by Joanna Coles
‘We don’t want any tears in the fabric,’ warns Isaac, winding vast straps of masking tape round and round the mattress.
‘He seems very cautious,’ I whisper approvingly to Peter. By 2 p.m. we are done and hail a cab to the Upper West Side.
An hour later there is still no sign of Isaac and his gang.
‘They’ve probably stolen all our stuff,’ says Peter gloomily.
‘Of course they haven’t,’ I say, but I’m privately relieved to see the truck finally straining up West End Avenue. As Peter shows two of the men to the service elevator, Isaac pulls me to one side, fidgets quickly on a notepad and presents me with the bill. It is for $1,839.
‘You pay me now,’ he says. ‘Cash only.’
‘But that’s three times the original quote,’ I exclaim. ‘I’m not paying that.’
‘It’s the packing materials,’ he says rudely, shoving the figures at me. ‘You used twelve rolls of bubble wrap. And we’ve used sixty rolls of masking tape, twelve wardrobe boxes, forty book boxes, six hi-fi boxes … Then there’s the three hundred dollar service charge.’
‘But no one told me I had to pay for those separately,’ I start, suddenly realizing how naïve I’ve been. ‘And no one told me about a three hundred dollar service charge.’
‘Well, it’s compulsory,’ he shrugs, folding his arms across his sweaty grey Gap T-shirt. ‘Sixty bucks per worker. Then there’s the travel time because the traffic was so bad it took us three hours to get to you this morning. Then another hour to get here from the Village…’
‘But why did no one tell me about this? That’s why I got a quote from Ira.’
‘Ira, schmira,’ he says. ‘It’s not my fault.’
He kicks the side of the van, where our possessions are still hostage and I stomp off to the cashpoint to get more money.
When I return to the apartment, I wait for them to unload our belongings. Then I slip into the kitchen to phone Isaac’s boss. He claims to have no record of my original quote.
‘But Ira faxed it to me,’ I say, waving the fax at the phone.
‘Ira doesn’t work here any more.’
At this point I fall back on the phrase I have found most useful since living here. ‘Look,’ I say in what I hope is a calm but menacing voice, ‘I feel it’s only fair to tell you at this stage that I am a lawyer and your company has already violated several state regulations … In addition I have a quote on paper…’
‘OK, OK,’ he says quickly. ‘Fifteen hundred dollars.’
‘Twelve hundred,’ I counter. ‘That’s still twice the original estimate.’
‘OK, OK,’ he says again, wearily. ‘Put Isaac on the phone.’
The two of them then have a screaming argument about the service charge, which Isaac has clearly invented.
‘I wasn’t going to take it anyway,’ he shouts at me, flinging the receiver down. I hand over the $1,200 cash and he storms off, his four silent cohorts trailing sullenly behind.
‘Never mind,’ says Peter as I slip the deadbolt on the door. ‘At least it’s all over and we’re here now.’
It isn’t over. Ten minutes later the boss calls back to say he has decided to sack Isaac for imposing the bogus service charge.
‘Well, that’s your decision,’ I start, when Peter starts frantically mouthing, ‘No, no, don’t get him sacked, he knows where we live!’
And so I spend the next few minutes ludicrously trying to defend the surly crook who has just tried to rip us off.
Thursday, 8 October
Peter
I am walking up Broadway, north from 96th Street, returning with Joanna from a trip she has forced me to take to a local grocery she has been recommended, the Gourmet Garage. On the window it calls itself ‘a working-class deli’, but in fact it is full of yuppies buying mesclun leaves, unpasteurized manchego cheese, white truffle oil, and organic granola with dried strawberries.
The Sherpas of Broadway throng about us, hardy delivery men from Ecuador, Peru and south China who live frugally in rooming houses and remit most of their pay to families in their distant homelands. Short and wide and sturdy, like tough little pit ponies, they haul groceries and take-out food on their bikes, riding on the sidewalks, where they slalom through the pedestrians and careen the wrong way up the street, fearlessly dodging the heavy, erratic traffic. They chatter to each other in harsh mountain Spanish and in ejaculatory Cantonese diphthongs, unseen and unheard by the middle-class residents of West End Avenue and Riverside Drive. It reminds me of South Africa in the old days, where blacks were socially invisible to whites.
