The Three of Us (22 page)

‘That fucking Clinton, it's unba-lievable what he's getting away with. What's wrong with you all? The more he lies to you, the more you like him. His approval ratings go up every time he bullshits you. The unavoidable conclusion, I'm afraid, is that you, the American People,
like
being lied to. Well? Do you?' He whips his camera lens and its attendant mike around the room, as though filming a vox pop, but though it's a good question no one will answer him.

Then, without so much as a word from our sponsors, he segues into a verbal pummelling of New York's mayor.

‘Giuliani – that creep, he's a crook if ever I saw one. He's only gonna kick twenty-five per cent of tobacco taxes into health care. Where's the rest going, huh? Where?' Again no one will oblige his restless lens. ‘I'll
tell
you where the rest's going. It's going to buying votes.'

I am on the verge of replying to bolster the atmosphere of general democratic debate, but a look at his crazed eyes warns me that he may well kebab me with a concealed knife or open his bulging olive anorak to reveal an AK 47. Instead I concentrate on ordering my coffee.

Tuesday, 20 October

Joanna

A notice has gone up in the lobby reminding tenants with ‘roach problems' to sign up for the fumigator's quarterly visit. I sign up immediately, wondering how many roaches we need to have seen to qualify as having an official ‘problem'. Since the incident in the basement I have now seen two in our apartment, both a horrible viscous brown. One was scuttling up the fridge door, the other was beetling down the wall in the tiny box room I am planning to use as my study. Both times I shuddered but backed calmly out of the room before shrieking for Peter to come and remove them.

When I complained to a neighbour, she laughed. ‘I'm surprised you've only seen two. The people below you were infested,' she told me.
‘Infested.'

‘The people below us were infested,' I wail to Peter, who, having grown up on the lookout for gaboon vipers and puff adders in Africa, is unmoved by a roach. I have, of course, taken suitable prophylactic measures by placing copious numbers of ‘roach bombs' – black pods of poison – under the sink, behind the fridge and the loos.

The fumigator turns out to be a huge, silent, teenage girl armed with an enormous syringe. Around her midriff she wears a wide leather belt, from which dangle several cartridges of poison.

I lead her into the kitchen and she clips a cartridge into the syringe as if arming herself for combat. With some difficulty she crawls into the cupboard under the sink, a favourite hangout for her quarry, she assures us. She emerges to refill her syringe, squinting at the tip as if she were a doctor in
ER.
It takes her five minutes to squirt her roach poison into our kitchen cabinets.

‘All you need,' she nods, heaving herself back up and holstering her syringe.

‘What's the highest number of roaches you've come across in this building?' I ask, as she departs.

She pauses. ‘The apartment under you had about two hundred.' She taps her belt. ‘They were nesting in the oven, but I sorted them out. Now remember, this stuff only lasts three months, so I'll be seeing you again in January.'

Thursday, 22 October

Peter

Dinner with Sheenah Hankin, an Irish therapist on the Upper East Side, is a strange affair. She and her husband, Richard Wessler, who is quarter Cherokee Indian and also a therapist, have rented the exterior of their brownstone, including the steps up to the front door, to a movie company, so it is bathed in bright lights and surrounded by a small crowd of curious onlookers who have come to observe Adam Sandler, the actor who played the lead in
The Wedding Singer.

It seems that every square foot of their cavernous brownstone on 93rd Street generates a return. The basement houses their psychiatric practice and the top two floors are rented out as B&Bs.

Sheenah, Joanna and royal-watcher Richard Mineards have met on the rounds of TV chat shows –
Geraldo, MSNBC,
and
Larry King Live
– and are currently pitching to cable TV a daytime talk show of their own called
The Britpak.
So before dinner we pore over publicity photographs they have had taken the previous week. In the contact sheets Sheenah and Joanna wear tiaras and Richard sports a top hat and cane.

