A Polaroid of Peggy Page 10

  “No, I don’t fucking well know—”

  “And I’ve come up with a package—”

  “YOU’VE DONE WHAT!”

  “—that I think she’s gonna buy.”

  Something inside told me that if the steam coming out of my ears wasn’t going to be the prelude to a full scale nuclear melt-down, I had better try to be a little calmer. So between clenched teeth, I said as evenly I could, “And what precisely is in this package?”

  “We-ell, more money of course—” He paused as though he had something to add.

  “Yes. And?”

  “And a week’s extra holiday. And—” He paused again.

  “And?”

  “—a seat on the board.”

  “A seat on the fucking board?! Are you fucking insane? You can’t offer someone a seat on the board without asking Geoff and me!” My internal plutonium rods were in serious overload again.

  “Er yeah, well, I did ask Geoff.”

  “And he was in agreement, was he?”

  That wasn’t intended as a rhetorical question but even before the words were out of my mouth, I realised it might as well have been. I sat down, utterly deflated and looked up at Vince like a beaten dog.

  He sat beside me and rested his hand gently on my arm.

  “Look mate, you know you haven’t been on top of things recently. Lucille came to see me and said she and Will were really upset that you’d let the DADA thing go by with barely a by your leave—”

  “What do you mean? I sent a memo round the office—”

  “Yeah, well, she said they’d had about enough and I was going to speak to you and then the next thing I know, we’re here, and she tells me Will’s off and I thought, you know what, we really can’t afford to lose her. Even forgetting all these awards, she’s special Andrew, she really is.”

  Special? Really special? For the first time, the precise shape of the ‘package’ was beginning to take shape in my mind. But I said nothing, just nodding meekly. Perhaps taking this as a signal that I was beginning to see things from his point of view, he went on, “Look mate, think about it. She’s winning every fucking award known to man. She’s getting a serious profile now. Did you know ‘The Times’ want to do a piece on her? Well, no, you wouldn’t but they do. Andrew, she’s a woman, a fucking beautiful woman, she’s whip smart and she’s young. This is 1999 mate. We’re three guys and we’re all in our forties—”

  Here he paused and gave me a meaningful look, very possibly to remind me that in a very few months one of we three guys would not be in our forties. And then he continued, and I was soon to realise that all the other bombshells he’d dropped were just to soften me up, because now came Hiroshima.

  “Just think Andrew, with Lucille as Deputy Creative Director, BWD can really kick on.”

  At last I found the strength to speak.

  “So, am I to understand that you and Geoff have agreed that Lucille will be appointed to the board as Deputy Creative Director.”

  Vince took his hand off my arm and looked me straight in the eye. He was all business now.

  “Yes Andrew, we have.”

  “Don’t we need a board meeting to decide that sort of thing?”

  “Do you really want us to have a board meeting to do it? Do you?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer because that really was a rhetorical question. He stood up and walked away from the table. And then after a few steps, he turned and came back, and leaned down and whispered in my ear.

  “And listen mate, you know the rules. What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. Okay?”

  And then he walked away again and up to Lucille who was talking to the top cat food client, both of them with their backs to where I sat. Vince put his right arm round her satiny bronzed shoulders just as he had been doing earlier, but this time, he didn’t put the other arm round the top cat food client. The picture was quite different and crystal clear.

  Predictably, I was feeling very sorry for myself. And, despite the fact that it was well after midnight in London, pathetically, I pulled out my mobile phone and called home to speak to Alison. A sleepy voice answered; it was the South African nanny. Alison wasn’t at home.

  Chapter 8

  New York, 1979

  “You mean anal?” asked Peggy over the lemon cheesecake.

  And she wasn’t using the word in any metaphorical sense, as in someone being anal. She meant anal as in directly connected with the anus, as in someone doing anal. And she seemed not to bat an eyelid as she said it, as sunnily unconcerned as if she had been discussing the possibility of having a cup of tea. Which, as it happens, at the time I was. Or rather, I was having not a cup of tea, but a glass. We were in the Russian Tearoom on West 57th, a week or so after the madness with Miller, and my subsequent unhinging at the photographers party. (I had, after the sound morning-after talking-to I had given myself, managed to take things a little more steadily – except where Peggy was concerned. I was as infatuated as ever.)

