The Three of Us

by Joanna Coles

  Another group spills out of the lift and is similarly unimpressed. ‘What’s that,’ asks a miniature Robin Hood, poking an arrow at the basket.

  ‘Candycorn,’ I reply brightly. ‘I thought it was traditional at Hallowe’en.’

  ‘We only liked wrapped sweets,’ he says solemnly, already on his way to the next apartment.

  ‘We’ve had to insist, I’m afraid,’ his father apologizes. ‘There was a case some years ago when someone used candycorn to try and poison some kids.’

  ‘Trick or treat?’ shout a new group, scampering up the stairs.

  ‘Trick,’ says Peter.

  They stare back in silence. Then a small ghost steps forward. ‘You’re supposed to give us candy,’ he says crossly.

  ‘Or money,’ a tiny wizard adds hopefully.

  ‘Let’s go do Richard Dreyfuss,’ the ghost suggests and they wild off up the stairs.

  I go back to my costume hunt and finally unearth an old jellaba Peter brought back once from a trip to Pakistan. It will have to do.

  Saturday, 31 October

  Peter

  An impressive degree of high-tech imagery has been employed by our guests in their choice of Hallowe’en costumes. John is the worldwide web, Dana is Windows 98, Suzanna is ‘fatal exception error’. Bill is the monster from Mars Attacks! and Mary, the Tin Man, handmade from foil. Walter is a mine safety inspector and Meryl is a flapper girl. Melanie is Melanie from Gone with the Wind, and Joanna wears her jellaba, which covers her whole body but for a lace filigree window over her eyes. I am wearing a Brazilian red wolf mask purchased at the Cathedral shop of St John the Divine. The mask is made of scarlet rubber. It has rows of impressive white rubber fangs, and a bottom jaw that toggles open by pulling a little tag. To make it more effective I have covered the exposed part of my face in scarlet face paint.

  The most exciting moment of the evening comes when I open the door to an aggressive-looking character in camouflage fatigues, army boots and a face streaked with black and green cream. This is Andrew Solomon – at last – in person. In the course of the evening he banters entertainingly, gives us tantalizing glimpses of his voluminous social roster and his exotic travels. He does not appear to be at all depressed. For three-quarters of a million, I begin to suspect, I may be better qualified to write about depression.

  NOVEMBER

  The baby weighs nearly 5 lbs and measures 13 inches from crown to rump.

  Babies born at this time usually survive in the hospital.

  Your baby is running out of room and his head is most likely resting on the bone in preparation for dropping into the pelvis.

  BabySoon.com

  Monday, 2 November

  Joanna

  Peter ventures out briefly, lugging a bag of dirty laundry. He returns purple faced, bearing cappuccinos and announcing it is the coldest day he can remember.

  We appear to have no control over the old-fashioned cast-iron radiators in our apartment, though New York City law is myopically specific about heating. According to Section 75 of the Multiple Dwelling Act (which is pinned to our mail room noticeboard) after 1 October (known locally as Radiator Day) the heat in the apartment must be 68°F, between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., when outside temperature falls to below 55°F. The apartment must be heated to 55°F between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m., when outside temperature falls below 40°F. Heating can be switched off again on 31 May.

  The first evidence we had that our landlord took Radiator Day seriously came when we were awakened by a terrible banging and clanking coming from the radiator in our bedroom. The noise continued until 6.30 a.m. when it metamorphosed into a severe fizzing and then finally sputtered out.

  Assuming that it was the system readjusting itself after six months in hibernation, we did nothing. But the next morning at the same time the chorus of banging and clanging and fizzing started again, so Peter entered the problem in the logbook kept at the front desk by leisurely Lugo, the handyman.

  Just because a problem is entered in the logbook, of course, is no guarantee that Lugo will come and fix it. Sometimes I think he relies on the placebo effect that once written down the problem will go away. But after our third sleepless night and two more entries in the logbook, he appeared at 7 a.m. armed with his monkey wrench. He banged ferociously on the radiator and pronounced the problem fixed.

  The next morning we woke at 4 a.m. again to even worse knocking, this time coming from the bathroom radiator.

