Nanny Returns (9 page)

“Grace!” I scream, climbing up the crumbling pyramid of wood as Ryan dives onto his chest on the landing above to stretch down to her.

“Hey there, girl,” he says softly. “It’s okay. She’s okay.”

I balance on the closest secure plank as she grips her front legs on the remaining step in a cloud of dust, panting calmly, like this is just where she lives now.

“She’s a tough cookie.” Ryan lets out a sigh. “Like her mother.”

I twist my mouth to one side and look up at him. “We’re going to figure this out, right?”

“For starters, want to grab the ladder and rescue me so I can rescue our dog?”

I smile sadly at them both. “Sorry.”

“Me, too. And I’m not saying this will be easy. I just …love you, and both our jobs have had us looking out for other people for a long time. I’d like to actually look out for our own, wouldn’t you?”

I nod in agreement, letting the relief at this armistice override how little connection I feel to any desire to fulfill its terms. And worse, for the first time in our relationship, with this nod, lie to him. “I’ll get the ladder.”

5

Citrine touches my wrist as I wrap up the story of my Jarndyce interview, which, despite the breathtakingly beautiful retainer check for ten thousand dollars that arrived by messenger, has yet to materialize into a billable hour. “I can’t imagine being back in school—I mean, it’s not as weird as going back to Chapin, but still, didn’t you feel old?” She walks on.

“Oh no, yes.” I continue as I follow her down the uneven pavement. “And at the same time freakishly not. Like, I could immediately peg who the cool kids were and I felt a little nervous around them. Maybe some part of our psyches freezes on the worst day of seventh grade and never recovers.”

She laughs knowingly, even though, if memory serves, her seventh grade worst was measured in degrees of Catherine Oxenberg–esque perfection. “I see the girls in my new-old neighborhood now,” she says, her ankle wobbling a bit as we go over a spot where a nearby oak has transformed the surrounding sidewalk into a skateboard run. “And it’s insane—they’re so …chic. We were . . .”

“I don’t want to say dirty.”

“Certainly the hair.”

“Remember you and Tatiana and Alex had a contest to see who could go longest without shampoo?”

She grins. “And you wore your dad’s blazers to school.”

“Oversized everything, scrunchie buns and practical shoes—it was a great time to come of age.”

She drops her canvas FEED tote to the sidewalk, steadying it between her black sneakers as she tugs her hair out of a makeshift knot to cascade down her back, pre-Raphaelite against the black sheen of her down vest. She places the rubber band between her teeth. “So when do you start?”

“Apparently I have. I’m on call for …I guess we’ll see for what. I mean, the students were a little much, but this teacher was
great
. If I can advocate for her and her colleagues, or at the minimum help them navigate these ‘tweaks,’ I’ll be thrilled. And in the interim that’ll be me having my tubes tied.”

“God, if only.”

“Right?” Realizing it’s started to drizzle, I glance up at the silver haze drifting through the dark gaps between buildings from the low clouds above. I look back to see Citrine pulling her refreshed bun taut, her face suddenly drained of all its luminescence.

“You okay?”

She nods, her gaze moving past me to the warehouse behind us, an indoor architectural salvage yard she’s been dying to take me to. She lifts her bag onto her shoulder, the sparkle returning to her tone. “We’re doing this. I’m so excited. Did you start
Brideshead
?”

“Yes.” I did. A page is a start.

“Spectacular, isn’t it? The themes inspired a series of lithographs I made in ’04 on religious versus sexual passion. And they had a lintel here last time that was quintessential Waugh. It must’ve been ripped from some palazzo on Fifth. Shame.” She leans into the glass door, ringing the brass bell above the frame, and I step behind her into the musty, dimly lit warehouse. We stand for a moment like two stars on an action movie poster, taking in the floor of peeling carved wood and the range of sherbet-colored porcelain.

“Incredible,” I murmur, dropping my head back to admire the Tiffany-era stained-glass panels hanging from a ceiling covered with what looks to be every type of industrial lamp and sign used east of the Hudson in the prior two centuries.

