by Joanna Coles
‘Oh God, I don’t know if I can face this,’ I grumble.
‘Well, we can go if you like,’ says Peter reasonably. We are about to leave when I hear a low mellifluous rumble of a voice behind me. Could it possibly be? … Is it really? … I turn around. It is. Alan Rickman is standing fewer than ten feet away.
‘Oh well, I suppose we’re here now,’ I say. ‘Let’s just see how it goes.’
Originally, the RSC had earnestly planned to perform a play in its entirety, but Tina Brown, conversant with New Yorkers’ bantam attention span, has cleverly persuaded them to offer us a medley of the Bard’s Greatest Hits instead.
The audience is huge, there are at least 1,000 of us, with many having paid $20,000 a table. As usual, however, we have slipped in on a press freebie. To my right sits a cheerful man called Christopher Buckley, who tells me he is the author of a book called Thank You for Smoking. He is in a state of some excitement because the place card next to him reads ‘Susannah York’.
To my left sits Garth Drabinsky, the legendary Broadway producer of Showboat and Ragtime, which has just picked up four Tony awards. The Drabinsky legend stems from his almost magical ability to stay financially afloat, confounding his many naysayers. He is a huge, darkly brooding presence, and seems depressed.
I feel depressed too. What did Dr Beth mean, ‘You’re certainly something but it’s not pregnant’? I look around for Peter, who has been placed at a different table. Curiously, when I finally spot him, he is sitting next to Susannah York.
‘Have you seen The Horse Whisperer yet?’ asks Drabinsky morosely.
‘Yes, very disappointing,’ I start. ‘What’s Robert Redford’s problem? How could he have cast himself as the romantic lead? He’s far too old! His mouth’s all lined, he looked ridiculous opposite Kristin Scott Thomas. And as for all those schmaltzy, sentimental shots of Montana…’
‘Really?’ he interrupts. ‘I loved the movie.’ He raises a heavy eyebrow. ‘And I consider Robert one of my greatest friends.’
Monday, 18 May
Peter
I am not at my best at these society events. I seem to revert to my African childhood, dumbstruck and gauche, radiating rudeness to mask social incompetence. I tend to lean on Joanna, using her as a social battering ram, as she possesses complete candour and an effrontery to make me blush. Tonight, however, we are split up, but this is fine since Susannah York is at my table. In the course of the evening I do not manage to exchange a single word with her, however, so intense and exclusive is her conversation with the man on her left, apparently an old friend. Once I think she smiles at me, but I cannot be sure.
When we leave we are besieged by a squadron of publicity girls, who hover around the foyer to present us with our goody bags. I am still at a stage where I am enticed by goody bags. To me they are like unseasonal Christmas stockings. The prospect is exciting, though the contents seldom fail to disappoint. Tonight’s freebies, which we examine in the cab on the way home, are the usual random medley of sponsors’ offerings: a copy of the New Yorker, a volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets, a tube of Callard and Bowser’s liquorice toffees. On the drive home we declaim sonnets while chewing liquorice until our teeth have blackened.
The best gift is a small radio from Bloomberg, the financial rival to Reuters. But to our chagrin we discover that the radio has a strictly limited repertoire – it is permanently pre-tuned to Bloomberg’s own station, and can receive no other.
Tuesday, 19 May
Joanna
After fruitless attempts to get through the voicemail, I make up my mind to go down and collect the second lot of results in person, when Dr Beth calls me.
‘Joanna, it’s Beth from Murray Hill, can you come in this afternoon? We need to talk. I’ve got your results back and quite frankly, Joanna, I don’t mind tellin’ you, I’m baffled.’
As I arrive, I see Donna the technician sitting on a low wall outside the surgery, smoking, a habit long since forbidden in New York offices. She gives me a thumbs up.
‘Your numbers have doubled,’ she says, drawing heavily on her cigarette. ‘That’s very good. That’s what we look for.’
Buoyed up by this news, I sit patiently underneath the peaks of Yosemite waiting for Beth, who finally calls me in to tell me she is still baffled, but has booked me a sonogram. She leads me into a small white room, tells me to swap my suit for a paper robe and I lie back on a grey leather reclining chair.
The monitor flickers into life, she squeezes a transparent gel over my belly and I see a series of dark undulating lines, which she tells me is my uterus. The electronic wand hovers and she zooms in on a tiny dark spot.
‘Mmn, a cyst,’ she murmurs. ‘Definitely an ovarian cyst.’
‘Is that serious?’ I ask, struggling to sit up.
She gestures me down and this time zooms in on an indecipherable white speck. She pulls one of her faces.
‘A cyst is a symptom of pregnancy,’ she says. ‘Doctor to patient, it’s too early to say. But woman to woman, I’d say you are pregnant, Joanna. Very, very early. But I don’t think it’s anything more serious.’ She sounds disappointed. ‘Congratulations,’ she says flatly. ‘You’re going to have a baby after all.’
