A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  So after all that, I was not an inch further forward, and couldn’t imagine where I went from here, short of getting on a plane and traipsing the streets of New Rochelle with my Polaroid of Peggy in hand. Even in my present distressed state of mind, that sounded a bit extreme.

  And then, just when I was feeling that life was all P and no E, when I could see my own thoroughly miserable reflection in the bone dry bottom of my once much more than half full glass, the good fairy came calling. And she came in the delightfully unexpected guise of Vince.

  Never have I enjoyed a meeting with Vince more; not, anyway, since he went from being best mate to treacherous bastard. He marched into my office with all the usual Aussie bluster, and yet there was a certain je ne sais qantas missing, which suggested to a seasoned Dutton watcher such as I that, somehow or other, his navigational skills had failed him, that he was deep in the brownest of water and that he needed me to provide the requisite paddle. Immediately, I perked up.

  The problem, it transpired, was that the client on our now-not quite so new seven million pound cereal account had decided that he did not, after all, care for the saintly Lucille’s campaign for his not-actually-chocolate chocolatey thingies and indeed, in the absence of Lucille or any of her underlings coming up with anything in its stead, was cutting up a trifle rough. The client, a fat Mancunian called Mick Hudnutt, had even gone so far as to suggest that I, who was still, after all, the ECD of BWD should get personally involved. This, I gleefully surmised, would have got right up Lucille’s turned up nose, and she, no doubt, perhaps in the aftermath of a bout of beauteous lovemaking with Vince, would, in the charming manner of a professional footballer when clearing his nose, have figuratively pressed a finger against each nostril and expelled the blockage all over his hideously hairy chest. I was so taken with this image that I found myself quietly weeping and Vince, given my recent topsy turvy emotional history, was moved to enquire if everything was alright. (Proving, I suppose, that somewhere, lost in his ever-increasing bulk, he still had something vaguely like a heart. But I was fucked if I was going to give him credit for that.)

  “Yes, thanks Legga,” I said, wiping my eyes on my Ralph Lauren sleeve – not really my brand, but it was the only clean shirt I could find that morning. Alison had been neglecting her laundry duties of late.

  “My name’s Vince, mate,” said Vince without a lot of matiness in his voice, thus foolishly acknowledging that my cheap shot had got home. I thought his reaction was definitely worth a bonus point for me, if not two.

  “Yes, sorry Vince. Got into a bit of a time warp there.”

  Vince didn’t seem convinced, but in his current need, was in no position to pursue the point.

  “So, mate, you going to help us out or not?”

  Oh, was I! Was I ever! I was going to take hold of Mick Hudnutt’s not-chocolate chocolatey dooberries and turn them into the most gloriously desirable bits of nutritionally useless rubbish that any four-year-old ever threatened matricide over. I would show Vince and Lucille and Geoff and all the rest of the twatting doubters, that I, Andrew Williams, was still the man!

  That night, I burnt the midnight oil. Not, it’s true, labouring over a breakfast cereal campaign. But I worked my way half way through series 1 of ‘Seinfeld’. And, despite constantly hitting the pause button so I could drool over Elaine/Peggy, I did, after a while, get into the rhythm of it. Not for the first – or the last time – in my life, I found myself catching on about ten years after the event.

  Chapter 16

  New York, 1979

  “I’m off to meet Miller for lunch,” said Peggy.

  Yes, those were the words that rocked my world, that sowed the seeds of our destruction, that I completely misunderstood. That was the stick, the wrong end of which I not only got hold, but on to which I hung like a pitbull with lockjaw.

  What happened was this: I was coming out of the elevator on the tenth floor to see if Peggy wanted to grab a sandwich, but just before I turned the corner into the casting department, I heard her speak. I wasn’t sure who she was addressing – her boss or Noreen I assumed – or in what context she was speaking. I didn’t stop to think there might be some perfectly innocent explanation. I didn’t stop at all. I turned tail and disappeared back into the elevator and thence to my floor, where I made straight for Brett or Bart’s happy hideaway. I walked in, said not a word, and spent the next however long staring mindlessly out of the window at the little yellow cabs stop-starting their way up Madison, while Brett and Bart consumed their usual lunchtime tiffin – something or other on rye with extra bong.

