Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

“I guess it’s just the natural cycle of things, isn’t it? Everything, bad or good, comes to an end. Life is undiscriminating that way.” Her talk of New York locked on a railroad track of doom handed me another segue. I was burning to confront her about the future, specifically her future with Jeremy, and about endings, specifically her ending with Chase which I understood had happened more than a year before. All of her answers would lead me to my ultimate question of why in God’s name I saw her secretly cavorting with the likes of her high-handed ex on West Fifty-Second Street. “Of course some demises are a godsend. Like you and Chase. You know, I never actually asked you about how things ended between the two of you.”

  I was looking at Belle’s profile intently and saw her breath catch slightly at the unexpected question. Tiny icicles had formed on her eyelashes and her red beret was dusted with snow, turning her into a long, frostbitten rose stem.

  “What a funny thing to ask about,” she answered lightly, eyes crinkling as she waved a glove back and forth in the air between us. She wouldn’t look me in the eye and continued staring out at the cityscape as she spoke, her breath ballooning before her into a cold, cottony cloud of dishonesty. “It was over forever ago, really. But one night, just over a year ago, he was ignoring me as usual and kept tapping his meaty index finger on his phone’s screen and the sight of it made me snap. I grabbed it and, if you can believe it, felt more disappointed when I saw he was looking at pictures of thoroughbreds instead of other girls.…” She tilted her head left and rested a gloved hand on one side of her beret. “So I threw the damn thing out his loft window. But even that didn’t get much of a reaction from him.…” She paused. “So I kissed Jeremy at the December Bender. Say, do you remember back in the days before answering machines when you could just let your phone ring and ring and ring for all eternity, refusing to take someone’s call? Or better yet when you took your phone off the hook to make someone face the infuriating wall of a beeping busy signal? You could send someone a message without having to say a single word. It’s such a shame that we’ve lost all of that to technology.”

  “Hang on just a second, Belle.” I raised a finger in the frigid air to stop her blathering and clarify the glaring revelation she had tried to skim past so breezily. “You kissed Jeremy that night to get a rise out of Chase?”

  “Crazy to think, isn’t it?” she cried, flipping her gloved palm skyward to indicate just how loony the world could be. She swung it down and placed it on her hip and, all at once, was solemn. “You can’t take this the wrong way, M. Really, you can’t.” Her insistence confused me. Why should it matter if her ultimate plan was to pack herself into Chase’s vintage Aston Martin and peel off with him in the driver’s seat at any moment, for good?

  “How am I taking it?”

  “Oh, please, I can see it stamped all over your face! You’d make a lousy poker player, you know.” I hadn’t said a word. But I had thought long strings of them. This really took the cake. Their Great Romance had all begun with Jeremy serving as a miscellaneous stand-in to irk the man who simply couldn’t be bothered with Belle. I thought of Belle’s calling card and her pencil-etched P.R.—pour remercier. Thank you, Jeremy, for sending Chase the message that launching expensive personal electronics out the window could not. And there was Jeremy, once again clad in a chocolate-brown UPS delivery uniform, ready to earnestly deliver the package. “It doesn’t change all of the wonderful things that came of it!” she insisted, but there was a profound sadness in her eyes. They had transitioned to a hunter green, dark and darting and unnatural. I knew Belle was a great believer in beginnings—hoping for them, reading into them, and even inventing them when they didn’t fit her desired bill. She had invented a beginning for her and Jeremy. And in it he was cast as romantic pawn, without ever realizing it. I was old enough to understand that anything could die at any time, with varying degrees of warning and explanation. And I saw then, with ominous clarity, that she could orchestrate their ending just as easily. I took a breath to launch into my confrontation about my ‘21’ sighting when—

  “Enough of all that ancient news! We’re here because you’re leaving, M.! You—leaving! Who can believe it? Faithful old M. flying the coop. And it must be so marvelous to think Scott Bosher is moving all the way to London for you! What an absolute dream.”

  The statement was a soft punch to my gut.

  “He’s not, actually,” I answered, my voice small as my throat closed in tight.

  “I’m sorry, I think I’m misunderstanding. You’re moving to London but Scott isn’t?” Despite her worship of Amelia Earhart as a young girl, the idea of my making a transatlantic journey solo—with a captain and second officer in the comfort of a Boeing 777—had her flummoxed.

