Nanny Returns (17 page)

14

Minutes later I give Stilton my hand to hold as he hops from the cab on the corner of Park and Fiftieth, his clammy fingers pulsing mine in the cadence of Coleridge. We quickly cross the street and hustle down the block because the entrance to the Waldorf Astoria is barricaded behind layers of town cars, from which emerge some bizarre parody of a 1950s nuclear family. Fathers and sons don matching ties, mothers and daughters don matching outfits, all custom-made, I assume. Unless this season’s Gucci includes peek-a-boo blouses for eight-year-olds.

We shimmy our way in through the glitzy throng, a markedly different crowd than the old guard assembled in Mrs. X’s living room. These are the women who have gleefully disseminated their husbands’ wealth all over town in the pursuit of forever looking like spoiled coeds; more Real Housewife than real deal. I make a note to update Citrine before her progeny mandates her attendance. As we jog up the carpeted stairs of the grand lobby and over to the check-in table, they all eye one another’s attempts at pint-sized
Vogue.
“Hi, this is Stilton X, he’ll be performing tonight.” I squeeze his thin shoulders through the wool of his blazer as we await his name tag.

“School?” the student volunteer asks.

“Haverhill Preparatory.” He nods officially.

“Elevator up to the ballroom. Follow the kids to their area and there’s a door at the back marked ‘performers.’”

“Excuse me, but I am expecting a tie.” Stilton steps away from me, his hands gripping the edge of the table, puckering the cloth. “Gillian, my dad’s secretary, said she would messenger it.”

“Here?” the girl asks, looking halfheartedly at the open cartons of gift bags lining the floor behind her chair.

“I thought it would be in our lobby, but it wasn’t, so it also makes sense she sent it here. So we can match.”

“Is there maybe anywhere else in the hotel where it could have been delivered?” I offer.

“You can try the concierge, I guess.”

And we do. The concierge, the reception desk, the manager’s office, the mail room, even the gift shop.

I check the oversized grandfather clock, confirming it’s not yet seven. “Brooks Brothers is still open. Pick any color you want and I’ll hop in a cab and get it while you warm up.”

“But I don’t know what color
he’s
wearing.” His arms crossed over his narrow chest, he leans his head back against a column.

“Navy?” I guess. With a puppy-on-a-stake motif? “Why don’t I run over and grab a blue one.”

He wrings his hands, looking down anxiously at the carpet’s fleurdelis.

“Or!” I reach. “You could be the badass who went rogue! Very John Varvatos. Bond at the racetrack. Obama on the trail.”

“We have to match, Nan,” he sighs.

“Okay …so.” I glance back over the tops of the potted palms at the clock. “I will intercept him when he arrives and get him to lose his tie, too.”

His face lights up. “We’ll Obama together!”

“Yes! But let’s get you backstage, okay?”

He throws both hands in the air and flicks his thin wrists. “Lead the way.”

We squeeze into the elevator for the top floor with two all-boy families and a mother wearing what I assume is a Marc Jacobs mini-dress, given its Mia-Farrow-meets-Mrs.-Roper vibe, with her grade schooler, who might actually be wearing a size zero of the same dress. The elevator slows and the doors open to a flash of lightning and a clap of thunder. BOOM! We all instinctively back up, children trying to squeeze behind their parents. Then, looking left and right, like members of Mystery, Inc., we inch out onto the landing to find other families, appearing equally terrified, emerging from the elevators on either side of us. The hallway is thick with hip-high—for adults, shoulder-high for kids—fog. A person in a silver unitard comes rolling past, bent back like a hoop.

“What the fuck?” the dad behind me asks.

“They got Cirque du Soleil,” his wife answers through clenched teeth. “It’s Canadian.”

Another blinding clap of thunder and the little girl beside me bursts into tears. “Darling,” her mother says, aggressively tugging her along into the haze, “It’s a
circus
. It’s
fun.
”

We follow them past the bar tables and into the room designated for children. At the weddings I’ve attended here, this is usually where cocktail hour is set up. Instead, the mass of Seventh on Sixth on Park on children is huddled together on the carpet, seemingly under attack from a cadre of mimes.

