The Three of Us (5 page)

‘You, off alcohol? Don't be ridiculous,' Meredith scoffs and, grabbing a passing waiter, promptly orders two more martinis. ‘With some of those outrageously expensive chips,' she yells after him, ‘and we'll take a plate of aubergine caviar.'

I take another sip, planning to swap glasses when she goes to the loo, which she does a lot, not always, I suspect, for the actual purpose a bathroom is intended.

‘So, have you heard about Kelly?' she says, leaning forward flashing her eyes in a way which signifies she has gossip. ‘She's on Ritalin and she's had a complete personality change!'

‘What?' I demand, wondering crossly why Kelly hasn't told me this herself.

‘Ritalin, you know that drug they give to kids with ADD – attention deficit disorder.'

‘But why? What for?' I ask, doubly cross that a close friend hasn't told me she's suffering from New York's most fashionable disorder.

‘Says it helps her focus,' nods Meredith.

‘Focus on what?'

‘Everything! She says it's so good that yesterday for the first time in ten years she went out without any Valium at all. I mean she deliberately left her pill tin at home and, even when she was caught in a mob at Barney's sale, she didn't panic once…'

Given that I am reluctant to take even aspirin, I'm always impressed at the way New Yorkers pop pills. Kelly and Jeff's large bathroom cabinet, which I once secretly opened, resembles a RiteAid comfort station. Every shelf was crammed with brown glass bottles: Prozac, Zoloft, Valium and Lithium alongside the more mundane Tylenol ‘Extra' and its rival Advil's response, Advil Extra Strength. Though they talk openly about self-medicating, I have no idea how much they actually take of the stuff.

Meredith goes to the loo and I switch glasses just as the waiter arrives with our next drinks and a white napkin envelope of home-made crisps and a plate of pitta slices, cut in the shape of triangles and arranged points-out in the shape of a star, to mop up a stylized taupe blob of mashed aubergine.

‘Darling,' shrills Meredith, eyes flashing and sniffing like a bloodhound, as she returns. ‘How are you?' As if we have just met.

Saturday, 23 May

Peter

At 3.45 a.m. I get up to go for a pee and on the way back I notice the bent figure of a tramp trundling a shopping trolley down Gansevoort Street. He parks it adjacent to the fire hydrant beneath our window and from the trolley's lower shelf he produces a long cast-iron tool – his own, personal hydrant spanner. He opens the hydrant, adjusting it carefully to allow a modest spout of water to flow. Then he goes about his ablutions. First, he fills up his three plastic water bottles; then he fussily rinses out a carrier bag, turns it inside out and vigorously shakes it dry. From his trolley he lifts out a tray of peaches and fastidiously washes them, one by one. After checking on his plastic bag again, which is drying, he eats two of his peaches, dabbing at his beard with a faded bandanna. He carefully eases the tray of remaining peaches into the newly cleaned carrier bag, ties its handles and gingerly places it back in his supermarket trolley. Then he washes his face over and over again and swills out his mouth.

From somewhere inside his grubby full-length gabardine coat he retrieves a little plastic box. I can't quite make out what it is. Tobacco? Snuff? Crack? Then he pulls something long and white from the box and breaks it off. It is a length of dental floss, and he proceeds to floss his teeth with great thoroughness.

In the gloom of the early morning Joanna appears, naked, on her way to the bathroom.

‘Check this out,' I tell her. ‘A tramp who flosses.'

Joanna observes the scene silently for a moment and then announces that her breasts ache.

‘Look at them,' she murmurs, ‘they're enormous.'

They loom, ghostly white globes in the half-light, and indeed they do look considerably expanded. I reach for one and cup it in the palm of my outstretched hand like the Sikh cab driver did to Ru.

‘Wow, that's some boob,' I exclaim, in what I hope is an admiring tone.

Below us the tramp closes the fire hydrant, replaces his spanner in the trolley, and trundles it slowly down Gansevoort Street, turning north on to the West Side Highway. I look at the clock. The whole ritual has taken nearly an hour.

Monday, 25 May

Joanna

… Though it is only 10 a.m. here, it is already 4 p.m. in London and I am in the office on deadline for a feature about Robert Downey Junior's persistent drug problem. I am distracted, however, by the frantic pitching coming through the thin wall. It is Ted, the elderly real estate agent in the next-door office, talking on the phone to a client.

