fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (3/3)
STAN.
Stan has fucked four women in the past month. One was Peggy.
First, there was the Nico lookalike who smoked those skinny feminine cigarettes and wanted to talk only about Jim Morrison or Scientology or the perks of a vegetarian diet. She told him she wasn’t eating meat anymore before looking pointedly below his belt and told him from behind her cigarette and behind her long dirty blonde bangs that she’d be willing to make an exception. She said it smug and not flirtatious and it was easily one of the worst pick-up lines he had ever heard. But he liked the shape of her mouth, wanted to know what it felt like around him, so he accepted.
The second claimed the moon landing was faked. She was a writer, or she said she was, but the only thing she seemed to have to show for it was an ink-stained left hand. Her name was Angela and she had a Queens accent that became thicker the more she drank, at its most pronounced when he fucked her. When she introduced herself, she claimed she knew his friend Tom, but Stan didn’t have a friend named Tom, or at least he didn’t think he did. He found that didn’t matter. She told him about the moon and she told him about film, the properties of filmmaking, gravity, Neil Armstrong, none of it sounding like fact but rather a biased desire to uncover a conspiracy. He went back with her to her place, and she had short cropped hair (made him think of Jean Seberg before he thought Mia Farrow, neither entirely on the mark: Angela was skinny as opposed to gamine) and he was distracted by the pale curve of her throat, the spasm of it while that Queens accent spilled from her, while he fucked her on faded floral sheets.
The third said she was from Los Angeles. Stan had believed her. She had freckles across her tanned nose, and oddly it was her teeth -- large and white, encased beneath thin pale pink lips -- that convinced him that it was California she belonged to, not New York. She didn’t say what she had done in Los Angeles, which led him to believe she was a failed actress with too much pride to admit it. She was a bottle blonde; he learned this later. He fucked her in the bathroom at a small bar where a band who thought they were The Moody Blues was playing.
And Peggy. He fucked her on the floor of his apartment, and it’s the single strangest sensation in the world: getting what you’ve wanted only to find there was no way you could have possibly imagined it in rich enough detail. Peggy fucks greedy -- her hands, her mouth, the tight grip of her cunt before she comes. She left her ripped pantyhose coiled like snakeskin on the floor the next day. He thought about her returning home, bare legs, blue underwear under her skirt, and he already wanted to fuck her again. What else is new, he might have asked; he’s spent the last five years wanting to be inside of her.
KEN.
In his head, but never out loud, Ken has taken to considering this their own moon landing. Madison Avenue without the safety net of older men’s names as their own foreign moonscape -- waiting, he thinks, for them to stake their claim.
Space age conquistadors. That had been what Stan had called Neil and Buzz, throwing down the newspaper on Peggy’s desk (and it’s only now that Ken considers that perhaps Stan hadn’t meant the name favorably but rather as an indictment), and Ken’s mouth had cracked open in a wide hopeful grin.
Apollo 11. Ken hadn’t slept the night they landed on the moon. He sat up with the baby, the volume of the TV turned down low (even though the coverage was over, even though it was an episode of The Twilight Zone he had already seen, but he had hoped new coverage would materialize, that they would broadcast at them, down from the moon again, secret missives only Ken would be awake to receive, and if this was to happen, he feared to miss it, feared to lose whatever terrifying cocktail of awe and hope had been stirred up within him).
It was the thrill of discovery. Everyone kept using that word: discovery. It was the proof that there was more out there than they could ever know or imagine. It galvanized him, in a way, made him brave, made him want more than he would ever find in that single office.
So at the end of July he said yes to Peggy and while Stan and her talked excitedly over each other, speaking more to themselves than to Ken, Ken didn’t mind: he was imagining they were bound for the moon.
Now he sits in Peggy’s apartment, their temporary place of business, each arriving with a list of potential old (or at the very least, dissatisfied) clients.
“Peggy, you either need to marry a woman or hire a maid,” Joan says as she surveys the place.
Peggy doesn’t answer. She’s mid-argument with Ginsberg about God only knows what while Stan smokes between the two of them, rifling through past designs they had shelved over the years.
The phone rings and they all freeze. Joan is the first to move.
“Holloway Cosgrove Olson & Rizzo,” she says.
27.
An afternoon in late August, Peggy runs into Megan. It’s been a hot summer, and the end of August is no different.
The city feels like the heat is trapped in the maze created by the buildings, no calming breeze to be found, nothing to break through the dense and oppressive heat. No respite to be found except behind closed doors -- polished lobbies, the dark bars belonging to hotels, the floor of her bedroom directly in front of the air-conditioning unit perched in her window. It’s an old building, drafty, and the cool air does not spread. It gets swallowed greedily by the heat, and them.
