Читать книгу How Nancy Drew Saved My Life - Lauren Baratz-Logsted - Страница 10

Icelandair must be the greatest airline in the world. The flight attendants wear these soothing uniforms that are kind of cool, they’re actually nice to the passengers and they give you real food, none of that “here’s your one-ounce bag of peanuts you’ll never be able to open and four ounces of soda and don’t you dare ask for the whole can, what else could you possibly need?” crap.

I was just getting ready to tuck into my salmon and grilled baby vegetables when my aisle mate, an elderly gentleman with not much hair, steel glasses and a lot of polyester recognized me.

This still happened occasionally, even though it had been sixteen years since I’d made the last commercial. It was the hair, the unruly black curls, and the quirky curve to my smile the few times I still smiled. At age three, right after my father had left me with Aunt Bea, that quirky curve had been deemed visually precocious, hence the casting director’s decision to select me as the face to represent Gubber Snack Foods. I was the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, had been spotted for my potential when Aunt Bea and I had been squashed next to the casting director on the subway.

“That child has amazing hair!” the casting director, Mort Damon, had enthused.

“If you like lots of hair on a little girl,” Aunt Bea had said.

“And that smile!” Mort Damon continued as he had begun. “It’s like looking at the Mona Lisa if she were a dwarf!”

Mort had given Aunt Bea his card and Aunt Bea had reluctantly accepted it.

“Don’t let this go to your head,” she’d cautioned after we’d answered the formality of a casting call and been called. “But this will be a way for you to earn your education. Not that I don’t think your father would be willing to pay, but you never know what might happen with an archaeologist.”

Gubber Snack Foods was supposed to be the perfect organic alternative to the overprocessed, oversugared foods for kids that lined the supermarket shelves. And a new generation of moms, working harder all the time both in and out of the home, had gratefully reached for it.

My big line, the one I intoned at the end of each commercial, having made sixteen commercials for various products in the line from the time I started until the time I turned seven, the words bubbling out of my organic chocolate-smeared mouth?

“It’s Gubberlicious!”

Four years later, at age seven, despite the fact that I was small for my age, I was deemed too old to hawk the product. Personally, I think it was because I stopped being cute. But whatever the reason, I counted myself lucky. Unlike other child stars who had difficulty adjusting to a life where they were no longer treated as special I had never been allowed by Aunt Bea to be treated as special in the first place and so I had no overinflated ego to recover from.

The commercials were still aired occasionally, appealing to audiences in a nostalgic way, and I still received the odd residual check.

As I say, people still sometimes recognized me, based on the hair and curvy smile. It by no means happened often, but at least a couple of times a year, some stranger would say, “I know I’ve seen that smile before! But where…?”

As far-fetched as it might sound, that people could recognize you just from a smile, I understood it from firsthand experience. Home sick with mono for a month in high school, I’d watched more old movies than I’d ever watched in my life or would ever watch again. On my first day of freedom, I’d been walking down Broadway when I caught the eye of an older woman, meaning someone lots older than me, traveling in the other direction, and she smiled.

“I know you!” I’d shouted, unable to come up with a name.

If she’d been someone truly recognizable, like Meryl Streep, I would never have stopped her. I mean, how mortifying!

She stopped on the street, smiling indulgently.

I racked my brain, trying to place that familiar face.

“Toothpaste commercial?” I tried.

She shook her head, smiled wider.

It was that last smile that nailed it.

“Animal House!” The way I jumped up and down, clapped my hands, you’d think I’d just beat Ken Jennings on Final Jeopardy. “You were the girl who was twelve but looked eighteen!” I shouted, talking to her like I was telling her something she didn’t know. “You passed out at the frat house!”

She smiled again, nodded.

“Well,” I said, winding down now that the glitch-in-my-memory itch had been scratched, “that’s just great. Thanks. And, hey, you really do have the best smile.”

I’d continued on my way, never even learning her real name. It wasn’t until later that it occurred to me to wonder how often that happened to her.

