Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “How about eating these in the park?” I suggested and ushered Jeremy, who seemed lost in a fog, a degree or two removed from reality, toward Battery Park. Antibank protestors had been keeping dense vigil outside of The House of Bartholomew for a number of months and a handful of them were spending their lunch hour scattered around the park with their picket signs abandoned in the grass.

  We found a bench and sat down, looking out to a fleet of sailboats in the harbor slicing against the wind in a picture-perfect regatta. It was a serene setting and I hoped it would encourage him to open up and tell me what exactly had happened between him and Belle. Since June, he’d shared fragmented parts of the story with me by phone but I couldn’t piece them into a coherent whole. He was useless as a narrator; his wounds were still too fresh. Staring down at the wax paper of his untouched tuna sandwich and ignoring the placid scattering of sailboats, he took one deep breath:

  As I already knew, after returning from the reunion on Sunday night, Belle had asked him to come to her on Bleecker Street. That would have been a reversion to the norm were it not for those days of unprecedented silence—she hadn’t communicated with him once over the three-day weekend. The tatty ticker-tape storm of debt he had rained down on her had been their last exchange before she left for Hanover. When he walked through the door into her whitewashed and monogrammed and ginger-jarred oasis, he said he felt a flood of relief to see Violetta the Victrola presiding in her same position of authority in the living-room corner. Violetta was their mascot, and if she was intact, if she was presiding over Belle’s apartment and their conversation, he was certain all would be well, all would end well.

  Belle motioned for Jeremy to take a seat on one side of her billowing sofa as she perched herself stiffly on the other, unable to stop clasping and unclasping her hands.

  “Jeremy, it was all so nice while it lasted,” she blurted out.

  “What do you mean—lasted? What a whole lot of nonsense!” he guffawed, springing up from the couch and nervously shifting his weight from one loafer to another.

  “Oh, Jeremy, this is hard enough as it is!”

  A foreign sound escaped her lips and suddenly she was crying, her golden head drooping gently toward her clasped hands like an unwatered daisy or a girl lost in bedtime prayer.

  “Belle, please don’t cry!” He rushed to her and grabbed hold of the thin sinews of her arms in one last gushing gesture of Hope and Romance. She shrugged away his touch and he was up on his feet again, pacing and grabbing nervously at his hair. “There is nothing in the world to cry about! Our life will be wonderful—I just know it will be—it’s just got to be—and we’re so close to getting there. Once we’re together in Brooklyn in the new apartment you’ll see how different everything will be.…” Her bent head lifted and his eyes met the flash of two bright emeralds, strewn with a bloodshot netting. If there were ever a look that declared There’s as much chance I’ll be moving to Brooklyn as there is I’ll be moving, ugh, upstate with you that was it. But he was too frantic to register it and pressed on. “Just like the old times. Say, do you remember those old times when we used to—”

  “Give it a rest already, Jeremy!” she snapped. “Whatever you’re about to say I’m sure we only did it once.” A moment passed and it gave her mouth time to toughen into a firm line of resolve. Her brow had knotted into a deeper frown that suddenly, illogically, reminded him of the beginning, his glimpse of her on that waterlogged Lower Manhattan street when she was wearing her white knickerbocker suit and struggling with her umbrella outside The Brothers’s front door and his life lit up as though it were opening night at the World’s Fair. “We’re not close to anything. We’re the farthest away that we’ve ever been. You only love me—you only think you love me now—because it’s all coming to an end … isn’t it always the way? It’s time we stop our rewriting and face up to reality.”

  He looked down at her perched like a gaunt bird on the couch’s edge and realized she was dressed entirely in black—an atypical, sober black—except for two bright shocks of red moving apart and together and apart again as her lips formed words he could not comprehend.

  “The thing we both need to be right now is sensible,” she observed, distantly.

  “You told me when we first met to handle everything with great care,” he declared, heartily, summoning every last shred of energy to fill his voice with a convincing boom. “I did. I did all of that and more. I don’t accept this.” With that, his energy supply was drained and he slumped back down on the couch next to her.

