The View From Penthouse B (12 page)

“I have a good feeling about you,” said the new mother. “And I’m not that interested in my employees’ love lives. We should get along fine.”

Olivia said, gesturing around the living room, “It’s immaculate. I don’t see any . . . baby stuff . . . any toys.”

“I hate clutter,” said Ms. Bradford. “I don’t have one thing on my desk at work, not even a blotter.” But then her voice changed to a worried whisper. “I think to myself: When I get back to work, do I keep pictures of Maudie on my desk? I might not be able to look at her without crying because I’ll miss her so much.” She involuntarily touched one breast, a gesture that any experienced nanny knew meant
I’ll pump at work. But it won’t be the same.

From her white ruffled bassinette, Maude began fretting and thrusting her legs fitfully.

“Have you tried eliminating milk products from your diet?” Olivia asked. “That could help with her colic. And this . . .” She sat down on a white leather ottoman, reached for Maude, placed her belly-down across her knees, and made circles on her back with two expert fingers. The baby’s eyes closed. Olivia said, “If you offer me the job, I’ll take it.”

“I do offer you the job,” said Stephanie Bradford. “I’ll call the agency. I was one week away from setting up a crib in my office.”

“One more thing,” said Olivia. “Would you feel better if you met Noel, my last employer? He can vouch for me. And you’ll see that he isn’t a creep.”

“And the wife?”

Without hesitation, Olivia said, “I signed a confidentiality agreement so I can’t answer that.”

“Well done,” said Stephanie. “But do answer this: Are you going to run off and get married just as Maudie’s stranger anxiety sets in?”

“I’ll sign a contract,” said Olivia. She smiled to soften the qualifier that was ahead. “I stay for one full year, minimum, as long as you’re fair and reasonable.”

“I like you,” said Stephanie. She then volunteered that Maude had been her paternal great-grandmother’s name. She’d arrived in steerage from England, worked on Beacon Hill as a governess, married the boss’s bachelor brother, had five sons, the youngest of whom grew up to be Stephanie’s grandfather. No scandal. Maude was beautiful, educated, and to Boston ears sounded like nobility. They stayed married for fifty-something years. “So you see where I’m coming from,” Stephanie confided.

Olivia did. This boss held no bias against household shenanigans based on love.

A jubilant Anthony organized a celebration. We had to invite Charles after he spotted the bottles of prosecco on the kitchen counter and wanted to know what was on the calendar. When I told Margot that I felt obliged to include him, she said, “Well, there goes any good time I might have had.” I offered to disinvite him, but she said it would probably be fine because the actuality of Charles was often better than the prospect. Bolstering his case: the spiral-cut ham he offered to supply.

Besides Charles, Margot, Anthony, and me, the guests were a man named Douglas, nattily dressed in a silvery striped tie, who looked starched and polished and fresh from the gym where he’d met Anthony, too soon to be called “boyfriend” but getting there. We had Olivia’s college roommate from Philadelphia, now in law school. Noel the paramour (very brave—we hadn’t met him); new boss Stephanie, who was rushing over between feedings. We had our grouchy across-the-hall neighbors, Jacques and Solange, who spoke only French in the elevator and never to us.

Charles arrived fifteen minutes early. Why? Because he believed—he actually
believed!
—that it would be a good time to tell his ex-wife and her sister that he’d met, in person, the son named Charles, aka Chaz, the ill-gotten offspring Charles had elected never to claim or know. Oh, and by the way? Chaz was downstairs in his biological father’s pied-à-terre, perfectly happy to wait until the party was over, but also happy to drop by since the host was his Facebook friend Anthony Sarno.

In the few minutes remaining before the desired guests arrived, Margot and I pushed Anthony into the kitchen and demanded that he explain. It took rewording and repetition of simple declarative sentences before we understood, so shocked were we that he, our defender, confidante, and advisor in all things practical, had undertaken something as hugely presumptuous as digging up a son no one asked for. With a swat to his closest bicep, I said, “I know you found him online, but Jesus! That wasn’t enough? You had to put him in touch with Charles? Have you ever heard the term ‘Pandora’s box’?”

“I think the outrage should be Charles’s, and he was pretty cool about it,” Anthony answered.