I manage a weak grin and, flooding with relief, make two instant vows. I will never come back to this surgery again. And I will never wear a turquoise pregnancy smock with white seagull-wing collar.
Tuesday, 19 May
Peter
My results are finally in. My time, it appears, is not up after all. There is nothing wrong with me. Nothing to explain the lump on my elbow. Dr Epstein sits across the desk flipping through the charts. He is bewildered.
‘How’s the writing going?’ he asks, knowing that I am a writer.
I feel this is no time for small talk.
‘Fine,’ I reply, wanting to get back to my polyp.
‘Still blocked?’ he asks.
What is he, my agent?
‘Well I had a bit of spurt a couple of weeks ago,’ I admit, ‘but it wasn’t very good stuff.’
He asks to feel my polyp again and then his face lights up.
‘I think you may have Carpal Tunnel Syndrome,’ he says.
‘What’s that?’ I ask fearfully.
‘I think you guys call it Repetitive Stress Injury. It’s caused by too much typing.’
I return to the apartment to break the news to Joanna.
‘Turns out I’m fine,’ I tell her. ‘I’m not going to die after all. My test results are all negative. He thinks it’s RSI. I must be the only blocked writer who has managed to contract RSI.’
Joanna doesn’t seem particularly engaged by my relieved chatter.
‘I got my test results too,’ she says and hands me a package.
I unwrap it to find that it is a book entitled The Expectant Father.
Wednesday, 20 May
Joanna
Like most of my friends, I have put career ahead of children. In our twenties it seemed almost embarrassing to admit they were even a possibility. Now I’m suddenly aware of the explosive change that lies ahead. But instead of being scared, I find myself fizzing with elation – as though a secret trapdoor has sprung open to reveal a future quite different to the one I had been expecting.
I wonder, though, how my bosses in London will take the news of my pregnancy. I am currently the sole female staff foreign correspondent on the paper, and after only a few months I have fallen pregnant. This was clearly not part of their plan. I stare out of my greasy office window, trying to compose a memo breaking the news to the editor.
The truth is I am not a real foreign correspondent at all. I have no desire to zoom across the country clutching an overnight bag and a laptop, forever on call. I took this posting simply because I’ve always loved New York. As it turns out the job is largely office based, relying heavily on rewriting the New York papers and watching cable news. My colleague in Washington, Ed Vulliamy, calls it ‘lift ’n’ view’.
; When I do try to engage in original journalism and hit the phone, no one has heard of the paper. This morning I am trying to get a comment on ‘zero tolerance’ from the NYPD press office.
‘Hello. It’s Joanna Coles from the Guardian,’ I say.
‘Where?’
‘The Guardian.’
‘La Guardia? The airport?’
‘No. The Guardian. It’s a British newspaper.’
‘Really? Never heard of it.’
The bureau itself depresses me. Though I should not complain about the location, in midtown on 44th Street sandwiched between Fifth and Sixth Avenue, the office itself reminds me of the shabby sets invariably used in amateur productions of Death of a Salesman. The windows are so fudged with dirt that I can barely tell if it’s raining. The glass top on the desk is shattered, its loosely arranged shards an industrial accident in waiting. The chair, a concave scoop of leatherette which has long since stopped revolving, has a two-inch nail sticking out of the left arm.
When I raise the issue with the foreign editor he is unsympathetic, assuming that I am exaggerating in the hope that he will allow me to refurbish with Philippe Starck accessories. Besides, he keeps reminding me, I am lucky to have an office at all. Most foreign correspondents are now required to work from a computer propped up in the back bedroom at home, something which would probably drive me mad.
Wednesday, 20 May
Peter
Joanna tells me that The Expectant Father will make me more understanding of what she is going through. I flip through the book and it falls open at an early page which advises me that the correct way to announce to my friends that Joanna is expecting a child is to say, ‘We are pregnant.’ I try saying it aloud. ‘We are pregnant.’ ‘We are pregnant.’ It sounds absurd. I cannot bring myself to do this in public.
It is true however that I have been putting on some weight since the conception. John, also pregnant, has alerted me to Couvade’s Syndrome, a condition suffered by fathers-to-be. Couvade comes from the French word, to hatch, and victims of the syndrome experience phantom pregnancies. I try out the idea on Joanna and she suggests that I might go to the gym more often.
I fall back on the thought that, rather like a beautiful Italian peasant girl who, having snared a husband, rapidly inflates into a moustachioed pasta pudding, I am perhaps relaxing into middle age, propelled by fatherhood.