  I can’t recall exactly what I had said that had led to her asking the question, but, whatever it was, I am pretty sure that wasn’t what I’d meant and Peggy had, to coin an appropriate phrase, got things completely arse about face. I can remember that my response was, in best comedy fashion, to spit half of my mouthful of tea straight out and to choke on the rest. This was 1979 remember, and the world was not quite as anally aware as it is in 2015. I don’t mean to sound like a prude, it wasn’t a subject that I was disinterested in, just one that I couldn’t have imagined broaching – at least not over tea and cheesecake, and certainly not in the Russian Tearoom where the average age of the clientele seemed to be about eighty – for some inexplicable reason Peggy loved the place – and, I imagined, not the sort of people who were in the habit of hearing the word anal much used in public. (Bowels on the other hand would have been a different matter. They looked like exactly the sort of people who talked about bowels non-stop.)

  While I struggled for life, Peggy casually added a rider, “’Cos you can’t just do it, you know. You’ve got to prepare for it.”

  I chose not to go into precisely what she meant by that, though I have to confess I have always rather regretted that I didn’t – I can’t be certain that it wouldn’t have led to an opportunity forever lost; it was a subject that we never did get back to. Instead, I made a half-hearted attempt to mop the tea off my shirt, muttering something like “No, no, I didn’t mean that at all, what on earth are you on about?” and abruptly suggested we get the check. Peggy thought my embarrassment hilarious.

  What this little scene shows is first, that we had, by this stage, got around to talking about sex, if not yet engaging in it, and second, that Peggy was much more than the nice Jewish girl one might have taken her to be. At least, that was the way I looked at it. If I was a little shocked at the implication that she might have indulged in such practises, I didn’t think of her as being in the least bit diminished by it. Quite the reverse. To begin with, I have always liked the idea of a woman with a past – and this suggested she might have had one. And I was more than a little impressed by how unfazed she had seemed to be. It was that American thing, which I so envied, of seemingly being entirely at ease with everything to do with sex, so unlike we repressed Brits. Or, despite the popular myth – popular in America anyway – maybe I am doing a disservice to my fellow countrymen. Maybe it was just me.

  *

  Sex. We were moving towards it. Slowly, by the standards of 2015, I will grant you. Glacially even. And not too sharpish even by the standards of 1979. But, in mitigation, let me remind you yet again that I did have the Miller problem to contend with. ‘Carpe diem’ is all very well but you have to have somewhere for the action to happen. What was wrong with my place, you may ask? Pretty much everything is the answer. The Playboy Mansion it wasn’t. I had, you may remember, made a half-hearted attempt to lure her back t
here on the night of our first date, but in view of the state of the place, it was probably no bad thing that she declined.

  But a man can take only so much. Caution was about to be thrown to the wind. After our hurried exit from the Russian Tearooms, and some sort of equilibrium had been restored after a stroll through Central Park and a bite to eat somewhere, I did for a second time, at long last, ask Peggy to come back to my place.

  But sometimes a man should take a little more. (Usually at the times when he can only take so much.) Caution should be kept firmly in hand. As I’d suspected would be the case, Peggy wasn’t much impressed with my sub-fusc sub-let and its faded furnishings and who could blame her? I wasn’t the most fastidious of housekeepers – I really did no more than maintain an uneasy truce with the cockroaches squatting in the kitchen – and then there was the cat. Part of the sub-letting deal was that I should look after the landlord’s manky (tom)cat. I’d never much cared for cats and I found this one particularly unappealing – never even bothered to learn his name then so I can’t share it with you now – but the apartment came with the cat or the apartment didn’t come at all, and it came a lot cheaper than most. However, possibly because I wasn’t the most diligent carer, his litter tray was sniffable from the moment you had turned the six locks on the front door. This didn’t enhance the romantic atmosphere. Though Peggy was willing to do some heavy petting on the sagging sofa she refused – as we used to say when I was a boy – to go all the way. (Younger readers may find this part of the story stretches their credulity.) Ever the optimist, I chose to believe that she was saving herself for a more convivial setting or at least until she was free to spend the night, but when this was to be I had no idea.

