A Polaroid of Peggy

by Richard Phillips

  But then came Monday, and the realisation of just how much of my wardrobe Alison had culled. She hadn’t just thinned the herd, she’d practically wiped it out, and I couldn’t find a single thing I wanted to put on. So I muttered the usual string of pointless profanities, grabbed the jacket I had been wearing on Saturday and limped out of the house in a huff. Then, when I got into the Porsche to drive to work, one of those really blinding early spring suns came out, so I reached into my pocket in the vain hope of finding my Ray-Bans and instead, what should I come across but the Polaroid of Peggy. I suppose I could have foreseen where all this might lead and torn the Polaroid into little pieces and thrown them out of the window, letting the little pieces of Peggy be blown away on the wind. But I didn’t. Instead, I pulled the picture out and looked at her Jewish/ Italianate/could-almost-be-Puerto Rican face once more, with the inevitable result that the movie that I had been watching in my head under the duvet on Saturday night began running again. And again. And again. And then the replay button got stuck, and nothing I could think of or do would distract me from it. And even when the day came in the not too distant future when India insisted I sit down to watch ‘Grease’ with her for the twelfth hundred and first time, it wasn’t John and Olivia I saw but Peggy and me.

  *

  I never did go to that meeting. I told Julia that she’d be summarily defenestrated if she ever allowed Vince or Geoff or anyone else into my office again before I had given my express permission.

  “Golly, that sounds rather exciting,” she said, with her trademark ooh-you-are-a-one look, but whether she did or didn’t know what I was talking about, she got the message and I was left in peace to gaze out of the window at blokes trying to fit standard lamps into the back of hatchbacks or similar.

  After a couple of days of this, and some intense negotiations between Julia and Vince’s PA, Maxine, I agreed to let him back in.

  “Got something to tell you mate.” Vince’s Aussie accent had a soupçon of extra Strine in it that day, which, experience had taught me, was an unmistakable sign that he was going to tell me something I didn’t want to hear.

  I tipped back in my chair, steepled my fingers and raised my eyebrows.

  “And that would be?”

  “Just that the meeting on Monday went fine without you—”

  “Pleased to hear it.”

  “—and that I’ve put Will and Lucille on the account. Hope you don’t mind.”

  Mind? Mind! You hope I don’t fucking well mind!!! On any other such occasion these words, or something less subtle, would have shot from my mouth like the venom from a very, very angry viper’s tongue. Will and Lucille were a senior, early thirties – that’s senior in advertising – creative team at BWD (meaning Art Director and Copywriter) and the sort of people who would have been asked to come up with the campaign for this new piece of business. I say ‘sort of’ because they were one of several teams who might have been picked for the job and – this is the point – or rather would have been the point – it was the Creative Director’s job, that is to say it was MY job, that is to say my RIGHT, that is to say my INALIENABLE right to be the one to do the picking. Not the job of the Head of Account Management – Vince – not even the job of the MD – Geoff – but mine! Unarguably, indisputably, incontestably – and any other word meaning exactly the same thing – mine!

  Normally – not that there could have been a normally because it was frankly unimaginable that anyone would usurp the authority of the Creative Director on such a fundamental issue of principle – but if there had been a normally – I would have responded by following up my first round of expletives by making it absolutely clear that Will and Lucille would only be given the job over my dead body. And not just dead but pickled in lime, padlocked in chains, weighted down in concrete and dropped into the deepest point of the ocean. Not that Will and Lucille, nakedly ambitious (particularly her), and a bit too smug for my liking, weren’t otherwise perfectly qualified and would, in all probability, have been first my choice anyway.

  No, it was the principle of the fucking thing. Or rather, as I keep saying, it would have been. But on this matter, at this time, given the place in which my head was presently at, I really had nothing to say, negative or otherwise. I couldn’t have summoned the energy to give a twopenny shit about matters of principle regarding lines of authority or anything else.

  So I continued to steeple my fingers, looked blankly at Vince, semi-shrugged my shoulders to indicate my utter passivity in the face of such news and wheeled around and back to my vigil by the window. I didn’t mean to be rude you understand; I had wanted to speak to him. I had wanted to say to him, “Why have you come into my office to talk to me about this completely meaningless shit, when I was having such a nice time thinking about Peggy?”

  It was just that I wasn’t convinced he’d fully understand why the fate of a seven-million-pound account was of less importance than daydreams about a girl I had gone out with for a few months twenty years ago.

  A few seconds passed and then I heard a quietly resigned, “Bloody hell” and the careful shutting of my office door behind him.

  Later Vince would tell me that he had gone straight to see Geoff after leaving me, and that, even at that early stage, they had begun to discuss the possibility that they might have to do without me. Vince and Geoff and I had been friends for the best part of twenty years – well, more or less since I came back from the States – and partners in BWD for nearly ten. But, as with the Corleones, this was business, and there was no room for sentiment. They had no idea what the problem was at first – he told me they suspected it was some kind of breakdown, whatever that meant – but they weren’t going to let the small matter of the mental health of a close friend stand in the way of business. If I had to play Tessio to their Michael and Tom and be garrotted with a cheesewire, then so be it. And, let me make it clear, if I had been in their position, I would have acted no differently.

  As it happened that’s not quite how things worked out – but I’m getting ahead of myself. My leg was rapidly improving – actually it was fine by Wednesday – but I carried on limping, hoping that the ostensible need to rest might seem to legitimise my being chairbound in my office. For the rest of that first week, I continued to hide there and ponder. Ponder, without really thinking about anything in any focused way. I pondered on Peggy. I pondered on Alison. I pondered on blokes in the street trying to cram things into cars.

  When I left the office in the evening, after saying a brief goodnight to an increasingly anxious looking Julia, and ignoring all the other quizzical eyes upon me – the answer to the “What the fuck’s up with Andrew?” question was obviously a matter for all-staff conjecture and no-one was buying the dodgy knee excuse – I would drive towards home and then, at a place in between, in Bayswater or somewhere, I would find a pub where I could safely count on not being recognised. Then I’d spend the evening drinking some not too terrible red and mooning over the Polaroid of Peggy.

  There was nothing unusual to arouse Alison’s suspicions about my getting back late from the office slightly the worse for wear – she quite often did the same herself. If she was already in, I would give her a perfunctory peck, ask her how her day had been without listening to the reply, grab something from the fridge, and plonk myself in front of Newsnight. If she wasn’t back, I’d ask the Nanny how the girls had been – without listening to the reply, politely dismiss her, and then go through my fridge/Newsnight routine. On the way up to bed, I’d look in on the girls – feeling vaguely tearful I seem to remember – and then get into bed with as little contact or conversation as could be managed without forcing a conflict. As Alison seemed as disinterested in me as I was in her, this was all accomplished fairly smoothly.

  Come the weekend and I was happy enough to get back to chauffeuring Alison round the shops; while I sat in the driver’s seat waiting for her to emerge from Joseph or Jigsaw or whereve
r, I had time to concentrate on Peggy. I busked my way through the evening and then it was Sunday again and tennis and being a dad and another chance to see ‘Grease’ and before you knew it, it was bedtime and somehow I had survived.

  And then I woke up on the Monday morning and the fog at last seemed to have lifted. I finally realised that I could not go on like this. After a week of fretting over my ancient lost romance, something approaching common sense had focused my dewy eyes and my dilemma was clear before me.

  However much the passage of time might have softened the reality of the past, I was in no doubt that I’d had a certain something with Peggy that I’d never had with anyone before or since. And that certain something had somehow, idiotically and regrettably – perhaps even tragically – been allowed to slip through my fingers. Incontrovertible fact: I only had one life. Didn’t I owe it to myself to find – or at least try to find – that something again?

  Yes.

  But.

  But those same hands through whose fingers I had let my once-in-a-lifetime something with Peggy slip, were now full to overflowing with another life: with children I loved, with a wife who I – well, let’s come back to that – with a business and partners and employees who depended on me. And yes, with a house and cars and holidays and all the other stuff that is measured on the E to P scale – meaningless shit, unquestionably, but, in all honesty, would I really want to be without it?

  So there was my dilemma. Except it wasn’t really a dilemma. Because, by any accepted definition of reality, Peggy was out of the frame – she’d been out of the frame for twenty years – so all I had to do was force myself to stop running the movie in my head.

  That’s what I told myself that Monday morning. Then I climbed into the Porsche, put on my Ray-Bans, hit the gas, and roared off to work, resolved to apologise to Vince and Geoff, and get back to real life. If it had been the proverbial midlife crisis, well, at least it had only lasted a week. I was going to be a man and forget about Peggy once and for all. Cold turkey, I told myself, cold turkey.

  Then I turned on the radio to my favourite Golden Oldie station, and out came Roxy Music. They were playing ‘Love is the Drug.’

  Love is the drug. Yes, indeed.

  Chapter 4

  New York, 1979

  It doesn’t matter whether you’re sixteen or sixty-four – as I now know from too much personal experience – after the euphoria of that rare first date, the one that goes well, comes the sudden onset of anxious doubt. Did it really go as well as all that? Or have you flipped through the runes but totally misread them?

  Sometimes I have memories of events which cannot possibly be as I remember them. A picture comes to mind which includes me bodily – in other words I am looking at myself in whatever scenario it is – and clearly that cannot have been the way it was. These misremembered events usually take vaguely cinematic form – once, for instance, I hitchhiked in the back of a red pickup truck up the Interstate to San Francisco, and what I see in my mind’s eye when I recollect that day is a kind of helicopter shot of the truck travelling a hundred feet below with the small figures of me – and the girl I was with – in the back.

  When I think back to the morning after that first evening out with Peggy, the camera is looking down from the ceiling in my rather tatty sublet on 2nd Avenue and 9th, and I am lying on my bed with my hands behind my head resting on the pillow. We are shooting through the ancient ceiling fan which, out of focus, is slicing through the picture in the foreground. Shades of ‘Apocalypse Now’ perhaps, but this is a very different movie. Though awake, my eyes are closed and there is a dreamy expression on my face, implying such beatific happiness that, compared with me, Larry wouldn’t have been at the races.

