A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m Nancy Gardner, welcome to the Gardner Inn. Once you’ve signed in, Dan will make you one of his famous Bloody Marys – first one on the house!”

  “You’re really very kind,” I remember saying because Peggy leaned up and whispered in my ear “You’re really very kind?” – her way of gently enquiring why I was sounding as though I had suddenly jumped into a play by Noel Coward. My excuse for unthinkingly switching on my Brit-in-America autopilot – had I not been too embarrassed to give it – would have been that I was now completely pre-occupied with the upcoming perils of registration. How were we supposed to sign in? I wasn’t quite as gauche as Benjamin Braddock but I understood how he felt. In the event, Peggy became an unlikely Mrs Robinson by taking hold of the form and signing – with our real names – and then smiling sweetly but directly at Nancy Gardner and challenging her to raise an eyebrow if she dared. Which, of course, being the wise-in-the-ways-of-the-world innkeeper she was, she didn’t.

  Peggy and I were then invited to take our seats for brunch. Did we have the smoked trout with the horseradish scrambled eggs? The constantly replenished jug of Bloody Mary, the secret of whose legendary recipe, was, I would guess, about ten parts vodka to one part the rest, ensured that I haven’t got the foggiest idea. After that, we attempted to regain our balance by taking some fresh air and strolled hand in hand down to the lake.

  There cannot be a Brit who has spent any time in the States who hasn’t periodically felt that they were living through a movie. Having been weaned on American film and sitcom, the sights and sounds of the place are so familiar, that reality and the cinematic often become almost indistinguishable. My description of that weekend may seem like an endless series of allusions to film stars and movies but every ten minutes something came up that reminded me of one Hollywood moment or another. And the next two names to spring to mind were Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly as they appeared in ‘High Society’. It was clambering into the boat by the jetty, where the billiard table lawn – backyard? per-lease! – met the rippling water, that set me off. You remember the bit where Bing sings ‘True Love’ to Grace? I know that scene took place in a yacht on the open sea, rather than in a rowing boat on a smallish lake, but as Peggy dangled her hand in the water and I pulled on the oars – or was it the other way around? – it still felt like we’d been cast in a remake. I don’t believe I was so foolish as to try to sing to Peggy, but it was no less a serenade.

  The afternoon wore on. We just about managed to get the boat back to land – being a natural oarsman is another of those gifts with which I have not been blessed – and, after a couple of near catastrophes, we were somehow able to clamber back on to the jetty without falling in and tie the boat up without it drifting back into the middle of the lake.

  Feeling rather smug about this successful demonstration of my seamanship – our manoeuvres were closely scrutinised by a couple of other guests in deckchairs as well as the Gardner’s enormous marmalade cat from its position in the sunniest spot on the lawn – I took Peggy’s hand and led her up to the patio where a couple of comely waitresses were serving what they fondly imagined was English afternoon tea. An elderly man with a pencil moustache and a bowtie sat at a baby grand positioned just inside the open French doors of the house, and was accompanying the proceedings with slightly jazzy interpretations of tunes from what has since become known as the Great American Songbook.

