A Polaroid of Peggy Read online

  “Are you telling me you have fallen for a picture of some girl you knew for a – for a – I dunno, a fucking nanosecond—”

  “It was four or five months—”

  “I repeat, a fucking NANOsecond, and that was half a lifetime ago – a picture you didn’t even know you had! – of a girl you’ve never spoken to since! – and that that is what is behind all this fucking craziness! Jesus, Andrew, you need a fucking shrink!”

  Put like that I had to agree that he had a point.

  *

  I probably should have called Alison to tell her that I wasn’t going to Paris and that I would be coming home after all. But in all my ‘fucking craziness’, to use Geoff’s nicely turned phrase, Alison wasn’t uppermost in my mind. When we were finally told we weren’t even going to be able to get to Paris in time to make a late appearance at the boozy dinner, it was after five, and, once in the cab out of Heathrow, I decided the ideal compensation for missing it was to visit one of those pubs around Bayswater of which I had recently been an habitué. Whether the landlord was pleased to see me again I cannot say, nor indeed can I tell you much more about the evening, beyond the fact that I got home and fell into bed at about eleven to find that Alison still wasn’t back.

  My memory of the following morning is, however, slightly clearer. When I awoke, Alison still wasn’t back.

  Chapter 6

  New York, 1979

  Not surprisingly, the first thing I wanted to clarify with Peggy after our reconciliatory snog was what the deal with this guy, Miller, really was.

  “It’s over I guess … we just haven’t gotten round to finishing it.”

  “But if it’s over, it is finished.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Why don’t you just leave him?”

  “Well, for one thing, I don’t have a place to go.”

  We had known each other for not much more than a week, and been out for drinks after work once, and had one proper date that had ended in disaster. So I didn’t feel able to say, “Yes, you do. You can come and live with me.” It would obviously have been absurdly impulsive and, knowing the sensible, practical girl Peggy was – or, at least, the crazily impractical girl she wasn’t – any such offer would almost certainly have been met with a derisory “Get outta here.” (A favourite expression of hers.) But almost as soon as the words weren’t out of my mouth, I began to regret that I hadn’t said them. If you want someone to believe in you, you have to show you believe in them. There is a power in commitment; it’s an act of faith and some people believe that acts of faith can move mountains. Perhaps if, there and then, even at that ridiculously early stage, I’d had the balls to lean down, grab hold of Peggy by the waist and pull her up on to my horse, she would have been prepared to ride off into the sunset with me. A long shot. A million to one shot. But you never know. That’s the thing; you never know. And you do hear of such things. Not just of love at first sight, but of people acting on it, dropping everything for each other, eloping, getting married, backing their hunch against all the odds that this is the person, and now is the time.

  I, however, said, “Don’t you have a friend you can stay with?” – which, let’s face it, was not, as acts of faith go, a nailed-on mountain mover.

  “I dunno. Maybe I could stay with Noreen for a while.” (Noreen turned out to be not-Peggy from casting.)

  For the time being I left it there. Not because I was worried any more about seeming too keen – I didn’t think she could have been in the slightest doubt about how keen I was – but because I didn’t want to push it. I could survive for a while on the knowledge that it was over with Miller – for the most part I chose to believe that it must be true – and I could lie in my bed and stare dreamily at the ceiling, feasting at midnight and way into the small hours on ‘I totally like you.’

  ‘I totally like you.’ Surely, it could only be the tiniest of steps from there to ‘I love you’?

  *

  In the next week or so, Peggy and I had lunch a couple of times, went for dinner in Chinatown once, took a Sunday walk in the park, and saw another movie – some sort of horror film which I suggested. It was the kind of thing I normally didn’t go for but I thought she might need someone to cling on to. Yes, we kissed and cuddled whenever I could contrive the opportunity – in the movie, on a bench or two in Central Park, in any doorway near the subway station where there wasn’t a down-and-out inconveniently trying to sleep – in short, wherever I could manoeuvre her; and however unsubtle in going about it I was, I never noticed her complaining. It was a little less than I might have hoped for – she fended off all my suggestions to spend a night away from her own place, which, you will need no reminding, wasn’t just her place, but Miller’s too – and though I seriously resented this, I neatly compartmentalised my feelings. For Peggy, I reserved all my uncritical adoration. The bad stuff, the frustration and anger I felt every time she took the subway back uptown, I hung on Miller.

  Then Peggy was suddenly absent. When I called down to her desk in casting and she didn’t pick up, I went to see what was wrong. I was a copywriter – I was paid to have a lively imagination – and all sorts of ghastly possibilities went through my mind as I rode the eight stories down. Had she been mugged? Kidnapped? Murdered? But the worst was that she’d made up with Miller and that they’d run off to get married.

  But Noreen was able to comfort me.

  “She called in sick. Her throat’s all swollen and she’s got this, like, funny, thick voice. She says they think it might be Mono.”

  I looked at her blankly.

  “Mono. Mo-noe. What, you don’t have Mono in England? Perhaps you pronounce it different there: MOE-NOE.”

  “Not as far as I’m aware.”

  I mentioned this to Bart and Brett, as I ingested a lungful of Colombian Gold or Peruvian Purple or whatever. They seemed alarmed.

