by Joanna Coles
When we reach our destination, and I have alighted, I glance back to see him leaning out of the open driver’s door, holding the carton low and emptying the last dribbles of piss onto the steaming tar.
Wednesday, 12 August
Joanna
I phone Dana again for advice on doctors. ‘I just don’t think I’d trust Dr Sharon in a crisis,’ I say, wondering if, perhaps, I have a problem with female doctors. ‘If she told me to push and it didn’t feel right then I wouldn’t.’
‘Then you must change and hang the expense,’ cries Dana, with all the financial confidence of someone whose husband has recently pulled off a significant movie deal on his latest novel.
‘If I was in your position, I would shop around,’ she advises. ‘You have to remember that obstetricians are not plastic surgeons; this is not the glamorous end of the medical market. The thing to look out for when you’re interviewing them is the address. It’s got to be the Upper East Side.’ And she gives a quick laugh. ‘That strip between Madison and Fifth on East 85th Street is extremely exclusive, it’s near the Metropolitan. I’d try for anyone up there.’
I call our insurers, asking them to send me their latest directory, and make a note to cross out all those with addresses below East 70th.
Thursday, 13 August
Peter
I’m at Marylou’s, a late-night bar on West 9th Street, with Toby, a pugnacious English writer, who has taken me out to celebrate the amnio ‘all clear’. ‘God has green-lighted your project,’ he tells me.
We are both drunk on Martinis, the quickest way to get plastered known to man, and Toby is deep in a pidgin English conversation with a rather glamorous oriental woman. I am left twiddling with the olive in my drink when I am startled by a low moan to my left. It has been emitted by a raw-boned woman in a patchwork leather jacket and a face that serves as a cosmetics palette.
‘Ohhhh,’ she repeats, apparently in pain.
‘What is it?’ I ask, alarmed. It is my secret fear that one day I will be called upon to do the Heimlich manoeuvre, something which I have never mastered despite the fact that, by law, every restaurant and bar in the United States has a large poster with step-by-step instructions. Rather like the laminated emergency procedure cards in the seat pockets of aircraft, I have never bothered to read it.
‘I ham sooo unhappy,’ she complains, in a heavy Russian accent. I lean back on my bar stool to size her up. Her hair is a coarse candy floss of flax gooed together in a stiff blonde halo.
‘Why are you unhappy?’ I ask. It seems ungentlemanly not to enquire.
She looks me in the eye. ‘Sooo many things,’ she says significantly.
‘Oh?’
‘Many complicated things.’
‘Really?’ I say, but she refuses to be drawn further.
I try another tack. ‘What would make you happy, then?’
‘Money,’ she says immediately. ‘Money will make me happy.’
Her occupation penetrates my Martini’ed stupor.
‘You know, it might work better for you if your approach was more subtle?’ I suggest benignly.
‘Subtle?’ she repeats suspiciously. She is unclear that I have taken it upon myself to advise her about the defects of her pitch.
‘Yes, subtle. Customers – clients,’ I say, quickly correcting myself, ‘clients might like the pretence of romance, the illusion of love. Otherwise it’s all a bit depressing, just a commercial transaction – soulless.’
Her eyes brighten with comprehension.
‘You think I ham hooker?’ she screeches, scandalized. ‘I’m no whore!’
And with that she turns to the man on her right and begins to proposition him.
‘I ham sooo unhappy,’ I hear her say before I relinquish my bar stool to go to the lavatory.
The men’s room is a one-at-a-time affair, useful in ensuring privacy for substance abuse. A long queue has formed outside it, curling back into the dining room. I wait in a drunken blur as the pressure in my bladder grows more urgent. The line shuffles forward very slowly, but at last I am next to go when a man appears at my side. He is wearing a white linen suit, spats, a string tie and a pencil-line moustache, a parody of a 1930s pimp.
‘I need to go so ver badly,’ he insists pleasantly with an Hispanic lisp. ‘You let me in first. OK?’ He is clearly drunk, even drunker than I am.
‘Hell, we’re all desperate here,’ I counter. ‘Go to the back of the line.’
