fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (1/3)
in event of moon disaster
mad men. one small step, one giant leap: peggy at the close of the 1960s and the start of something more. peggy/stan, et al. 24,370 words.
notes: consider this a faux Season 7, aka the one where Peggy and Stan, with the aid of Joan, Ken Cosgrove Accounts/Eyepatch, and Ginsberg, start their own agency -- and also start some other business. this got absurdly long and I feel like I've been writing this forever, so this is me washing my hands of this haha.
You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
JOAN DIDION
With you or without you I’m moving on. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Will you help me?
MAD MEN
1.
Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year.
In fact, St. Joseph’s first dropped the ad, citing that original thorn, original sin: “budget issues” the Monday after Thanksgiving. And now, a week later, they’ve dropped her too, tied to a request they return to the drawing board.
Peggy’s been doing that a lot lately: returning to the drawing board.
“I never liked it in the first place,” Ginsberg had said, staring down at the storyboards, all that remained of the original idea. “Too spooky,” and then he shuddered.
2.
It’s Lou Avery who takes her off St. Joseph’s.
Lou Avery took over for Don in anticipation of the fact that Don will never come back. Don’s not anywhere Peggy knows, yet each time she steps into that office, she surprises herself by expecting to find him there.
“Your vision’s been compromised,” is what Lou says to her from behind Don’s desk. The line is delivered with the word kid implicit at the end, like he’s the good sheriff and she’s run afoul of the law. She stands there silent for a beat too long; the way he said it made it unclear whether this is an edict passed down from the St. Joe brass or Lou’s own opinion, and therefore, his own decision. She doesn’t ask for clarification; she doesn’t want to know the answer.
She leaves Lou’s office with a nod.
Something no one thinks to warn you about is that the ad world is a fishbowl and they’re all swimming in the same polluted stream. Everyone knows about her and Ted. They might not know the specifics, but they know enough.
“Discretion,” Joan had said coolly to her the day Ted left, the same day Harry Crane had been in the office and looked at Peggy like she was equal parts leper and Bond girl, “goes a long way for one’s reputation.”
“Did I ask?” Peggy had snapped before she stalked out of the conference room. The thing was: she hadn’t been mad at Joan. She hadn’t really even been mad at Harry Crane. If she was mad at anyone then and if she is still mad at someone now, it’s herself, and it’s Ted. All that effort it had taken to prove that she hadn’t gotten where she is now by sleeping with Don -- wasted, and thrown back in her face. Like she said, and like St. Joseph’s said: back to the drawing board.
Peggy walks into the creative lounge only to find it empty, save for Stan.
“Where is everyone? It’s two in the afternoon?”
He glances up at her, pen still poised against the paper in front of him. “Working, presumably.”
She frowns. “What are you doing?”
Stan sighs, drops the pen onto the table and leans back heavily in his chair. He takes a long drag off a joint before replacing it in the makeshift ashtray he’s created with a roll of mostly used masking tape and a plate from the kitchen. He casts a sidelong glance at her as he inhales, curious and challenging at once. “Working. Presumably.”
“My turn to ask what you’re doing?” he says when she continues to stand there, all pent-up energy, her hands braced on her hips. She plops down at the table across from him, watches stray wisps of smoke smolder up from his joint. She catches his eye and the lines around his eyes crinkle as he almost offers her a smile.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says.
A thing to remember is that in the lead-up to the last year of the 1960s, there is a lot of promise of change. Promise, or threat, depending on one’s position on the premise, or precipice, of change.
Here is a flash to the end of the story: Peggy will not end 1969 in the same place she ends 1968. If someone was to pull Peggy aside, tell her that by the end of this year she will have everything she wanted but nothing she would ever know she she wants now, Peggy wouldn’t believe them. Peggy would ask, well, then, what should I want.
At the close of 1968, Peggy doesn’t know what she wants and she doesn’t know where she will be in one year’s time. That makes the present unbearable and the recent past something worse.
At the close of 1968 there is a lot Peggy does not know. We will land on the moon that summer, and Peggy doesn’t know that yet. She will not win a Clio and Don will not come back. Ted will not come back. Oliver! will win Best Picture and Stan will rant about Kubrick for the better part of a week and she doesn’t know that yet either. She already knows too much and not enough about Stan. That will change too. Not the part where she knows too much, but the part where she does not know enough; with him, she will find the word enough does not apply.
But it is still 1968, and Peggy sits in the creative lounge while Stan continues to sketch and to smoke and Meredith attempts to navigate a string of garland down the hall, shedding pine needles in her wake.
Peggy doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
3.
“I could never sleep with my boss,” Joyce says. “For one thing, he has this whole stomach girth thing happening. For another, he’s a he.”