  “Shit that stuff is real contagious,” said Bart, refusing the joint that I was passing back to him. “You’ve like … er … you’ve er … with her, right?”

  I thought I knew what he was driving at, and pride forbade for me from disabusing him. So he decided to roll another rather than risk catching the Mono that I might have caught from Peggy.

  Still, it was only when I found out from an English secretary, who worked for some bigwig on the executive floor and who I bumped into by the water-cooler, that we did, in fact, have Mono in England, only we called it Glandular Fever, that I began to take it seriously. There was good news in that I’d had it as a teenager and I knew that you could seldom, if ever, catch it twice, but the bad was that I knew that it could keep Peggy off work – and away from me – for months. I thought I should send her a get well card.

  In the advertising world it is a matter of creative honour that you create your own cards rather than send store-bought, so I enlisted Bart’s Art Directorial help and he and I made a card that we thought was screamingly funny (although the Peruvian Purple may have had something to do with that) and the next day I went to ask Noreen for Peggy’s address. But her desk was empty. I guessed that she too must have the dreaded signs of Mono, and, judging by the eerie emptiness of the casting department, it seemed that most of the other not-Peggys were probably similarly afflicted. So where to send my screamingly funny card?

  I called Personnel or HR or whatever they called it then but they refused to reveal any details. And so I was stuck. I didn’t have her home number and even if I had, I wouldn’t have called it for fear of speaking to Miller. (Fear of the manly things I might say to him, I mean.) Remember this was 1979. No e-mail, no Facebook, no mobile phone. No chance of communicating with Peggy until she came back to work.

  The upshot of all this was that I fretted and pined for her helplessly in the week that we were apart. Yes, only a week because it turned out not to be Mono at all, but just a passing bug, yet time enough for the heart’s fondne
ss to increase by the bucketload and for the thought that she was spending that week with Miller to niggle, and wiggle and jiggle inside me and drive me bloody bananas. As soon as she got back, I dropped everything and went down to see her with my unsent card. I can’t say she screamed quite as heartily as Bart and I but she seemed to genuinely appreciate the effort I had made and we arranged another date. In fact, Peggy did the asking. A friend of hers had given her tickets for some off-off-off-Broadway play and she was keen to go. She felt it might be useful for her job in casting if she got around more and saw some new acting talent; she wasn’t remotely senior enough to be allowed to make any serious casting recommendations herself but she thought that making this sort of extra-mural effort might win her a few brownie points with her boss. Although the play sounded as though it would be unutterably tedious – some sort of reworking of Uncle Vanya with the setting transferred to contemporary Nicaragua, just the sort of thing any advertising person would instinctively loathe – I was happy enough to tag along. I thought it might earn me some brownie points with Peggy.

  The play was as dreary and worthy and as everything-I-hated as I’d expected. I spent the whole of the second half trying to imagine the various players acting in fantasy TV commercials that I was writing in my head. None of them looked liked they had what it would take, apart from Uncle Vanya himself who I could possibly see doing something for Roach Motel. (‘Roach Motel – roaches check in but they don’t check out.’ My favourite product and line ever.) I thought Uncle Vanya might be useful if they ever wanted anthropomorphised cockroaches. I shared these ideas with Peggy when, to my intense relief, the final curtain came down.

  “Not good, huh?” she said.

  “Whoever gave you those tickets should be made to sit through it themselves.”

  “He already did,” she said.

  “He must really dislike you then. Who was it?”

  A short pause followed – as though Peggy was thinking better of something.

  “Oh, just a guy.”

  My antennae waggled.

  “What guy?”

  “What difference what guy? You don’t know him.”

  Yes, I did.

  “It was Miller wasn’t it?”

  A hesitation, then the inevitable admission, although without much remorse.

  “Yes, alright, if you must know, it was Miller. Actors get given tickets for this kind of thing all the time, and anyway he’d seen it, so he gave them to me. What difference does it make that it was Miller? He wasn’t here. You were.”

  Well. Well, well, well! Quite a lot to unpack there. First, what difference did it make that it was Miller? ALL the fucking difference, that was the difference that it made. Just the very fact that Mill-er had been my benefactor made me feel physically ill. Second, she had once again kept me in the dark – it seemed we’d only just got things straight from the last time, when here she was, deliberately concealing something else from me. Third, he WAS there. In a sense. I wasn’t sure in what sense, but somehow, in some sneaky, underhanded, metaphysical way he had definitely been there.

  And fourth, and much the most disconcerting, was the fact that –

  “Miller is an actor?”

  Peggy raised an eyebrow. This wasn’t quite the bitter recrimination she may have been expecting.

  “Yes, he’s an actor.”

  “How did you meet him? Did you meet him at the office?”

  “I really don’t see this is your business, Andy.”

  “Did you? Did you meet him at the office? Did he come in for a casting?”

  “Yes, if you must know, he did. So wh—”

  “What was the casting for?”

  “What? What difference can that poss—”

  All the difference in the world. Pray that it wasn’t for a hair gel – deep-set blue eyes, dead straight nose, a mane of thick, shiny, bouncy – at twenty-nine, I was already thinning noticeably.

