The Three of U.S.: A New Life in New York

When we first arrived in New York we came equipped with an armful of introductions to people we ‘absolutely had to meet’. Most of these meetings have proved rather awkward, contrived affairs, where once the subject of our mutual friend is exhausted, conversation becomes threadbare. So we have lost our appetite for this kind of entrée.

Andrew Solomon, journalist, author, socialite, art collector, is, however, in a class of his own. We have been furnished with his number by almost everyone we know in London. He has an astonishing social span – he is an international Zelig. I have met people in Botswanan game parks and on Caribbean beaches who, on hearing I live in New York, say, ‘Oh, have you met a friend of mine, Andrew Solomon?’

The answer is no. It is not, however, through want of trying. We have been playing phone tag with him for months now, but Andrew Solomon evidently lives his life according to an itinerary packed with ever more exotic and obscure locations.

‘I’m afraid we’ve missed Andrew again,’ I tell Joanna.

‘Oh, where is he this time?’

‘Nassau, Havana and Bogliasco.’

Thursday, 11 JuneJoanna

Tonight we have supper with Larry and Nancy, two wealthy writers whose TriBeCa loft seems somehow far better designed for actually living in than ours. They too have been forced to partition space, but have chosen quiet wicker screens rather than our solution of messy bookshelves and desks. It seems a triumph of practical but stylish design and I am silently oozing envy as the door buzzes and supper arrives.

‘Oh God,’ I apologize, as Nancy starts removing the cellophane wrapper to reveal a huge platter of sushi, beautifully arranged with ginger roses and zig-zagged green papers to separate the portions. ‘I should have told you, I’m pregnant, and raw fish is the one food which is supposed to be taboo.’

‘Oh congratulations!’ shrieks Nancy. ‘Are you going to get married?’

As she heads over to the kitchen area to make me an omelette, their three-year-old daughter, Danielle, emerges from her wicker-screened den and Larry is instructed to put her to bed.

‘Seriously,’ Nancy continues, ‘you are going to get married, right? I mean, if you don’t it’ll be tough on the kid at school.’

‘Actually, I don’t think we’re going to,’ I say. ‘But it’s a lot more common in Europe to have children without being married than it is here.’

‘Oh, but you must get married,’ shouts Barbara, another guest. ‘I mean you must, for the child’s sake. I’ve been married for thirty years and it just gets better!’ Curiously, her husband is absent.

‘Well, who knows?’ I murmur, anxious to avoid further lecturing.

‘Is Danielle in bed yet?’ asks Nancy as Larry reappears, offering more wine.

‘No,’ he says calmly. ‘She’s watching cartoons and masturbating.’

Peter coughs on a prematurely smuggled sushi.

‘It’s a phase she’s going through,’ Larry explains jovially. ‘She does it all the time.’

Saturday, 13 JunePeter

I log on to Amazon.com, the online bookseller, which has started carrying the sales rankings of the books they stock. This is fatal. You can now track the sales of your book on a daily basis – an agonizing process for us so-called ‘mid-list’ authors. Customers may also air their own reviews and bestow you with a star rating. Today my latest book, Mukiwa, a memoir of growing up in Africa, is the 20,181st best-selling book in American cyberspace.

While online I collect an e-mail from Amazon.com. It is an advertorial plugging new books on the subject of writing. I must have signed up for this electronic junk e-mail sometime by failing to tick the box declining it. I am very taken with an account by the children’s writer, Maurice Sendak, best known for his fantastically fuzzy Wild Things, who says he’s ‘never spent less than two years on the text of one of his picture books, even though each of them is approximately 380 words long’.

Two years to do the words alone. All 380 of them. By my calculations he’s polishing off 190 words a year. That’s fifteen words a month. Say, a bon mot every couple of days, on average.

Go, Maurice! That’s my man.

Sunday, 14 JuneJoanna

Having checked in with my sister first, who assures me our mother is ‘getting used to the idea’, I phone Yorkshire again, hoping that the excitement of a first grandchild will have dimmed her moral disquiet.

‘How are you? Oh, and the baby of course?’ she asks, in tones which clearly suggest she’s been got at by both my father and sister.

‘We’re fine,’ I say, giving Peter a thumbs up.

‘Well, I’ve stopped knitting blankets for Bosnian babies,’ she says, sounding almost cheerful. ‘Do you have any thoughts on what colours you’d like?’

Wednesday, 17 JunePeter

Margarita has come to clean, and I am tapping at my keyboard, trying to stay out of the way of her vacuum’s mighty vortex, when a shadow crosses the light, and she approaches, clucking disapproval.

‘Mr Peter, Mr Peter, no thank you,’ she admonishes and, rather than feeling like her employer, I feel like a child who is about to be bawled out by a kindergarten teacher. In her pink dayglo glove she is clutching a pile of discarded mail, which she has retrieved from one of our waste bins. ‘This, Mr Peter, no good. Very bad. No thank you.’

