The Three of Us (20 page)

We spend the rest of the day unpacking boxes, keeping an uneasy eye on the door should Isaac suddenly make a reappearance, wielding a crowbar or worse. Around 8 p.m., exhausted, we flop down and start channel surfing until we hit
20-20,
America's equivalent of
Watchdog,
presented by Diane Sawyer, famous for her low but alarmist tones.

‘In tonight's show,
20-20
goes undercover to expose bogus moving companies who move your belongings right out of your sight and right out of your state!'

Several people describe their possessions vanishing for ever. ‘I realized the truck was moving off in the wrong direction for our new house but I never realized they were robbing us,' sobs one woman. ‘I just thought they knew a quicker way to get there.'

‘The advice from the experts', Sawyer concludes, ‘is never select a moving company from the back pages of a newspaper or magazine. Only go for established companies and always ask for personal recommendations. And now, the man who hired one of the country's top paediatric surgeons to help his crippled pug dog walk again! We'll be right back after these messages…'

Friday, 9 October

Peter

At a book-launch party today, where the VIPs all had to wear name tags, I notice a genial chap labelled Maurice Sendak. The name is familiar but irritatingly unplaceable. And then, on the way home, I remember that he is Maurice Sendak, the-slowest-writer-in-the-world, the one who snails along at 190 words a year. I have missed my opportunity to congratulate him on this feat.

Saturday, 10 October

Joanna

Unwilling to leave her flourishing launderette business, Margarita has refused to work for us in the Upper West Side, so I have been touting for cleaner recommendations from residents in our new block.

Today I am sitting wrestling with a column when there is a rap on the door and through the spyhole I see the telescoped face of a brightly henna'd woman staring at me.

‘Hello,' she says in an Eastern European accent, when I open the door. ‘I am Sofia. I hear you look for cleaner. I am cleaner. Good cleaner. Mallory in 13D recommend me. I am Albanian. I clean for you?' And reaching for my hand, she says, ‘You show me apartment, I tell you how much. Yes?'

Impressed by her efficiency – I only asked Mallory if she could recommend someone yesterday after bumping into her in the lift – I obediently give Sofia a quick tour, during which she whistles at the scuffed wooden floors. ‘Apartment, bad condition, very difficult to clean,' she says finally. ‘I think five maybe six hours' work. One hundred dollars.'

‘I'll have to think about it,' I reply, baulking at paying $20 more than we paid Margarita and realizing that I should at least ask Mallory for a reference.

‘I am Albanian,' she says again. ‘My family? I don't know where they are.' And to my horror she starts to cry. ‘I don't know where they are,' she shudders again. Unable to go back to my work, I make us both a cup of tea and try, without much success, to follow a complicated narrative which ends with Sofia's arrival, alone, in New York.

‘Four years,' she says holding up four bitten fingers. ‘I have been here four years. I wanna go back, but now not possible.'

I listen with a mixture of guilt and irritation at Sofia's distress and my ignorance of the internal politics of Albania and Kosovo. I give what I hope are supportive but noncommittal sounds.

After about twenty-five minutes of this, she perks up. ‘Mondays is good for you, yes?'

‘Let me talk to my boyfriend,' I say weakly. ‘Give me a number to call you.'

‘No number,' she says, rising decisively from the table. ‘I come back tomorrow. OK?'

‘OK,' I say, with a non-specific sinking feeling, realizing it will be more or less impossible not to hire her.

An hour later, in pursuit of a Starbucks' decaff, I bump into Mallory again in the lift. ‘Thanks for sending Sofia round,' I say. ‘Is she reliable?'

‘What? I didn't send her round.'

‘Well, she just came to see me on your recommendation.'

‘But she's terrible,' Mallory exclaims. ‘Goddamn it, she must have seen a note I put on my desk about you. I've been trying to get rid of her – she's lazy, she's always late and she's expensive. I hope she didn't spin you all that Albanian bullshit. I can't believe she told you I recommended her.'

‘Is it bullshit? She seemed terribly upset.'

‘Perleeze,' she says, rolling her eyes. ‘She told you her family were missing? Yeah, right! They all live in Brooklyn. Listen, my uncle has a cleaner who he really likes, I'll get her number for you. But don't take Sofia.' And she stalks crossly out of the lift and into the back seat of a chauffeured Lincoln town car, throbbing patiently at the kerb.