Peggy makes the mistake of telling Joyce about Ted. She tells Joyce about Ted the same week she is dropped from St. Joseph’s, the week everything is too fresh for her and the city has begun to freeze over: sugar crystal ice mapping over glass window panes, storefronts glittering in red and green and plastic-faced Santas, Peggy’s hot whiskey cooling at the bar too quickly.
The whiskey warms her chest and Joyce’s eyes narrow as she considers her. “He’s old, right?” Peggy glares. “Okay, not old old, but he’s married. And your boss. So that makes him old at heart. Geriatric, even.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Peggy says and Joyce merely sighs.
“An affair doomed from the start,” Joyce says with a surprising lack of judgment (and an even more surprising amount of wistfulness). “Like all the great tragic literary heroines of yore.” Peggy quirks a brow at the word yore. Joyce leans forward, the side of her body braced against the bar; Jimmy Durante sings city sidewalks, busy sidewalks. “We need to find you a train to fall in front of, or a moor to wander, or,” and at this, Joyce lights up, her elbow bumping the full glass of beer she left unattended on the bar, “a new and improved, unattached,” she says pointedly, “gentleman caller.”
This will be how Peggy winds up meeting Ralph, a tall man with severely parted dirty blonde hair, who does accounts somewhere within the bowels of the Time-Life Building.
“Cheer up, Pegasus,” Joyce says, reaching for her beer. “At least you’re no one’s wicked stepmother. Yet.”
Peggy can’t help but grimace behind the lip of her glass. All that time spent begrudging Ted his family and she had never once considered the possibility they could have ever become hers.
“Jesus.”
Joyce raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
4.
Peggy meets Ralph at a movie theater over in the East Village. Joyce had picked not only the theater but the movie they would see -- some film about a girl gang of bikers, a selection which leads Peggy to consider that maybe Joyce hasn’t fully abandoned Abe’s side of the aisle in the wake of the great bayonet-stabbing-cum-ambulance-break-up -- lending the entire evening a sentiment they are being observed by an invisible third party chaperone.
Ralph’s cringing reaction to the movie is more entertaining than anything that happens on the screen and any piece of shared conversation from earlier that evening. Peggy wants to ask him what kind of movies he actually likes, but finds that she doesn’t really care. War movies -- he looks like the sort who would like a good (or bad, taste is supposedly subjective) war movie.
By the time the houselights come up, Peggy has already written Ralph off. The future of their night ahead ends, in her mind, on the sidewalk outside the theater.
She’s wrong. As they exit the theater, awkward conversation stretches between her and Ralph, like stale taffy stuck to the pull. And it’s there that she runs into him: Stan.
Peggy had been wrong when she said the most entertaining part of the night had been Ralph’s mounting disgust at a girl gang of bikers. The most entertaining part is the way Stan does a double take when they both spot each other, how, like always, his curiosity is tempered by a profound amusement at her expense.
They both freeze by the theater’s exit, Ralph at Peggy’s side, and what appears to be Stan’s date at his, the whole encounter a low-rent West Side Story stand-off. Peggy doesn’t bother to try and disguise her surprise, but she smoothes her hands over her dress, painfully aware that she’s still wearing the same thing she wore to work. She holds her chin a little too high, a little too imperious.
“Well, well, well. She does leave the office,” Stan says, his smile impish, eyes bright. His date is tall, thin in that willowy, chicly underfed way. Peggy notices her lipstick is faded, smudged just a hint below her bottom lip. Something mean lurches in Peggy and her eye keeps wandering to this woman’s bottom lip.
“Don’t make a comment about gin joints,” Peggy says, cutting him off at the pass. His smiles grows larger, but he’s eyeing her, looking at her in a way (she thinks) he never considers her in the office. Wolfish, she thinks; that’s the word.
“I wouldn’t dare. In fact, I’m personally offended you’d even think I could be that clichéd,” he says, that stupid smile of his not faltering for a second. His gaze drifts to Ralph briefly, amused question writ obvious on his face. “What brings you out here? Didn’t think this was your kinda movie.” She wonders if this is how their entire conversation is going to progress: Stan toying with her, his growing entertainment with her discomfort, each question and statement lobbed her way loaded with an understanding only she could have. He knows this isn’t her kind of movie; he knows too much about her.
“It’s not,” Peggy says at the same instance his date says, “I loved it.”
Peggy arches her eyebrows and mouths, “She loved it,” at Stan who only smirks.
“Joyce, our friend Joyce, picked it. For us,” Ralph says haltingly, choosing this moment to speak up, and Stan laughs, like he now understands everything. “I’m Ralph,” he says, extending a hand. Peggy feels a flush of embarrassment as Stan takes his hand and shakes, offering first his own name to Ralph and then Peggy’s name to his date (Francine, he says her name is Francine).