Charles, on cue from the foyer, called in the direction of the summit, “Everything okay in there? I’m fine with whatever you decide.”

Margot, now with both shoulder blades pressed against a far wall, muttered, “Beyond, beyond belief.”

“Are you taking a vote?” Charles asked.

“No we are
not
taking a vote, you asshole!” she yelled.

Anthony said, “May I say something?” He closed his eyes as if silently counting down to the opening of a prayerful oration, then finally said, “Look. I’m sorry. Obviously I didn’t know he’d pull something like this. But I can’t help thinking what this is like for the kid. He’s not a runaway. He isn’t needy. He goes to FIT. And he’s majoring in hat-making.”

At this point, we sisters would surely have ranted about the untimeliness, the arrogance, the selfishness, the cluelessness of bringing the bastard child of a philandering ex-husband to his wounded ex-wife’s party. But what we both sputtered instead was
“Hat-making?”

“He has a website,” said Anthony. “I think he’s really good. And if you’re worrying about how to engage him, he loves to talk about his work.”

Now Olivia appeared, the first time Margot or I had seen her in a dress, a champagne-colored gauzy affair with a brown velvet ribbon at her waist. “Everything okay in here?” she asked.

“It certainly is not!” said Margot. “Charles wants to bring his out-of-wedlock child to your party, and I want to kill him.”

“You can say no,” Anthony pointed out.

Olivia said, “Please! Noel will be here any minute. And Stephanie. It’s not a good night for drama.”

“Or bad karma,” Anthony added.

“You started this,” Margot told him. “I thought you knew how the world worked, that long-lost children show up when they need love or money—”

“Or closure,” Anthony said quietly.

“Closure? Where’s
my
closure? I divorce him and he not only moves into my building, but he thinks I’m a caterer and brings his little bastard as a plus-one to the only party I’ve given in three years!”

“I think it’s a tribute to you,” Anthony said.

“Oh, really?” she said. “Exactly how is it a tribute to me?”

“It’s a tribute to you because Charles knows that, in the end, you always do the right thing. The gracious thing. The kid is downstairs—”

“Where he’s probably trashing the apartment or looking for cuff links to pawn!”

“I am quite sure that’s not the case,” said Anthony.

“Is this some sort of gay support thing?” asked Margot. “Like that hotline for troubled teenagers?”

Anthony’s expression changed, not to one of anger but of incomprehension. He glanced my way for clarification and then back to Margot. “I’m confused,” he said.

“Duh! He wants to design
hats
when he grows up!”

“He has a girlfriend. Who’s also majoring in hats.”

“Did you friend her, too?” Margot asked.

Anthony said, “I understand your sarcasm. But this has now reached another stage. There’s an eighteen-year-old kid downstairs wondering how this touchy situation is going to resolve itself.”

Margot yelled, “Charles! Get in here!”

While I wouldn’t describe her lunge in his direction as a physical attack, we all moved out of her way. “Why tonight?” she cried. “Was this the only night Junior could come meet his mother’s sperm donor—note the sanitized term!—and you couldn’t call us and say, ‘Sorry, something’s come up’? You think we’d
care
if you couldn’t make it? You think we couldn’t have a party without you?”

Charles said, “I wanted to help Olivia celebrate. I thought of just bringing him and introducing him as a young friend, but I thought you’d find that strange.”

“I’m speechless!” Margot cried. “If I were some weakling instead of me, I’d be in the bathroom now, retching my guts out.”

“Does he know who we are?” I asked Charles. “So we can’t just pretend we’re some random neighbors?”

“I haven’t whitewashed anything. He knows I inseminated his mother fraudulently. She was married . . . I was married . . . to the lady giving the party upstairs. He knows I served time and am on parole. Happily, he is a
very
open-minded and forgiving young man. I’d like to think that in some small biological way, I contributed to that.”

Margot turned to me, and I knew the expression well: incredulity and stupefaction, yes. But now there was a flicker of what I recognized as grudging amusement at that which often stunned us: Charles’s award-winning narcissism.

She really was remarkable, my sister. I could see the turn. I knew at that moment that she was going to say “Okay. Bring him up.”

16

Chaz with a Z

“H
ERE’S NOEL!” OLIVIA
called from halfway across the room. “He came!”

