The Three of Us Read online

  Monday, 3 August

  Peter

  As the wait for the amnio results continues, we are becoming more irritable. We are both finding it difficult to sleep now. And the tiredness is accumulating. After watching a Seinfeld repeat, we crawl to bed at midnight fairly weeping with exhaustion, only to lie awake under the gently slapping ceiling fan. In the far distance the horn of the train sounds mournfully, the Long Island Railroad on its way out to Montauk. It sounds romantic, I imagine, like some sad clarion call for an unremembered age, an age before we lost the equilibrium of our existence.

  Finally I fall gratefully into a deep, dreamless sleep. Then, as if there has been no perceptible passage of time, I am sitting upright in our cramped double bed – awake. It cannot be morning yet? It isn’t, it is still quite dark and we are being bombarded by the big band sounds of wartime favourites. It is insomniac Eunice, the retired estate agent next door, whose entertainment centre is thoughtfully located against our thin, common dry wall. Our bedroom buzzes with the chorus of the ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B’. I check the time on my new luminous Seiko watch. It is 3.30 a.m.

  ‘This is outrageous,’ I say in my best censorious head-masterly voice. ‘Unacceptable,’ I add for emphasis.

  ‘Well, do something about it!’ says Joanna crossly, pulling her pillow over her head.

  ‘I will,’ I say defensively. I take up a kneeling position on the bed adjacent to the common wall and after a couple of practice, phantom knocks, I rap urgently on the wall.

  ‘There,’ I mutter. ‘That ought to do it.’

  We wait for a response. Is it my imagination, or does the big band sound grow perceptibly bigger? I rap again, but nothing happens.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ says Joanna, emerging from beneath her pillow with all the menace of a scorpion appearing from under a rock, ‘do it properly.’ She reaches down to her bedside and retrieves a bulky Birkenstock, which she smashes furiously against the wall half a dozen times. The most immediate effect of this, admittedly, unequivocal communication of disapproval, is the thud of Flowers on Provençal windowledge by Polly Carter, 1981 upon the sea-grass. The picture bounces and hits the bedstead, smashing its glass into the intricately woven crannies of the matting. Then the big band sound mutes.

  In our aural war with Eunice, it is but a small victory. At 6 a.m. I am lying awake listening first to an advert for Saturn cars and then to the NBC early morning news. In the background of the anchorman’s pumping newsdrive, I’m pretty sure I can hear Eunice’s contented bourbon-fuelled snores. In the weak dawn light I notice what look like black tyre tracks upon the wall. They are Birkenstock treads. I get up to go to the loo and stand on glass shards from Flowers on a Provençal Windowledge.

  Tuesday, 4 August

  Joanna

  Still no news, though I am feeling less anxious as various friends have been phoning to reassure us that this is just the way the American medical system works. It worries you unnecessarily, then gives you all sorts of tests you don’t need.

  At 5 p.m. I phone the genetics department. Contrary to my assumption, the receptionist tells me that it actually takes six to eight working days, so today is the earliest we could have heard anyway. I hear her flicking through papers. ‘No, we don’t have nothin’ for you yet.’

  Unable to concentrate on work, I reach for my Filofax to make some distraction calls. It falls open on ‘S’ so I try Andrew Solomon, but he is away again. He may be reached, says his message, at numbers in Charlottesville, San Francisco, Davis, LA, Taipei, Kyoto, Beijing, Ulan Bator and Moscow. ‘Until August 13th,’ his recording continues, ‘I will be, variously, in the Gobi desert, on the steppe, and sailing up Lake Khövsgöl Nuur with the Mongolian navy. In an emergency it may be possible to reach me via my translator’s mother at (976–1) 454.379 or (976–1) 325.723 – but don’t count on it.’

  Tuesday, 4 August

  Peter

  To take my mind off the wait I accept an invitation to play tennis at the renowned Meadow Club on First Neck Lane in Southampton, one road back from the sea. Across the street is Woody Allen’s beach-front mansion. The Meadow Club has more grass courts than Wimbledon. It is a vast quadrangle of pristine playing lawn, some forty-five courts in all. Today four courts are in use. On the training courts a Serb instructor is trying to teach an elderly American woman to serve. It is not going well.

  ‘All the coaches are Serbs at the moment,’ observes my partner, Henry, the investment banker. We knock up for a while and then he suggests we play for real.