  “It’s a great shame,” I said. “And it won’t do any good for us to talk about it now. I didn’t want things to end, but I need to do this. The firm sees overseas postings as an important career step.…”

  The words sounded crude even to my ears, though the last few months of constant self-justification had made them slightly more palatable.

  “I can’t understand why you put so much irrational faith in that place,” she said with an unmasked trace of disgust. “It will never return the favor. It will only let you down. You’re choosing that hideous place over your life.”

  “That’s the last thing I’m doing, Belle,” I answered, calmly. “I don’t expect you to understand because we’re cut from very different cloths, but it’s something I need to accomplish—not for them, but for me. I’m doing this for me.” Hearing her lecture me on one-sided relationships really was rich given the dynamic she had forged with Jeremy.

  “Well, I’m glad to hear you’re so concerned with yourself, but what about Scott? How does he fit into all of these accomplishments of yours?”

  “It’s only a year—two years at the most. He may not see it now but I think with time he’ll understand.” There was a deathly silence and her mammoth cartoon eyes blinked at me exactly twice.

  “Hello? Is anyone in there?” she suddenly shrieked, face burning the brightest cardinal as she made a knocking motion in the air a few inches from my head. Glad-Eye Ernie peeked his head around the corner, bushy white eyebrows raised to the heavens, checking that one of us wasn’t trying to leap off the top. “Don’t you feel anything? You can’t expect to live and love if you can’t even feel anything!”

  I was quiet for a moment—a superficially anemic foil to Belle’s hysteria. I held still, wanting to choose my words carefully.

  “Just because I don’t make a big show of things, just because I don’t turn my life and my heart into publicly viewable theater”—I paused with emphasis at that part—“it doesn’t mean I don’t feel, Belle. I feel more than you’ve ever bothered to know.”

  “Oh, I’ve bothered,” she said, fixing the placement of her beret that had shifted asymmetrically during her tantrum. “But I’m not certain I care to bother any longer.”

  “Frankly, that makes two of us,” I agreed. “You know, you claim you do everything in the name of Love—hell, you’ve built a business on it with La Belle Vie. And you think you’re so clever, always playing to the gallery, flying a flag you have no right to fly. The truth is: you’re a fake, Belle. And you know what gives me the right to say that? I saw you yesterday. I saw you with Chase outside of ‘21’ and if you have a half-decent bone in your body you’ll come clean with Jeremy. Your would-be boyfriends have trailed after me for years asking me to help them win you or win you back though I knew full well—femme fatale that you are—you’d already moved on to the next. I’ve done enough of your dirty laundry to last a lifetime. But this is different. Jeremy is different. He’s not another disposable prop to use on that damn blog of yours. I know that you know that. And it makes me sick to watch you do this to him.”

  Then, unexpectedly, she laughed. It wasn’t one of her usual bright peals. It was shadowed laughter, tinged with something brutal and knowing.

  “I never pegged
you as the jealous type, M. But it just goes to show how terribly wrong we can be about people.” Her neck extended higher to physically demonstrate the pitiful case of tall poppy syndrome she was sure she had just diagnosed. A harp’s chord sounded from her pocket and, as the ultimate insult, she dug out her iPhone and began swiping its screen with deliberate interest. She kept her eyes trained on her screen as she spoke. “You may think you saw something, M., but the bottom line is”—she wanted to speak my language of finance now—“we all see what we want to see.”

  “We certainly do,” I agreed. “And I can see things very clearly now. I can see that sometimes, as hard as it may be, a person has to let a thing go. Recognize it’s built on an idea that really doesn’t exist anymore. I can’t believe in you, Belle, and I can’t protect you any longer. I can only hope you find the decency to be honest with Jeremy. And I hope you’ll be able to find the courage to be honest with yourself and actually commit to something one day.”

  “M., I—,” she bleated, helplessly. This had finally managed to strike a nerve but I would ignore whatever pretty line she was trying to package and serve back up at me.

  “Thanks, Ernie,” I said on my way back through the observation deck door. The frigid altitude had turned his mustache into a white broom brush of ice. He looked out at Belle, red bereted and quietly weeping and all alone out on the deck, then gazed at me with a stunned expression that asked how I could dream of leaving a fair damsel in such a cold and distressing position. “Don’t fall for the act,” I told him, coolly, swinging a woolen thumb toward the door. “She’s a survivor. She’s always been one. So don’t you worry, Ernie, the last thing Belle Bailey would ever do is swan-dive off the top.”

