with the upholstered headboard and a bench stationed at the foot of the bed. A large Dorothy Draper yellow screen painted with Grecian urns was tucked behind a gray suede fainting couch. Above the bed hung a partially nude portrait of a young Japanese girl, her schoolgirl socks still on and legs spread wide. Pressing forward down the hall to the last room, I found an incredibly messy guest bedroom—there were ties and men’s shirts scattered on a Chevron striped rug, half-empty water bottles crowding the surface of a puce Lucite bedside table, magazines and newspapers piled high on a mother-of-pearl tray on the floor next to the bed. Across the hall were the doors to the children’s rooms, behind one of which I could hear a cacophony of yelps, cries, and screams.
I glanced at my watch and realized that I’d spent enough time ogling Jill’s apartment and needed to get started on setting the tables before Gigi discovered my delinquency and had a nervous breakdown. But just as I was about to high-speed tip toe back down the hall to the dining room, I heard a loud crash and the door to one of the children’s rooms banged open, revealing a little girl dressed in a navy jumper dress and gray cable-knot cardigan, her light brown hair clipped back by two plaid barrettes, her plump cheeks flaming red and streaked with tears. ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ she yelled behind her shoulder, before running smack into my thighs.
She reeled backward, and I braced her shoulders to keep her from falling. Once she regained her balance, she shook me off and raced back into her room. Her nanny appeared from inside the bathroom and regarded the fragments of what looked to be fine porcelain scattered all over the hardwood floor. ‘Ava,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘What did you do now?’
And with that, the girl burst into a fresh wail and threw herself on her pink shag rug. ‘But Mommy said she would have tea with me before my bath and Mommy doesn’t like drinking out of plastic!’ she cried.
I ventured into the room, which was decorated in various shades of pink, with butterfly-themed wallpaper, silk balloon shades, and a fuchsia crystal chandelier. A child-sized table was set with an elegant fine china gold and ivory tea service, minus the teapot. As the nanny began picking up the pieces, I carefully approached Ava and knelt down next to her writhing, kicking body.
‘Can I have some tea please, Ava? You’ve set such a nice table. And I’m so very thirsty.’
With a snivel, she raised her head and studied my face through her long, wet lashes. ‘Who are you?’ she asked.
She had her mother’s olive skin tone and fine features. I told her my name and that I was there to help with her mother’s party. ‘But I’m suddenly very thirsty,’ I said, clutching my throat and swallowing hard. ‘Would you please, please share some tea with me?’
She nodded solemnly and rested her hand on mine. ‘You poor dear,’ she whispered. A post-tantrum hiccup escaped from her small mouth as she guided me to her table, where she instructed me to sit and stay until she returned with another teapot. After searching frantically through her toy box, a gorgeous little chest painted with butterflies and flowers, she finally found a teapot made of pink plastic, and poured me a cup. For the next few minutes, we sat like that—Ava pouring and I drinking and remarking on the delicious flavor and subtle aromas of her make-believe tea, as the little girl fussed with the imaginary pots of sugar and cream—until the nanny emerged from Ava’s en suite bathroom and clapped her hands together, calling an end to my diversion and her play.
‘Bath time,’ the nanny announced. ‘Say goodbye to your guest.’
Ava set her tea cup down carefully and circled around the table. ‘Thank you so much for coming,’ she said before bestowing me with a dramatic air kiss. ‘Let’s do this again soon.’
Regretfully I left her to her bath and returned to the dining room and my chores. I quickly laid down the white linen tablecloths and set the tables with the floral arrangements (long glass troughs tightly packed with raspberry-colored English garden roses) glasses (stemless red and white wine goblets) and plates (hand-painted with flowers and made of fine bone china) and began working on the place cards. I recognized quite a few of the names—Caroline’s was on the list, as was Dahlia’s and Ainsley and Peter Partridge’s. Jill, the evening’s hostess, was seated next to Jasper Pell, whom House & Home was honoring that night as their ‘designer of the year’ and who happened to be the very same decorator Caroline had suggested I hire at her baby shower.
The memory of Caroline’s quick dismissal of me at her shower made me suddenly realize that John was right about one thing: I wasn’t about to score any points with the other hedge fund wives by working as a server for A Moveable Feast. Cringing in anticipation of facing Caroline and Dahlia wearing an apron and carrying a tray of quivering canapés, I knew that it was too late to back out—I wouldn’t dare leave Gigi in the lurch, especially since she was already short-staffed for the night—and as much as I wasn’t looking forward to facing the other women’s sneering faces, I was genuinely happy to be working again.
Back in Chicago, before we moved to New York, I worked in private client services for Bloomington Mutual, a Midwest-based, multinational bank with brokerage, commercial, and investment arms. I’d started there fresh out of Northwestern University as a research analyst, and had always felt grateful for my job. Out of the fifty-two students who applied for the job from my college, I never thought that I’d be the one to land it. My grades were good, but so were those of the other applicants, and they’d all held prestigious internships at banks and law firms and showed up at the Bloomington Mutual informational meeting looking like they already had the job. I remember walking in and seeing them all there assembled in the career center’s main receiving room, their neat leather folders and Mont Blanc pens poised for note taking, the girls in fresh-pressed navy wool suits that didn’t look like they’d once belonged to their mother (like mine had).
But to my great surprise the Bloomington Mutual managing director in charge of recruitment had been impressed with my work history. ‘There’s nothing like a nine-to-five to teach a kid real responsibility. These unpaid internships are a bunch of malarkey,’ she had grumbled during our one-on-one interview the following day. I got the impression that she’d worked her way through college and high school like I had and perhaps even recognized a younger version of herself in me. Or maybe she just liked the cut of my mother’s DKNY. Who knows? What matters is that she picked me and after briefly returning home to Minnesota to reorganize my belongings and earn some cash to pad out my near-empty bank account, I moved into a small apartment near Wrigley Field with a couple of my girlfriends from school and started working at the bank.
I was good at my job. I didn’t mind pulling all-nighters in preparation for a big pitch or meeting, and loved trying to make sense of the endless charts and graphs that we were forced to produce. My strengths, according to the progress reports I received, were in proofreading documents and writing deal memos, rather than in the more analytical aspects of my job. To be honest, I was happy to leave the number crunching, and economic modeling to the other analysts, and they were happy to turn to me for help synthesizing complex deals into readable reports.
Little by little I started making a name for myself at BlooMu, which is how we referred to the bank in-house. As I mentioned earlier, my bosses liked me. I think it was because I was respectful and always on time, and didn’t bring my ego into the office every day like a lot of my contemporaries. No task was too menial, no deadline impossible. When my two-year research-analyst program ended, I was asked to stay on as an associate, received a nice bump in pay, and a lot more responsibility. My managing director, a forty-something man who resembled a geekier Richard Gere, took a liking to me, and brought me on overseas trips—I saw London, Seoul, Hong Kong, and Berlin—all on one deal, a merger between two liquor conglomerates. I made polite and witty (if I do say so myself) conversation at client dinners and cocktail parties, took copious notes at meetings, and never, ever took advantage of my corporate card. Five years and many deals later, when my MD was promoted and a vice presidency spot opened up, the word at BlooMu was that I was a shoo-in for the job.
But around this time things had started getting serious with John. We had met at a mutual friend’s housewarming and he asked me to lunch. I didn’t hear from him for a while, but then one night he called and asked me if I