  We have slowly grown used to the individual radiators knocking and hissing on and off with no relation either to each other or to the weather outside. This morning the kitchen is freezing, though both bathroom radiators are churning out heat with a Saharan ferocity. Meanwhile, the temperature in the baby’s room has plummeted so low that Peter says it’s far too cold to go in and finish off the painting.

  Tuesday, 3 November

  Peter

  ‘Have you heard what happened to Andrew Solomon?’ gushes Suzanna down the phone. ‘He was arrested after your party?’

  ‘What for?’

  She has no further information, so I phone him, only to be intercepted by his answer message. ‘I hope the rumours of your little local difficulty with the NYPD are exaggerated,’ I say, trying to make light of it. Later, however, I log on to find a round-robin e-mail from Andrew Solomon to his friends. It is written from his hospital bed.

  Hallowe’en night, I attended a costume dinner party. I wore a leather camouflage outfit from John Bartlett and smeared my face with my sister-in-law’s Enriching Mud Face Mask, and I looked rather convincing as a guerrilla or paratrooper – I never quite decided which. I had numerous compliments on my costume, which I was variously told was ‘sexy’, ‘scary’, ‘witty’, and ‘chic’. At about 1.30 a.m., the party wound down. As it was a brisk, clear night, I began walking a little way by myself, enjoying the night air, replaying in my mind amusing episodes from dinner, checking out the costumes that went past on the street.

  In Central Park there were giant klieg lights along the course of the New York Marathon, and TV crews busy setting up bleachers and barricades. I strolled in, thinking that I’d be able to get a cab down Fifth Avenue, and keen to see the park so lively at this implausible hour.

  About two-thirds of the way across, an unmarked car going at least 60 mph spun around and drove straight at me, so that I had to jump into some shrubs to avoid being hit. It screeched to a halt and two policemen leapt out.

  ‘OK,’ said one of them, Officer Carrol, the younger and blonder and more nervous one. ‘Do you have any ID?’

  I quietly handed over my driver’s licence.

  ‘What’s on your criminal record?’ asked the other one, Officer Fox, snide and self-important.

  I said that to the best of my knowledge I had no criminal record.

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Officer Fox. ‘You ever spent a night in a jail cell?’

  I said that I had not.

  ‘Well, start thinking about it because that may be where you’re heading tonight.’

  Utterly bewildered, I asked whether I had done something wrong. Officer Fox looked at me as though I were retarded. ‘You’ve broken the park curfew,’ he said. ‘No one allowed in here from 2 to 6 a.m.’

  I apologized, explained that I had never heard of such a law and noted that it was not posted at the entrances to the park. I might just as well have recited the Gettysburg Address in Inca dialect. The cops sniggered.

  ‘We’re writing you a summons,’ Carrol said. ‘You can tell your story to the judge.’

  At that point, another car drove up, and Officer Taverna popped out. Nodding at me as though I were a dead rat, he said, ‘Another one of them?’ The other two guys nodded.

  ‘Lives in the Village,’ said Fox, who still had my driving licence.

  ‘Listen,’ Taverna said, sticking his face close to mine. ‘We’re gonna get you guys out of the parks.’

  All at once, I began to understand what was going on.

  ‘We’ve had en
ough of you guys and now we’re gonna get rid of you,’ he went on. I decided not to get into a confrontation. ‘I’m really cold,’ I said. ‘Is this going to take long? Can I wait in the car?’

  ‘It’s gonna take as long as it takes,’ Fox said. He took my wallet and thumbed through it. ‘You’ve got too much money in here.’

  I said I had just been to a cash machine and that I had taken out $800 to cover household expenses.

  ‘That’s a lie,’ Carrol said. ‘Cash machines do $400 a day – max.’

  I said I had a special card, and showed him that it said ‘Chase Private Bank’.

  The cops had hats, while I did not. I got colder and colder and I began to shiver. ‘I’m so cold,’ I said meekly.

  ‘Shove it,’ said Taverna.

  I stepped forward to ask Fox, who was writing my summons, whether it could be waived, and Taverna shoved me back into the bushes. ‘You go sneaking up on a cop from behind like that,’ he yelled at me, ‘we’re gonna see you locked up.’