I have to confess, I wasn’t as consistently gracious as she was with me when confronted with the whole “I know I’ve seen that smile before! But where…?” situation. If I was in a good mood, I shyly answered, “Gubber Snack Foods.” If I was in a bad mood, I said, “It must have been when I body-doubled for Julia Roberts.”

They’d look at my non-tall, non-lithe body in confusion and say, “No, I don’t think that was it…”

The reason I plucked Julia Roberts’s name out of the air was no accident. It was because she had that same kind of smile: you could block out the rest of her face and with no other clue guess, “That’s Julia Roberts!” Julia Roberts and I shared nothing else in common, but we did share that one thing: block-out-the-rest-of-your-face smiles.

Indeed, even Mrs. Fairly had recognized me, once she’d seen the Gubber Snack Foods gig on my résumé.

“I used to buy Gubber Snack Foods,” she’d said, just like everybody always says it, like they’ve performed some kind of accomplishment you should be impressed by and not the reverse. “Oh, not for myself,” she’d gone on, “but in a previous post, I’d had more direct responsibility for the children of the household. I tasted one of those Gubber Snacks once…” She leaned across conspiratorially. “Revolting.”

Indeed. But the checks had been good at least.

Now the man in the seat next to me, George Cranston from Staten Island, was saying pretty much the same thing, all of which I’d heard a thousand times before, or at least fifty.

“I can’t wait to get home after my trip and tell my grandkids I sat for seven hours next to a beautiful somebody who used to be on television.”

And, for some reason, I was not in the mood to spend seven hours reminiscing about my years as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid. With my luck, he’d make me say my famous line, the line that other kids had teased me about at every phase of my schooling, once they’d figured out who I was.

“I’m not who you think I am,” I said impulsively.

“No?” He looked crestfallen. “Are you sure?”

“Quite.”

“Come on,” he said. “Say, ‘It’s Gubberlicious!’ for me just one time. I’ll bet you’re her.”

“No, I’m not,” I said firmly. “I’m…I’m…I’m her doppelgänger. People just confuse me with her all the time, but I’m really not her. Hell, people probably confuse her with me all the time, for all I know.”

George Cranston from Staten Island pulled back at my use of “hell,” but he was curious enough that it didn’t stop him for long.

“So,” he said, arms crossed, “who are you that people should confuse you with her?” He said “her” like the Gubber Foods Kid was Madeleine Albright or something.

“I’m a writer,” I countered the challenge without thinking.

Shit, where did that come from? I asked myself timidly as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

Actually, I kind of knew where that had come from. Back when I’d been interviewed by Mrs. Fairly, I’d even intimated as much, shyly confessing a newfound ambition to one day write.

Well, I had to do something with my life, didn’t I?

“Why would you want to do that?” she’d asked, stunned.

It’s amazing how, if a person has no inclination to do a thing themselves, they have trouble understanding the attraction/fascination it might hold for others.

I recalled for her an article I’d read once in the New York Times—it’s amazing how much trouble being an avid devotee of the Times has gotten me into—that said that eighty-one percent of people polled said they thought they had a book in them. What other career could boast that kind of attraction? Surely lots of people might say they want to be doctors, but it was more for the BMW and the nebulous help-humanity aspect of it than the desire to be up to their elbows in O.R. blood, I was sure of it. And surely eighty-one percent of people were not lining up to be systems analysts. I’ll bet not even that many people wanted to be actors, despite the glamour, what with public speaking being the number-one phobia, up there ahead of death and spiders.

And yet so many people wanted to write, and not necessarily because they saw it as an easy path to fame and fortune, although surely there were those who thought that.

So why the high statistics?

It was, I thought, because of the almost universal desire to be heard.

I wanted to be heard, too.

But since I couldn’t even hold my own interest with the scribblings in my diary, I knew I had my work cut out for me if I wanted to take steps in that direction.

I wondered at my own audacity, the notion that I might have something worth saying. But I also knew that enough had happened to me—the death of my mother, the absence of my father, the whole sorry affair with Buster—to infuse my voice, however naive it might be at times, with a precocious wisdom.