  It was Jerry Seinfeld who solved the problem. Indirectly perhaps, but he played the pivotal role.

  *

  Shortly after the tea-room incident, I was sent off to the Chicago office for a few days – I was needed to “help put out a fire on a hot chilli sauce”, as my Creative Supervisor, thrilled with his own joke, put it – and so Peggy and I had a little break from each other. Absence, as in the case of the Mono affair, did just what they say it does. My conviction that she was the one grew deeper every moment I was away from her, and as soon as I returned, I rushed straight down to her office to present her with a little gift I had brought her. I had spent hours trudging round O’Hare looking for just the right thing – nothing too corny. As usual I couldn’t make up my mind and eventually heard the tannoy announcer insist that ‘Andrew Williams go to Gate 24 immediately.’ So, in my panic, I flung a few dollars at the hapless sales girl and grabbed something I had seen and unequivocally rejected two or three tours around the airport before, but which now seemed to be the only thing to hand. It was a novelty cigarette table lighter, a miniature Marlboro cowboy whose ten gallon hat you tipped from the back. This engaged the flywheel, which in turn caused the spark that sent a flame roaring out the back of his horse, its tail rising just in time to avoid conflagration. On a plaque on the little plastic plinth, it said ‘A Gift From The Windy City.’ I fretted on the plane all the way back to New York that it really wasn’t Peggy’s kind of thing, and not only because she didn’t smoke. But, having nothing else to give her and hoping, I suppose, that it really would be the thought that counts, I duly presented it. She seemed absolutely thrilled, declared it ‘just hilarious’ and insisted on running around demonstrating it to all the not-Peggys in the casting department. I did suspect that maybe she was laughing just a little too hard, but the possibility that she might be faking it – and the kindness that implied – made me love her all the more.

  She was still enthusing about the Marlboro man and his horse at the coffee shop where we had lunch later that day.

  “Jerry would love this,” she mused, as she ignited the lighter for the thousandth time. “He would absolutely love it.”

  “Who is Jerry?”

  She looked up at me, somehow surprised that I hadn’t divined who she meant.

  “Jerry,” she repeated. “Jerry Seinfeld.”

  “Who’s Jerry Seinfeld?”

  She set the cowboy and his horse on the table.

  “You don’t know who Jerry Seinfeld is?”

  Hard to believe now, but at that time I, along with just about every other living Englishman, had never heard of Jerry Seinfeld. But Peggy, along with a growing band of in-the-know aficionados, was already a major league fan.

  “Jerry Seinfeld,” she patiently explained, “is this incredibly amazing new comedian. I mean he’s not that new, he’s been around a couple years, I think. But he is funny, I mean really funny. He just like talks about everyday stuff, stuff he just comes across. Andy you have to see him. Check out the ‘Voice’. He’s doing all the comedy clubs.”

  To this day, I have never managed to work out why Peggy thought the cowboy with the farting horse would have proved so irresistible to Jerry – in some post-modern, ironic way, I have always assumed, without quite knowing how – but I didn’t pursue the point and it didn’t matter. What her remark did do was inspire me to look in that week’s ‘Village Voice’ to see where he might be playing, and what I discovered was that, one week hence, on Saturday night at 9 p.m., Jerry Seinfeld, the hottest new comedian in America, would be playing at The Blue Mongoose in Stamford, Connecticut.

  A plan began to be hatched. I asked Bart or Brett where Stamford was, and they confirmed what I had thought, that it was about an hour or so from Manhattan, about fifty miles away, close to the Connecticut, New York State border. At the next free moment, which just happened to be the very next moment, I took a break from the office – telling Laverne, the receptionist on my floor, that I was going to Barnes and Noble to get a book about something I was working on. And in a sense, all senses really apart from the critical one, I wasn’t deceiving her. Because I was indeed going to Barnes and Noble to get a book, and it was for something I was working on: the most important thing I was working on, in fact. The seduction of Peggy.