“So J-Bird’s playing matchmaker again?” Stan says. Peggy’s eyes snap to his arm as he wraps it around Francine’s waist, and Ralph starts a little at Stan’s use of again. Peggy glares. “Good luck with this one, man,” he says to Ralph, all jocular boys’ club, and Peggy’s bites the inside of her cheek. She doesn’t know what she’s irritated by more: this dialogue between Ralph and Stan or Francine’s smudged lipstick. Either one, or both, largely informs what happens next.
“We were gonna go grab a drink,” Stan says, “if you guys wanna come.”
“I’m not -- ” Ralph says.
“Sure!” Peggy says.
Stan’s face passes from surprised to suspicious quickly, like a shade drawn at dusk, his offer clearly an empty one.
He hangs back and grabs Peggy by the elbow, leans in as they leave the theater. “Ralphie that bad, huh?”
She looks down at his fingers wrapped around her arm and then back up at his face. “Shut up,” she says lightly.
“Gonna have to save a seat for Doris Day to round out this plot.” He holds the door for her.
“Stop talking to me.” She can hear him chuckling behind her as they step out onto the sidewalk.
They grab a table at a bar near the theater, a place Peggy would never frequent. The interior is dark, dim, crowded with too many people, the heat inside near oppressive. She pulls her coat off immediately, casting an eye warily around the place.
Over their table is a giant crude painting of a shipwreck in a chipped wooden frame, an apocalyptic beginner’s attempt to crib Goya (or at least that’s what Stan says about it when he catches Ralph looking up at it).
“So how do you know Peggy?” Ralph asks.
Stan smirks as he swallows his beer. “Oh. I’m her brother.”
Peggy rolls her eyes.
Ralph looks slightly taken aback. “I didn’t know you had a brother. You mentioned a sister, not a brother.”
“He’s the black sheep of the family,” Peggy says, maintaining eye contact with Stan. He grins. She turns back to Ralph. “He’s not my brother,” she says, and Ralph only looks more confused. “I work with him.”
“So you’re both in advertising,” Francine says, her tone flat, her posture slumped, Stan still looking at Peggy like he knows what it feels like to imagine them together and alone. Peggy nods, pinned by Stan’s gaze. Peggy is a lot of things, which sometimes all too often can include naive, but she’s not stupid. There is a knot of tension pulling itself tighter at that table, something electric she has always shied away from giving too much spark. Ralph is still casting glances at the shipwreck on the wall and Francine is watching Peggy’s hands, her face bored and unreadable. She is watching the space between them and Stan’s, the two of them seated across from each other, both their hands flat on the table as though they are both waiting for someone to call the word draw! -- and then pistols, bang. Peggy doesn’t look at their hands but she thinks about Stan going home with her (with Francine, not Peggy). She thinks about the smudged lipstick, drinks her own beer greedily and feels an odd fission of something (something she refuses to call jealousy, even if it feels a lot like jealousy, and labels it as loneliness instead) spread within her.
Peggy slips her hands in her lap. The band that had been playing when they arrived has stopped and over the radio, Bing Crosby this time, sings children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.
“You know,” Peggy says, and for just a beat the awkwardness at the table, that mismatched chemistry, is suspended and obvious before them all. “This song has been following me . . . for days now. Just this song, no other Christmas carol.”
“Yeah?” Stan asks, his voice a low drag. He takes his hands and he cradles his beer. He looks to Francine, the song ends, and the moment dissipates.
5.
“You enjoy the movie last night?” Stan teases her in the office the next day.
Peggy looks up from her desk. “You and I both know I only care a fraction what you do about fictional biker gangs.”
He smiles, almost laughs, pleased with either her or himself. Maybe both; maybe, sometimes, they’re knotted up that tight for him, interchangeable and indivisible. He pauses, and Peggy watches him, his face an almost comic mask of deep consideration.
“You think there’s a commercial in that?” he says finally.
Peggy crosses her arms over her chest, pushing back a little from her desk. “What? For Sunkist? Some oranges rolling down an open highway, chased by a roaring gang of bikers?”
He gets a faraway look to his face like he’s imagining exactly that. “I would watch that commercial. I would love it.”
She waves him off, returning to the notes she has scattered across her desk. “Get out of here. Go do some actual work.”
He pokes his head in on his way out.
“You think we could get Peter Fonda?”
“Good-bye,” she calls.
6.
The idea to start their own agency comes about that New Year’s Eve.
Stan comes over, boards for Avon tucked under one arm. Before the holidays, there had been a sudden burst of momentum on the Avon front, and now, according to Lou, Pete, Joan, and probably God, they're behind. It had been Peggy’s idea to work at her place rather than the office. There was something decidedly dark and depressing about spending two New Year’s in a row at work, and considering the year that followed in the wake of last year’s, and considering (though she is loathe to admit it) Peggy takes stock in things like omens, she figured a change, if only in scenery, would be a good start.