“I get all my mixed media materials here. I love this place.” She unsnaps her vest, her yoga clothes still damp beneath. “All the history.” She starts coughing.

“Careful there,” I say, patting her back. “I think the history has spores.”

“But don’t you love it?” she asks, recovering her voice.

“Add one working toilet and a microwave and this is pretty much my house.”

“You’re so lucky.” She picks her bag up and we start walking the narrow aisles. “Clark’s architect keeps dragging us around these stainless steel showrooms and I’m just, like, there’s no heartbeat. I don’t want my home looking like a stranger picked out everything down to the food in the refrigerator. But this!” She steps over to an ornate wood mantel resting against a thick stack. “This has
soul.
” She extends a black-legginged leg as if she was leaning and pretends to hold a cocktail.

I point at the errant rusted nail jutting dangerously close to her vest.

“You don’t like it.”

“No, I do! Sorry, it’s just, currently, while I’m missing three stairs and a contractor, I’m kind of dreaming about someone picking out everything down to the food in the refrigerator. In fact, coming home to a fresh carton of milk and some working doorknobs would be my idea of Christmas.”

“You’re just running low on inspiration.” She takes my hand. “Come on, they have the
most
fascinating things downstairs.”

An hour later we’ve snaked our way through the mildew-saturated catacombs displaying the remnants of New York’s prewar fixings, with Citrine’s sheer delight at every last piece of cracked tile, chipped knob, and tarnished letter serving as our torch.

“Oh my God, these are
fantastic
,” I hear yet again as I sift through a bin of dusty mortis sets. “Nan, look.” I turn to the far end of the aisle, where Citrine, loaded up with collected finds under both arms, carefully displays a metal plaque with her outstretched fingers. “It’s from the factory next to my studio! Well, now it’s a demolition pit, but it used to be a glove factory. I’m totally getting it. How are you doing down there?” She shuffles toward me, careful not to drop anything.

“Good.” I continue to dig in the dusty crate of metal parts. “Just looking for a mortis set for our bedroom door.”

“A what?”

“In order to keep the original glass knob, which does not currently catch closed, I was told I needed to find an original ‘mortis set.’ At which point I devoted too much time on Wikipedia learning the history of mortis sets. I have forever lost this along with the part of my brain now completely filled by stair pitch gradations and bathtub flanges and their varying requirements.”

She smiles. “I’m one conversation about kitchen triangle configurations away from blowing my brains out. Wow. Is that a . . .” She steps around me and wanders out into the aisle. I look down at the three seemingly identical brass boxes on the cement floor and—eenymeeny-miny-moing—choose one. “Nan?”

“Coming!” Dusting off my coat, I follow the sound of her voice to discover Citrine sitting inside a massive alabaster bathtub.

I peer at the orange sticker on its side. Eighteen thousand. “Wow.”

She lolls her head to me along its rolled rim. “Come sit.” Pulling her sneakers up and clutching her treasure like a kid keeping her toys from floating away in the bubbles, she makes room for me to climb in at the other end.

Lowering my bag between my legs, I sink back into the perfectly calibrated curve. “This is nice.”

“Isn’t it?”

I nod, resting my head on the cool stone to gaze up at the network of pipes snaking overhead.

“You know,” she says, “it reminds me of Tatiana—her mother had a tub like this in their Lake Cuomo house. In her bathroom. Did you ever see it?”

“Never invited.” I smile at the idea.

“Oh.”

“Do you two still see each other?”

“No. I mean, I run into her, but when she turned twenty-one she got a trust from her father and then she married a trust and neither of them has to do a day of work. You wouldn’t recognize her. She had her boobs done. She gets Botox. It’s gross. And it’s not like she’s doing anything interesting. She just goes to the gym all day. That’s where I see her. Yoga class. She’s got a staff of, like, seven taking care of her two-year-old.”

“Tatiana had children?” I screech, unable to temper my shock.

“I know!” She laughs. “Scary, isn’t it? Nan, everyone’s getting so blah. I’m so psyched I found you. We have to get the boys together and hang out.” She knocks my ankle with the toe of her Puma.

“We should.”

