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It may not have been anybody’s idea of the Ideal Life, but it had become my life and it was sufficient.
The bedroom they gave me was in the far corner of the penthouse, a tiny box of a room—see? I had guessed that would happen!—that I suspected had been meant as an extra storage closet. It wasn’t so bad, though, not like what I imagined would be the airless, lightless, spiderweb-infested lodgings of any nanny living in the suburbs. I had a bed, a lamp to read by, there was even a TV, if I were so inclined, which I rarely was. So what if the room was a shade of yellow I detested; I was too timid to complain.
All households with small children have their routines. But the Keating household really didn’t have a routine that involved both parents and children for six out of the seven days of the week.
The only thing Alissa could be depended upon to do with her children was to take them out on Saturday afternoons. They invariably left at 1:00 p.m. and would remain gone for three to four hours, no more, never less. Their routine was also invariable: lunch at a kid-friendly restaurant like Rumpelmeyer’s, a visit to the toy store FAO Schwarz when it was still there, the big Toys “R” Us when it replaced the other and a final stop at some educational place, the planetarium or the Museum of Natural History.
The first few Saturdays that Alissa took the kids out for their afternoon outing passed unexceptionally. Even though I had told myself I would spend my three hours off a week working on writing something, anything, I instead met my own friends for lunch and shopping, Helen and Grace, my closest girlfriends.
Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. Take care of kids for 165 hours; eat, shop for three. If nothing else, the routine that I was forced to follow was improving my math skills.
But then a Saturday came when I woke with a stomach bug, leaving me no choice but to complete the remaining three of the 168-hour weekly cycle in my room, with no more than golf on the tiny TV to keep me company.
Then a knock came at the door and I suddenly had company.
“May I come in?” Buster poked his head around the door. “I didn’t hear you leave today so I thought you might be in here. Are you unwell?”
It seemed such a formal way to phrase the question—“Are you unwell?”—formal and utterly charming.
And when he came all the way around the doorway, the tray in his hands containing a Lenox bowl of chicken soup and a SpongeBob SquarePants plastic glass with a straw in it, he needed to do no more to sweep me away.
Even if I was lying down, he still swept me away.
“I just figured that—” he smiled sheepishly like a wolf “—even the girl who takes care of everyone else needs someone to take care of her sometimes.”
See what I mean?
When I had trouble sitting up, he set the tray gently on the floor and even more gently helped me, arranging the pillows behind me.
He even fed me with the spoon.
“Shh,” he said when I started to protest.
It just seemed so unseemly, my ambassador boss treating me with more tenderness than I’d ever seen him show to, well, his own children. It was inconceivable that he’d ever behaved so with Alissa.
“One day, when you’re feeling better, maybe I’ll let you take a turn and you can feed me.”
Combined with my feverish state, the image he’d put in my mind of me feeding him caused me to snort, which in turn caused the chicken soup that had been in my mouth to spray out my nose.
I must have seemed a charming companion.
Red-faced, I finished being fed in silence.
Afterward, he dabbed at my mouth, then eased me back down upon the pillows, smoothing the sheet over me.
“Would you rather be alone,” he asked, then paused before adding hopefully, “or would you like some company?”
All of a sudden, I hated the thought of being alone in that yellow room with nothing but golf, which I could neither stand nor understand, for company.
“Some company would be okay,” I said tentatively, “I guess.”
Aside from the narrow twin bed, the only other seating in the yellow room was an uncomfortable armchair with unpredictable springs that I only used late at night to sit at my desk, trying to convince myself I could someday be a writer.
Buster looked the question “May I?” And before I knew it, he had pulled the uncomfortable seat up alongside the bed, settling himself into it, despite that he dwarfed the thing.
“Do you know much about golf?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“It’s a silly game,” he said. “Useful, though. Would you rather watch or talk?”
“Talk would be good,” I said, “I guess.”
