A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  One subject I did a lot of poolside pondering upon, and not before time you might think, was my attitude towards them – Alison and her chap, I mean. Or, should I say, my lack of attitude. For was it not odd that I simply didn’t care? Wasn’t I supposed to? And yet the thing was that I seemed emotionally unaffected by it. I had no issue with Alison, and, apart from the fact that I’d always thought that Dougal-call-me-Doug was a bit too full of himself for my liking, no issue with him either. I willingly conceded that I hadn’t been the most attentive of husbands – not a drunken philanderer, but often preoccupied with work and what have you. And I saw too that, as we’d drifted on, we’d both really just been going through the motions rather than having a fulfilling marriage. The passion of love, it seemed, had been displaced by the cool objectivity of reason. And it seemed perfectly reasonable to me that Alison should take up with someone else. I didn’t forgive her, because it didn’t require any forgiving – I didn’t feel that I had been offended. And as for where this taking up with Doug should lead, well, I could see it going either way. If our situation – let’s stop calling it a marriage – could be sustained, then for the good of the children, and of the finances, and to avoid all the upset that a divorce always seems to bring, then why not? And if not, and we would go our separate ways, which, as I’ve indicated, I suppose I thought more likely, then I would just have to deal with it.

  But then I thought about Miller, and my insane jealousy of him. And how different my feelings had been in that menage à trois from the way they were in this one. And realising that, when roused, I was just as capable of whacking a glove across the face of a love rival as the next idiot, it just made my passivity about Alison and Doug seem all the more significant. The desperately sad but inescapable fact was that I felt – or didn’t feel – as I did, because Doug wasn’t a love rival. You have to be in love to have one of those.

  Towards the end of the holiday, the parents of the little local oik, feeling, I presume, that some sort of Italian good form dictated they should acquaint themselves with the family of their son’s new playmate, asked us all over for a barbecue. (If barbecues are what they call them in Italy.) To my pleasant surprise, they all seemed terribly impressed with Florence. Gabriella, the mother seemed to adore her and the Hollywood-casting aged old granny could hardly stop herself from pinching her cheeks. And when I saw Florence actually carrying out serving dishes of salads and fruit from the kitchen, it was all I could do to stop myself from enquiring if her body had been inhabited by extra-terrestrials. (This was the kind of jolly banter that I frequently indulged in with the girls, despite being constantly told by Alison that what I found passably amusing they experienced as mortally wounding.)

  Lucca – il papa – pulled me to one side.

  “’Ere,” he said, “You liker no?”

  And he held up an as yet unlit joint.

  “I, er, tike it from Georgio’s roomer.” (Georgio was the oik.)

  “Oh,” I replied, trying not to appear shocked, and thinking I needed to get Florence out of this den of iniquity, A.S.A.P.

  Then Mario had a fit of undisguised glee; laughing, coughing, spluttering, bending double, literally slapping his sides; he was beside himself at having made such a terrific joke.

  “No, no, juster kiddin’ Undroo. But you liker, no?”

  What could I do? Look like a prig and tut-tut him away, or try not to inhale and pretend to enjoy it?

  The trouble was I only had to look at a joint these days, and the party in the meat packing district, and all the paranoia that came with it, and all the soul searching that came after it, came flooding back.

  So, whether I did a Bill Clinton or I didn’t – and I didn’t but neither would I do much more – it was but a short hop from the Costa Smeralda in 1999 to Manhattan twenty years before.

  *

  It was a Thursday again, it was late August, just after we had returned, still together but no closer, from our holiday in Sardinia, and in Donald’s basement it was sweltering. The window was open, but no cooling breeze came through, and the sun beat down on us ferociously; it must have been hot because, for just about the only time I could remember, the heatless real flame gas fire was actually switched off.

  For once I wasn’t late, because I had come with a real purpose. My mind was beginning to clear, and I wanted to talk to Donald about something in particular. It was the joint I’d had with the oik’s dad – or the nervous couple of puffs I’d had at the joint – that had set this train of thought running.

  I had taken Donald through the story of the photographer’s party more than once in the past, although, given that he’d told me that I’d never mentioned Peggy to him until this latest round of sessions, I can’t have said anything to him about the day after, when I’d sat in the diner near my apartment, wondering whether my feelings about her were as real as they seemed, or whether my crush was only so intense because it was just another manifestation of the heightened sensations that just being in New York seemed to induce. Since the joint in Sardinia, when I’d been transported back to the meatpacking district, I had gone on to thinking about that Sunday in the diner, and I now had to go through it all with Donald, because the question I wanted to ask flowed directly from that. And the question was this:

  “Do you think that the reason that this business with Peggy has taken such a grip of me now is that it’s a kind of an echo of the feelings I had then?”

  “Well, when you recall anything – any feelings – from the past, it’s an echo of sorts isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but I mean more than that. If my feelings for Peggy at the time were sort of in extremis because of the whole New York experience, then is the echo I am feeling now going to be that much louder than it normally would be?”

  Donald got on my train of thought.

  “And reverberate more?”

  “Exactly. And reverberate more.”