Even if I only wrote for myself, but seriously, it might give me the catharsis I needed.

Apparently, George took my avowal of being a writer at face value.

As he droned on with an idea he had for what I should write next, a story he was too lazy to write himself but that he felt someone should tell, I found myself wishing Mrs. Fairly were in the seat next to me instead, but she’d flown on to Iceland a few days before with Annette, saying it would be best if they got situated and the master grew accustomed to having two more in the new Iceland house before adding me as a third.

George seemed offended I didn’t jump at his novel idea, even though I suspected he would have sued me penniless if I’d ever dared to try.

“So,” he said, still enormously miffed, “if you’re not going to write Travels with George for your next novel, then what the hell are you going to write?”

What, indeed?

And, more importantly, WWNDD about my annoying companion?

Reading all fifty-six of those books, I’d fast learned that people always started telling Nancy everything…just as soon as they met her! And, before long, Nancy could always read their minds. She was like the ultimate Mistress of Empathy.

So, WWNDD?

She’d be nice to the nosy old geezer, she’d listen to every boring thing he had to say, she’d answer his questions with complete politeness without giving anything important away.

“I’m not sure what I plan to write,” I said honestly. “That’s part of what I’m going to Iceland to find out.”

And it was.

Ever since I was a young girl, I’d flirted with the idea of being a writer, had even written a long story, Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, a roman à clef if there ever was one. Writing, mostly in my journal, was my way of making sense of the world. More importantly, perhaps, it was a way of getting outside of myself, of living the lives I was not smart enough or talented enough or brave enough to live. I might not be able to sing on key, but maybe one day I could write a character who was an opera singer or a rock singer, beset by trials and tribulations but finding love where and when it mattered most. Best of all, if I were a writer, I could write my own endings, whether I was in the mood for tragedy or joy. I could kill those who deserved to be killed, I could kill those I loved best in my fictional worlds just for the sake of creating great drama, I could love without fear.

The only problem was, I had yet to come up with an idea that moved me. Even Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, once I’d read it through for the twelfth time, didn’t seem like something anyone else would ever pay good money for, unless it was because they wanted an example of writing that was howlingly awful.

I burned it in the fireplace, but I never forgot the one great line of my young heroine, Carly Bongstein: “If I ever get out of here alive, with God as my witness, I’ll never eat pork chops again.”

But I knew in my young heart I was destined to write something far more important than Diary of the Wicked Aunt’s Girl, even if it turned out to be the kind of book that sold meagerly, the critics raving or ranting for naught. It wouldn’t matter, because I would have written something true, something that really mattered, if to no one else, then to myself.

The only problem was, I had no idea what that book might be about.

And that was part of why, at age twenty, I’d applied for the position of nanny at Ambassador Keating’s house. I thought it might be good for my would-be writer’s soul to seek out low-level employment, cocooning as it were, until I knew what to write about.

And now, having not been able to come up with the inspiration for My Great Novel during my years in the Keating household, I was winging my way to a new household in Iceland in the hopes that a change of scenery would finally do the trick.

But I still hadn’t a clue as to what I would write about and had said as much to Mrs. Fairly, said as much to George now.

Mrs. Fairly had taken it better than George.

George seemed to be of a mind that I was holding out on him, that I was some kind of paranoid freak, fearful he might steal my ideas and use them for lucrative gain, just as he undoubtedly imagined I wanted to steal his.

“Well, if you want to be that way about it,” he huffed, reaching into the pocket hanging from the back of the seat in front of him in order to retrieve the reading material he’d stowed there earlier as insurance against the boredom of our long flight.

When he’d first put his reading material there earlier as we’d been settling in, I hadn’t bothered to take note of the specifics, concerned as I was at the time with arranging for my own comfort. Contacts out and glasses in to prevent dry eyes? Check. Shoes off to give my feet maximum comfort until such time as I might need to use the restroom with the no doubt urine-stained floor? Check. My copy of Shirley Hazzard’s Transit of Venus, the brass Poe bookmark—“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream by night,” the brass of which had set off the metal detector at airport security—firmly lodged at page 52? Check.

