But before that, we were “trippies” on the same Freshman Outing Trip at the start of our first year. Our group spent three days and nights together on the Appalachian Trail without running water or electricity, so I knew strange and intimate things about the man including how Miglë, his First Love back home in Klaipėda, broke his heart perhaps irreparably; his preference for black briefs over boxers; and his fondness for American grilled cheese sandwiches. As if we weren’t close enough already, on that misting sidewalk Vitus thrust himself forward to administer three full-contact cheek kisses in that elongated, overly committed European way that is so uncomfortable for most Americans. My left cheek felt wet when he pulled away.
“Are you here for work? Play?” He winked at me and gave his cigar another soggy smooch, sending clouds of smoke billowing around us under the umbrella.
“A work assignment, actually.” I gasped into the smoke, immediately kicking myself for implying that I would be in town for an extended period. It was a dangerous gaffe. Something odd happened when people ran into acquaintances, however distant or arbitrary, in foreign countries. You were flung together in the same unknown waters. While some people, like me, preferred to go it alone, others clung to familiar faces like a D-deck passenger clamoring for a grasp at Titanic’s last lifeboat. I could tell right away that Vitus was a clamorer.
“Still with Barts?”
I nodded, masking my discomfort that he somehow knew where I worked. Vitus nodded back at me, admiringly.
“You?” I felt compelled to ask if only to fill the moment with something other than the sight of Vitus’s full lips pursed eagerly around that cigar end. He told me he was a credit analyst at one of the big European investment banks and had been in London since he graduated from MIT.
“So you are at the Fraser Suites off Cromwell Road, then?” I remembered the guy having a steel-trap memory, but his knowledge of investment bank corporate accommodation addresses caught me off guard. “How about I pop by this weekend to give you a proper British welcome?” Vitus took obvious delight in using the phrase pop by. All I could picture was Vitus looming outside my front door—sans cigar and sweating beneath a mammoth British Royal Guard bearskin—adjusting his chain-link chin strap to announce he had arrived to whip me up some traditional bubble and squeak for a welcome-to-London lunch. I never thought of myself as antisocial; I was just very particular about how I chose to socialize. I didn’t mean the guy any harm but close-talkers made my skin crawl—as did people who had any inclination to pop by. Spontaneity, social or otherwise, had never been my bag. And now, Lithuanian quant jock Vitus Ostrauskaite had locked me on his radar and I knew there was little chance he would let up. I wondered if he had any idea how sad his ultraclose presence was making me. The thought of his having no comprehension of it, as he leaned toward me, only managed to sadden me further.
“I’ll have to see, Vitus—lots to do! Lots to do!” I answered with a trace of hysteria.
Vitus maintained eye contact and it was then that I knew he would smoke me out from under my umbrella unless I gave him my new U.K. BlackBerry number and agreed that a pop-by could actually be quite nice. Feeling helpless and displaced in a rainy place far away from home, I conceded. What I really wanted to do was use my golf umbrella and all of my limbs and any other attention-grabbing object in sight to flag down a fast-zipping, beetle-backed black cab. Once I had piled myself into the back and the driver chirped “Where to, luv?” in my direction, I’d collapse with my request: “The Vanderbilt, sir—straight to The Vanderbilt as fast as your carriage can take us!” But no black cab—unless it miraculously channeled the levitating powers of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang—could sail me thirty-five hundred miles back across the Atlantic. Vitus was sufficiently pleased with my response so, with a blaze of his blue eyes and a vigorous “Cheers, M., cheers!”—followed by another drawn-out trio of full-lipped cheek kisses—he left me, his weatherproofed, fitted leather jacket engulfed by a swirling mix of London mist and cigar smoke.