  “Really this is absurd—”

  “Tell me! Please. You have to tell me.”

  “Okay, okay, it was a shaving cream. Satisfied now?”

  OH MY GOD! A shaving cream! That was worse than a hair gel – a shaving cream – granite jaw, exposed torso – bound to be – rippling pecs!

  “Are you okay Andrew? You look a little pale.”

  *

  I recovered enough for us to round off the evening at a bar in the West Village – somewhere near Bleecker Street, which was where the converted studio/theatre had been. Peggy just had a coffee – she wasn’t much of a drinker – but I felt I needed something stronger. I needed to be fortified for what was to come. No matter what the cost to my health, I was determined to get to the bottom of this once and for all, and, when we were seated at our table by the window, I pressed on with my inquisition. There was a red neon sign in the window, advertising some brand of drink – I couldn’t see which because it faced outwards onto the street, as it would have to if it was to lure any customers in, so the lettering read back to front from where we were. But I remember the hot light it reflected back on us, and Peggy commenting, “That kind of works don’t you think? Adds to the atmosphere. Makes it feel like a real interrogation.”

  She seemed to have decided to take all this nonsense in her stride. She was, after her initial defensiveness, rather amused by it, and probably a little flattered. So on I went. And I relaxed a little when I received the answer to my next question: no, she told me, he hadn’t got the part. And I brightened up considerably when, unbidden, she added that he hadn’t even made the short list. To have an actor – and one obviously photogenic enough to go up for a shaving cream commercial – for a love rival was bad enough. To have had one good looking enough to get the part, and therefore, an actor who was that extreme rarity, one who was successful and earning, would have been very, very hard to bear.

  Not that Peggy would concede for a second that he was a rival to me in any way.

  “Will you just knock it off, Andy? I keep telling you Miller and I are history.” (Tiny pause.) “Almost history. No, no. Not almost. We are. We just haven’t you know – formalised it – yet.”

  That was reassuring, but to someone with my extra-heightened levels of insecurity, not quite reassuring enough. So I pressed on.

  “Does he have a surname? Or is Mill-er one of those actors with only one name? You know – like Topol.”

  “For the last time, enough with the ‘ers’ already! No, he is not like Topol. Yes, he does have a surname.”

  “Which is?”

  “Prince. Miller Prince. Happy?”

  Was I happy? No, I was not. Miller Prince. I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. In a sexy name contest, Miller Prince v. Andrew Williams would have been too obviously one sided for the Sexy Names Board of Control to have ever allowed it to take place.

  “Miller Prince,” I repeated back disconsolately. “Really?”

  “Well no” she said, “Since you ask, not really. He changed it. He didn’t think his real name kind of worked for an actor. Wouldn’t have looked good on the movie posters – yeah, right! – he should have such problems.”

  “So his name isn’t really Miller at all?”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Peggy said, “Miller is his real name. But the Prince part – well, that does have elements of his real name but that’s all.”

  “What elements?”

  “Er, let’s see now. The P. And the R. And like the, um, ‘nce’ sound.”

  “The what sound?”

  “The ‘nce’ sound.”

  “So what’s his real name?”

  “You’re not going to laugh if I tell you, are you?’

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, we’ll see I guess. It’s Pronski. Miller Pronski.”

  “Miller Pronski? Are you serious?”

  “I am serious.”

  And,
as you may have guessed, and Peggy had anticipated, this revelation did provoke a quiet chuckle. Or two, or more. Miller Pronski v. Andrew Williams seemed to be a much more even contest.

  I finished my drink in a much improved mood and left the bar, hand in hand with Peggy, and with a veritable spring in my step. I might have bounced all the way home had I not turned to quickly check what hair that I had left, by inspecting my reflection in the bar window. It was then, as I brushed my hair first this way and then that, vainly – in both senses of the word – trying to cover the increasingly threadbare spaces, that I noticed the red neon sign again, and this time, being outside, I was able to read it.

  Those of you who know anything about American alcohol brands, or who have ever walked down any downtown street in just about any American city, will, surely, have long ago correctly anticipated the jolt I was about to receive. And I, too, particularly since I was in the ad biz and acutely conscious of brand names in a way that ordinary, usefully employed folk are not, would, even in the short time I had been in the States, certainly have seen and registered this same red neon sign, or rather exact replicas of it, innumerable times.

  And yet, somehow, I had never before made the connection between

  Miller –

  – and Miller.

  Miller, the no.2 beer brand in America, whose red neon name stared out from half the bars in America.

  And Miller – Miller – Miller Prince, nay Pronski, the actor handsome enough to go up for a shaving-gel casting and therefore, inevitably with a full head of gleaming hair, hair so healthy it would be bound so tight to the scalp, not a single strand would ever fall out.

  If I had gone into the bar and stuck my fingers into the socket in which the neon sign was plugged, I could hardly have received a more sickening shock to the system.

  I am not a religious fellow, not remotely spiritual, not the least bit superstitious – well, I may have been known to touch wood, but only when no-one can see me do it. I see nothing in clairvoyants, am unstirred by tealeaves, and say crystal balls to tarot cards.