  THE LOST GIRL

  London was grayer than I remembered. As I wrenched myself away from New York, I had been hell-bent on picturing all of the upside, the unspeckled and foreign possibility awaiting me overseas. It didn’t help that Piggelo timed my move with the gloomiest time of year—that bleak post-Christmas period when England’s sun, like a demotivated and disdainful shift worker, shows its dimmest self at eight o’clock in the morning and starts rolling back out around 3:00 p.m., giving the country a giant, daily two-finger salute. I landed on one of those exceptionally drab mornings, an hour later than scheduled thanks to the perpetual gridlock lacing the gloom above Heathrow. I stepped onto a quietly humming Heathrow Express train that bulleted me straight to Paddington station and all the yawning unknowns ahead of me in a matter of fifteen minutes. Few passengers on the train bothered to look out the window—the passing scenery of London’s western outskirts felt a bit like an older relative’s deck of totally uninteresting photographs washed out from too much exposure. Raising my head from the salmon-pink pages of my FT, I looked out at the bland suburban blur and smiled. Despite the grayness, I felt a skip of excitement deep inside for what I had done—for what I was doing—for what I was about to do. Me, reliable old loafer-clad M., had left my tried-and-tested comfort zone in the dust in order to do something different. A Wall Streeter moving from New York to London was hardly original, but still it felt original for me.

  Of course I felt outlandish and alien as soon as I arrived. Strange newsstand headlines outside the Heathrow baggage hall such as DOUBLE TUBE STRIKE MISERY and M25 LORRY CRASH HORROR gaped at me with cryptic urgency and many fashion-forward women passed me in Paddington station wearing those genie pants with low-hanging crotches that seemed better suited for lounging around a harem than an urban train platform. There were city codes I would need to crack. But still, on that first morning, I felt that London and I had an unspoken understanding. London knew how to manage people’s expectations—it kept its head down, dutifully muddled through, underpromised and overdelivered—and I felt a synergy in our approaches. Unlike New York, London propositioned you with little but low-lying skies and tea-stained smiles and a regular smattering of drizzle. So anything you’d encounter that overshot that modest mark felt like a great, bright splash of gravy.

  A soulless but centrally situated corporate flat awaited me in South Kensington, but only for a period of thirty days. I was on my own after that, which had come as a bit of a surprise. During my last week in The House of Bartholomew before my move, Drewe used a stiff shoulder to usher me into a conference room one morning. He explained that The Brothers was in a fierce cost-cutting mode. The best it could do was give me short-term housing for one month; an introduction to Polly, a seasoned estate agent at a London lettings firm called Sampson & Smallwood; and a copy of a secondhand London A to Z pocket guide, which Drewe inched toward me across the conference room table.

  “Is this the typical relocation package?” I was stupid enough to ask. “And is this spine broken?” Frowning, I picked up the heavily used A to Z and pointed out varying creases—plus one mysterious stain—to Drewe. He cleared his throat in obvious discomfort.

  “I wouldn’t call anything about the markets we’re living in typical, M.,” he rebuked, suggesting that I hadn’t been tracking VIX movements and whipsawing bond yields diligently enough. “And yes, the spine is broken. That is my A to Z. I had an accident with some … Marmite.” I let the pocket guide drop to the table. He could have had the decency to lock the thing in a sandwich bag before handing it to me. “I circled some of my favorite attractions from the time I spent in London and thought you might find it useful.”

  God only knew what Drewe had asterisked as must-sees. Before daring to thumb through the book, I would have put my money on the torture chamber at the London Dungeon or the Ghost Bus Tour, that all-black funeral bus that floated people around to sites of gruesome murders and reported paranormal activity. And of course there would be the Mayfair nightclub Mahiki where Drewe would have Young Royal–watched while consuming a stream of Zombie cocktails splashed full of overproof rums and absinthe. I peeled back a particularly threadbare page in the A to Z to find the south section of Mayfair where, sure enough, Dover Street and Mahiki were circled repeatedly with tragic predictability. Whether it was on Park Avenue South or just off Piccadilly, bankers—even non-revenue-generating and undead ones like Drewe—couldn’t resist offering up their bulging wallets to an interchangeable late-night staff of bouncing, coconut-bra-clad beauties.