  Shaking now from the cold and from the assault, I suddenly understood how powerful Jews in Munich in 1939 had continued to think that they’d be OK. Several friends of mine had been crushed and bruised by police in the previous week’s candlelight march for a murdered gay college student.

  Fox began telling me about my court date.

  ‘Can I pay a fine instead of taking off a full day to go to court?’ I asked.

  ‘You guys think you can pay us off?’ said Carrol. ‘Don’t even think of bribing us.’

  I wanted to explain that I had never bribed anyone, but I felt as though I had been frozen in my costume and nothing I had to say, nothing about my bearing or my accent or my education, could turn me into a human being in the eyes of these police.

  ‘This is Giuliani’s New York,’ Taverna said. ‘Guys like you are finished.’

  It took the full weight of my superego not to pick up a rock and hit him over the head with it.

  When they finally let me go, I raced to Fifth Avenue and caught a cab, and I sat in the back seat and sobbed and sobbed and sobbed for the humiliation, the impotence, and the lost illusions and hopes. I got home at 4.30 a.m.

  I am writing this from my hospital bed, where I am recovering from emergency treatment for what could have become a fatal inner ear infection caused by my interrogation in the cold. Here I am now, dripping a steady stream of blood from the porches of my ear, sporting a messy red badge of anger and new-born activism. I have lost, utterly and profoundly, the sense of my own immunity that made my life in this town so pleasant and easy for so long.

  Wednesday, 4 November

  Joanna

  Flicking through People magazine at Robert Kree, my hairdresser’s on Bleecker Street, I come across an article entitled ‘Miracle Babies’, which features a Californian couple called Keh. Arceli Keh and her husband Isagani are pictured sitting on a taupe Dralon sofa with their laughing daughter, Cynthia, aged twenty-three months. The Kehs conceived Cynthia using IVF, not unusual, except that Mrs Keh lied to the doctors about her age. She told them she was fifty. In fact, she was sixty, and finally became pregnant just three days shy of her sixty-fourth birthday.

  ‘There’s a piece here about the oldest mother in the world,’ I say to my stylist, Diana, a cheerful woman from Long Island, who is swigging a bottle of Evian. ‘She’s sixty-four, but she told the doctor she was ten years younger. Imagine, when her daughter graduates she’ll be ninety.’

  ‘I wish I could knock ten years off my age and have people believe me,’ says Diana. ‘I did Kevin Spacey’s hair the other day. He was really nice but you know what put me off? He was wearing Adidas sandals with white socks. I mean, how sad is that?’

  Friday, 6 November

  Peter

  I have finally got around to tackling my visa status, or the lack of it, and I’m being interviewed by an immigration lawyer in his 32nd-floor penthouse office on Fifth Avenue. Scott Pullman, of Pullman and Pullman, is a serious young man who does nothing but immigration cases. I sketch out my situation and he makes notes on his legal pad.

  ‘I think our best option,’ he concludes, ‘is to apply for a Green Card as “A Person of Exceptional Ability”. What would you say is your area of speciality?’

  I embark on a grand tour of every job I’ve ever done, lawyer, foreign correspondent, TV documentary maker, author, but he cuts me short.

  ‘No, no. You don’t understand. These cases are decided by people in an office in Vermont who spend an average of ten minutes on each application,’ he warns. ‘You don’t want to confuse them. You can only present yourself as an expert in just one subject. What will it be?’

  ‘Well, I suppose it would have to be Africa,’ I say.

  ‘Right. Africa. What I want you to do is go and collect every single newspaper clipping, TV documentary and book you’ve ever done on Africa. Any reviews, awards or commendations, over say the last fifteen years, and bring them in and I’ll sift them and assemble our application. Later on I’ll ask you to get letters of recommendation from any expert you can think of in the field. The more famous, the better.’

  He pauses to review his notes. ‘Have you ever interviewed any royalty?’ he asks suddenly. ‘The immigration people in Vermont are very impressed with royalty.’

  ‘No,’ I admit. ‘I’m afraid I’ve never interviewed a royal. Except King Zog of Albania. But I think he was only a Pretender.’

  ‘What, a fraud?’

  ‘Well, he was in exile in Johannesburg at the time.’

