The Three of Us (6 page)

By the time I arrive there are sixty or so women gathered in the hall and about a dozen rather reluctant-looking men. (Peter has refused to accompany me on the grounds that he is on deadline for a
Newsweek
column on Winnie Mandela, though I suspect the real reason is to do with ‘Must See TV' night on NBC:
Seinfeld
followed by
ER
).

I take my seat towards the back of the audience and a large gentleman, apparently in charge of proceedings, steps up to the dais.

‘Welcome,' he says. ‘We're just waiting for our leader, who is upstairs chanting.'

‘How very Greenwich Village,' mutters my neighbour, a blonde, bobbed woman with a complicated briefcase and tan legs which disappear into clumpy trainers.

The large man addresses us again. ‘We realize we have had a terrible tragedy occur in our midst and this evening we want to bring a focus to this kind of violence.' He eyes us steadily as if one of us might be harbouring the suspect.

‘You know,' he says slowly, ‘there are people walking around who have done these things.' Several of the women nod knowingly, as Paul Benjamin, the playwright whose work is to be performed tonight, emerges from a side door, his chanting now apparently finished.

It is an adequate drama, notable mostly for the overwhelming earnestness with which it is read. The real drama, however, begins afterwards when the police officers address us.

Ronald Haas, a huge and rather comforting detective from the Special Crimes Squad, goes first. ‘Obviously a heinous crime has taken place,' he begins. ‘An individual was raped…'

‘A
WOMAN
was raped!' shouts a furious girl in dungarees from somewhere on the third row. ‘A
WOMAN
was raped.'

‘A woman was raped,' the officer corrects himself. ‘Obviously I can't give you specific details…'

‘We don't want specific details,' calls another woman. She is gnawing a raw carrot. ‘Just tell us what time it happened.'

‘About eight-thirty,' says Officer Haas.

‘Holy shit!' exclaims someone.

‘The only other thing I can tell you', Haas continues uneasily, ‘is that the assailant was a six-foot tall, two hundred and ten pound, black male with stubble.'

‘Why have no police approached me to tell me to take care?' shouts another girl, this one in a denim smock.

‘Because that's not their job,' cries a frail man from across the hall.

‘Look,' says Haas, ‘I care deeply about this community and I'm offended by this crime.'

‘Well, what can you do about it?' demands an elderly woman, stroking a dachshund. ‘Every time I walk down the street and see a black guy I'm gonna be scared now.'

At this point another detective, Merri Pearsall, who says she has coincidentally just rented an apartment in the neighbourhood, takes over. ‘My thought is, I might have prevented this,' she says wistfully, before running through some tips which might prevent us from being attacked ourselves.

‘Get used to noticing details,' she says. ‘Height, clothing, weight, hair colour.'

‘How tall
IS
six foot anyway,' shouts the first dungaree'd girl. ‘How can you tell for sure?'

‘I have a dog and I always carry a can of Mace,' interrupts the carrot chewer, brandishing her carrot stick. ‘Which is better? Dog? Or Mace?'

‘I'd take a dog over Mace any day,' says Detective Pearsall. ‘You can't use Mace if there's any wind and I've seen a room full of cops overcome by it in seconds. Definitely a dog.'

Dog over Mace, writes carrot woman on her notepad, firmly underlining each word three times.

As I gather up my things, preparing to walk home, I try to imagine a fear so intense that you would throw yourself out of a fourth-floor window. ‘Is she OK?' I ask another woman, who seems involved in the evening.

She pulls a face. ‘She landed on the second-floor fire escape and lost a kidney,' she says. ‘But she's still alive, if that's what you mean.'

JUNE

The baby's brain, muscles and bones begin to form. The ball of cells growing inside your uterus – the embryo – is now the size of an apple seed.

BabyCenter.com

Monday, 1 June

Peter

236 days to go until the baby arrives. We have started calling it B-Day.

I mooch down Gansevoort Street in the simmering heat, past Judd Grill's gym, where I can see a trio of burly meat-packers building brawn on the bench presses; past Samba's Deli and the Maggio Beef Corporation, which is wedged beneath the amputated tracks of the old Manhattan Freight Line. Every lamp-post and street-sign reeks of vaporizing dog's urine. The very pavements themselves seem to perspire. Through their cracks they ooze beads of greasy sweat from the city's foul subterranean bowels. I'm on my way to our local twenty-four-hour diner, Florent, for what has become my ritual lunch.