Friday, 9 October
Joanna
Brunching with Kelly, Jeff and several of their friends I recount our experience with Isaac. They are unsurprised. Our story, it turns out, is a standard tale of Manhattan moving, if not a rather lame offering. Meredith announces that last time she moved apartments her possessions were safely in the truck when the foreman demanded to know how much tip she was planning to give him.
‘I don’t know, it depends on how much gets broken,’ she joked, having set aside $40 for each of the three men.
‘Well, lady, how much gets broken depends on the tip,’ he leered, sticking his unshaven chin alongside her cheek. ‘I usually recommend a hundred dollars a man or it’s not worth our while. If anything gets broken, you can always claim on insurance. Do we understand each other?’ She ended up forking out $300.
We spend the rest of the day unpacking boxes, keeping an uneasy eye on the door should Isaac suddenly make a reappearance, wielding a crowbar or worse. Around 8 p.m., exhausted, we flop down and start channel surfing until we hit 20-20, America’s equivalent of Watchdog, presented by Diane Sawyer, famous for her low but alarmist tones.
‘In tonight’s show, 20-20 goes undercover to expose bogus moving companies who move your belongings right out of your sight and right out of your state!’
Several people describe their possessions vanishing for ever. ‘I realized the truck was moving off in the wrong direction for our new house but I never realized they were robbing us,’ sobs one woman. ‘I just thought they knew a quicker way to get there.’
‘The advice from the experts’, Sawyer concludes, ‘is never select a moving company from the back pages of a newspaper or magazine. Only go for established companies and always ask for personal recommendations. And now, the man who hired one of the country’s top paediatric surgeons to help his crippled pug dog walk again! We’ll be right back after these messages…’
Friday, 9 October
Peter
At a book-launch party today, where the VIPs all had to wear name tags, I notice a genial chap labelled Maurice Sendak. The name is familiar but irritatingly unplaceable. And then, on the way home, I remember that he is Maurice Sendak, the-slowest-writer-in-the-world, the one who snails along at 190 words a year. I have missed my opportunity to congratulate him on this feat.
Saturday, 10 October
Joanna
Unwilling to leave her flourishing launderette business, Margarita has refused to work for us in the Upper West Side, so I have been touting for cleaner recommendations from residents in our new block.
Today I am sitting wrestling with a column when there is a rap on the door and through the spyhole I see the telescoped face of a brightly henna’d woman staring at me.
‘Hello,’ she says in an Eastern European accent, when I open the door. ‘I am Sofia. I hear you look for cleaner. I am cleaner. Good cleaner. Mallory in 13D recommend me. I am Albanian. I clean for you?’ And reaching for my hand, she says, ‘You show me apartment, I tell you how much. Yes?’
Impressed by her efficiency – I only asked Mallory if she could recommend someone yesterday after bumping into her in the lift – I obediently give Sofia a quick tour, during which she whistles at the scuffed wooden floors. ‘Apartment, bad condition, very difficult to clean,’ she says finally. ‘I think five maybe six hours’ work. One hundred dollars.’
‘I’ll have
to think about it,’ I reply, baulking at paying $20 more than we paid Margarita and realizing that I should at least ask Mallory for a reference.
‘I am Albanian,’ she says again. ‘My family? I don’t know where they are.’ And to my horror she starts to cry. ‘I don’t know where they are,’ she shudders again. Unable to go back to my work, I make us both a cup of tea and try, without much success, to follow a complicated narrative which ends with Sofia’s arrival, alone, in New York.
‘Four years,’ she says holding up four bitten fingers. ‘I have been here four years. I wanna go back, but now not possible.’
I listen with a mixture of guilt and irritation at Sofia’s distress and my ignorance of the internal politics of Albania and Kosovo. I give what I hope are supportive but noncommittal sounds.
After about twenty-five minutes of this, she perks up. ‘Mondays is good for you, yes?’
‘Let me talk to my boyfriend,’ I say weakly. ‘Give me a number to call you.’
