The Three of Us

by Joanna Coles

  Peter

  Dinner with Sheenah Hankin, an Irish therapist on the Upper East Side, is a strange affair. She and her husband, Richard Wessler, who is quarter Cherokee Indian and also a therapist, have rented the exterior of their brownstone, including the steps up to the front door, to a movie company, so it is bathed in bright lights and surrounded by a small crowd of curious onlookers who have come to observe Adam Sandler, the actor who played the lead in The Wedding Singer.

  It seems that every square foot of their cavernous brownstone on 93rd Street generates a return. The basement houses their psychiatric practice and the top two floors are rented out as B&Bs.

  Sheenah, Joanna and royal-watcher Richard Mineards have met on the rounds of TV chat shows – Geraldo, MSNBC, and Larry King Live – and are currently pitching to cable TV a daytime talk show of their own called The Britpak. So before dinner we pore over publicity photographs they have had taken the previous week. In the contact sheets Sheenah and Joanna wear tiaras and Richard sports a top hat and cane.

  Mineards, who speaks with an aristocratic drawl, and contributes gossip to William Hickey’s Diary in the Express, is an expert on the minutiae of minor royals around the world. He has filed a story today, a titbit he has scavenged somewhere, that Prince Andrew has come to Fergie for financial advice, a strange thing to do on the face of it, given her much-publicized three million dollar overdraft. Andrew apparently phoned her up to tell her that Princess Beatrice had lost a tooth and to enquire what the going rate was from the tooth fairy.

  The day before, Mineards says, clearly on a royal roll, he filed a story that Fergie had three sets of table manners for the girls:

  (a) best behaviour when eating with granny;

  (b) reasonably good, to be used when eating in public,

  and

  (c) ‘spaghetti up your noses’ when eating at home in Sunningdale.

  Halfway through the evening there is some excitement when Professor ‘Windy’ Dryden arrives fresh off the flight from London. He is the author, he tells us, of no fewer than 110 books on various aspects of therapy, including the classics, The Incredible Sulk and How to Overcome Procrastination.

  ‘How long did that take you to write, How to Overcome Procrastination?’ I ask.

  ‘Ooh, about six weeks.’

  ‘How long do your books normally take you?’

  ‘Normally? Mmm, about four.’

  On hearing that Joanna now works for The Times, he complains that the paper was responsible for his only appearance to date in that scurrilous tabloid, the Sunday Sport. He had given a quote over the phone to a Times reporter who was writing a story about rage control.

  To the question ‘How would you get a male patient to control his rage?’ Windy Dryden had replied, ‘I try to get him to imagine his testicles are in a guillotine and if he gives in to his rage the blades will close aroundthem.’ The following Sunday, he says, the Sport ran a piece headlined, ‘PROFESSOR’S RAGE CONTROL A LOAD OF BOLLOCKS.’

  Windy Dryden complains mildly that he is a compulsive obsessive and in order to prove this, he empties the contents of his bulky black nylon bum-bag onto the dinner table. As well as a dozen pens, it includes a chunky eraser in a sealed zip bag, and, in another ziploc bag, a plastic contraption called a Nozovent™. He proceeds to demonstrate how Nozovent™, a flexible, bone-shaped piece of plastic, helps him to breathe properly at night by sticking the two ends of the bone into his nostrils, causing them to flare alarmingly, and giving the benign Professor a rather fierce demeanour. With Nozovent™ in place up his nose, he exhales and inhales deeply to show his efficiently widened nasal passages.

  At this point the location manager of the filmset outside comes in with a query. He takes in the Professor, who is still wheezing through Nozovent™, and clearly thinks we are all barking eccentrics, trying to have a dinner party while several thousand megawatts of krieg lighting are pouring through the windows.

  Friday, 23 October

  Joanna

  This afternoon when I return from the Gourmet Garage with a fresh cache of Hershey’s chocolate milk and more graham crackers, Vadim, the melancholy Russian doorman, is sitting at the front desk in the grand but gloomy lobby. Normally he gives a weary, ‘Hello again,’ which, if he’s feeling chatty, will be followed by a mournful and equally weary observation about the chaos in his former Soviet homeland.