  It was when he started to play “Let’s Fall in Love” that I started to feel an incipient queasiness about proceedings. While Peggy was spreading Boysenberry jam or something equally American on a scone the size of a landmine she began absentmindedly singing along and it was when she got to the bit about the doings of birds, bees and educated fleas that I was suddenly reminded of what was expected of me when the sun went down. Now, I suppose there are some blokes who are so secure in their blokeishness that it never occurs to them that homo erectus might not always do what it says on the tin. But on this day of days, which more to the point, was to be followed by this night of nights, I began, despite all my best efforts to distract myself, to imagine the unimaginable. And, as we all know, when a doubt creeps in, it usually adamantly refuses to creep out again. And if one is sufficiently neurotic – and the sufficiency of my neuroses has never been questioned – then it is not unknown for a creeping doubt to metamorphose into a full-blown self-fulfilling fucking prophecy. In golf, this phenomenon, which has been known to afflict some of the greatest ever to have played the game – the double Masters winner, Bernhard Langer is perhaps the best known victim – is called the ‘yips’. Despite the fact that you may be able to drive the ball with unerring accuracy and perform all the other golfing feats of derring do that only prodigious natural talent and years of mind-numbing practice and the very latest computer designed equipment can bring about, when you have the ‘yips’ you can find yourself unable to do something your half blind granny could do with her walking stick; namely get it in the hole from two feet away. I don’t know if there is a name for the sexual version of the yips, but we all know what happens when you can’t get it in. And the last bloody thing I wanted that night, was a consoling arm from Peggy around my slumped shoulders and to hear her utter the dreaded words, ‘Really, it’s nothing to worry about, it happens to everyone.’

  Sensing that all wasn’t as it should be, Peggy broke out of her scone-spreading song-singing reverie to look at me, frown, and say, “What?” And then, when she saw I was still lost in space, more insistently she repeated, “What?!”

  I realised I was staring straight ahead, with my mouth open, my face, I imagine, appearing to be as transfixed with horror as my thoughts were. Thinking that her question was best avoided, I attempted to reconfigure my expression into something approaching a casual smile, and said, “More tea?”

  “Tea?” she said. “That’s what you were thinking about? More tea?”

  She didn’t seem remotely convinced. She looked at me thoughtfully for a moment, shook her head, then picked up her scone and boysenberry jam, and then brought it towards her mouth before suddenly changing her mind. She set the scone back on the plate, stood up and said to me, “C’mon. Is this what we’ve come for? Tea?”

  And she took my hand, walked me back to reception, asked for the room key, won another eyeball to eyeball challenge with Nancy Gardner and led me upstairs to the second best room in the house.

  *

  With reference to what went on that night in the second best room in the house, and this not being that kind of book, I am only going to mention what is strictly dramatically necessary.

  I am able to report – with relief – that none of the misgivings I had at the tea table proved to have any foundation. I cannot say that this was all or even in part due to Peggy’s rapid response to my fit of the vapours over the boysenberry jam. Everything might have gone swimmingly anyway, though her intervention could hardly have done any harm. We never discussed what demons were at work in my head that afternoon, so what she knew or what she thought she knew, I have absolutely no idea. What is certain is that by osmosis or intuition or whatever, she divined that this was the moment to drop the scone and carpe diem pronto.

  This demonstrates two of the characteristics in Peggy that I found most wonderful. One was this wavelength thing I’ve mentioned. Somehow, unlike any other girl or woman I have ever known, she had this uncanny understanding of where I was coming from – and of where I was trying to get to. The other, as I was to realise more and more – in this case to my benefit but sometimes to my cost – was that she not only knew my mind, she knew her own, and she was never afraid to act upon it. I began by fancying Peggy, then I found out that I liked her, then that I loved her, and, in the end, on top of all this, I discovered how much I admired her.

  A couple of other things to mention about our night under the gabled roof of the Gardner Inn. And here, I am – just this once – going to describe a physical detail of what we
nt on. As with most couples I suspect, not that I can possibly know such a thing for certain of course, when Peggy and I first advanced bedward we found ourselves in what is rather unerotically referred to as the missionary position. Whatever its reputation for unadventurousness, the one overwhelming advantage of this old favourite is that, at the critical moment, you are looking straight into each other’s eyes. (Unless, that is, you are trying to deliberately avoid them, which only serves to underline how much truth about your feelings it reveals.)

  I should emphasise at this point that I am not big on souls. As I’ve mentioned before, I am not a religious person, and neither do I claim to be a spiritual one. Really, I have no idea what that even means. If I can’t see and touch it, if it can’t be proved under a microscope, than by and large, I choose not to believe it. I have no difficulty in following the Douglas Adams line that 42 is the answer to everything.

