Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  On one October evening, if you found yourself disoriented in Queens and squinted toward the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge, you would have seen its glittering lines connect to a long string of winking headlights snaking all the way down the FDR Drive, illuminating a path of importance straight to the front doors of The House of Bartholomew. A chain of tinted-windowed, black Suburbans idled opposite the front doors, spitting out or engulfing people of power in ceremonial clouds of exhaust. With the flash of an almighty employee card, you stepped across the threshold into the Art Deco lobby, whisking back to what felt like a boom-time, bull-market party circa 2006. There was deep blue lighting and crystal glassware and Harry Connick Jr.—or Harry Connick Jr.’s doppelgänger, though I could only presume it was the real McCoy as imitation was sacrilege at The Brothers—jazzily ad libbing in a corner beneath the four-headed mountain lion. It was an eye-popping affair. It wasn’t permitted to be anything less. Each and every employee, right down to the most junior IT analyst brandishing his BlackBerry holster and square-toed oxfords, had been summoned in homage to something momentous: the 150th anniversary of Bartholomew Brothers.

  The firm’s holiday party had been canceled two years running to show sympathy for Main Street and the wider markets that continued to whimper and struggle like a wild animal caught in a barbed wire fence. But it couldn’t let this occasion pass without a high-flying dose of corporate fanfare. I heard that CEO Bill Withers’s inner circle lording high above us in the Chairman’s Office had given serious thought to renting out the entire Metropolitan Museum of Art and staging the party in the Sackler Wing alongside the Egyptian mummies and other worthy relics. But in the end it was decided that it would be more discreet and fitting to host a celebration “on campus” on the same night at each of the firm’s locations worldwide.

  In New York, at the mothership, the revelry was staged in the cavernous main lobby of our global headquarters. An even more imposing fleet of security guards was present, confiscating cameras and iPhones but permitting firm BlackBerrys for “work purposes only.” Withers had circulated an unusually breathy voice mail to all employees a month in advance encouraging attendance and, in a rare burst of sentimentality, extending the invitation to other halves. It’s Bill and it’s Sunday night here in Beijing. When he left us his voice mails from soaring metropolises the world over I always felt slightly cheated when he never followed his personable salutation with the local seven-day weather forecast. This fall is a special one for us, not only because of the continuing strength of our global client franchise against a backdrop of mixed economic sentiment. The hushed familiarity of his voice meant you couldn’t help but picture the man shoeless and robed, striped socks on display atop an ottoman as he kicked back in a hotel suite wingback recording the message. It was cleverly scripted to give the impression that he wasn’t speaking to thirty thousand cogs in the Bartholomew machine; this was a message in a bottle written with great care and sent bobbing out to sea, just for you. It reminds me of that old Chinese proverb—how does it go again? When the wind of change blows, some build walls … yes, some build walls while others build windmills. That’s the one. Bartholomew Brothers has been building proverbial windmills to harness opportunity for the past 150 years. It’s what Henry Q. Bartholomew did in 1860 when he had the extraordinary vision to hang a shingle and pawn promissory notes out of a modest basement on Nassau Street. There was an impressive, pregnant pause as Bill’s voice cracked, presumably with emotion. Today, as we carry Henry Q. Bartholomew’s torch forward, the simplicity of Henry Q. Bartholomew II’s ITSI pillars serves as the faithful compass that guides us daily. As we turn 150 years old—or should I say young!—this October, we will come together on one night to celebrate the rare esprit de corps, the intellectual rigor, the undeniable bonhomie that has brought us to this point. Though he said it without a hint of irony, the grandiose phrasing, paired with the husk in his voice and his deliberate drawing out of the word bon-hooomieee, made you wonder if Withers and his Chairman’s Office speechwriters weren’t just a little bit drunk when they drafted and delivered the script.