New York manages to feel too small a city at times. In this heat it tips over the border into claustrophobia.
It’s in this environment that Peggy finds Megan. They are both over by Grand Central Station wearing twin expressions of embarrassed surprise several paces away from each other.
“It’s funny,” Peggy says when they sit down at a table at the first bar they pass, “Running into old friends in this city.”
Megan frowns and smiles at the same time, the end result marking her as confused. “Were we ever friends?”
“Yeah!” Peggy says a little too forcefully. “We were friends. Colleagues.”
“Friends of Don,” Megan jokes.
“Now there is a man with too many friends,” Peggy jokes, pointing a finger at Megan. Megan only smiles a little, and it’s sad, makes Peggy sad and she doesn’t even know why. So she asks, “How is he?”
“You don’t see him?”
Peggy shakes her head. “Do you?” She tries to ask it as another ill-conceived joke, but it falls flat.
“Well, sure. He’s still my husband. It’s just -- it’s complicated. I live there and he lives here, and.” She stops abruptly there, not even trailing off. Megan is not that great of an actress, Peggy thinks, not at all charitable. She doesn’t ask Megan what Don has been doing. Their conversation goes at fits and starts, too revealing and too much giving way to unsure and stumbling.
“We’re both following our dreams,” Peggy says, and even to her it sounds unbearably cheesy.
Megan smiles at her politely, like she knows firsthand how lonely and steep the road to follow a dream can be. “Shall we order?” she asks.
Their conversation inevitably circles back to Don, even if obliquely at first. They talk about work (Megan’s acting, Peggy’s new agency) which becomes advertising which becomes Don which becomes marriage.
“I thought,” Megan pauses, shaking her head with a silly smile, like she might start laughing or crying at herself. She does neither, just shrugs self-consciously. “I thought that was going to be me and Don, you know? Partners. Equals.”
Peggy doesn’t have anything to say to that.
“That’s what you want,” Megan is saying. “There’s the romance of it all and the excitement, that passion. It’s the partnership you want to come home to.”
“Sure,” Peggy says too casually, and when Megan smiles again, Peggy thinks it’s at her own expense.
“I have missed you,” Peggy says as they leave the restaurant. “And hey, you ever consider a return to advertising -- my door’s open.”
They both know it’s an offer Megan will never take her up on, they both that by Monday Megan will have returned to Los Angeles and the life she has there, but they both smile at each other as though to say, wouldn’t that be nice.
“Thank you, Peggy.”
“Break a leg,” Peggy says, feeling a cliché, walking out into the sweltering heat alone.
28.
There are random stacks of Life magazine open all over her apartment, separate stacks designated to the ads they love and the ads that make them mourn their chosen profession.
Peggy finds she likes living where she works, working where she lives, chicken or the egg, whichever comes first. So far they have been working with small fish, local nibbles, but, as Ken pointed out, their version of local is New York, and as though he had been about to burst into Broadway song and dance, he had said, “the greatest city in the world.”
“Cool it, Sinatra,” Stan had said, a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
Stan and Peggy sit on the couch, exhausted. Lately, it’s become his custom to be the first at her place and the last to leave. That night, he stayed late, helping to finish the work they had done for some city council candidate’s campaign. Hardly the work they had imagined doing when they stepped out of SC&P, but, like Ken said (and Stan mocked after their third beer): greatest city in the world.
The work never seems to be over now. She likes that though; she thinks he likes that too, that he wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Stan’s hand rests between their bodies, and with idle curiosity, she touches the knot of his wrist, her fingers circling it loosely, passing up over the bumped ridges his veins make along the back of his hand, on to his knuckles. He rolls his hand over, palm up, and she presses her palm to his, their fingers interlocking easily.
They’re sitting on her couch holding hands like they’re on their way to prom. She gulps down the dregs from a cheap can of beer.
“We’re doing well, right?” she asks him suddenly. “This thing? We haven’t failed?”
“Yet,” he says, but he squeezes her hand, bumps his knee against hers.
She pokes him. “You’re supposed to be my optimist.”
“And I am. I also just so happen to be your pragmatist, too.”
“Optimist, pragmatist. Hedonist. One-man show, Stan Rizzo.”
“Only where you’re concerned,” he says lightly, but their hands are still entwined, and she knows what he means. She thinks she agrees.
JOAN.
That morning Joan came in to find Peggy, Stan, and Ginsberg passed out on the couch, all one heap of wrinkled clothes, two-thirds hungover, all in need of a shower.
“I missed the slumber party?”
Peggy had yawned wide, pushing Stan’s head off her shoulder. “Shit,” was all she said. And then, “Ken told us about your meeting with Yellow Taxicab. We got to work . . . ”
“And then you fell asleep?”
