Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  I hadn’t asked Belle to help or to meddle but that was irrelevant—she did it all the same. And I imagined the mortification I would have suffered had she called Scott a few days earlier, before I had sent him my message. Before we’d arranged our date. Yet she had also just saved me with the miracle of the walnut loaf. It was the typical oscillation between appreciation and exasperation I experienced with her. Swinging between totally lovable and totally reproachable, Belle always left me wondering what mysterious agenda actually drove her. But I had to keep all of these thoughts to myself. She was so systematically sunny to the greater world that I was the one who would look bad if I made any critical remark about her.

  “I think she’s trying to beef up her blog a bit,” I explained, taking the higher road. I rewarded myself, tossing in one snide line. “You know, write a more serious piece from time to time so her readers don’t drown in a sea of macarons and wall sconces.”

  “God knows they all need saving from those!”

  “Would you permit me one last reply before I break corporate code and relinquish this thing to you for the night?”

  “With all the talk of my hunkiness, it would be cruel to leave them hanging,” he conceded.

  My arm retreated and I tapped a message back to Belle directly, not via Jeremy, without hesitation:

  How was the date? The night is still young! BB, ask Scott how it went when you’re at his office next week.

  I hit Send and handed the BlackBerry back to Scott.

  “You don’t want to wait for her reply?”

  “Not necessary,” was my trim response, knowing there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell she’d answer. Belle—in the wrong and outed—would stay moodily silent. “I think we’ve given all of that enough attention for one evening.”

  Feeling strangely empowered, I executed a curious series of finger snaps that somehow triggered the appearance of one of the mustached waiters—this one channeling d’Artagnan, dashing to or from a dual-wielding sword fight. My eyes scanned the menu then shifted up to lock on to Scott, his stare reflecting the backlit, cocktail-fueled fanfare unspooling at tables all around us.

  “I’ll have the Ready Aim Fire, please.” The menu listed it as a concoction boasting dashes of hellfire bitters. It matched my feisty frame of mind to a tee. “How ’bout we make it two?”

  The night was young and so was I. The truth was I was determined to be young, to act young for once, and, untethered from my BlackBerry and the ball and chain of its buzz and Belle’s beautifully performed intrusions, to take the share of bright things and bright people I was entitled to but had ignored for so long. Scott was opening an invisible door that led to a wider world I hadn’t imagined. It was like we were standing on the roof of the Plaza and he was pointing out the more subtle, upper stretches of the city that I had somehow never noticed before—unfurling with miles of magically concealed alleys and nooks and gateways before handing me a hang glider and saying It’s all out there waiting for you—now jump!

  “Ready Aim Fire? A fiery choice, madam. It suits you perfectly.”

  With all the flashing shadows and the cacophonic laughter and the waxed facial hair curling at me every direction I turned, I couldn’t tell whether it was d’Artagnan or Scott who had said it.

  Later that night, back in my apartment, I was happily hazy from my handful-too-many cocktails and prolonged nearness to Scott. In a gust of giddiness I did one (small) circle of my apartment and flung myself onto my bed in a giant spread-eagle. I sat up and composed myself, heading to the kitchen to pour myself a pint glass of water. Then—consequences be damned—I sat down at my computer, logged on to Verity as TheDivineMissM, and rattled off my first online “truth”:

  I feel pretty and witty and everything I know I should have been feeling back when I was barely sixteen. Is this what it feels like to finally get your turn?

  GET SAVING, LITTLE GUY

  Soon enough, spring was a distant memory, having died a premature death at the smothering hands of summer just as we’d been getting to know her. It was a steaming and unforgiving Monday morning in August when I found Jeremy standing over his desk, shaking his head at an inside page of The Wall Street Journal.

  “You don’t believe in all of this nonsense, do you, M.?” he asked, turning to me as I walked into our row. “A girl with a good head on her shoulders wouldn’t.”

