As she approached Cupid’s Arrow, she saw us circling toward her and her rouged lips parted in the frosty air.
“Merry Christmas, Belle—what an amazing surprise!” I exclaimed, moronically, skidding my bike to a stop alongside her.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, at me or at Jeremy or at the profound awkwardness of the situation. She reached for an end of her long red scarf and looped it one more time around her blond head. “Yes! Merry Christmas!” Jeremy had come to a stop and assumed the form of a frozen ice block beside me. “Chase and his family prefer Christmas stateside,” she explained, in a flustered defense of her reappearance on the continent, winding another length of red wool around a forearm. “Which is odd because Christmas in England is so much more jolly. All the mulled wine and mince pies. I mean people actually use the word Christmas there—none of this Happy Holidays poppycock. Did you notice that, M.? Isn’t it so refreshing?” She blinked at me eagerly.
“Jolly, yes, absolutely,” I replied, with an exaggerated pump of my fist in the air. “I mean English people actually use the word jolly, even when not referring to Saint Nick!”
“Yes, right!” she laughed, nervously. She was speaking to me but, making matters decidedly worse, looking straight at Jeremy. Her eyes were enormous green pools and in them I could see the miniature outline of his frozen, lovelorn reflection. They looked at each other and could see nothing but the tiny, vanished world that had once been theirs. The grisly mess of Belle’s blog post was an eight-hundred-pound abominable snow monster, specked with gravel and grime, shifting its weight uncomfortably on the sidewalk next to us. Would any of us even try to acknowledge the thing? Belle decided to balk. “I’m also here because I’ve gone back to school. Up at Columbia,” she announced, somewhat shyly, rotating north and nodding her head in the direction of her new campus in Morningside Heights, “in the MFA Writing Program. As hard as it was, I decided I needed to move on from Clipped Wings. I’ve turned the page and am writing something new—something I hope will be beautiful and noble and honest. Everything I haven’t been these last few years.”
Back to school. In varying degrees since leaving College we’d all been baking silently beneath the fluorescent lights of adulthood and office life and misfitting career paths, turning us paler and yellower and more submissive as the calendar months paged by. On some level we all longed to step back and be engulfed by the academic promise of school again—with its crisp printouts of class schedules and syllabi and packs upon packs of sharpened number two pencils. Belle had probably longed more soulfully for it than the rest of us. By entering a graduate program she had returned to her playground—admittedly, it was a concrete-covered substitute for Dartmouth, but still it evoked the idllyic turf where she had thrived not so many years and an eternity before. Above all, she had resolved to take hold of her pen and write something real, something that would really be her own.
“I’m so happy for you, Belle,” I told her. It was true. I felt a yolk-colored glow of happiness for her, but also a gray wash of sadness—a sense that life was largely an exercise in trying to go back to something purer and more purposeful that we had lost or overlooked or subconsciously strangled along the way.
“That means more to me than you may realize, M.,” she said, thankfully. But when she answered me she lowered her eyes down to lock on Jeremy’s bike, plainly seeing that it was the Lucky Strike she had once given him, and her eyes waved with moisture. A faint rasp emitted from Jeremy’s throat, as though he wanted to express his overwhelming pride over her decision to return to school and write seriously and at long last be true. Or maybe he needed to explain that thing of great importance to her—that he was setting off on a new, brave quest and going abroad to be a balloonist, to find the place meant for them, the place where they could be together again—but had no idea where to begin. I couldn’t endure a moment more of it.
“I’ll just wait on the corner,” I said quietly, pointing my bicycle away from them and retreating behind a streetlamp.
I couldn’t guess how it would play out between them and was surprised to feel a vicarious knot tightening in my stomach at the sight of them, side by side and blushing again. Maybe they would speak or maybe they’d go for a spin around the block in an innocent re-creation of their old times together. I saw them exchange a few shy words, out of audible range, then Belle hopped on to Cupid’s Arrow and they began to cycle slowly down the block together. They made it ten feet or so until the wheels of Lucky Strike seemed to lose all traction, leaving Jeremy spinning in stationary circles atop a billowing snowbank. Belle didn’t notice, standing up from her seat and unconsciously pushing farther ahead of him. Jeremy pedaled furiously, as if his future, as if all of his happiness depended on catching up to her. But then she stopped, and with it sent a rekindled gust of hope back down the block to Jeremy. Her long neck curved toward him. I could only see the back of Jeremy’s head but knew he would have been looking to her expectantly, waiting for her to deliver some line he had dreamed of over and over again on those dark suburban nights when only his dreams of those words could illuminate the meaningless streets and train tracks outside his apartment window.