  “Hey man, you okay?” solicitously enquired Bart or Brett. “You need a little TLC?”

  “Or maybe a lot of THC?” added Bart or Brett, setting off the usual hacking and spluttering which signified their utmost merriment.

  “Do you want to go out and get shit-faced?” I asked them, suddenly feeling ready for action.

  “When, tonight?”

  “No,” I said, “right now.” And I got up and walked out of that office, grabbed my jacket from my own, swept past Laverne, and into the down elevator and out of the McDonnell Martin building, with Bart and Brett struggling to keep up.

  We walked into a bar where I spent the rest of the afternoon and most of the evening ordering, in a very loud clear voice, a Bud or a Coors or a Rolling Rock, making the point to no-one but me because no-one else would have grasped it, that I was ready to get shit faced on any beer they had so long as it wasn’t a fucking Miller. And after each beer, I picked up a shotglass and chucked an eye-watering, lip-crimping rye whisky down my throat. And I insisted that Brett and Bart did exactly the same. Then, at about ten, one of them said something like, “Lesh go sheebeegeebee,” and we staggered out of the bar, managed to hail a cab without falling under the wheels of the passing delivery trucks, and, with the aid of a little pidgin French and some would-be sign language, just about made our instructions clear to the non-English-speaking Haitian cab driver to head for the Bowery and the New York club de those jours. Brett and Bart claimed to be regular patrons and they must have been telling the truth because, astonishingly, despite our condition, unfit for any purpose, the bouncers let us in. There was a band called Bad Brains playing, not famous for the catchiness of its tunes, but a perfect choice for my state of mind, and I pogo’d the night away, drinking ever more, so pissed that my meat-packing-party paranoia was temporarily suspended and I puffed enthusiastically on any joint that was handed to me. At about one or two in the morning, I noticed there was a chirpy girl with spiky green hair somewhere in my orbit and I asked her, or tried to in the deafening noise, if she had a boyfriend called Miller.

  “WHO?’ she screamed back.

  “MILL-ER!”

  Finally understanding, but understandably baffled, she shook her head, and I said,

  “Fine, you’ll do for me then.”

  And that was the end of our conversation and the beginning of a not very wonderful thing.

  *

  This all took place about five or six weeks or so after Peggy and I had been to New Rochelle, which meant that she had now been sleeping on Noreen’s couch for a month and a half or so. A long time to have a cricked neck but she showed no new interest in cohabiting with me. I was no closer to capturing my elusive quarry.

  Never the less, we’d been having a pretty good time. In July and early August, as is typically the case, it was often so oppressively close and unbearably hot that even the strongest antiperspirants threw in the towel. (Subway to be avoided at all costs.) But the New York summer still had plenty to offer.

  Sometimes, Brett and Bart and Noreen and Peggy and I went off as a little group. This infamous fivesome first came together the weekend we went to Fire Island. Christo, a gay art director at the office (originally Christopher, of course) who spent from May until September in nothing but tight white tee-shirts (and jeans!) to show off hi
s muscly tan, occasionally popped in to join the bong throng and one day casually mentioned that he was off on a two week shoot in Hawaii – “Nice job!” opined Brett or Bart – and that his summer cottage near Cherry Grove was going to be empty if any of us fancied using it. It hardly needs saying that we had all had our hands up quicker than Nazis at a Nuremburg rally and with so much competition for the place, we decided to share it; so Christo threw us the keys, gave us the address and apologised for the mess we were going to find.