  I was still trying to keep my love life safe from the all-invasive claws of The Brothers, but since plus-ones were permitted I found myself asking Scott with a sheepish stutter, as though I were inviting him to escort me to the corporate equivalent of a Sadie Hawkins Dance. To my surprise, he said yes immediately. You honestly think I’d miss the chance to attack a Bartholomew sashimi spread again? Come on, M. Jeremy, on the other hand, had no qualms about pleading with Belle to join him. I knew there was little chance it would happen. When she and Chase broke up she legislated a policy of not venturing south of Chambers Street unless an event beneath the Wedgwood dome of Cipriani Wall Street’s ballroom demanded it. But Jeremy was clever—he knew he had architecture on his side. He guessed Belle’s heart would race at the thought of walking into the heart of The House of Bartholomew’s storied Art Deco lobby. If he promised she could document the moldings, the pink Knoxville marble, the vaulted ceiling, the mountain lion, he knew he could woo Belle into attending. She could never have reveled in it or snapped photos of it amidst the security guards and scanning machines when popping by the office in the full flurry of a workday. And there wasn’t a chance Chase would have ever invited her to this kind of event. Jeremy was well aware of the firm’s strictly enforced no-camera policy. But the party would be held in the lobby, not on the trading floor, he reasoned, so Belle and her wandering iPhone would be harmless, wouldn’t they?

  On the appointed Thursday night, I stood on the far end of the lobby at the foot of a banquet table housing more fresh figs than I had ever seen in a concentrated space in my life. I think I was in the Sun King section of the party. Or maybe it was the Pompeii section. Wherever I was, as I kept vigilant watch for Scott’s arrival, my primary goal was to take shelter from Drewe, who had been trailing me with silent persistence, evoking blood-chilling scenes from Friday the Thirteenth. Nearby, Leezel had planted herself firmly alongside a dessert table, her twinkling eyes fixed on a forest of mille-feuilles, profiteroles, and fruit frangipane tarts. Instead of her signature hair bow, for such a resplendent occasion she wore a dress that actually was a bow, mimicking one of those giant, looped ribbons stuck to the top of a birthday-present SUV in a television ad. Carefully lining my plate with figs, I watched her waggle her fingers above the dessert spread like a high diver seconds away from taking the plunge.

  Biting into my first fig, I saw Belle float through a beeping fortress of security wands into the lobby, with Jeremy’s arm serving as her faithful ballast. She shrugged her stole into his waiting hands and he disappeared dutifully toward the coat check. Her green eyes did a masterful sweep of the room. When her radar locked on me she flitted over, glimmering and ethereal and totally outlandish in indigo tulle like a misplaced, slightly melancholy, five-foot-ten Tinkerbell. I had stuck to a no-frills charcoal suit for the occasion and briefly considered that, were we anywhere north of Chambers Street, people would have no doubt mistaken me for Belle’s stolid, female bodyguard. It took her no time at all to burst out her news.

  “He fixed it!” she announced, excitedly. To hell with hello! There would be no acknowledgment of our quiet stalemate, the last few months that she and I hadn’t spoken, just as there would be no questions about my relationship with Scott. Instead, she would state—assert was actually the more fitting verb to use—her happiness. “He had it fixed last weekend.” My blank stare coaxed her forward. “Granny’s watch. You see? It tells the right time again.”

  Belle held out her watch for me to examine and, for good measure, added: “I told Jeremy my wearing a watch that works would give you one less reason to be grumpy with me.”

  Then she reached into her clutch and retrieved a piece of paper that she carefully unfolded to reveal a message:

  Belle,

  I looked at you—and all time stood still.

  Jeremy

  “But I thought he had the watch fixed?” I couldn’t
help but snicker. “Isn’t it still broken if time is standing still?”

  “No,” she snapped, placing the note back in her purse and gently resting the restored watch against her breastbone. “I just told you he had it fixed. Don’t you understand, it’s a metaphor—”

  “I was kidding, Belle. The metaphor didn’t escape me.”

  “He understands how important these kinds of family treasures are,” she informed me, as though I had no idea. “Granny’s watch means as much to me as one of Jeremy’s grandfather’s keepsakes means to him—like Violetta or his silver dollar.”

  “But Jeremy doesn’t have either anymore,” I said, suddenly aware of how exposed and defenseless he was in the world without the presence of his two luckiest charms.