  “Well, I suppose it might.”

  “You see, what I need to know is whether these feelings … this sense I have about Peggy now, can be relied upon. If I am going to try to find her, I mean. I need to know that, don’t I?”

  I doubt if Donald actually held his breath then or that I held mine, but there was suddenly a palpable sense in the room that a line had been crossed. Until I said those words, at that moment, I don’t think I had consciously articulated – even to myself – that I was going to set out to find Peggy. Looking back, it seems that it was inevitable. But with so many things in life, at least in my life, the logical conclusion to a sequence of events is never clear until it’s reached. So often I have felt – after the event – as though I have been tip-toeing blindly up a see-saw, not realising, even as I was taking that fateful final step, that the balance was about to irrevocably shift.

  And my question was answered. Whatever the reason for the strength of the echo, the Polaroid of Peggy was calling to me, and I was going to answer. Just as I had sat in that diner and turned things this way and that, but concluded that whatever the whys and wherefores, the bottom line was that I was still mad about the girl, so I had now reached the same conclusion again.

  “Do you have any idea where she is?” asked Donald.

  I laughed.

  “Now you come to mention it, not a clue.”

  “So where would you start?”

  “No idea.”

  “You’re not worried about where this might lead? What about Alison? Your family?”

  I thought about that. For about ten seconds. And then, by way of a reply, I just shrugged. I wasn’t worried about the effect it might have on Alison. Our relationship may have once been romantic but now it was entirely pragmatic. My children, yes, I had concerns about them, of course I did. But I would cross that bridge when I came to it. It was extraordinary. A few moments ago, the notion of looking for Peggy was hardly a notion at all. Now the idea seemed set in stone.

 
“And what about Peggy? Supposing she doesn’t want to be found?”

  I thought about that too. For about five seconds. Then I heard her say, “I totally like you.” And I remembered the windows-of-the-soul moment in the second best room in the Gardner Inn in Pound Ridge. And I remembered that the one time I had played Tarzan, Peggy had been more than willing to be Jane. (And I remembered all the other times when I’d just faffed about, and how she had followed my lead then too.) No, I wasn’t worried about her not wanting to be found.

  “And what about her family? She’s probably got one. She may have a husband and children. What about them?”

  I didn’t need to think about that at all. One thing I would never deny – not that anyone would ever challenge me on this score – is that I am ruthlessly selfish. When there is something I think I want, I go for it, and I don’t stop for long to think about who might get hurt in the process. Cuckolded husbands I wouldn’t give a fuck about. Devastated children might be more of a problem but I’d find some sort of specious rationale – they’re better off out of an unhappy marriage, that kind of thing – that would allow me to sleep sweetly.

  And if I’m not exactly proud of that, neither am I particularly ashamed. It makes me, I would venture to suggest, just like most people.

  So there I was. On the E to P-ometer, I would have had to admit, the glass was falling. Marriage disintegrating, career on the skids, mental health debatable.

  But on the plus side, I had, at last, a direction of sorts.

  ‘I know where I’m going.’ Well, I thought I did.

  ‘I know who’s going with me.’ That, I didn’t know.

  ‘I know who I love.’ Well, I thought I did.

  ‘And my dear knows who I’ll marry.’ Yes, well at this point, quite apart from the fact that I already was married, my dear may well have forgotten she ever was my dear, so that was possibly a little premature.

  Part Two

  Chapter 12

  New York, 1979

  I clung to the idea that Peggy would throw her lot in with mine even though she had made her immediate intentions – or lack of them – clear enough. I had a mental picture of her arriving at my front door, a suitcase bulging with her clothes in one hand, her favourite potplant in the other, and a cardboard box of her old LPs under her arm. But then my mind’s eye would switch channels and I would see myself sorting through my mail and finding an envelope in her handwriting which, when opened, would turn out to contain the old Dear John letter. Unbelievable, I told myself, it’s been less than twenty-four hours and she’s already forgotten your name. Ha ha ha. My head resounded with hollow laughter.

  Yes, as ever, I was constantly veering between wild unjustified optimism and expectation of the absolute worst. When I wasn’t trying to decide between Fiji or Rio for the honeymoon, I was thinking that Peggy and Miller must have made it up and that the carryings-on in the second best room at the Gardner Inn had been permanently erased from her memory. And all that was going on in the ten minutes it took me to ride the subway up to the office on the Monday morning after we got back.

  I hadn’t even got my feet under my desk when I was being bombarded with enquiries.

  “Did the guide book come in handy?” enquired Laverne coyly, as I passed reception. Obviously, I hadn’t covered my tracks to Barnes and Noble as well as I’d thought. Then it was Brett and Bart’s turn. They put their heads round my door to invite me over for a Monday morning conference.

  “So, man,” asked Brett or Bart, drawing deep, “did you manage to get the royal sword out of its sheath?”

  “Yeah man,” added the other, “did you go down on one knee? Or both.”

  SFX: uproarious laughter interspersed with violent coughing. I didn’t particularly take to these smutty references to my weekend of the purest love, so I made some po-faced reply – which only increased the uproar/coughing – and went back to my own office.