His bonhomie evaporates at this and he fronts up to me. ‘Ya let me in first, OK.’ It is no longer a question. I try to size him up as an opponent. He looks like the kind of guy who might pack a flick knife. But I’m bursting to pee, and this need overwhelms my natural caution and my preference for conflict avoidance.
‘No fucking way,’ I say.
He approaches, getting so close I can see two fertile shrubs of dark hair sprouting from his nostrils.
His voice rises an octave in exasperation. ‘Man…’ he says, trailing off, and I can’t work out if he’s threatening or pleading. His ringed fingers grasp unsteadily at the lapels of my leather jacket. It is a new jacket, three-quarter-length deerskin, purchased only this morning after weeks of agonizing and comparison shopping, and I don’t want it grubbied up by this incontinent pimp.
‘Leggo,’ I complain and I push him back. It is not intended to be a serious shove, just a ‘get out of my space’ sort of a shove, but he staggers backward, unable to regain his equilibrium, tottering further and further away from me, until his backside lands on a big round table. It is populated by heavy-set swarthy men with gelled hair and thick wrists, around which glitter broad gold-link chains. The men are interspersed with brittle, bottle-blonde women. The pimp sits heavily on the table, some central bolt gives out with a groan and the whole thing collapses in a crash of crockery, enfolding him in a messy mummy of linen. All is screams and hoarse shouts as the enraged diners spring out of the way of splashing wine and water and saucers of olive oil.
Just then the loo door springs open and I rush inside, seeking sanctuary. I take a long, satisfying pee and then sit for another ten minutes on the toilet lid waiting for the commotion to die down. Then I quietly unlock the door and, after a precautionary peep, I rush through the dining room. From the corner of my eye I see that a generalized fight seems to have broken out, but I dart right past it and burst out into the muggy street, where the Russian hooker accosts me again.
‘I am so unhappy,’ she croons, beginning her pitch from the top. She has clearly forgotten that she’s already targeted me once tonight. I brush her off and set course for home, walking fast, head down.
Friday, 14 August
Joanna
Kelly phones from the Hamptons to report interesting new developments. Sean Puffy Combs’s interior decorator has stormed off after irreconcilable aesthetic differences. She could tolerate the rap star’s ubiquitous gold and green colour scheme, but drew the line at Puff Daddy’s obsession with his monogram. He insisted she emblazon it in gold letters not only at the bottom of his heated swimming pool, but also on the bottom of his five baths, on the rim of his jacuzzi and on every towel in the $2.5 million house, including those reserved solely for beach use. Apparently, the final straw came when he told her to have it inscribed on every single kitchen dishcloth too.
‘Do you think his mongram is just SC?’ wonders Peter. ‘Or SPC? Or even SPDC?’
Friday, 14 August
Peter
According to Radio 10-10 WINS, it is touching 100 degrees in downtown Manhattan, with humidity in the high 90s. As it is Dani and Michael’s turn in our shared Hamptons’ cottage, we are roasting in the city. I stroll down by the Hudson River, hoping vainly for a sea breeze and shady bench on which to sit and read my book and recover from my pounding hangover. Maybe even see a bird. So far I have not spotted a single bird in New York that is not a pigeon or a seagull. I consult the tiny map in my Manhattan diary and head for Battery Park, which, it transpires, is being dug
up. A large sign informs me that the park is built on a giant pier and that the wooden supports for the pier are being snacked on by small fish called snail darters. The irony is that the snail darter had become almost extinct in the Hudson River and has only reappeared thanks to the efforts of local conservation groups in cleaning up the water. And to show its thanks the snail darter immediately set about devouring the park that is the centrepiece of conservation efforts.
I find a corner of the park that is not yet a building site and flop down on a bench, besieged by the judder of jackhammers and roar of cement mixers and compressors. Above me are the glass towers and atriums of Battery Park City and in front a flotilla of luxury yachts bob gently in the marina, their rigging tinkling like wind chimes on a Thai veranda. The biggest yacht is a sleek royal-blue sloop. Lashed to its helipad sits a small helicopter with a plastic bubble cockpit and rotors folded back like a dragonfly at rest. The yacht is owned by the business magazine, Forbes. Its name, scrolled proudly on its prow, is Capitalist Tool.
I sense rather than see someone joining me on the bench and I look up from my book. It is a human cigar – or at least a man in a velveteen cigar costume. He is impersonating a Partagas cigar, according to the strip around his barrel. His brown-clad arms reach up and slowly twist his head, representing the burning ash at the tip of the cigar. He wrestles mutely to detach it and I consider offering to help. Then it comes off with a plop, to reveal a sodden, red-faced Hispanic man with tousled damp black hair.
From a small brown furry rucksack, the cigar man retrieves his lunch – a pastrami sandwich and a can of soda. He scoffs down the sandwich, glugs the soda and belches loudly. Then he replaces his head, and flips a flyer at me from his bundle. I thank him gravely and he bows his ash in acknowledgement. Then he pushes himself up off the bench and moves away very slowly, taking tiny, mincing steps as his legs are restricted within the barrel of the cigar suit. Over and over again, as he disappears from sight, he offers flyers to pedestrians and rollerbladers, but they ignore him.
Saturday, 15 August
Joanna
I have developed a heightened sense of alertness where baby stories are concerned and am haunted by a terrible tale from Illinois that Kelly claims to have seen in the papers recently. It’s so chilling that at first I dismissed it as an urban myth. But Kelly is adamant, so I do an on-line search of the Chicago Tribune and sure enough it is true.
Two years ago a couple shot dead a friend of theirs, an eight-month-pregnant woman and, performing their own C-section, sliced open her belly and cut out her foetus. When the police raided their house, they found the baby fast asleep under a clean blue blanket, in perfect health. The couple, who were black, confessed and were both jailed for life. It seems they had always wanted a pale-skinned child of their own.
Monday, 17 August
Peter
It is late morning and I have finally roused myself from an unproductive torpor to go to midtown and meet Tom, a lugubrious friend from Newsweek, for an expense account lunch at Osteria del Doge on 44th Street. So I’m sitting on the 1 train, in a busy carriage examining the adverts overhead. It seems that no bodily problem is too intimate to be canvassed among complete strangers. ‘Call 1-800-Nasal Polyp’ entreats the ad directly in front of me. Next to it, I am advised to ring ‘1-800-Anal Wart’. A woman sitting across from me follows my eye line to ‘1-800-Anal Wart’ and I quickly look away, fearing she might think I am in need of this service.
A man bursts through the interconnecting doors from the next car. He is about forty, shabbily but not trampishly dressed.
‘Good morning, everybody!’ he announces in a surprisingly strong, mellifluous voice. ‘My name is Steven, I’m HIV Positive, and I’m certified legally blind.’ He doesn’t have sunglasses on and I look at his eyes trying to work out if he really is blind. He looks right at me, and I find myself waving my hand quickly from side to side to see if he notices. His supposedly sightless gaze follows my hand for a moment before resuming its studied vacancy.
‘I’m homeless as well,’ he continues. ‘I’m also hungry and I’m trying to raise three dollars to go to McDonald’s. Can anyone spare any small change?’ He passes slowly up and down the carriage, but no one can. For Steven, it seems to me, has made a fundamental tactical error in his guilt trip. He has taken on blindness, so he cannot look at us or shame us; he does not ‘legally’ see us at all, so we may ignore him with impunity. We do not have to stare down at the floor to avoid his accusing gaze, we do not even have to mumble a rejection as he looks beseechingly at each one of us in turn.
Bad gig, Steven.
Monday, 17 August
Joanna
Peter has been trying to shame me into using the subway more often. So today I take the 9 train into midtown. I’m sitting in a fairly empty carriage when a grizzled man sitting opposite in sandals, shorts and an Aloha shirt produces a pair of nail clippers and begins to clip his toenails. Several other passengers look aghast, but no one speaks up.
Then an errant nail clipping shoots up in a parabola and lands on the pages of a newspaper being read by a woman in a smart business suit.
‘Oh, gross! That’s disgusting!’ she shrieks. ‘You pervert. You should do that at home, not here.’