The chicken soup and juice had revived me enough so that I was wanting to cringe for having nothing better to say than “I guess” at the end of every response. In fact, I found myself hoping that I’d be interesting enough to command the attention of a handsome ambassador, even a married one.
He got up, switched off the set—there was nothing so exotic as a remote control for the nanny, certainly not one that worked—and sat back down again.
And then we talked.
Mostly, he talked, I should say, about his exciting career, about the books he liked to read. And yet, even though he did most of the talking, it felt as though we talked a lot about me. He would ask a question, like, “So what was it like, being on television in all those commercials at such a young age?” And then, when I mealymouthed with, “It was okay…I guess,” he amplified my answer with, “I know it must have been surprising. Oh, not that those commercials weren’t wonderful, because they most certainly were, in particular the one where you rubbed your tummy as you said your line. But how many people can say they were in a series of commercials? Not many, would be my guess.” He’d seen my stupid commercials! What could he have been at the time, his early twenties? What man that age would take note of, and later remember, such insipid commercials?
“Actually,” I corrected in a small voice, “television has been around for quite a while, so probably a lot of people could say that. I guess.”
He laughed as though I were an incredibly witty person, as opposed to the overprecise geek that I was.
And so we passed our first Saturday together, with him carrying on the conversation for both of us in that same innocuous vein. Just before four o’clock, with Alissa and the kids due back any minute, he picked up the tray, excused himself and said he sincerely hoped he’d made me feel just a bit better.
“You did,” I said.
When the next Saturday afternoon rolled around, and I was well enough to go out again, I had my hand on the door before I heard his voice call out to me.
“Charlotte, I guess you must be feeling well enough to do whatever it is you usually do?”
“I guess,” I said.
“But it sure would be nice if you changed your mind and decided to stay here,” he said with his sheep-wolf smile, “with me. I feel as though we barely got a chance to talk last week.”
“I could always cancel my plans,” I said, “I guess.”
“And I guess that would be finer than fine….” He sheep-wolf smiled again.
And so I canceled my plans with Grace and Helen, canceled my friendships with everyone in the world, never looking back, at least not for a long time.
Over the course of the next several Saturdays, we got to know each other better, always in the yellow bedroom. Even though we had the whole deserted penthouse to range over, we stayed where we had begun. What it lacked in comfort, it made up for in feeling talismanic to what we both felt growing.
At first, we talked about safe subjects. He liked to tell me about his career, seemed to respect that I was intelligent enough to understand whatever he might choose to share. And he was most interested in hearing about my desire to be a writer. Despite my relative lack of experience with men, I’d come to realize that there is a certain kind of man for whom the writing female is an endless source of fascination. Perhaps it’s as simple as this: they are curious as to what we write because they imagine we share our characters’ bravery and desire. Certainly, if there’s any sex involved in the writing, people would assume that you’ve either done or desperately want to do all the acts depicted; although God knows what they think about people who write serial-killer books with sex scenes involving gerbils. Or perhaps the fascination that writers hold for some people is more complex, like recognizing that the mind that is capable of sustaining a fantasy over a hundred thousand readable words must somehow be qualitatively different than the mind that cannot. They see the creativity as something other, foreign, exotic, those three adjectives having discretely different meanings.
“That’s the thing,” said Buster at last, one Saturday, “my wife could never be a writer.”
There it was: the first time he had brought up her name between us, even though he hadn’t named her by name at all, but had merely spoken of her in her assigned role.
That was all it took, though, the watershed after which he felt it safe to discuss his wife’s shortcomings at length. It would be easy to characterize him merely as a selfish and philandering husband—indeed, he was those things—but it would be a mistake not to allow the core truth in the things he said.
He said his wife didn’t understand him; and she didn’t.
He said there was no warmth between them; and there wasn’t.
He said she was the coldest of cold fish; and she was.
It was all true. Every accusation he leveled at her carefully coiffed head was true; I’d seen it all with my own eyes.
“I’m feeling overwhelmed by work lately,” I’d overheard him say to her one time.
“You just need to be more focused,” she replied, not even deigning to look up from her own work.