She had left not long after, bound for a meeting with a Manhattan-based wig company (“We’re a parody at this point, you know this, right,” Ginsberg had said).
She couldn’t do what Peggy is doing, no sense of balance, merging it all under one roof: her home where she works and where she works, her home. That’s too messy and impossible an integration for Joan to even entertain. A lot of things Peggy attempts are too messy and impossible for Joan to consider. But then, Joan has made a career out of balance.
Take, for example, the men in her life.
It’s a Tuesday and Bob calls from Detroit on Tuesday nights. He’ll ask about Kevin and he’ll ask about the new job and she knows that if she were to tell him about anything, anything at all, unasked and unsolicited, he’d listen with that same polite attention. “It’s nice,” she had told her mother, “to have a friend.”
She had said the same thing to Roger and his reply had been predictable: his arms spread open in selfish supplication, his face a mock frown. “Hey? Who’s saying I’m not a friend?”
The wig company, for what it’s worth, said yes.
29.
The fall of 1969 is the season when Stan lives with Peggy. They don’t call it that or consider it that way, never speaking of the routine develops, the routine where Stan is always there, domesticity borne out of the pretext of work. But he’s there, he accumulates within her apartment, a toothbrush left in her bathroom, his shoes kicked under her bed, his shirts brushing up against her dresses in her closet. His body in her bed.
But that comes later.
People like to speak of falling in love. This, whatever this arrangement is, is what they fall into.
Peggy pads out of her bedroom in an old ratty pair of pajamas only to find Stan asleep on her couch. He’s sprawled out along the length of it and the blanket her mother gave her is pulled up over him, his legs hanging off the edge and the cat is stretched along the back of the couch just behind his shoulder. He’s snoring lightly, mouth parted open.
She reaches over and shakes his shoulder, his snoring cutting off sharply and in question. He blinks up at her. “What to my wondering eyes,” he grumbles, a dumb smile spreading his mouth. “And here I had thought you were just a dream,” he teases.
She rolls her eyes and folds her arms over her chest. “It’s not even six and you’re charging straight out of the gate.”
He yawns widely, his arms stretched overhead, nearly cuffing the cat in the head. “Credit morning wood.”
Peggy rolls her eyes again and pushes his legs over a little too roughly and sits down, his legs dropping back down into her lap near instantly. Her hands rest on his legs, just below his knee and she can feel the muscle in his calf twitch slightly when she runs her fingers over it.
“I think I had an idea last night, a really, just, genius idea, but fell asleep in the middle of it,” he says, his words bleeding into a second yawn.
“An idea about what?” she asks. The cat paws its way over to Peggy trying to get her attention but she ignores it.
“I don’t remember,” he frowns. “Nothing. Everything.” He laughs.
Peggy considers his leg under her hand and his body stretched out next to her.
“Please tell me you’re wearing pants under there.”
Stan waggles his eyebrows at her. “Wanna get under here and check?”
“Get up,” Peggy says as she stands, unceremoniously dumping his legs off her lap.
“Oh, I am up,” he says. She means to glare at him, but maybe it’s because it’s so early, maybe it’s a lot of things, but instead she winds up offering a coy, lopsided smile before bracing her hands on her hips and shaking her head.
“I’m going to make breakfast,” she announces a little too loudly.
“Thanks, honey,” he mocks, the cat now spread over his chest, purring loudly. “I like my eggs over-easy,” he calls after her.
“Make them yourself!” She can hear him mumbling, and she’s pretty sure he’s talking to the cat.
Another morning, Peggy wakes fully clothed besides Stan on her bed. There are still notes and production boards at the foot of the bed, and an uncapped pen has leaked blue ink all over her sheets.
“Oh shit,” she mutters into his back. “Wake up, we fell asleep.”
Waking Stan up is like waking a slumbering bear.
“This is not how I envisioned waking up in bed with you,” he mumbles.
“Stop imagining me naked and get out of bed.”
“Your mattress,” he says into the pillow, “is really firm.”
“Get up.” She shoves at him.
“Like sleeping on a cement block covered in a fancy sheet.”
“Then roll over and get up.”
He sighs when he stands, his knees popping, stretches his arms out and yawns dramatically.
“I’m gonna take a piss. And then I’m gonna make some coffee.”
“Buy some coffee,” Peggy shouts after him. She pulls the collar of her shirt up to her nose, sniffs, decides she definitely should change.
“What?” he shouts back.
“Buy coffee. We ran out yesterday.”
She can hear him mutter goddamnit and then the toilet flushes, the pipes whining in protest. He’s humming, she can hear it over the running faucet and his side of the bed is still warm and it’s all so painfully domestic she doesn’t know what to do with it or herself. The intimacy between them isn’t new. Hell, the domesticity isn’t either. It’s been there for a long time, whether in the office or on the phone calls that came after, that easy lived-in feeling has always marked their every interaction.