Spotting three young girls dressed in Mandarin costumes, singing arpeggios in the corner, I steer Stilton over by the shoulders. “I have to ask,” I say as we approach.

“We’re Ping, Pang, and Pong. We’re doing the lamentation aria from act two of
Turandot,
” one answers.

“I almost guessed that. Can you direct us backstage?”

She points us down the wall to a door with a “performers” notice taped to it.

“Where are the high school students?” I ask Stilton.

“They used to rent out suites downstairs during the party, but three years ago the police got called and now, unless they’re performing, they just stay home.”

We push through the marked door into what is really just a screened-off section of the kitchen. From the other side we can hear and smell dinner being plated above shouted instructions. As the door swings shut behind us, I catch a rocking motion out of the corner of my eye and realize a metal chair has been pulled into the corner of the otherwise deserted area, and on it a couple is doing something on the spectrum of making out to making a baby.

“Darwin!” Stilton calls in greeting before I can spin us back out.

Darwin looks over, his cheeks flushed, and I recognize Chassie as she hops off him to pivot to the wall and secure the open trousers of her red pantsuit.

“Hey, Stil-man.” Darwin holds out his hand and Stilton rushes across the red Formica tiles to slap it. “Your dad’s making a grand appearance, right?”

Stilton lifts on the balls of his feet. “We’re going to both not wear ties. It’ll be cool. Hi.” He waves at Chassie.

“Hey,” she says softly, flipping her newly platinum hair over her shoulder as she leans back against the wall.

“Well, nice to meet you, but we got to practice,” Stilton tells them.

“Us, too,” Chassie says, nodding her head in deep drops. “We’re doing a Clinton-Romney debate.” Her words come out slowly.

“Oh, great. Is Ingrid here?” I point at the door behind me.

Chassie’s face sets. “We voted her
off
Forensics.”

Seeing my eyebrows raise, Darwin tugs his Sidekick from his blazer pocket and scrolls his e-mail. “Whatever. She brought it on herself, back-talking my dad.” He taps on his keyboard while Chassie peers over his shoulder. “Who thinks the site is hilarious, by the way. That shit got blown way out of proportion.”

“Is
that
why you posted it, to impress your father?”

Chassie suddenly slips forward, a hand landing hard on Darwin’s shoulder to steady herself. He grabs her waist.

“Are you okay, Chassie?” I ask.

“Totally. Yeah.” Her hand still gripping his blazer, she bends down under her chair. “My mom texted to take a Xanax for my nerves. It’s just hitting me fast ’cause I didn’t eat dinner. Guess I better hydrate!” She motions cheers to Darwin with a highball glass of dark liquid. He reaches under his chair for a sweating glass of his own.

I turn to Stilton. “Let’s go warm up.” Somewhere G-rated. And inform Gene about the booze cruise setting sail back here. We push back through the filling children’s room, where a pyramid of muscular men in gold unitards with a bronze intestinish pattern is on deck trying to entertain the corralled kids, but they’re so …close and so …muscular. The children seem to be inching back on their sitz bones.

In search of Gene, we cross the hall into the filling ballroom, which has been transformed into the big top. The tablecloths are black, the chairs are black, the candles are black. And above it all, acrobats dangle from jewel-toned banners of fabric, spinning above our heads to music at once spastic and eerie. Seemingly oblivious, parents peek at the place cards, rearranging names, avoiding the man in whiteface who’s honking a bicycle horn and squirting people with his boutonniere. “It’s French,” I hear a woman hiss to her splashed husband as he dabs himself off with a cocktail napkin.

Yet, despite the circus theme, there is nary an unpaid adult in the child’s room, nor are children welcome in the ballroom. In fact, Stilton and I are both garnering some not so subtly disapproving looks.

