Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “You must have seen me onstage carrying my giant check,” he observed.

  “It would have been difficult to miss. It was a very big check,” Belle agreed, suggestively, with an emphatic bat of mile-long eyelashes.

  “Absolutely enormous.” He grinned at her, allowing his jaw to unclench a fraction.

  “Utterly colossal,” she breathed.

  Was this actually happening?

  “Look, I know I’ve dropped some massive clangers in the past,” Chase practically thundered, spotting his opening. “But let’s give it another proper whack, Bailey. What do you say?” I gathered he was issuing some sort of confessional or proposal and couldn’t have cared less that I was standing right there with them. So obviously revved up from his display of wealth before a concentrated mass of his classmates, he was breathing at her eagerly, like a pedigreed hound freshly affixed with his Best in Show rosette.

  How had he arrived at this moment? I pictured him a few weeks earlier in a tableau of repose at one of his London clubs—Buck’s or maybe the Turf Club. Spreading his bulk across a leather chesterfield and dropping a succession of celery-salted gull’s eggs down his gullet, he would have explained to an interchangeable companion his decision to finally bite the bullet and buy the bloody cow. Puffing his cheeks and letting loose an exaggerated exhale, he might have said: To hell with it—it’ll just be easier if I marry Belle. She’s a nice little croquet player and has the common sense to bring her own mallet to a garden party. And she isn’t tramping around the City like so many of those … uppity ones these days. Right. You know the ones I mean. Astonishing, aren’t they? No, there isn’t a safer punt I could make. And there isn’t a goddamn chance I’ll let some ballooning fairy mince off with her. I’m sure the reunion and being back on campus would have sealed it for him. It was impossible to imagine a leggy, vapid type like modeling sensation Milana participating in anything Ivy League–related or joining Chase for key milestones back in Hanover. She would have looked like a bug-eyed alien fresh off some extraterrestrial runway, sulking on the sidelines of our freshman Homecoming bonfire while Belle leapt around the blaze in a series of winsome grands jetés. They had been young together, in some way, shape, or form, and I realized then that shared youth was an ace so beautiful it was virtually impossible for anyone, no matter how heroic their devotion, to trump it.

  I saw it with my own eyes; I heard it with my own ears. Chase had laid out his offer, in front of me and probably within earshot of a dozen others given the sonic boom of his voice, in as clear and romantic a way that would ever be possible for him. And, in response, Belle broke into an enormous smile but her eyes—those huge, hazel eyes—I saw them crinkle. It was her tell, a sign that she was being her least genuine self.

  “I think it’s a lovely idea,” she twittered back. With that, she stepped toward him and wrapped her arms around his neck to toy with the slightly-too-long golden curls that bloomed there. “So it’s decided, then,” she added, with the firm satisfaction of an event planner who had just convinced her wavering client to pick the superior table centerpieces for the glittering affair in question. Then something dark rumbled across her expression and she looked past me out toward the Green, at all costs avoiding my stare and the money light burning insistently, imploringly atop Baker’s spire. I saw the corners of her rouged mouth drop a trace as she added with deliberate boredom, finally turning to face me:

  “Well, for God’s sake, M., let’s not just stand here mooning. Isn’t it cocktail hour already?”

  BE TRUE

  We weren’t allowed to stay. On Monday morning, the reunion was over—forcing us off the fairy-tale acres of campus, pale and quiet with sorrow as we were absorbed again by the ordinary flow of life. I was sitting on my London-bound airplane at Logan Airport, watching the last, disheveled stragglers board when my BlackBerry lit up with an incoming call from Jeremy.

  “It’s all over,” Jeremy rasped into the line. “Belle has decided it’s all over between us.”

  He sounded so small, his voice compacted under the weight of his disbelief. Belle had never been one to procrastinate. When her mind took hold of something, I knew she could act with alarming swiftness.

  “When did she say that, Jeremy? Did you see her in New York last night?” I was praying she had the decency to look him in the eye as she broke the devastating news.

