by Joanna Coles
‘Yeah well, that’s the State Department. This’, she says tapping the badge pinned to her blouse, ‘is the Immigration and Naturalization Service. We got our own rules.’
‘My girlfriend is six months pregnant,’ I appeal.
She shrugs, unmoved, and I realize that this woman has probably heard every single species of hard-luck story and special pleading imaginable to humanity. I cannot compete with refugees and torture victims. Nothing I say is going to have the slightest effect on her. I decide that my best hope is to play a waiting game. The hall behind me is filling up with what appears to be most of the contents of a flight from Bogotá, and the officers have to keep the line moving along – quotas to maintain, performance goals to achieve.
‘Well?’ she says, almost disappointed that I don’t seem to be dancing the tacitly agreed steps of our immigration tango, where I beseech and she ruminates. Instead I affect resignation.
‘Well, of course, it’s up to you,’ I admit.
I begin idly to flick through the pages of my passport, examining the stamps and noticing that the smaller and less important the country, the more florid and attention-seeking the stamp.
‘Oh, all right,’ she humphs. ‘I’ll give you six months, but you sort this out, right?’
I thank her and shoulder my way through the teeming ranks of the Third World, many of whom, I fear, are as close to their American dream as they will ever come.
Sunday, 27 September
Joanna
We are pursuing my fantasy of renting somewhere warm after the baby’s birth, somewhere to recuperate in the sun. But we are constrained by all sorts of limits: we must stay in the USA, where our health insurance works, and we must be somewhere accessible by land, as my doctor has frightened me with new evidence linking early air travel with infant cot death syndrome. And it must be somewhere warm in January. So we settle on Florida, a twenty-hour train journey by Amtrak Sleeper.
My current plot is to rent a small conch house in the old town of Key West. I have never been there, but I imagine a month of lazy days with the baby strapped to Peter’s chest, gurgling contentedly, while we breakfast over the newspapers in an open-fronted café on Duval Street, a favourite hangout of Hemingway’s in the 1930s. In the afternoons I intend to swim my way back to pre-maternal trimness in the warm turquoise shallows. My chief influence for Operation Key West is Alison Lurie’s novel, The Last Resort, in which everyone seems to live in pastel-painted wooden houses weighed down by crimson boughs of bougainvillaea.
Key West’s added attraction is that it’s always been a writer-rich environment – home to more Pulitzer Prize-winning authors than anywhere in the States. At least that’s what people keep telling us, but other than Hemingway we’ve had some difficulty finding out just who these other writers are. The only writer mentioned in my Florida guidebook is the poet Robert Frost, who used to spend his summers there in a small cottage, which is now a Heritage House Museum.
Peter has agreed to Operation Key West on condition that we do a recce first. So after spending several hours on KeyWest.com, I have set up a series of meetings with real estate agents, all of whom claim to have exactly what we’re looking for. Now I am in Miami waiting for Peter to join me en route from Africa. There is only one problem: Hurricane Georges has arrived in the Keys to meet us.
Tuesday, 29 September
Peter
We are in South Beach, waiting for Hurricane Georges to blow itself past the Keys, so we can drive down there to find somewhere suitable for Joanna to stage a warm-weather postpartum recovery. Our gilded cage is the Delano Hotel, the twenty-storey temple of South Beach Art-Deco, swathed in the all-white velvet bondage of its over-designed confines. In our small corner room the floors and walls and curtains are white, the bedspread and towels and robes are white, the TV and hi-fi are white. White, white, white. This is what it must be like to go snow-blind.
In the late morning we take the ghostly red-lit lift to the white mausoleum of the lobby and pick up the newspapers at the hotel shop. There, in amongst the emergency toiletries, Joanna discovers a small box labelled anal floss. She thinks it must be a joke, but this is South Beach and I’m not so sure.
We stroll down Ocean Drive to the News Café, to breakfast on eggs and home fries and large glasses of juice made from pulped Florida oranges. The sound system throbs with Vivaldi and Debussy. It is barely ten a.m. and the electronic billboard on top of a nearby high-rise tells us that the temperature is already 93 degrees.
