The Three of Us (24 page)

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 enough 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.

‘Listen, did you read the e-mail I sent you from BabyCenter.com today?' I ask Peter over supper of meatloaf and onion gravy at the Metro Diner.

‘No, not yet.'

‘Well, they reckon that you should start saving now if you want your kid to go to college, because in eighteen years' time it's going to cost quarter of a million dollars.'

‘Oh, bollocks.'

‘And that's in addition to the other quarter of a million. But they say that if we manage to save $542 a month from now on, we'll have enough to cover it.'

‘Double bollocks,' says Peter and orders another cappuccino.

Tuesday, 10 November

Peter

I am making my first pilgrimage to Albee's on Amsterdam Avenue. It is a haj I have been trying to delay for as long as possible, as Albee's, New York's well-known emporium of kiddie equipment, represents the tyranny of strollers and other essential accessories of breeding. Albee's is even more depressing than I had anticipated, a tawdry bazaar which makes no attempt to shop dress but rather tries to give the impression of a bargain basement with prices sliced to the marrow.

Joanna tasks me to track down something called a Diaper Genie, apparently as crucial to a baby as a litter tray is to a cat. As I slouch along the winding alleys flanked by tall piles of baby merchandise, I brush against a precarious tower of tiny, gaily coloured plastic lavatory seats that are designed to fit into full-sized ones and they come tumbling down. I flee the scene in search of my designated quarry, the Diaper Genie. It is, I eventually discover, a three-foot plastic cylinder with a hinged lid, that, its advertising blurb promises, will store soiled diapers in a sanitary, odourless and convenient way. I wrestle it to the counter, carefully stepping over the scattered debris of dozens of mini loo seats.