The Three of Us (27 page)

Wednesday, 9 December

Joanna

This morning I suddenly hear myself announce that as soon as I have finished my decaff, I am going shopping for baby things.

‘Where to?' enquires Peter.

‘Oh, downtown, various places.'

‘ABC?'

‘I might drop by there,' I admit diffidently.

‘All right, I'll come too,' announces Peter. I know he is suspicious that I am intending to order the crib we admired there. He is right to suspect me.

But it turns out to be a frustrating experience, as the assistant seems reluctant to sell us one.

‘What's your due date?' she asks, eyeing my straining jacket.

‘January 22nd.'

‘Oh, we can't have it ready by then,' she says, sounding almost pleased.

‘It's OK, the baby will spend the first eight weeks in a Moses basket,' I reply.

‘Well, we need a minimum of fourteen weeks,' she says, as if this is obviously the end of the conversation.

‘We'll have to hope it doesn't come early then,' I retort, suddenly determined to have the crib whatever the cost. Peter, of course, having pretended to check the safety locks while pronouncing on the quality of workmanship, has moved safely off to examine musical mobiles with bogus intensity.

‘I want the green one,' I say petulantly.

‘What sex is the baby?' asks the assistant.

‘I don't know.'

‘You don't know?'

‘Not yet, no.'

‘Well, what colour's the nursery?'

‘Um, it's white.'

‘Well, mint green is a very difficult colour to team with, it will dominate the room. Are you prepared for that?'

‘The room is fairly big, I don't think it will dominate it. And the curtains will match; they're blue and green.'

‘Well, what colour's your crib linen?' she persists, weirdly determined to put us off.

‘White.'

‘What, surely not all of it?' she challenges.

‘Look,' I say firmly, reaching for my purse, ‘I want the mint green crib with the engraved cherubs.'

‘If it's a boy, he'll hate you for choosing the cherubs,' observes Peter, as we move towards the till.

‘Honey,' says a middle-aged woman, smiling slyly as she folds her credit card slip, ‘chances are he's gonna hate you anyway. They all do, you know. Eventually.'

Saturday, 12 December

Peter

Though I have an aversion to pasta, Joanna has cooked up a Medusa's head of spaghetti for dinner and splodged onto it a jar of insipid tomato topping. I am having difficulty serving the meal, for ever since they were stretched abnormally wide to effect my forceps delivery the pasta tongs refuse to clench back to their original position, and the spaghetti keeps slithering through the claws.

Monday, 14 December

Joanna

I am now going to the surgery on a weekly basis. Today, as usual, the nurse velcroes the rubber cuff round my arm and squeezes the bulb to check my blood pressure, then forces me onto the scales to confirm a total weight gain of 29 lbs.

‘Good,' says the nurse. ‘You can expect your baby anytime from January 1st.'

Panicked at the news it might come three weeks earlier than expected, I come home to find Peter frantically ordering Lugo, the leisurely handyman, around the baby's room, where the two of them are trying to put up curtain rails. Lugo is having difficulty because, despite our careful measurements, we appear to have ordered the wrong-sized rails.

It turns out to be my fault because I wrote the measurements down and then ordered the rails from the Pottery Barn catalogue with no apparent reference to the figures whatsoever. Even odder, I ordered more rails than we have windows. I am uncertain how this happened, but it has left Peter furious, Lugo bewildered, and me convinced that we are not sufficiently practical to be parents.

Monday, 14 December

Peter

I'm at the gym, striding away on the ski-trek machine and, through a veil of sweat, watching a CBS early evening news spot on the stress of Christmas shopping. A new study, they report, shows that for many men Christmas shopping is more stressful than being in combat. Well, I've been in combat and this test is patent nonsense. Combat is not nearly as stressful as Christmas shopping. For one thing there aren't as many choices in combat.

Tuesday, 15 December

Joanna

Despite my failure over the curtain rails, there is one achievement I do feel rather proud of. I have been slowly accumulating the layette and, according to Miriam Stoppard, I have now got everything on the list apart from six muslin ‘sick-cloths'.