  The book I chose was ‘Country Inns of the Tri-state Area’ by Karen Brown. Not a title to set the heart racing you might think, but in my case, in this case, you would have been wrong. The sales assistant at Barnes and Noble had told me that if I was looking for a really nice place to stay near Stamford – “not too big, something a little intimate” were my exact words to him, and with a slightly camp, semi-leer he got my meaning exactly – then this was the book that I would be sure to find it in.

  I took it back to the office and with Bart or Brett’s advice to assist me – “hey man, check that place out!” – I selected the Gardner Inn, a few miles away in a place called Pound Ridge, just across the state border in New York. The illustration in Karen Brown’s book showed a big, white clapboard house, a ‘colonial’ something they called it in the blurb, with a lawn that ran down to a small lake, where there was a little jetty and a boat you could take out for a row. It had six rooms, all with their own everything, and their ‘celebrated award winning Sunday brunches’ included ‘locally smoked river trout accompanied by horseradish scrambled eggs and home-baked corn bread and Bloody Mary’s mixed to Dan Gardner’s secret recipe – a bracing walk afterwards strongly advised!’

  Faint heart never won fair maiden and there is a tide in the affairs of men which if taken at the flood and all that kind of thing and for once, I did seize the moment. I called the Blue Mongoose and booked two tickets, and I called The Gardner Inn and booked the second best double room. (The price would normally have made me blanche but having already been told the price of the very best double room it somehow seemed quite reasonable.)

  I then told Laverne that the book I had wasn’t the right one and I needed to change it and I left the office again, but this time I went to Grand Central, where I bought two return tickets to Stamford for the required date.

  With the complete dirty deed done – well, not the complete dirty deed but the complete preliminary part of the di
rty deed that I intended should lead to the ultimate dirty deed – I called down to Peggy and asked her to meet me for a drink that evening, an invitation which she seemed happy enough to accept.

  “Peggy,” I asked, as the waitress set our drinks down, “are you sitting comfortably?”

  “Am I what?” she said, clearly not familiar with the phrase.

  “Never mind,” I said and proceeded to lay out the plan that I had for the forthcoming weekend – the plan for the two of us. And, for added drama, I produced, and laid on the table and turned around so she could read them, the ‘Village Voice’ open at the page with the ad for Jerry Seinfeld’s gig, ‘Country Inns of the Tri-state Area’ by Karen Brown open at the page with the Gardner Inn on it, and the two rail tickets to Stamford. ‘Voice’ first, Karen Brown on top of that, and then the tickets placed, first one and then, with a flourish, the other, on top of that.

  “Wow,” she said, silently studying them. “Nice work.”

  Then she looked up at me and with a shrug and a little smile said, “Okay.” (Brief pause.) “Okay.”

  *

  The rest of the week I actually made a point of not seeing Peggy. She called up one day to suggest going to a movie, but I asked if she minded if we took a raincheck – I was beginning to get into the lingo – because I had too much work to do. This was totally untrue, but I didn’t want anything to go wrong between now and the weekend and I figured that the less we saw of each other, the less chance of a misunderstanding that could lead to a wrong word that could lead to a row that would bring the carefully constructed architecture of our weekend away crashing down.

  What I did do, however, was make sure that our arrangements for Saturday were beyond misunderstanding. I constantly took the rail tickets out of my wallet to check and recheck that I had booked to the right place and on the right date. And then I checked in my wallet again to make sure that I had safely put the tickets back in it. I called the The Blue Mongoose to make certain that Jerry Seinfeld had not been laid low by Mono or some other itinerant germ and that the performance was due to proceed as planned. I called the Gardners in Pound Ridge on at least four separate occasions to make absolutely certain that for this coming Saturday night, the second best double bedroom in the house had my name on it and that it was written in unmistakeably clear, capital letters in indelible ink. On the first occasion this involved no more than a polite enquiry that there had been no confusion.