“Stay there!” she cried out to him, her voice pricked with panic. “Don’t come any closer!” It was as though a winter gust blew down the street and as it nipped at her cheeks she suddenly felt the sharpness of Jeremy’s pain—the pain that she herself had brought him—and couldn’t bear to be so close to all of that rawness.
“Belle, I—”
“I’m so sorry,” she hurried on. “I only seem to hurt you! I only want the opposite—for you to be so happy. You deserve it more than anyone. If you believe any part of this, Jeremy, please—believe that. But whatever you do, don’t come near me. Not right now. If you do, I’m afraid I’ll ruin your life all over again.” She was slightly out of breath and, standing tall against the hardened blue sky, her words gathered as fleecy white clouds puffing upward from a picturesque cottage chimney in a guidebook long since out of print. She had never looked more like the Queen of the Snows though she seemed regretful of the title—a beauty pageant winner who had theoretically won it all but was on the brink of handing back her crown. Her flushed confusion was palpable.
“Ruin my life?” he repeated, stupefied. Whatever she had posted, whatever dark things she had done, he would only see the light in her. “You bring me to life!”
She crumpled slightly with emotion, burying her chin in the protective depths of her scarf, then lifted her dark green doe eyes to him almost pleadingly.
“Why didn’t we meet when we were nineteen?”
“Nineteen, ninety—why on Earth does it matter?”
“Because I would have deserved you then. I’ve done some awful things and I know I don’t deserve you now but I keep thinking maybe one day … maybe one day I can deserve you again.”
Her words were a match head tearing across a striking strip to ignite into a warm and assuring orange. She had that power. I knew those hope-soaked syllables would set everything blazing for him again. Gripping the handlebars of my bike, watching from my corner of the snowy New York street with Jeremy fixed in the center of my line of sight, I couldn’t blame him. Atop the Empire State Building before moving to London, I told Belle that I couldn’t protect her—that I couldn’t believe in her any longer. But part of me kept on believing. I stared ahead of me like a moviegoer transfixed by romantic leads acting out some culminating moment in a classic film, shaking my head yes, yes, her return to school was concrete proof that it was only a matter of time until she would come back to dazzle us all again—the old Belle Bailey, age nineteen, using pressed autumn leaves as bookmarks, marching me up to the observatory at midnight to spy on our futures through a rusting refractor telescope, my old friend who I couldn’t help but love for her brightness, for her insistence on living life according to her own script so carefully written in her trademark cursive, for all the impractically beautiful things she was that I would never be in my
life.
“What’s next, then?” he asked her, bravely.
“I think we’ll just have to see,” she answered, indefinitely, but there was a whisper of promise and adventure in her voice that even I could hear twinkling its way down the frosted block. She wound another length of scarf around her swan’s neck and opened her blushing face toward him with a smile. “It will be prettier that way, don’t you think?”
She began to pedal away from him again, but this time she wouldn’t turn back. Her heart might have cracked when she rounded the corner from Barrow to Bedford Street, though no one could hear it for the muffling effect of the snow. The last thing Jeremy saw was the end of Belle’s never-ending red scarf, fluttering behind her in the pale-blue winter wind—the fragmented sentence of her and him left bright and baffling and beautiful and suspended somewhere in the center of the universe.
BACK IN THE BRIDAL SUITE
My mother and I are on the eighteenth floor of The Vanderbilt Club, standing together before a full-length mirror, gramophone melodies still drifting in and wrapping us in a safe and sentimental cocoon. She has just affixed my veil and I am finally make-upped and ready to meet my groom. She traces an age-spotted hand against my cheek, affectionately.