  “Oh, my poor boy”—and with that she reached over and placed a cool hand to his burning cheek, her rare form of human aloe vera that he so desperately wanted to soothe him for the rest of his life—“can’t you see how dangerous it is when two people are too similar? I think that was always the big problem with us. We’re too much alike. We both build worlds out of a whole lot of nothing.”

  “Nothing?” he repeated, astonished, staring at her then resting his hand on top of hers. “But, Belle—that’s everything.”

  Jeremy paused and took a breath as if to continue but then just exhaled. Our tuna sandwiches were sure to have soaked through by that point. I was tempted to unwrap them both and toss them to the pigeons—or to the antibank protestors lounging around us.

  “I left her apartment and wandered north through the Village but have no idea how I actually got home,” he explained, beating me to the punch and tossing his sandwich in a perfect arc into a nearby trash can to earn an irrelevant three points. “All I remember is lying in bed that night, counting cracks in my ceiling and thinking if I just busied myself counting those cracks I could make it through the night. That one night. But what would I do about the other 364 days of the year and then all the days after that? What am I supposed to do with all of that after?”

  “And that’s the last time you saw each other?”

  “No,” he sighed. “There was one more time. I needed another chance. I insisted she meet me at Gardenia.”

  I’m sure he would have been waiting for her with a yellow carnation blooming from his buttonhole, carefully positioning himself at a rickety green bistro table in front of THE PERFECT ENDING, in the hopes of recalling the old giddiness—the old firefly flicker his presence used to ignite in her. He said he brought her a little bag of those colored candy hearts and pushed one plaintive, pale pink heart across the table toward her:

  BE TRUE

  “I am being true,” Belle exhaled back at him. She extended a narrow index finger, pushing the heart back in his direction. “You just don’t seem to like what the truth has to say.” Jeremy sat opposite her, frozen except for one twitching eyebrow. It was as though Belle was mouthing words to him in an untraceable dialect of Icelandic. “Fine, then. You want to hear the truth? The truth is I was never any of the things you wanted me to be, Jeremy. I think I loved being with you because it made me believe that I was all of those things. I let you go on believing a lie so I could believe in it, too. I wanted to be that girl—bright and beautiful and so damn buoyant it actually made me sick some of the time. But I’m not. I don’t have the first clue about who I am, actually.”

  “You are those things!” he blared, pounding a fist against their tiny table. Nearby pedestrians spun around and a friendly terrier barked in their direction. “You are all of those things!”

  “Jeremy,” she lowered her voice to clarify, leaning toward him with taunting intimacy, “all I am is a girl who doesn’t know who she is or what she wants. And a girl who can only make you miserable.”

  “We were happy together,” he said to her, simply. “Say what you want but I know we were happy together.” If he boiled everything down to the essential thing, then she would believe him.

  The wind changed direction sharply, sending a stray newsprint page soaring past them down the block—an outstretched eagle with an inky, rectangular wingspan. Belle watched the paper swoop up then around the corner out of sight—then dropped her eyes to the ta
ble. “Please stop.”

  “My grandfather always said that it all goes by in the blink of an eye,” he explained. “This life, I mean. He told me you should do whatever you can, whatever is in your power, to make that blink the happiest one you can. That you should never wait for or postpone your happiness.”

  However he had tried to convince her, it hadn’t worked. I was very sorry about it all and, quite frankly, amazed that Chase’s name hadn’t come up once in the story. On that point, I was riddled with shame that Jeremy’s faith in me was so great that he never needed to ask me whether I knew about Belle’s cheating in the first place.

  “Did she say anything about Ch—”

  “She’s gone,” he interrupted, waving a nail-bitten hand at me.

