The Three of Us

 

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For TAG, whose pram is in the hall

PREFACE

At the risk of degenerating into Oscar speak, we would like to thank the following: our agent, Gil Coleridge and our editors, Val Hudson and Andrea Henry, for doing their respective jobs with such elan; Jane Thynne and Andrew Solomon for allowing us to quote from their emails; and our New York friends (especially Dani Shapiro, Michael Maren, Suzanna Andrews, Dana and John Tierney, Andre and Leina Schiffrin, Ron Gallen, Betsy Fagan, Sheenah Hankin and Tom Masland) for their patience and humour in dealing with our incessant questions; Sheila Kitzinger and Dr Miriam Stoppard for letting us quote from their work. We are also grateful to be able to quote from Dr Seuss and from the websites of
BabySoon.com
and
BabyCenter.com
.

Joanna would like to thank Alan Rusbridger and Roger Alton at the
Guardian,
for posting her to New York. And Peter Stothard and Sandra Parsons at
The Times,
for continuing to accommodate her dispatches.

The Three of U.S.
is not a forensic record – occasionally we have changed names, dates and other identifying details, largely to prevent intrusion. But this principle is defined in the exception. Our labour coach, for example, is so instantly identifiable to any of the scores of New Yorkers who have passed through her ante-natal academy, that to change her name would be pointless.

Joanna Coles

Peter Godwin

Manhattan 1999

MAY

MANHATTAN

Friday, 1 May

Joanna

The test is negative. There is no pink line in the second box on the tester stick, but I'm sure I am pregnant. I haven't done it wrong either. Over the years I've done enough of these tests to know exactly how to use them; how to pee in a squatting position without splashing all over the tester stick and precisely how long to wait before looking for the tell-tale sign. Sometimes they use a red tick to indicate you're pregnant; sometimes it's a blue cross. With this one, the Answer Test, a positive answer is indicated by two pink lines. But there is only one. The other box, the important box, remains clear, white and unambiguous. I am not pregnant.

Friday, 1 May

Peter

I have just returned from the doctor, who has managed to convince me that I am dying. The cause of my premature death will be the polyp that has developed under the skin of my left elbow. I became aware of it a few days ago as I walked along Hudson Street from the Printing House gym, favoured exercise yard of the West Village literati, back to our loft on Horatio Street. My polyp is hard to the touch, like a walnut, and curiously mobile. I fiddle with it constantly, my own internal worry bead.

At first I thought I had overdone it with the free weights. Although in denial about my own competitiveness, I am loath to lessen the weights when alternating on a machine with someone else of comparable size. Over the years I have sustained various injuries to ligaments and muscles due to such hubris, and this elbow polyp, I figured, was simply the latest. But there were worrying differences: the suddenness of my polyp's first appearance. One minute nothing, the next a subcutaneous walnut. The lack of surrounding swelling. And the fact that it didn't actually hurt. Finally, when the walnut refused to diminish on its own, I went to the doctor.

Under the American health insurance system my family doctor is, as far as I can deduce, a gatekeeper. He is there to prevent me from having access to specialists. The more often he can stymie my attempts to reach the doctors who really know what they're doing, the expensive doctors, the more lavishly he is rewarded by our insurers.

Dr Epstein has a practice on 14th Street, between 8th and 9th Avenue. It is one of the most depressing streets downtown – not quite Chelsea, not yet Greenwich Village – strewn with tacky shops selling cheap plastic luggage and knock-off trainers, polyester clothes and tinny boom boxes. Many of the shops urgently proclaim that they are in the throes of closing-down sales.
EVERYTHING MUST GO
, their banners read. Several announce that they are going bankrupt and in
POSITIVELY OUR VERY LAST WEEK
. But in all the months I have traversed the street, none of these shops has actually closed.

The other patients waiting in Dr Epstein's reception are all longshoremen – wide men in steel-toed boots, checked flannel shirts and jeans. For Dr Epstein's practice is above the Longshoremen's Union headquarters. My appointment comes and goes, but my name remains uncalled. Perhaps, among these giants, I am not big enough for my physical presence even to register.

‘Mr Gobwun?'

‘Godwin. It's Godwin, actually.'

‘Whatever. Dr Epstein will see you now.'

Dr Epstein is small and hairy and rotund. He is evidently suffering from a terrible cold and his voice is clogged with catarrh. After taking a brief medical history, he places two stubby fingers on my polyp and chases it around my elbow. ‘Hmm,' he muses. ‘Odd.'