Later I am consoled somewhat by a news item on the Rolling Stone, Keith Richards, the bad boy of rock ’n’ roll. It is reported that he has broken several ribs. This injury has not been inflicted in some night club brawl, however, or while trashing a hotel room. He has, in fact, sustained it in a nasty fall from the ladder in his library while trying to retrieve a volume from the top shelf. I wonder what the book was: Proust? Dickens? Or perhaps a leather-bound edition of the New Musical Express?
Eventually, it seems, a Rolling Stone does gather moss.
Thursday, 21 May
Joanna
My office is on the sixteenth floor and offers a Hopperesque view across the street and into the offices opposite, where I watch the other hunch-spined workers twisted over their terminals. I like being up high, but I worry about the bank of elevators, which, I have learned, sometimes stop unaccountably between floors.
The first time this happened was between the eighth and ninth floors and I was alone and felt reluctant to press the red alarm in case it triggered a general evacuation and froze the lift altogether.
After waiting about two minutes, I tentatively pressed the button. It gave an unimpressive little buzz.
‘Hello,’ said a bored voice through the intercom.
‘I seem to be stuck,’ I said, trying not to sound panicky.
‘Yeah,’ said the voice, pausing. ‘You are.’
‘Well, can you get it going again?’
‘Yeah, the functions need resetting.’
‘Well, can you sort it out?’
‘Yeah, yeah. Don’t panic.’
‘I’m not panicking, I just want to get out.’
‘OK, OK.’
Nothing happened so, assuming it might take some minutes, I started on a muffin and opened the New York Post. I was reading the Page Six gossip column, which is usually in fact on page eight, when my eye slipped to a headline on the opposite page: ‘WOMAN NARROWLY MISSES DROWNING IN ELEVATOR’.
I read on to discover that a woman and her Jack Russell terrier had been trapped in a lift after traipsing down to the basement to do her laundry. Unbeknown to her, workmen in the street outside had accidentally cracked a water main, which started flooding the basement and cutting the power. Eventually the water started creeping into the lift, where she was frantically pressing the alarm button. As the water kept rising she kept screaming, until her husband, worried at her delay, went down to investigate and finally heard her. By now the water was up to her neck. In order to save her dog’s life, as the water rose, she had lifted him onto her head, where he had sat barking madly throughout their ordeal.
I pressed the button again.
‘Yeah?’
‘What’s going on?’
‘I told ya, I’m resetting the functions.’
‘But how long is it going to take?’
‘Another couple of minutes. I told ya, stop panicking, OK?’
Two minutes later the car duly jerked back into life and I ascended to my floor, where there was an exasperated voicemail from the foreign editor wanting to know where I was.
Thursday, 21 May
Peter
I have no inclination to read The Expectant Father, but am somehow drawn to it, almost titillated by the horror of what lies ahead. It warns me that Joanna may now exhibit violent mood swings as her hormones fizz with new life. My real worry is not the mood swings themselves, but her use of pregnancy as an all-purpose excuse for bad behaviour. She is already a skilful practitioner of premenstrual tension. By spicing it with the odd display of coquettishness and an occasional glancing apology, she can shroud bad behaviour for up to three weeks out of every four.
Now Joanna has nine months’ access to the one excuse that tops PMT. I am filled with apprehension that she will seize upon her condition to behave as disruptively as she pleases. And though I’m determined to be stoical and tolerant, I suspect that this restraint on my part will only provoke her further.
Swallowing my panic at the turn of events, I grab my kit and head for the gym. I will exercise my way out of this anxiety. The lift doors part to reveal a neighbour who is an actor and his dog, a grinning Labrador with a red polka-dotted bandanna round its neck. The dog thumps its tail on the floor and, unsolicited, puts its paw up to be shaken. His owner and I exchange small talk. ‘I’m up to my neck in Rosie’s taxes,’ he complains, patting the dog. ‘I calculate that she’s earned more appearing in commercials this tax year than I have. And there’s only so many vet’s bills and dog food that I can write off.’
At the Printing House gym, I gaze out over the West Village, while I pedal wildly, going nowhere on the stationary bike, and it occurs to me that I will have to earn more money if we are going to have a child. Hell, even our neighbour’s dog earns more than I do.
Friday, 22 May
Joanna
I am running late to meet Meredith, a friend and investigative magazine reporter, in the Royalton bar. Despite the fact that according to all the pregnancy books, I should now be walking briskly twenty-five minutes a day, I can’t face ten sweaty blocks of midtown crowds, so I hail a cab, which takes me twice as long.
‘Darling, you’re late,’ she cries triumphantly as I finally spot her in the gloom squatting on a purple velvet pouffe. She pushes a clear cone of martini at me complete with bobbing khaki olive. It looks exquisite, a fringe of icy condensation slipping down the outside. I can’t resist and take a small sip before declaring somewhat unconvincingly that I shouldn’t really because I’m off alcohol at the moment. I haven’t told her I’m pregnant.
‘You, off alcohol? Don’t be ridiculous,’ M
eredith 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.