‘I'm going to have to push you, Frank, I'm sorry but I gotta know today,' I hear him say. ‘Frank, if I could give you more time, then believe me I would. Believe me, I've been fighting for you, Frank, I've been fighting very hard. And I don't mind tellin' ya, they don't call me the Rocky-of-Real-Estate for nothing. Are you in with me, Frank? Do we have a deal here? I don't mind telling ya, ya won't regret it.'

Until two years ago the
Guardian
office in New York was staffed with thirteen people selling subscriptions for the
Guardian Weekly
edition. Then the paper's accountants in London caught up with this forgotten enclave and made them all redundant, shifting operations to Canada to cut costs. But they were unable to shift the unexpired Manhattan lease, and so for a while I worked in an eerily deserted office. Now the paper has managed to rent the remaining space to a trio of elderly real estate agents. They arrived one Monday morning with several boxes stuffed full of executive toys.

Ted is the most avuncular of the three. He has decorated his office with framed copies of the most lucrative deals he has closed over the last forty years. These are, I suppose, the real estate equivalent of Pulitzer prizes, though the small print makes them almost impossible to read. His favourite is prominently displayed on a separate music stand by his door.

‘This', he told me, shortly after his arrival, pointing proudly to the cream paper filled with minute print, ‘is for a helicopter landing pad I sold on top of the fourteenth tallest building in the city. And I tell ya, it was a lucky deal, lucky for me anyways!

‘A month after I signed the contract, I'll be damned if a helicopter didn't topple off the edge of the Pan Am building, killing everyone aboard and some more underneath. After that, all helicopters were banned from taking off or landing on buildings across the city.' He gives a rueful laugh. ‘Lucky for me, right? But God, was the guy who bought the landing pad from me pissed!'

In between the contracts he has slipped in the odd family photograph of a wife and scowling son, somewhere in his late teens, with a backwards baseball cap on his crown. In each of the photos he is also wearing Tommy Hilfiger jeans, with the crotch nestling between his knees, a trend, Ted explains, inspired by maximum-security prisoners whose trousers are always loose because they are not allowed belts.

The pride of Ted's executive toy chest is his wave machine. This is a glass box, a yard long by a foot high, filled with a viscous aquamarine oil. When switched on it simulates the ocean, only in slow motion. ‘Very soothing,' nods Ted. One day, he says, he is planning to surprise me by changing the colour of the oil.

‘I'll do it,' he threatens. ‘Just see if I don't, I promise you, one day you'll walk in and I'll have changed it to purple!'

Under his desk he also keeps a wooden rod with an iron hoop, which looks like a metal detector.

‘This is my “Bullshit Detector”,' he announced within an hour of his arrival, waving it at me and making a high-pitched beeping noise. Whenever a client says something he doesn't agree with, he reaches for it, sweeps it towards them and starts up his high-pitched beeping.

Monday, 25 May

Peter

After consulting our battalion of liveried doormen, we have finally hired a cleaner. She is a short, hefty, middle-aged woman with brightly hennaed hair, called Margarita. Her work uniform is an appliqué T-shirt, black leggings, Nikes and dayglo pink rubber gloves. She arrives with another maid to negotiate her fee.

‘Eighty dollars,' states her colleague baldly. ‘That is the rate.'

This seems a little steep to me. In London we paid our cleaner £30. Given that Margarita says it will take three hours to clean our apartment here, $80 works out at nearly $27 an hour. The minimum wage in this country is $5.45 an hour, so we will be paying her almost five times that.

‘Sixty dollars?' I suggest. ‘That's twenty dollars an hour – a good wage,' I say hopefully. I am a terrible negotiator, the thrills of shopping at the souk are not for me.

But Margarita will not budge. There is to be no negotiation. The two women stand there arms folded over their bosoms regarding me sternly and I cave in. It's a deal. As they leave, Margarita's colleague informs me that laundry will be extra.

Margarita comes from Ecuador and though she has been in the United States for twelve years, she speaks no English. Well, that's not entirely fair. She speaks three words of English: ‘No thank you.' She deploys this phrase in differing intonations, depending on the situation.

