Fake Plastic Love

by Kimberley Tait

  But I could still try. Walking through the Rosey Jekes café door on that reunion Friday, I looked to my right in search of Belle Bailey or some cheerful swatch of red signaling her presence and was immediately smacked in the upper arm by a newspaper, tightly rolled up into a baton.

  “Did your mother write an op-ed in The Dartmouth?”

  I turned left, startled, to see Belle flaming at me, accusingly, waving the paper baton an inch from my face.

  “Welcome home to you, too!” I laughed. I stopped laughing when I took hold of the newspaper and unfurled it to read a gruesome all-caps headline:

  MOTHER’S ADVICE TO THE

  YOUNG WOMEN OF DARTMOUTH:

  MARRY A DARTMOUTH BOY

  My stomach dropped.

  “This can’t be serious…?”

  Belle’s allegation wasn’t an unreasonable one. The op-ed gaping at me from the page smacked soundly of my mother:

  You are too brilliant not to face the hard facts head-on. Don’t do yourself the disservice of denying this one fundamental truth: your future success and happiness will hinge on the man you one day marry. Life is a race and the contentment you find, the comfort and lifestyle you are able to achieve, will be determined by whether or not you bet on, and attach yourself to, the right horse. At no other time in your life will you be surrounded by so many promising picks—intelligent, ambitious young men who deserve to have an equally promising young woman by their side.

  “This must be some sort of prank. Is The Jack-O-Lantern behind this?” I stammered, referencing the College’s humor rag as I devoured the copy in cringe-inducing gulps.

  Time is of the essence. Act now. Find your man on campus and marry him, Women of Dartmouth. I didn’t and will have to live with the gravity of that mistake for the rest of my life.

  “No, M., I’m afraid it’s not a joke,” Belle answered, somberly. “Not in the least. Someone’s mother sent this in and The D published it. It’s whipped everyone into a frenzy.” I couldn’t comment on the reactions of other alumni but Belle had clearly escalated herself to a fever pitch. She claimed the men of Theta Delt had already printed a late-edition run of commemorative T-shirts for their Saturday pig roast: COME FOR THE PIG … BUT HONESTLY, BOYS, NO NEED TO MARRY ONE. “It’s put everyone on high alert. I can feel all the eyes boring through my left ring finger, silently demanding an explanation as to why no rock there sits.” I had never heard Belle use the expression “rock” before and my heart sank a notch or two in disappointment, harking back to the image of Jeremy slumped helplessly over the full-page Tiffany advert at his desk. “And that’s only the ladies! Apparently all the single men on campus are battening down the hatches and not daring to leave their fraternity basements.”

  Her eyes were two terrified circles as she spoke—an uncharacteristic sight as she typically had a fearless fire about her. What was this actually about? I flashed back to one of Belle’s early appearances on our floor in The House of Bartholomew. Chase was still down in the gym with his speed bag and to pass the time or forge a superficial tie Leezel had asked Belle a question.

  “Have you picked yours out yet?” She blinked up at Belle from her chair.

  “My what?”

  “Why, your ring!”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  Leezel’s hair bow sagged with the realization that Belle, by not picking up her references, was clearly not the kindred spirit she had pegged her as.

  “Your engagement ring, you silly goose!” Leezel swiftly navigated her computer browser to Cartier’s home page—which interchanged with Sotheby’s as her default landing page—and spun her monitor around to point it directly at Belle. Belle’s face drained as she faced off against that two-dimensional menagerie of icy-blue and blazing-yellow gemstones. She wore the same gaunt expression in Rosey Jekes, continuing to clutch the op-ed in distress and rushing me over to a secluded table at a far end of the café. I had no idea who authored the thing—while I doubted it was my mother’s work, I knew the political incorrectness of the piece meant it would get picked up by papers nationwide and my mother would call me to ensure I had seen and digested its undeniable truths. I would shrug it off. But I could see right away Belle would do the opposite. The op-ed and its public declaration had struck some very tender nerve in her. It was as though, because of it, she felt compelled to make some kind of brash move. She felt her hand was being forced.