  After bouncing the ball expertly up and down on the grass a couple of times, showing admirable hand-eye co-ordination, I toss it high into the famous, ethereal Hamptons’ light for my first serve. I am young. I am fit. I have not bothered to warm up. As my raquet head whips down to slap the monogrammed ball in for a certain ace, I feel a rip across the muscles of my back. I am too embarrassed to own up to my pulled muscle and soldier on through two desultory sets, going down 6–2, 6–1. My opponent is exultant.

  Later I drive slowly down the five miles of Meadow Lane, a narrow spit of land bounded on one side by continuous beach pounded by Atlantic breakers, and on the other by what they call in these parts, a ‘pond’, a sheltered lagoon.

  As I drive I gawp at the single row of houses, some of the most expensive real estate in North America. Seldom has so much money been spent with so little taste. It is a gruesome accumulation of architectural follies on a grand scale – the full extent of the kitsch and the eclectic and the bastardized, tee’d up on the dunes for the merciless dissection of passers-by. Spanish villa style abuts French château and the avant-garde. One house is a dead ringer for a stealth bomber, its dark matte shingle eaves soaring and then swooping down to the sand as though trying to evade enemy radar. Dragon’s Head is the first among equals, bustling to the front for the sheer enormity of its misconception. It is famous in these parts because it was retrospectively denied planning permission. A dizzy of turrets tops acres of smoked plate glass, busy little porticoes and walls of grey granite blocks, built with all the finesse of the jailhouse. It is a cautionary example of what happens when you allow the client to wag the architect.

  Thursday, 6 August

  Joanna

  Five p.m., still no news. If we haven’t heard by this time tomorrow, I will phone again. In fact, I will just check the Manhattan number in case there is a message.

  There is: ‘Hi, Joanna and Peter, this is Jeannette from Beth Israel. I’m calling with good news, your test results were negative. Congratulations. I repeat the test results are negative. Call me if you want any more information. This is Jeannette at Beth Israel.’

  Thank God. I play the message back to Peter, who makes a whooping noise and gives me a high five.

  So now we have jumped the hurdle of amniocentesis we face, in Elena’s words, ‘the same risks as the general population’.

  We go to the nearest toy shop, Victoria’s Mother on Main Street, and have a row about whether to buy a small velvet dog or a fluffy bear in a stars and stripes jersey.

  Thursday, 6 August

  Peter

  We go out to celebrate our amnio results at Babette’s, an East Hampton restaurant that greatly excites Joanna for its frequent sightings of Steven Spielberg. He is reputed to order nothing but scrambled tofu. We order from a menu that is so pretentious it is completely incomprehensible. It turns out to be an unimpressively mushy dinner, whose constituent parts seem embarrassed to share a plate, and detract from the taste and texture of one another. I gain a new appreciation of Spielberg’s tofu habit.

  The couple at the next-door table have a baby capuchin monkey, which the entire kitchen staff parades up to admire.

  ‘He is called Benjamin,’ explains his owner, a thin-faced, dark-haired Colombian. ‘We call him Benjie.’

  Benjie is clinging to a frayed teddy bear. The staff coo and Benjie surveys them with a hostile glance. According to his mommy he is, apparently, taking a break at the Ham
ptons from his usual habitat, a SoHo loft. He eats angel-hair pasta and smoked tempeh and Portobello mushrooms from a saucer, palming it all into his little muzzle with tiny black fingers.

  Benjie is secured by means of a collar of ribbon attached to a thin red velvet cord, a tiny-calibre version of the velvet rope used to cordon off VIP areas at night clubs. But there is considerable slack in the cord and I notice he is regarding my turkey bacon with close interest. He flares his nostrils at it. I feel sure that Benjie has had enough of tempeh and angel-hair pasta and diced Portobello mushrooms, enough of being a vegetarian. Benjie wants my meat. We lock eyes across the table and he regards me with frank hostility as one primate competing with another for scarce resources. I bare my teeth at him, surreptitiously, so the Colombian won’t see. I have read somewhere that this is how alpha male primates see off competitors, by unsheathing their canines. To my disconcertion, Benjie bares his teeth back at me.

  ‘Ah, sweet,’ the kitchen staff chorus. ‘He’s smiling.’