Saturday, 10 October

Peter

Joanna is complaining that I snore – an allegation which I hotly refute. She says that she wouldn't mind if it were a regular, comforting snore which she would find almost sweet, but that I emit arbitrary snores of varying durations. She claims to be worrying that I may be choking in my sleep, or even that I stop breathing for unnaturally long periods. In order to clear up this matter, we agree to place my tape recorder beside the bed, set on its voice-activate function.

Sunday, 11 October

Joanna

Meredith phones and offers to give us a housewarming.

‘I can't face it,' I say, ‘we've still got tons of boxes to unpack and we haven't got enough furniture.'

‘What's to face?' she laughs. ‘Think of the gifts. Everyone brings gifts to a housewarming.'

‘But we don't really need anything except big stuff, like another bed,' I say, adding ungratefully, ‘and I don't want loads of knickknacks.'

‘No, no, you need a theme for gifts,' she says, ignoring me. ‘What about bar tools?'

I cringe. ‘Meredith, we don't even have a bar!'

‘Oh, everyone needs bar tools, darling,' she scolds. ‘Ice tongs? … How about a crystal bowl with special ridges to hold lemon slices? Tell me, do you actually
have
one?'

‘No, of course not.'

‘For drinks parties I find mine indispensable. I know,' she cries. ‘Marquetry!'

‘Marquetry?'

‘Yes,' she laughs expansively. ‘Picture frames, mirrors, inlaid wooden trays. Darling, it's perfect.
Everyone
loves marquetry.'

Sunday, 11 October

Peter

Over breakfast I rewind the tape and play it back. The sound is a long continuous roar, like a large antelope in pain. Joanna laughs so hard she almost falls off the kitchen stool. But I point out that the continuous roar is a distortion caused by the tape switching on for a snore and off again as soon as silence reigns. ‘It discriminates,' I complain. ‘It doesn't give me credit for the silences – there could be hours in between these individual snores when I was breathing quietly.'

Later I look up snoring in my
Merck Manual of Medical Information,
only to discover an appalling complication: sleep apnoea. ‘Because symptoms occur during sleep,' explains the
Merck Manual,
‘they must be described by someone who observes the person sleeping. The most common symptom is snoring, associated with episodes of gasping, choking, pauses in breathing … In severe cases, people have repeated bouts of sleep-related obstructive choking…' Other side-effects of sleep apnoea are ‘Headaches, excessive daytime sleepiness, slowed mental activity', all of which I suffer from. Eventually, warns the
Merck,
sleep apnoea can result in heart failure. The treatment ranges from trying to sleep on your side to wearing an oxygen mask in bed and, finally, a tracheotomy, where surgeons drill through your neck to gouge a permanent hole in your windpipe.

As I cannot trust Joanna to give an accurate report of my sleeping habits, I am thinking about booking into a sleep lab for overnight polysomnography, where they will attach electrodes to my head and measure the ‘physiological parameters' of my slumber. Will my insurance cover this? I wonder, as I fall asleep.

Monday, 12 October

Joanna

Unable to face Sofia, I retreat to my study and tell Peter I won't answer the door.

‘You have to deal with her,' he says. ‘Otherwise she'll just keep coming back.'

At 5 p.m. Sofia pops in to finalize the deal. I flee to the kitchen on a pretext and leave Peter to talk to her. Soon I hear them apparently deep in conversation and hesitantly return.

‘I met Zog once,' Peter is saying pleasantly, ‘when he was in exile in Johannesburg.'

‘Who?' Sofia asks.

‘Zog. King Zog?'

She shrugs.

‘The pretender to the Albanian throne?'

Sofia is looking uneasy now.

‘Enver Hoxha, was he as bad as we all thought in the West?'

‘Hmmm,' says Sofia, noncommittally. She glances at her watch. ‘Oh God, I'm late for next job. I call back tomorrow,' and she rushes for the door.

We never hear from her again.