Nothing changes them. No, that’s not true. Plenty of things have changed them -- the hotel room at the Waldorf, all those pitches and all those campaigns, Ginsberg’s hiring, her departure -- but for the better. Better sounds like too much. Closer. Closer is the word. Even, and especially, all the things that should have pulled them apart -- they brought them closer.
Pushed closer and closer until here they are, alone together every night in her apartment.
Partners, she thinks, remembering Megan, remembering her own comment to Stan back at that bar in Midtown. They’re partners now.
“I’m gonna get the coffee!” she yells, semi-panicked. She tugs a (semi) clean shirt on and grabs her purse.
“What?” he swings the door open, his face wet. “I said I’d do it.”
“No, you didn’t,” she says. “I’ll be five minutes, don’t destroy the place.”
He raises his eyebrows and looks around. “As if that’s possible,” she can hear him say as she unlocks the front door.
“Get some danishes!” he shouts after her.
30.
So it makes sense they start sleeping together -- platonically, sexually, every potential meaning of the phrase -- a lot.
They start sleeping together. Again. A lot.
The first time, that’s actually the second time, but the first in a pattern that emerges:
Peggy initiates it and he goes for it immediately, like he’d been waiting for her to reopen the door to this. The Carol Burnett Show is on the television and the first draft of work for Gordon’s Gin is scattered on the coffee table in front of them. He goes down on her on the couch, first dragging her trousers down her legs before biting at the naked crook of her knee, grabbing her by the hips, hauling her against his mouth. Peggy doesn’t know why she initiates it. She thinks it’s because he’s always there. He’s always around and that makes this a thing impossible to resist. She also tells herself it’s different with Stan, different from Pete, from Duck, from Ted. He’s not her boss, he has no rank over her, and if honesty is a thing she can achieve with herself, then maybe she can admit that they haven’t just been about business for a long time now.
He makes her come with his mouth, and he pushes into her when she’s still coming down, and it’s a lot, too much, and she can hear herself whining his name, him chuckling in her ear, the sound bitten off fast into a low groan as she arches up under him, Peggy saying something that sounds a lot like more.
After:
“You left bite marks on my thighs.”
“Do you want me to apologize, or you want more?”
She shoves him away, a dumb smile on her face and he laughs.
Again: on her knees against her littered coffee table, bumping her chin on the edge of it when she comes, Stan groaning behind her.
Again: only once again at his apartment, no reason for them to venture outside of the Upper West except on business, the both of them stoned, her skin prickling under his hands, feeling like they’ve been fucking for hours, no sense of time, Stan telling her she’s hilarious when she’s high.
Again: they fuck, her on top, her body flush with his, his feet planted against the mattress fucking up into her, telling her to go slower. He likes to fuck her slow, likes her impatience, how given enough time and enough pressure, she inevitably cracks, says anything, begs him. This time, all she does is smirk and snap her hips faster. “Jesus, fuck, Peggy.” He tips his head back and sucks in a breath. “I’m gonna fucking come.”
“Good. I want you to,” and that makes him laugh breathless and groan at the same time, like everything about this and her is impossible. She watches his face when he comes, can feel him inside her, makes her bite her bottom lip.
“Talk to me,” Peggy says into the dark. “Like you do on the phone.”
The sheets stick to her legs and the mattress shifts as Stan moves beside her.
He chuckles, but the sound is appreciative. “I spend every waking hour with you. I’ve got nothing to tell.”
“That’s work. And I don’t want to argue about wigs or city comptrollers or taxis. Talk to me about something other than work.”
He sighs, but then he starts to talk. He talks about movies. He is always talking about movies. He’s always talking about stories that happened to other people or rooted faraway in the fictional, yet somehow still all too telling about him.
He mumbles beside her, his beard and his mouth occasionally brushing her shoulder, about the skeleton fight scene in Jason and the Argonauts and how he saw it for the first time on a date and after the movie ended that was all he had wanted to talk about but she didn’t and he saw the movie three times more in theaters but he never saw that girl again.
He can’t remember her name but he can remember that fight scene. He can remember exactly how it made him feel.
31.
These are the things Peggy has learned about Stan: he’s still obsessed with biker films and he made her see Easy Rider twice in theaters. He likes to hum Ennio Morricone scores while he works and the bulk of 1966 for her is marked by the theme to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly as performed by a preoccupied Stan Rizzo. He thinks that The Treasure of the Sierra Madre was the first movie he ever saw in a theater and she thinks it’s strange that he can’t remember for certain. She told him that, for her, it was All About Eve, and that had made him smile, lines crinkling around his eyes as he said of course, as he said, no wonder you’re always gunning for that brass ring.