  ‘Hello again,’ he says, depressed, as I struggle in. ‘When is baby due?’

  ‘About January 22nd.’

  ‘Then it will be Aquarius,’ he says, taking my bag and walking me to the lift. ‘This is good sign. Not Pisces. Pisces people too sensitive, especially with women. Like me. I am Pisces.’ And he wanders back sadly to the front desk.

  Friday, 23 October

  Peter

  Inspired by Professor Windy Dryden’s Nozovent™, Joanna persuades me to purchase a set of athletes’ nose wideners that are supposed to increase nostril capacity, thereby improving oxygen intake and physical performance. As an unintended side effect, or so Windy Dryden claims, these nose wideners are of great help to snorers. Though I still strongly maintain that I am not in fact a real snorer, but merely an occasional one, I agree to try them. They are stiff white adhesive strips which you stick to the outside of your nose to open your nostrils.

  I apply one carefully before bed and examine the effect in the bathroom mirror. My nostrils widen substantially and I try to imagine I am a first-grade sprinter trying to squeeze that last 2 per cent out of my performance to shatter the 100-metre record. Joanna stifles a giggle as I make my entrance, and then affects indifference as she wishes to encourage me in this foolishness. In any event we both enjoy an apparently snore-free night and awake refreshed.

  Saturday, 24 October

  Joanna

  Today’s e-mail from BabyCenter.com seems particularly useful, as it attempts to answer a question we have been asking each other since May: can we really afford to have a child? Peter is doubtful and keeps making dire predictions that we will never go on holiday or eat out again. I am more optimistic, but the truth is that neither of us have any idea how much it is really going to cost to raise a child, especially if it is here in Manhattan.

  I read on:

  Just answer a few basic questions on your spending patterns:

  1 Before you start your baby on solids, do you plan to:

  – Breastfeed exclusively?

  – Breastfeed and supplement with formula?

  – Formula feed exclusively?

  2 What type of diapers do you intend to use?

  – Cloth without a diaper service?

  – Disposables?

  – Cloth with a diaper service?

  3 Over the course of your child’s first eighteen years, do you think you’ll most likely:

  – Cook your own food?

  – Buy mostly prepared food (and cook some of your own)?

  – Eat out a couple of times per week?

  4 What type of daytime care-giver do you plan to use until your child goes to preschool?

  – Parent/relative?

  – Day-care?

  – Nanny?

  5 When it comes to shopping for your child (clothes, toys, furniture, equipment, computer, etc.), do you tend to be:

  – Hand-me-down happy?

  – A bargain hunter?

  – A brand-name buyer?

  6 Where do you plan to send your child to elementary school?

  – Public?

  – Parochial (church-affiliated)?

  – Private?

  7 Where do you plan to send your child to junior high and high school?

  – Public?

  – Parochial (church-affiliated)?

  – Private?

  8 When it comes to spending on your own entertainment (weekend babysitters) and your child’s (extra-curricular enrichment activities), what kind of spender do you think you’ll tend to be?

  – Low (sitters once every two to three months, cost-free activities
)?

  – Medium (sitters once a month, city-sponsored activities)?

  – High (sitters once a week, private activities)?’

  I plump for a baby who will be breastfed, disposably diapered, with parents who eat out a couple of times a week, a part-time nanny, bargain kid’s supplies, a parochial school and a sitter at least once a week. Then I click on the calculator icon.

  ‘Your total expenditure will be approximately $250,548.’ This staggering sum is followed by the rider, ‘While this takes into account many out-of-pocket costs, such as summer camp and Saturday-night sitters, it doesn’t include braces, lost wages that result from taking time off to raise children, or an additional car for your child’s sweet sixteen.’

  ‘I’ve been doing some research and it costs a quarter of a million dollars to raise a baby in New York,’ I tell Peter as we tuck into sushi. ‘And that doesn’t include things like dental braces.’

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t have buck teeth then,’ he says absently, struggling with a piece of fatty tuna.