I do not seem able to find muslin sick-cloths anywhere in New York. Macy's, Bergdorf-Goodman, Barneys, Saks: I have tried them all. Eventually, an assistant at Albee's, the discount baby emporium, tells me that Americans do not use sick-cloths.

‘But what do you use?' I ask.

‘No one has ever asked me that before,' she says.

‘Perhaps American babies don't vomit like English babies,' I try dryly.

‘No, no, they probably vomit about the same,' she says sincerely. ‘Couldn't you use a cloth diaper, maybe?'

‘Aren't they a bit bulky?' I ask.

‘Not if you arrange them artfully,' she says, pulling down a packet from a nearby shelf. ‘You could wear them over your shoulder like this,' she demonstrates, ‘as a scarf.'

I cannot imagine my grey Jil Sander suit accessorized with a cloth diaper, but I buy a packet of eight anyway.

Tuesday, 15 December

Peter

I am back in Dr Wasserman's chair, having my thousand buck onlay onlaid.

‘Here it is,' says Wasserman. He reaches his big but surprisingly nimble paw into a little plastic box and, with a flourish, produces the onlay.

‘Hmm,' I say, determined not to be impressed, which is not difficult – it is a tiny, rather yellow blob of resin.

He glues it into the hole in my mouth he has previously excavated, and while he waits for the adhesive to bond his nurse, Evelyn, chats to me.

‘You have a nice accent,' she says. ‘I think the English accent is so classy.'

‘Hank yaw,' I say, my mouth still clamped open.

‘D'ya think I have a Brooklyn accent?' she enquires of Wasserman in a heavy Brooklyn accent.

‘Occasionally it shows through a little,' he says tactfully. He notices me checking out his framed Columbia Dental School scroll hanging on the wall. ‘We were the rebel year,' he recalls proudly. ‘
WE
thought we knew better.' I try to conjure up a class of firebrand dentists, but fail.

Wednesday, 16 December

Joanna

We have been invited back to their carolling evening by the Horatio Street Association, our old neighbourhood group. We meet at Jackson Square, a defiant triangle of grass, squeezed between Eighth Avenue and West 14th Street. Usually it is populated by weary dog owners armed with their obligatory pooper-scoopers, but tonight's assembled group is a mixed bunch of Wall Streeters, models, out-of-work actors, writers and painters, accompanied by a few precocious Manhattan children dressed against the freezing fog in puffa jackets, mufflers and bobble hats. Hymn sheets are distributed and we set off down Eighth Avenue, bathed in the festive flashing red lights of our NYPD squad car escort.

Our first stop is the steamy confines of Piccolo Angelo, where the patrons are forced to stop mid-mascarpone and listen to our unrehearsed rendition of ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!' Our song accomplished, we trek across Greenwich Street while the police officer halts the traffic, to the local supermarket, D'Agostino's, where we elbow our way past the grumbling check-out queue to the frozen food section. There we deliver a rather poor ‘First Noel'.

Several more restaurants and the Village Nursing Home later, we turn into Gansevoort Street, the transvestite promenade we used to overlook from our loft. The children are getting fractious, trying to prize open a newspaper vending machine until the officer intervenes. Adjacent to the gay club, Hell, the kids are distracted by the sight of a hefty local transvestite dressed up as Mother Christmas and perched upon a customized penny farthing tricycle, squeezing an accordion and singing. Next to her stands her companion, a small red devil complete with plastic horns, pointy tail and spandex stilettos.

‘Hey, Mother Christmas, sing us a song,' the children plead. And primping her huge white wig, the transvestite breaks into a bass chorus of ‘Rudolf the red nosed reindeer, had a
fucking
shiny nose…'

‘Oh, no, no, no,' shrieks Carole, our team leader, wagging a finger. The officer thrusts his way to the front. ‘Now you be nice, huh?' he threatens. ‘Go ahead and sing the decent one for the kids here, or I might just lose my Christmas spirit with you, honey.'

Mother Christmas embarks sullenly on a sanitized version, singing defiantly off key.

We move on, delivering a ragged burst of ‘We Three Kings of Orient Are', down the street at Florent, Peter's old lunching haunt, and fall into step with the officer.