  I peeked over his shoulder down at the broadsheet. It wasn’t choppy markets that were getting him down. He was staring gloomily at a full-page Tiffany & Co. advert featuring a gargantuan engagement ring that, at a passing glance, could have been mistaken for a freshly groomed Wollman Rink in Central Park. The accompanying headline read, in the bluntest terms: GET SERIOUS.

  “I wouldn’t mind it if I only flipped past these things in the morning paper. But someone’s been tearing them out and leaving them scattered around Belle’s apartment.”

  “Someone?” I repeated. He could hardly think it was Belle’s cleaning lady. Nuptials were no doubt on her brain. The last La Belle Vie printouts she left me revealed she’d become obsessed with collecting and posting stories of dreamy marriage proposals:

  Beneath enormous flakes of snow floating around us on a cobblestoned lane in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.

  Eating breakfast in bed, when he asked me if I was ready to start my day—and the rest of my life.

  On a bike ride chasing lighthouses on the rocky coast of Maine. The chain came off his bike so he waved me over and said he had two important questions for me: can you help me fix this chain, and can you make me the happiest man in the world?

  On a picnic in a secret rose garden where, completely overcome, tears filled his eyes and he dropped down on one knee. It was the first and only time I’ve seen him cry.

  There was also an entry featuring photos of Jeremy cradling a miscellaneous baby, whose I had no idea, with captions like Just practicing! and I’m experiencing some serious stroller envy, ladies.

  I could only imagine the dizzying effect it had on him.

  “The ad copy,” he continued, grazing his fingers lightly along the handsome, 72-point font, “is getting more direct by the day. They’re cutting right to the chase.”

  “Seems a bit desperate,” I commented, closing the paper as he stared at me with wounded eyes. “I mean desperate of Tiffany. Do you know if we’re shorting its stock?”

  Jeremy loosened his tie.

  “They certainly could give a guy a break one of these days.”

  “You goddamn well wish, Kirby!” Chase boomed, heartily, crashing into our midst and flinging a golf bag haphazardly alongside his desk. On top of his action-figure looks, apparently Chase had wolf-like hearing, too. I grimaced as I looked down at the golf bag. I couldn’t stand his club covers that resembled jaunty mini ski hats, each topped with an insufferable pom-pom and monogrammed with the initials CB in an unmissable kelly green. “A girl like that won’t accept anything less than three carats. I’m talking minimum. Get saving, little guy.”

  Leezel—who had trundled in directly behind Chase to take her seat—snickered from inside her cubicle to let us know that she agreed, on the three carats and on Jeremy’s not having a prayer. Keeping my back turned on Leezel and Chase, I rolled my eyes and tossed the paper into the recycling bin.

  “Vintage,” I stated, authoritatively, with one word papering over the cataclysmic effects of Chase’s remark. “If Belle had a choice, she’d choose a vintage ring any day of the week.”

  Chase made an exaggerated vomiting noise then turned to mouth something silently at Leezel who, at the sound of the word vintage, looked as though she had been pierced by a tranquilizer dart. He might as well have topped things off by posting a sanctioning sign at his desk that read VINTAGE IS FOR POOR PEOPLE before plucking a pom-pommed long iron from his bag and powering to the other end of the floor.

  “M.,” Leezel drawled from behind her cubicle wall, not bothering to stand up. “You were expected in Piggelo’s office five minut
es ago.”

  “Since when?” I cried. Jeremy and his pressurized plight to “get serious” shrank to nothing on my radar.

  “Since I put the appointment in your calendar after you requested I schedule time with her for you,” she snipped back.

  There would be no upside in trying to berate or reason with the woman—though I knew that if she had scheduled a meeting with Piggelo for Chase, she would have ensured his punctuality by heaving him there herself on an elevated sedan chair if need be.

  “We’ll talk properly about this later,” I assured Jeremy, firmly. I grabbed a pen and notebook, leaving him shaking his bewildered head at his desk.