  There was a profoundly sad pause, totally incongruous with the bright and distant swatches of white sailcloth and the beauty of the summer’s day somersaulting around us in Battery Park. And suddenly I saw the pretty scene through his heartbroken eyes—as a laughing, leafy garland circling the dullness of his grief. This was the sort of day designed for people to meet and fall madly in love. But I feared Love may have been declared dead for him. For when Jeremy said Belle was gone, I knew he was referring to a great deal more than her packing her ocean-liner trunks and sailing for Southampton. It wasn’t only Belle who had vanished. In his mind, it was the good girl. The good girl—pearls gleaming, hair washed and smelling vaguely of lily of the valley, cheeks flushing with earnest emotion, bright eyes widening, cycling along in her basket-clad bicycle, hinting at fondly remembered days gone by and white-picket years yet to be lived. He had dreamed of her, with all the luck in the world had found her, had loved her, but she was gone—first weakening and then buckling under the impossible weight of his ideals.

  And from that point on, Jeremy might be left wondering where all of the good girls had gone, each time another woman smirked at his attempt to open a door for her rushing out of Grand Central Terminal. Each time he saw a female brow furrowed in concentration—for so many city girls had such a hard, knowing look about them, the look that Belle herself assumed in the months before she left. Beautiful but brittle porcelain masks of amassed experience and seen-it-all savvy. One night, finding himself lost and lonely on an after-work walk downtown, he might accidentally wander into one of those dim and interchangeable cocktail lounges and, faced with a sea of those lovely masks, flash to Belle in her new London life with Chase. An anonymous finger would point in his direction from a cluster of masks and the chiseled male faces laughing alongside them. He’d retreat back, understanding that city life was eternally promising but required methods of payment he did not have access to. His chivalry, his sincerity, his buttonholes, his raw effort were discontinued currencies accepted nowhere.

  I knew all too well the sensation of otherness—the feeling of being a step removed from the normal pace and progression of life—that Jeremy was confronting so starkly as a result of Belle’s departure. In some ways Jeremy and I were a natural pair, and I briefly wondered if we had ever gotten together, if we’d been more than just good friends, whether our respective otherness could have canceled each other’s out—if it could have added up to a sense of shared belonging. But I had always viewed Jeremy as far too sentimental to think about in those terms—and I’m sure he felt the same way about my pragmatism. Though his overdreaming drove me up the wall too many times to count, his romantic resilience had always managed to move me. For weren’t those moments of who’d-ever-have-believed-it wonder, however few and unreasonable and fleeting, the moments to get out of bed for—the moments for which mankind was made?

  I felt a wave of panic, looking at Jeremy’s downcast profile next to me on the bench. If he had lost his faith—if his resilience had worn through and he was no longer our generation’s Last True Romantic—who would pick up the mantle? Who would be there to give the rest of us hope? Could he really abandon us like this? I stretched my neck back, scanning the clouds above Lower Manhattan’s spires in search of the propellor plane and Nathan’s reassuring banner advertising his limitless Love of Kelly flapping sappily behind it. Of course the plane was long gone. But when I turned back to Jeremy I saw a glimmer in his gaze as he caught sight of something on a distant horizon, well past the white sailcloth in the harbor and the double-decked silvery stretch of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and the aquamarine wake of an ocean liner bound for Bermuda’s pink shores.

  “You know I never took Belle up in a hot air balloon,” he said, keeping his eyes trained on the distant thing. “There’s a whole other world up there that she’s never even seen. Maybe I just need to find a new angle. The perfect place to take her up. If I can find that place and take her up and show her…” His voice trailed off and he patted down his jacket in search of his notebook, then dropped his arm back down to his side. “It’s something to think about, anyhow.”

  He couldn’t help it—he was subconsciously shifting back into his default gear of possibility.

  I had once asked Jeremy what he loved most about hot air ballooning—what had hooked him as a boy and kept him dreaming of returning to it as a man. I assumed the nostalgist in him would say something about wanting to preserve man’s most primitive—and purest—form of flight, bridging the wonder of a forgotten time with the clinical rush of our present day. But he told me something different:

  “Anything can happen up there. You can go for a ride and hit your target, or a gust or jet stream can blow you four thousand miles off course. You never know. It all depends on where the wind wants to take you. Ballooning is technical but at its heart, it’s a sport of chance. A lot like life, if you think about it. At a certain point, all you can do is let go and let the wind carry you.”