‘What’s yer problem, lady? I’m not hurtin’ anyone.’ He looks around for support. ‘She uptight or what?’
Nobody replies and he bends down to clip his other foot. The woman leaves the train at the next stop and I slip quietly down the carriage, out of range of any further flying shards.
I take a cab home.
Tuesday, 18 August
Peter
I have developed some odd white blotches on my chest, which I think might be some sort of heat rash from too much time on the beach. I describe my symptoms over the phone to my mother in Africa, and she recommends something called Miconazole nitrate cream, an all-purpose anti-fungal cream which, she assures me, will cure it. Miconazole, she promises, is available over the counter without need of prescription. On my way back from the gym I drop into RiteAid and, overwhelmed by row upon row of medicines, I seek out the pharmacist for directions. Various customers are lounging around waiting for their prescriptions to be filled when I arrive at the counter. I check the scrap of paper on which I have printed the drug’s name.
‘Where can I find Miconazole cream, please?’ I enquire.
‘Miconazole?’ she booms in a voice that carries across the vast hangar of a store and out on to Seventh Avenue. ‘For vaginal discharge?’ The desultory customers perk up.
‘Uh, well, no, I think it’s for general fungal infections,’ I say.
‘Well, our Miconazole is over there in aisle two and it’s for vaginal infections.’ She stresses the word ‘vaginal’ unnecessarily and I flee down aisle two. Sure enough, the packet warns, in red capital letters, that Miconazole is ‘FOR VAGINAL USE ONLY’. There is no room for ambiguity here. I conclude that at seventy-three my mother has finally lost her medical marbles.
Tuesday, 18 August
Joanna
I need another new bra. I am outgrowing them at a rate of one every three weeks. And my nipples have grown enormous. Men stare at them on the street. As Yorkshire folk would say, they stick out like chapel hat pegs.
Wednesday, 19 August
Peter
I phone my mother to query her prescription, and also to wish her a happy seventy-third birthday. And I recount to her my mortifying Miconazole hunt.
‘Well,’ she says indignantly, ‘any pharmacist should know that there are different preparations. If a man asks for Miconazole, they should assume it’s the general purpose cream, or at least they should enquire.’
I tease her that I’d concluded she was medically confused.
‘I’m not past it,’ she retorts. ‘Let me tell you how I spent my seventy-third birthday: I was in at work by six forty-five a.m. By twelve noon I’d seen thirty-five patients. I then went to the dentist and had root canal work. Then I went over to
ward twelve, the mental ward, and certified four patients in need of psychiatric admission. I’d like to see you doing that when you’re seventy-three.’
Hell, I’m still four years off forty-three and I couldn’t do that.
Thursday, 20 August
Joanna
‘You know we are going to have to move?’ I murmur over our decaff cappuccinos and ‘apple crumble muffins’, which I was persuaded to try for a change when I phoned in our regular order of bagels and scallion cream cheese to Barocco.
‘They’ve no fat, no sugar and they’re fifty cents off!’ enticed Rosita, who takes the phone orders.
‘This is disgusting,’ says Peter, pushing his muffin away. ‘What is it again?’
‘I told you, it’s apple crumble, it’s good for you. It’s got apple but no sugar and no fat.’
‘No sugar, no fat and no taste.’
‘It’s such a shame,’ I say, looking round at our hopelessly impractical forty-foot-long sitting room with its view onto the Hudson. ‘But this is so not an apartment for babies.’ Today, tidy after a whirlwind visit by Margarita, it looks like something out of Architectural Digest with its gleaming wooden floors lethally polished to skating standards, and stylish Roman columns installed as an ironic feature by Stephen and Christopher, the gay couple who rented the place before us.
‘I suppose we could get some wicker screens like Nancy and Larry and partition off a nursery space.’
‘I’m not going to be able to work with a baby bawling away behind a wicker screen,’ says Peter, trying a conciliatory nibble at his muffin. ‘Mind you, I can’t work anyway…’
‘I think we’re talking about a boring apartment with proper rooms,’ I say sadly, my vision of us living on a Woody Allen filmset finally slipping away.