Tuesday, 13 October

Peter

One of the cures for sleep apnoea is to lose weight, so I have returned to my jogging regimen with renewed ferocity. I run beneath an arched avenue of lushly foliaged oak trees along Riverside Park, a thin green finger that stretches sixty blocks along the Hudson. To the east is Riverside Drive, lined on one side with grand apartment buildings and French Beaux Arts townhouses – it was Manhattan's poshest residential Zip code at the turn of the century. To the west, across the Hudson, is the shore of New Jersey. My northern view is framed by the gigantic iron span of the George Washington Bridge. Beyond the bridge, on the Jersey side, it is green and rustic, amazing that it is but an oar's dip from this teeming island of Manhattan.

Though it is a beautiful boulevard designed by Frederick Olmsted, the man who landscaped Central Park, Riverside Park remains a largely tourist-free zone, the crowds favouring his more famous project.

As I jog up Riverside Drive, I pass an extraordinarily cosmopolitan selection of monuments: Joan of Arc sitting astride a charger; a large limestone frieze commemorating the New York Fire Horses; a bulky medieval Japanese figure lurking under the portico of the Buddhist temple at 105th Street – Shinran Shonin, founder of the Jodo-Shinshu sect. The statue is a survivor of the Hiroshima atom bomb, and was shipped to America in 1955 to promote world peace.

At 106th Street the brooding figure of a goatee'd Franz Sigel gazes across the river as he kicks his spurs into the greened bronze flank of his steed. I have no idea who Franz Sigel is and his plaque bears nothing but his name. Samuel Tilden, Governor of New York and unsuccessful Democratic presidential candidate in 1876, stands at 107th Street.

A statue of Lajos Kossuth, Hungarian patriot, has been erected at 113th Street ‘by a liberty loving race of Americans of Magyar origin'. And two streets on, at the summit of Claremont Hill – where the Battle of Harlem Heights once raged during the Revolutionary War – the tomb of General Ulysses S. Grant, a vast, white, colonnaded mausoleum, stands guard at the corner of the campus of Columbia University, itself built on the site of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum. The august grandeur of General Grant's sepulchre is undermined somewhat by encircling Gaudíesque benches, whose bright mosaics, depicting mermaids and sharks, camels and whales, taxi cabs and Donald Duck, were added by a Chilean artist and his 1200 local volunteers in the early 1970s.

As I turn for home, my T-shirt sticking wetly to my back now and my calves burning, I notice a small carved urn inside an enclosure on the edge of the park. It turns out to be the Monument to the Amiable Child, placed here in memory of a five-year-old boy who fell to his death from these cliffs two hundred years ago. On the urn's pedestal, its letters smoothed now by a blotchy carpet of lichen, is a reminder of our mortality from Job 14:1-2, ‘Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: he fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.'

Upon my breathless return, I look up Franz Sigel in the
Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia.
But the entries jump straight from ‘Sièyes, Emmanuel-Joseph, Comte de French political theorist and clergyman born 1748 … whose pamphlet
Qu'est-ce que le Tiers-état
stimulated great bourgeois awareness,' to the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, born 1368, who rebounded after a defeat by the Ottoman Turks to conquer Bosnia, Herzegovina and Serbia – a task that looks particularly impressive today.

Of Franz Sigel, there is, alas, no sign. He has not made it into world history's top 16,000, so I feel my ignorance of him is excusable.

‘Have
you
heard of Franz Sigel?' I ask Joanna.

‘Is he an actor?'

‘No, I think he must be a German patriot of some sort, but I can't find him in my
Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia.
'

‘Maybe he's eyeing Schwarzenegger's mantle,' she suggests, deep in a copy of
Daily Variety.

‘Schwarzenegger's Austrian. Even I know that.'

‘Austrian shmostrian. Ever heard of the Anschluss?'

‘Did you know that I'm related to the Earl of Wessex?' I ask, ignoring her. ‘He was a Godwin. I read in the
Cambridge Biographical Encyclopaedia
that he was the chief political adviser to King Canute.'

‘So your ancestor advised King Canute to stand on the shore and bid the tide not to come in. That figures.'

Tuesday, 13 October

Joanna

Today I receive my weekly update from BabyCenter.com, an online resource centre I discovered a fortnight ago while surfing the web during a sleepless night. After registering my due date, I now receive regular e-mails outlining our baby's development.