“I disagree. There is still critical work to be done.” She had been looking at her computer screen, lightly handling her mouse until she turned to train her glassy beads on me. “We live by certain truths, M. People that matter like dealing with other people that matter. And everyone has a price. What’s yours?”
“Let me put it this way,” I ventured, attempting to translate my answer into Piggelo’s particular dialect of bottomless bottom lines, “if you promised me all of the gold in The Brothers’s three-story vaults, I still wouldn’t stay.” This may have stunned her but of course she didn’t show it.
“This isn’t at all like you,” she said, attempting another tack. “Giving up on a thing. Not following through. Quitting midstream.”
“You’ve never known me,” I said, plainly.
“What did you just say?”
“I didn’t know me, so how could you have possibly known me? It’s a great shame, but you actually don’t know the first thing about me. There was so much that I had to give. So much that you totally missed.” I was finally setting the record straight with her and I could feel a surge of adrenaline pick up speed in my veins. I took a step toward Piggelo, and based on engrained good manners alone, put my arm forward to shake her hand good-bye. She eyed my hand and, for just a moment, I thought she wouldn’t reciprocate the gesture. But then she stood up—she was always so much shorter than you’d expect her to be—and offered me a limp mass that I closed my right hand around. Her handshake was unbelievably weak for such a formidable figure—so weak it almost felt like grasping the last, sad flap of a dying fish. I held Piggelo’s damp hand in mine for a few seconds, then let go and moved toward the door. “This isn’t a winning team,” I said to her, casting one reflective last look back. “This isn’t even a team.” The shine of her eyes dared me to tell her something she didn’t already know. “It’s a place that preys on the good intentions of hardworking people.” Her infantry of stilettos stood on the carpet alongside her like toy soldiers, shining and hollow and beautiful but adding little actual value to the world. “All this time you wanted me to think I had disappointed you. But I’m the one leaving, and I’m walking out the door knowing that actually, it was the other way around.”
I moved briskly away from Piggelo. The spotless chrome elevator zoomed me down to Earth and I scrambled for my Brothers BlackBerry, a hunk of plastic serving only one remaining purpose in my life. I didn’t need to log on to Verity. I didn’t need to use my TheDivineMissM pseudonym. I needed to tell the truth directly to the one person who needed to hear it. I opened my e-mail and my thumbs flew across the keyboard to compose a message that had the clipped and stuttering feel of a nineteenth-century telegram:
Scott. Finally taking the leap. No longer scared. Green Marys at Minetta next Saturday? Need to tell you how right you were all along. Don’t respond to this message. My BlackBerry will self-destruct in five seconds. Love, M.
The elevator doors whisked open and I stepped into the lobby, my stride lengthening with mounting excitement. I was on my way out. And up. I was without a shadow of a doubt on my way up. Before reaching the front revolving door, I tossed my Brothers-branded deal bag—with employee card and BlackBerry zipped securely inside—over to an ever-alert security guard. He lunged to his left and caught it like a receiver cradling a perfectly executed pass deep in the enemy’s end zone.
THE QUEST
It was Christmas in New York and the great metropolis was a wrapped and twinkling present that it was happily giving back to itself as a reward for another shining year done. On December 24, Jeremy Kirby and I were going for a bike ride through the West Village. We both no longer worked at Bartholomew Brothers. I was starting my new job at Bridges Capital in early January and Jeremy was getting ready to leave New York. We were meeting so he could tell me about the plans he had made.
Earlier that month Jeremy voluntarily left The Brothers. Belle posting her blog entry on the 150th anniversary party permanently compromised his standing with Piggelo and the firm, and their internal campaign against him became so pointed that one afternoon he packed up his desk and quietly submitted his notice. He said that the timing was right—that he had greater, greener pastures to pursue. Dropping his BlackBerry and employee card on Drewe’s desk, he slipped silently into the chrome elevator, making one final crossing through that magnificent lobby to reenter the world, a man freed but for the time being solitary and unpinned from the focal point of his dreams.