  Saturday, 24 October

  Peter

  My reluctant enthusiasm for the nasal expander evaporates this morning when I try to remove it from my nose. It would seem that the manufacturers had not intended it for extended wear, and it has become very firmly adhered to my skin. So much so that I cannot lift even a tiny corner of it to get a grip. Eventually, using Joanna’s eyebrow tweezers, I manage to achieve purchase and rip it off. It is excruciating. When I peer into the mirror through teared-up eyes, there is a nasty red raw patch etched across my nose in the shape of the nostril widener.

  ‘What’s with your nose, man?’ asks Jeff when we meet for lunch at Coffee Grounds on Little West 12th Street.

  ‘Joanna threw a shoe at me,’ I say and he shrugs.

  ‘Check this out for a surreal phenomenon,’ says the young waiter. A real fly has got caught in a gooey artificial web that forms part of their Hallowe’en decorations. He pokes at the web, trying to free the trapped insect. ‘Is that bizarre or what?’ he asks. ‘I mean like, think of the symbolism of it.’

  Sunday, 25 October

  Joanna

  If possible, Maya’s ‘Manhattan-style’ skirt is even shorter than the last time, it is pale blue with small red hearts and as she stoops to vacuum under the sofa with our Panasonic, which Margarita so vehemently scorned, I am presented with a flash of matching thong.

  As she works she chats incessantly. ‘In Croatia I trained as a pedicurist and then my father sent me to restaurant management school,’ she says, vigorously mopping the kitchen floor. ‘I am married but we do not have sexual relations,’ she adds baldly. ‘He was my childhood sweetheart, we married when we were both eighteen, then I caught him cheating on me, so pshhhtt – he was out!’ She pauses to tear off a huge wodge of Brawny kitchen roll. ‘Well, not totally because we still share the same house,’ she sighs. ‘We are separated, but I make him stay to help me with our children. I have two. My little kid is four. The other is fifteen and she is too fat, I keep telling her to lose weight, but all her friends are fat, you know? It wouldn’t happen like this in Croatia.’

  Maya and her errant husband came here from Croatia on a year’s visa nine years ago and stayed on. ‘So I’m illegal? Big deal. What do I need papers for? There’s no reason to leave ever. America has everything I want.’

  Sunday, 25 October

  Peter

  I am meeting Toby for lunch at Tea and Sympathy, a tiny café which Joanna tells me is favoured by the likes of British models Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Stella Tennant. It aspires to imitate a British transport café and serves tea in pots and boarding school food. Toby is late and the English waitress tells me in an Estuary accent, with Sloane peeping through, that I may not take a table until he arrives. Furthermore, due to the cramped conditions, she forbids me to wait inside.

  ‘That’s not a very sympathetic attitude,’ I remonstrate feebly, pointing at the restaurant’s name on the door. She indicates a handwritten notice over the counter, which reads, ‘Rules of the House: the waitresses are always right.’

  Toby finally turns up but without his trademark silver puffa jacket and Nikes with flashing heels. Instead he is clothed in Harris tweed and wire-rimmed glasses. ‘It’s part of my new strategy,’ he says in his naturally amplified voice as we squeeze around a tiny table, brushing elbows with fellow diners, ‘to exploit the Anglophilia currently rife in New York.’

  I toy with the idea of toad-in-the-hole or Welsh rarebit, but in the end plump for shepherd’s pie followed by a cuppa Tetley’s.

  ‘What happened to your nose?’ Toby asks. My nasal defacement is still evident two days after my experiment with nostril expanders. His expression suddenly brightens. ‘Did someone belt you?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing that dramatic. I caught it on the door of the bathroom cabinet.’

  Toby looks unconvinced.

  ‘Look over there,’ he says, clearly audible to all twenty covers. ‘It’s Rupert Everett. He looks pretty depressed. I’ll bet he’s still smarting over not getting an Oscar nomination for My Best Friend’s Wedding.’

  Indeed it is Rupert Everett, all of three feet away from us, sitting on his own, head bent down with a woollen bobble hat pulled low over his brow, looking rather miserable.

  Monday, 26 October

  Joanna

  In two weeks’ time I will be officially land-bound, no longer able to fly safely. So, anxious to exploit our last opportunity to travel, I trawl the classified ads in the New York Post and book us a last-minute bargain break in the Bahamas.