  Except.

  Except that when I looked into Peggy’s eyes that night – and I believe she felt the same looking into mine – it really did seem as if I was seeing something beyond the physical and yes, if such a thing exists, which, of course, I know for absolutely certain – almost – that it doesn’t, then I was looking deep into the proverbial windows of the soul. There is nothing on earth so thrilling as that feeling and I have never known that feeling so strongly as I did that night with Peggy.

  And that is all that I have to say on this matter. Except this: we didn’t leave the second best room in the house at all that evening. We ordered room service, watched a bit of telly, and the rest will have to be left to your imagination. When we awoke the next morning, the two tickets for the 9 p.m. show at The Blue Mongoose in Stamford were still, unused, in my wallet.

  Over breakfast Peggy said, “A pity. You’d have really loved Jerry.”

  To which I should have answered, “Not as much as I love you.”

  But I didn’t.

  ‘Coulda, Woulda, Shoulda’. Isn’t that how the song goes?

  *

  On that warm and sunny Sunday morning – it could have been overcast and freezing for all I know, but, inevitably, warm and sunny is how I remember it – we elected to take a walk into town: ‘The historic hamlet of Pound Ridge’ as it was described in the little publicity brochure that was left in our room and which Peggy pored over amongst the detritus of the enormous breakfast we had been served.

  As we walked out of the dining room cum library in which we’d eaten, I felt that all eyes were upon us. I certainly hoped they were; after my overnight heroics there was definitely a give-away swagger in my step. I’d hate to think it was wasted.

  Peggy kept quoting from the brochure as we took the leafy lane into the ‘hamlet’ – actually a dangerously bendy road with no thought of a pavement. Americans don’t expect to walk.

  “You related to people called Tarleton?” she asked.

  “Tarleton?” I said, and having no idea where this was going, flippantly added, “Doesn’t sound Jewish.”

  “Well neither does Williams, does it? What’s that all about? Which shtetl did the Williams come from?”

  The ‘Williams’ had come about because, according to family legend, my illiterate great grandfather had taken the name of the immigration official at Tilbury who, speaking as much Lithuanian or Yiddish as my great-grandfather spoke English, had given up trying to get any sense out of him, and, for want of anything better, and seeing the scrawled mark that was the best the old boy could come up with by way of a signature, put his own name down on his immigration papers. The family has always been grateful. It has probably served us better than being called X. I told Peggy this, but she didn’t seem satisfied. Like many New Yorkers, she simply could not get her head around the fact that there were such things as English Jews at all. To Americans, Jewishness and Englishness are polar opposites, the one all wise-cracking and smart business, the other sang froid and snottiness. In America, English equals WASP. And the idea of a Jewish White Anglo Saxon Protestant doesn’t make a lot of sense.

  “Yeah, well, whatever,” she said, “I am pretty sure Ban-As-tre – Jesus, what sort of name is that? – Banastre Tarleton wasn’t Jewish anyway. But if he had been an ancestor of yours, I was going to suggest you keep quiet about it. He was some kind of English colonel who burnt Pound Ridge down before George kicked your British asses outta town. Says here he was called ‘The Butcher’.”

  “But not the kosher butcher.”

  “Seems unlikely.”

  “Who knows? A historical detail lost in the mist of time.”

  “I don’t think they’ve lost any of the historical details. They’re all here. Lovingly preserved. Wonder what happened to the Siwanoy and Kitchawong Indians.”

  “No idea. Any theories?”

  “We-hell, it says they were a sub-group of the Algonquins.”

  “Obviously they went for drinks with Dorothy Parker.”

  “Obviously.”

  On we walked. And on we bantered. And if it sounds like we were completely, self-indulgently wrapped up in our own wit and wonderfulness, well, so we were. That’s the joy of the wavelength thing for you. Once or twice in a lifetime you hit paydirt and you just can’t get enough of the sum being greater than the parts. If you’re on the outside looking in – as least to someone with my meagre generosity of spirit – it always looks nauseatingly smug and you can’t wait for the happy couple to come to blows. But if it’s you and your beloved, then the outside world might as well be Mars. You just don’t give a shit what anybody thinks.