  Smiling? Like hell he is.

  Monday, 10 August

  Joanna

  It is 10.40 a.m. and back in Manhattan, I have now been waiting at the doctors’ surgery for fifty-five minutes. I have finished a long and much-talked about piece in the New Yorker entitled ‘Why Parents Don’t Matter’, which instructs parents to stop blaming themselves if things go wrong with their children. And I have flicked listlessly through Parents magazine, which says that if anything goes wrong then it is all the parents’ fault.

  Another woman whose appointment was, I am convinced, later than mine, has been called before me to see the same doctor and I wonder if I should make a fuss. I hate doing it, but I have been advised by all my friends that when dealing with American doctors you have to show that the patient is boss.

  ‘Always let them know you have access to a good lawyer,’ Dana has counselled me. ‘And let them know you’ll sue.’

  I wander up to the receptionists’ desk, where the three of them are squabbling in Russian.

  ‘Is there a problem? Why is my appointment running so late?’ I ask nicely. They stop arguing and stare at me.

  ‘Name?’ asks the youngest of the three, bored and chewing, with Slavic cheekbones so fierce they look like offensive weapons.

  I give it as she glances at her appointments schedule.

  ‘There’s no problem,’ she says, sulkily getting up and squeezing out of her booth to place my chart in a wire holder. ‘It’ll be ’bout five minutes.’

  I stalk back to my seat and snatch up a leaflet entitled The New Mommies’ Network offering a selection of seminars including Early Discipline: Setting Limits for Baby! and Toys as Developmental Tools. I stuff it in my bag and gaze round the surgery wondering, not for the first time, if I should change doctors.

  Unlike England, where one takes what one is given, the trouble with being able to choose your doctor is that the onus is then on you to be sure you make the right choice. Staring at the surly coven behind the receptionists’ desk, I am convinced I have failed. Choice brings responsibility and I have not lived up to mine. I did not, as one should do, inspect the surgery before I made my first appointment and I certainly didn’t interview each of the three doctors before signing up to their practice.

  More to the point, how can one tell if someone is a good doctor? Should I ask for a list of statistics? Demand to know the survival rate of the babies they have delivered?

  Then there’s the address: Murray Hill. Who runs a surgery stuck out here in the boondocks of Murray Hill? Geographically, it might consider itself an exclusive arrondissement of midtown, but medically it might as well be in Minsk. Why aren’t I sitting in a plush reception on the Upper East Side?

  I am suddenly overcome with fury. Another ten minutes have gone and I am still here, while the woman who arrived after me has already left, grinning at me on the way out. I know they’ve confused our appointments, but won’t admit it. Flushed with hormonal rage I feel like screaming, ‘Look, I’m paying four hundred dollars a month for this, what’s going on?’

  ‘Ms Coles?’

  Brandishing my chart, a short nurse beckons me to follow her into one of the small cubicles. ‘Are we having our test for Down’s syndrome today?’ she smiles, as if talking to a child.

  ‘Well, that would be rather pointless, given that I’ve already had amniocentesis,’ I reply tartly as she flicks open the chart and bothers to read it.

  ‘Oh yes, and everything was OK?’ she asks, gesturing me towards the scales.

  ‘Yes, it was fine.’ I take off my jacket and shoes and step on to the scales as she fiddles about with the weights to make it balance.

  ‘Ooof,’ she scolds. ‘Who’s put on too much weight then? Eight pounds since the last visit. You need to halve your calories!’

  ‘But I missed a visit,’ I protest, ‘so it’s eight pounds over two months really.’

  ‘Look,’ she snaps, back in adult-speak, ‘I’m not saying this to hurt your feelings. You’ve put on more than you should have and it will make it harder for you to get thin again after the birth.’

  I’m almost certain she’s wrong. I have been reading Miriam Stoppard and Sheila Kitzinger so obsessively I can recite whole passages from memory and, considering I had lost weight during the first trimester, I know an eight pound gain is within the limits.

  ‘Have you done a urine sample yet?’ she asks, back in her baby voice as I smoulder over my weight gain.

  ‘Perhaps that will take a couple of pounds off,’ I mumble, disappearing into the bathroom to take aim into the tiny plastic cup. As I shuffle back into the cubicle, Dr Sharon has arrived.

