on my way to buy groceries at D’Agostino’s on Washington Street, I pass a man unloading boxes from a truck into the twenty-four-hour City Deli at the corner of our building. On the side of the truck is painted the name of the company: ‘Lo Boy Foods’. Underneath it advertises ‘Individual portions of meats and fish’. An entire company devoted to the catering needs of solitary diners? Maybe that is my fate, sitting alone in middle age, eating individual portions of meat and fish from ‘Lo Boy Foods’.
The prospect of Joanna being pregnant suddenly doesn’t seem so unpalatable, well, no less palatable than a future fuelled by ‘Lo Boy Foods’.
On my return from shopping, on the corner of Bank and Hudson, the old folks are sitting in their wheelchairs on the pavement in front of the Village Nursing Home, rolled there by the white-uniformed nursing aides for some ‘fresh air’. Their the worn-out bodies will slowly toast the morning away in their wheelchairs, empty eyes staring out at the traffic.
And I notice, yet again, the smartly dressed middle-aged man sitting on a bench to one side, with his mother. He reads the New York Times intently, while she sits twitching next to him, one leg crossed tightly over the other, bony knuckles clenched over the armrests of her wheelchair. She is unable to talk or even to listen, it seems. I’m sure she wouldn’t notice whether he’s there or not, but that doesn’t dissuade this conscientious son from his daily vigil. His dedication to his uncomprehending mother makes me feel ashamed of myself.
And again a baser thought worms its way into my mind. Maybe it’s just as well to have kids around in case I happen to survive into my own dotage.
Friday, 8 May Joanna
My period is now two weeks late, though every day it feels as if it’s about to start. I can’t face the uncertainty of another home test, so I am sitting in the offices of my Murray Hill gynaecologist. I am thirty-six and this is the first time I have ever visited a gynaecologist. At home, in England, I relied on the GP for everything, but in New York everyone has a different doctor for every part of the body. Americans recommend them to each other as a sign of trust and friendship, like hot stock-market tips. I remember asking Kelly, shortly after we’d met and we were sitting in Bar Pitti on Sixth Avenue, if she could suggest a good doctor.
‘What sort?’
‘Well, you know, a good family doctor, a generalist.’
‘You know, that’s kinda hard and I really wouldn’t recommend mine,’ she said, pushing a manicured index finger around the salt-fringed rim of her margarita so it made a dry, squeaking noise. ‘I really don’t think he’s very good. He won’t diagnose over the phone, so you have to go to his office every time you need him. But I do have a very good dermatologist, my gynaecologist is excellent and I have a truly excellent podiatrist. But he may be full, I was lucky, he was mentioned in New York magazine’s top ten doctors, and now he’s got a waiting list longer than the Coney Island boardwalk …’
‘Honey, you should tell her about our neurologist too,’ interrupted Jeff, her husband. ‘And somewhere’, he added, fishing out his Palm Pilot and whipping the stylus over the screen, ‘I have the number of a very good orthopediologist. How much do you pay for insurance?’
‘Three hundred and eighty-nine dollars a month. Each.’
‘What? Are you nuts? Three eighty nine! We only pay two hundred and fifty each.’
‘It was the cheapest I could find that would take us on,’ I protested.
‘Health care in this country is screwed,’ said Jeff, tapping his margarita glass and mouthing ‘Three more, please’ to the bartender. ‘Hey, is that Madonna over there?’ Outside the bar a white stretch limo had pulled up and the singer, accompanied by another woman, got out and disappeared into the bar next door.
‘Well screw her,’ said Jeff, who, I have noticed recently, can get pretty angry over nothing much at all. ‘Screw her and her slutty friends. We don’t want them in here anyway.’
‘Doctors?’ I murmured trying to bring the subject back.
He shook his head. ‘You want a general doctor, right?’
‘Yes,’ I said, thinking back to Dr O’Reilly in Notting Hill, whom I had chosen because, like every other GP I have ever been to in my life, she was the nearest.
‘Well, it all depends. Do you self-medicate?’ he demanded.
‘Self what?’
‘Self-medicate. You know, self-diagnose, call your doctor and self-prescribe?’
I confessed this was not a common practice in Britain.
‘Oh it should be, it saves them time and you can just pick up the prescription … I mean three years ago I was going through a bad time – before I met you, honey,’ he grinned at Kelly. ‘And I knew I was having a depression. So I phoned up and self-prescribed Prozac.’
‘Really?’ I exclaimed, imagining how Dr O’Reilly – a taciturn Irish woman whose sole driving force appeared to come from resisting local pressure to become a GP fundholder – would have reacted if I had phoned and casually self-prescribed Prozac.
‘Yeah, well, as it turned out I didn’t suit Prozac at all, in fact it made me a little paranoid. But then I did go to see my doctor and she switched me to Zoloft, which has been great. It’s a much better drug for me in fact. Still is.
‘Whatever, you’ll love my doctor,’ he added, retrieving a pen from his wife’s Prada Kelly bag. ‘Give her a call and say I recommended you. Leah Falzone, she’s over on Union Square.’
Friday, 8 May Peter
It is nearly midnight and I’m in my customary position, slumped at my desk staring out of the window. The meat trucks have just started their deliveries outside, so instead of going to bed and lying awake, fretting about my test results, I am trying to work. Our apartment block is in a supposedly ‘happening’ area called the Meat Packing District, and we are surrounded by giant meat warehouses that supply New York’s restaurants and hotels. Unbeknown to us when we moved in, the Meat Packing District is deserted during the day, beginning its work each night at about midnight, when convoys of huge refrigerated trucks arrive from the Mid-West to unload chilled carcasses of cows, sheep and pigs. These trucks back up into the warehouses emitting a continuous screech of warning beeps, a sound specifically designed to penetrate. And penetrate it does, right through our storm windows and over the roar of the air-conditioner.
So I sit at my desk, trying to work and looking out at the view. It is an interesting view, more interesting than the stale words of my novel. To the north it takes in the illuminated ribbons of traffic of the West Side Highway, busy at any hour; a vast floodlit billboard of the Marlboro cowboy lighting up against a bucolic Montana backdrop; and a large black ‘V’ sign on an orange background, which marks the entrance to the Vault, which bills itself as New York’s favourite S&M club.
Across to the west is the chimneyed husk of the decommissioned Chelsea branch of the New York Sanitation Department, now used as a parking lot for city garbage trucks; a broad band of the Hudson River and the twinkling lights of the condo towers that have recently risen from the New Jersey shoreline. In the strip of wall mirror at right angles to the window, I can see the reflection
