of the Empire State Building, which rose silvery and majestic before us into the crystalline sky above.

  “The Empire State Building, Belle? I’ve already been to the top and I honestly don’t have the patience for dealing with that line,” I told her, pointing to an unending string of parental figures and mittened children, all of whom appeared to be runny-nosed and generally miserable. Belle left me to have a quiet word with an elderly security guard boasting a snow-white broom brush mustache and rejoined me with the man shuffling along behind her eagerly.

  “No, I’m positive you haven’t been to the top,” she contradicted me, smartly. “Not the real top, anyhow. And of course I never do lines.” It occurred to me that one of the essential things that bound Belle and Chase together over the years had been their love and mastery of queue-barging. “Ernie, this is my friend M.”

  Ernie wriggled his broom brush mustache and eyed me approvingly.

  “Another beaut! What do you do for a living, Belle, run a pageant?”

  There was a great deal of laughing and blushing before Belle whispered in my ear, “Don’t mind Ernie, he’s an old rascal and gives everyone the glad eye.” Good thing I hadn’t let it rush to my head.

  Glad-Eye Ernie ushered us into a red-carpeted VIP walkway, wallpapered with photos of celebrities striking melodramatic or comical poses as they clung to those massive, coin-operated rotating binoculars on the observation deck. With the press of an oversized button Ernie bulleted us skyward in our own private elevator straight for the 102nd floor. We took a hard right and he motioned us through a door and up a tiny cast-iron staircase to the typically off-limits “secret” 103rd floor.

  “I had to bring you up here so you could properly bid the city adieu,” Belle announced as we stepped onto a narrow platform. With no protective glass, it was bracingly cold up there. It was also amazingly quiet. Everything was so still and silent and chilled that it felt as though you could swing an ice pick forward and chip the great city into any sky-high snow sculpture you could dream up.

  “How did you finagle your way up here?” I asked, though I could have guessed the answer. Belle Bailey always found a way to reach any place she wanted to be. And besides, through the growing success of her blog, she was becoming a quasi celebrity in her own right. For all I knew they might have invited her to pull the giant lever and light up the Empire State Building with a dream-inducing, twenty-story red heart in honor of La Belle Vie. Just the other week I had turned on Bloomberg TV to see Belle sitting like an alert and blinking ostrich alongside a loud-mouthed, impeccably groomed financial anchoress discussing the growing power of online followings and generational tastemakers. I nearly spat out my coffee when I heard her quote Jeremy from their first date: My business model isn’t complicated. I wake up and try and share the beauty in everyday things. Why do people follow me? There is so much that’s grim, so much that’s ugly in our modern world; I think everyone can agree what we all need is more pretty.

  “Oh, Ernie’s the dearest old pal,” she explained, as though they were veterans of the same band of brothers, once upon a time leaping earthward together over Normandy during World War II. “He took my parents and me up here when I was eight years old. Told me I was the luckiest little girl who would be getting a sneak peek at where all the angels live. I was older when I came back next—fourteen, maybe?—and he told me this 103rd floor was actually supposed to be a mooring mast for zeppelins and airships. Can you imagine it? Passengers walking across a mile-high gangplank and disembarking right here in the middle of the sky as an official port of entry into the United States.”

  “But that never happened,” I said, picturing a ring of zeppelins tethered to the top of the building, gently bumping into one another in the wind like helium balloons tied to a mailbox signaling a birthday party.

  “No, it never did,” she said, woefully, lamenting yet another gorgeous thing the crude realities of planet Earth had denied her. “The air currents in New York were too strong. It was impossible.”

  “But it still means we get to see all of this.”

  From that loftiest perch the city’s grid really was remarkable—with streets and lives and loves lost and found linking together and laid out as a network of silver piping. Belle was right—being up there was a quintessentially New York thing to do. In Manhattan, you didn’t spend your time gazing at rivers or distant climes, you searched for roof gardens and observation decks that allowed you to stare back at the city in a perpetual act of self-worship. Standing beside Belle, surveying the frosted spectacle beneath us, I wondered whether all of that validating energy would keep cycling inward until one day the whole thing, queasy and lovesick, would implode.

  In the meantime, there on the 103rd floor, we were buoyed up with the city and its dreamiest heights—each spire, each ’scraper below us was an uptick of promise. I thought being higher than any building in sight meant the jig would be up. I would have stepped behind the curtain and figured out the city and its bag of tricks—I would have seen too much and so wouldn’t let it keep fooling me. But from that soaring perspective, against all of my natural instincts, I could physically feel the romantic pulse of the place. It was whispering something, telling me it had an urgent message for me and, when I tried to ignore it, it persisted and called back out to me, again and again. Even if what it had to say was a lie as it so often was, it seemed to be all that mattered. Belle wasn’t wrong when she said I would be dazzled.

  “It’s very brave of you to leave all of this behind,” she said.

  “You know what? It’s harder than I thought it would be,” I replied, honestly, the headlamp of my heart swinging to thoughts of Scott. Where was he in that great labyrinth of piping down below? “Parts of it at least.”

  “Mmmm,” she murmured back, in that detached and vacant way that told me she was lost in other, more self-directed thoughts. “I’ve been feeling the pull more lately, you know. Sometimes it keeps me up all night. I lie awake wondering where it is I’m actually supposed to be. Where my story is supposed to play out.” Belle embodied an unfortunate generational trait—with so many doors open to us, it was hard not to fantasize about walking through all of them. If you picked one, you knew all the other
s would slam shut in unbearable unison. It was the agony of being so embarrassingly spoiled for choice. “Maybe something is wrong with me,” she continued. “When I’m in New York, I can’t help but dream of being somewhere far away and foreign. But whenever I’m there, I only dream of being back in New York. Neither ever seems to be enough.”

  “I think the trick is to pick one thing and really commit to it,” I said, loading my voice with meaning.

  I don’t know if she processed what I said, or caught the very specific reference I was making to her failure to fully commit to Jeremy. Her eyes were scouring the streets leagues below us with a quiet fervor. The gentle gasp she issued subconsciously every few minutes made me wonder whether she was scanning the illuminated lattice of Manhattan in search of Jeremy or Chase or some mystical person or place that would finally mean she could stop hiding. Or maybe she was looking anywhere but up, into the heavens, where she might catch sight of a particular pair of angels who had left her so alone. She ignored my allusion and flung herself onto a new conversational tack.

  “Anyway, we need to savor all of this while we still can. In two thousand years, there’ll be nowhere left to look,” she stated, gravely. Her reference to the future threw me. It was a rarity given her fixation with all things past. “Scientists have proved that New York and Amsterdam and Miami are guaranteed to disappear once the sea level rises high enough. All of this will be history. Do you think that means we’re all doomed?”

  I could have taken affront to this—she didn’t have to pull me and all of mankind down with her sinking ship, even though we’d both be long gone—but I gave it more thought and delivered my answer.

  “No, Belle, we’re not doomed. Come on already.”

  “You know I think we are doomed,” she maintained. “But isn’t it sort of thrilling in a way? If we’re doomed, if everything is going to hell in a handbasket and there isn’t a thing we can do about it, it means we can just let go.”