  As I sat down, the phone rang. It was Peggy. I asked her to hang on for a moment, said a silent prayer – to whom or for what I didn’t know – got up and locked the door, and then picked up the receiver to find out what the score was today.

  “Hi Andy.”

  “Hi Peggy.”

  Sort of nil-nil so far. Nothing to indicate which way this was going to go.

  “Andy, um, I am going to be a bit tied up for a couple days so I’m not going to be able to see you, you see I have—”

  Uhuh. Here we go then. I was already ahead of her. “—I have to make arrangements for my wedding with Miller.”

  “—I have to see my brother, Marv. He’s in the city tomorrow and he wants to take me out. And its crazy busy down here today – detergent panic! Don’t know what time I’m going to get out of here. But we can get together Wednesday if that’s okay with you.”

  A wave of relief swept over me. Completely illogical, of course. Bald spots notwithstanding, to the objective observer there would have been no earthly reason for me to feel so insecure. But old habits etc., and when you’re totally doolally about a woman who is, technically, still co-habiting with another man, it is hard, even if you have just spent a weekend away together, to be totally sure of your ground. However, custom dictated that I should appear unconcerned.

  “Wednesday? Hm. Might be something I’m doing …” – pause while I rustle papers to simulate sound of turning diary pages –

  “… on Wednesday. Let me check.”

  “Look if there’s a problem, don’t worry about it. Maybe next wee—”

  “—no, no, no! Looks fine after all. Wednesday it is then.”

  Never play poker with a woman. (Mother, wife, girlfriend, daughter, whoever.) No matter how small – or big – the stakes, they always know when to call your bluff.

  Or maybe, it’s just me.

  *

  As it turned out, Wednesday was another of those days that might have been better if it had never happened. We went to see the new James Bond movie, ‘Moonraker’, and frankly, wished we hadn’t.

  “I prefer Sean Connery,” I said, over coffee at a place next to the cinema.

  “So do I,” said Peggy, “Rog doesn’t do it for me.” And it was the last thing we agreed on that night.

  Another of those sudden cloudbursts? Well, a nasty squall anyway, and all because the subject of Peggy’s name came up again. We hadn’t discussed it since the very first date.

  “The last movie I saw at this place, I also didn’t like,” said Peggy, “‘Ice Castles’. You see that? Yuck. Schmaltz-eee!”

  Now, the theme song from ‘Ice Castles’, as you may recall, was ‘Through The Eyes of Love’ by Melissa Manchester, and I had had cause to think of it that very day, because I had spent my lunch hour in a record store on Sixth Avenue, having gone there with Brett (or Bart) because he wanted to buy something by the Sex Pistols. (Or The Clash was it? – anyway one of those punk bands that I could never stand, but which I had occasionally self-consciously attempted to pogo to at parties because everyone else was doing it.) So, while he looked at one end of the store, I was idly thumbing through the female vocalist section at the other, looking particularly – and probably not entirely coincidentally – through the Peggy Lee section. There, I discovered, she had just released a new album, and on it was a cover version of ‘Through The Eyes of Love’. So, not unnaturally I told this topical tale to Peggy, who said in response, “Oh, really.”

  Her indifference took me aback. Wasn’t it ever so slightly romantic that I should have spent my lunch hour choosing to look through the records of her famous namesake, and what’s more, wouldn’t you have expected the very title of the song – ‘Through The Eyes of Love’ – to have made my Peggy just a soupçon, well, gooey-eyed?

  But not a bit of it. Quite the opposite, because her next words were, “God, I hate that song. It was worse than the movie. Gush, gush, gush.” And then she actually p
ut two fingers in her mouth, just to make it absolutely clear, if I hadn’t yet got the message, that ‘Through The Eyes of Love’ made her want to vomit.

  Objectively – ah, our old elusive friend, objectivity again – why should that honestly held opinion, to which she was perfectly entitled, cause my hackles to rise? And yet, totally irrationally, they did. Not all of my hackles perhaps, but certainly the odd one here and there. And, as a rising hackle always will, it came together with its fellows to form a sub-conscious impulse that made me want to get her going, just a tiny bit, in return. There was no real malice aforethought, m’lud. How could I have even known that bringing up the subject of her name again would do the trick? Surely, it was only natural that talking about the other Peggy Lee would lead me on to this:

  “Er Peggy, just tell me, all kidding aside, what is your real name?”

  Peggy, who was having a double malted milk shake or something equally disgusting, and battling to suck in this mess, released the straw, and looked up at me, black-brown eyes gleaming. Alright, they seemed to be saying, let’s play!

  “I told you, it’s Brenda.”

  “Yes. Brenda. Very funny. Peggy Lee, Brenda Lee, very funny. What’s next? Vivien Lee?”

  She frowned a little and yet half smiled at the same time, as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing.

  “Why is it so important to you?”

  “Ah! So it isn’t Brenda!”

  “I never said that. What I said was, ‘Why is it so import—”

  “Yes I know what you said – ” (Can you sense the tension ratcheting up a little?) “ – but I think you’re just playing games.”