I balanced my umbrella between my neck and shoulder and checked my watch. It was three thirty in the afternoon and night was already falling. I had planned on scouting out the squash facilities at a few of The Vanderbilt’s reciprocal clubs but the double act of Polly and Vitus had really knocked the wind from my sails. I looked around me and saw the reassuring green glow of a Marks and Spencer grocery store beckoning me across the street with the promise of oven-ready chicken madras and jalfrezi curries. As I stepped out of the wet and began loading a basket with a small stockpile of the boxed dinners—I always managed to find doses of comfort in planning ahead—a rainy wisp twisted in through the shop door and down the aisle and into my ear to take shape as Scott’s voice repeating his parting question from our last afternoon on the Met rooftop: What are you so scared of anyhow? A small chainsaw buzzed inside my pocket and, slinging my basket into the crook of one elbow, I checked my BlackBerry to confront a plainly delighted text message from Vitus:
CHEERS, M! WELCOME AGAIN! FANCY SEEING CHANGING OF THE GUARD THIS WEEKEND PRIOR TO OUR LUNCH? YOURS, V.
I stockpiled a few more dinners into my basket in quiet desolation. Then I set my basket down and pulled up Verity on my BlackBerry, logging in as TheDivineMissM. I punched in my answer to Scott’s question, a digital message in a bottle I hoped would somehow reach him:
What am I scared of? This. I think I’ve always been scared of something along the lines of this.
* * *
Back in New York, Jeremy began jumping into empty conference rooms at the office as a free way to sneak in calls to me overseas. I held my breath each time I saw “Unknown Caller” flash across my BlackBerry, knowing it was the cryptic mask that disguised incoming calls from Bartholomew Brothers. Whenever I answered the call—whether I was perusing a Marks and Spencer grocery aisle or bracing for a Vitus pop-by or tuning out in front of the BBC News at ten in the sterile comfort of my corporate flat—I was afraid, and at the same time oddly hopeful, it would bring with it the gory revelation that Jeremy had finally found out about Belle and Chase. But that never happened. Instead, Jeremy phoned me in an increasingly worried state, asking for my help with something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. If a notepad and pen were nearby, I would reach for them instinctively and begin doodling abstract shapes as a way of channeling my focus—of preventing myself from blurting out the dark thing I vowed I wouldn’t do Belle the favor of breaking to my best friend.
“Something’s off, M.,” he wavered into the line. I assumed he was clutching at his sandy hair in anxious, upward grabs as he spoke. “I can feel it and I can see it but I can’t figure out exactly what it is.”
He reported that a faint line had carved its way down Belle’s formerly flawless forehead—a perpendicular crease that sat as an unhappy centerline between her soft-angled eyebrows.
“It’s called age, Jeremy.” I sighed. “We’re not getting any younger, you know.” But he was adamant that another destructive force was at play.
“No, don’t you see? It’s me. I think I’m actually aging her. My Love is actually aging her,” Jeremy concluded, softly.
“Are you listening to yourself right now?” I groaned. “Your love isn’t aging Belle. That’s ridiculous.”
“I didn’t realize the extent of it until I saw her today,” he continued.
“She may be beautiful but she’s still human, Jeremy. Cut her some slack. Maybe she hasn’t been sleeping well.”
“That’s just it! You’re exactly right!” he exclaimed. “She hasn’t been sleeping well. She’s been talking in her sleep and I haven’t the foggiest idea what it means.”
“What has she been saying?” I asked, slow and suspicious. I didn’t recall her ever having an issue with sleep-talking or -walking for that matter, only willfully tiptoeing out into the midnight shadows back in College for her surreptitious meetings with Chase.
“It’s not good,” he answered, switching to sotto voce to underscore just how somber the situation wa
s. “She’s been saying something about a car chase.”
I started doodling on my notepad more furiously—sketching jagged lightning bolts and knife blades—as I imagined Belle crying out Oh, Chase! languidly into the milky night, a verbal dagger hacking into Jeremy’s chest repeatedly as he lay beside her, wide-eyed and emotionally crushed.
“I should have never taken her upstate,” he determined with all the brightness of a shattered lightbulb. “I’m so glad she finally met my mom, but I think bringing her home was a terrible mistake.”
On one of those bleak winter weekends that can bleed the life from even the sunniest personality, he rented a car and navigated them north to seal his predetermined Fate. Belle had prefaced the trip with a sprightly blog entry she called “A Frostily Fine Weekend Upstate!” featuring pictures of her distressed leather portmanteau, haphazardly open on one of her hardwood floors and brimming with red woolens and accessories that would look borderline ludicrous in the Kirbys’ two-bedroom bungalow. The vignette was topped off with a weathered and dramatically geometric Doctor Zhivago dust jacket from the 1950s.