“Hey, how about a hug for an overtired ambassador?” I’d heard him suggest to her not long after I moved in.
“Not now,” Alissa replied. “I just did my hair. Are you really going to wear that to dinner with the Carlsons tonight?”
Then there was the time I tried to explain to her that some of the other kids at the playground were bullying Kim over his name, singsonging the cheer “Kim, Kim, he’s no Tim! If she can’t do it, let’s get a boy and win!” True, it was a lousy rhyming scheme, but it still hurt Kim. I told Alissa that it might be a good idea to come up with a nickname for him, preferably an “I eat nails for breakfast” kind of name, so he could avoid the taunts until he was old enough to defend himself from such abuse, at least mentally.
“What about Killer?” I suggested.
“What about Kim?” she countered. “Look, Charlotte, I really do appreciate your concern, but you are, after all, just the nanny. Kim needs to get tough. It’s a cruel world out there. He might as well learn it at an early age. He’ll be all the stronger for it later. One day, he’ll thank me for this.”
Somehow, I doubted that. What I really thought was that, one day, the overpriced therapist he’d undoubtedly need would thank her for it.
Sure, it was a cruel world out there. Nobody needed to tell me that. But I also knew that there was no need to make it any harder on a kid than it needed to be, just for the sake of toughening a kid up. What, did all of life have to be boot camp? And I also knew Kim’s pain, because I was the one who was there for him when the other kids bullied him, I was the one who held him when he cried about it at night.
“Why couldn’t they just name me Dirk?” he sobbed.
I had no answer but to hold him tighter.
Alissa and Buster were the kind of couple, not necessarily hating each other but with so little kinship or kindship between them, that when you looked at them and their children, you could only conclude: Well, at least on two separate occasions, everyone closed their eyes, gritted their teeth and thought of England.
And, of course, I understood Buster where she didn’t; he thought so and so did I. I was never cold. If not completely as warm as I could be yet, I was growing warmer all the time.
It was a few months before he traced the back of my hand with his strong finger; he was that patient.
It was another two weeks after that before we had our first kiss and then it was me initiating it. At this point, I had dreamed about doing so for so long, I could no longer wait for him to decide the matter for me. What if he never did? What if he remained content to have a woman who would listen to him? What if he remained content to have a woman to whom he enjoyed listening?
I’d tell him stories, shyly at first, about growing up in Aunt Bea’s house.
“I was eight when Joe was born,” I said. “I was so excited about having a new baby in the house. I thought, ‘Great! I’ve finally got a brother!’ But Aunt Bea pointed out that he wasn’t my brother. Well, of course, he wasn’t, not really. But then she said, ‘And don’t go getting any ideas that you’re equal. This is Joe’s house, not yours.’”
“Ouch!” Buster said. “What a bitch!”
Somehow, it was the perfect thing to say.
And when I told him about wanting to write, he made me feel understood.
At least that’s the part I let myself remember.
And I’d tell him what the kids had been doing during the week.
“Stevie and Kim helped me bake cookies. They said they’d never baked anything before. They were supposed to be chocolate chip, but they ended up being charred chip because we forgot to set the timer and got caught up playing Don’t Spill the Beans.”
He looked at me admiringly. “You take such good care of them,” he said. “We’re so lucky to have you,” he said.
Sometimes, it felt as though I were their mother!
Oh, what a wonderful thing for a woman, any woman certainly but this woman in particular, to be listened to raptly by someone who in turn interested her.
I was in love with him, falling, free-falling through the sky without ever stopping to wonder about consequence.
He said no one would ever say we were bad people. He said two people so rarely fall truly in love, the sin would be in not pursuing our feelings to wherever they might take us. He said that one day—no, not soon, probably, but one day—he and I would be together publicly, as well we should be. He wanted us to have a baby together. Not then, most definitely not then, but someday.
He was shocked to learn I was a virgin. To him, who had been having sex longer than I had been alive, it was a shock to think that anyone over the age of consent could still be a virgin.