  “I’m taking very good care of Violetta for him, I assure you,” she replied, high-handedly. “And when he lost his dollar at the December Bender the night we first got together he said he came to realize that he didn’t really lose it. He said it gave him up—because he didn’t need it anymore. He doesn’t need the luck because I’ve come into his life.” She stopped short of taking a seat on the marble floor and folding herself into a half-moon, horseshoe formation, her lanky arms and legs pointing into the air to demonstrate her role as human talisman.

  “That’s a beautiful sentiment,” I admitted, because it was. Still, I couldn’t comprehend telling someone, anyone, such a flattering story about myself. People forged ahead in this world through shameless self-promotion yet I still wanted to believe there could be a happy medium lying somewhere between Belle and me.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it,” she breathed.

  Everything was and always would be all about Belle. After the sly arrow of her text message zipped in as a defining moment of my first date with Scott, she never acknowledged or told me about her meeting at Scott’s office the following week. Scott was the one who gave me the full recap.

  “She’s a very determined woman, isn’t she?” he offered, which said everything.

  “She certainly is,” I agreed, impressed at how precisely he had hit the nail on the head. So many people missed Belle’s determination, writing her off as flighty or vacuous or whimsical or adorably dewy-eyed. Her cream-rose complexion and head-tossing laughter and unabashed femininity disguised the machination propelling each of her moves. Scott said she had arrived at the Verity office to interview him with no intention of actually conducting the interview there. She bustled for a few moments around the open-plan floor, taking a few pictures of a pair of beanbag chairs and the office Ping-Pong table. Then, with no warning, she thrust a canvas tote bag into his hands—chock-full of baguettes and bunches of kale and a bottle of red wine for good measure.

  “She marched me straight out the front door in the direction of the farmers’ market.”

  “You mean Union Square?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “For the interview about Verity or a tutorial on cooking with heirloom tomatoes?”

  “Maybe she was aiming for both? I asked why we needed to go to the market if we already had our groceries but she said she wanted me to look more in situ. I had a meeting in Midtown that afternoon and I’d actually never been to the farmers’ market—it was easier, and frankly more entertaining, to just go along with it all.”

  “Did she at least let you keep the bottle of wine after all of that?”

  “Oh no, I had to give the tote bag back. You know, I’m not even sure the baguettes were real.”

  “Incredible,” I murmured.

  “But she did give me this.” He showed me a framed print of three copyrighted words in a sophisticated typeface:

  CERTIFIED BEAUTIFUL ADVENTURER©

  Dearest Scott—thank you for being such a dream!

  The offhand, lightning-bolt slashings of Belle’s signature decorated a bottom corner of the print in bright-blue, fountain-penned ink.

  “Wonderful, now you’re certified!” I exclaimed. “I know you’ve been meaning to get your Beautiful Adventurer license for such a long time now.”

  “I’m certified … more like she’s certifiable,” he countered. “What a random thing to give someone. Especially a man.”

  After the ordeal was over, Belle told Scott the story would go live on her blog a week later. She did exactly as promised and Scott sent me the link with an accompanying question:

  “Is this a joke?”

  There were inexplicable photos of Scott juggling, literally juggling, a selection of heirloom tomatoes—Green Zebras and Dixie Golden Giants and Jaunes Flammes—while standing between a heritage meat and pickle stand at the Union Square farmers’ market. There was only a passing mention of Verity and its mission to promote the genuine. She was more preoccupied with asking him about his preferred bed linens (“Clean ones?”) and the most coveted destination on his travel wish list (“Easter Island—ever since I was a kid”). A recipe for Gorgeous Gilded-Age Homemade Ketchup, calling for generous tablespoons of shredded green ginger roots and a manly quart of brandy, sat next to a picture of Scott grinning as he sank his teeth into a giant, heavily ribbed Costoluto Genovese. (Sprinkle and Whisk, apparently specializing in far more than imitation walnut bread, was credited with the recipe.) Driving home her disregard of my presence in his life, Belle also announced Scott’s inclusion in her soon-to-be-released Most Eligible Men in the Universe list: her annual pick of the dreamiest moguls, royals, heirs, and sporting hunks—all tantalizingly single and all ridiculously out of reach for her average reader.