With him, Stan brings a bottle of expensive-looking single malt whiskey someone must have bought him for Christmas.
“I didn’t get you anything,” she says when she opens the door, eyeing the bottle. She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against the doorframe.
He smirks. “Good. I didn’t either.” He raises the bottle. “This is for me.”
“So chivalrous,” she says, stepping out of his way just enough to allow him entrance. The small hallway is freezing and she closes the door quickly after he brushes past her, bits of snow from him now clinging to her sweater and her jeans. “Merry Christmas.”
“Nice tree,” he teases.
She still has her Christmas tree up, a sad little thing she had picked up on an equally sad weekend she had been determined to make not-sad (and she had mostly succeeded, buying the tree, buying the ingredients she thought went into her mother’s spice cookies but she forgot the molasses; she bought a string of lights and cheap multicolor bulbs and tinsel, and it was back at home that she realized the molasses was missing, and the cat had found the tinsel and the tree looked too bare and too small and Burl Ives was on the radio and -- )
“There’s some cookies in the kitchen,” she offers. “I don’t think they’re stale yet.”
“With an offer like that . . . ”
Peggy can smell the cold on him, snow still melting in his hair and his beard, on the shoulders of his coat. “Give me that,” she says and she takes his coat from him.
“You order food?”
“Chinese,” she calls, pulling two beers from the fridge. “How was the family?” she asks him.
He shrugs. “Familial.” He takes the beer from her. “And how was the Olson clan?”
Peggy offers him a tight-lipped smile he returns until it spreads too wide across his face and he bares teeth.
“They’re good,” she finally says. “They were good. The Christmas ham was good. Mass was good,” and Stan interrupts her with an amen. “Everything was good.”
“Good.” His smile shifts, softens even, until she thinks it’s something past friendly -- too intimate and knowing, yet there is a marked lack of judgment from him. It makes her uncomfortable, the bottle of beer clenched tightly in her hands.
“So,” she clears her throat. “Are we going to get to work, or what?”
They get to work. They eat the Chinese, they argue over the distribution of egg rolls or whether the Szechuan chicken from this place is any better than the kind they get at the office, and they drink the beer. They brainstorm idly about Avon without really getting anywhere.
Around ten, Peggy turns the television on and Stan pulls out his stash.
“Quitting time already?”
“Time,” and he pauses, his concentration split, “to usher in the New Year. Care to partake?” he asks, slow and distracted as he rolls a joint. Peggy watches him. She likes his hands, likes looking at his fingers -- thick and suggestive, yet their movement precise and adept.
“The New Year’s not really a thing that should be ushered in alone.”
“1969,” he drawls. He flicks his lighter and inhales deeply.
She picks up the bottle of unopened whiskey left on her coffee table. “This is fancy,” she says, her tone turning mocking. “You don’t do fancy. This should only be drunk by, like, the Stanley Rizzos of the world. Not the Stans.”
He snorts, passing her the joint.
He unscrews the cap on the bottle of whiskey while Peggy takes a hit, watching him through narrowed eyes. He pours a generous helping into the two coffee mugs she left out on the table, both imprinted with a faded SCDP logo.
They clink their mugs together. “To the Stanley Rizzos and Margaret Olsons of the world,” he toasts.
7.
“1969,” Peggy says. “Go.” The talk of starting their own agency is borne out of drunken talk of resolutions.
Stan sighs heavily, leaning back against the couch cushions. “No more forgetting I do not in fact enjoy tripping on acid, and trying again is really unlikely to change that.”
Peggy laughs. “There’s a morally responsible resolution.”
“I’m a paragon of moral responsibility.” He takes a long sip from his mug, punctuated by a low gasp as he swallows. “You. Go.”
“No more sleeping with married men.” She says it quickly, without thinking. She’s drunk, and she laughs at that too -- at what she said, at her own drunkenness. Stan looks at her with a creeping smile, like she might have just proven him right, answered a question she had no idea had been posed.
He sighs again, leans forward and sets his empty mug down on the table. He rubs at his beard like he’s mulling something over. “What?” she asks, halfway afraid to hear what he might say.
Instead he surprises her.
He surprises her when he says, “Start our own agency.”
Here is the thing that will carry with her throughout not just the coming year but for a long time after: he said our instead of my. He had included her from the start.
“What?” she asks again, on the verge of another laugh (she almost feels bad they’ve all but wasted this bottle of whiskey on their own unrefined, stoned palates), but this time, the caution is gone.
She knows that Stan had wanted LA. She also knows that they will never talk about it, how Stan had wanted Los Angeles and it was Ted who took his place. How in a way that could tell another story -- Stan wanted it, Ted took it -- but they’re never going to talk about that either.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” he says. “Striking out on your own.”