  I sprinted down the hall to Piggelo’s office as elegantly as I could manage. Amazingly, her last meeting had run long—her back faced her glass office wall as she stared down three terrified-looking men who were shoehorned together into one sweaty mass on her love seat. They sat next to the row of shockingly heeled stilettos Piggelo kept lined along her office floor. Banished from her town house as a high-risk threat to her glass staircase, they were never worn but always stood at attention, with spiked heels that were either science-fiction haute couture or medieval torture devices. The thought of one of her hefty feet jamming unnaturally into any of those shoes sent the mind reeling to very dark places. It also hinted at the fault line that was shifting deep within the Bartholomew Brothers culture. When I joined the firm, underplay had always been the order of the day—it was an essential quality they looked for in recruits and was one of the reasons I’d gone to work there. Men sported Timex Ironman watches, not vintage Rolexes. Women wore modest eternity bands, only flashing their monstrous cocktail rings after hours, outside the office, swinging them at one another like high-carat light sabers. People bragged about substance not surface; you would, for example, boast about climbing K2 or Everest, not about the number of thankless Sherpas you hired to carry you up. Piggelo’s unworn stiletto lineup—worth many multiples of what a Sherpa could hope to pull in over any number of climbing seasons—was an ominous sign the tide had turned.

  I was directed by Piggelo’s assistant to take one spin around the floor while Piggelo finished with the tragic trio. At the end of my first loop, I passed Drewe’s glass office—adjacent to Piggelo’s so he too could benefit from the most cinematic views of Lady Liberty available on the floor. Chase was inside with him, holding his long iron in one hand while drawing on a dry-erase board animatedly with his other. Drewe was nodding as he followed Chase’s scribbling intently, copying it all down on an oversized piece of paper. I couldn’t make out exactly what he was writing but the board was covered in elaborate football play patterns, pockmarked with crosses and arrows all presumably leading to the goalposts of a coveted Managing Directorship.

  Everyone knew Drewe was on a campaign to improve his personal brand and thereby make MD. The Brothers’s 360-degree annual review process was only months away and Drewe felt his promotion hinged on securing more favorable reviews from his peers who had systematically shredded him in years past. Mechanical intrusiveness, lack of arm use when walking, self-appointment as Piggelo’s minion-in-chief, and those ungodly eyes were the usual grievances. People also couldn’t stand the way he’d teeter on the edge of his office chair, doing hundreds of abdominal crunches as he vacantly stared at his computer as if no one could see what he was doing. So he had taken to inviting Chase into his office every few weeks to enlighten him on the gritty and gruff realities of what people actually thought of him. At the same time he could presumably learn the finer points of alpha behavior from the most masculine specimen on the floor. I couldn’t imagine what Chase was saying to him and how wildly he was leading him astray. They both side-glanced at me—Chase with an adolescent smirk plastering his face—as I attempted my second approach to Piggelo’s office. A few feet away from her door, I heard:

  “M.!”

  Piggelo’s volcanic bellow ricocheted from her glass wall to glance off the sweating heads of the sorry triumvirate, who were still staring at one another miserably like a collection of haunted portraits. The cry startled them out of their seats and summoned me to take their place. Never veering her eyes from her computer, she waved one arm in lasso-like circles—motioning for the next trembling body to take its seat. I entered her office, as always unable to discern whether or not she was engaged on a call. A sudden, forced burst of laughter into her headset indicated she was, so I assumed my position on the love seat as she finished her conversation, boring her shining, beady eyes through the back of my skull.

  “The work is good,” she finally said to me. It was a cryptic line but I was grateful for it. I shouldn’t have needed to hear it. I knew I did good work. I cared about the portfolios and legacies of our clients and, in return, they trusted me. With my navy suits and neatly angled bob, I may have looked serious. Just the thought of exposed cleavage—a tactic a number of female private bankers I knew used regularly—sent me reeling with distress. Though I didn’t sport plunging tops, the fact was I always cared. I wasn’t acting to win Piggelo’s fleshy applause or clamoring for another grade title notch on the greasy pole of advancement at The Brothers. Doing a good job mattered to me. At the time, I was too busy being diligent to connect the distressing dots—to understand the irony, and all the dirty implications, of people like me never being credited or thanked, and people like Leezel Bartholomew being the ones with the Lucite employee recognition cubes on their desks.

