Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  “You can have a big family,” I whispered.

  “But I can’t,” she corrected me, hazily. “Chase can’t have children. He only told me after I moved. After the wedding. Of course he won’t consider adopting. Something ridiculous about not tainting the Mayflower lineage or the Breckenridge gene pool.”

  “I had no idea,” I faltered, very aware that there was nothing I could possibly say that would comfort her. “I can’t imagine how upsetting that’s been, Belle.” She nodded sedately then consulted her Granny’s wristwatch. “I’m sorry, do you need to be getting back?”

  “God no, not in the least—I just wanted to show you. I keep it on New York time, you see,” she confessed, taking the watch off and turning it around in my direction. “It’s silly, I know.”

  A cloud of imaginary letters swept around us and shook themselves into a message, lost but not forgotten, from Jeremy: I looked at you—and all time stood still. She blushed and with it revealed a wisp of her old girlishness for the first time that evening. I pictured Belle’s heart waving on an ordinary day as she consulted her watch just before lunch hour; she’d think of Jeremy, freshly awoken, hair crumpled at his tiny folding breakfast table eating his rainbow-colored bowl of Froot Loops. She continued to blink down at the timepiece. She lived in London but kept her heart and watch—the one that only worked because he fixed it—on New York time, and by doing so she committed to neither. She could emotionally bounce across the Atlantic and it would always be the other place she mooned over more. She must have begun to wonder at times which pieces of New York, which pieces of Jeremy and their story, had existed, and which ones she had invented. There could be worse things, I’m sure she repeated to herself as her daily bathroom mirror mantra, than this kind of dreaming existence.

  “So of course none of this is about my not liking London,” she concluded, irritably. “Not really, anyhow. London itself is lovely. I’m just homesick. I heard a crack of a baseball bat on a lawn in Hyde Park the other day and it almost deconstructed me completely. I don’t even like baseball.” She smiled weakly. “I miss home. But the trouble is I don’t really have a home to go back to.”

  “Everyone knows that home—and homesickness—is about people, not places, Belle.”

  “When we named ourselves the Lost Girls all those years ago, you know I never would have guessed how self-fulfilling a prophecy it would be for me,” she murmured. “I’m the Most Lost Girl in the World.”

  After a stretch of silence, something wistful took hold of her face and she looked at me with a sudden gust of inspiration—of understanding.

  “Please, M., will you come back to the flat with me?” She reached out and circled a cold hand around one of my wrists. My arm flared with a scattering of goose bumps at her touch.

  “Wait, your flat?” I clarified, unhooking my wrist from her grasp.

  “It’s not far!”

  “Oh no, Belle, it’s not a good idea and it’s getting rather late—”

  “Please,” she pleaded. “There isn’t a chance Chase will be back from Annabel’s at this hour. He’ll still be shoveling spadefuls of caviar into somebody’s mouth. And there’s something you need to see. There’s something of great importance I need to give you.”

  * * *

  Nothing was what I expected it to be when I entered Mr. and Mrs. Chase Breckenridge’s flat on South Street, a few blocks from The Connaught hotel, backing onto the gated oasis of Mount Street Gardens in Mayfair. Belle might have shipped over 120 boxes of shoes, but you could see—you could feel—how little of her was present as soon as you walked through the door. It wasn’t just the absence of ginger gars and decoupage and whitewashed furniture. Cupid’s Arrow, Belle’s faithful old basket-clad red bicycle, was also nowhere in sight. It seemed especially strange given how much of a cyclist’s city London was, how Pashley was actually an old English brand, and how ridiculously close Belle was to the winding pathway gravel of Hyde or Green or St. James’s Parks, all a stone’s throw away.

  “Where are you keeping Cupid’s Arrow?” I asked her as we moved along a hallway papered with green-and-cream depictions of a hunt in English parkland that could have been selected by Chase’s mother Diana in 1982.

  “You’ll see,” she answered, not looking back as she led me into the depths of one of their drawing rooms, which seemed to lead into another drawing room and then another like one of those never-ending funhouse mirrors intended to hypnotize children. She gestured to a corner armchair and I dropped myself into it while she hovered over a nearby chess set that had been abandoned midgame.