  A few weeks later, when Belle left her next printed and bound set of La Belle Vie blog entries for me at The Vanderbilt concierge desk—a habit she maintained even when we weren’t speaking—the story on Scott was conspicuously absent. Instead, the package included an envelope sealed emphatically with two diagonal pieces of Japanese washi tape in red-and-white, candy cane stripes. A note card inside read:

  M.,

  Forgive me for being incommunicado of late. So much swirling about with my new online shop and work revising Clipped Wings. When the dust settles I would love nothing more than to see your pretty face alongside two Aperol highballs with our names on them. Let’s pretend we’re really and truly young again, shall we? I’m thinking 2004—it was such a perfect year, wasn’t it?

  B.B.

  Belle romanticizing days of old was nothing new. But more and more, as our lives continued to diverge like the fixed flight paths of two chartered planes, one bound for snow and the other for sand and sun, I sensed she wanted to prop our friendship up largely for the sake of the past—what I reminded her of, our Lost Girls adventures and all the things I had been privy to before her parents were gone. We weren’t charting new territory or building anything new together. I was a useful human bridge that could stretch my limbs into a wide spread-eagle and connect her back to the person she once was, but was no more.

  We hadn’t gone for those Aperol highballs. In our present lives Jeremy was really the only active thing that connected us anymore. As we stood together in The Brothers’s lobby with very little to say to each other after her wristwatch outburst, a force field of optimism blazed toward us somewhere from the left. And speak of the devil we both turned to see Jeremy, his beeswax hair pomade working on overdrive as he approached us from the coat check. He wore his faithful three-piece suit and moved modestly but gracefully through a shifting sea of super-two-hundred wool and seven-fold ties—all standard attempts of Brothers employees to earmark themselves as alpha bulls stuck in a herd of bison. Skating up to take his place by Belle’s side, he showed no trace of the nagging doubts he had admitted to me on our trip to O’Hara’s over the summer. In an unusual move, he was even wearing a buttonhole in a work context—a floral link between his personal and professional worlds. It was a cornflower, in a hue impressively close to the signature blue of Bartholomew Brothers’s square logo. Belle had taken a rare break from her trademark red and her indigo tulle tied the whole vignette together perfectly.

  “Those mou
ntain lions,” she said to him in a dreamy whisper, looking up to a corner of the lobby ceiling and the four-headed feline creature looming high above us. He placed a hand on the small of her back, lowering his head to give her his undivided attention. “They must have been inspired by King Tut’s mummified pet cats, you know. Ancient Egypt had a profound influence on design in the twenties.” His general wattage dialed up even further at her historical reference and obvious excitement over it.

  “I’d hate to burst anyone’s bubble but it’s actually only one mountain lion.” Like a multicolored mirage waving to life above a uniformly beige desert horizon, Scott popped up between the three of us and pointed intelligently at the lobby ceiling. “One lion with four heads. One head for each ITSI principle.” He cleared his throat and turned to me. “Hello, beautiful.”

  “Well, this place is brimming with surprises tonight!” Belle twittered, dumbfounded at the sight of Scott kissing me hello so naturally. “This is going to be more fun than I bargained for.”

  “Hi there, Belle,” he greeted her. “And Jeremy. The legend lives. Good to finally meet you, sir.”

  Balancing professional decorum with his eagerness to please Belle, Jeremy was far too keen and energetic with his handshake, probably giving Scott the impression that he was wired on a hastily downed energy drink. “That’s fantastic trivia but something tells me you didn’t show up at this circus for the lions,” Jeremy observed, tossing a teasing wink my way.

  “No, no, absolutely not.” Scott shook his head, pulling me toward him, affectionately. “I came for the rare blowfish.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Killer sashimi spread,” Scott deadpanned, further confusing the overwrought Jeremy. “Best in Manhattan, I told M.”

  “Well, I think that calls for some bubbly!” I interjected, desperate to cut the scene and calm everything down with the tempering effects of alcohol.