Nanny Returns (2 page)

“How can you say that? You were an amazing nanny!”

“But that doesn’t make me an amazing mother! Not the same thing.” I slice my arms in front of me, my bag dropping to my wrist. “At
all
.”

“Hello!” The broker’s voice echoingly trills down the hall accompanied by the jingle of keys. “Mr. Hutchinson, you better get going; the buyers are going to be here shortly. Did the subletters leave everything spic-and-span?”

The final walk-through completed, we’re soon squashed into the rear of the law office’s steel-paneled elevator in the lunch-hour crush, where Ryan reaches for my hand and I muster a reassuring squeeze back. The car glides to a stop on thirty-seven and we wriggle through the branches of lofted takeout containers onto the landing. My heels sinking into the plush green carpeting, I hold his arm as we make a left into the law firm’s hushed reception area. I try to soothe my face into the image of the sane, elegant wife, the kind who accompanies her husband to offices like these to sign thick documents of importance. Not the kind experiencing a Euripides-level impulse to reach under her skirt, rip her reproductive organs out with her bare hands, and throw them at the mahogany wall.

“Ryan!” A portly elder statesman rushes through the adjacent double doors, one fat hand extended to shake, the other at the ready to pat. “What an excellent start to the week! How are you? How’s your father?” he exclaims in a manner suggesting a cigar wedged in the corner of his mouth. “I’m so sorry they couldn’t fly back to be here for this. Boy, they’re selling at the perfect time. Word is the bubble’s about to blow.”

“Well.” Ryan steps out of his grasp. “I’m really sad they have to sell, but Dad wants to open a branch in Seoul and seed money’s seed money.”

“Anyone who can afford to capitalize on the Asian markets right now can’t go wrong. So we got all their power of attorney documents—good time to embezzle something, huh?” He chuckles, leaning in conspiratorially. “You want to embezzle something?”

“Gordon, this is my wife, Nan.” I offer my fingers for a squeeze.

“You are lovely! Ryan senior didn’t do you justice.” My back is duly patted. “I’m sorry we missed your wedding. God, that’s gotta be, what—”

“It’ll be six years this coming June,” I say.

“Oh, right, yes, it was the same weekend as Max’s graduation from Stanford. How about you—any little Hutchinsons yet? Your father must be dying for a little Ryan the Fourth.”

We exchange a marital look that should make oxygen masks drop from the ceiling. “Not yet,” I say, smiling my sane, elegant wife smile.

“Well, don’t put it off. I tell all my clients now to plan for an in vitro offset in the prenup.”

“Pardon?”

“In vitro offset. If she pisses away a hundred, hundred fifty thousand with no output, you can deduct it from the settlement.”

“Oh,” I say, trying to get my eyelids to relax. “Great. Shall we go in?” I follow along a low-ceilinged corridor lined with signed John Grisham posters as they discuss the last time Gordon and my father-in-law played golf. Was it in Hong Kong? Was Hong Kong still British then? Ha-ha-ha, I trill to some racist golf-ball-Asian-lady joke I thankfully didn’t quite catch.

“And here we are.” Gordon opens the door for us to a conference room, where our gaze is immediately drawn to the wall of glass overlooking Central Park all the way to our new neighborhood to the north.

“Oh my gosh! Nan!” A beautiful woman bounds up from the buyer’s side of the table and rushes to hug me.

“Citrine,” I say, startling, her face so out of context.

“Oh my gosh, this is amazing! Are you the sellers? That’s crazy! Come meet my husband!” She takes both my hands and leads me around the large rectangle, past their lawyer and broker, to a dour man, easily in his midforties, sitting comfortably under his Savile Row suit and slicked-back hair. “Honey, this is Nan Saunders.”

“Hutchinson, now,” I say, gesturing to Ryan, who looks to be enduring another of Gordon’s jokes.

“Right, of course, you’re married! We went to Chapin together, honey.” She puts her arm around my waist and I smell honeysuckle. “We’ve known each other since we were five! This is my husband, Clark.”

“Another one.” Clark stands and extends a meaty hand. “Seems like Citrine can’t go a block without running into someone she knows. You ready to do this thing?”

“Clark,” she admonishes as he checks his Patek Philippe. “Such a banker,” she says to me. “Can you imagine?
Me,
the artist. Married to a banker.” She releases me to lift the bouclé sleeves of her jacket, the interlocking C buttons glinting in the sunlight, her paint-stained fingers emerging to prove her point. I’m pivoted to face her large green eyes. “Wait, I thought you guys were in Stockholm?”