“Don’t get too excited.”

“Sorry.” I fiddle with the hardware in my hand. “Ryan and I—we’re just having kind of a weird patch of …weird, so.” I nod.

“Renovations are stressful. All the millions of little decisions—”

“It’s not really …he wants to start a family, like, yesterday. And I don’t know . . .” My voice faintly echoes back to me as the motion sensor lights clank off in the adjacent aisle. “Being back here—I’m suddenly confronting the enormity of that kind of commitment. And just how much you can fuck someone up if you half-ass it.” Her head nods slowly up and down, her expression blank. “It’s just, Ryan and I’ve done so much together, been the only two English-speaking, non-blowfish-eating people on so many adventures that the fact that I’m afraid to talk to him about
this
is just really kind of alarming, you know?”

“I’m pregnant.” She stares at me.

“W-wow,” I stutter. “Citrine, that’s . . .” But she’s so still, her face so masked, that I can’t read which direction I’m supposed to go—congratulations or I’ll be by your side at Planned Parenthood.

“A surprise,” she finishes for me dryly.

“How are you feeling?”

“Shocked. Sick.”

“What does Clark say?”

“I haven’t told him yet. I haven’t told anyone.”

“Thank you.” I reach out to touch her hand, as I’m out of neutral questions and her voice is only getting flatter. “For telling me.”

“Of course I’m going to keep it.”

“Of course.”

“I mean, I was always irregular so I thought the nausea was just bad hangovers. By the time I figured this out—I’m already three months. I have a group show in Stuttgart in September and two pieces due to the Japanese. I have to keep working.”

“You will.”

“I’m not Tatiana.” She stares out at the other unmoored basins. “I can’t lounge around shoe departments all day.”

“You don’t have to.”

“You think?”

I look down the stretch of alabaster at her, sprawled across from me in all this dust, holding her potential art in her lap with her paint-spattered fingers, her hair a tousled mess. She’s beautiful.

And she’s in it.

“I really do, Citrine. No one’s in charge of you but you. It can be however you want it to be.” As I hear myself say this, I see through a sliver of open door, behind which I could just jump in and do it, this mother thing.

“Yeah …yeah. I need a drink.”

“Me, too.”

“How about chessy pasta for two and you drink for both of us.”

“Deal. I’m treating myself to this mortis set.” I hoist it over my head.

She smiles. “And I’m treating myself to this tub.”

Heavily buzzed from drinking a three-course dinner’s worth of Pinot Noir for two, I sit on my spectacularly new sanded steps and flip through the mail, blessing Steve for finally showing up and getting something done in a timely manner. One cannot be heavily buzzed on the only stretch of her home that is not a deathtrap, glazing over a J.Crew catalog and thinking of maybe sleeping right here until morning—and be a mother. One cannot.

Perhaps someone who charged an eighteen-thousand-dollar bathtub that came from the presidential suite at the Plaza with her husband’s American Express Black card—she can. Someone who has her career established and already read multiple oeuvres—she can do it. But this one, debating using her coat as a blanket and shoes for a pillow—cannot.

“Eighteen thousand. For a bathtub,” I say to a disinterested Grace, racked out along the length of the doorjamb.

An envelope flitters out from the stack of catalogs and I have to steady myself with the edge of the stair before reaching down to focus in on it, the familiar scrawl making me instantly, sweatily sober. I swipe it up and tear into the heavy paper.

Dear Nan
,

Please join me at my apartment at three o’clock Thursday, May 1st, for tea as a thank-you for your help
.

Best, Mrs. X

Well . . .

Fuck.

Me.

6

Thursday afternoon, on the lookout for Steve’s minivan, I lift a flap of the yellowed
Times
off the living room window and stare at the cars splashing past on the puddle-strewn street. Steve left for Home Depot four hours ago and at this point I’m desperate to gauge whether he’s even coming back today, or whether he passed a derelict property just as the enthusiasm not evidenced since we interviewed him finally resurfaced, compelling him to leap out and renovate it with our lumber.