This required a reload of the image in our heads. The actual Noel was not the lonely yet smoldering father—a Captain von Trapp or a Mr. Rochester—that I had fashioned in my mind’s eye. He was a bespectacled, pot-bellied man with a receding hairline, who was smiling so fondly at Olivia that I’d taken him for a party-crashing uncle. Until he kissed her on the lips, hungrily.

“Welcome!” Margot called. “We’re so glad, totally delighted”—I felt the nudge of her elbow—“that we finally get to meet the famous Noel.”

He shook Margot’s hand and then mine. “I’m so grateful that Olivia landed here during this difficult period,” he said.

“You should thank Anthony,” Margot said. “He has to be the most devoted big brother on God’s green earth. We just get credit for the couch and the afghan.”

“Anthony’s new boyfriend is coming,” Olivia told Noel. “We’re supposed to be very cool about it, though.”

Noel said with a wry smile, his eyes an unremarkable blue behind his rimless glasses, “Am I ever anything
but
cool?”

An answer in the form of another lingering kiss finally terminated when Olivia pulled back to say, “Stephanie was able to get a sitter so she’s not bringing Maude.”

“The baby’s how old?” Noel asked.

“Weeks! Almost seven.”

“My little girl will be a year in March,” Noel told us.

I said we knew that because Olivia talked about her all the time.

That made Olivia’s features gather into such a sweet, wistful pout that Noel touched her cheek and said, “It’ll be fine, babe.”

Olivia said, “Noel is asking for joint custody.”

The doorbell rang again and Margot said, “I can’t. It might be Charles. Gwen? Would you? I’ll be under a blanket somewhere.”

It was only the malignant Solange and Jacques, coatless, purseless, giftless, protesting that they were dropping in for only a minute. We didn’t think they would come at all because we had the unresolved issue of the copper umbrella stand of undetermined ownership halfway between our two front doors. A week earlier they had left a curt message on engraved, monogrammed notepaper stating that we were taking up more than our share of the “
palier
.”

Later Anthony would report that they seemed baffled as to the party’s raison d’être
.
An au pair’s finding employment?
Why would that be of interest to anyone of their station?

New employer Stephanie was next, attractive in an intense, nubby-suited, CEO kind of way, hair expensively streaked and well coiffed, not one to smile easily as she studied new acquaintances a few seconds too long.

Olivia introduced her new employer to the old, who exclaimed, “She’s the best!”

“I reached that conclusion myself,” Stephanie said. “Obviously, I wasn’t troubled by your ex-wife’s condemnation. I’m much more interested in her caretaking than her private life.”

“Not officially my ex,” he said. “That takes time. None of it was Olivia’s fault. I know you’ll be very happy with your new hire.”

“Maude took to her immediately, blob that she is. And I had to get back to work, like, yesterday.”

Olivia volunteered that the feeling was mutual. Maude was adorable. And named after her great-grandmother.

“Great-
great
-grandmother,” Stephanie corrected.

“Who was a nanny!” said Olivia.

“A governess,” said Stephanie.

Though the doorbell didn’t ring, the front door opened and in came Charles with the very stranger whose arrival Margot had been dodging.

He was dark and slight. A teenager in a vintage tweed overcoat. His eyes were large and brown, and his face had the bones and planes of an ethnicity more interesting than Charles’s. Even within the wool and herringbone folds, he looked as if he might dance on Broadway or model in Milan. And hard to miss: a hat that his new father figure would soon describe as an insouciant bowler—dark forest green, studded with brass grommets.

Before approaching either, I watched them at the buffet table. It was Charles in his paternal role, working stubborn precut slices of ham away from the bone. With his chin and elbow, he seemed to be pointing out the two kinds of mustard and various kinds of bread. I waited until he’d constructed his own sandwich before I approached. The young man didn’t quite smile and seemed uncertain what the name Gwen-Laura Schmidt connoted.

“Margot’s sister,” I explained.

Charles said, “As you probably surmised, this is Chaz—”

“With a Z,” said the young man.

“Hats by Chaz,” said Charles. “Not a bad name for a line.”

“I’m working on a certificate in millinery techniques,” Chaz explained.

I then voiced the backup sentence I’d been saving should follow-up be required. “I understand hats have made a comeback.”