That fall he had retracted his bid on the Bedford-Stuyvesant one-bedroom apartment, the oasis he had wanted to build for himself and Belle. He gave up his Midtown cubbyhole and retreated to an even more economical apartment next to a train station just north of the city, far enough away from its humming and silver din. On the northbound ride home, I’m sure he was grateful he couldn’t see the New York skyline turning translucent and almost tender in the fading light. At night, when the heavens shifted and cleaved open and suddenly it was raining, I imagined him lying awake in his apartment, counting the cracks that cut jagged and unjust motifs across his bedroom ceiling. His window would be open and he would breathe in the freshening wonder, remembering winter whites and an inside-out, polka-dotted umbrella. He would replay a rainy December lunch hour and think of the glowing pink line of his life’s Before and After. The line would condense into one luminous spot and catapult an ocean’s length eastward to a little British isle smothered in fog. He would stare harder at the ceiling, trying to pick out the best path to rescue that pastel dot from the haze and bring it back to its rightful place. Until he did, the pale pink would keep burning through that persistent mist for him—it was, and always would be, Annabelle Bailey.
When we met in a coffee shop on Sullivan Street that Christmas Eve, he was sitting at the front window bench, bent over a small wooden table. I took a few steps closer to look at him through the window and saw that he was scribbling into a battered notebook angled thoughtfully in front of him. He was ignoring his espresso and mysterious lines and words he had written—all-capped or circled or asterisked with obvious emotion—jumped up from the page and leapt over his shoulder to declare their importance to me:
What is true will find a way
Altitude is a new angle
Luxor
*Love Valley?
Sensing a shadow behind him, he turned his head back and jumped up to wave at me through the glass. A cluster of winter berries was pinned to his overcoat lapel—holly or hawthorn berries nestled into some ivy—and I was relieved, overjoyed even, to see a crackle of his old fire back in the exaggerated peaks and troughs of his handwriting, in the brightness of that buttonhole. But at the same time a look of yearning hovered in his eyes, telling a more complicated story. He was still cycling around on his old bicycle Lucky Strike—I saw it chained to a parking sign next to the café—and it was easy to picture him retracing old zigzagging routes that would only become more and more romantic in his mind with the softening effects of time.
When I moved back to New York that fall, I brought Violetta with me to deliver to Jeremy as Belle had requested. One Saturday I took the train up to his suburban apartment with the large square box perched on the seat next to me, bound securely with a half roll of packing tape and filled with enough bubble wrap to cushion an elephant. I arrived and set the box down on the little folding table in Jeremy’s kitchen. He clocked its contents with a single glance. Even its box dimensions were burnt in his brain.
“No, M.” He stopped me, extending one palm out as I flicked open my Swiss Army knife and got to work cutting through the miles of tape. “Please—don’t.”
“What do you mean? Why?” I frowned. We stood staring at each other as the apartment trembled gently with the momentum of a passing train.
“I want to remember it the way it was. I’m not ready to see her. Not yet, anyhow. Maybe at some point in the future…”
“Okay,” I conceded, clicking my knife shut.
“But will you keep her for me? Until
I’m ready to see her again?”
I decided I wouldn’t mention the damage, the once-beautiful and now-broken silhouette of that gorgeous music-making machine. I wouldn’t lead him on any further by delivering Belle’s message of faith that he could find a way to fix what she had smashed. That she wanted their mascot held in safekeeping, too. Instead, I would find the right repair shop or instrument expert or whatever it would take and I would make Violetta shine like new for him—like it was 1925 all over again.
“It would be the greatest honor, Jeremy. I’ll take the very best care of her. And you’ll know where to find her when you’re ready.”
Inside the coffee shop, I sat down at Jeremy’s table with an Americano steaming in front of me.
“I’m heading back into the basket,” he announced, his voice slow and thoughtful. The statement made me imagine Jeremy, curled into a tight fetal position, rocking back and forth in an adult-sized bassinet. “I’m going to balloon again,” he clarified.
“You’re taking a trip? That’s the perfect plan. Some time out so you can—”
“No, I’m not taking time out, M.,” he corrected me, gently. “I’m going away. To work.”
