Fake Plastic Love by Kimberley Tait

Author:Kimberley Tait
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flatiron Books

SABERS AND HOLOGRAMS

Autumn sparked and crackled to life in New York City, channeling all of the magic and impossibility hardwired into the universe. By day, and on Saturday afternoons most of all, the city made you its grandest promises, dressed up in its fall finery—all poppies and mustards charged with the inimitable dream current of the season. By night, Manhattan’s bridges bejewelled themselves with cascading ropes of green and yellow lights slicing through the wonder of the India-inked air.

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.

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