  She is the second of the three doctors in the practice and it’s surgery policy that you have to see all three because you don’t know which one will be on call when you come to deliver. I had imagined a somewhat older and reassuring figure, with whom I could swap amusing birthing anecdotes when the time came. Instead, Dr Sharon is probably not yet thirty, with a bush of uncombed hair and big unpainted toes. She looks nervous and as she pulls the tops of my leggings down I know instinctively that this is not a woman in whose presence I can lose control and lie screaming with my legs apart.

  We listen to the baby’s heart, which is thundering like zebras’ hooves across the Serengeti, and she assures me that all is normal.

  ‘Was there a problem this morning?’ I ask, as I swing off the bed.

  ‘How do you mean?’ she says, folding her arms defensively.

  ‘Well, I had to wait fifty-five minutes, yet the surgery didn’t seem very full,’ I grumble, remembering Dana’s advice about the patient being boss, but feeling myself go red.

  ‘I feel I saw you in a timely manner,’ she says curtly. ‘Sometimes they have problems with finding a chart. I’ll make sure to bring it up with the reception staff.’

  ‘And another thing: your nurse tells me I’m overweight, but according to my calculations, I’m completely on track.’

  She glances at the notes, then looks me up and down. ‘Yes, everything looks fine,’ she says, arms crossed. ‘Anything else?’

  ‘Well, yes, I notice from the websites that Roosevelt appears to have much better birthing facilities than Beth Israel,’ I say defiantly. I have spent the previous evening surfing the web, moving between the sites for Beth Israel, where I am booked to deliver, and its sister hospital, Roosevelt. According to the pictures on www.wehealnewyork.org, Roosevelt looks far more comfortable than Beth Israel.

  ‘Each bedroom in our Birthing Center has hardwood floors, a large double bed, a rocking chair and a fully equipped bathroom with hydrotherapy bath,’ it offers. ‘Partners are welcome to stay the night and the mother can keep her baby with her at all times. Mother and baby will not be separated.’

  ‘Well we only deliver at Beth Israel,’ says Dr Sharon, adding with a slight note of menace, ‘to go to Roosevelt you would have to change doctors.’

  ‘And is that hard?’ I ask.

  ‘Not hard at all,�
�� she smiles coldly, grabbing my chart and sweeping out of the room.

  Wednesday, 12 August

  Peter

  I’m late for a lunch with another transplanted London writer, Joe O’Neill, who has trumped our West Village loft by renting an apartment in the Chelsea Hotel, where Sid Vicious lived up to his name and stabbed his consort, Nancy Spungen, to death. And because I’m late I break my new economy pledge to go everywhere by bus or subway, and hurl my arm out at a passing yellow shoal of cabs. A particularly desperate cab cuts across three lanes and screeches to a halt in front of me. On its roof it bears a large internally illuminated plastic sign which reads: Who’s the Father? 1-800-DNA TYPE.

  We lurch off up Eighth Avenue, and as the driver clicks on the meter a sultry pre-recorded message advises me, ‘This is Eartha Kitt. Meeeouww. Cats have nine lives, but you only have one, so buckle up.’ When Eartha has had her say, the driver, Harris Fleur, according to his Taxi and Limousine Commission ID, turns up the radio. It is tuned to WQEW, and is belting out old Peggy Lee tunes: ‘Alone’; ‘Misery Loves Company’, and Harris Fleur is singing along lustily in an Afro-Caribbean accent. He knows all the words.

  We stop at a red light and my nostrils twitch as an acrid urine smell infuses the cab. I look outside to locate the source of the offending odour until I realize that the windows are closed and the aircon turned up. Then I hear a great sigh of relief from upfront, and hear the splashing. I crane forward. Harris Fleur has fed the crinkled snout of his substantial brown penis into a waxed juice carton and is pissing noisily. He catches my eye in the rear-view mirror. ‘Nowhere for cab driver to take a piss in this town. Nowhere at all,’ he complains.

  The light turns green and cars behind us begin honking. ‘OK! OK!’ yells Harris Fleur, and stabs a bird at them with the middle finger of his free hand. He flicks the cab into gear and draws slowly away. His other hand is still clutching his cock, still feeding it into the spout of the carton clasped between his thighs. Though his driving becomes much smoother, I can still hear the piss sloshing around in there.