As we read the papers over coffee, sculpted youths with bare midriffs and bodies pierced with jewellery, rollerblade or scoot on skateboards down the avenue of palm trees. Convertible cars with their tops peeled down cruise slowly by, once, twice, their occupants absorbing glances gratefully. Even the huge chromed tractor unit of a juggernaut joins the passing parade, looping back to make several unnecessary passes. It is a boulevard of attention seekers.
We walk back to the Delano, crossing the sidewalk to seek out the broken shelter of the shady side. Back at the hotel we descend to the pool, which is lined by squads of white-uniformed waiters and attendants. Beyond is a wooden fence and the beach, but few feel the need to venture out there, content to wallow here, in our own amniotic sac.
Our companions are hard-bodied gays, and louche, overweight middle-aged businessmen, whose skins are irradiated to carcinogenic ruddy brown husks. They are escorted by much younger gum-chewing girlfriends, who sport artificial breasts which rear up from their lurid bikini cups like clenched buttocks, and lone tendrils of tanga strap which snuggle in the clefts of their real bums. Their nails are long and curved and painted to match the colour of their bikinis, lime green or candy pink. Their hair is big and aggressively blonde. The girls seem perfectly comfortable being ogled by the rest of us. They float on Lilos around the pool languidly exhibiting their wares. One of them, I notice, has a tattoo on her calf and I swim closer to examine it. It is a bank of roses, and under them the word ‘Princess’.
Next to the fat men there is an absolutely vast young man, a great pear of a body layered by a black suit and tie and wrap-around Ray-Bans. He is obviously a bodyguard and he sits in the sun fairly spurting sweat.
So our day passes, as we wait for Hurricane Georges to clear the Keys and make Key West accessible again. The news reports say that no one is being let in, except for locals.
Wednesday, 30 September
Joanna
It is so hot I can hardly bear to leave the air-conditioned sanctuary of the hotel. Peter has insisted on booking a convertible, imagining he is something out of Miami Vice, but every time the automated roof yawns open I nearly pass out with the heat. So we cruise around with it tightly battened down and the air-con on full blast. To make matters worse my only summer maternity dress is lined with acetate, which sticks to my thighs every time we go out.
Miami is America’s most popular location for fashion shoots and skinny Ford models mill around the hotel lobby and out on the veranda, giggling like schoolgirls, their jumble of long loose limbs held together only by their string bikinis. I feel more pregnant than ever, among these gambolling sylphs. Lounging under an umbrella by the green Gunite pool, I realize we haven’t seen a single child, either at the hotel or strolling down Ocean Boulevard. Miami Beach is even less of a breeding ground than the West Village.
Wednesday, 30 September
Peter
We leave early in the morning to see how near Key West we can get before we are turned back. The drive seems interminable, through the suburban sprawl of south Miami, but at last we are in the Keys, with the blacktop road rollercoasting up over causeways flanked by azure seas – real azure, not touched-up, brochure azure. Soon signs of the hurricane damage appear; posses of cherry pickers poke up at the fractured technological tentacles of overhead electricity cables and telephone wires; broken branches and trees line the roadside. We pass a trailer park which has been splintered and torn and splayed open like a wound for passers-by to peer inside.
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Then the traffic slows to a halt and we are at the police cordon. I open the window to let the muggy air pollute the chilled recycled air inside and hand our press cards to the black state trooper. He scans them through the narrow slit between the rim of his hat and the top of his Ray-Bans, and compares us with an expression of incredulity that anyone would voluntarily go to Key West at a time like this. Then he waves us through.
OCTOBER
The baby now has eyebrows and some hair on her head, and she is continuing to gain weight.
If the baby is a boy, his testes have formed and are beginning their descent out of his body and into the scrotum, but they are still located inside the abdomen.
Now that the baby is about five months old, she will be able to use her own immune system to help defend herself against infection.
BabySoon.com
Thursday, 1 October
Joanna
After cruising the chaos of Key West the only accommodation we find open is the Southernmost Guest House. It is a grand, grey-fronted Victorian house, trimmed with filigree, run by a garrulously hospitable grandma. She is wearing a V-necked black net top, exposing a good deal of improbably pneumatic cleavage.