She has, and he knows it, so her mouth twists slyly. She doesn’t know when they closed the distance between them on the couch -- sometime between that first sip of whiskey and this conversation -- but Stan’s still leaning forward, their knees almost touching, and she looks at him, actually looks at him. It’s a casualty of daily encounters with the same person: you stop looking at them. When they’re no longer new, you don’t pay as close attention. She’s paying attention now, and he’s paying attention to her. Stan looks like the sort of man who would want to build something (based on the beard, she thinks that should be a log cabin or a rocking chair or a better rock anthem -- not this). Like he’d want to create something from nothing and know that it was his. She supposes most men would want that, that she even wants that for herself, but as of late it’s begun to read plain and obvious in him.
“Thinking about it is one thing. Resolving to do it? That’s another.”
“Humor me,” he says, and she looks at him like that’s all she ever does. But she smiles as she imagines it. Stan with ambition, with obvious ambition, is another thing too. It’s a thing she likes.
Which she supposes is why she kisses him.
Peggy kisses him first.
In that moment, she wants him. She wants everything he’s saying but it’s also him she wants. So she leans over that much closer and she kisses him. The kiss is tentative at first, like when he had kissed her back at the office, after Ginsberg had stabbed him in the arm. She can feel him sigh against her mouth and he hesitates. He hesitates, not her. He’s too close for her to view him clearly (and hasn’t always been the case? He’s always too close, she can never comprehend what she is seeing, she has no distance and she has no bigger picture where Stan is concerned).
“You know. That wasn’t a line to get up your skirt,” he says.
“I’m not wearing a skirt,” she breathes against his mouth. His hand slides up from her knee to grip her thigh and squeezes once. So she kisses him again, more confident this time, and he kisses her back, grabbing her to him, the kiss going deep and sloppy. His tongue is hot, pushing against her own and his hand on her thigh drags her closer, her own mouth rough and aggressive with his, her hand pulling at his hair. She’s stoned and more than kind of drunk, but it all feels good, feels good in this impossible, foreign way she know she can’t fully chalk up to the weed or the whiskey. She wants this, she wants him, and that strikes her as borderline insane.
When Peggy grinds down against his thigh, she can feel the hitch in his breath, can hear the loud wet smack of their lips when they separate, his beard rubbing at first her neck and then her collarbone as he bites his way down her throat. His hand drags up her body, feeling her up through her sweater, and she can’t stop panting, feeling like she always does with Stan, but heightened: like he has managed to find that loose thread inside of her and rather than stitch her up, he’s pulling, he’s unwinding her. He’s hard against her, she can feel him, but there’s no real demand or insistence from him, instead just taking what she’ll give him.
They abruptly stop kissing when the New Year hits. The countdown on the television interrupts them, “Auld Lang Syne” playing tinny and small yet filling her apartment. They sit there together, separate, not touching, catching their breath and watching the TV coverage. Peggy’s lips feel hot, swollen and bruised, and she fights the urge to press her fingers to them. She can’t look at him, afraid she’ll have that shellshocked look to her. They’re still sitting too close and he reaches over for the smoldering joint he left in the ashtray, taking a drag. It all feels a bit like something she made up, a bizarrely graphic fantasy, if it wasn’t for the puffy mouth and the ache still pulsing between her legs.
“Happy New Year,” he says as he exhales.
She finally looks at him. His eyes drift to her mouth and his lips tip upward. They’re drunk and they’re stoned, and it will surprise her how easy this will be to push from her mind. It will be easy for business as usual to resume the following days and the days they continue to work on Avon, while he’ll draw pictures of women with full and colored lips and Peggy will attempt to plumb the depths of female desire where a pretty made-up face is concerned.
“Yeah,” she says. She takes the joint, turning her attention back to the television. “Happy New Year.”
8.
In January of 1969, here is a collection of things Peggy knows for sure: she will not trust Joyce to set her up with any more prospective blind dates; she will not return to the salon on 7th Ave., even if it is that much closer to the office; she shouldn’t kiss Stan; she shouldn’t kiss Stan and pretend that if she keeps kissing Stan it’ll be a thing that adds up to nothing; Lou Avery is not Don and Don is not coming back; the dry cleaner’s one block from her apartment is almost definitely an Italian mob front; Ted is in Los Angeles and Ted will remain in Los Angeles and when if ever she thinks of Ted she will remind herself: Los Angeles; she does not think of Ted much anymore.
9.
Peggy doesn’t think of Ted much anymore. When she does, she finds there is no longing, just a humiliating sense of futility shrouded in something darker, something angrier. When she does, she finds it’s all ruined, marred by how he left it. How he left it, not her; because of him, not her. When you have no say, she thinks, you can’t be the one who left anyone or anything behind.