I look down at my desk, inexplicably ashamed of myself, though I am not sure what I have done wrong.

‘Do like this,’ she says, and begins to tear up the old press releases and credit card offers, and other detritus of the junk mail age, into smaller and smaller pieces. Then she deposits them in the bin bag with a flourish so that their individual shards scatter, making it impossible to reconstruct them. I am still uncertain of our sin, though I am beginning to suspect we have breached one of New York’s arcane recycling regulations.

‘Why?’ I ask. ‘Why must we tear up all our old mail?’

‘Why?’ She looks at me as though I am truly to be pitied. ‘Because …’ she struggles to find the word in her slowly improving English vocabulary. ‘Because is dangerous.’ And with that she retrieves some of the intact mail and pretends to be surreptitiously reading it, as though she is a spy. ‘You see?’ she asks. ‘Is dangerous.’

I try to explain that we couldn’t care less if strangers wish to peruse our old mail, but Margarita is unmoved and continues laboriously ripping up the letters. And in the end I cannot bear to witness this time-wasting exercise and I join her at the dining-room table tearing up inconsequential paper. Which is where we are found when Joanna returns from having her hair blow-dried.

Thursday, 18JuneJoanna

I am only nine weeks pregnant and already my wardrobe doesn’t fit. This seems especially alarming because as I was flicking through Sheila Kitzinger’s Complete Book of Pregnancy this morning I noticed the entry for sixteen weeks: ‘Your waistline will be starting to disappear.’

It has already disappeared, completely. I begin a listless hunt through my wardrobe only to find myself, incredibly, fantasizing about wearing a comfortable turquoise smock.

Kelly has given me a book called Pregnancy Chic. Ostensibly a fashion guide, it is actually a vehicle to push leggings and spinnaker-shaped T-shirts manufactured by the authors. I can’t work out what’s worse, the jaunty illustrations of smiling women in caftans or the advice itself, which seems to concentrate largely on the many different things you can do with a scarf.

‘Medium square: looks great tied loosely around your neck or shoulders over a tunic or a sweater! Pocket square: tied neckerchief-style with a tunic or button-down shirt! Oblong: looks best with a solid tunic, sweater or cardigan!’

I don’t want to wear a neckerchief-style scarf, I want to be able to fit back into my Joseph bootleg pants, of which I have four pairs, and the size 4 jeans I bought in the Boston Banana Republic after losing half a stone covering the Louise Woodward trial.

I e-mail Jane in London, whom I cannot remember looking even vaguely pregnant during her ninth months carrying William. She sends back an encouraging missive, which she entitles, ‘Sick Male Notions of Female Attractiveness’. ‘Don’t worry about buying maternity wear, squeeze into your old stuff and wear long jackets. Clothes are the least of your worries. If you haven’t done so already, make sure you book a maternity nurse asap. All the best ones get booked fast and you won’t get through the nights without one.’

Saturday, 20 JunePeter

216 days to B-Day.

I flop down on our vast bed for an afternoon nap after another noisy night of meat deliveries. It is the biggest bed I have ever slept in, a Serta Perfect Sleeper with an orthopaedic California King Sized mattress, six foot six inches wide, topped with a soft quilted upper lining, to give you the best of both worlds: firm support for your back and an inch of surface softness to snuggle into. With such vast dimensions, the California King Size presents various serious engineering problems, so, for example, our box spring base is in two halves, with extra legs in the middle of the bed to keep it from sagging. Of course, none of our English linen fits.

Our new bed feels especially luxurious given that for our first few days in New York we slept on a mustard-coloured sleeping Lilo that I had acquired at The Leading Edge in Whiteleys Mall on Queensway and shipped over with us on the QE2. The sleeping Lilo, according to The Leading Edge, which specializes in the latest gadgetry, was a breakthrough in somniac science, easy to store and transport, but with its own system of internal baffles, providing all the comfort of a real bed. Best of all, by simply altering the amount you inflated it, it could simulate a soft, fluffy mattress or deliver firmer support. In reality we found that every time one of us shifted weight the other was bobbed up on a swell of air pressure – it was like trying to share a trampoline.

The Leading Edge Lilo came complete with a foot pump and hose attachment. But it also came with a slow and unlocatable leak. Before we retired for the night, I would tread-pump the Lilo to full pressure. It would then slowly deflate until about two hours later, Joanna, a lighter sleeper than me, would awaken to the ungiving pressure of the parquet floor. She would elbow me and I would get up, attach the foot pump and groggily tread it for ten minutes until the Lilo had reinflated. I would repeat this performance every two hours, getting up to feed air to our bed.

This is what I now imagine having a small baby will be like.