  It took about ten minutes to walk into one side of the cutesy little white clapboard town and out of the other. As we were about to turn on our heels, the heavens opened – perhaps it had been overcast after all – and we ran for cover. We found a little coffee shop, and it was there, through my stupidity and clumsiness, that I broke the spell. Having come so far, I couldn’t help but wonder what came next. Although, I managed to stick to my pre-weekend vow to myself not to mention him by name, Miller inevitably came between us.

  “What do you mean what comes next?” asked Peggy. If it had been possible to show some sort of infra-red image of her voice, and the warmth in it was a great big glowing red blob which before this moment had encompassed the whole picture, you would, in the space of about half a dozen words, have seen it suddenly shrink to nothing.

  Softly, softly, catchee monkey. All good things come to he who waits. Dah di dah di dah di dah. But, although I could clearly see even then that putting pressure on Peggy was not the answer, I just couldn’t help myself. And besides, wasn’t it a question I was perfectly entitled to ask? Were we supposed to run off and have the most romantic weekend of our lives – of my life anyway – and then simply return to New York and our separate existences, me in my shabby sublet and her – her with Mill-er! It didn’t make any sense. Not to me. Nor, I told her, would it to anyone.

  “Is that it? You care about what other people think?”

  “No, of course not—”

  “Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t want to be able to say to those junkies you hang around with, Bob and Bill—”

  “Bart and Brett – and they’re not—”

  “—well, whoever the hell they are, don’t you just want to be able to tell them that you have knocked me on the head with your club and carried me off to your cave? Isn’t that it? You want me to belong to you?”

  “No, I want us to belong to each other.”

  “Don’t you get it, you jerk! I don’t want to belong to anybody. And I don’t want anyone belonging to me. Not at the moment. Right now, I am coming out of a relationship that has been slowly dying for – well, almost since it began. Look, maybe it does look weird that I am still living in the same apartment as Miller. But who cares what it looks like. You know it’s over between him and me, and it’s just beginning with us. And anyway, I’ve told you already that as soon as I can get my
shit together, I’ll move in with Noreen or something, but Andy you have to understand this: I am not ready to commit to anyone else. Not yet. You just have to take this for what it is.”

  “What happened to ‘I totally like you’?”

  “It has got nothing to do with my totally liking you. Jeez, haven’t I shown you how I feel this weekend? But you have to care about me enough to give me some fucking room and not be obsessing all the time about your own insecurity. You have to show me that you can be that – that – giving.”

  Giving? Did she say ‘giving’? Me?

  *

  Remember what I said before about our emotional weather? How for the most part it was gloriously sunny but then, every so often, out of the blue along would come some tumultuous storm that would send us running for cover? So it was, late that Sunday morning in Pound Ridge. But as ever, the clouds would pass and by the time we pulled back into Grand Central, it was all one-liners and holding hands again, and everything was forgotten.

  Well, no, not quite forgotten. As I changed the cat litter – after nearly two days away you could smell it long before I had got a key into even one of the six locks – and then settled down to my usual Sunday evening diet of sitcom reruns, I turned it all over in my mind again. And I kept on coming back to the question of commitment. She had told me in the coffee-shop that she didn’t want commitment, but if only I had said what I’d really wanted to say when she made the comment about the missed opportunity to see Jerry Seinfeld, might that not have shown her that I wasn’t afraid to put my feelings on the line? And if I’d done that, what might she have said in return? And if we had both declared undying love for each other – a stretch but, in the mood we were in, not impossible – how might that have shaped events from then on? Wasn’t this just like it had been the very first time she’d told me she was planning on moving away from Miller and I’d been so feeble in my response?