  Knowing Fire Island’s reputation for hedonism of a particular kind, Bart, Brett and I decided we might, when catching the rays on the Cherry Grove beach, be giving an impression that we didn’t want to give, and so decided it might be desirable to have some female company along. Peggy was keen but didn’t want to be the only girl, so Noreen was roped in, and one sunny Saturday we set off on the Long Island Railroad from Penn Central to Sayville, then crowded into a cab to the dockside and finally climbed aboard a ferry to Cherry Grove which was overflowing with people and the sheer joy of being out of the hot, stinking city. The atmosphere was so exuberant that some passengers – we happy few amongst them – broke into song as we made the short trip across Long Island Sound, singing – and I kid you not – YMCA. A ridiculous pantomime, yes, but this was 1979, the same year it came out, so not quite yet – if very nearly – the cliché it might seem today.

  Christo’s place turned out to be a little, boxy, clapboardy sort of place, just as you might expect, which backed directly on to the beach. (In America, I learned, and as I’ve touched on before, almost everywhere turned out to be just like you’d expect, because you’d seen it all in the movies.) There was one main bedroom, which Peggy and I, being the only established couple, got – the sort of taken-for-granted arrangement which I always thought was so unfair when I wasn’t in a couple – and a smaller one with a single bed, which Brett and Bart chivalrously granted to Noreen. I can’t tell you a lot about that Saturday night – a barbecue of sorts, a starry, starry sky, Donna Summer and the like blaring out from boomboxes all along the beach. Or maybe that was just the soundtrack I’ve added to my moviemory of the night. Much to our guilty delight, Peggy and I came across several items of Christo’s that he might have locked away if he’d known he was going to have guests in his bedroom, but despite thinking back to that conversation over the lemon cheese cake, or possibly because of it, I didn’t suggest we try any of them out.

  A sultry night was ended by blinding sunlight pouring in through the uncurtained window and the squawking chorus of sea-gulls scavenging for breakfast. I reluctantly disentangled myself from Peggy, and searched for and eventually found my underwear – I didn’t want to casually stroll into the ‘loungeroom’ in the altogether and frighten Bart and Brett, sprawled out on the slightly soiled white sofas, into thinking I’d gone all Christo on them. As I was closing our bedroom door, I met Bart or Brett coming out of Noreen’s room. Inevitable I suppose.

  We all went to a beachside restaurant for lunch expecting to eat something fishy but they had some kind of Sunday special advertised as a ‘pig roast’. Not the most inventive product description I’d ever read, but certainly to the point.

  “You know I’m strictly Kosher,” I said to Peggy.

  “Oh, me too,” she replied, and we both had the pig. Another piece of evidence, as if I needed any, that we were totally in tune.

  We caught the late ferry back, the setting sun slanting across the crowded deck, where the atmosphere was a little quieter and more reflective but no worse for that. Here my moviemory is a medium two-shot of Peggy and I, our arms around each other’s waists, staring straight out, and then a cut to a wider reverse shot from a helicopter, so that you can see that what we’re looking at is the wake behind the stern as the ferry cuts through the spangled evening sea. The helicopter then climbs ever higher until it takes in the whole panorama and the ferry looks no bigger than a toy boat in a bath. Alright, I admit, I may now be describing the scene in slightly more technical detail than spontaneously comes to mind, but it’s not so very far from the way I remember it.

  *

  Then, another time, Christo suggested we all go off to Studio 54. We were extremely doubtful that we’d be allowed in, but Christo thought he knew the secret.

  “Just wear your two ties,” he said to me, and he turned out to be right. We hovered around the edge of the crowd outside the door, and the guy in the shades with all the power of Nero at the Coliseum took one look at me and we got the thumbs up. Much back slapping from Brett and Bart, and many ‘way to go’s’ accompanied my triumphant entrance – and better still, the odd ‘who’s he?’ from the envious unwanted still stuck out in the unwelcoming street.