Mineards, who speaks with an aristocratic drawl, and contributes gossip to William Hickey's Diary in the
Express,
is an expert on the minutiae of minor royals around the world. He has filed a story today, a titbit he has scavenged somewhere, that Prince Andrew has come to Fergie for financial advice, a strange thing to do on the face of it, given her much-publicized three million dollar overdraft. Andrew apparently phoned her up to tell her that Princess Beatrice had lost a tooth and to enquire what the going rate was from the tooth fairy.

The day before, Mineards says, clearly on a royal roll, he filed a story that Fergie had three sets of table manners for the girls:

 

(a) best behaviour when eating with granny;

(b) reasonably good, to be used when eating in public,

and

(c) ‘spaghetti up your noses' when eating at home in Sunningdale.

 

Halfway through the evening there is some excitement when Professor ‘Windy' Dryden arrives fresh off the flight from London. He is the author, he tells us, of no fewer than 110 books on various aspects of therapy, including the classics,
The Incredible Sulk
and
How to Overcome Procrastination.

‘How long did that take you to write,
How to Overcome Procrastination
?' I ask.

‘Ooh, about six weeks.'

‘How long do your books normally take you?'

‘Normally? Mmm, about four.'

On hearing that Joanna now works for
The Times,
he complains that the paper was responsible for his only appearance to date in that scurrilous tabloid, the
Sunday Sport.
He had given a quote over the phone to a
Times
reporter who was writing a story about rage control.

To the question ‘How would you get a male patient to control his rage?' Windy Dryden had replied, ‘I try to get him to imagine his testicles are in a guillotine and if he gives in to his rage the blades will close aroundthem.' The following Sunday, he says, the
Sport
ran a piece headlined, ‘
PROFESSOR'S RAGE CONTROL A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS
.'

Windy Dryden complains mildly that he is a compulsive obsessive and in order to prove this, he empties the contents of his bulky black nylon bum-bag onto the dinner table. As well as a dozen pens, it includes a chunky eraser in a sealed zip bag, and, in another ziploc bag, a plastic contraption called a Nozovent™. He proceeds to demonstrate how Nozovent™, a flexible, bone-shaped piece of plastic, helps him to breathe properly at night by sticking the two ends of the bone into his nostrils, causing them to flare alarmingly, and giving the benign Professor a rather fierce demeanour. With Nozovent™ in place up his nose, he exhales and inhales deeply to show his efficiently widened nasal passages.

At this point the location manager of the filmset outside comes in with a query. He takes in the Professor, who is still wheezing through Nozovent™, and clearly thinks we are all barking eccentrics, trying to have a dinner party while several thousand megawatts of krieg lighting are pouring through the windows.

Friday, 23 October

Joanna

This afternoon when I return from the Gourmet Garage with a fresh cache of Hershey's chocolate milk and more graham crackers, Vadim, the melancholy Russian doorman, is sitting at the front desk in the grand but gloomy lobby. Normally he gives a weary, ‘Hello again,' which, if he's feeling chatty, will be followed by a mournful and equally weary observation about the chaos in his former Soviet homeland.

‘Hello again,' he says, depressed, as I struggle in. ‘When is baby due?'

‘About January 22nd.'

‘Then it will be Aquarius,' he says, taking my bag and walking me to the lift. ‘This is good sign. Not Pisces. Pisces people too sensitive, especially with women. Like me. I am Pisces.' And he wanders back sadly to the front desk.

Friday, 23 October

Peter

Inspired by Professor Windy Dryden's Nozovent™, Joanna persuades me to purchase a set of athletes' nose wideners that are supposed to increase nostril capacity, thereby improving oxygen intake and physical performance. As an unintended side effect, or so Windy Dryden claims, these nose wideners are of great help to snorers. Though I still strongly maintain that I am not in fact a real snorer, but merely an occasional one, I agree to try them. They are stiff white adhesive strips which you stick to the outside of your nose to open your nostrils.

I apply one carefully before bed and examine the effect in the bathroom mirror. My nostrils widen substantially and I try to imagine I am a first-grade sprinter trying to squeeze that last 2 per cent out of my performance to shatter the 100-metre record. Joanna stifles a giggle as I make my entrance, and then affects indifference as she wishes to encourage me in this foolishness. In any event we both enjoy an apparently snore-free night and awake refreshed.