  “I’m not up for chess, Belle—really,” I told her, prompting her to pluck the black king and queen pieces and, one by one, move them to opposing sides of the board. The chess pieces must have been some kind of trigger, because, all at once, the grandfather clock standing tall beside her began a slow clockwise spin into the wall to reveal a narrow, secret passageway leading into another room.

  “It’s my secret room,” she gushed, motioning me up from my chair. “Please, will you come inside?”

  She ushered me through the clock opening into a small den that looked like it had been airlifted straight from her old apartment, her old life, on Bleecker Street in New York circa 2009. Even the familiar stenciled pattern of letter Bs that used to adorn her foyer waved at us from all angles. Cupid’s Arrow was mounted a few feet up on one of the walls with some kind of invisible bracket, like a lonely and levitating piece of art.

  “I always imagined getting married and emblazoning my new name everywhere,” she commented, sweeping an arm to the sea of Bs flung out around us like a three-hundred-square-foot fisherman’s net woven with ego. “These Bs are for Bailey, not for Breckenridge.” I stared in amazement as she moved around the den, skimming a hand lightly across the surface of her writing desk. “It took me weeks to get the reek of Acqua di Parma out of this den,” she commented. “Before I moved in, Chase used this as his man cave. But when I arrived, I told him the entire flat was really one big man cave and he could at least give me this. A room of my own, just like Virginia Woolf said we need. He has another heavy-duty safe upstairs where he stores his bottles of sixty-four-year-old scotch.”

  “Yes, of course,” was all I could manage. I imagined another trapdoor springing open, revealing a freshly showered Jeremy—his hair beeswaxed and his buttonhole emblazoned with a king-sized poinsettia to indicate his splayed-open heart—who would invite me to dance with him on some nearby furniture. Before I’d have the chance to protest, his gentle brown stare would glimmer and I would know he had caught sight of Belle, whose presence would have inevitably rocked the foundation of his world as though it were the very first time, all over again. Let me take you back, Belle, he’d whisper, with all the softness and tragedy of any final pleading. I’m here now. I came here for you. I came to take you back to New York.

  The effect of it all was so transporting that I didn’t immediately notice Belle stepping forward to drag a folding vanity screen to one side of the room. I blinked and found myself looking straight into the horn of Violetta the Victrola, facing me mournfully from the opposite corner of the den.

  “You kept her?” I blurted out, regaining my voice as soon as I clapped eyes on the sentimental machine.

  “I had no right to,” she agreed, hastily. “I can see that now. I was so selfish—I wasn’t brave enough to stay with Jeremy but still I couldn’t let him go.”

  She took a seat on her desk chair and watched my slow approach toward Violetta. Just like the moment Jeremy unveiled her to me atop the soulless fibers of The Brothers’s recycled carpet, totally delighted at the prospect of lighting up Belle’s world, I was drawn to the gramophone. I walked toward Violetta tentatively, the same way one might approach the mangled wreckage of a car crash that has been shifted to the side of the road to accommodate passing traffic. And what I saw was in fact mangled. The walnut base was badly scuffed and worst of all the curved neck of the horn was conspicuously dented. It peere
d at me crookedly like the pleasant but off-kilter smile of a stroke victim.

  “What the hell happened to her?” I asked, furious. Not only had Belle carted off one of Jeremy’s great treasures, but she had also been totally careless with it, stashing the evidence of her destruction behind a vanity screen in a panic room.

  “Chase,” she replied, shamefacedly. If I had a nickel for every time someone answered one of my questions with the single syllable of that damn man’s name. “Chase was drunk one night cavorting around with his mates and someone whacked her with a cricket bat.”

  “Someone?”

  “I honestly don’t know who. Maybe it was Chase. I think it was an accident. But maybe it wasn’t … he knows full well that my hanging on to Violetta is proof that I can’t let go of Jeremy. I’m sure he can’t bear it.”

  What was it about Jeremy that Chase despised so intensely? I kept staring at the broken shell of the once-beautiful gramophone and in no time the answer sailed out of the horn toward me clear as a song. It was so simple. Part of it might have been Belle’s genuine love for Jeremy that Chase must have sensed at some level. But did that actually matter to him? More than anything I guessed it was Jeremy’s earnestness, his lack of access and privilege, which meant he would always try harder—he would always pine for things and appreciate them more deeply. Everything he cared about would always mean so much more to him. Chase would never, in all his life, be able to want something as badly as Jeremy. Even his name was a blatant irony for a man who had never had to chase a single thing in his entire life. At the tail end of his drunken evening, when his friends were gone and roughhousing their way through a series of slumbering Mayfair mews, Chase might have slumped against a hallway wall in exhaustion, rasping to his wife an explanation in lieu of an apology: You’re too good for me, Belle. I know it—I’ve always known it. And I know I’ve always wanted you for all the wrong reasons. But still, I can’t allow him to have you.

  “You need to take her with you when you move,” Belle said to me, her voice rich with feeling. “Back to New York. Back to Jeremy.”

  “I’m sure there are shipping services that can assist you with that,” I answered, curtly.

  “No, M. It needs to be you. I need you to tell him for me.”

  “Tell Jeremy what exactly? You took off with his gramophone, Chase hit the bourbon too hard one night and, whoops, so sorry, your grandfather’s treasure took a beating with a cricket bat?”

  The secret passageway door was still open, the grandfather clock rotated toward us. A nervous buzz suddenly laced the air and I was certain an intoxicated Chase would charge in at any second to catch us idling dreamily under the gramophone’s spell. I couldn’t guess what would happen after that—maybe he’d march up the stairs and hurl the thing straight off the roof.

  “I need to go now, Belle.”

  “Please,” she begged me. “I’ll have it delivered to you tomorrow. You need to take it with you and tell him that it’s broken—that I’m so deeply sorry that I broke it.” Then her voice shifted up, like an optimistic key change in a popular song on a radio countdown. “He’s so handy at these sorts of things. He worked miracles with Granny’s watch. Tell him that I know he can make Violetta right again. I know he can find a way to fix all the damage that’s been done to her.”

  “And if he says no?” I asked, as if his refusal would be a bona fide possibility.

  “If he doesn’t want her, you need to keep her. Just for the time being. She could never have a real home here. You’ll look after her, M. The way you always do.”

  IT’S A BARNUM AND BAILEY WORLD

  The next Monday morning, I gave myself a long look in the bathroom mirror before leaving my flat and heading into the slick confines of the Barts London office. Piggelo had taken the red-eye over from New York and would already be stationed in the back of a black Mercedes S-Class on steady approach from Heathrow—a dark torpedo snaking its way through leagues of gray to eventually pierce the heart of the City. I widened my eyes at the forbidding image, holding my stare for a few seconds, then broke out laughing for the first time in weeks. Everything felt so much lighter, so much less grim and desperate now that I knew I was on my way out—that in a matter of a few hours, I would be handing Piggelo my resignation. To give myself a taste of my imminent new life, I had granted myself a BlackBerry-free weekend so was blissfully unburdened by the usual string of imaginary fire drills. All of that was enough to send me running to the City with gusto, taking the stairs two at a time when I stepped out of the train at St. Paul’s Tube station and discovered the escalator had stalled again. Mopping a fine film of sweat from my brow, I surfaced from the station and stared up at the Cathedral dome. As I admired the resilient roof that by some crazy miracle was largely undamaged by the prolonged devastation of the Blitz, a woman heading in the opposite direction and lost in a similar trance bustled straight into me.

  “I’m so sorry!” she apologized, teetering herself back upright. “My God—M.?”

  “Jamie!” I cried, face-to-face with Jamie Gruenstein, one of my few original female colleagues from our early training days at The Brothers. Jamie had cut her losses early, leaving after less than a year. Though many trainees speculated that she must have suffered a nervous breakdown—or a nervous collapse, which one was worse?—in reality she had decided Wall Street just wasn’t for her and went on to become a middle school math teacher.