But now, for some reason, I was dead curious as to what George would deem appropriate in-flight reading material.

I stole a surreptitious glance.

It was Nancy Drew, #47, The Mysterious Mannequin.

He must have heard me gasp, because he looked up.

“Something wrong,” he asked, “Ms. Writer?”

“It’s just that…”

“Yes?”

“Oh. It’s just that I didn’t expect to see…”

“See what? Someone reading Nancy Drew on the way to Iceland?”

I hesitated, nodded.

“Ha!” he snorted, turned back to his book. “Shows how much you know.”

“What does that mean?” I pressed.

But my aisle mate was no longer interested in engaging in polite discourse with me. Apparently, I’d somehow managed to offend his delicate sensibilities one too many times.

“It’s just that,” he finally answered, not even deigning to lift his eyes from the dark print on the page, “if you’d ever been to Iceland before, you’d know better than to wonder about such things.”

I tried to immerse myself in Ms. Hazzard, but it just wasn’t cutting it. At the right time, I knew I’d love what I was reading, admire it intensely. But I was on a plane to Iceland, for God’s sake, had no idea what I was getting myself into, and probably the only reading that might have worked for me right then was brain candy.

Quickly, I learned that the SkyMall magazine was not the answer, either. And so, for a brief time I tried to read Nancy Drew over George’s shoulder, but he caught on fast, protectively hunching over the book and cradling the page with his right arm, like we were in grade school and he was the smart kid preventing the unprepared kid—that would be me—from cheating.

Sighing, I wished once again that Mrs. Fairly were my aisle mate instead of the dyspeptic George. True, they’d both recognized me as the Gubber Snack Foods Kid, although I’d successfully deflected George into believing I was not—some success!—but at least Mrs. Fairly had remained cheerful about it throughout the whole thing, whereas George…

Of course, Mrs. Fairly had only been peripherally interested in me as a former commercial child star. Yes, more than her interest in me as that had been Mrs. Fairly’s interest in me as the woman who used to be employed by Ambassador Keating.

What had been the story behind my employment? What had it been like there? Why had I left?

As I mentioned earlier, I had sought out employment in the Keating household as a refuge from both my claustrophobic situation in my aunt’s house and as a way to bide my time until a novel grew inside my brain.

My interview with Mrs. Keating had been far different than the one I’d more recently survived with Mrs. Fairly. Mrs. Keating, a tennis-playing tax attorney staunchly committed to loopholes and her weak backhand, had drilled me like she was a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and I was someone who had applied for the job of, well, ambassador.

Alissa Keating was pretty enough, but only in the way of women who have enough time and money to ensure they look that way. Without the bells and whistles and bows, she’d have just looked like anybody else who wasn’t really such a much.

Not that I’m trying to be catty here, just stating fact.

Anyway, Alissa needed a new nanny for her two kids because the last one “had left under unpleasant circumstances.”

Her face got all pinched when she said that, kind of like a golden raisin, and I suppose I should have questioned her further on it, but I just assumed that my predecessor had been a thief or incompetent or both. Since I was not a thief, and hopefully not incompetent, I figured I would suit the Keatings just fine.

Then Alissa brought in the kids for me to meet them.

Stevie, the girl, named for the sultry singer from Fleetwood Mac, who Alissa claimed her husband adored, was five at the time and was cute and bouncy, all blond curls and laughing glee. Children of neglectful parents—and I would indeed come to learn over the next three years that the Keatings were neglectful parents—are often sad little creatures, cynical before their time. But I’d long known there was the rare exception to that rule, kids who remained perky and resilient despite a cruel or indifferent upbringing. I knew these characteristics, could recognize them in another, because I possessed them myself.

The boy’s name was unfortunately Kim, ill advisedly named after the Kipling character by his mother, who obviously had not stopped to think that her literary pretensions might get the crap beaten out of her son later on in life. Kim was three at the time, a dour towhead with sad blue pools for eyes with too-long lashes who had not managed to become as resilient as his sister.