Saturday, 24 October

Joanna

Today's e-mail from BabyCenter.com seems particularly useful, as it attempts to answer a question we have been asking each other since May: can we really afford to have a child? Peter is doubtful and keeps making dire predictions that we will never go on holiday or eat out again. I am more optimistic, but the truth is that neither of us have any idea how much it is really going to cost to raise a child, especially if it is here in Manhattan.

I read on:

Just answer a few basic questions on your spending patterns:

1 Before you start your baby on solids, do you plan to:

– Breastfeed exclusively?

– Breastfeed and supplement with formula?

– Formula feed exclusively?

 

2 What type of diapers do you intend to use?

– Cloth without a diaper service?

– Disposables?

– Cloth with a diaper service?

 

3 Over the course of your child's first eighteen years, do you think you'll most likely:

– Cook your own food?

– Buy mostly prepared food (and cook some of your own)?

– Eat out a couple of times per week?

 

4 What type of daytime care-giver do you plan to use until your child goes to preschool?

– Parent/relative?

– Day-care?

– Nanny?

 

5 When it comes to shopping for your child (clothes, toys, furniture, equipment, computer, etc.), do you tend to be:

– Hand-me-down happy?

– A bargain hunter?

– A brand-name buyer?

 

6 Where do you plan to send your child to elementary school?

– Public?

– Parochial (church-affiliated)?

– Private?

 

7 Where do you plan to send your child to junior high and high school?

– Public?

– Parochial (church-affiliated)?

– Private?

 

8 When it comes to spending on your own entertainment (weekend babysitters) and your child's (extra-curricular enrichment activities), what kind of spender do you think you'll tend to be?

– Low (sitters once every two to three months, cost-free activities)?

– Medium (sitters once a month, city-sponsored activities)?

– High (sitters once a week, private activities)?'

I plump for a baby who will be breastfed, disposably diapered, with parents who eat out a couple of times a week, a part-time nanny, bargain kid's supplies, a parochial school and a sitter at least once a week. Then I click on the calculator icon.

‘Your total expenditure will be approximately $250,548.' This staggering sum is followed by the rider, ‘While this takes into account many out-of-pocket costs, such as summer camp and Saturday-night sitters, it doesn't include braces, lost wages that result from taking time off to raise children, or an additional car for your child's sweet sixteen.'

‘I've been doing some research and it costs a quarter of a million dollars to raise a baby in New York,' I tell Peter as we tuck into sushi. ‘And that doesn't include things like dental braces.'

‘Let's hope it doesn't have buck teeth then,' he says absently, struggling with a piece of fatty tuna.

Saturday, 24 October

Peter

My reluctant enthusiasm for the nasal expander evaporates this morning when I try to remove it from my nose. It would seem that the manufacturers had not intended it for extended wear, and it has become very firmly adhered to my skin. So much so that I cannot lift even a tiny corner of it to get a grip. Eventually, using Joanna's eyebrow tweezers, I manage to achieve purchase and rip it off. It is excruciating. When I peer into the mirror through teared-up eyes, there is a nasty red raw patch etched across my nose in the shape of the nostril widener.

‘What's with your nose, man?' asks Jeff when we meet for lunch at Coffee Grounds on Little West 12th Street.

‘Joanna threw a shoe at me,' I say and he shrugs.

‘Check this out for a surreal phenomenon,' says the young waiter. A real fly has got caught in a gooey artificial web that forms part of their Hallowe'en decorations. He pokes at the web, trying to free the trapped insect. ‘Is that bizarre or what?' he asks. ‘I mean like, think of the symbolism of it.'

Sunday, 25 October

Joanna

If possible, Maya's ‘Manhattan-style' skirt is even shorter than the last time, it is pale blue with small red hearts and as she stoops to vacuum under the sofa with our Panasonic, which Margarita so vehemently scorned, I am presented with a flash of matching thong.