“No,” I say, taking a tiny step back from the intensity of her gaze. The same tractor beams that made classmates hand over Barbies, bracelets, and boyfriends has grown no less potent with age. “I mean, we were. We moved back a month ago. We’ve been living wherever my husband’s work with the UN takes us.” I hear how that sounds. “I was getting my master’s.”

“Wow, this is so crazy—the broker told us the Hutchinsons were an older couple living abroad.” She glances to her husband for a gesture of corroboration and he nods. “You guys need better PR.”

“Oh,” I say, laughing. “No, it’s his parents’ place. They’re also doing the expat thing—they’ve been in Asia for a little over ten years now. Ryan’s just handling the sale for them. Ryan?”

“Hi.” Excusing himself from Gordon and their broker, he comes over, a hand extended in greeting. “Ryan Hutchinson.”

Citrine touches her pointer finger to his chest. “You don’t recognize me?”

He shakes his head for a moment before his eyes suddenly widen. “Citrine?! I didn’t place you without a headband. Wanna fox-trot?” He steps in and strikes a leading pose.

“You guys were in Knickerbocker together?” I ask as Citrine laughs.

Clark shakes Ryan’s hand. “Clark Cilbourne. What’s Knickerbocker?”

“Seventh-grade dancing school,” we all reply in unison.

“All the cool girls brought their dresses to school on Thursdays,” I recall with a sigh. “Tatiana had a Laura Ashley floral with puffed sleeves that I just thought was the living end.”

“You weren’t in Knickerbocker,” Ryan says, just re-realizing this, as he does every few years.

I shake my head remorsefully. “My dad didn’t want me to go, because
he
had gone and remembered it as pure torture—”

“It was!” Ryan confirms.

“
But,
” I continue, “it was the last boat out of Taipei for meeting boys. Either you went to Knickerbocker and two-stepped with guys who didn’t clear your shoulders, cementing bonds of friendship that would endure until mad adolescent passion ensued—or you didn’t have sex until college. There was little middle ground.”

Everyone laughs and Ryan surreptitiously squeezes my ass.

“Okay, let’s get seated and get signing!” Gordon claps his hands with a hollow thud from the head of the table.

Over the next two hours, reams of paper are passed around and signed and signed and signed. As I’m not legally involved in the proceedings, there’s nothing for me to do except be silently supportive while Ryan inks away decades of memories. Citrine is in the same support boat and we share smiles of solidarity across the table as her husband faces the far more daunting task of writing $6.5 million worth of checks and promissory notes—
$6.5 million
. In a building that allows for no more than 50 percent financing. I hope that these plural children we’re apparently having are happy, well-adjusted people with all their fingers and toes—and a passion for investment banking.

At last the final document is ratified, notarized, and spat on and we are freed. Ryan checks his BlackBerry and walks over to the glass to make a call. I signal that I’ll meet him out front and find myself making my way to the ladies’ with Citrine, snaking into the labyrinthine bowels of the firm, past cubicles of exhausted, unshowered twenty-somethings stoking the fires of the windowed partners.

“It is
so
great to see you,” she says, holding the heavy Formica door for me.

“You, too.”

“I finished
Wonder Boys
,” she says.

“Oh?” I hedge, opening a stall door.

“You recommended it. At our tenth reunion.”

“Oh my God,” I acknowledge, recalling the cocktail party I cashed in all my frequent flier miles to come back for. “Right, yes, I was on a Chabon kick. How did you like it?”

“Loved it. Have you read
Straight Man
?” I hear her ask over the gray metal divider.

“Richard Russo? I’ve been meaning to …I should go buy it—”

“No—don’t!” she cuts me off as she exits to the sinks, taking off her jacket and folding it over her arm to wash her hands, revealing a Rage Against the Machine T-shirt. She smiles to me as I join her at the mirror. “This is my going-to-a-midtown-law-office outfit—like?” I return her smile. “Anyway, I’m giving up my studio and its wall-to-wall paperbacks. Why don’t you come out for dinner and I’ll load you up?”

“That’d be great,” I say, not quite believing the invitation.

“Someday they will make a soap that gets these stains out.” She dries her indelibly multicolored fingers and opens her purse, extracting a business card, brick red on one side, Miró blue on the other, her name and gallery information in bright yellow ink. “How’s Wednesday?”