‘No number,’ she says, rising decisively from the table. ‘I come back tomorrow. OK?’
‘OK,’ I say, with a non-specific sinking feeling, realizing it will be more or less impossible not to hire her.
An hour later, in pursuit of a Starbucks’ decaff, I bump into Mallory again in the lift. ‘Thanks for sending Sofia round,’ I say. ‘Is she reliable?’
‘What? I didn’t send her round.’
‘Well, she just came to see me on your recommendation.’
‘But she’s terrible,’ Mallory exclaims. ‘Goddamn it, she must have seen a note I put on my desk about you. I’ve been trying to get rid of her – she’s lazy, she’s always late and she’s expensive. I hope she didn’t spin you all that Albanian bullshit. I can’t believe she told you I recommended her.’
‘Is it bullshit? She seemed terribly upset.’
‘Perleeze,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘She told you her family were missing? Yeah, right! They all live in Brooklyn. Listen, my uncle has a cleaner who he really likes, I’ll get her number for you. But don’t take Sofia.’ And she stalks crossly out of the lift and into the back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln town car, throbbing patiently at the kerb.
Saturday, 10 October
Peter
Joanna is complaining that I snore – an allegation which I hotly refute. She says that she wouldn’t mind if it were a regular, comforting snore which she would find almost sweet, but that I emit arbitrary snores of varying durations. She claims to be worrying that I may be choking in my sleep, or even that I stop breathing for unnaturally long periods. In order to clear up this matter, we agree to place my tape recorder beside the bed, set on its voice-activate function.
Sunday, 11 October
Joanna
Meredith phones and offers to give us a housewarming.
‘I can’t face it,’ I say, ‘we’ve still got tons of boxes to unpack and we haven’t got enough furniture.’
‘What’s to face?’ she laughs. ‘Think of the gifts. Everyone brings gifts to a housewarming.’
‘But we don’t really need anything except big stuff, like another bed,’ I say, adding ungratefully, ‘and I don’t want loads of knickknacks.’
‘No, no, you need a theme for gifts,’ she says, ignoring me. ‘What about bar tools?’
I cringe. ‘Meredith, we don’t even have a bar!’
‘Oh, everyone needs bar tools, darling,’ she scolds. ‘Ice tongs? … How about a crystal bowl with special ridges to hold lemon slices? Tell me, do you actually have one?’
‘No, of course not.’
‘For drinks parties I find mine indispensable. I know,’ she cries. ‘Marquetry!’
‘Marquetry?’
‘Yes,’ she laughs expansively. ‘Picture frames, mirrors, inlaid wooden trays. Darling, it’s perfect. Everyone loves marquetry.’
Sunday, 11 October
Peter
Over breakfast I rewind the tape and play it back. The sound is a long continuous roar, like a large antelope in pain. Joanna laughs so hard she almost falls off the kitchen stool. But I point out that the continuous roar is a distortion caused by the tape switching on for a snore and off again as soon as silence reigns. ‘It discriminates,’ I complain. ‘It doesn’t give me credit for the silences – there could be hours in between these individual snores when I was breathing quietly.’
Later I look up snoring in my Merck Manual of Medical Information, only to discover an appalling complication: sleep apnoea. ‘Because symptoms occur during sleep,’ explains the Merck Manual, ‘they must be described by someone who observes the person sleeping. The most common symptom is snoring, associated with episodes of gasping, choking, pauses in breathing … In severe cases, people have repeated bouts of sleep-related obstructive choking…’ Other side-effects of sleep apnoea are ‘Headaches, excessive daytime sleepiness, slowed mental activity’, all of which I suffer from. Eventually, warns the Merck, sleep apnoea can result in heart failure. The treatment ranges from trying to sleep on your side to wearing an oxygen mask in bed and, finally, a tracheotomy, where surgeons drill through your neck to gouge a permanent hole in your windpipe.
As I cannot trust Joanna to give an accurate report of my sleeping habits, I am thinking about booking into a sleep lab for overnight polysomnography, where they will attach electrodes to my head and measure the ‘physiological parameters’ of my slumber. Will my insurance cover this? I wonder, as I fall asleep.