She’s learned that he’s a night owl, that morning finds him cranky and irrational, easy to anger, but his anger is quick, both to spark and then to settle and go at best forgiven, at worst forgotten. That he likes her mouth, her lips. When they fuck, he likes to pass his fingers over and into her mouth. How all she has to do is bite, lick, suck a little and his whole body seizes up.
That he talks too much. He talks too much in bed, not just dirty, but conversationally, telling her about an idea Ginsberg had about a chain restaurant who wanted their business while biting at her breast, about how some buddy of his got arrested at some protest down at Washington Square while he lazily fucks her. Peggy has a hard time keeping up her end of the dialogue when he does this, her body too responsive to his, her mouth made clumsy.
He has the movie poster for Blow-Up on the wall in his kitchen. He had called it the most depressing movie he had ever seen, but there it was, pasted on his wall (his aversion to photography was a nerve she loved to poke at with him, and it seemed the same held true for him, like a sore tooth he couldn’t stop worrying with his tongue).
That he’s well-read in a way that never ceases to surprise her (a fact he takes as an insult against not just his person but his brain, as he has told her multiple times). He’s always reading. There’s Stan on her couch reading back issues of the New Yorker Peggy forgot she had. Reading Bukowski poems, reading Philip K. Dick sci-fi novels. Reading Vonnegut and Vidal and Mailer and Updike.
“You have a decidedly male perspective when it comes to literature,” she told him one night. They were in bed, they were naked, and Peggy had picked up a book -- Roth this time, she remembers the cover -- he had left on the nightstand on her side of the bed.
Stan had looked down and she had followed his gaze until she rolled her eyes at his half-hard cock. “I have a decidedly male perspective on most things,” he had said, taking the book from her.
32.
That fall they take a meeting with Ray-Ban. Since going into business on their own, they’ve managed to attract some attention, including a brief write-up in the Daily News as arranged by Joan. Leading up to the meeting with Ray-Ban have been two other successes: first, Gordon’s Gin and then Kool-Aid.
So they take the meeting with Ray-Ban at the Hilton in Midtown. So Peggy and Stan make their pitch while Joan and Ken entertain.
And they sign them.
“I believe this calls for a celebration,” Ken says.
They celebrate. And like every other drunken outing, Peggy and Stan are the last ones standing at the bar.
“We left Ginzo all alone,” Peggy says, on the verge of giggling. “He’s alone in my apartment; we have to come home to that.”
“We could get a room.” She meets his eye; heat unfurling in her.
“We can’t afford a room,” she points out. “We can barely afford these drinks.”
“Is this a Dickensian romance, or what.”
“Romance?” she says. “There’s a word.”
She can’t read him for a beat. “Which word would you prefer.”
“I don’t know.” They maintain eye contact, and the only thing Peggy can think is that she’s in so much trouble here. “Finish your drink.”
He smirks, almost meanly. “You going to romance me?”
Peggy slides off her stool and presses her body against his side. “No. I’m going to fuck you,” she says against his ear.
He clutches the sweaty glass and downs its contents. His hand rests at the small of her back as he steers her first out of the bar and then into a cab.
The house is dark when they get back, no sign of Ginsberg. They stumble through her apartment, Stan’s blazer dropped in front of her door, her dress already pushed up over her hips.
“Not on the table,” she gasps into his mouth. “We work on that table.”
She rides him on the bed, brutal, the muscles straining in her thighs, their hips rubbing together. As she’s about to come, she leans her body down against his, his hand gripping the nape of her neck. She comes hard, tucks her face against his chest. He rolls them, fucking her through it. Not the way she fucked him, but slower, deeper, kissing her -- her mouth, her jaw, along her face -- and her arms are wrapped around him, tight.
After, he makes a move to roll from her and she grabs him by the shoulder.
“Don’t move,” she says just under his ear.
“My ass is cold,” he mumbles. She laughs against his neck, runs the heel of her foot against the curve of his ass and he hitches against her. He pulls back, grabs the blanket at the foot of the bed and drapes it over them, wrapping himself around her again.
They lay there for awhile, diagonally across the bed, their bare feet poking out from under the blanket. Her fingers drag through his hair and she can feel his breath hot against her neck, his own fingers running over, testing, the sharp curve of her bare hip.
“I keep waiting for this to be a bad idea,” Peggy says, “to prove to be this . . . really bad thing. But it’s not, it doesn’t.”
“You think I’m a bad idea.”
“No. Not at all. I think mixing work and . . . ”
“Romance?”
“You and that goddamn word.”
33.
Peggy finds that New York is full of possibility again. They’re succeeding with the agency. The weather has begun to turn. The anticipation of 1970 is carried inside of each of them.