  ‘No,’ rules Scott Pullman categorically. ‘King Zog doesn’t count.’

  ‘I once covered a tour of Africa by Prince Charles,’ I offer.

  ‘Well, that might be something,’ he says, perking up. ‘And how was it?’

  ‘Well, it was rather strange,’ I admit. ‘In Swaziland, where he attended the coronation of King Mswati III, he spent the whole time trying to avoid looking at the bare-breasted virgins at the Reed Dance, while the tabloid photographers used fish-eye lenses to try and snap a picture of “Charles Copping a Right Royal Eyeful”.’

  I notice that Scott Pullman appears to be writing this down. ‘You’re not writing this down, are you?’ I ask.

  ‘No, no.’ he says. ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, then we went to Victoria Falls.’

  Scott Pullman looks blank.

  ‘Africa’s greatest waterfall? “The Smoke that Thunders” – one of the natural wonders of the world, named after Charles’s great-great-great grandmother. It’s a sight that has inspired poetic responses from just about everyone. David Livingstone – the Scottish explorer – looked down at it, and said, “On sights as beautiful as this Angels in their flight must have gazed”.

  ‘Anyway, Prince Charles walks out onto the lip of the Falls, and he turns to the Zambian Minister of Tourism and asks, “Do you get many suicides over here then?”’

  Here I end my royal anecdote, but there is a long pause and Scott Pullman appears puzzled, his pen still poised over his legal pad. ‘What’s your point?’ he asks finally.

  ‘Well, the man has no poetry in his soul,’ I offer by way of moral.

  Scott Pullman nods emphatically in agreement and stands to conclude our interview. He steers me past the polished yucca plants to the door, and pumps my hand. Then he cocks his head to one side. ‘What is the answer?’ he asks gnomically.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Are there many suicides over the Victoria Falls?’

  And though I am trying to pose as A Person of Exceptional Ability – Special Subject: Africa, I have to admit that I have absolutely no idea how many people have deliberately hurled themselves over the Victoria Falls.

  ‘But I can find out,’ I hear myself promising as the gold-brocaded elevator chimes my departure.

  Monday, 9 November

  Joanna

  Suzanna, an expert business reporter, calls to say she is working on an investigative piece for Vanity Fair about Garth Drabinsky, the theatre
impresario, producer of Ragtime and Showboat.

  ‘Didn’t you say you once sat next to him at a dinner?’ she quizzes.

  ‘Oh yes, back in May, at a Royal Shakespeare Company benefit,’ I remember. ‘He seemed rather depressed.’

  ‘Well he had very good reason to be,’ she says. ‘You name it, Drabinsky has been accused of it. Fraud, kickbacks, breach of contract. And it was falling apart just about then.’

  Well, well, no wonder he was a morose dinner companion.

  Monday, 9 November

  Peter

  Joanna has read somewhere that wheatgerm is the answer to all health concerns and that a regular intake of it is essential. She has returned from the Nuts About Health store with a capacious glass jar of wheatgerm, which she now sprinkles over all our food without discrimination. Nothing, it seems, can cross our lips without this dusting of wheatgerm. It is like culinary dandruff – ubiquitous and disgusting.

  Tuesday, 10 November

  Joanna

  ‘Time for a wake-up call!’ urges today’s e-mail from BabyCenter.com. ‘The cost of college in eighteen years is probably more than you think. In order to start planning you need to determine the amount you’re aiming for and how much time you have to get there.’

  I fill in our baby’s due date and the screen reconfigures. ‘Based on the information you entered, your child’s college costs will be $254,240.’

  I stare in disbelief. This is on top of the quarter of a million it has already predicted we will spend on basic childcare – excluding braces. I try to recall how much my ill-spent years at the University of East Anglia cost and how much we would have to save a year to accumulate a college fund.

  But BabyCenter.com has got there before me. ‘To reach this goal of $254,240 for your child, you’ll need to save $542 per month for the next eighteen years.’

  $542 per month … I read on. ‘If the monthly amount seems too high,’ BabyCenter.com concludes cheerfully, ‘don’t despair! Remember, starting with a smaller monthly investment is better than not starting at all.’

  I fret throughout the day about this and resolve to start a savings plan.