Monday, 12 October
Joanna
Unable to face Sofia, I retreat to my study and tell Peter I won’t answer the door.
‘You have to deal with her,’ he says. ‘Otherwise she’ll just keep coming back.’
At 5 p.m. Sofia pops in to finalize the deal. I flee to the kitchen on a pretext and leave Peter to talk to her. Soon I hear them apparently deep in conversation and hesitantly return.
‘I met Zog once,’ Peter is saying pleasantly, ‘when he was in exile in Johannesburg.’
‘Who?’ Sofia asks.
‘Zog. King Zog?’
She shrugs.
‘The pretender to the Albanian throne?’
Sofia is looking uneasy now.
‘Enver Hoxha, was he as bad as we all thought in the West?’
‘Hmmm,’ says Sofia, noncommittally. She glances at her watch. ‘Oh God, I’m late for next job. I call back tomorrow,’ and she rushes for the door.
We never hear from her again.
Tuesday, 13 October
Peter
One of the cures for sleep apnoea is to lose weight, so I have returned to my jogging regimen with renewed ferocity. I run beneath an arched avenue of lushly foliaged oak trees along Riverside Park, a thin green finger that stretches sixty blocks along the Hudson. To the east is Riverside Drive, lined on one side with grand apartment buildings and French Beaux Arts townhouses – it was Manhattan’s poshest residential Zip code at the turn of the century. To the west, across the Hudson, is the shore of New Jersey. My northern view is framed by the gigantic iron span of the George Washington Bridge. Beyond the bridge, on the Jersey side, it is green and rustic, amazing that it is but an oar’s dip from this teeming island of Manhattan.
Though it is a beautiful boulevard designed by Frederick Olmsted, the man who landscaped Central Park, Riverside Park remains a largely tourist-free zone, the crowds favouring his more famous project.
As I jog up Riverside Drive, I pass an extraordinarily cosmopolitan selection of monuments: Joan of Arc sitting astride a charger; a large limestone frieze commemorating the New York Fire Horses; a bulky medieval Japanese figure lurking under the portico of the Buddhist temple at 105th Street – Shinran Shonin, founder of the Jodo-Shinshu sect. The statue is a survivor of the Hiroshima atom bomb, and was shipped to America in 1955 to promote world peace.
At 106th Street the brooding figure of a goatee’d Franz Sigel gazes across the river as he kicks his spurs into the greened bronze flank of his steed. I have no idea who Franz Sigel is and his plaque
bears nothing but his name. Samuel Tilden, Governor of New York and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1876, stands at 107th Street.
A statue of Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian patriot, has been erected at 113th Street ‘by a liberty loving race of Americans of Magyar origin’. And two streets on, at the summit of Claremont Hill – where the Battle of Harlem Heights once raged during the Revolutionary War – the tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant, a vast, white, colonnaded mausoleum, stands guard at the corner of the campus of Columbia University, itself built on the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The august grandeur of General Grant’s sepulchre is undermined somewhat by encircling Gaudíesque benches, whose bright mosaics, depicting mermaids and sharks, camels and whales, taxi cabs and Donald Duck, were added by a Chilean artist and his 1200 local volunteers in the early 1970s.
As I turn for home, my T-shirt sticking wetly to my back now and my calves burning, I notice a small carved urn inside an enclosure on the edge of the park. It turns out to be the Monument to the Amiable Child, placed here in memory of a five-year-old boy who fell to his death from these cliffs two hundred years ago. On the urn’s pedestal, its letters smoothed now by a blotchy carpet of lichen, is a reminder of our mortality from Job 14:1-2, ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.’
Upon my breathless return, I look up Franz Sigel in the Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia. But the entries jump straight from ‘Sièyes, Emmanuel-Joseph, Comte de French political theorist and clergyman born 1748 … whose pamphlet Qu’est-ce que le Tiers-état stimulated great bourgeois awareness,’ to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, born 1368, who rebounded after a defeat by the Ottoman Turks to conquer Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia – a task that looks particularly impressive today.