Late that fall, heading into the winter months, New York feels like the city it had been when Peggy had first moved to Manhattan from Brooklyn -- new and exciting, something potentially waiting for her in each and every building she passed, down every street and avenue she did not travel.
There’s an article in the Times that Sunday about the uptick in time capsules being buried in anticipation of 1970 and the advent of a new decade.
“I don’t like the idea of returning to the people I’ve been.”
Stan looks up at her over the portion of the paper he had poached from her. “I’m sure they were all perfectly lovely ladies.” He smirks then. “I remember the you I met. You were so angry, wound so tight.” He laughs quietly at the memory.
“And you were such an asshole.”
“Well, yeah. Sure. But you knew exactly what to do with me.”
She raises her coffee to her mouth, pausing before taking a sip. “I did, didn’t I,” she says proudly.
34.
Stan tried to teach her poker one night.
He sat down across from her at the kitchen table. “Okay,” he said, “the game is Texas Hold ‘Em -- $100 bet minimum -- ”
“Shut up,” Peggy had giggled, interrupting him and bumping her teeth against the top of her bottle of beer with an audible clack, which only made her laugh harder.
“You are drunk,” he said, taking a long pull of his own beer. He pointed at her. “I am gonna take advantage of this. I am telling you now. I’m gonna clean you out, take you for all your money.”
Peggy had waved her arms around, indicating her apartment. “This is all my money,” she said mid-laughter before busting open in another gale.
He talked of small blinds and big blinds, the turn, the river, showdown. They both learned quickly that Peggy had no gambling sense whatsover.
“Can I bet the cat?” she asked after another disastrous hand for her. “You can have the cat, she likes you better anyway.”
“Everyone likes me better! And no, no felines in the pot. Give me that -- don’t look at the cards yet.” He batted at her hands as she said, “okay, okay, okay!”
She looked at her cards in her hand anyway and then looked back up at him. “You better not let me win.”
“Let you? Are you kidding me? I wouldn’t dream of it.”
He won easily, a pot ultimately comprised of bottle caps, paper clips, chewing gum and idle threats issued by Peggy. He got her naked in her bedroom, told her to get down on her hands and knees on the bed, and she did. She glanced at him over her shoulder as she settled on the mattress, her loud breathing drowned out by the creak of the springs, and he had paused, his hands still at his belt, his unbuttoned trousers.
“What are you doing?” she asked and Stan leaned over, his open mouth tripping hot down her bare spine.
“Taking my reward,” he mocked, and when he touched her she had moaned.
35.
Ray-Ban proves to be their biggest coup. Joan is proud to announce that by the end of the year, barring catastrophe or act of god, they should have enough set aside to rent actual office space.
“Can’t say I’ll miss this hovel.”
Joan spearheads the real estate hunt and as the holidays approach she finds what she deems to be the perfect spot: two blocks over from the Time-Life Building on Fifth Avenue.
Which brings them to now: packing up all that’s come to accumulate within Peggy’s brownstone and prepare to open the offices of HCOR.
Here is the thing: Peggy is excited. This is exactly what they had wanted when they stepped away from their previous jobs. This is the mark of success. But at the same time, she feels as though a chapter she had no idea she ever even wanted to open is about to close. She’s enjoyed the hard scrabble strangeness of working out of her home, of having them all here, of Stan --
So early one morning she does the obvious thing: she picks a fight.
It starts with Peggy saying something glib, about how she’ll need someone else to overpopulate her apartment now that they’re all vacating it, goes one further when she adds, “warm my bed, now that the winter months are here.”
Stan freezes at the stove, ignoring the eggs frying up. “What are you doing?” he asks, slowly.
Arguing is nothing new with Stan; it’s hardly a novelty. They do it daily, over things both big and small, but this, she knows, already feels different. It’s one thing to argue about a vision for how to best sell gin or whether Nixon really is going to bankrupt American values or their movie viewing choice on a Friday night. This time, though, is about them. About everything they have let go unsaid, about how he makes her feel flayed open sometimes, all the sensitive raw parts of her showing, how in this moment she fears what he might do with her like that.
“Well, we may not have had a pension or bonus system in place, but we figured out our own benefits scheme, didn’t we.” She says it acidly and Stan doesn’t react for a beat. He turns back to the eggs, taking them off the stove when he realizes they’ve burnt.
Stan shakes his head, his back to her as he scrapes the eggs off the pan and onto a plate. “Sometimes I think you learned all the wrong things.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
He folds his arms over his chest and leans back against the kitchen counter, facing her. “How to treat people, how you think they think of you,” he says slowly and then he shakes his head again. “You paid attention at the wrong time to all the wrong lessons. You missed the punchline, and now you call a joke a proverb.”