  My first order of business in London was with Polly, the estate agent from Sampson & Smallwood who also turned out to be a distant cousin of Leezel Bartholomew’s. Leezel herself had been either totally oblivious of—or totally uninterested in—my move. I suspected both. On my last day she took an especially loud personal call from her cubicle then flounced off the floor, pointing a ruffled umbrella like a unicorn horn before her as an implied good riddance. Polly and I spoke twice by phone before I had flown over and she sounded increasingly hysterical when I shared the criteria I was ideally looking for in a London flat.

  “Near a park!” she crowed. “And with a doorman!” she howled even more riotously. Every word I spoke seemed to blow her farther back against a concrete wall of disbelief. “And to be clear, this is zone one we’re discussing?”

  Admittedly, part of me imagined I could swap my New York life for the highly stylized experience that any American, no matter how level-headed, imagines when moving abroad. A world of cheery bobbies, patrolling cobblestoned lanes with happy waves of their batons, and even a sharp-witted doorman who could have doubled as a Wodehousian manservant named Jeeves. Something slightly different was awaiting me.

  On the appointed afternoon, mildly crumpled with jet lag, I waited for Polly on a sidewalk near Notting Hill Gate clutching my gargantuan WOWS golf umbrella like a life preserver. I was well on my way to being soaked through when, at long last, Polly fishtailed onto the curb in front of me in her canary yellow Sampson & Smallwood–branded Mini Cooper. She circled us once around Hyde Park as a warm-up to West London, zigzagging us down Park Lane past a half-deconstructed Ferris wheel sitting on a stretch of dried grass, implying sorriness and the halfhearted dismantling of something that had brought so much joy such a
short time ago. That Ferris wheel became the visual metaphor of the afternoon. With an unending series of tsks and shakes of her head, Polly faulted me for not seeing the potential in the five flats she jolted me to—including one damp, subterranean foxhole that sent her flying into a fit of phlegm-rattling coughs, the sort that alarm doctors and result in deep breaths and cool, metallic presses of a stethoscope. It had only been a few hours but I decided she had made her point, hammering home a sufficient amount of real estate disappointment for one day. I would be heading to The Brothers’s small but burgeoning London office near St. Paul’s the next morning—Barts, to everyone in the U.K.—and wanted to feel moderately upbeat for my new start there. It would do me no good to walk in on my first day trailing a path of melancholy and mold spores behind me. Polly skidded alongside a curb to deposit me back into the rain.

  “Maybe it will be sunny this weekend?” I offered as a totally undeserved parting shot of friendliness. I hoped it would set our next appointment off on a better foot. She shot me a colorless look. Shooing me out of her car, she fishtailed off, spraying a dozen pedestrians in her wake as she gunned it left along Bayswater Road. I unfurled my WOWS umbrella again and pressed my body forward into the rain toward the nearest Tube stop. As I mumbled a self-administered pep talk and high-stepped through a series of oceanic puddles, a gangly man with very full lips and an equally disconcerting fitted leather jacket barreled straight into me on the sidewalk. He ducked underneath my golf umbrella to take close-range shelter against my chest.

  “M.!” he cried into my face. The man reeled back slightly and the startled motion sent a flurry of coarse charcoal ash raining down around us as he fought to regain his balance.

  “Oh, Vitus!” I piped back, weakly, realizing who the man was. He restored his equilibrium and tucked himself back under cover with me.

  And so I found myself face-to-face with chronic close-talker Vitus Ostrauskaite. He stared at me with brilliant blue eyes as he chomped intensely on the damp end of a cigar. His leather jacket was marked with lashings of rain that beaded off the leather like aquatic, three-dimensional leopard spots, indicating he’d done an excellent job of weatherproofing it. Of course he had. Vitus—a Lithuanian math whiz who I knew from Dartmouth—was meticulous about things like weatherproofing. As a bit of a Renaissance man, Vitus had a curious obsession with Thoreau so insisted New Hampshire was the place he would be able to go into the woods and live deliberately as an undergrad. That deliberate living lasted for a year, at which point Vitus transferred to MIT.