Odd? I am a doctor's son and I know that ‘odd' is not good.

‘Does it hurt?' he asks.

‘Not really.'

‘Is it growing?'

‘No, it was that size when it arrived.'

Dr Epstein rapidly fills out a large form. It is latticed with boxes, most of which he is ticking.

‘Tests,' he explains. ‘You need tests, a lot of 'em.'

I feel like I'm in an opening sequence of
ER,
with the first plot line being wheeled in on the gurney while Dr Ross or Dr Green rattles off a battery of acronyms.

‘What seems to be the problem?' I ask, realizing this should be his line.

‘Let's just wait until the test results come in, shall we?'

‘But what kind of thing might it be?' I insist.

‘Well, I'm really not sure, but…' He trails off.

‘But what?' I prompt.

‘It might be a lymphoma.'

Lymphoma, I know from
ER,
is American doctor-speak for cancer, and I return to our apartment in the West Village convinced that my future is mostly behind me.

Saturday, 2 May

Joanna

I am more than a week late now. On the back of the packet it proclaims the Answer Test is so sensitive it can detect pregnancy within twenty-four hours of an overdue period. On the front it claims to be ‘99 per cent accurate!' so I think perhaps the test is past its sell-by date. I didn't much trust the pharmacist who sold it to me. He looked shifty and I had to wait for ages while a tall, balding man was interrogating him about Viagra, Pfizer's wonder drug to overcome ‘erectile dysfunction'.

‘How much is it?' he asked in a heavy Hispanic whisper.

‘It's about ten bucks a shot, but you can only get it on prescription,' said the pharmacist.

‘Ten bucks? Each tablet is ten bucks?' demanded the man, louder and alarmed.

‘Yes, but it's only available on prescription,' the pharmacist repeated, tidying the breath mints by the till. ‘I can't just sell it over the counter, you need a doctor's recommendation.'

‘Oh it's not for me,' said the customer hastily. ‘It's for my friend.'

‘Then you tell your friend he has to see a doctor before he can get some.'

‘But this is not possible,' the customer replied. ‘My friend, he is in Brazil. He is desperate…'

‘Tell you what,' said the pharmacist, lowering his voice, ‘come back around seven p.m. when things are a little quieter round here, and I'll see what I can do for you, OK?'

‘Seven p.m. today? I'll be here, seven p.m. Thank you, thank you.'

‘But you better tell your friend how much this stuff is gonna cost him, OK?' said the pharmacist.

‘I tell him, I tell him exactly,' said the customer, giving him a discreet thumbs up and hurrying out of the store.

Sunday, 3 May

Peter

I am preoccupied with the wait for my test results and I cannot possibly concentrate on my novel. Despite a recent spurt, my book is going terribly anyway. Dog metaphors besiege me when I try to describe its progress. Sometimes I feel like a dog that circles interminably around something unknown, something it hasn't quite got the confidence to confront. Sometimes when I approach passages which cry out for major rewriting, I feel a nauseating
déjà vu,
like a dog returning to its own vomit.

The truth is I have had writer's block for months, but I cannot bear to admit it. It seems I need the Zimmer frame of non-fiction on which to rest the body of my imagination; I am crippled without the firm aluminium stroller of fact. Scared by the multitude of options out there, I have to impose a false horizon, a fake polystyrene ceiling, on my literary ambitions.

It's like loft living. We thought that this loft we now inhabit, with its vast, high ceilings, would be the most aesthetic living machine possible; a white-walled, parquet-floored, 2,000-square-foot playground for adults. But soon a strange attitude developed. We found ourselves delineating areas. At first it was just in our minds, as defined by clusters of furniture, the dining-room table, my study desk, the TV. But then we began, little by little, to cordon off areas with bookshelves and sofas and filing cabinets, trying to create a conventional apartment out of our soaring, unfettered space. Such, I have begun to fear, is the story of my literary imagination too.

I have printed out a sign which says:
THIS IS YOUR JOB
. It is supposed to urge me to take writing more seriously and to remind me that the novel is now my main source of income – because I have virtually no other source. I have blown up the message in 29-point Times New Roman bold type and affixed it to the pillar opposite my desk with a blob of chewing gum. I know I am far too old for gum, but it seems to alleviate the headaches that have been plaguing me.

Sunday, 3 May

Joanna