‘Margarita, can you clean the windows?' I ask her, miming cleaning the grimy windows. ‘No thank you! No thank you, Mr Peter!' she bellows back, nodding vigorously and smiling broadly so that her gold tooth winks in what little light has made it through the panes.

When I introduce Margarita to our stock of household cleaning materials and equipment – all the usual fluids and unguents and sprays, and my newly purchased vacuum cleaner – her brow knits in disapproval and she scowls. ‘No thank you, Mr Peter!' she says firmly, and this time she means just that. I am mildly offended. I went to some trouble choosing the vacuum and it seems perfectly adequate.

‘Look,' I appeal to her, ‘it is the latest Panasonic, the Jet Flo 170. It's got 170, um 170 suck power, or something.' But she is not impressed.

Today Margarita arrives with her own preferred condiments of cleaning, evidently chosen with the loving care of a commando's specialized weaponry, and her own vacuum, all loaded on to a shopping trolley pushed by her taciturn teenage son.

‘This,' he says, translating his mother's Spanish, ‘this, my mother says, is a real vacuum.'

It doesn't look like much, an ancient beige drum vacuum, its grubby plastic casing bound with masking tape. Margarita fires it up and sweeps the nozzle along the floor, where it immediately sucks most of a small kilim into its mighty vortex, and its tone changes to a strangled high-pitched scream. She rattles off another Spanish command and her son says to me, ‘Go on, pull it. Pull the rug.' I grab hold of the kilim and tug it. Margarita takes up a wrestling stance and holds the vacuum pipe in both hands. We tussle this way and that for a while, but I am quite unable to dislodge the kilim until she switches off the power and I finally stagger backwards, kilim in hand.

‘That's a hell of a vacuum,' I am forced to concede.

‘No thank you, Mr Peter,' says Margarita graciously and smiles a victory smile garnished with another flash of gold tooth.

Tuesday, 26 May

Joanna

Tonight we attend the inaugural dinner of the American Friends of the Royal Court held at a grand townhouse just off Fifth Avenue.

It is run by a rather terrifying band of supremely confident English women who, among their other triumphs, are also accomplished fund-raisers. It's the first time either of us has been involved in anything like this, and it soon becomes apparent we are in way over our heads.

There are twenty of us altogether at the dinner and Stephen Daldry, the Court's artistic director who has flown in from London this afternoon specially to address us, explains what the theatre needs. Except that he is far too abashed to ask for money directly and, instead, keeps talking about ‘raising the Royal Court's profile', so that it isn't entirely clear what he's actually after. Looking suitably perplexed, an American woman sitting opposite me suddenly pipes up, ‘Well, what do you need? Would it help, for example, if each one of us sitting here were to write you a cheque for twenty thousand dollars?'

To my horror, several other people nod supportively. ‘Good idea,' murmurs my neighbour, and one woman even makes as if to retrieve her chequebook from a small beaded handbag. Unable to catch Peter's eye, I sit frozen in fear of us being publicly humiliated as the only people round the grand candle-lit table unable to afford such a gesture. Fortunately, Daldry is so embarrassed at the idea that it is somehow lost over the dessert wine. Overwhelmed with relief, as we are leaving, I cheerfully sign up both Peter and I to attend a volunteers' meeting to explore ways of expanding the Royal Court's reputation in New York.

Tuesday, 26 May

Peter

Today I notice for the first time a disturbing tribe of women on the street – mothers with newborn babies. This tribe has apparently lost all dress sense and dispensed with sartorial vanity entirely, strolling along in lumpy sweaters, mismatched socks and untended hair. They converse in goo-goo talk with their little grubs, and wear beatific, gormless smiles. The only other place I've seen this foolish beam is on the faces of cult members. Will Joanna's brain also turn to mush? Will she too promenade in jumble-sale attire, with bad hair, chat entirely in infant gibberish, cease to call me by my name and address me as daddy instead?

Oh God, what have we done?

Wednesday, 27 May

Joanna

Someone has stuffed a flyer under our door advertising a playreading this evening at the local West Beth Community Centre. The reading has been arranged hurriedly by local actors and writers as ‘the community's reply' to a rape in Horatio Street, which ended with a desperate girl flinging herself out of the bedroom window of her fourth-storey apartment. After the reading local police have agreed to address us about neighbourhood safety and how to protect ourselves.