“You know, this is the proudest I have ever been of you,” she warbles with emotion, eyes filling and chin trembling. “You look beautiful, M. But before your father arrives I do have one question for you.” I hold my breath, bracing for: You wasted all of those years at that dreadful investment bank and you weren’t able to find a numbers man to marry? But I know she won’t be asking me that—she’s over the moon about Scott Bosher. Though he’s a tech entrepreneur—a man who left finance to fiddle with computers! was her initial reaction—as an ex-banker he’s very good at math, scoring impressively well on the numerical aptitude test she asked him to take on his first trip with me to Chicago. When he sharpened a pencil and, without a hint of protest, sat down at the kitchen table to work his way through the hour-long exam, my mother keeping time with her egg-shaped cooking clock, I knew how much I was loved. “Do you think we’ll hear a collective gasp during the service?” she asks me, teasingly.
“You mean at the part when the priest says my full name?” My mother is right and I can’t help but laugh. It will be a very strange thing to hear my full name spoken aloud, to hear my own lips issue them, for the first time since I was eight years old. My grandmotherly name embarrassed me so much as a little girl that I transformed myself into an initial, only answering to “M.” and disguising my real identity every chance I had.
“Well, I won’t apologize for it,” my mother puffs back at me. “We named you after my great-aunt who was a real battle-axe back in her day. Though I never imagined you’d take the irony to a whole new level. I never thought we could give such an old-fashioned name to such a thoroughly modern girl.” She sighs and once again rests a hand against my cheek. “One day you’ll learn the importance of honoring the past.”
“I think you need to have reverence for it,” I agree, “but what matters most is being honest with yourself about the present.”
“Very true, dear, very true. But this is all far too philosophical for your wedding day. Blushing brides only need to focus on looking beautiful,” she explains, fussing with my veil. “Let’s get you more pink.”
She expertly handles the second open champagne bottle—she did an admirable job polishing off the lion’s share of the first—and rushes back over with another fizzing, rose-filled coupe. Glass in hand, I drift over to an enormous bouquet—white and pinks and lavenders, all cloud-like and billowing—presiding by the window. Belle sent it to The Vanderbilt yesterday with one of her old letterpress note cards tucked in the depths of its floral folds. Her message sounded strangely familiar to me:
Dear M.,
You found each other and that’s the beginning of everything.
With Love,
B.B.
Though with time I had found peace with Belle and her poor choices, out of respect for Jeremy and myself, I cut contact with Chase or anything Brothers related. As far as I know she finished her master’s degree and is in London again and still Mrs. Breckenridge. That makes our friendship—at least for the time being—impossible. Her bouquet and her card tell me she understands. When she went back to school she retired La Belle Vie—the Web site still exists but it sits frozen in time as an online relic, its last entry dated more than two years ago. I also recently read that her debut novel would be published soon, and preordered a copy online. The timing of its release was almost mystical, coinciding with a new expedition setting out to find Amelia Earhart’s long-lost plane near Nikumaroro Island, a solitary speck floating in the middle of the South Pacific.
Hovering near Belle’s flowers, I am thinking of searches and diverted paths and unintended destinations and am left wondering how much she knows—or doesn’t know—about Jeremy. Whether she heard from him, whether they saw each other again after their snowy Christmas Eve encounter. Whether she’s still keeping him at a distance as her prettiest untouchable dream. Whether, with her real book written, she’s found a way to deserve him again. I step toward the window and pull back the sheer curtains, scanning a stretch of blue sky above. After he left, Jeremy sent me a postcard each month from the unusual places he floated to with Søren Sørensen after his debut in Château-d’Oex. He sent me giraffes and zebras grazing on the grassy plains of the Serengeti, a colony of ghost-like pagodas ascending into an auburn sundown in Myanmar, an aerial view of Luxor, Egypt, where Jeremy said dozens of mounds of sand on the West Bank of the Nile—visible to the naked eye—still housed unexcavated ancient treasures in the Valley of the Kings. His last card with its bright fleet of rising balloons was postmarked from Nevşehir, Turkey, three months ago. I looked it up and learned he was in a region called Cappadocia, renowned for its spectacular rock formations that attract hot air balloonists and tourists from all over the world. I believed it was just another stop in Jeremy’s journey—his Great Romantic Quest to find the perfect place to take Belle flying. It had taken two years but he had found his way to Love Valley. Would you be surprised to hear I feel a strange connection with it?