  There was a whole crowd of us that night, all the usual crew plus a couple of pals of Christo’s, a South African designer who looked more like Frank Zappa than Frank Zappa and his dinky blonde model girlfriend. It took us about twenty minutes before we could get one of the dancing gay barmen in their satiny shorts to serve us – it was the full flamboyant New York bartender act – mainly because we couldn’t make ourselves heard over the amyl nitrate powered shouting and whooping and bloody annoying blowing of whistles that accompanied whatever already foundation wobbling track was being played. My two ties only had so much door opening power though, because they wouldn’t let us in to any of the VIP and Very VIP lounges that the real movers and shakers hung out in.

  Still, it was fun. I demonstrated one or two of my devastating disco moves to Peggy, who gave me that look that says ‘Hmmm, interesting,’ but which actually signified that the only reason she wasn’t scurrying back to her seat was that she wouldn’t have been able to force her way through the sweating, squirming mass of bodies that pressed from all sides.

  Later, fairly drunk and in some cases stoned, and high also on the fact that we had actually got into Studio 54, we went back for more drinks to the South African designer’s place which, of all places, was on Roosevelt Island, a tiny patch of land in the middle of the East River, recently reopened for residents after years of use mainly as an asylum for the insane. (“Roosevelt Island!” said Bart in wonder, having not caught up with the news, “You mean people actually live there?”) To get there, you had to take the newly installed cable car by the 59th Street Bridge, and just being in a cable car in Manhattan seemed so wild that it could only add to the intoxication of the evening. On the balcony of the Roosevelt Island apartment, Peggy and I watched the reflection of sun in the mid town skyscrapers as it rose, while Frank Zappa – who else? – filtered out from the room behind us. Another evening, another moment, that you don’t forget in a hurry.

  *

  And somewhere around this time too, there was the evening when, in one of those decibel packed bars that we used to favour after work, Bart or Brett happened to find out that Noreen’s family came from somewhere called Manville in New Jersey, a place name which he recognised because he had a cousin who had once been ten pin bowling there. And one thing led to you can guess exactly what, and, goodness knows how, we all ended up in the Manville Bowl, a place about as far removed from Studio 54, in terms of all that was hip and cool and right-on as it was humanly possible to get. But in terms of having a rollicking good time, maybe even better. No stars to fuck at the Manville Bowl but plenty of beer to drink and carbs to eat and laughs to have. I didn’t, by the way, and wisely, you may think, sport the two-tie look at the Manville Bowl.

  And interspersed with all of the extra-mural activities of our newly formed group were romantic – yes, corny to say so, I know, but that’s the right word for it – evenings when it was just Peggy and me. Evenings when, despite the pervading presence of Eau de Feline, we would just spend our time watching whatever schlock telly was on and then by amusing ourselves in my lumpy bed. Or maybe we’d have a cheap Italian or Mexican or Polish meal – in the Lower East Side there was no cuisine of any ethnicity that was unavailable and all available for a knockdown price
– and just chit-chat our way through the evening with an ease that, viewed from so many difficult years distant, seems all but impossible to imagine.

  But sometimes at the end of these evenings Peggy would opt for Noreen’s cramped couch rather than my lumpy bed, and I can’t say I always accepted her decision with perfect grace.

  *

  One Wednesday – the week after the trip to Manville, I think – on what had been one of our now pretty regular film nights, we were, as usual, conducting the post movie post mortem in one of those nondescript coffee houses that we always gravitated towards after the main attraction. I can’t remember what the name of the film was or whether either or both of us liked it or not, so I think we can safely put it in the neither here nor there file. I do remember Peggy suddenly dismissing the movie from the conversation by saying, “Hey Andy, you remember my dad saying he was going to be Tevye. Well, they’re doing it next Sunday and he asked me if you wanted to come see it with me?”

  Her face was bright and eager. It was clear she genuinely wanted me to come. And so, it seemed, did Herb and presumably Barbara. It would mean I was being invited back to meet her parents for a second time. All this, you might think, boded well. My policy of bold patience (or patient boldness) was apparently paying off. I was being invited into the bosom of the Lee family, and for a second time too. I had had my first audition and I must have passed. But did my heart lift? Well, yes, but maybe not as far as it should have done.