A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  My immediate fear, typically I suppose, had been that some disaster had befallen one of my parents but when I rushed into Nick’s office it turned out to be nothing to do with Mavis or Syd.

  “It’s Stuart Price,” said Nick, as he passed me on the way out, carefully shutting the door. I blinked after him – it did not compute. Stuart Price was my old Creative Director in London, with whom I had got on reasonably well, but no more than that, and from whom I had not heard a word in the nine months or so I had been in New York. What could he want? And then it turned out it wasn’t just Stuart on the phone, but Gerry Morgan as well, then not quite at the dizzy corporate heights to which he would later scramble but still at some serious executive level and not the sort who would normally bother himself with the likes of me. So what could he want? All very odd, and just to compound the strangeness, this was a conference call, probably the first I’d ever had. That, I thought as I sat there, must be why we were in Nick’s office, because he had the kind of phone that could cope. (Again this was ’79, still in the electronic stone age.)

  But now, on the train, I thought maybe that was wrong too. Maybe Nick Moreno had been in on the whole thing, maybe the Manatee had too, maybe it had been their idea in the first place. Because what Stuart had wanted to tell me was that one of the Creative Group Heads in London – below him but above common or garden copywriters like me – was leaving, and that since this guy had, as one of his accounts, the tyre business which I’d had some writing success on, they wanted to know if I might be interested in coming back to London to take his place. And when, stunned, or at least, extremely surprised and, inevitably, flattered, I’d asked how soon, Stuart had said, the sooner the better.

  I asked for a day or two to think about it and Stuart paused and then I heard Gerry’s voice, speaking directly to me for the first time. He said, yes, of course, that would be fine. And then we said our goodbyes, and I retired to Bart and Brett’s office to consult with them.

  “Shit, man,” said Brett or Bart, “would that make you like, management?”

  “I suppose so,” I replied.

  “Wow,” said Bart or Brett, “fucking A. Hail to the chief.”

  And of course, that was an important part of it. Something I couldn’t ignore. The crucial first step from humble serf to squire’s overseer actually gave me a shot at a proper career, and although I had never thought of myself as the ambitious type, now, when offered the opportunity, I saw its advantages.

  I kept turning all this over in my mind as the train clattered on. In the end I decided that it might have been this way: a hole had appeared in London that they needed to fill quickly and that Stuart had concluded I might be the peg to fit; protocol meant he had to get Gerry to call New York to ask for their permission – hence his involvement. New York – Todd and Nick – slightly disillusioned with me, to put it mildly, would obviously have done nothing to stand in my way. Or alternatively, Nick and Todd had been in touch with London to say I wasn’t cutting it, and London just happened to have had a hole to fill. Either way, I had the political savvy to realise that I probably didn’t have a lot of options. New York didn’t want me and London wouldn’t like it if I threw what was, after all, a real promotion, back in their faces.

  Thing was, I really didn’t want to go back to London. Did I? And what about Peggy if I went?

  *

  The rain had finally stopped when we all climbed into the Pontiac for the ten minute drive to Temple Israel. Though it was August, Herb was wearing a scarf wound around his neck to protect his throat and he had brought with him a small glass of something with honey in it, to sip on the way. No chances were to be taken with the leading man’s vocal chords. He was in the front passenger seat with Peggy at the wheel – possibly I thought to avoid having to sit next to me. Barbara and I sat in the back, on opposite sides, with Mrs Lipschitz sandwiched between us in the middle. We drove in silence all the way apart from the spasmodic glglglglglgl coming from Herb and his glass.

  Mrs Lipschitz had, in fact, not spoken a word to me or to anyone in my presence since her sudden entry into the conversation over tea on my previous visit. She had maintained her silence throughout lunch today, and all the way through the afternoon. Now, completely unexpectedly, just after we pulled into the Temple Israel parking lot – Herb had a special place reserved, close to what was to serve as the stage door – she tapped me on the shoulder, and apropos of absolutely nothing at all, produced one more revelation.