Because of this, the departed party doesn’t get a say in how they are remembered after their exit, be it hastily, planned, or entirely unexpected.
For once, Ted doesn’t get a say.
Ted belongs in the dustbin now with all the other men, men who left her with a variety of things, a catalog of different adjectives for different emotions, but namely disappointed. Ted belongs to Los Angeles now -- where they say the sun is always shining, where his wife is always blonde, a place where Peggy has never been.
Certain things are ruined now, not just her idea of him.
(He’s not that virtuous -- he’s just in love with you: she had called the first a lie and the second the truth, but now she wants to flip them, revise her thinking, no longer a lie followed by the truth, but a truth paired with a lie, or two truths, she still doesn’t know what to do with that line, he’s just in love with you.
She had asked Stan about it once -- the virtue, not the love -- though not directly and not in detail. It was in early in December. It was early December and Peggy still sometimes thought of Ted. She often thought of Ted. “Who’d you say is the most virtuous person you know?” she had asked him abruptly. It was early December and it was dark out, it was late, and they were still at the office.
He had frowned when he looked up at her. He stretched back in his chair, tipping it back, mumbling to himself more so than to her, “I don’t think that word’s even in my vocabulary,” before returning the chair to the ground and on all four legs. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “I don’t think I keep much company with the virtuous sort.” He said the word virtuous like it soured in his mouth.
“You don’t think I am?”
Stan bit down on a smile (and knowing him, a laugh as well). “No,” and he said it with pride, not for himself, but her.
Something must have shown in her face because his own gentled. “Virtue’s overrated,” he said, and either wholly unaware or all too aware of the irony, poured some whiskey into his coffee mug.
“How’s that?” she had asked, pushing her own cup forward. He took it from her.
“Because,” he said, distracted, as he poured, “you put yourself up there on that pedestal,” he paused as he screwed the cap back on the bottle, and then looked at her, “from which one can only fall,” he concluded dramatically.
She rolled her eyes and took a long pull from her cup. She smacked her lips. “Who do you think is the most virtuous in the office?”
He considered the question. “Caroline,” he said definitively.
“Roger’s secretary?” she laughed. She took another sip and then said, “Oh my god, I think you’re right.”)
Take, for example, Rosemary’s Baby. Take the film itself, take the ad, take the theater they saw it in, where Don saw them. Take it all from her -- even thinking about it makes her feel embarrassed, a tight knot that threatens in the center of her gut, making her feel small and stupid. Played. It makes her feel played.
He was right, that’s the worst of it. She could almost thank him for it, thank him for how he left it. Left her. He left no room for her to want him back, no desire to repeat any of that again, all the small humiliations lit up cruel and obvious in his wake.
So Peggy does not remember Ted fondly. For a good while there, Peggy does not remember Ted fondly, until, eventually, she will not remember him much at all.
When Ted calls the office he talks to Lou or Stan. He talks to Lou as his equal and to Stan about art; he checks in with Lou and makes demands upon Stan.
She doesn’t talk to Ted much now and when they do they talk about oranges. Peggy finds she can manage that: she’s never much cared for the taste of oranges.
10.
Ted’s departure was without ceremony. He slinked off the island of Manhattan with only a memo offered as a farewell.
“I know you will flourish and succeed in my absence,” the memo read. It had been addressed to the SC&P creative team at large, but Peggy took it personally.
Ginsberg had held the memo in his hand. “Who knew he was quite the wordsmith,” Ginsberg said. They had looked at him and he had shrugged. “Never actually read these things before. But this one was nice. I almost feel bad.”
“Don’t,” Mathis said. “He’s with the angels and the palms and Raquel Welch now.”
“And Pete Campbell,” Stan had said and they had laughed.
Peggy hadn’t said anything.
That evening she sat with Stan and a bottle of rye in the creative lounge. It went unremarked how easily they had reverted to their previous working relationship after she came back from CGC, after Ted left. Stan never talked to her about Ted, never goaded her or needled her the way he had about Abe (or about Mark, about Duck, and had there been another man who wasn’t Ted, it would have been more of the same).
The most she ever said to him on the subject of Ted was that night, and this came after three glasses of rye. The side of Stan’s hand was stained with ink and she kept staring at it, the work for Maytag abandoned between them on the table.
“People, I have found,” she had proclaimed, “disappoint you.”
“Yeah. They do,” Stan nodded. “They do do that,” he said, his understanding quiet and implicit. He sat there with her and neither of them said a thing.
And that was that.
People, she has found, not only disappoint, but they move on.
So Peggy moved on.
11.
Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year, and in fact, she’s not even nominated. There’s a moral buried somewhere in that story, but Peggy is tired of seeking out morals almost as much as she is tired of fearing the words, “I told you so,” strung in bitter succession and then whispered in her ear.
The same month the Clios are held, the New York Ad Association holds a dinner. SC&P is invited, and by extension Peggy is invited, so Peggy buys a dress. It’s a plain dress, black, no frills, no bows, all harsh, unfeminine lines.
“It’s a dinner, Peggy,” Joan tells her at the open bar. “Not a funeral.”
It might as well be one, the serious tone struck for the night managing to be both somber and self-congratulatory. At their table, Roger is tipping towards the unseemly side of drunk. Cutler is eyeing the room, and Peggy’s unclear if he’s on the prowl for potential clients or potential employees to poach from rival firms. Ken is explaining something elaborate and mechanical, if only based on his dramatic hand gestures, to Stan. And Stan -- she’s not entirely sure how he does it, but he’s managed to make a black tie event look casual: his lazy posture at the table, his indifferent but amused attitude, and his utter lack of self-consciousness in the way he wears a tux.
He glances over at Peggy and Joan as they approach, raking his eyes deliberately over Peggy before meeting her face with a smirk. Peggy takes the empty seat next to Stan, waving him off when he -- after a delay -- attempts the gentlemanly and stands, reaching for her chair.
“You clean up nice and severe,” Stan says, his eyes drifting over her and her dress again.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Your tie’s crooked.”
His grin is loose and boyish. “Wanna fix it for me? Tell me I’ve been a bad boy? Get you a whip and you’d definitely have that whole disciplinarian, dominatrix-y vibe -- ”
“Please stop talking.”
He laughs. “Yes, ma’am,” he says as the emcee takes his place at his podium, the banquet hall going quiet in drips and drabs around the room.
It’s a boring speech, and she finds herself watching Stan out of the corner of her eye. He traces a finger over the condensation dripping down the side of his glass. She didn’t eat enough earlier and they have yet to be served dinner; she feels lightheaded, which is what she’s choosing to blame for any and all thoughts running through her head right now (all thoughts dealing exclusively, it would seem, with Stan, Stan and his crooked tie, Stan and his wet fingers, that tux, his mouth on New Year’s Eve, his mouth now -- all bad thoughts).
She turns her attention back to the speech, cheeks slightly flushed. Stan doesn’t fix his tie.
They’re at the bar after dinner, waiting on another round of drinks.
The man next to her introduces himself. Peggy misses his name, but she catches that he’s from Geyer. That’s the important part, she assumes, at an event like this.
“I’m Peggy. Peggy Olson. SC&P.” She leans to the side a little, reaches back and grabs Stan’s arm. “This is Stan. This is . . . ” she turns her head towards Stan and mumbles indistinctly, “from Geyer.” She really should have eaten more for dinner and drank less. A lot less.
The nameless man from Geyer takes Stan’s hand and shakes it. “You’re the husband?” Geyer says. Peggy freezes, and so does Stan, still holding this guy from Geyer’s hand. He drops his hand and they stare at him wide-eyed. Oddly, it’s Peggy who recovers first.
She laughs, the sound high and nervous. “Might as well be,” she says, but she says it too cheerfully. Stan just squints at her before laughing to himself, taking their drinks from the bartender and standing there with both in his hands.
“Give me that,” she mutters, taking her drink from Stan.
It’s not long after that when he asks her if she wants to get out of there. It’s like a line from those dumb biker movies he likes so much, only he’s wearing a tux instead of leather, and she’s Peggy and not anybody else. She grins all the same, trying on her own version of a Hollywood line:
“What you got in mind?”
12.
“Whose party is it?” Peggy asks.
He shrugs, his hand bumping against her thigh. “A friend.”
They are in a cab, en route to a party over on Mercer in the Village. Peggy’s loaded already, crowded in the backseat with Stan, and this close, she can smell him: the cigarettes he smoked one after the other at the bar, a faint hint of aftershave he never wears, the clean starch of his shirt, and him, the heat of him. She rolls her head towards him.
“We’re gonna be so fancy,” she says, “so, so fancy,” and then she starts to laugh.
She has no idea whose party this is or who Stan’s friend is hosting it. Peggy had been right in the cab: they are grossly overdressed. A friend of Stan’s -- his name either Karl or Carl -- will only refer to her as “Pat Nixon,” laughing each time like it’s the funniest joke. “Look at you two,” a man in a frayed Army vest and a tattoo of a dreamcatcher covering most of his upper arm says (a man who turns out to be Stan’s dealer, a fact that makes itself known to Peggy when she witnesses their exchange of cash for grass), “a fucking portrait of upstanding Manhattan citizenry. You the mayor yet?”