Weeks passed without word and though I thought of him I didn’t worry, hoping maybe he had found the idyllic place he had been looking for all along. Until last weekend, when I huddled into my faithful corner of the Grill Room at The Vanderbilt to run through my Saturday rituals for the last time as a single woman. My wedding was a week away. Scott makes me happier than I ever thought possible—but still, I couldn’t help but feel a faint brushstroke of loss, the sensation that I was shedding a part of myself and my life that I’d never be able to recover again. My club sandwich on wheat and the weekend papers fanned around me at my corner table. I took a bite of my sandwich and dug into the pink stack of my FT Weekend. Though I usually start with the front section, something fire-engine red and blazing caught my eye, telling me to pick the Life & Arts section out of the pile first. I stared down at a picture of the grinning, wild-haired Dane, Søren Sørensen, activating the propane burner of his hot air balloon to inflate it and power off on his next adventure.
High-altitude highs: the enduring appeal of hot air balloons for the adrenaline-seeking megarich
I scanned the article as quickly as I could, my index finger whizzing back and forth in a frantic search for another familiar name buried in the copy. Sørensen discussed his new business—he’s now taking brave souls over the summit of Everest in his balloon, thirty-thousand-plus feet high at a price tag of $2.6 million a head. But there was no mention of Jeremy. Other enthusiasts explained what enchanted them most about ballooning: the simplicity, the stillness, the weightlessness, the powerful rush of seeing forever by taking things back to the basics. The article then plunged into the dangers and outer limits of the sport. Balloons striking power lines, balloons catching on fire, balloons crash-landing into deserts and oceans, balloons getting caught in jet streams and blasting thousands
of miles off course, balloons accidentally drifting over borders to become provocative missile targets. In places like Egypt and Turkey, where ballooning is a multimillion-dollar business, safety standards are shaky and incidents are frequently covered up by profit-hungry business owners—who use force and firearms if necessary to keep pilots in the air and the stream of tourists flowing in and streaming up.
Two months ago, the article said, a balloon in Cappadocia, Turkey, reportedly went missing and was last seen at sunrise drifting south into Gaziantep close to the Syrian border. A lightning storm had been brewing only ten kilometers away from its launch site, making for unstable flying conditions. No trace of the balloon was found but many suspect it could have been caught in the electric edges of the storm, or in a perilous air current pushing it too far south into Syria where it could have been shot down somewhere around Aleppo, caught in the bloody crosshairs of the civil war. A cloudy horror gathered within me. The article was miraculous and excruciating—a pink paper airplane fired at me from the skies above western Asia that, when unfolded, didn’t reveal a message but only a series of more pronounced and more agonizing question marks.
In the past week I’ve heard nothing more from Jeremy. I left an urgent message with Sørensen’s office but haven’t gotten a response—he must be buoyed up somewhere in the Himalayan skies. I’ve had no luck gathering more information on who was aboard or what happened to the vanished balloon. I read online that there are north of two hundred registered balloons and countless unregistered ones in Cappadocia, yielding a flock of at least one hundred in the sky on any given morning. I know my next step will be calling Jeremy’s parents—something I’ve put off doing for fear of heaping more distress onto Jean Kirby’s overstrung shoulders. I’m still hopeful I won’t need to, if I can find happy answers to all of these questions. If I am able to confirm Jeremy’s happy ending. So today, on my wedding day, as my act of faith I’m keeping his last postcard close to me. Once the makeup artist finished her work and fled The Vanderbilt, I rescued it from the sideboard and the threat of the looming green champagne bottles, safeguarding it in one of my wedding dress pockets without my mother noticing. Jeremy will also be with us through Violetta. After a great deal of research, I managed to find an old antique radio and phonograph repair shop on the Lower East Side that toiled away for weeks to fix the battered old Victrola up like new. I’ve been taking good care of her—just as Jeremy and Belle had both asked me—in the hopes that one day they’ll be back, together, and she can be theirs again. In the meantime, knowing how much it would mean to me, Scott agreed that Violetta should crank out the song for our first dance—“Moon Love,” the Glenn Miller song we danced to the night we heard the symphony play in Central Park. The night he tucked my hair behind my ear and told me that moonlight—to my total amazement—actually becomes me. The night I knew he was the first one able to crack my heart open.
Fake Plastic Love Page 38