  As we climbed out of the car, she said confidentially to me, as though we were still having the same unbroken conversation about names that we’d had before, “Herb, he was always crazy with names. What’s wrong with Lipschitz, that’s what I’d like to know? Is Lee so much better? Was it worth all the trouble and money to change it?”

  And that was it. Not another word. Thinking about this during the first act, I realised that she had finally nailed the lie about the Li’s of the Beijing shtetl. As regards the Lipschitz v. Lee question, I thought, on balance, that I was with Herb.

  *

  The show was a smash. All that Herb could have wished for. I sang silently along with every word and he didn’t miss a biddy or a bum. When Tevye’s daughters Tzeitel, Hodel, and Chava – who, I estimated, were variously played by girls (?) of about sixteen, twenty and forty-two – started to sing their big number, ‘Matchmaker’, both Barbara and Mrs Lipschitz looked questioningly at Peggy and me, and Peggy, determined to give nothing away, smiled sweetly but gave no encouragement to them. Nor to me.

  When they started on the second or third chorus – the bit about finding a find and catching a catch – I tugged at Peggy’s sleeve and gave her a little smile, but she remained totally non-committal. Or should I say that in the act of being non-committal she managed to give me to understand that the non-part was the only bit I needed to be taking note of. After that, I gave up, went on mouthing my diddys and dums and applauding and cheering as required.

  I don’t know how many fiddlers have been on the roof of the Temple Israel Community Centre since – more than a few I suspect – but I don’t suppose there have been more curtain calls than the first night (of four) Tevye was played by Herb Lee. (Also of Lee’s Eyeglasses, serving New Rochelle since 1955.)

  *

  The trip back to New York was everything you would have expected. Trappist monks wearing gags could not have been less talkative. Peggy stared out of one window, and I stared out of the other. As it was pitch black outside neither of us saw anything but the reflections of our faces. Hers grimly set, mine blank, empty, pretty much devoid of hope.

  We walked to the subway in the same silence in which we had travelled on the train, and when the five arrived at the platform, Peggy held out her arm by way of indicating that I should get on first. Then when I did, she took a step back, and the subway train pulled away without her. I left her standing there, not following the exiting train with a turn of her head or even just her eyes, but staring dead ahead.

  *

  Another Sunday evening. Another lonely beat on the Lower East Side. I bought a couple of slices of pizza on the way from the subway to my apartment, found a beer in the fridge and turned the telly on. I looked around for the cat and not seeing him I concluded that he must be out prowling the streets. (In all the time I lived there, I never found out how he came and went.) I was, for once, rather disappointed not to see him. I would have been grateful for any company that night. But it was just me and Rob and Laurie and little Ritchie. As I might have known, the comedy rerun station had been doing its scheduling in consultation with the gods, and had put on back-to-back ‘Dick Van Dyke Shows’ with the specific aim of making me feel even worse.

  It worked. I wanted another beer, but found I’d had the last one in the fridge, so I went across the street to the bar with the neon sign that used to light up my bedroom. It was a kind of old fashioned place with a local clientele, which at that time, u
nlike today, meant not especially young or well heeled. They served a bit of food – a burger or a burger was the usual menu choice, and they played a bit of music – nothing too loud or radical. It was, in short, just a regular bar. And wouldn’t you know it, the gods had followed me there. I was sitting there swigging a Schlitz or a something but definitely not a you-know-what when I picked up on the music that was quietly filtering though the sound system.

  ‘The Best is Yet to Come’ sang Peggy, in that inimitable silky whisper.

  You can take something like that in one of two ways. A sign that somewhere at the end of the long dark tunnel there may yet be a chink of light. Or you can decide it’s just cruel, bitter irony – fate spitting in your soup.

  I went for option two.

  *

  On Monday morning, I got to the office early and tried to clear my head. What, I was trying to calculate, would my position be if I didn’t take the London job? I could see the upside of the offer but I just wanted to think it all through, one more time.