“Oh, yes, that’s perfect,” I say, handing her my own Kinko’s bulk print card with a logo designed by my grandmother.

“Terrific.” She slips out the pen that was holding her bun in place, letting her famous strawberry blond locks cascade to her waist like a Garnier commercial. Gripping the Bic between her teeth, she twirls her hair back up and resecures it. “Call me if there’s any problem. Otherwise I can meet you when you get off the L.”

“L?”

“I’m in Williamsburg.” She gestures to her jacket. “Do not judge an artist by her wifely buttons.”

“Darling!” Grandma flings open the brushed-steel door to her new loft in a kimono and black satin flip-flops. “Where’s Ryan?” she asks, giving me a quick kiss before retreating to resume preparation for tonight’s dinner party, reuniting her with my friends, for whom she’s always been a surrogate fairy grandmother. I lower my heavy tote of materials from the afternoon spent running my client’s orientation training.

“Oh, Ryan had to stay at the office. He sends his regrets,” I say, privately relieved to put a few hours and drinks with old friends between Baby Timing Conversation and BTC the Sequel.

“Well, poop,” Josh, my best friend from NYU, says, getting up from the gray velvet couch in the vast loft’s sitting area.

“Poop. Poop,” his three-year-old, Pepper, gleefully repeats as she gallops along behind him to give my knees a hug.

“I was looking forward to hanging with him,” he says, kissing me hello over three-month-old Wyatt, strapped to his chest in a snuggly.

“Where’s Jen?” I counter, picking up Pepper and slinging her onto my hip as we all mosey back to the couches.

“The market never sleeps.” He replaces Wyatt’s expectorated pacifier as he reseats himself.

“Well, then, we are just a coupla single gals out for a good time!” I say, raising my free hand in a finger-horn rock salute.

“Things have been insane since they bought Bear Stearns. She had to cut her maternity leave by a month.”

“Can they do that?” I ask, leaning back to ballast as Pepper gigglingly arches to touch her dad’s hair.

“Oh yeah.” He angles forward into her reach. “It’s all hands on deck. Jen’s just psyched not to be on the other end of it.”

Grandma emerges from behind the cloisonné screen that delineates her kitchen with a tray of her signature truffled deviled eggs just as the doorbell rings. “Nan, could you?”

“On it.” I carry Pepper to the door and let in Sarah, my best friend from Chapin, who flings her arms around both of us in greeting.

“You smell like puke,” Pepper informs her.

“Astute.” Sarah kisses the top of Pepper’s blond head. “There was a big ceiling leak over our lockers so I wasn’t able to change my scrubs.” She leans into my ear. “And it’s not puke, it’s intestines.”

Grandma glides over to offer an egg and cheek kisses. “Throw those in the machine next to the stove and I’ll get you some of my yoga clothes.” Within minutes Sarah is freshly swaddled in lululemon spandex and Donna Karan cashmere.

“God, have I missed this,” I say, settling back into a comfy dining chair with a glass of wine in hand. “International adventures are highly overrated.”

“No, darling,” Grandma says, ladling steaming lamb stew onto one of her pink Limoges plates that survived the Big Purge. “That’s exactly why you have adventures—to make a humdrum night at Grandma’s missable. Does Pepper like lamb?”

“The
baaa
kind?” she asks, looking up from under the English farm table, where she’s rediapering her stuffed hippo.

“That’s a ‘no, thank you.’” Josh reaches to the messenger bag at his feet and extracts a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Grandma hands him a plate and he presentationally arranges the four squares. “Here we go, Pep. Your favorite.”

Pepper climbs up onto the chair next to him and nods in approval.

“Peanut butter—bold move,” Sarah comments, polishing off the last egg.

“Communication glitch.” He pours himself a glass of wine. “With Jen’s hours at the bank,
I’m
the one who does all the pediatrician appointments. I take notes and most of the major stuff gets passed along, but somehow I forgot to mention peanuts as the new Agent of Death. Anyway, Jen always has the midget on Saturdays so I can meet my deadlines, and one day I finish early, come by the playground, and discover she’d been feeding the little lady Skippy since she had teeth.”

Pepper tilts her head up and bears her jelly coated pearly whites at us.

“Isn’t it crazy?” Sarah says. “When we were kids
no one
had peanut allergies. Josh, you should write an article about this for the magazine. In the ER, toddlers routinely come in with obstructed airways. This isn’t parental hypochondria—these kids are tachycardic.”