“Don’t say that. She needs to know you, Jeremy—the real you. And where you come from is part of that.”
“Ha!” He issued the noise like a synthesizer sounding a surprised note after a finger pressed down on a miscellaneous key. I couldn’t tell if he was scoffing at or agreeing with me.
“Well, it is.”
“You’re absolutely right, but I always worried it might scare Belle away. You know how she has such a sweeping approach to everything in her life. She can latch on to the smallest details and magnify them into vast galaxies.” For a moment I thought he was describing a Silicon Valley visionary, not Belle Bailey, curator of pretty online content. “I was afraid she’d get the wrong idea and it would stick with her. Where a person comes from doesn’t need to determine where they’re going.” He would do anything to avoid being tarred and feathered by bankruptcy like his father and was determined to make those past wrongs right. I transitioned from drawing knife edges to three-dimensional boxes on my doodle pad. “But she insisted on it,” he continued. “And you know how it goes when Belle insists on something. I tried to put it off, but she said she was beginning to take it personally—beginning to think I was hiding her from them, not the other way around. She told me that any journey forward has to begin with a journey back.”
Of course Belle was a rampant nostalgist—journeying backward wasn’t just a hobby, it was the woman’s modus operandi—but I knew in my heart it was not why she wanted to venture north to the Kirby home. What was it that drove Belle to insist on the introduction? A trip to Schenectady was probably about as appealing to her as a midafternoon stroll across the Bartholomew Brothers’s trading floor after a row of desks had just powered through a lunchtime curry delivery. I suspected it was a reconnaissance mission more than anything else—a way for Belle to see a more complete picture of Jeremy’s life and steal a glimpse of the future she thought would be inevitable were she to stay with him. And through it she would condemn him for the family he had no control over—the past he had tried so hard for so long to compensate for.
“What happened, exactly?” I probed, gently.
He told me the visit was a flopping failure, in large part because his father behaved so poorly, and partly because Jeremy’s nerves made everything worse. He said he decided to book a room in a charming boutique inn fifty miles from his house. It was a beautifully restored Victorian property that had opened for business just after the Civil War. Its twenty-first-century self offered truffle-decorated turndown service, Adirondack chairs draped with Hudson’s Bay Company striped point blankets on the back deck, and a log fire roaring in the lobby. Staying there no doubt hacked a totally unnecessary chunk out of his biweekly paycheck.
“And we really can’t stay at your house?” he said Belle had asked him, nervously. “To be closer and help with things? You said your mom is so unwell.”
“I really don’t want to trouble her,” Jeremy explained. “The doctors say too much excitement isn’t good for her now.”
“Even happy excitement?” she asked him, her voice cresting with hope.
“Any excitement,” he confirmed, crisply, and with that the conversation was over.
Within a half hour of their arrival, Jeremy said his father Jack had pulled Belle into the basement to show her an introductory video on a skin care “marketing opportunity” with a company called Second Skin. Shinily boxed Second Skin products were stacked from floor to ceiling down in that basement—everything from sudless soap (guaranteed not to sud or your money back!) to cumin-scented deodorant (escape to Lebanon with every application!). With only a five-hundred-dollar initial investment, Jack said, Belle could get in on the ground floor and see her earnings multiply one hundredfold within six months!
“And in the meantime, you can ward off those wrinkles!” he added, energetically, gesturing to the stockpiles of product teetering ominously around them, all boasting a gravity-defying Time Recovery Formula.
“Oh, I see!” Belle chirped back, placing a long, porcelain hand against one of her cheeks that blushed cherry red with embarrassment. This was the sort of unsightly stuff that would never be hinted at in her blog entries.
Jeremy said he had been making tea for his mother Jean and bounded downstairs two at a time to rescue Belle as soon as he heard the zealous sound of the word “wrinkles!” echoing up the basement stairwell. He left Jean—whose eyesight had degenerated further so at least she didn’t have to see the shudder-inducing Second Skin display in the basement—sitting alone in the kitchen, rocking gently in despair, for herself and for her well-meaning son.
