by Joanna Coles
‘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 o
f 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.
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:
