A Polaroid of Peggy

by Richard Phillips

  Options: I play it extremely cool, don’t even try to kiss her, and let things build a little longer. Or: I go for the kiss – the way things had been going I was pretty sure she wasn’t going to do the last minute turn of the head thing and catch it on the cheek – but then leave it at that for tonight. Or: I go for the big one, invitation to come up, view etchings, etc. First option – safe – possibly too safe, actually maybe just cowardly. Second one, pretty safe, but still, conceivably, with the suggestion of smouldering passion to come. Third, obviously risky but potential ecstasy, movement of earth, explosion of stars, creation of universe, start of Williams/Lee dynasty, future member of which goes on to win Nobel prize.

  Really, a moment’s serious thought told you it was a no-brainer – as they didn’t used to say in 1979. Go for option two – to begin with. If she responds in a big way – enthusiastic tongue engagement, willing participation in embrace, even hint of pelvic thrust – then you switch to option three. If you just get back a non-committal so-so probe between your teeth, you should probably go for a neat finish, pull away, promise to call her and go home to put the best construction on her reaction you possibly can: something like – she’s a nice girl who’s not the type to jump into bed before she’s had a chance to get to know you. Emphasise the positives. She kissed back, didn’t she? She didn’t try to pull away. And if you start worrying that was because you went for the neat finish before she had the chance to pull away, remember that was why you went for the neat finish. To make sure you could tell yourself afterwards that you honestly didn’t know whether she might or might not have pulled out, thus keeping open the possibility that she might have wanted to continue onward – and upward – and who knows where-ward! – which would mean in turn, that you can go off to sleep believing that somewhere down the yet-to-be-established line there might still be a Nobel prize in the offing.

  Okay, strategy sorted. But now for the tactics. Where to do the kissing? I could lean across now – still in the coffee place – and go for it. But that might be clumsy – bound to be when you’re sitting in separate chairs. You lean towards her, your chair tips forwards, weight plus momentum etc., and before you know it you’re in free-fall, head first into lap. Not cool.

  Instead I make the sensible call. I ask for the check and pay, noting, appreciating but refusing to accept her offer to stump up for her half – though also hoping that won’t be taken as setting a pattern – and walk Peggy towards the subway station. I reach for her hand. She takes mine. So far so good. I give her hand a little squeeze. She returns squeeze. As Peggy herself might say, better yet. We get to the subway station. I put my arm around her waist, gently pull her towards me, and project my lips in the direction of hers. She tilts her chin upward to me. Lips meet, lips open – teeth don’t clash, hooray! – tongues mingle, tongues explore, saliva is exchanged. Meanwhile the concomitant reaction elsewhere. Nerve endings tingle, blood flows, member stirs, hips thrust – nothing too aggressive, just the natural order of things – and, blow me down – I use the words advisedly – if her hips aren’t pushing back. Houston, we are go!

  I pull my head away and look her in the eye. Making it sound as deep and meaningful as I can and not at all connected with the needle on the lustometer which is now well into the red zone, I say, “Peggy, do you want to come back to my place?”

  And she says, “Oh Andy, I’d love too, I really would – but I don’t think I can.”

  And I say, as I obviously would, “Why not?” and then trying to seem playfully ironic but more probably just sounding desperate, I add, “The night is young.”

  And she says, “No, I really can’t. Miller will start worrying if I don’t get back.”

  And I say, with an uneasy, creeping premonition, “Miller?”

  And she says, “Yeah, Miller. I guess I should have told you about Miller. We ah … we ah … kind of live together.”

  There is a tiny, delusional bit of me that is hanging on to the improbable idea that this is one of Peggy’s jokes, and that I am about to discover Miller is her pet goldfish.

  “Miller’s kind of possessive.”

  A possessive goldfish? Seems unlikely. Could still be a dog though? Or maybe a Siamese cat.

  “Might start phoning round.”

  Probably not a dog then, or a Siamese, no matter how uncannily intelligent they are supposed to be. All not lost yet however. Could still be just a roommate, could even be a girl. This was America after all, and you kept coming across girls with surnames for first names – like Cameron or Porter or yes, maybe, Miller.

  “Look I know I should have told you about him—”

  Miller obviously wasn’t one of those girls.

  “—but you see, these days we’re mostly more like roommates.”

  Last possible escape route cut off. And now the worm is finally beginning to turn. Miller? Miller! Apart from anything else, what sort of poncey, pretentious name is that? I was casting around for a weapon; that would have to do.

  “Sorry Peggy, there’s something I don’t quite understand. ‘These days he’s more like a roommate’ indicates to me that at some point Mill-er, was slightly more than just a roommate. And ‘mostly’ kind of suggests that occasionally at least, Mill-er still is. In which case, can you possibly explain what all this is about?”

  “Why are you saying Miller like that? You don’t have to be nasty about him. You don’t even know him.”

  “No, you’re right, I don’t know him. I thought I might be getting to know you, but clearly I was woefully mistaken.” She opened her mouth to say something but I cut her off. “And don’t you think it’s a bit rich to be questioning my – my – my attitude towards Mill-er when you’re the one with some fucking explaining to do?”

  It was the end of a beautiful evening.

  *

  I got back to my grubby little apartment at about two in the morning, fell face down on the bed and passed out fully clothed, window blinds still up, neon signs blinking from across the street and intermittently lighting up my bedroom.

  Furious, without another word to Peggy, I’d turned on my heel and stomped off in a self-righteous paddy, walking the forty-odd blocks between the midtown subway station where I’d left her, and my place downtown. But I didn’t get home before finding a bar or two along the way – the first was in Gramercy Park, I think, the second, who knows – where I got into serious set-em-up-Joe mode. Whiskey is an acquired taste which I’ve never acquired but I managed to grimace and shiver my way through a succession of neat shots of Jack Daniels. It was the only brand of American whiskey I’d ever heard of so that was the one I ordered. (Who says advertising doesn’t work?) I have to confess I wallowed in my role of jilted, heartsick loner – I’d gone from being in a Woody Allen romantic comedy to some sort of film noir: shades of Ray Milland in ‘The Lost Weekend’, tie loosened, hat tipped back. Not that I was wearing a tie or a hat, and actually, I’m not at all sure Ray Milland was either or whether he was even sitting in a bar in ‘The Lost Weekend’, but you get the general idea. In a certain, masochistic way I probably rather enjoyed it, or at least, on some level felt a slightly warped satisfaction. Didn’t it just go to show that the inner, inner, inner me was right all along? That I was a no-hope loser doomed forever not to get the girl?

  When I abandoned Peggy I was incredulous – how could she have just sprung it on me like that? – and I felt entirely within my rights to be as livid as I was. But even as I slumped on the stool at the bar I was beginning to question whether I hadn’t over reacted. Of course, it wouldn’t have been me if I hadn’t been beset by self-doubt, but when I tried to properly review what had happened I just couldn’t make sense of it. It seemed that Peggy had, by any standards, behaved appallingly in encouraging me to think she was single and fancy free, and what’s more, fancied me – when all the time she was concealing the fact that she was living with another bloke. And yet, against that, t
here had been absolutely no necessity for her to have mentioned him at all. She could have just found a polite way to decline my offer and gone home. I might even have ‘respected’ her for that – as I said before, I could have looked at it from the ‘she’s a nice girl who’s not the type to jump into bed before she’s had a chance to get know you’ angle. So either it was just a sort of casual cruelty or … or I didn’t really know, but maybe she just felt she needed to be honest with me. And hadn’t everything I’d seen in Peggy, everything I intuited – all the vibes I got from her – up until the moment of her confession at the subway station, been so totally positive? She liked to kid around, yes, that much I knew – but that was a mile away from the apparent duplicity over Miller.

  Miller. Miller! Mill-er! Just bringing his ridiculous name to mind set me off again. Apparent duplicity? Apparent! It was apparent because what it looked like was exactly what it was. “Barman, gimme another Jacque Dannulls.” (I never said please. People in American bars never do.) Besides, the fact that I had so totally bought into her being a decent sort proved precisely what? Since when had I been such a great judge of character? “Barmannuther Jacquesdannulls.” And so it went on.

  On Sunday, it was no better. I surfaced – that is to say, had my eyes forced open by the blinding sunlight now streaming in – to discover the proverbial jackhammer between my ears. I got out of bed long enough to pull down the blinds, tear off my jacket and trousers, get a glass of water, locate some Tylenol, have a pee, and turn on the TV. Then I went back to bed in my underwear and shirt – disgusting but true, I didn’t take it off until I fell into the shower on Monday morning – and socks! – and watched reruns of ‘The Honeymooners’ and ‘I Love Lucy’ until I fell asleep with the lights still on at goodness knows what time. If it had been today, I would undoubtedly have spent the day with my cellphone – I would have been in America so I wouldn’t have called it a mobile – never out of my sight or hearing. I would have been hoping against hope that Peggy would call, and been fighting the urge to call her. But this was 1979 so mobile phones were no more of a reality than jetpacks. At least, that was one agony from which I was mercifully spared.

  Of course, unless you’re paying absolutely no attention to the timeline here, you will have realised that it was all eventually resolved. Eventually was in about twelve hours, first thing Monday morning. Peggy knocked politely on my office door, and stood before my desk – I didn’t ask her to sit down – from which position she offered this explanation.

  “Andy, you had a perfect right to get shitty with me, I’m sorry, I really am. I know I should have mentioned Miller and everything before but it’s been falling apart for months, a year maybe, well maybe not quite a year but anyway. It was only a matter of time before one of us – well, you get the picture. Anyway, I run into you and we go for a drink and we have such a good time and you ask me out and I think why not? What am I going to do, say no, I’ve got to stay in and spend another Saturday night not talking to a guy who I’m really not that into anymore, and who’s certainly not into me?”

  “I thought you said he was possessive?”

  “Yeah, well … that’s except when I’m with him, I guess … Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah … look … I just never thought ahead, I suppose. Dumb. But whoever said I was smart? Anyway I just wanted to say I was sorry, and you know what, I totally like you. I really do. That was the reason I came along. You were the reason.”

  I may not have that absolutely word perfect and got all the phrasing and half-a-beat New York pauses and what have you in exactly the right places but, as near as dammit, that was it. She really did say – I totally like you – you were the reason. For a perfect score she could have added ‘I went straight home, packed my things, and moved out and spent the rest of the weekend huddled in your doorway praying for your forgiveness,’ but she didn’t and being the magnanimous guy I am, I was prepared to overlook it.

  So that was it. A storm in a teacup. Hardly worth mentioning you might think. But if that was it, it was only it for now. Because what seemed to characterise our relationship from the very beginning – or at least one of the things that did – was that we had to weather a whole series of storms in teacups. I am not going to bother to record them all here, but, staying with the meteorological theme, it was as though our relationship was centred somewhere near Haiti in the middle of the hurricane season. No, it wasn’t. That’s going much too far. No, it was situated in a place where most of the time it’s a perfect temperature and the sun is always on your face and you’d never want to be anywhere else except on those too frequent occasions when these black clouds suddenly appear and explode above your head. In other words, mostly utterly glorious but sometimes, for short bursts, anything but.

  Why this was, whose fault it was, I really can’t say. Looking back, it seems to me that we were never really able to get past that; we never seemed to get on an even keel for long enough. Maybe that was the reason, or one of them, why just sailing serenely on for ever and ever was never going to be our thing.

  Anyway, after Peggy had given her little speech of contrition, I came round to her side of the desk and kissed her. It was, bar none, the most fabulous snog of my life. Slow, lingering, wet and wonderful. If you’re thinking I’m going to tell you that some perfectly appropriate piece of music just happened to start coming through the wall from the office next door, you’d be wrong. My moviemory of that scene is a two shot of Peggy and I clinging and kissing, and as the camera slowly pushes in closer and closer, we hear nothing but the white noise of the air conditioning and the occasional muffled beep from the Manhattan traffic outside.

  Chapter 5

  London, 1999

  I tried. I really did. For the next few weeks the Polaroid of Peggy stayed locked away. I dropped it into the top left hand drawer of my office desk and turned the key. And whenever I was tempted to look at it – and dive into the warm waters of the past – I willed myself not to, or found some sort of distraction. I didn’t exactly take the Baden Powell option and nip off for a cold shower whenever I felt the blood rise, but it was that kind of thing. Denial – and the masochistic satisfaction one takes from it – were the order of the day. The trouble with denial is that the more you try to deny whatever it happens to be that you’re denying, the more you think about it. Which sort of defeats the object.

  I pretended to throw myself into work. I really didn’t feel the genuine pull of it, the way I had pre-PP, but I made a decent fist of pretending that I did. I went to all the meetings I was asked to, and a few that I wasn’t. I manufactured a fake enthusiasm that I was sure looked just like the real thing. I made a point of randomly pitching up in the offices of all my people, not to keep them on their toes but to give them the impression that I was on mine. To all intents and purposes, I was back to being the relentlessly upbeat, company cheerleader that they expected me to be. Eeyore was out. Tigger was back in.

  I suppose I hoped that if I carried on like this, sooner or later I would begin to feel the way I was pretending to feel, that the act would become the reality. Only it didn’t. I was Sally at Katz’s Deli and not a wet patch anywhere.

  I tried to get involved with the work Will and Lucille were doing on the new business we’d won. (It was a breakfast cereal account – our initial project for which was to be the launch of some new kind of chocolatey (but not actual chocolate, of course) wheaty something or others.) I got Julia to fix a time with them, and, at the appointed hour, they came to my office with some ideas for TV commercials. Normally I would have seen them alone, but Vince had popped in to waste ten minutes, and he was still there. He was leaning back on my desk, right beside my chair, in which I, not unnaturally, was seated.

  “I’ll leave you to it,” Vince said, as Will and Lucille came in but, possibly because it slightly rankled – despite my previously denial – that Vince had appointed them to the account in the first place, I said something like, “No, stay Vinc
e. We’re all friends here.”

  So he stayed, still leaning on my desk; in other words right beside me, or, after I swivelled in my chair to face them, perhaps just behind and, as he was standing, above me.

  “So,” I said, ushering them towards the repro Eileen Gray leather sofa that my office guests were expected to perch on – bloody uncomfortable really, “What have you got?”

  Will, a rather rangy, dress-down (but properly labelled) Mancunian was the Art Director, and, for whatever reason, it’s usually the case, as it was in this, that the Art Director nods along while his work-partner, the Copywriter, does the talking.

  One of my very favourite words in all dictionary-dom is ‘pulchritudinous’ and it might have been invented for Lucille. (Lucille Wood to give her some family context. ‘Lucille Wood – and so would I!’ as some office wag once had it, and which all the boys – being boys – would chorus whenever her full name was said.) Lucille liked to wear tight pencil skirts to emphasise her swervy hips and would sit with her legs pinned together – possibly to get you thinking about what it might be like if they weren’t – and tucked slightly at an angle to her body. She favoured men’s shirts not, shall we say, buttoned all the way to the very top, and would lean forward in such a way that her impossible to ignore, and wonderfully supported bosoms – another of my favourite words – were, well, impossible to ignore.

  She was, as, of course, she would have to have been, from Bristol, and had that slightly childish Julie Burchill-like voice, with just a hint of a lisp thrown in. To complete the effect was a torrent of loosely arranged blondish hair and a pair of thick, black, men’s glasses kept on the edge of her nicely turned-up nose. She thought that everyone fancied the pants off her, and she was usually right. She was ruthless in using this to advantage, and, by the way, we weren’t above it either. If we had an excuse to squeeze her into a new business pitch, particularly if none of the prospective clients were women, we had been known to do it.