I crane my head, but there’s no sign of Gene. So Stilton and I wend our way to the most unobtrusive corner, where parents peruse the items up for bid. As Stilton begins his tongue twisters, I scout for some other Jarndyce authority figure and notice a strange sequence repeating itself. As is typical of a silent auction, the women barely restrain themselves from elbowing one another out of the way to scribble down bids and contact information, high on the thrill of acquiring luxury items below market value frosted with a creamy tax deduction icing. But as the husbands make their way in from the bar and are pointed to the items in contention, the wives, avoiding their friends’ eyes, surreptitiously cross their bids out, their plumped lips curdled in a tight line. I nudge in and see names scratched out below a cruise to Japan, dinner with the soon-to-be ex-president, a Fred Leighton necklace. The only item still holding is a meeting with Warren Buffett.

“Mom!” Stilton suddenly cries, slaloming through the round tables over to the turbaned figure entering the room under one of the four archways. She winces at the contact and he drops his arms to carefully take her hand, prepared to be her date. She smiles feebly down at him, extending a small wave in my direction. I return it and leave the silent-auction dance of contemplation and resistance to greet her properly, the Host Committee on my heels.

“Darling!” Bunny and Saz get to her first in the wide doorway, extending a sapphire committee brooch and pinning it to the lapel of the golden raw silk caftan Mrs. X has paired with the turban.

“You are
so
brave.”

“So brave.”

“To venture out.”

“
Such
a good mother.”

“Stilton, you are lucky.”

“
So
lucky.”

The ladies cluck and fuss, bringing a blush to Mrs. X’s un-made-up cheek. But just then the air behind her turns white.

“Carter!” a chorus of voices call out on the landing and, through the open doors, I see that a phalanx of press are now positioned in the fog flow. Carter Nelson makes her way down the line with an entrancing smile, hands dangling beside the emerald peplum of her New Look–esque evening dress, which complements the storied seven-figure Christie’s acquisition strung around her neck. She is absolutely stunning. In person her skin is even more luminous, her red hair shinier, green eyes more captivating. I sense the female energy around me pinch.

A man slides up beside her and slips his arms around her waist. The camera flashes spark double-time.

Mr. X.

Holy. Shit.

Twenty pounds lighter. A thousand follicles thicker. A jowl down. Wow. A decade shaved off his sixty-plus years, the paparazzi shots did not do the makeover justice.

“Daddy! Daddy! Take off your tie!” Stilton rushes away from his mother and into frame, and I’m as surprised as Stilton looks when Mr. X heaves him to his hip, wincing only slightly. “This is my eight-year-old son, Stilton,” Mr. X addresses the cameras. Stilton leans in and whispers something in his ear. “Sorry, seven.” He clamps his hand over Stilton’s, which is attempting to loosen the green knot at his father’s neck. “He’ll be performing tonight.” Mr. X returns his other arm around Carter’s waist, an impressive family picture forming around the virile husband with a grip on a boy two-thirds his size. At my elbow, Mrs. X’s blush evaporates faster than the dry ice. “I’m here tonight to support my son and support the schools by bidding big.”

He drops Stilton and follows Carter into the room, right past his wife. Mrs. X stands there for a moment, her face tight as the committee hustles in on Carter’s heels, Stilton trailing her peplum and mumbling about Obama. I’m hedging whether or not to follow when suddenly Mrs. X winces. The ladies freeze, staring at one another, brooches facing inward. Then, tacitly, they diverge, half following Carter, half coming back to Mrs. X to escort her to her table, bring her water, a cracker, a damp towel.

Just then, Sheila makes her own grand arrival, looking regal, a golden hair clip pinned behind one ear. I excuse myself and weave over to her on the edge of the parquet dance floor. “Sheila?”

Her eyes focused over my shoulder, she leans forward to air-kiss beside my cheek and then pivots away. I touch her arm. “Sorry, but do you have a quick moment?”

“Of course,” she says emphatically to those around us, and follows me a few feet from her welcoming cluster. “Yes?”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I can’t find Gene, and two Jarndyce students—Darwin and Chassie—are drinking backstage. I thought someone should know. Chassie said she’d taken a Xanax and seems tipsy.”

“And this will affect their performance,” she surmises, her face darkening with concern.