But he loved the idea.
You’ll laugh when I say I was a virgin, but I swear I was, a twenty-one-year-old virgin. And you can laugh again when I say that I had been saving myself for that one true love that would be worthy of the greatest gift I had left to give.
Perhaps in preparation for an event I hoped would come, I wrote a short story about a young woman’s first time and showed it to Helen and Grace on a night out. They, far more experienced than I, marveled at what they called the to-the-bone authenticity of the lovemaking scene.
“Pretend I’m Roger Ebert,” laughed Helen, assuming a masculine voice. “‘You can almost feel the body fluids.’”
“And I’m the other guy,” giggled Grace, also going baritone. “‘Better than a modern Harold Robbins—I think I just wet myself!’”
“That’s great,” I said. “But I don’t think those guys review books, too.”
“Oh, well…” Helen shrugged. “We don’t know any book reviewers.”
“But it really is good,” Grace said, handing the loose pages back to me. “You must be getting more action than I thought.”
Oh, if they had only known how little experience the author of that hotly erotic scene had ever had.
It really is amazing what you can learn in books. From Judy Blume, I’d learned how to deal with my first period. And from countless other books, I’d culled enough to know what exactly I would like from a sexual experience, enough so that I could fake a written simultaneous orgasm with the best of them, powerful enough to make Grace, imitating the reviewer who reviews with Roger Ebert, wet her pants.
I never minded that Buster was so much older than me. I know some will look at these events, set them beside what they know of my childhood and Freudianly conclude, “Ah, it is so obvious—she was looking for a father figure.”
But people who would think that seem to me to be the same kind of people who ironically conclude that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. A cigar is never just a cigar.
For the permanent record, I did mind calling a grown man Buster. Hell, I wouldn’t want to call a young boy Buster. But the one time I tried to call him Bertram it just didn’t feel right, either. So for better or worse, “Buster” it was.
Making love with Buster, when it finally happened, was the greatest thing that had ever happened to me. Oh, there was pain to be sure, but it was so much more than pain. It was beauty and it was love and it was a closeness I’d only previously known through writing.
I never felt sorry for Alissa. I could see how cold she was, had no problem believing Buster that for her it had always been a marriage of convenience, the cachet of being married to the attaché.
And so the Saturdays piled up, whenever he wasn’t out of town on diplomatic business. The Saturdays piled up until there were nearly three years of them from when we had begun. And during those three hours a week, it was like we were the only two people in the world, a small yellow world with bad TV reception.
Sleep with someone in haste, repent at your own damn leisure, I always say. Well, I always say it now, at least.
Long into our third year together, I missed my period. If I’d been another woman, I never would have panicked so quickly, being just a couple of days late. But I’d always been regular, reliable like calling Western Union for the exact time. If I’d been a more practical and less in-love woman, I might have concluded that the delay in my period had to do with the anorexia I’d been flirting with, the lack of appetite brought about by my advanced state of in-loveness leading to a dramatic weight loss that had disturbed the tides of my regular cycle.
I told Buster, not too trepidatiously. After all, wasn’t this what we had been intending all along? Okay, so maybe this was a bit sooner than we would have liked, but did it really matter so very much if we’d jumped the gun by just a smidgen?
And that was when Buster offered me money to go away and have an abortion. I was crazy to think we could do this thing, he said. It would destroy his career, he said. His wife would take him to the cleaners, he said.
How quickly you can go from thinking someone is the greatest person who lived to thinking they don’t deserve you, never deserved you in the first place. Sometimes, the freefall out of love is quicker than the fall into it.
I didn’t want Buster’s money, of course, didn’t need it. But I also had no intention of aborting his child. I’m not trying to take a moral stand here on what’s right, pro-choice or pro-life, but if you push me I’ll tell you I’m pro-choice and only wish that more people, me included, were more careful about their choices ahead of time. But I couldn’t see destroying something that had been conceived in what I could still only think of as love. I had loved Buster, Buster had loved me, and any child of ours would have a great set of brains.