  “She called me as soon as she got back to the city. She asked me to come see her on Bleecker Street. It would have seemed normal except she sounded so strange, M.… so steady and strange … I knew something was very wrong, right away … I can’t—”

  “Ma’am, please? Your phone? We’ve closed the cabin door?” a flight attendant implored, her forehead creased with pre-take-off angst as she ducked into my face.

  “I’m about to take off,” I said to Jeremy, apologetically, cradling my BlackBerry more closely. “I am so sorry to be leaving you like this. I’ll call you back the second I land.” He said nothing. But I could hear the ripped and ragged edges of his breathing, so decided to add: “I always believed Belle was better than this.”

  I then had six hours’ worth of flight time to think about Jeremy’s tortured state—and to speculate about how Belle was choosing to spend her Monday. Chase was staying stateside another week and I knew he was back in New York, where he still owned his cavernous TriBeCa loft. Would she be hopping onto Cupid’s Arrow and cycling over to him that night, like an alcoholic tracing familiar steps back to an overserving, once-favorite pub? I also asked myself—over and over again—whether Jeremy’s pain would have been lessened if I hadn’t shielded him from the conspiratorial sight of Belle and Chase outside of ‘21’ back in January. If by saying nothing, I had been an unintended accomplice in his heartbreak. I agonized in my plane seat, warping and shifting my pillow but unable to find a comfortable position. Pulling a sleeping mask over my eyes, I searched for respite in a few shallow hours of airplane sleep.

  * * *

  I found a way back as soon as I could, finagling a trip to New York for August, in two months’ time. I told Chase I needed to attend “LEGACY: 2050,” The Brothers’s annual conference for private clients discussing strategies to preserve their wealth for the next generation. He grunted back his consent. I’m pretty certain he wasn’t even listening when I asked. Belle Bailey was moving to London and the complex logistics of her relocation, which apparently included the shipment of 120 pairs of shoes that Belle insisted needed protection in their original boxes, left him prickly. He spent more time than ever in his office, lights off and door shut, beating the bejesus out of the speed bag he’d installed in the back corner.

  It wasn’t surprising that Belle hadn’t told me her side of the story—or that she would feel compelled to explain her actions to me. Once she relocated to Chase’s Mayfair digs, she was positioned within a mile of my own London flat, but might as well have been hanging her hat on the moon. She vanished from my life once again and that suited me fine, such was my anger over her ice-cold break with Jeremy.

  Everything happened at lightning speed even by Belle’s mercurial standards. She and Chase were married shortly after her arrival in a tiny ceremony at St. George’s, Hanover Square, the church in which great lights including George Eliot and President Roosevelt and Shelley once tied the knot. In the manner of the most secretive celebrities, they only invited immediate family members, meaning Belle would have had no one there to represent her side. The small reception that followed was marginally more inclusive. I had received an invitation—the heavy cream envelope sat on my entrance table for days, its tilted tangle of gilded calligraphy glaring at me as I exited and entered my flat. Weddings, pregnancies, christenings, funerals … there are certain things, and certain life milestones, that one takes for granted always being a part of in an old friend’s life, no matter how much water is under the bridge—no matter how complex the tapestry of the friendship. I wished I could have been there for Belle as her longtime friend and bastion, but in the end
I couldn’t bring myself to endorse her union with Chase, which I suspected would ultimately cause her as much harm as it was causing Jeremy. So my only glimpse of the day was through Belle’s post about her wedding reception on La Belle Vie, now rebranded with stunning creativity as La Belle Vie—Abroad! I could only find one picture of the bride, minus her groom. She tossed her long neck back lightly in laughter, green eyes opaque and crinkling, with everyone around her grinning as they consumed gin and tonics in cavernous finger bowls. She wore Valentino, a floral appliqué tea-length dress in a dove gray so pale she almost looked apparitional. Her followers would be oblivious to what I could see beyond all of the glamour and the gloss, the intricate embroidery and the pronounced curve of her collarbones—traces of the life compromises she was making, her own disappointment in what she knew full well she had done.

