The Three of Us

by Joanna Coles

  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.

  ‘Oh God,’ I apologize, as Nancy starts removing the cellophane wrapper to reveal a huge platter of sushi, beautifully arranged with ginger roses and zig-zagged green papers to separate the portions. ‘I should have told you, I’m pregnant, and raw fish is the one food
which is supposed to be taboo.’

  ‘Oh congratulations!’ shrieks Nancy. ‘Are you going to get married?’

  As she heads over to the kitchen area to make me an omelette, their three-year-old daughter, Danielle, emerges from her wicker-screened den and Larry is instructed to put her to bed.

  ‘Seriously,’ Nancy continues, ‘you are going to get married, right? I mean, if you don’t it’ll be tough on the kid at school.’

  ‘Actually, I don’t think we’re going to,’ I say. ‘But it’s a lot more common in Europe to have children without being married than it is here.’

  ‘Oh, but you must get married,’ shouts Barbara, another guest. ‘I mean you must, for the child’s sake. I’ve been married for thirty years and it just gets better!’ Curiously, her husband is absent.

  ‘Well, who knows?’ I murmur, anxious to avoid further lecturing.

  ‘Is Danielle in bed yet?’ asks Nancy as Larry reappears, offering more wine.

  ‘No,’ he says calmly. ‘She’s watching cartoons and masturbating.’

  Peter coughs on a prematurely smuggled sushi.

  ‘It’s a phase she’s going through,’ Larry explains jovially. ‘She does it all the time.’

  Saturday, 13 June

  Peter

  I log on to Amazon.com, the online bookseller, which has started carrying the sales rankings of the books they stock. This is fatal. You can now track the sales of your book on a daily basis – an agonizing process for us so-called ‘mid-list’ authors. Customers may also air their own reviews and bestow you with a star rating. Today my latest book, Mukiwa, a memoir of growing up in Africa, is the 20,181st best-selling book in American cyberspace.

  While online I collect an e-mail from Amazon.com. It is an advertorial plugging new books on the subject of writing. I must have signed up for this electronic junk e-mail sometime by failing to tick the box declining it. I am very taken with an account by the children’s writer, Maurice Sendak, best known for his fantastically fuzzy Wild Things, who says he’s ‘never spent less than two years on the text of one of his picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long’.

  Two years to do the words alone. All 380 of them. By my calculations he’s polishing off 190 words a year. That’s fifteen words a month. Say, a bon mot every couple of days, on average.

  Go, Maurice! That’s my man.

  Sunday, 14 June

  Joanna

  Having checked in with my sister first, who assures me our mother is ‘getting used to the idea’, I phone Yorkshire again, hoping that the excitement of a first grandchild will have dimmed her moral disquiet.

  ‘How are you? Oh, and the baby of course?’ she asks, in tones which clearly suggest she’s been got at by both my father and sister.

  ‘We’re fine,’ I say, giving Peter a thumbs up.

  ‘Well, I’ve stopped knitting blankets for Bosnian babies,’ she says, sounding almost cheerful. ‘Do you have any thoughts on what colours you’d like?’

  Wednesday, 17 June

  Peter

  Margarita has come to clean, and I am tapping at my keyboard, trying to stay out of the way of her vacuum’s mighty vortex, when a shadow crosses the light, and she approaches, clucking disapproval.

  ‘Mr Peter, Mr Peter, no thank you,’ she admonishes and, rather than feeling like her employer, I feel like a child who is about to be bawled out by a kindergarten teacher. In her pink dayglo glove she is clutching a pile of discarded mail, which she has retrieved from one of our waste bins. ‘This, Mr Peter, no good. Very bad. No thank you.’

  I look down at my desk, inexplicably ashamed of myself, though I am not sure what I have done wrong.

  ‘Do like this,’ she says, and begins to tear up the old press releases and credit card offers, and other detritus of the junk mail age, into smaller and smaller pieces. Then she deposits them in the bin bag with a flourish so that their individual shards scatter, making it impossible to reconstruct them. I am still uncertain of our sin, though I am beginning to suspect we have breached one of New York’s arcane recycling regulations.

  ‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why must we tear up all our old mail?’

  ‘Why?’ She looks at me as though I am truly to be pitied. ‘Because…’ she struggles to find the word in her slowly improving English vocabulary. ‘Because is dangerous.’ And with that she retrieves some of the intact mail and pretends to be surreptitiously reading it, as though she is a spy. ‘You see?’ she asks. ‘Is dangerous.’

  I try to explain that we couldn’t care less if strangers wish to peruse our old mail, but Margarita is unmoved and continues laboriously ripping up the letters. And in the end I cannot bear to witness this time-wasting exercise and I join her at the dining-room table tearing up inconsequential paper. Which is where we are found when Joanna returns from having her hair blow-dried.