  “You’re the last person I expected to run into!” she announced, excitedly, then physically darkened as she glanced down at my deal bag. “No! I cannot believe you’re still there!” She marveled at me as if presented with a remarkably preserved prehistoric fossil. “You must be the last woman standing?”

  “Ha,” I laughed, blending amusement and pride and sorrow into a single note. “Essentially.”

  “Boy, you must be tough as nails. I couldn’t bear all of that awful cold-calling and that man with those dead eyes—what what his name again? How can I not remember his name!—always looming over my shoulder with his logbook and making my skin crawl. I actually had a nightmare about him the other night. And those metronomes! God almighty, do you remember Piggelo’s metronomes?”

  “I do. The metronomes are gone but they still haunt me, too. The guy with the dead eyes is still around. Drewe.”

  Her face contorted at the name. “Did you know Krissie from our class was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder?” she offered, breathlessly. “PTSD!”

  “You’re not serious!”

  “Yup. Can you blame her? I ran into her a few years ago and she said it was that improv game ‘Die!’ that sent her right over the edge. She’s been in therapy for years. They must have changed their ways if you moved to London for them?” she asked nervously.

  “Oh, you know what they say—the more things change…” After a few beats of vacant blinking, I changed gears. “Anyway, what brings you to London?”

  “Oh, I married an Englishman,” Jamie answered, airily. “He just couldn’t bear being away from Blighty. Twisted my arm to move here. And really, I can teach anywhere, right? I haven’t looked into the teaching license stuff yet—all the free museums are too distracting!” As Jamie stopped to inhale, visibly overcome by the vast cultural possibilities offered by the capital, the old dread I felt whenever I surfed Escape the Street and scanned alpaca-related job opportunities started to seep in. I watched Jamie rattle on about galleries and the Old Vic and the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park with the same fascination I might have had examining a newly formed scab at close range. I was on the verge of stepping out from the great Bartholomew bubble and all sorts of things—glorious, gruesome, and totally average things—populated the world I was reentering. I had no idea where I would fit in to that overwhelming and ambiguous pecking order—or lack of pecking order. I was terrified. “What about you? Is London a permanent stop?”

  “No, you’ve actually caught me on my way out. I’m moving back to New York.”

  “Oh, what
a shame! I was going to ask you to high tea at Claridge’s. Why are you leaving, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “I’ve fallen in love.” I glowed with a new kind of pride—and with it felt empowered to face whatever worldly terrors awaited me. “And I’m leaving The Brothers. I’m taking a job that involves no cold-calling. Or people with dead eyes.”

  “A dream man and a dream job!” she exclaimed, happily clasping her hands together. “I’d say you’ve got everything sorted, M.”

  “I have, haven’t I?” I smiled, tilting my head to one side.

  We wished each other well and went on our ways.

  When I arrived at my desk, Chase ducked out of his office, pitched forward at an awkward angle with fists resting on his hips. Something was clearly afoot. Instead of thundering toward me with an obnoxious remark in his typical way, he gave the disturbing impression of constipation. We locked eyes for several beats. I was struck by how unbelievably tired he looked. For years Chase’s face had resembled a battered leather armchair left outside to brave some hard-hitting weather patterns, a by-product of his good fortune and his ability to live the sunny good life. But there had always been a dominant quality of youthfulness in him, a boyish insistence that would enable him to pull off acting twenty-five at thirty-five and eventually, at forty-five. Something had changed. His skin looked prematurely creased, with lines cut at angles that intensified around the eyes. It was as though he had just suffered an agonizing night with sinuses clogged sleeping face-first on his pillow. And at closer range you saw wisps of silver pushing into his golden locks, muting them and announcing how exhausted—and just plain overwhelmed—he was by his new personal and professional responsibilities. Making matters worse, I could also see that he had gotten a haircut over the weekend—a very bad haircut that had probably happened at the hands of a fabulous stylist Belle insisted he try—and he wore that embarrassed look of knowing exactly how awful it was.