  It was a beautiful optimism. It was quintessential Jeremy.

  We’d been sitting on the bench for a good hour so I offered to buy him an espresso near the office to help perk him up and fuel the rest of his afternoon. On our way out of the park, we passed a picketer’s sign that—of all the unfortunate things in the world—read WHERE OH WHERE HAVE ALL THE GOOD GUYS GONE?, leaning against an empty bench.

  “They’re out there,” Jeremy said to the sign owner who was splayed out on the nearby grass in the hopes of absorbing some lunchtime rays. The man squinted an irritated left eye up at the outspoken stranger who was blocking his sun. Jeremy picked up the sign by its wooden handle and held it toward the reclining man for easier viewing. “I assure you, they are. All you have to do is look.”

  * * *

  If I learned anything from Jeremy and his story, it’s that we make a conscious choice about the things we latch ourselves onto in life. We get to decide who and what is worthy of our devotion. Sometimes, we make the wrong call, and lose ourselves in illusions about the undeserving. For too long, I had lost myself in the steely grip of Bartholomew Brothers, and I knew it was high time to finally break the cycle.

  I needed to focus on my second reason for heading back to New York. I returned to Battery Park the next lunch hour and stared out at another calming scene of sailcloths. Taking one deep breath, I dialed the number I had pulled up on my BlackBerry. The phone rang twice before a melodious female voice answered.

  “Good afternoon, Bridges Capital.”

  “Is Michael Gilbert there, please?” I asked, with all of the seasoned sophistication of a three-toed sloth.

  “I’m sorry, Michael is in a meeting. May I take a message so he can call you back?”

  “Yes, please,” I said, eagerly, giving my name. “Could you tell him that I’m in New York and that if he has any time, I’d very much like to meet with him. I know it’s been a long while but I’m hoping we can continue the conversation that we started last year.”

  THE TIME-TRAVELING BELLE

  I developed a funny habit on all of the transatlantic plane trips I took that year. When the cabin lights dimmed, I pictured the flight paths of thousands of travelers just like me streaking the sky over the Atlantic back and forth and back and forth in
what must have looked like a man-made, carbon-emitting Milky Way. It was an avian galaxy of roaring engines and blinking wing lights that breathed with purpose. People had important places to go and important things to do. And, boarding my flight bound for Heathrow a few days after my lunch with Jeremy in Battery Park, at long last so did I.

  Back in London, I sent Belle Bailey an e-mail, saying it was important that we meet as soon as she was able. To my surprise, she replied immediately, agreeing and suggesting The Connaught hotel in Mayfair on the condition I never breathe a word of it to Chase:

  The Connaught is my home base now. My equivalent of your Vanderbilt, I suppose. I’m there most of my free evenings. Chase never sets foot in there. It has nothing to do with the name (trust me), but he’s very devoted to Annabel’s, that members-only club in Berkeley Square where you walk in and it feels like a bomb full of Russian models and hedge fund managers and plates of caviar has just exploded in your face.

  There was a new baldness to her writing. Something else was missing, too. Her initials. She was letting her e-mails trail off, not closing them out with her crisp, trademark stamp of old.

  When I walked into Coburg Bar at The Connaught, Belle was already waiting at a table by the window, her neck forming a melancholic arc that reached toward the twinkling and top-hatted pagaentry of Carlos Place. Her left arm was extended before her, her thumb and middle finger pinching the stem of her half-full martini glass as though keeping the outwardly angled lobes of a transparent Venus flytrap at bay. There was no three-plus-carat diamond shooting blue sparks from her left hand, only a plain band of white gold circling her ring finger—so modest it nearly blended into the paleness of her skin.

  She stood up as I approached and issued two anemic air kisses to my right and to my left.

  “Shall I order you one of these?” she asked me, gesturing listlessly at her drink.