I liked the kids well enough on first meeting and they seemed to like me, with even Kim allowing a single tentative smile in my direction, like maybe he thought, Okay, so you’re being nice now, but how long will that last? How long will you last?

Alissa said I’d be expected to make sure the kids ate breakfast and dinner, make sure they got off to school okay and to all their extracurricular activities—there was a lot of ballet and soccer and that early-violin thing all the rich New York kids go to that I can never remember the name of, Samurai or something—and that when at home, she did not want them watching TV; she wanted me teaching them more important things all the time.

“Um, I’m not very good with math or geography,” I confessed, figuring it was best to get that out of the way so she could decide against me without wasting any more time.

That brought her up short for a minute, but only a minute, since three years earlier a good nanny had been hard to find, unlike now when a good position was hard for a nanny to find.

“I suppose that could be okay,” she finally said. “They can get some geography from their father. I’m pretty sure he keeps a map of some kind in his office. And they’re already the genetic recipients of good math from me.”

Alissa stressed that she wanted someone who would live in, that she needed someone seven days a week because she and her husband went out a lot and she did not want to disrupt the children by having them handed off to different sitters all the time.

I said that would be fine and it was. I wanted to get out of Aunt Bea’s house but, despite my own money, did not feel ready to live on my own. At least in the Keating household there would be the distraction of a job to do. Plus, I loved children.

“I don’t want a nanny,” said Alissa, “who is more interested in her own social life than in taking care of my children.”

I could have said that it seemed that she was more interested in her own social life than in taking care of her kids, but I held my tongue in an effort to come across as employable. So instead I said:

“That won’t be me. I have no social life.”

She gave me a once-over that said she was hardly surprised, for I had indeed worn the most sensible clothes plus no makeup for the interview, but then all of a sudden she did look surprised, snapping her fingers three times, as if she was trying to come up with something.

“The Gubber Snack Foods Kid, right?” she accused, pointing to me on the last snap.

In the instant after Alissa snapped and pointed, it was clear from her look that she thought I’d come down in the world, lookswise, since my last commercial. Well, that had been sixteen years ago.

“I guess they have someone come in and do makeup and stuff for those things, huh?” she said, in words that could have implied sympathy but didn’t.

I just shrugged.

But I could see in the next minute, by the acquisitive gleam in her eye, that if nothing about my résumé had clinched the job for me earlier—surely my lack of geography and math hadn’t exactly won me points, nor had her children’s immediate liking of me seemed to make an impression on her in any way—this had. Alissa Keating would enjoy nothing more than having friends and colleagues learn that she kept a former child star—even if all I’d done was make a few stupid commercials—as a subordinate in a tiny bedroom in her household.

I could just hear her at the tennis club now.

“Can you believe it?” Alissa would ask. Thwack! “‘It’s Gubberlicious!’” Thwack! “Yup! I’ve got her right up in my attic!” Thwack!

And, okay, I hadn’t actually seen the tiny bedroom at that point, but I could certainly guess.

Not long after her victorious gleam, the master of the household entered the kitchen where she had been interviewing me, walked by us without a glance, retrieved a foreign beer from the refrigerator and, with one testosterone-charged flick of the wrist, used a bottle opener to shoot off the cap. Turning, bottle to his lips, he took me in for the first time and I him.

It’s no overstatement to say that Buster Keating was the most beautiful man I’d seen in person up until that life-changing moment of my life. The rich dinners he’d undoubtedly consumed at diplomatic get-togethers had done not a trace of damage to his tall, muscular physique, and whatever tennis he himself played had only served to strengthen the structure into hardness, like a da Vinci model—I’m talking about the carved men of the sculptures here—every line and sinew defined. He had a shock of dark hair that defied the well-trimmed look one would expect in a diplomat, instead giving him the perpetual appearance of someone who had just climbed out of bed, a bed in which he and whoever his lucky partner was had no doubt had great sex. His brown eyes were to die for, his jawline like something a superhero couldn’t dent. When he smiled, the flash of white was almost obscene, both in intensity and implied invitation.