“To work? Where?”
“Europe, for a start. There’s a big ballooning festival every year in the Swiss Alps. In a place called Château-d’Oex. It’s all happened so quickly.”
“Wait, what’s happened so quickly?”
“Do you remember Søren Sørensen—that Danish adventurer Piggelo tried pitching to for so many years?” I did remember Søren Sørensen. He was a madcap multimillionaire who abandoned his original career as a commodities trader to strike off in attempts to set new speed or distance records in everything from gliding and ballooning to tall-ship sailing and dogsledding in odd and obscure corners of the globe. Even after Jeremy had been banished to his behind-the-scenes Compliance role, The Brothers had used him as a regular talking point on their hunt for Sørensen. They even turned him into a feathery fly, launching him into the awkward waters of an early conference call with the prospect: In fact, we’ve got our own record-setting balloonist right here on the line with us, Søren. Jeremy Kirby. We think of Jeremy as a testament to what Bartholomew Brothers is all about—he’s fearless in his risk taking, but at all times he uses the utmost care and caution to manage every risk that he does take.… I cringed at the memory. Jeremy and the daring Dane had bantered pleasantly about ballooning for a few minutes on that first call, discussing Sørensen’s recent historic flight above the summit of Everest. But rumor had it that Sørensen shut down the first—and only—live meeting he had with Piggelo before the ten-minute mark. Jeremy and I viewed Sørensen as a sort of demigod from that point on. “If you can believe it, he remembered me and called me up a few weeks ago. His copilot dislocated a shoulder and he was in a pinch for someone to fly with him at the festival. He wants me to stay on with him for the rest of the season. With all of his corporate endorsements, he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I think it should be enough to give my mom some peace of mind.”
“Sørensen,” I marveled. Like Jeremy’s account of his very first meeting with Bill Withers, the story had an unlikely quality to it—the kind that widened your eyes and unhinged your jaw and smudged out your most cynical inclinations. “I guess you couldn’t convince him to consider the Adirondacks over the Alps?” It was a selfish question—of course I wanted Jeremy closer to me. But that didn’t matter. Most of all I wanted to reach out across the tiny table and shake him with happiness that he was untethering himself from his disappointment and going up, up, and away to forge his own path. “It’ll be a wonderful new start for you.”
“Søren’s opened a new door for me and I’m going to walk through it,” he agreed, his eyes lightening into a warm and sad chestnut color. “I’m not sure what it will lead to but it’ll set me on my way. I’m looking for something. Or some place, rather. I’ll know it when I see it.”
On that Christmas Eve, later that afternoon, I would be taking a much more modest trip of my own, heading on another northbound train to Rowayton to see Scott and spend the holiday with him and his parents. When I returned from London we met at the Minetta Tavern and, with my hands so shaky and stomach so knotted I could barely touch my Green Mary, I looked into his clear eyes and asked him to give me another chance.
“When I was thirteen, my dad took me golfing for the first time,” I opened, nervously. “I’d graduated from the driving range onto a proper course—my first nine holes. I was so wound up I made a spectacle of myself at the first tee. God, was I mad. He patted my shoulder and tried to calm me down by saying he was giving me a mulligan—it was my first real try on a real course and I deserved a do-over. I hated that idea. And I refused to accept it, telling him that everyone should get their one shot and it’s up to them to make something of it.” Scott said nothing, staring at me so steadily with freckles so unreadable that I fidgeted even more anxiously with my hands. “Since then I’ve operated with a No Mulligan Policy. You only get one shot is what I said from that point on.” Then I slowed to a standstill, unsure of how to tell him how embarrassingly wrong I’d been. “The thing is, I’ve changed my mind about the mulligans. Sometimes we need them. I need one now. I screwed up very badly and need you to tell me that I deserve a do-over. That you’ll give me a second shot.”
Scott said nothing, just slowly stirred his Green Mary with torturous care. Then he reached over and placed a small box wrapped in brown paper on the bar top in front of me. I opened it and, despite my angst, couldn’t help but boom with laughter—proudly rotating the square in the air above my head.