  Not seeing Belle at the wedding inflated her into a quasi-mythical figure in my mind. I found myself spending more time than I had ever bothered poking around online for hints of her new life. Belle had never taken a gap year on the Inca trail, nor could she fathom participating in a convivial day of pheasant shooting in the driving rain somewhere in Wiltshire, but as Chase’s wife in London she did her very best to effect the style and manner of a Modern Sloane Ranger. Her New York Social Diary appearances segued seamlessly into cameos in the back society pages of Tatler. At a viscount’s charity auction for veteran soldier skihabilitation programs or, rather randomly I thought, at a retirement party for a man named Dudley Bootle-Winterbottom. She had grown her hair out, keeping it swept up in a prettily effortless bun, and could be spotted with other members of the smart set sporting their Temperley day dresses and white plimsolls in and around the King’s Road with a slightly pinched carelessness. Maybe I was reading too much into it all, but as I scanned her recent La Belle Vie—Abroad! entries, I detected something deeply unnerving about them. Her unquenchable wanderlust—her desperate need to escape—seemed to have dialed up to worrisome levels since leaving New York:

  Please, just sweep me off to …

  Let’s just pack our bags and disappear, shall we? How about tonight?

  Wouldn’t you rather be…?

  Let’s find some other beautiful place to get lost.

  Where to next, darlings? I’m restless for a new adventure.

  #takemeaway

  Her readership was down, and I could see how sparse her followers’ comments were as I clicked through her latest posts. The comments that did appear were borderline hostile:

  LADY! You live in London. LONDON. Do you know how much I would DIE to live in London??? GET A GRIP.

  Maybe people grew bored or were just plain fed up with her lack of presence—reading about the girl who so clearly had it all but seemed so chronically dissatisfied with her lot, always wanting some intangible other thing, always wanting to click her ballet flats and vanish to some earlier year or prettier post code. I also wondered if her breakup with Jeremy had anything to do with her declining popularity. All traces of him had vanished from the blog; he was confined to her archives section like a printed encyclopedia set resigned to a basement, out of circulation and clocking time through an ever-thickening film of dust. I had once told Scott that Jeremy never wanted to take center stage. Yet Belle had positioned him as such a prominent prop in La Belle Vie—the pitch-perfect boyfriend—right from the start. And he really had started carrying so much of the blog’s weight, featuring in most of its content for the past year and a half. Without Jeremy’s genuine fodder—without the presence of that handsome, elbow-patched gentleman with a fresh buttonhole and weathered hardback and devoted twinkle in his eye—maybe her readers sensed that the dream was done. Maybe they realized with a flush of betrayal that the dream had never really existed the way she had led them all to believe. Maybe La Vie wasn’t so Belle, after all.

  * * *

  When I took my seat at my old desk in The House of Bartholomew that August, it felt like slotting back into a familiar stream of runners after taking a time-out in a medical tent alongside a marathon course. Everything would have felt exactly the same except for the fact that everything had changed. There was an overarching unease in the air that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. The usual cluster of smokers outside the office seemed to be taking even more desperate, darker drags of even shorter cigarette nubs as I passed them on my way in. I noticed people abandoning the old Brothers religion of using communal pronouns—always saying “we” when speaking with clients or colleagues—and instead punctuating their sentences with self-interested and almost aggressive declarations of “I.” On more than one occasion, I discovered a tattered copy of A Benchmark of Brilliance—the foundational tome we’d all been forced to learn by heart—discarded in a corner recycling bin. Part of the problem was that, since the financial crisis, many Brothers employees started feeling a nagging sense of doubt and even shame about working at the firm. The partners didn’t do much to convince us otherwise. Like an expanse of arid earth that hadn’t seen rain in years, the culture started cracking into deep and uncomfortable patterns. Earlier that summer, in an ill-judged internal PR move to try and placate the ranks, Withers left an insincere to-all voice mail announcing that everyone needed to make a point of taking one full day off each weekend. Going forward, junior employees would be physically barred from coming into the office on a Saturday.