  Thursday, 18 June

  Joanna

  I am only nine weeks pregnant and already my wardrobe doesn’t fit. This seems especially alarming because as I was flicking through Sheila Kitzinger’s Complete Book of Pregnancy this morning I noticed the entry for sixteen weeks: ‘Your waistline will be starting to disappear.’

  It has already disappeared, completely. I begin a listless hunt through my wardrobe only to find myself, incredibly, fantasizing about wearing a comfortable turquoise smock.

  Kelly has given me a book called Pregnancy Chic. Ostensibly a fashion guide, it is actually a vehicle to push leggings and spinnaker-shaped T-shirts manufactured by the authors. I can’t work out what’s worse, the jaunty illustrations of smiling women in caftans or the advice itself, which seems to concentrate largely on the many different things you can do with a scarf.

  ‘Medium square: looks great tied loosely around your neck or shoulders over a tunic or a sweater! Pocket square: tied neckerchief-style with a tunic or button-down shirt! Oblong: looks best with a solid tunic, sweater or cardigan!’

  I don’t want to wear a neckerchief-style scarf, I want to be able to fit back into my Joseph bootleg pants, of which I have four pairs, and the size 4 jeans I bought in the Boston Banana Republic after losing half a stone covering the Louise Woodward trial.

  I e-mail Jane in London, whom I cannot remember looking even vaguely pregnant during her ninth months carrying William. She sends back an encouraging missive, which she entitles, ‘Sick Male Notions of Female Attractiveness’. ‘Don’t worry about buying maternity wear, squeeze into your old stuff and wear long jackets. Clothes are the least of your worries. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you book a maternity nurse asap. All the best ones get booked fast and you won’t get through the nights without one.’

  Saturday, 20 June

  Peter

  216 days to B-Day.

  I flop down on our vast bed for an afternoon nap after another noisy night of meat deliveries. It is the biggest bed I have ever slept in, a Serta Perfect Sleeper with an orthopaedic California King Sized mattress, six foot six inches wide, topped with a soft quilted upper lining, to give you the best of both worlds: firm support for your back and an inch of surface softness to snuggle into. With such vast dimensions, the California King Size presents various serious engineering problems, so, for example, our box spring base is in two halves, with extra legs in the middle of the bed to keep it from sagging. Of course, none of our English linen fits.

  Our new bed feels especially luxurious given that for our first few days in New York we slept on a mustard-coloured sleeping Lilo that I had acquired at The Leading Edge in Whiteleys Mall on Queensway and shipped over with us on the QE2. The sleeping Lilo, according to The Leading Edge, which specializes in the latest gadgetry, was a breakthrough in somniac science, easy to store and transport, but with its own system of internal baffles, providing all the comfort of a real bed. Best of all, by simply altering the amount you inflated it, it could simulate a soft, fluffy mattress or deliver firmer support. In reality we found that every time one of us shifted weight the other was bobbed
up on a swell of air pressure – it was like trying to share a trampoline.

  The Leading Edge Lilo came complete with a foot pump and hose attachment. But it also came with a slow and unlocatable leak. Before we retired for the night, I would tread-pump the Lilo to full pressure. It would then slowly deflate until about two hours later, Joanna, a lighter sleeper than me, would awaken to the ungiving pressure of the parquet floor. She would elbow me and I would get up, attach the foot pump and groggily tread it for ten minutes until the Lilo had reinflated. I would repeat this performance every two hours, getting up to feed air to our bed.

  This is what I now imagine having a small baby will be like.

  The pleasure of our California King Sized Serta Perfect Sleeper is only ruined by the fact that every time I flop down upon its vast quilted acreage I am reminded that we paid too much for it at Bloomingdale’s. I am taunted by the saturation advertising on TV by ‘1-800-Sleepys’, and its rival, ‘1-800-Mattress, Leave Off the Final “S” for Savings’ in their apparently cut-throat war to be purveyors of the best mattress deals to New York’s fitful sleepers. Always an ex-post-facto comparison shopper, I have tortured myself by phoning both 1-800-Sleepys and 1-800-Mattress, to discover that the California King Sized Serta Perfect Sleeper, the exact same California King Sized Serta Perfect Sleeper, can be purchased from either of them over the phone, for $500 less than we paid at Bloomingdale’s. And of course, both hyperdrive salesmen assure me, ‘We deliver free! Guaranteed within two hours! Anywhere in the five boroughs!’

  Monday, 22 June

  Joanna

  I am on my way to see my new accountant, a solemn-sounding man called Bob Green. When I phoned to make an appointment he informed me he worked from home, so I set off for his apartment on the thirty-eighth floor of a modern tower block overlooking the East River. When I arrive he answers the door, an unsmiling, middle-aged, black-haired man with his left shoulder wedging a phone to his neck.

  His office is framed by huge, grey-tinted windows offering spectacular panoramic views stretching down past the solid towers of Brooklyn Bridge to the graceful columns of the World Trade Center. Directly below I can see a red helicopter taking off from the 34th Street heliport. It rises to the height of our window before swooping off across the East River towards La Guardia airport.