Here’s what I don’t want: a fiercely barking Grace adding that certain je ne sais quoi to the message I’ve been harnessing my mojo to leave. I look down at her, lying on the floor, strategically dead center to track me as I pace in my sweat pants and Grandma’s Chanel jacket. She lifts her head to return my questioning gaze and I project our tacit Beckett routine: Let’s renovate. We can’t. Why not? We’re waiting for Steve. Oh.

Mojo harnessed, I release the newspaper and stride purposefully to seize my phone from the mantel, where I’ve strategically placed it beside an empowering picture of Ryan and me learning to surf. Idon’twanttogoIdon’twanttogoIdon’twanttogo. But I owe it to myself to find out what thanking me for my help looks like. I square my shoulders and hit the little green phone icon on my cell.

Ringing. Oh God, instantly sweating rivers. It’s picking up! I open my drying mouth—it’s her! It’s her on a machine! Oh, thank you, Jesus!! I am flooded with sweat. I shrug off the jacket as I’m greeted with an electronic beep.

“Mrs. X, hello! This is”—
beep
!—“Sorry, this is”—
beep
—“Crap! I, this is”—
beep
—“This is Verizon calling”—
beep
—“Never mind.” I jam my finger into the scroll ball and the phone clicks over. “Hello?!” Shitshitshit!

“Ms. Hutchinson?”

“Yes?”

“This is Janelle in Gene DeSanto’s office.”

“Mm-hm?”

“Can you be here at nine p.m.? There’s some kind of situation and the board is coming in.”

“Yes, of course. Wait, nine p.m.?” I repeat back to her, grabbing a pen from the mantel.

“Yep. Thank you. Good-bye.” I click off, scrawling
Jarndyce 9pm
on the wall.

Okay, just climb right back up—call right back, do it, now, GO! I hit call. I’ll just say it was a joke. I’ll say I was breaking the ice by crank calling—ringing!

“X residence.”

“Grayer?” I startle.

“Who’s speaking?”

“It’s Nan, Nan Hutchinson, hi!”

“Hey.”

“Oh my God, I’m so glad you answered! If you were here I’d kiss you.”

“O-kay.”

“So, is your mom there?” Pleasenopleasenopleaseno.

“She’s napping.”

I toss my pen-clenching fist overhead. “Too bad. Could you give her a message for me when she, um, wakes up?”

“What,” he challenges more than asks.

I dig my toe into the gouge between the subfloor and parquet. “Just that I’m delighted to RSVP to her tea.”

“What tea?”

“She invited me to tea.”

“Why?” he scoffs.

“Um, to thank me, she said.” I pull my foot back before I invite a splinter. “Why, do you think it’s for something else?”

Silence.

“Grayer?”

“Look, I don’t know. You don’t have to come. You don’t have to be friends with her or anything. I mean, I’m sure you’re busy.”

“No, it’s—did you hear back from Chester?”

“He’s in. Look, I’ve gotta go.”

“Of course. That’s so great for Stilton. Please tell him I said congratulations and, um, good to talk to you.”

“Yup. You, too, Verizon.” He hangs up.

“You’re going to have to wait for intermission to be seated.” That evening I’m greeted by one of the students sitting behind an incongruously pedestrian folding table in the white stump circle. Finally called to service, I secure my dripping umbrella and glance down to see the banner taped to the table for
The Caucasian Chalk Circle
. “Our credit card machine broke, but we’re accepting checks.”

“Credit cards? How much are the tickets?” I ask, unbuttoning my suit blazer and checking to see how soaked my patent leather pumps are beneath the darkened hem of my trousers.

“A thousand.” She takes in my expression. “It’s a benefit.”

“For?”

“The school.” She picks her thick braid off her shoulder as if it were a small pet that’d been napping there and sticks the end in her mouth. “To send the Drama Club to Venice next year to work with a real commedia dell’arte troupe.”

“The Save Venice Club can’t sport them the cash?” I ask.

She just looks at me blankly.

“Actually, I’m here for a meeting. What’s the quickest way to Mr. DeSanto’s office?”

“Oh, they just finished that yesterday,” another girl informs me, pointing to the newly unveiled formal staircase wrapping up the wall behind them. “Up those stairs and make a left.”

“Thank you.” I take them two at a time as I did at Chapin, remembering how, on the descent, I’d hold on to the banister and fly over the last four steps of every flight to land with a delicious thud, softened by my Doc Martens. Best to do after three o’clock when the building emptied and I could gain momentum all the way down from the library. This is how we entertained ourselves without holograms.

Disoriented by entering the second floor from the opposite end of the corridor, I take a few moments to get my bearings and find the plaque indicating the entrance to the Headmaster’s Suite. I push the door open and look up at the paneled walls, which display enough crests and framed photos of bygone—really bygone, as in bloomers—prep school memories to do a Ralph Lauren stylist proud. While a jarring break from the aesthetic just outside, I must admit it a strategic choice for the sanctum where parents pull the trigger on committing to forty thousand after-tax dollars a year in tuition—a tad more subliminally suggestive of the Ivy League they’re gunning for than lacquer and Lucite.

“Your name?” A secretary behind a Chippendale desk calls to me above the Mozart softly tinkling from hidden speakers. I am surprised that instead of the Gibson-girl pouf suggested by her surroundings, she sports a Rihanna wedge. “Your name, please?”

“Hi, yes, it’s Nan Hutchinson.”

She runs her long, zebra-printed fingernail down a typed list and checks me off. “The board’s meeting in Mr. DeSanto’s office.” She points me past the tufted couches to doors bracketing an impressive stone fireplace. “It’s the one on the left. You can go ahead in.”

I thank her and let myself into the headmaster’s office, which is nearly as large as his conviction. Clicking the door shut behind me, I spot Gene leaning back against the front rim of a scrolled antique desk, facing what I presume is the board—judging from their bespoke attire and intense expressions of engagement—occupying the three silk settees that ring the Aubusson rug. The men look poised to leap from their seats and ring the Stock Exchange bell and the female half of the crowd is nothing like the line of sweet-faced matrons who filed into Chapin’s headmistress’s office for tea. No one is wearing a headband or low pumps or even pearls. And not one person looks happy.

Behind Gene’s desk two men and one woman, in notably unbe-spoke boxy suits, cluster around a Dell laptop displacing Gene’s iMac.

“Nan, Nan, good, you’re here,” Gene welcomes me. “Now we can start.”

I beam a professional smile and commence inching carefully over crossed and tapping glossy shoes in the alley of space between the couches and a three-foot-wide leather replica of a tortoise serving as a coffee table.

“And
why
is she here, again?” a large man, under whose weight the nearest silk sofa is listing slightly, asks. I recognize him from C-SPAN as Congressman Grant Zuckerman, Darwin’s father.

“She’s the new Shari,” a woman sitting beside him hisses as I arrive at Gene’s side.

“I just don’t see why we have to bring more people into this,” Grant continues to bark. “We don’t have any other admin staff here. My team can manage it.” He waves his hand at the boxy suits behind Gene and me.

“Grant, Philip vouched for her. I’m sure she’s signed something,” says a blond woman with a Princess Diana haircut and deep voice, whose oxblood trench dress matches the velvet damask wallpaper. “Now let’s get this bullshit finished so I can catch my daughter’s curtain call.”

“Sheila, none of us want to be here,” another woman admonishes from across the room. I recognize her as a panelist on some Bravo show, but can’t remember if her empire is chattel, clothing, or cuisine.

“Yes, I’m Nan Hutchinson. The new, uh, Shari. Pleasure to meet everyone!” I boost my voice to direct all heads my way. “And it sounds like we have our work cut out for us tonight, so if one person could volunteer to give me a two-minute overview and a time check for how long we’re going this evening, I’m happy to get us moving.”

“Jesus Christ,” Grant mutters. Everyone stares daggers at me.

“Okay, well, maybe one of you?” I gesture to the suits futzing with the laptop to see if I should step around the desk.

“No!” several trustees shout at once.

“Not yet,” Sheila adds. “It may not be necessary.”

“Yeah, thanks, Nan, um, maybe you could just go over there?” Gene motions to the nearby wall.