  Then my eyes open, my forehead furrows, and I sit bolt upright. Larry needn’t have worried. I am worried enough for both of us.

  Could I have got it wrong? I must have got it wrong. (Maybe I slap my forehead with the heel of my palm here.) Things like this – things like Peggy – don’t happen to me!

  Like most people, all but the really dull I am sure, I am a mass of contradictions. One is that I am, in some ways, absurdly, completely unjustifiably, self-confident and in others, a frightened rabbit. Ask me to do a presentation to a bunch of complete strangers – ten, twenty, fifty, doesn’t matter how many – and I know I am going to be absolutely brilliant. But when it comes to women, I am often headfirst straight down the nearest burrow. I’m pretty relaxed at the chat-up stage, but I never believe it is ultimately going to work. At bottom, I suppose, I don’t really believe I’m lovable. Mavis, what the fuck did you do to me?

  So this incredible feeling of oneness that I had sensed the night before with Peggy, seemed, in the cold light of day – and it was cold, April but not remotely spring-like – frankly, incredible. (Now I think about it, why on earth was that fan switched on in my moviemory?)

  I was still turning things over in my mind and never getting them settled, as I ate my breakfast – two eggs sunny side up, bacon, home fries, unbeatable – in the diner next door. I was, as always, flicking through ‘The New York Times’ – I’m a news and sports junkie wherever I am – but that day I was taking nothing in. When I got to work I went straight in to see Brett or Bart, one or the other, and allowed myself to be persuaded to suck on a little loosener. Usually, it would set off the predictable fit of the giggles but it just wound me up even more.

  I went back to my own office and brooded. What should I do? Should I casually pass by her desk and make like I just happened to be down on her floor and thought I’d say hi? Except that I’d never been down on her floor apart from when I went to find her the other day, so how embarrassingly unconvincing would that be? Should I call her and solicitously ask if she got home safely? That seemed like a more promising line to take except wouldn’t it make me look a bit too keen? Did anything kill passion more quickly than being too keen? Except possibly being solicitous. What girl wanted a guy whose old fashioned ways would impress her mother? I wondered what time she went to lunch. I wondered if I hung about in the entrance lobby I could spot her coming out of the elevator and just happen to run into her. Even I could see that not only was that a plan fraught with potential disaster, but possibly even less convincing than pretending to casually pass by her desk. But I was seriously turning over it in my mind, and trying to work out where I might stand to get a full view of all the elevator doors – tricky, so perhaps I should wait outside instead so I’d catch her as she came of out of the revolving door onto the street, but then it would seem like I was going back in, so how would I manufacture a reason for coming back out with her? – when my phone rang.

  “Hello, is that Andy?”

  My God, could it really be—

  “This is Peggy.”

  —it could, it could, and not only it could, it WAS. My ego suddenly re-inflated like an airbag in a head-on collision. How could I have ever doubted me?

  *

  That Saturday night we went to a movie, a Woody Allen movie. She was a major Woody-phile, as most were back then, and I was very excited: What could have been more appropriate than going to see a Woody Allen film in New York? It was all a bit surreal really. Going to the movies in Manhattan with a New York girl like Peggy was pretty much like being in a Woody Allen film – and within that movie-like scenario I was going to see a Woody film.

  I put this to her as we stood in line waiting to buy our tickets.

  “Just imagine,” she said, picking up on the idea, “if the Woody Allen movie we are going to see had a scene in it in which we are going to the movies to see a Woody Allen film.”

  “Right,” I said, “and imagine if, in that scene, the movie we are going to see is the movie we are going to see.”

  “Oh my God, yes,” said Peggy, “it would be like infinity! You know, like when you’re standing in a room full of mirrors so your reflection just keeps bouncing back
wards and forwards.”

  Look, it wasn’t the most brilliant or original exchange but it was that wavelength thing I’ve been on about – and the comfort you get from realising that you’re not out there in deep space alone. That there is someone who gets you – and who you get – standing right there beside you.

  “Have you ever seen those Escher drawings?” I asked.

  “What, you mean those staircase drawings that never end? And you can’t work out whether the people are supposed to be going up or down. I love those. I had one on my wall in my room when I was in High School—”

  “‘Ascending and Descending’,” I said quietly, a little nonplussed because I now knew something slightly amazing that she was about to find out.

  She looked at me carefully.

  “That was the one. Yeah, that was definitely the one. How did you know that?”

  “I had it on my wall too.”

  We stood in silence, absorbing the significance of this. I wasn’t a believer in fate or destiny or anything like that but there seemed to be a message here.

  “That’s freaky,” she said.

  “Weird,” I said.

  But I don’t think either Peggy or I thought it was freaky or weird. We didn’t say it, but I am pretty sure we both secretly thought it was, in the argot of the time and place, pretty neat.

  She put her arm through mine and we walked into the cinema.

  *

  After the movie came the small questions: Are you hungry? Fancy a drink? Just a coffee maybe? (We settled on just a coffee.) And then over the coffee I began to contemplate the big question: We’d seen the movie, we’d very soon have had the coffee, what happened then?

  Yes, sex was about to come into the equation. (By the way, if you’re thinking that it’s only girls who think like this, you’re obviously a girl.)