  I ask the agent to fax the details of where we are billeted. Eventually a groggy photocopied brochure struggles through the fax machine sufficiently smudged to make it unreadable. The only details I can make out about Elbow Cay, our destination, seem rather ominous. ‘Visitors to Elbow Cay will find it one of the quieter, more informal corners of the Bahamas.’ The photo of what I hope to be the palomino beach is so blotchy it appears to be strewn with seaweed or even jellyfish. I decide against showing it to Peter.

  ‘It sounds wonderful,’ I lie cheerfully. ‘We can spend all weekend reading on the white sands and have supper in a beach restaurant.’ But he remains convinced I have fallen prey to a telephone rip-off and predicts that construction of the hotel will not be completed.

  ‘Oh, who cares what it’s like as long as the weather’s good,’ I retort.

  Thursday, 29 October

  Peter

  Instead of the basking sun we have come here to enjoy, it is relentlessly wet on Elbow Cay. The hard, slanting rain pelts the bedraggled palms. It pimples the turquoise water and splashes against the sun-faded timber jetty. It bounces off the white veneered husks of the upended fibreglass boats, under which the mangy marina dogs have taken refuge. Only the mangrove delights, dancing to the deluge.

  The island is as still as a weekday cemetery. Our fellow holiday-makers remain indoors playing solitaire, reading thrillers or week-old copies of Time.

  On our final day the rain lessens a little and we boat over to the nearby Man o’ War Cay. It is an extraordinary little island of small, gaily coloured clapboard houses and a network of narrow concrete pathways, along which the locals, most of them as big as Sumo wrestlers, ride in their electric golf buggies. In the quaint graveyard, virtually all the headstones bear the name of Albery, for Man o’ War Cay is populated almost entirely by the descendants of this one family, originally from Carolina, who remained loyal to the British during the American Revolution, and were forced to flee when the Redcoats lost. For their loyalty to the crown they were promised fertile farm lands in the Bahamas, though the British knew the soil here is far too salty for crops.

  We stroll around until we chance upon what is now evidently the main industry, a tiny sailcloth factory in which half a dozen large Alberys feed brightly coloured canvas into their sewing machines, fashioning it into duffel bags and holdalls, floppy hats and sponge bags. Unusually, I find myself infected with the
urge to buy and I come away with an armful of these gaudy sailcloth items.

  Thursday, 29 October

  Joanna

  In the three days we have been here we seem to have eaten nothing but conch. Conch fritters, conch stew, deep-fried conch, marinaded conch, blackened conch, conch salad, conch burger and tonight, conch à la crème. We are all conched out and secretly relieved to be Manhattan bound.

  Friday, 30 October

  Peter

  In our absence a sketch of a witch, complete with pointy hat and warty chin, has appeared in the elevator, asking all residents willing to be trick or treated, to sign up. Fourteen people have already agreed and Joanna adds our names.

  ‘I notice Richard Dreyfuss hasn’t signed up,’ I say.

  ‘Shall I add his name anyway?’ asked Joanna, her pen hovering.

  Saturday, 31 October

  Joanna

  I’m rooting through our cardboard boxes frantically looking for a costume for a dinner party we are holding tonight.

  ‘The thirty-first? Excellent,’ said Mary, when I called to invite her and Bill. ‘What will you be wearing?’

  ‘Oh, the only black dress I can still squeeze into,’ I said, thinking her question rather formal.

  ‘You’re not wearing a costume?’ she exclaimed. ‘Oh, but you must, it’s Hallowe’en.’

  ‘You can if you like, but I’m not wearing a costume,’ said Peter, when I broach the subject later.

  ‘Well, I’ve committed us now and everyone else will be wearing one,’ I mumble. ‘And I know Mary is going to go to some trouble, she told me she’s going to make it herself.’

  Grudgingly, Peter has purchased a rather effective wolf mask, leaving me at a disadvantage. The door bell interrupts my costume hunt. It is a small band of trick-or-treaters, including several TeleTubbies.

  ‘Don’t you have any Snickers bars?’ asks Po, refusing the basket of candycorn I offer. His plastic pumpkin bucket is already half full of Milky Ways, Hershey bars and Kit-Kats.