‘Surgically enhanced and why not, hey?’ she laughs gaily, squeezing her shoulders together proudly to give us the full effect, before reaching for a key on a huge wooden fob. ‘Welcome to the only house on the street to have electricity!’
We follow her up the stoop and onto the first-floor balcony, past a wooden love seat swinging lazily from the eaves. The tiled room is excessively fussy, with lacy tablecloths draped across every surface. Empty champagne bottles – the souvenirs of many a honeymoon – line the bookshelf, next to vases of silk flowers. On the table sits a giant brandy snifter, in the bottom of which languishes a china mouse, presumably trapped. But we notice none of these things, just the welcome roar of the air-conditioner and the deliciously chilled air.
‘Seventy-five bucks, that’s half my normal rate, plus breakfast, well, coffee and cake downstairs,’ she offers. We take it.
Thursday, 1 October
Peter
Most of Key West is still without electricity and the town is filled with the din of dozens of mobile generators and freezer units on refrigerated trucks, and the noise of pumps, and cranes and bulldozers clearing the debris, and the buzz of dozens of chainsaws being used to cut the hurricane-felled palms into smaller clearable chunks. There are great mounds of stinking seaweed in the streets, and dead birds everywhere.
The shops and restaurants and many houses are boarded up, often with defiant if banal messages to the hurricane spraypainted on the shutters. ‘Go away Hurricane Georges!’ ‘Key Westers say NO to Georges.’ ‘We HATE hurricanes.’ On the shutters of a sunglasses shop is the message, ‘Shades is closed till further notice – you don’t need sunglasses in a hurricane.’
The town itself is almost entirely depopulated. Only a few hardy eccentrics remain, defying the warnings to evacuate. A black woman with a bleached blonde Afro, purple bell-bottoms and white patent-leather platforms, cycles up and down, one hand on the handlebars, the other making frantic signs of the cross.
And later, on the boardwalk at the marina, we run into a one-legged, one-armed, drunken Ahab figure. ‘You’ll see, this will come to no good!’ he warns us in the tones of a Doomsday prophet.
The only place we can find to eat is Mangoes on Duval Street, which Amy, its indomitable owner, has kept open throughout the hurricane, as an emergency cafeteria. But we must get there for supper by 5.30 p.m. and be gone before 7 p.m. when the curfew kicks in and the National Guard begin patrolling the town for looters.
As we scuttle up the unlit street from Mangoes back to the Southernmost Guest House just before curfew, Ahab bursts out of a side street. ‘Your stars are ill-placed!’ he bellows, brandishing a bottle of rum and giving us both a tremendous fright.
Back at the Southernmost Guest House the electricity has finally gone down. The big white air-conditioner stands silent and the temperature steadily rises while we try to judge the moment when it will be cooler to open the windows to the steaming doldrums outside and lose the largely illusory remnants of refrigerated air within.
Friday, 2 October
Joanna
Our forays into Key West’s rental market have not been successful. We soon discover that most of the real estate agents have scarpered and only two of our viewings have survived. The first I have arranged with an absentee landlord, whose apartment I found posted on KeyWest.com.
Though the apartment is advertised as ‘classic Key West architecture’, we arrive at a gated complex of modern white wooden houses. A wiry walnut of a man in his seventies, dressed only in micro cut-off denims and a sea captain’s hat roosting on the back of his head, strolls out to greet us.
‘Hi there, people, I’m Argo and you must be the Brits to see Otto’s place,’ he says, hand outstretched. His chest is trellised with a froth of grey hair, and a thin stream of sweat emerges from under the peak of his cap, along his bushy right eyebrow, and down his cheek. His little brown dugs tremble as he bids us follow him up the stairs to a second-floor apartment. It is tiny, a fact the landlord has tried to disguise with a multitude of angled mirrors and smoked glass. ‘It kind of reminds me of the Middle East,’ says Argo sincerely. ‘Not that I’ve ever been there. But Otto has.’ We are in and out in four minutes.
Our second appointment is with Keith, a grey-faced young agent. He insists on firing up an ancient moped and leads the way, weaving erratically in and out of the fallen trees.