Okay, so maybe he or she would suck at math, but with my verbal skills—written, more than oral, “I guess” I’d have to say—and Buster’s sense of geography, any child of ours would still have a great set of brains.
Buster was livid, said if I was going to talk like a crazy woman, I should leave sooner rather than later.
And that was when I got the cramp, not a convenient miscarriage cramp as you might think, just a delayed-period cramp, so severe because of the delay, the buildup.
As soon as Buster realized what it was, he was contrite. Wouldn’t I stay? Wouldn’t I forgive him? Surely I understood: he had merely panicked at the suddenness of everything. If I hadn’t dropped the news on him so suddenly, so out of the blue, he would not have reacted so. If I were to tell him the same thing right now, he would most definitely react differently. Couldn’t we just make love to reseal our faith and love in one another? After all, we’d made love while I was on my period many times before…
I packed my things the same day.
It is a truth universally unacknowledged that just because you’re sleeping with your charges’ father, it doesn’t mean you can’t be a good mother to kids. But I wasn’t a good mother to Stevie and Kim, of course. I was a great mother. And when it came time for me to go, it killed me to leave them behind. I would have liked to stay on long enough to help them grow up all the way—they were eight and six at the time I left. But one of the most important lessons life teaches you is to tell when a thing is over and it’s time to move on.
I did not want to see Buster ever again, but I knew he would give me a good reference. After all, he wouldn’t want to risk my wrath, not knowing what my wrath might be.
Loving Buster had made me feel spectacular, special, and now I was back to being as ordinary as dirt.
Well, I certainly wasn’t going to tell Mrs. Fairly that. So instead, I lied.
When she’d asked about the conditions under which I’d left my previous position, I eschewed the pregnant-nanny story and told her instead that it was simply time to move on, that with Stevie now eight and Kim now six, they seemed too old, too involved with their own worlds to need me so much, and the position had become no longer sufficiently challenging.
“But Annette is already six,” Mrs. Fairly objected to my reasoning. “Will you find that she too doesn’t need you enough, that she is insufficiently challenging?”
“Oh, no,” I allayed her fears in cockeyed fashion. “The Keating children were New York children. After a certain point, what more could they possibly need? But Annette will now be an Iceland child. I’m sure she’ll need all kinds of things in her new situation and will prove challenging for some time to come.”
Well, it worked for me.
What Would Nancy Drew Do?
I was convinced that, in similar circumstances, being the nanny in an ambassador’s home, there were a lot of things I did that Nancy would never do. But I was sure she would hug and kiss those two dear children goodbye and tell them she loved them and was proud of them and was only a phone call away should they ever need her, and I did all that. I don’t know if Nancy would have cried when she hugged and kissed Stevie and Kim goodbye, but I did that, too.
The flight from New York to Reykjavik takes seven hours, more than enough time for a person to relive the biggest mistake of her life while sitting next to an old man who now hates her guts because she won’t tell him what ideas she has for what she wants to write about, because she doesn’t know, nor will she steal his.
But all bad things must come to an end.
Or so I thought.
Just as I was envisioning the plane touching down without incident, the copilot emerged from the cockpit, tool kit in hand, as the pilot made an announcement.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we have a slight problem with the landing gear…”
“Slight problem?” George gulped beside me, his old eyes suffused with fear as the copilot bustled past us and proceeded to cut a big rectangle out of the carpeting.
“I’m sure everything is fine,” said the pilot, “probably just a malfunction on the landing-gear light.”
“Malfunction?” George looked as if he was going to be sick.
I felt sick, too.
Why had I ever gotten on this plane? my mind shrieked. Sure, people said that flying was safer than driving a car, but that was for other people who were not control freaks like me who never felt safe unless she could feel the earth. Besides, I didn’t even drive a car!
I was about to go into a panic, like most of the people around me, when I saw how truly upset George was, silently praying to himself as he watched the copilot disappear down into the plane.