  The terms of my work permit meant that McConnell Martin New York weren’t free to fire me. I had something called an L1 visa which meant I could only work in the US for the company that had brought me into the country – if they wanted to get rid of me, they had to send me back to where I came from, or arrange a transfer to another office. That gave me some bargaining power, I supposed, although I couldn’t quite see what. If I just dug my heels in and said no, sorry, I’m not going, they could obviously find a way to make my life uncomfortable: move me to an even smaller, even less fit-for-human-habitation office than I already had, give me really crap work to do or none at all, get on my case every time I was a minute late coming in or getting back from lunch. In other words gradually turn the thumbscrews tighter until I resigned. (I am sure that would count as constructive dismissal in the UK today but I doubt such a concept existed in America in 1979 and perhaps not even now.) And, if I were to resign, then the work permit situation would work against me because I wouldn’t be free to get another job unless I had a Green Card – the holy grail pursued by every foreign worker in the US. Although I had started my application, it would be at least a year before the Department of Immigration, the wheels of which ground exceeding slow – and then some – decided to officially anoint me with the glorious title of Resident Alien. And then, and here was the Catch 22, only if I stayed with McConnell Martin, because they were the sponsors of my application. Without them, I’d have to start the whole balls aching process again. What it all boiled down to was that I would be taking an enormous gamble if I quit and would probably be forced to make money by doing casual work in bars or restaurants. And even if I could find such work, what sort of people would hire me? By definition lawbreakers and exploiters of illicit foreign labour. Doubtful if such employers had progressive employee benefit programmes.

  Even so, and despite realising that the proprietors of Lee’s Eyeglasses might take a dimmer view of a potential son in law whose prospects were so much reduced, I might have been prepared to risk all if Peggy was there to come home to after a twelve hour shift washing dishes.

  But that was clearly not to be the case. And it was made even clearer when Noreen walked into my office with a message from Peggy saying she had rented a flat of her own.

  “Oh,” I said, further depressed by this unsurprising but still unwelcome news. “Where?”

  “I think it’s up to Peggy to tell you that – if she wants to.”

  Ah, I thought, she knows. She knows. And waited for her to leave. But she hung around just long enough to change her mind and say, “It’s 94th and Riverside. A studio. It’s tiny but it’s real cute. Okay for one person.”

  I then – as you do – spent about an hour deconstructing that for any hidden nuances of meaning. I considered the details of the address and what it implied. It was diagonally across the city, on the extreme far side of Manhattan from my place on the Lower East Side, her NW to my SE. So you could interpret that as meaning she was putting as much distance as possible between us. On the other hand it was on the Upper West Side, her old neighbourhood, the place with which she was most familiar. So it was only natural she’d choose somewhere around there. But, being her old neighbourhood, it also meant that one of her near neighbours would be Miller.

  And then, there were its dimensions. A tiny studio, okay for one person. From that, one could only infer, it was not big enough for two. Nice of her to point that out. Real cute. Her very words.

  And then I wondered whose message that really was. Peggy’s or Noreen’s? Hell has no fury etc except, possibly, when it’s the best friend of the woman scorned, who, let’s face it, has been known to take a certain pleasure in stirring the pot.

  Not that any of that much mattered when you weighed the facts of the case.

  I did spend the next couple of hours, almost until lunchtime, searching for any sign of a silver lining but the cloud over my career in New York remained unyieldingly black. So at around one, I asked Laverne to put an international call through – my line didn’t allow me access for anything so exotic – but when I finally reached Stuart Price’s PA, she told me he was already gone for the day. If I was the type of person who believed in signs, I might have believed I’d seen one there, but, as I think I have made clear, I’m not that type of person, and all I thought was, what the hell, I’ll call him in the morning, and I’ll think I’ll go to the deli and get my favourite mortadella and provolone on rye with dill pickle, mustard and mayo and take it into Bart and Brett’s office and have my lunch with them.