‘Do you get much trouble around here?' Peter asks him.

‘Nah, I ain't seen anyone packing a gun in more than two years. No one does nothing no more,' he says, sounding disappointed.

‘Why's that then?'

‘It's the death penalty, ain't it?' the officer declares confidently. ‘More than thirty people got the needle in Texas this year and now they've brought it back here in New York. You telling me that ain't no deterrent?' And he climbs back into his car, carolling patrol over for another year.

Friday, 18 December

Peter

We have a slight problem today at yoga because our normal exercise space is impeded by a vast Christmas tree which Joanna has finally forced me to buy from a couple of Quebecois lumberjacks operating from an old van parked on Broadway. In advance of our yoga I have plugged in the lights to make the scene more festive, but every time we do Downward Facing Dog we end up with a mouthful of conifer, which Mary Barnes, our instructor, gamely tries to ignore.

Mary ends the session by bidding us to ‘Feel the energy, feel yourself taking your energy into the day with you.'

When she has gone I collapse on the floor reading
Private Eye.
Joanna starts up a mock anti-yogic mantra in which she intones, ‘Feel the energy drifting out of us, feel the spite, feel the malice, feel the
Schadenfreude,
feel the envy, all flooding back into us as we realign the day according to our actual characters.'

Saturday, 19 December

Joanna

The
New York Post
reports that Tina Brown, who relinquished her editorship of the
New Yorker
in June to launch her own magazine, has finally decided on a title for her new venture. It is to be called
Talk,
with the subtitle:
The American Conversation.
The definite article makes it sound as if there is only one American conversation going on. It seems a fairly ambitious claim to the Zeitgeist.

Like most British hacks I am intrigued by the spectacularly successful Brown and her husband, Harry Evans, the former editor of the
Sunday Times,
and was rather flattered to receive an invitation last spring to dinner at their East River home.

The other guests were mostly Manhattan media A-list: Robert Hughes, the art historian; Si Newhouse, owner of Condé Nast; Julie Taymor, director of
The Lion King
; Wendy Wasserstein, the playwright; and Chip McGrath, editor of the
New York Times Book Review.

Though the dinner was in honour of Adam Gopnik, who'd won a Polk award for his dispatches from Paris, the trophy guest was to be the actor Steve Martin, in town shooting a remake of
The Out of Towners
with Goldie Hawn.

Martin had obviously informed our hosts he was going to be late because we sat down to our lobster ravioli with his chair empty. I was on Harry Evans's table and the conversation soon turned to drugs.

‘Have any of you ever done cocaine?' Evans enquired of the table. No one was forthcoming. ‘I once took marijuana in the hopes of achieving an instant erection … It failed to materialize,' he concluded glumly.

Sitting on my right, a dark-haired, distracted man introduced himself as Elliot Goldenthal, ‘a composer'.

‘I'm working on the score of Neil Jordan's new movie,
The Butcher Boy,
' he said.

‘I hope it's better than that awful music he used in
Interview with a Vampire,'
I replied, breaking into my bread roll.

‘Actually,' said Elliot, ‘that was my score too. In fact it was nominated for an Oscar.'

I was just about to slide under the table with mortification when there was a small commotion as Steve Martin finally arrived. To my astonishment, and that of the rest of my table, the silver-haired actor made a beeline straight for me, arms outstretched in hugging mode, as if we were friends of old.

In an instant I realized what had happened: he had confused me with our hostess, whose hair length and complexion I share.

‘Joanna Coles,' I said loudly, leaping up and proffering my hand to fend off his faux pas.

‘Oh,
how
could I have mistaken you?' he giggled, trying to mollify me as Tina approached unseen behind him. ‘You're so much younger!'

The next morning I described the evening to Meredith. ‘Talk about dissing your hostess,' she grinned. ‘You do realize you'll never be invited back?'

Saturday, 19 December

Peter

The truth is it's just as well I'm doing yoga, or I might well have blown up by now. I think we are both more stressed by this pregnancy than either of us is prepared to admit, even to ourselves. I am now in real danger of joining those ranks of New Yorkers who walk around like loaded guns, just waiting for the smallest annoyance to trigger them.