Something sours inside of her. “Hit the right nerve and look who finally gets artistic.”
“You don’t need to be mean,” he says patiently, but she doesn’t think he’s only referring to what she said.
“And you don’t need to insult me.”
He takes a deep breath. “Whatever you have to say, just say it. I’m not doing this bullshit waltz with you.”
She could tell him a lot of things. She could tell him that she likes having him here -- in her house, in her business, with her. That he has managed to permeate every aspect of her life, and the most curious part is that she finds she not only doesn’t mind, but that she likes it. That she doesn’t want him to leave, that she’s terrified he will.
Instead, she says, “If you’re going to hurt me, just get it over with and do it now.”
He frowns, confused, on the cusp of saying something when her front door opens.
“Jesus, not even Thanksgiving and we’ve got the snow and the snowplows and the fucking snowmen out there,” Ginsberg says, shaking himself off like a dog on the threadbare rug in front of the door.
“Oh, breakfast!” he says, kicking his boots off.
They work the rest of the day in mutual silence. Ginsberg notices, clearly, and the chatter he fills her apartment with to compensate for the both of them is incessant and exhausting.
That evening she picks at a plate of cold lo mein at her kitchen table, an array of sunglasses scattered around her she knows she needs to box up to move soon, and Stan joins her. He cracks open a can of beer.
“Are we going to talk about earlier.”
Peggy looks up at him, her face drawn and unyielding.
“Okay,” he says, “Then I’m going to talk.” He clears his throat; she thinks it’d be entirely unlike him to have prepared a speech or invented lines for this conversation, but he strikes her as nervous, which makes her wary. “I don’t know what is going through that head of yours right now, but I’m pretty sure, whatever it is, it’s really fucking off-base.”
“Are you going to leave?”
He frowns. “Leave for where?”
She smiles small, shaking her head slightly.
“Are you mad at me?”
He smirks, looks at her. “You at me?”
She shakes her head again, but she says, “Sometimes you are . . . just,” and then she stops.
“Right back at you.”
She wants to ask him if he’s staying but she can’t bring herself to say it. Instead he breaks the silence, says, “I’m hungry,” and reaches over for her plate.
STAN.
This is a thing Stan has learned about Peggy: she has the single strangest collection of facts stored in her head. One night she told him about the old news reel theaters. That there was a sign in the lobby, “The thirst for news may now be quenched, so drink thy fill of Knowledge.” Stan likes her weird set of knowledge. There’s so much she doesn’t know or pay attention to, but when she does, she absorbs it all.
36.
“You feed the cat?” Stan asks. He scratches at the back of his neck and rummages in the fridge.
Peggy screws up her face, looking up from the typewriter at her kitchen table. She’s still in her robe and he’s in his undershirt and a pair of boxers, hair uncombed, socks on, the floor too cold. She watches him at the fridge, taking the milk out of the fridge even though she hasn’t answered him. She really can’t remember if she fed the damn cat. When she tells him that, he just looks at her like he knows her, like of course, why bother asking, and he likes her for that.
He’s talking to the cat, unscrewing the bottle of milk that’s probably been in the fridge too long and taking a sniff. She watches him, the way the muscles in his back shift and ripple under his shirt, how in theory this all ends by the end of the month when they officially move into the new office space. The pretext is removed: there will be no reason why he needs to spend the amount of time he spends with her in her apartment. Maybe that reason never existed though. It’s a Sunday morning and the only person here with her is Stan.
Can you imagine coming back from that? he had said back in July. He had meant the moon, he had been talking about astronauts, but sitting there in her kitchen, she finally understands what he meant.
“I love you. You know that, right?”
Her words just hang in the air and he freezes, the bottle of milk still in one hand, the other gripping the handle of the fridge door. He looks at her over his shoulder. “I do now,” he says, almost smug.
“I just thought I should say it. Because. I don’t know.”
“Because I fed your cat?”
After breakfast, Peggy brushes her teeth.
Stan stands in the doorway and when she’s done, when she has turned the faucet off, she looks at him. He steps into the small bathroom, puts a hand on her waist and she stumbles forward into him. He bumps his forehead against hers and says, “You know I love you too.”
“Yeah,” she says just as quietly. “I do.”
37.
At the end of this particular story, Peggy finds Don again. Peggy runs into Don, on Fifth Avenue, not far from her new office.
He’s there, on the sidewalk, a heavy wool coat, a hat, black gloves. He looks the same as when she last saw him, and it’s strange to her how that gives her a bit of peace. She wonders if Don has been in New York this entire time, just that far off her radar. It’s hard for her to imagine New York without Don in it.
“It’s been a long time,” he says as a greeting.
They sit down in a darkened restaurant surrounded by Christmas shoppers on their lunch break. Up close, she can see he does look different, if only a little. His face is softer, not as cruel, and there are more lines collected around his eyes.