  “I’m glad to hear it,” I replied, tentatively. I was clutching my notebook in my lap and could feel its paper cover begin deconstructing into a damp, pulpy mass beneath my perspiring palms.

  To heighten the awkwardness, a uniformed member of the executive-dining-room staff suddenly bustled through Piggelo’s door holding an elaborate lunch tray with a meek-looking vase of flowers and an unidentifiable bowl of pale soup.

  Piggelo eyed the bowl.

  “You’re far too early.” She paused. “Leek?”

  The word leek released all of the air from the soup-bearing man who had been holding his breath in readiness for some form of impact. You could see he was, fundamentally, a gentle soul. He shook his head with profound regret.

  “Cauliflower.”

  “I am disgusted.”

  That statement—uttered at such a low decibel she might as well have been a Komodo dragon growling it at him from the depths of a medieval moat—physically rocked him. The tray wobbled to the right, depositing a spoonful of steaming cauliflower soup onto his hand. He continued to smile bravely at her as that small patch of skin sizzled. Even from the love seat I could see an army of sweat beads spring into an emergency drill formation across his brow.

  “I understand.”

  With a bow, and another wobble handing him a second third-degree burn to match his first, the man retreated in a racket of clanking cutlery, the flower vase toppling tragically onto the carpet outside Piggelo’s door.

  “The work is good,” she repeated, wiping the unsatisfactory soup episode clean from her mind though I was sure it would lead to the gentle, soup-bearing man’s immediate termination. (We all suspected that Piggelo had a giant red ejection button fitted on the underside of her stately desk to help her resolve such disappointing moments—with a single press of a finger she could send any given person on the floor catapulting out the nearest window, or have them vanish forever in a suitably anticlimatic puff of smoke.) I blinked back at her. These were the typical angles of any interaction with Piggelo—cold and cryptic but saturated with layers of meaning you knew you would never chip through even if you were armed with an industrial ice drill. She had already given me one line of praise for the miracle of Belle’s walnut loaf. Hearing another positive comment so fast on its heels blew my bobbed hair straight back. Without meaning to, I executed the longest pregnant pause I had ever managed in my tenure at the firm. Her eyes flickered for a moment with some distant derivative of approval.

  “We’ll need your help with an upcoming project.”

&
nbsp; “Of course, I’d be—”

  “We’ll probably need to send you away for it. Can we count on you to be on board?”

  Piggelo wasn’t pitching something to me, exactly. She didn’t pitch to you unless you had north of two hundred and fifty million in liquid assets in which case she would be shuttled in to you like a five-ton search-and-rescue chopper to ask for, and always secure, the order. I opened my mouth to respond but something pinned me back. I knew answering immediately was paramount—Piggelo would view it as disloyal not to nod my head with an instant and vigorous yes. I had no idea what Piggelo actually meant by “away.” She would tell me where I was going when she was good and ready and, until then, I wasn’t permitted to ask. Those were the unwritten terms of my contract with The Brothers.

  But unlike all the times before, there were other, competing factors at play. Scott’s freckles twinkled through my mind. And then there was the unexpected phone call I’d received the previous morning from a fellow Dartmouth alum—a Class of ’89 named Michael Gilbert who had spotted my CV on Escape the Street. He was recruiting a team for his new socially responsible investment fund called Bridges Capital that backed businesses that “did well by doing good.” Though they had yet to make a name for themselves, he said they had solid funding and were offering a small equity stake to compensate for a lower base salary. They wanted their team to have real skin in the game. They weren’t based on a Kyrgyzstani peak—they had set up an office just north of Columbus Circle—and they didn’t invest in any alpaca weavers. When we spoke, Michael used phrases I didn’t think people actually used in a corporate environment:

  “We’re building something exciting here and I think you could have a great time helping us do that. You could certainly add a ton of value.”

  Hold on a second—a job didn’t have to be totally joyless?