Our first stop appears to be the conch house of my dreams. Pale lilac with a little stoop, it is midway down a charming street in the old town, with a courageous palm tree still standing in its little patch of garden. ‘It sleeps nine,’ says Keith, having some difficulty propping up his moped. He fails to mention that all nine would sleep in narrow dorm beds squeezed into two small bare rooms and that the place has clearly been repeatedly trashed by shifts of freshmen for the last ten years.
His final suggestion turns out to be a huge concrete development on the edge of town, built in a horseshoe around a pool now bobbing with driftwood and seaweed. Circa 1970, it has all the appeal of a penitentiary with long, bare concrete corridors which eerily echo our conversation. ‘This is awful,’ murmurs Peter and we make our apologies.
‘I’m not sure a twenty-hour train ride with a baby is such a good idea anyway…’ I start.
‘If we set off now, we could get the last flight back from Miami to Manhattan,’ he says quickly. We leave Keith at the gate to Key Alcatraz, frantically pumping his kickstart.
Friday, 2 October
Peter
We pack our bags, settle up with supergran, and set off on the four-hour drive to Miami. As we negotiate around another pile of fetid foliage, a piece of it detaches itself, and rolls down in front of us. It is Ahab, our personal doom-monger, come to bid farewell. He stands up in front of the car, his beard and clothes festooned with bits of seaweed and palm fronds, and gives the bonnet a tremendous thump with his old wooden crutch. ‘You are blighted!’ he rages, shaking his bottle at the now sunny skies. ‘Calamity is upon you!’
I hoot and he staggers away, throwing himself back on to the great mound of fly-hazed seaweed from which he becomes again indistinguishable.
Monday, 5 October
Joanna
Back in Manhattan I am now suffering from heartburn and unable to sleep. I lie in bed surfing aimlessly through the seventy-six channels we receive via Time-Warner cable.
On Channel 2 David Letterman is reading a news item about students in a social-studies class whose teacher had set them the arduous task of biting slices of toast into the shapes of American states.
Over on Channel 34, public access television, a man in sunglasses is introducing a photograph of his own misshapen penis, which twists like an ‘S’. This, he explains solemnly, is a symptom of Peyronies’s disease, then he tries to sell his own paten
ted technique for penis enlargement. Twenty minutes later, when I flick past again, he’s still there, with the same photo of his unusual penis displayed onscreen.
Tuesday, 6 October
Peter
I try Andrew Solomon again. His answer message informs me he’s away on another trip and furnishes me with contact numbers in London, Istanbul and Patmos. ‘Until the 11th,’ says his message, ‘I can in principle be reached on a Turkish boat phone, number (7-095) 969.74.39, though I am mistrustful of both that redoubtable technology and our captain’s language skills.’
Wednesday, 7 October
Joanna
Though they are usually keen to recommend local services in exchange for a tip, the doormen are unable to suggest anyone to help us move apartment, so I resort to looking in the back of the Village Voice.
‘Don’t worry, lady, this is a small job for us,’ says Ira, of GV-Moving-For-All-Your-Needs. ‘We’ll deliver the packaging materials in advance and our men will arrive on the dot of eight a.m.’
The packaging arrives as promised and I am rather impressed to find there is much more of it than I had ordered.
‘They’re clearly used to people underestimating how much stuff they’ve got,’ I rationalize to Peter, who is silently assembling cardboard boxes of various sizes. ‘That’s what I like about American companies, they seize the initiative.’
‘It’ll be rip-off,’ says Peter. ‘New York movers always are.’
By 9 a.m. the following morning, I have phoned Ira twice and both times I’ve been fended off by the voicemail. I leave a message on a random extension and eventually a woman calls me back to assure me a truck is on its way but has been delayed due to the terrible traffic. ‘But you’re only in SoHo,’ I protest.
‘The office is in SoHo, but the truck is coming from New Jersey,’ she says.
At 11 a.m. it finally arrives with a crew of five, headed by a twitchy redhead who introduces himself as ‘Your foreman, Isaac, I am Israeli.’ For the next two hours they proceed to wrap everything we have not already packed in vast swathes of bubble wrap, including the bed and sofas, though we assure them that wrapping them in blankets would have been fine.