“I saw the announcement,” he tells her. “Consider this my overdue congratulations.”
“You found out we seceded from the union in the newspaper?” It seems kinda cold when it’s laid out like that.
“That, and Roger a few months back.”
Their conversation feels stifled to her, like he’s a stranger. She thinks there are some people you can go months and years without seeing or speaking to and when you encounter them again it all picks up again, like no time as passed at all. With Don it feels like too much time has passed.
“Lately I find myself wondering about the past,” he says, cryptic and vague, though also like he knows exactly what she’s thinking. “You ever do that?” He lights his first cigarette since sitting down with her.
“Sure,” she says, non-committal. What she wants to say is of course she does.
She’s always going to imagine a great many different avenues she might have taken. She’ll wonder about Don’s office and if it ever could have been hers, and if it that had been a possibility, would the host of problems associated with that office have been worth it. Because there would be problems, just as many if not more than she has now. Because she might have wanted a great many things -- out of this job, out of her life, out of every person she has ever come in contact with -- but she has never wanted to be Don.
Their conversation ends when he asks her, “Are you happy?” She doesn’t think it’s a question she’s ever heard Don ask.
A small smile spreads across her face. “I am.”
“I know we didn’t . . . leave things well,” she says on the sidewalk. Wet flakes of snow have begun to fall. Don’s face betrays nothing. “But I really am grateful.”
He puts his hat on and looks down at her, extending his hand. “And I really am happy for you, Peggy.”
She takes his hand and rather than shake it, she gives it a firm squeeze and smiles.
38.
Peggy meets Ken over at the new office space in Midtown.
“Not quite Paris,” he says, the two of the them standing side-by-side in front of the window in what will be his office, surveying the view, “but I’m helping to take you somewhere, right?”
Peggy smiles up at him.
“I think I liked you better with the eyepatch,” she says.
“Funny, Cynthia said the same thing.”
HCOR. Holloway Cosgrove Olson & Rizzo.
The four of them stand back looking at the sign.
“Would you look at that,” Joan says.
“I still like HOCR better,” Peggy says.
“Of course you do,” Stan says.
“It’s alphabetical, it’s neat,” Ken says. “Well, minus Joan. But she put the most money in . . . ” Ken continues to ramble about Joan selling her shares of SC&P, about how alphabetical order is easier to remember, until he becomes static white noise beside her.
“Holloway, Cosgrove,” Peggy whispers to herself, a slight pause, “Olson and Rizzo.”
39.
Things Peggy has accumulated over the course of 1969: cheap gold ashtrays that crop up all over her apartment; detritus of Stan’s record collection bequeathed to her in the name of re-education and de-schoolmarm-ing herself (his phrase, not hers); the terrible habit of asking without a glance over her shoulder, “What d’you think?” thereby assuming that Stan is always there to answer; more debt than she had imagined herself saddled with by the age of 30; a mother who continues to attempt to set her up on blind dates with members of some sad Catholic men’s league; and a photograph taken that first morning they started working out of Peggy’s brownstone. In the photograph, Ginsberg is waving his arms (it was Dawn behind the camera, insisting they all be in it) like he’s trying to stop the photo from being taken. Joan is posed professionally next to the couch, her body turned at just the right angle, same for her chin, her smile cool and polished. Ken is leaning forward, his hands clasped between his knees, beside Peggy on the couch. Peggy sits in the middle, her posture straight, but her head is slightly turned. She’s looking not at the camera, but to the right of her. Not quite where Stan is sitting, but as though he has caught her attention and she is turning to look. In the photograph, Stan sits to her right and he’s laughing, sprawled out against the couch, his arm slung behind her.
40.
On New Year’s Eve, Peggy and Stan sit together in her empty office. An empty bottle of champagne rests in the center of the room and she sits with Stan on the floor, the city illuminating the darkened room from outside the bare windows above their heads.
Peggy can remember a homily from when she was younger, fifteen or sixteen, and the priest had asked, “Do you know where you are going tomorrow?”
The priest had meant it in terms of eternal salvation, in terms of taking an inventory of one’s soul, but Peggy had been fifteen, she was sixteen, and she had taken him literally. It became a prayer all its own each night, a call and response: where will I go tomorrow?
Peggy always thought that it was important to have an answer to that question. For a long time it was easy to have an answer, and then it wasn’t. Then it was a warm summer night and she was asking Stan where he was going tomorrow. She was asking him because if she knew where he was going then maybe she’d know where she was going too. Not because she needed to be led, but because maybe she wanted to be where he was.
Where Stan is would be a good place to go tomorrow.
The city waits at their backs. Last year, she thinks, feels very far away.
fin.
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