  “I suppose this is the new feminism,” she remarked, flatly.

  That was a conversational line I had zero interest in pursuing.

  “What does it matter anyhow, Belle?” I tried, buoyantly. “You’re spoken for!” I didn’t want to overstep my bounds and suggest Jeremy was on the brink of proposing though—despite all the recent turbulence, his well-meaning insecurity, and her covert prancing about town with Chase—I was sure it was the case. And I had convinced myself of the power that proposal would wield no matter what the ring setting or size—that the authentic would trump the synthetic, that it just had to, in the end.

  “Why couldn’t I have met Jeremy here?” she asked me, switching color palettes and flushing deep blue with woe. She brought an elegant hand to her creased forehead as though it were a compress intended to cool her brow. “In College. When everything was so simple—so uncomplicated.”

  “It doesn’t work that way, Belle,” I answered, and she let her hand drop back to the table in resignation. “And it didn’t seem uncomplicated at the time, even if we look back at it now and know that it was. The important thing is that you found Jeremy—and that he found you. It doesn’t matter where or when.”

  “But it does matter,” she said, dully. She looked down to her Granny’s watch and, confirming the hour, she nodded. “I’m afraid I’ve run out of time.”

  “Run out of time? But you’re not even thirty!” I cried.

  “Exactly,” she agreed, vaguely.

  “You have all the time in the world! And Jeremy adores you!” I practically spat out. She ignored this and stared at an invisible, heartbreaking thing some diagonal distance away from us. After a moment, she shook herself back into our conversation and snatched the newspaper back from me, rolling it into a tight baton again.

  “Do you know what upsets me most about this article?” she fumed, waving the baton around her in broad loops like an overheated magician willing a stubbornly resistant rabbit to spring out of a hat. “What girl doesn’t want to find and marry her College Sweetheart? I mean, honestly! It’s all so insulting. How dare this woman tell me I should have done something that I so desperately wanted to do—something that unfortunately didn’t happen for me, no matter how much I hoped it would have?”

  “I understand,” I answered, quietly. I never saw it as a monumental loss or omission that I hadn’t found Great Love in College. It just hadn’t happened. But since then I didn’t want to be the girl always leaving the party alone, the one convincing herself that a take-out order was so much less of a hassle than a dinner date on a Saturday night, the one who spun around on court at the end of another tournament win to find no one of particular importance clapping with appreciation in the observation gallery … did she think those were things I actually enjoyed? Didn’t she think I wanted and deserved more than that? And when I finally found Scott, which in retrospect felt like a small, short-lived miracle in and of itself, I wanted him to put up a fight for me more than anything. When I told him I needed to go to London, I wanted him to say for God’s sake don’t, stay for me, or when I left—as all of my daydreaming underscored—board a plane to find me and try and bring me back. The bottom line was I wanted him to prove me wrong. But it hadn’t happened. I may never have been a girlish sort of girl, but we are lying if we don’t admit that deep down we all want nothing more than to be chased, to be found, to be told that out of all the billions, no one else will do the trick—that we are without a shadow of a doubt The One.

  “I didn’t find the Love of My Life in College. Instead, I lost two of them.” She set the ba
ton back down on our table and it unfurled itself automatically into an unhappy, upturned letter U. “You were overseas when it happened so I’m not sure if you know that I was sitting over there when I got the news.” She pointed a long, lonely finger to a small table on the other side of the café. “Once I knew my parents were gone I did my best to avoid the coverage. But one day, completely by accident, I read an article about the cockpit voice recorder from the flight. A man had actually proposed to his girlfriend on board not long before they went down. Did you ever hear about that?” I held still and silent, wanting to let her speak. “They roped the pilot into the proposal. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I’m sorry for the interruption but I wanted to let you all know that one of your fellow passengers Jenny is celebrating her birthday with us today at forty thousand feet—and the best part, Jenny, is that Andy wants you to be his wife. Ten-second pause. She said yes, everybody—everybody, Jenny said yes to Andy. The pilot whooped and applause crackled behind him in the business-class cabin. There was the sound of a pop and a flight attendant must have started doling out glasses of bubbly. I know my mother would have been thinking of me at that moment—thinking That’s what I want for my girl. When will it be her turn? What I wouldn’t give for her to know what the real kind of love means. The plane fell off the radar five minutes later.”

