Friday, 22 May Joanna
I am running late to meet Meredith, a friend and investigative magazine reporter, in the Royalton bar. Despite the fact that according to all the pregnancy books, I should now be walking briskly twenty-five minutes a day, I can’t face ten sweaty blocks of midtown crowds, so I hail a cab, which takes me twice as long.
‘Darling, you’re late,’ she cries triumphantly as I finally spot her in the gloom squatting on a purple velvet pouffe. She pushes a clear cone of martini at me complete with bobbing khaki olive. It looks exquisite, a fringe of icy condensation slipping down the outside. I can’t resist and take a small sip before declaring somewhat unconvincingly that I shouldn’t really because I’m off alcohol at the moment. I haven’t told her I’m pregnant.
‘You, off alcohol? Don’t be ridiculous,’ Meredith scoffs and, grabbing a passing waiter, promptly orders two more martinis. ‘With some of those outrageously expensive chips,’ she yells after him, ‘and we’ll take a plate of aubergine caviar.’
I take another sip, planning to swap glasses when she goes to the loo, which she does a lot, not always, I suspect, for the actual purpose a bathroom is intended.
‘So, have you heard about Kelly?’ she says, leaning forward flashing her eyes in a way which signifies she has gossip. ‘She’s on Ritalin and she’s had a complete personality change!’
‘What?’ I demand, wondering crossly why Kelly hasn’t told me this herself.
‘Ritalin, you know that drug they give to kids with ADD – attention deficit disorder.’
‘But why? What for?’ I ask, doubly cross that a close friend hasn’t told me she’s suffering from New York’s most fashionable disorder.
‘Says it helps her focus,’ nods Meredith.
‘Focus on what?’
‘Everything! She says it’s so good that yesterday for the first time in ten years she went out without any Valium at all. I mean she deliberately left her pill tin at home and, even when she was caught in a mob at Barney’s sale, she didn’t panic once …’
Given that I am reluctant to take even aspirin, I’m always impressed at the way New Yorkers pop pills. Kelly and Jeff’s large bathroom cabinet, which I once secretly opened, resembles a RiteAid comfort station. Every shelf was crammed with brown glass bottles: Prozac, Zoloft, Valium and Lithium alongside the more mundane Tylenol ‘Extra’ and its rival Advil’s response, Advil Extra Strength. Though they talk openly about self-medicating, I have no idea how much they actually take of the stuff.
Meredith goes to the loo and I switch glasses just as the waiter arrives with our next drinks and a white napkin envelope of home-made crisps and a plate of pitta slices, cut in the shape of triangles and arranged points-out in the shape of a star, to mop up a stylized taupe blob of mashed aubergine.
‘Darling,’ shrills Meredith, eyes flashing and sniffing like a bloodhound, as she returns. ‘How are you?’ As if we have just met.
Saturday, 23 May Peter
At 3.45 a.m. I get up to go for a pee and on the way back I notice the bent figure of a tramp trundling a shopping trolley down Gansevoort Street. He parks it adjacent to the fire hydrant beneath our window and from the trolley’s lower shelf he produces a long cast-iron tool – his own, personal hydrant spanner. He opens the hydrant, adjusting it carefully to allow a modest spout of water to flow. Then he goes about his ablutions. First, he fills up his three plastic water bottles; then he fussily rinses out a carrier bag, turns it inside out and vigorously shakes it dry. From his trolley he lifts out a tray of peaches and fastidiously washes them, one by one. After checking on his plastic bag again, which is drying, he eats two of his peaches, dabbing at his beard with a faded bandanna. He carefully eases the tray of remaining peaches into the newly cleaned carrier bag, ties its handles and gingerly places it back in his supermarket trolley. Then he washes his face over and over again and swills out his mouth.
From somewhere inside his grubby full-length gabardine coat he retrieves a little plastic box. I can’t quite make out what it is. Tobacco? Snuff? Crack? Then he pulls something long and white from the box and breaks it off. It is a length of dental floss, and he proceeds to floss his teeth with great thoroughness.
In the gloom of the early morning Joanna appears, naked, on her way to the bathroom.
‘Check this out,’ I tell her. ‘A tramp who flosses.’
Joanna observes the scene silently for a moment and then announces that her breasts ache.
‘Look at them,’ she murmurs, ‘they’re enormous.’
They loom, ghostly white globes in the half-light, and indeed they do look considerably expanded. I reach for one and cup it in the palm of my outstretched hand like the Sikh cab driver did to Ru.
‘Wow, that’s some boob,’ I exclaim, in what I hope is an admiring tone.
Below us the tramp closes the fire hydrant, replaces his spanner in the trolley, and trundles it slowly down Gansevoort Street, turning north on to the West Side Highway. I look at the clock. The whole ritual has taken nearly an hour.
Monday, 25 May Joanna
… Though it is only 10 a.m. here, it is already 4 p.m. in London and I am in the office on deadline for a feature about Robert Downey Junior’s persistent drug problem. I am distracted, however, by the frantic pitching coming through the thin wall. It is Ted, the elderly real estate agent in the next-door office, talking on the phone to a client.
‘I’m going to have to push you, Frank, I’m sorry but I gotta know today,’ I hear him say. ‘Frank, if I could give you more time, then believe me I would. Believe me, I’ve been fighting for you, Frank, I’ve been fighting very hard. And I don’t mind tellin’ ya, they don’t call me the Rocky-of-Real-Estate for nothing. Are you in with me, Frank? Do we have a deal here? I don’t mind telling ya, ya won’t regret it.’
Until two years ago the Guardian office in New York was staffed with thirteen people selling subscriptions for the Guardian Weekly edition. Then the paper’s accountants in London caught up with this forgotten enclave and made them all redundant, shifting operations to Canada to cut costs. But they were unable to shift the unexpired Manhattan lease, and so for a while I worked in an eerily deserted office. Now the paper has managed to rent the remaining space to a trio of elderly real estate agents. They arrived one Monday morning with several boxes stuffed full of executive toys.
Ted is the most avuncular of the three. He has decorated his office with framed copies of the most lucrative deals he has closed over the last forty years. These are, I suppose, the real estate equivalent of Pulitzer prizes, though the small print makes them almost impossible to read. His favourite is prominently displayed on a separate music stand by his door.
‘This’, he told me, shortly after his arrival, pointing proudly to the cream paper filled with minute print, ‘is for a helicopter landing pad I sold on top of the fourteenth tallest building in the city. And I tell ya, it was a lucky deal, lucky for me anyways!
‘A month after I signed the contract, I’ll be damned if a helicopter didn’t topple off the edge of the Pan Am building, killing everyone aboard and some more underneath. After that, all helicopters were banned from taking off or landing on buildings across the city.’ He gives a rueful laugh. ‘Lucky for me, right? But God, was the guy who bought the landing pad from me pissed!’
In between the contracts he has slipped in the odd family photograph of a wife and scowling son, somewhere in his late teens, with a backwards baseball cap on his crown. In each of the photos he is also wearing Tommy Hilfiger jeans, with the