“Ding-dong, the witch is dead,” I declared.
He had made me a miniature tombstone—my very own commemorative Lucite cube engraved with my name and reading:
IN MEMORIAM
BARTHOLOMEW BROTHERS BANKER
2006–2011
“Okay, M., I’ll give you your mulligan.” He smiled, his freckles scattering warmly as he pulled me into his arms. “But only if you promise we’ll do something wonderful with it.”
My imminent journey to Connecticut with Scott and the news of Jeremy’s departure made my snowy afternoon with him equal parts elation and melancholy.
The streets were oddly silent for Christmas Eve and the huge snowstorm that had passed through the night before insulated the city with a great white down blanket that would disintegrate into a ratty gray rag by the next morning. At Jeremy’s suggestion, I had borrowed a bike so we could go for a ride together like two miniature figures gliding along the sugar-glazed tiered surfaces of a giant white cake. We finished our coffees and started with two clockwise and counterclockwise circles of Washington Square Arch, then pedaled west along Fourth Street.
“I’ve been trying to be more philosophical about everything that has happened,” he said to me, serenely. “Everyone kept saying that by working at The Brothers we were on a gilded elevator. If it was an elevator, it was broken. And if it was a ladder, most of its rungs were missing. I’m sure I did all of the right things—everything I was supposed to. But it didn’t add up to what I was told it would add up to.”
“That may be the great tagline of our generation, you know.”
“The thing is, it wasn’t the right path, M. It wasn’t the path meant for me. That was the real problem. And I haven’t stopped thinking about it. I’ve decided that maybe we decide what the grand total will be. The grand total of our life, I mean. Maybe it all depends on the path we pick. I sometimes wonder if we would have gotten to this same place if we’d never gone to the Bender that rainy December night.”
“The Bender itself was irrelevant,” I answered, matter of fact, though of course it was far from irrelevant for me because it’s where I found Scott. “If you hadn’t gone to the Bender, you would have found another way. Somehow, you would have managed to find her, Jeremy.”
“You’re right. I think that’s what I’m trying to say. I hold myself responsible. The world is only a
s large or as small as we want to believe.” He exhaled into the chalky winter air. “And if we want something, if we really believe in something, we can always find another way to get there.” We had reached the diagonal of Seventh Avenue—the gateway to the heart of the West Village and all of its most charming prewar nooks and crannies—and were waiting for the red light to change. “Let’s go find Chumley’s,” he suddenly proposed, just as the pedestrian symbol flashed in our favor. “A hot toddy could be just the thing right about now.”
Jeremy knew the main supporting wall in the old speakeasy Chumley’s on Barrow Street had collapsed years before—a sorrowful urban moment for many—and he knew that I knew the bar was long gone. But, just for the afternoon, he wanted to pretend. And I, seeing the great strides he was making to move forward, indulged him, allowing our ride to become the pursuit of uncatchable ghosts, the search for long-since-faded messages of Fate and Luck and Love scratched in swooping pink loops onto sidewalks in chalk.
I don’t know who spotted it first. But pedaling somewhere along Barrow Street, we saw something that looked like a bang-up imitation of Cupid’s Arrow leaning against a signpost at a friendly twenty-degree angle. All of the color drained evenly from Jeremy’s face. And then, like a vision sliced cleanly from the most well-worn corners of his imagination, we saw Belle Bailey, in the flesh, skipping out from a brownstone, bundled in yards upon yards of bright red wool. Where she was coming from and where she was going were anyone’s guess. The cold had infused her cheeks with the vibrancy of a bunch of blooming roses. Her hair was still bobbed, but those knifepoint ends were gone and the cut had a prettily disheveled look to it. The gaunt and angled figure I’d met at The Connaught had mellowed and it was apparent that a human survival mechanism had kicked in—some essential practicality dwelling deep inside her that would remain when the last of her girlish notions and cotton-candy dreaming dissolved. She had forced herself to find a way to live with, and maybe even find some contentment in, her marriage to Chase—the fake, plastic world she had built.
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