  I guessed that in Belle’s mind, when the plane fell off the radar a loud roar would have sounded off somewhere beneath a wing or an engine—too loud and too fast for anyone to guess. An explosion would have followed, implying orange and black and twisting metal and unalterable endings. Jenny would have married Andy—not on Earth but on the lovelier dust of some lunar landscape. Belle would one day marry on Earth, and her mother would never know where or to whom. All of these thoughts dialed up in Belle’s mind into something monstrous—something deafening and suffocating.

  “Now is the time to do it,” she stated.

  I played dumb.

  “Do what, Belle?”

  “Say good-bye…,” she clarified, slowing herself down to a melancholic standstill, “… to Jeremy.” She then dug deep, her forehead crease intensifying as she committed herself to finding the gleaming path forward amidst all the heartache.

  “Belle, stop.”

  She tore on ahead.

  “You know I once heard someone say spring is the perfect time to find the person you’ll spend the summer with—and all future summers. That kindling a Romance at this time of year projects an illusion that your time together will always be filled with the sweetness of long evenings and a sense of promise. I believe that. It makes perfect sense.”

  I couldn’t guess where she came up with her theories—whether she had read them somewhere on the blogosphere or recycled them from the back chapters of forgotten nineteenth-century novels. It didn’t matter. What mattered was how fiercely she convinced herself they were true.

  “Look, you’re upset. And it’s totally understandable. But you’re not thinking clearly. Being back here is hard. For you more than anyone. And that damn article hasn’t helped with anything.” I looked down at the upward U of the newspaper and would have set the thing on fire if I had a box of matches handy.

  “No, I’m perfectly lucid, M.,” she insisted, bravely, but her narrow, trembling chin betrayed her. “How can I keep a thing going if there’s no real future there? The last time I saw you, you said to me—and you were entirely right—that sometimes you have to let a thing go, as hard as it might be.” It was awful to hear her repurpose my words as an axe to swing at the thumping heart of Jeremy. “Besides, I can’t think Jeremy will mind after the send-off he gave me last night.”

  “No real future there? All you talk about on La Belle Vie anymore is your future together!”

  She issued a soft snort at that.

  “And what kind of send-off did he give you?” I followed up, ominously.

  “How many times do you think Jeremy has been drunk in his life?” she asked me, focusing her stare back on that invisible thing in the distance. I began to count on my fingers and got stuck at two.

  “Well, count last night as number three.” She leaned toward me and inhaled in that fully enveloping way that left so many men in raptures. “Please don’t tell anyone what I’m about to tell you, M. You’re the only one I can trust.” As Lost Girls and only children we had always been sisterless sisters of sorts. “I know how close you are with Jeremy, but I can’t turn to anyone else.”

  “You can count on me, Belle,” I assured her, seriously. “Tell me what happened.”

  The barista set down two steaming Americanos before us—a vast eternity bridging the first ones we unwittingly ordered together during our freshman year—and Belle waited for her to bustle away before beginning. She reached into her purse and pulled out a piece of yellow carbon paper and unfolded it to show me.