Outside on the broken sidewalk the restaurant has arranged a hopeful little cluster of fake marble bistro tables and green metal chairs under bright blue sun umbrellas. However, this venue has not proved popular with customers, who have to share it with a clutter of big red metal wheelie bins overflowing with bones, mysteriously dabbed with iridescent green paint, and listen to the insistent whine of band-saws cutting carcasses inside the Shuster Meat Corp – ‘We specialize in boneless beef cuts'.

Florent looks like a diner. It is long and narrow, and has a mirror and red leatherette bench seats with chrome trimmings along one wall, and a white Formica counter down the other. But Florent is not a real diner at all. It is an ironic diner. A parody of a diner. It has quilted aluminium walls and a pink ceiling, from which hangs a slowly revolving disco mirror ball.

Above the cash register is an old-fashioned announcement board, the kind you used to see at convention centres, with individual letters pressed into plastic grooves to relay the day's schedule to delegates. The board has today's date followed by some helpful information:

 

The weather: Hot, hot,
HOT
!

Today 96°.

Tomorrow – Hotter 99°.

 

Underneath the heading ‘Flo by Night' it suggests options for night clubs in the Meat Packing District, helpfully categorized:

 

Gay: Hell, Lure, The Anvil, Manhole

Lesbian: The Clit Club

Straight: Hoggs and Heifers

Or: Stay at home and read to each other

 

The walls of Florent are decorated with framed maps of various city centres around the world. But between these maps are fictional ones penned by Florent, who is evidently a fantasy cartographer. He draws the imagined layout of cities that might have been, with intricate plans of their docks and parks, bridges and graveyards.

Florent himself, who is seldom in residence during the day, is a gay Frenchman who arrived in New York about thirty years ago. He organizes the annual Bastille Day event held in Gansevoort Street. The highlight of the Bastille Day festivities is the Marie Antoinette look-alike competition, which a bewigged, powdered and bustled Florent always enters.

I haul myself up on a stool at the bar and flop the hefty bundle of the
New York Times
down on the counter. The Mexican busboy immediately slams down a glass of iced water, cutlery, a paper napkin and a paper place mat which is adorned with a map of Caribbean islands: Cuba, Dominican Republic and Haiti, Puerto Rico and Jamaica. At hand there is also a glass of wax crayons should I feel the need to doodle on the islands.

‘Yo,' says Brigitte, the waitress, a cheerful TV editor from New Zealand working on her first novel, ‘what can I get you?'

I do not need to see the menu, I know it by heart and have tried almost everything on it. The food at Florent is a peculiarly camp variety of diner food. So today my BLT comes complete with a fussy rocket salad and thin, delicately cut French fries.

I have with me part of the manuscript of my book and after a cup of stewed coffee I pore over the text.

‘Hit a snag?' asks Brigitte, helpfully.

‘Yeah, the voice isn't quite right. I'm thinking of moving it into the first person.'

Soon an informal writing workshop has convened with the waiters, Cedric-the-filmmaker, David-the-actor/playwright, and Brigitte-the-novelist, helpfully pointing out the advantages of an all-seeing third-person narrator over the ‘I' word.

Sunday, 7 June

Joanna

I am still wondering how to tell the office about my pregnancy when Peter raises the issue of telling our respective parents. I know we must, but I am still apprehensive. His, I know, will be thrilled. Having spent their entire adult lives in the Third World, nothing seems to faze them and considering they are both now in their seventies they remain amazingly flexible in attitude.

I'm not worried about my father either – he is the most amiable, patient person I know and, after thirty years of trying to interest inner-city comprehensive kids in Shakespeare, he is resolutely unshockable. It's my mother who's the problem. My mother is a vicar's daughter and a former marriage guidance counsellor who is doing her best to reconcile herself to the fact that both her daughters now live with men to whom they are not married.