Of course, Buster was about twenty years older than me, but that didn’t matter. Why should it? Anyone could see that he was in a league I could only dream about, a league I’d never even seen before.

“Hey, you’re new,” he said before taking a slug of his beer.

It never occurred to me, in that moment, that his reaction could be anything more than that of the habitual flirt. I’d met people like Buster Keating before. Not necessarily bisexual, they couldn’t help themselves from flirting with every single person they came across, man, woman or animal. He probably flashed that same smile at his secretary, whether she was hot or not, at the carrier boy who delivered important papers to his office, at the schnauzer on the corner. For him, such a thing was merely a Pavlovian response; I was sure of it. There was nothing special to be read in his reaction to me; I was sure of that, too.

Alissa Keating was apparently sure of it, as well, for, without even turning to look at her husband, she said, “That’s right, Buster. Charlotte is the new nanny.”

And so it started, both my job in the Keating household and my ruinous affair with Buster.

Oh, I don’t mean to imply that it started right that minute. The onset took much longer than that. But, really, it kind of did.

The first several months there, I had hardly any contact with Buster at all, nor with Alissa for that matter. Since Buster spent a large part of every year either in Washington or at the foreign embassy to which he had been posted, he was mostly at home only on weekends and sometimes not even then. As for Alissa, she was too busy being everything but a mother to be a mother; that’s what she had me for. And so, most of my dealings with them were through the daily notes Alissa left for me on the butcher block in the kitchen, a knife always stuck in the top of the note so that no stray wind could ever blow her precious words away, notes filled with instructions on nutrition and scheduling recommendations for Stevie and Kim.

“Five fruits and vegetables each and every day, Charlotte. Even with your math-challenged mind, you can count that high…right?”

“Fifteen minutes of TV in the morning and fifteen at night. That’s it. They don’t call it the idiot box for nothing…right?”

“That last piece of chocolate cheesecake is mine…right?”

There were times I thought there must be better uses for that sharp note-stabbing knife than the purpose it was being used for.

And so, before another day had passed following my interview with Alissa, my life began to be filled with the education of small children, with shopping for birthday parties and making sure granola bars and juice boxes were in backpacks, with tutus and Samurai violin lessons.

It didn’t take many more days to pass before I started to fall in love with those kids. It wasn’t so much that they were particularly charming, certainly Kim wasn’t, but there was something so vulnerable about their orphans-within-a-two-parent-household circumstances. If their parents would not pay enough attention to them, then I would let Stevie play with what little makeup I owned, I would learn how to play games involving balls and things so I could teach Kim how to play, too.

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.

What Would Nancy Drew Do? I wondered frantically.

I pictured that titian-haired retro girl and suddenly I knew exactly what she’d do: she’d remain calm on the outside, no matter what thoughts were going through her head, and she’d offer comfort to anyone who needed it.

I put my hand over George’s wrinkled one.

“It’s going to be okay,” I said.

George was still muttering, saying tearful goodbyes to his grandchildren.

“Really,” I said. “I’ve been through this kind of thing a hundred times.”

That stopped him. “You have?” he asked.

“Yes,” I lied, wondering if Nancy Drew ever lied to make someone else feel better. Probably not, I figured: one, she was probably morally against lying; and, two, with fifty-six cases under her belt, she really had been through everything a hundred times!

“Yes,” I said again, “and it always turns out okay in the end.”

“It does?” George asked, wanting to believe.

“Of course,” I said. “You’ll have an exciting story to tell your grandkids the next time you see them. Why, you should just look at this as material for that story you’ll one day write.”

“Ha!” he said, regaining some of his former spirit. “I thought you were the writer!”

Still, he clung to my hand right up until the copilot emerged from the bottom of the plane.

“Everything’s fine,” the copilot announced to cheers. “It was just as the pilot said—must have been a malfunction with the light.”

Even still, it was treated as an emergency landing, fire trucks screaming beside the plane as we hit the runway.