  “It’s a receipt,” she explained. I could see that plain as day, and I recognized Jeremy’s name scratched precisely along the bottom signature line. “I went over to Jeremy’s last night. He always comes to mine and never likes it when I turn up there but I knew he was feeling low about not coming to the reunion so I wanted to surprise him. In no time at all we started arguing about something pointless and before I knew it he pulled open his desk drawer and I swear to God, M., hundreds of these flew out.” She extended the yellow paper toward me to ensure I was able to verify it as his. I squinted and saw it was a receipt from Sotheby’s, a Midtown location I knew would never have been on Jeremy’s radar screen without her tutelage. “This particular one is for the telegram announcing Katharine Hepburn’s birth that he bought for eight hundred dollars at the auction sale from her estate. Yes, that’s right, you heard me,” she went on, mildly hysterical. “You know I only mentioned the auction to him in passing, mainly to say what a damn fine lady I think Kate was. I didn’t ask him to go and put a winning bid on a lot!” I imagined Jeremy sitting in the center of the auction mob, bravely holding his paddle in the air in another misguided attempt to solidify her happiness. Wouldn’t the eight hundred dollars have been better saved to spend on an engagement ring? All logic had been pitched straight out the window. Then I imagined one yank of Jeremy’s slim arm unleashing a carbon-copy blizzard—pale yellows and the occasional pink raining down around both of them in a crackling storm of IOUs. It was the spurious stuffing that packed their existence together. Or the stuffing of their confused expectations. He was expecting one thing, and she another. Yes, it was all a confusion of expectations, great and flurrying and dense and it was too much for either of them to know what to do.

  “What did he say when he showed you the receipts?”

  “Is this what you want? He was drunk as a skunk and his face flamed in a way I didn’t think would be possible for him—all reds and blacks and blues swirling into something awful. Is it? Belle, is it? Huh? Well, bad news, doll, I haven’t got any money! I stood with my feet planted on the floor, holding my head high, probably looking haughty as hell without meaning to, and refused to respond. Say something! He was shaking and finally gave up and slumped down on a chair. What was I supposed to say to him? All I could think is You’re a gentleman and a gentleman wouldn’t dream of behaving like this.”

  “Did you say that to him?”

  “No, of course I didn’t. I said: I never asked you for any of this.”

  “You’re right,” I agreed, though I knew that often in life we ask people for things without ever uttering a word.

  “That seemed to hit a nerve—the opposite of what I was trying to do. I meant that I didn’t care. The dinners, the theater tickets, the fancy cocktailing, the auction lots—I could give a bag of beans about any of it. But he took it the wrong way and fired out with: And somehow I’m expected to produce a twenty-five-thousand-dollar engagement ring from Tiffany’s!” Her head drooped sadly toward her bare left hand that circled her Americano weakly. “I’d be careful with those thoughts was all I could manage to say to him. Think them enough, believ
e them enough, and suddenly, they’ll be real.”

  “He was overwrought, Belle. He obviously didn’t mean it. I know he would never mean something like that. You’re everything to him.” My throat tightened sharply as I uttered that last sentence.

  “The whole apartment blackened once he said that terrible thing,” she explained. “It’s like the dreams I’d dreamt for us escaped out of his apartment window and were gone.” I wondered if the windowpane had rattled gently as the tail of those dreams streamed out into the night, looping down to take a dejected place in the thick of exhaust fumes somewhere deep in the Queens-Midtown Tunnel. And above them, the Chrysler Building would keep pointing itself high-handedly into the night—tall and aloof and glittering. “He fumbled at an apology and reached out to try and hold me but I had turned so cool. I don’t quite know how to explain it, M., except his words physically cooled me. And suddenly I felt preserved and chilled, floating above all the tiring stuff of real life. I was calloused in a beautiful cocoon. For the first time in my life, I felt as though I had been pushed beyond the realm of caring. Have you ever felt anything like that? Have you ever decided maybe it’s best to stop caring so much? It’s a very strange feeling—disturbing but empowering. The funny thing is, the entire time I couldn’t stop thinking about my mother sitting on the plane listening to Andy propose to Jenny. It’s what she wanted for me. I know that in my bones. I know how much she would have wanted me to be married and settled and happy by now. She would have been such a wonderful grandmother, M.”