‘Go on,' says Peter, pushing the phone across the dining table. ‘Just do it, I'm sure she'll be over the moon.' It is 9.15 a.m. and we have just finished breakfast, so given the five-hour time difference I think they will have finished lunch in Yorkshire.

‘I'll just tidy the breakfast stuff up first,' I say brightly, though our caffè lattes and warm blueberry muffins arrived in a bag from Barocco, one of a score of delis within 500 yards which deliver our breakfast, so there is nothing to wash up.

‘Go on, stop playing for time,' he admonishes, hauling the
New York Times
onto the sofa and beginning to weed out the numerous sections we never read.

‘Hello?' My mother answers the phone. She sounds suspicious, a tone which I've noticed has increased since she took over management of the local Neighbourhood Watch and now receives long recorded messages from the police about local burglaries, which she diligently transcribes by hand on her blue Basildon Bond pad and distributes to the neighbours.

‘Hello, it's me,' I say.

‘Hello!' she cries. ‘Hang on, and I'll just tell your father to go and listen on the extension upstairs.' A good start; at least I've caught them together.

‘I've got some news,' I begin awkwardly.

‘Oh yes?'

‘You're going to be grandparents.'

There is a pause and a sharp intake of breath.

‘Oh,' says my mother. And then, with a small tinge of hope, ‘I mean, well, I have one question for you. Does this mean you are finally going to get married?'

‘No,' I reply slowly. ‘I don't think we are. No.' I hope this sounds firm.

‘How will you look after it?' she asks, sounding mildly incredulous.

‘Mum, I'm thirty-six.'

‘Congratulations, duckie,' my father's voice booms down the extension, valiantly trying to drown out my mother's apparent shock.

‘I'm trembling,' my mother says, dramatically. ‘Oh dear, I had no idea. I need to sit down…'

‘I'm going to be a grandfather!' Dad says excitedly.

My mother interrupts him. ‘Oh dear,' she laments again, and I can hear her struggling to say something encouraging. ‘Oh dear,' she repeats quietly, ‘I think I need a brandy.'

Tuesday, 9 June

Peter

Joanna has imbued our unborn child with its own character. It is that of a street-smart, super-competitive, gravel-voiced Manhattanite, already ashamed of its odd, foreign parents.

‘Hey, Dad,' she rasps in imitation, ‘how come you haven't got a real job?' The knowing foetus, her incarnation of it at least, is already withering in its take on our relative lack of financial status. ‘Why haven't we got an Aston Martin like William's dad, huh?' it complains. ‘And what's with this Village loft? It's pah-thetic! How come we don't live in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, like Gus?'

Joanna's name choices have become ever more bizarre and arbitrary. ‘Obadiah. I like Obadiah,' she pipes up over supper at Florent, apropos of nothing in particular – pregnancy has made her a mental doodler. ‘Or what about Zebedee?' She is deep into her Old Testament phase.

We return home to find our answer service bleeping with a message. It is from Andrew Solomon.

When we first arrived in New York we came equipped with an armful of introductions to people we ‘absolutely had to meet'. Most of these meetings have proved rather awkward, contrived affairs, where once the subject of our mutual friend is exhausted, conversation becomes threadbare. So we have lost our appetite for this kind of entrée.

Andrew Solomon, journalist, author, socialite, art collector, is, however, in a class of his own. We have been furnished with his number by almost everyone we know in London. He has an astonishing social span – he is an international Zelig. I have met people in Botswanan game parks and on Caribbean beaches who, on hearing I live in New York, say, ‘Oh, have you met a friend of mine, Andrew Solomon?'

The answer is no. It is not, however, through want of trying. We have been playing phone tag with him for months now, but Andrew Solomon evidently lives his life according to an itinerary packed with ever more exotic and obscure locations.

‘I'm afraid we've missed Andrew again,' I tell Joanna.

‘Oh, where is he this time?'

‘Nassau, Havana and Bogliasco.'

Thursday, 11 June

Joanna

Tonight we have supper with Larry and Nancy, two wealthy writers whose TriBeCa loft seems somehow far better designed for actually living in than ours. They too have been forced to partition space, but have chosen quiet wicker screens rather than our solution of messy bookshelves and desks. It seems a triumph of practical but stylish design and I am silently oozing envy as the door buzzes and supper arrives.