  “We want you to cultivate interests. Enhance your personalities. You have to try and be a person other people don’t want to immediately hang up on,” Withers pleaded into the phone, his voice jagged edged with exhaustion. His old jauntiness was gone and instead of picturing him kicking back with slippers and robe as he recorded his voice mails, you imagined him slumped at his desk, his beard turned stark white, clutching his exasperated bald head in his hands. Within minutes someone leaked the voice mail to the press and papers around the country had a field day with it.

  People who had once wholeheartedly bought in to the values of the firm were becoming more skeptical, and more vocal. A few days before flying back to New York, I attended a global employee town hall hosted by Withers via video feed in our London office conference room. Leezel sat in front of me, clutching a cellophane bag full of bonbons as sustenance. The town hall closed with a Q&A session that should have been filled with the usual string of meaningless questions and meatless answers.

  “Okay, folks, I’m told I have time for one more question,” Withers announced with audible relief.

  “Mr. Withers.” On the screen I saw a young woman bravely stand up somewhere in the middle of the immense House of Bartholomew auditorium. Her neck was swathed in a long woolen scarf that told me temperatures were still kept at meat-locker lows in there.

  “Bill—please,” he chortled, exposing two rows of capped teeth that were so synthetically white they were verging on pale blue.

  “Mr. Withers,” the young woman repeated, undeterred, “could you please outline the steps you are taking—beyond the hiring of a singing and dancing hologram—to address the serious decline in employee morale and the overall deterioration of the firm’s culture?”

  Bill’s eerie grin froze on his face. He cleared his throat once. Leezel assumed her usual look of horrified affront. The question and its implied critique of her beloved Brothers probably felt like a stray bonbon had wedged in the back of her throat, blocking off a vital air passage.

  “Look. These are challenging times. Not just for us, but for the whole industry. Yes, a lot of negative sentiment exists, but make no mistake that negative sentiment can only cause damage. It can only destroy our productivity and cause us to fall behind. It can only cause kids coming out of college to chase jobs at tech start-ups instead of thinking the Holy Grail is an offer from us. So what I would say to you is: if you don’t like it here, then leave. The rest of us have work to do and your negativity is only dragging us down. And with that, this town hall is adjourned. Let’s all get back to work.”

  The video feed crackled and then cut dead. The House o
f Bartholomew auditorium would have cleared out briskly that day. And I pictured a special security detail escorting the heretic young woman from the building, dragging her heroic form along the recycled carpet by the ends of her extended woolen scarf.

  There were also more personal differences that altered the smell and the sound of the place for me. The absence of Leezel’s Chanel No. 5 spritzes, for example, that so often resembled a circling water bomber unleashing its spray over a raging forest fire. Or Chase’s unchecked roars whenever the Arsenal football scores on his bottom-left screen revealed the wrong result. And of course, above all, there was Jeremy. He was still seated at the end of the now empty row, still wearing his three-piece suit. No coxcomb and bells were in sight, but they should have been. On my first morning back I found him by the window, staring pensively toward Lady Liberty, waiting for her to wing him a carrier pigeon or smoke signal that would hand him some all-important piece of information. His hair was beeswaxed, making him look like a diligently groomed orphan who’d just been told he hadn’t been picked for adoption.

  It had been two months since Jeremy and Belle’s Great Romance had officially folded, and—as she showed no signs of wavering or whisking back across the Atlantic into his arms for a reuniting foxtrot—his discordant new reality was cementing itself. He needed my support more than ever.

  Around lunchtime on my first day back we went to our old lunch spot to pick up tuna sandwiches. I really wasn’t a fan—it always seemed unnatural to can tuna or mash it up and smear it between two soggy slices of bread—but I felt it was important to show him solidarity on every level. A premature Indian Summer was tantalizing us—with almost no humidity and breezes that were brushed with the heart-tugging promise of autumn in Manhattan.