They’d been through it all before. When Jean had been a first-grade schoolteacher, Jack had talked her into keeping a stockpile of Slick 50 Supersonic Engine Treatment Systems in her car trunk to pawn off on unsuspecting parents during after-school pickup. He trained her to pepper automotively clueless mothers with totally awkward and out-of-context questions like: Do you worry about fuel efficiency? I know I certainly do, looking at that great big mess over there in the Middle East! Jack only had the best of intentions. Somehow that made the whole thing worse. It was that weak strain running through the paternal side of the Kirby family—a fool’s belief that, with a single stroke of luck, each morning everything could be wiped clean and born again into something magnificent.
When Jeremy was very young and his grandfather took him up in his first hot air balloon, he told him he could, in the manner of the great Wizard of Oz, rise through the atmosphere and follow his own yellow brick road right to the very end. To the very end of what? Jeremy never said, and it was all too sad for me to ask about. I don’t think anyone ever broke it to Jeremy that there was no yellow brick road, literal or metaphorical, and so there would be no enchanted, emerald oasis called Oz at the end of it. (I was the least likely person to advocate for wizards or magic slippers or a place called Oz—at age eight I caught my father sneaking Santa’s presents beneath the tree and had been a comfortable nonbeliever ever since.) Jean was too consumed by her own worry, her frazzled nerves, to have the conviction to stand up to her husband and set her son straight. And so Jeremy kept believing. By the time he had professed his Love to Belle, his mother was legitimately ill—first it had been her nerves and then it was her eyes. She suffered from a series of stress-induced ailments—shingles and dangerously high blood pressure and macular degeneration that steadily blurred her vision and would one day render her blind. Jeremy was a faithful son. He wrote her a letter every week, though soon she would not be able to read them, and every other week he included a check for her. He didn’t like to think of it or speak of it but there it was, all the same—his past, the Kirby legacy, his familial albatross that, only because of how much he cared, would pin him down with its giant wings until death.
“I’m positive Belle’s forehead line sprang to life as a result of that basement skin care sales pitch,” Jeremy breathed, sadly
.
“Maybe not?” I offered, hopefully. “Belle has always been a big product junkie.” It was true but still I could feel him shaking his head at me across the humming transatlantic telephone wire.
“It was a total boondoggle. I don’t know if she’ll be able to put it behind her.”
My pen was still in my hand and I looked down at the pad to see that my subconscious had drawn sad little stick figures that stood trapped in my doodled three-dimensional boxes. I picked one stick figure and drew him a beautiful buttonhole, oversized and overly elegant—a bare-bones rendition of Jeremy and his giant poinsettia on that rainy December Bender night—hoping it would make his paper entrapment more pleasant.
“I’m really sorry but I’ve got to turn in now, Jeremy,” I said, apologetically, watching my living-room clock march on toward midnight. “Piggelo is flying over tonight on the red eye. If you can believe it she’s finally going to unveil my new boss tomorrow.”
“Break a leg, M.,” he said in his best attempt to cheer me on.
“You, too, Jeremy,” I wished him back.
“Sure,” he answered, “I have absolutely no problem with a leg. So long as it’s the only part of me that’ll be breaking.”
* * *
The next morning, with a certain amount of foreboding, I plunged into the dark depths of the planet via an unending series of London Underground escalators. Taking my seat on the garish and geometric upholstery of the Piccadilly Line carriage—a page torn out of a 1970s interior design nightmare—I saw an early-twentysomething blonde sitting across from me with a camel coat wrapped around her willowy frame. I suppressed a surprised wave but found it difficult to pull my stare away. With her vibrant red gloves and lightly stained doll’s mouth and wide-set hazel eyes, the woman looked like a slightly younger Belle Bailey, back when her and Jeremy’s Love was new and her expression wasn’t yet stamped with the weary watermark that was so obviously tormenting Jeremy. She looked straight ahead without any trace of recognition. After a minute, as our train jolted us brusquely into Hyde Park Corner, she reached into her high-end handbag and, without checking to see if anyone was watching, pulled out a Magic Marker. She removed its cap and leaned over to color a section of her left black pump that I could see was scuffed. When she finished concealing the mark, she sniffed the marker and, as she recapped it, locked eyes with me and shrugged.
Fake Plastic Love Page 27