  I was going to miss those ridiculous New York sandwiches, as thick as a whole flight of doorsteps. And, call me sentimental if you like, but I was going to miss Brett and Bart too. Perhaps I had already caught those weepy Americans habits and wasn’t going home a minute too soon.

  *

  I did call Stuart Price the next morning, he said how delighted he was, and I tried to sound appropriately pleased in return. Then he said, that for reasons of internal departmental politics, he didn’t want the news getting out for a few days, so could I please keep schtum. (He wasn’t Jewish but, like lots of advertising people, he liked the odd bit of lingo.)

  Then I asked for an appointment to see Todd Zwiebel, and was, a few hours later, summoned to appear on high. When I got there, Nick Moreno already had his fat Italian–American bottom on Todd’s sofa. (As Bart or Brett commented, when I popped in to see them afterwards, he was probably planning for the day when he could take the office over for himself and send Mrs Zwiebel the traditional Mafia ‘message’ wrapped in newspaper: ‘The Manatee – he sleep with the fishes’.)

  I explained to Todd that I’d had this terrific offer from London – like he didn’t know! – and I didn’t feel I could turn it down. He said he understood, but how upset he was, and I tried to sound appropriately sorry in return. Then I mentioned how Stuart Price had emphasised the delicacy of the matter.

  “He asked me if we could keep it schtum.”

  The Manatee, looking very confused, said, “You Jewish, Andy?” And then turning to Nick Moreno as though he, of all people, might provide an explanation. “Andrew Williams – that’s a Jewish name?”

  Then he turned back to me, and his final words were, “English and Jewish. I never got that.”

  *

  A week or so passed. The lid had been successfully kept on the news of my departure, and a date had not yet been fixed for my flight home, so I was still going through the motions of being a copywriter in New York. A very hot and sweaty New York. September had arrived, but any cooling rain seemed to have gone with August, and steaming, sticky summer was back, as they say, with a vengeance. Who had offended it may have been unknowable, but like a schoolteacher keeping the whole class back, it was taking it out on the whole sweltering population.

  I was never much of a diary keeper but I had noted down the date of the Dr Pepper concert in Central Park
, the one with Robert Palmer, to which, weeks before, I had – emphasis on ‘had’ – arranged to go with Peggy. It was on Thursday, a couple of days time. I’d had the tickets tucked away in my desk for ages and now I was in a quandary about what to do with them. I liked Robert Palmer, but not enough to go on my own and I didn’t really know who else to ask. In the end I went to Brett and Bart and said one of them could have the other ticket, but they would have to decide amongst themselves who the lucky guy was to be. They hit upon the inspired idea of playing a best of twenty-five series of ‘scissors, paper, stone’ to decide – each leg of the twenty-five to be the best of five games. As these things do, news of the event got around, and Christo, Noreen, Laverne and I, along with at least half a dozen others were packed into Bart and Brett’s office, on the Wednesday evening, the night before the concert, for what they had now decided was a World ‘Scissors, Paper, Stone’ Series and for which they had made special souvenir posters, which were now plastered around the walls of their office. (Really wittily done too, much better than their ads.)

  Excitement was reaching fever pitch when, Bart or Brett, I forget which, came storming back from a 12–7 deficit to take five legs in a row and make it twelve all. Beers were in full flow, the bong was on the go, Noreen was massaging Bart’s shoulders, Christo was fanning Brett with a towel – or it could have been the other way around – and they were all set for the decider. And then there was a knock on the door, everyone held their breath – this was not the moment for anybody from management to walk in, and they didn’t. It was Peggy.

  “Not interrupting anything, am I guys?” she asked. And then she looked at me and said, “Do you have a minute, Andy?”

  Chapter 19

  London, 1999

  The two idiots sat on the edge of the Eileen Gray sofa as I scribbled changes to the Cornish pasty script, the first one being the replacement of any reference to Cornish pasties with non-chocolate chocolatey breakfast cereal.