Face beating, I nod heartily. “Totally!” I take a few steps back and try to lean against the damask wallpaper as if I came here tonight with the express purpose of doing so.

“If I may?”

“Please, Cliff?” Gene encourages.

I turn and realize the man sitting in the crook of the U is Cliff Ashburn, Metropolis Bank CEO and
Wall Street Journal
centerfold, whose graying temples frame an average face that has been powerfully pheromone-enhanced by mind-boggling success. He takes a moment to remove his glasses, polish them on the end of his tie, check against the light, and return them to this nose, all while everyone waits, rapt. Someday I will be so confident in my ability to hold focus I’ll lead a meeting slouched in a corner. “To recap,” Cliff says calmly to his clasped hands, “exactly how many people are aware of this incident?”

“Darwin was the intended recipient of the e-mail,” Grant answers. “He then, understandably, stupidly, forwarded it to three friends—”

“My son, Jamie,” a blockbuster thriller author says, shooting her hand up, her eyes on the carpet’s weaving ribbons.

“My son,” a man echoes.

“And the Boyer kid,” Grant finishes.

“Thankfully, the Boyer kid was here getting ready for his eight o’clock curtain,” someone fills in. “And hasn’t seen it.”

“We already seized his computer,” the woman behind the desk informs the group.

“We’ve seized
all
their computers. And their iPhones.”

“How did this come to light again? I’m confused,” the Bravo panelist asks, nervously tugging at the Hermès Kelly watch fob that dangles off an olive leather strap, matching the purse resting against her slim ankles.

Grant shifts his girth. “My son, Darwin, had the good sense, after his error in judgment, to send it to me out of fear and concern for the girl and for the school. I grabbed my laptop, raced to the airport, and set this triage in motion.”

“Excellent.” Cliff nods. “Fast thinking—quick response time—we’re ahead and on top. Has anyone contacted the girl’s mother?” he inquires as his cell rings in the breast pocket of his thin gray blazer. He slips it out to silence it without a glance.

“She’s been starring in an Albee play in the West End,” a woman answers. “My husband’s trying to transfer the production to Broadway.”

“Okay, so then if the gravity of the situation can be impressed upon Darwin and your two sons.” He looks at each of the three parents in turn, eliciting reflexive swallows and nods of commitment. “As board president, I’m comfortable saying we’ve contained this.”

“Can it be contained?” Bravo questions, the fear in her voice palpable.

“If everyone does their part,” Sheila replies, smoothing her dress. “At the network we constantly sit on information in order to maintain the access to and cooperation from people we need. Quid pro quo.”

“Really?”
Broadway Transfer is intrigued.

“It was tough for Anderson Cooper to accept, but I brought him around.”

“Okay, next steps,” Cliff states. “Obviously, these are children, and children require supervision.” His assesing gaze lands on Grant.

“I think what we need to be asking is how the hell this happened on Gene’s watch.” Grant, his face reddening, narrows his eyes at the headmaster in turn. “Gene?”

“Yes, of course.” Gene snaps to, propelled to take a little step forward. “I sincerely apologize—”

“Don’t apologize—I want these kids fucking policed.” Grant lumbers to stand, taking the ball and running with it right off the field. “We’re entrusting them to
you,
Gene. You mold their academic lives, their social lives, and, starting now, their fucking cyber lives. You cannot continue to blow off that responsibility.”

“Cliff?” Sheila swivels to him for his thoughts, as do we all. He nods approval.

“Get the faculty in here.” Emboldened, Grant drops to a steely timbre. “I want everyone in the screening room in sixty minutes.”

While the board maintains its encampment, I am at last called to duty and join Gene in pulling up seats alongside his receptionist at her desk in order to activate the snow chain. I apologetically rouse teacher after teacher—priced out of the Drama Club’s benefit performance—from their comfortable couches in the outer boroughs at nine thirty on a Thursday. Then, when I reach the end of my assigned list I make fake calls, rousing my voice mail, just to avoid having to talk to the grumbling board, whose newly focused ire is crystallizing on the other side of the mantel.