The party is its own carnival of lost and chemically-altered souls, Peggy thinks. A girl with tall white boots and a wide mouth, drinking tequila neat, keeps describing Peggy as being “familiar” with Stan -- as in, “This one, in the dress, she’s familiar with Stan,” like Peggy not only knows Stan, but she has learned all his tricks. A skinny guy with his shirt unbuttoned, his hipbones poking out above the low waistband of his jeans, is holding court over by a dented keg, telling about the time he spent an entire night with The Doors, his sermon infused with the fervor of an evangelical, though his every word a blaspheme.
Stan catches Peggy’s eye. “He spent two hours at a diner with a roadie for the band. That’s his story.”
“Do they know that?” Peggy asks, pointing at the meager crowd surrounding the guy, now proclaiming the inherent apocalyptic eroticism of The Doors’ music.
Stan shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. They just wanna hear a story.”
She wants to accuse him of being cynical, yet she also thinks he’s probably right. She loses Stan soon after to some guy with a bolo tie and a freckled complexion hidden by aviator shades. She loses him to an argument about Cambodia or Nixon’s bombs or both Cambodia and Nixon’s bombs, or they’re not arguing, they’re agreeing, their voices are merely raised. Peggy bums a cigarette off a crying woman in harlequin checkered pants, sitting on the floor alone like a jester without a court to serve. Peggy is told this woman is having a bad trip (either meaning the acid she took when she got here or her entire stay in New York) and that she is to be ignored. She is also told that no one knows who the woman belongs to, and that’s almost enough to make Peggy feel sad. Instead she takes her cigarette, lights it with a book of matches she finds next to the phone, which she notices, is off the hook. Peggy replaces the receiver back into the cradle then sits down, ignoring the crying woman, watching Stan argue or agree, smoking her cigarette. A girl with smudged eyeliner and tanned bony shoulders sits down next to Peggy on an old love seat that threatens to buckle under their weight. She recommends to Peggy a cocktail of Dexedrine and gin, for, she tells her, when the times are hard. The girl leans in to Peggy, as though she has a secret in mind.
“The times,” she says, “are always hard.”
13.
The bottle of ketchup at their table is empty.
Back at the party, Stan had said, “I’m starving. You starving? I’m starving,” his shadow looming over her as she sat looking up at him. He led her out of the apartment, his hand pressed against the small of her back, fingers flexing, and down three blocks into a diner.
He’s bleary-eyed across from her in a booth, the red vinyl cracked, his tie undone, and she has his tux jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s gone limp, her lipstick completely faded, and she thinks they’re both approaching the other side of drunk, a headache already starting to threaten. They order greasy cheeseburgers and she chokes down some burnt-tasting coffee.
“Your friends are weird,” she says, picking at the remains of her burger.
“They’re just some people I know.” She’s not sure if that’s supposed to be a mitigating statement, if he’s trying to pardon himself, or if that’s really how he sees them.
She takes another sip of her coffee and regrets it immediately. She makes a sour face. “Tomorrow’s Friday,” she says.
“It is.”
“I don’t want it to be Friday.”
“It’s basically the weekend.”
“Yeah,” she concedes. “Wild weekend plans?” she teases.
“Oh yeah.” He stifles a yawn. “Hot date Saturday.”
“I pity the lucky lady.”
“You met her actually.” He says it too casually, and Peggy blanches, pictures the woman with the white boots at the party, the crying woman, the girl who warned her, the times are always hard. “Francine?” he adds.
It takes Peggy a beat, and then she remembers. Francine. Francine and the girl gang of bikers, the bar with the shipwreck and “Silver Bells.” The smudged lipstick. “Oh, right. Her,” she says. “That was awhile ago,” she says after a too-long pause. “The same girl, all these months later. And she hasn’t kicked you to the curb yet.” She had aimed for levity, but even to herself she sounds like a woman scorned. Stan must hear it too.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
A bell chimes over the door and Peggy looks over. An anonymous man in a hat shuffles his way to the counter and she watches. She looks back at Stan.
“Do what?” Peggy plays innocent, snags a French fry off his plate and eats it even though it’s cold.
“You don’t get to do that.” It’s been a long night, she thinks, and now it feels like it has taken yet another turn. Stan’s expression is not unkind, but it is also without patience. It makes her wonder how long she’s been working to earn that, his lack of patience. She own expression goes stony as she looks at him, a half-eaten fry held up to her mouth.
“You comment about the men in my life all the time,” she says. She’s already gone defensive and they both know it.
Stan shakes his head. “Not the same.”
“Oh? Really?”
He looks away and then back at her, everything about him long-suffering, and she thinks that’s unfair. “Yeah. Really.”
She leans forward, her elbows on the table. “Explain that to me then. Dazzle me with your reasoning.”
“No dazzle necessary.” He says it lazily, like this isn’t even worth talking about it, but he pauses too. He pauses too long. They’re at the edge, the place they don’t ever go further than, at least not with words. “I never resent you for it,” he finally says.
“I don’t -- ”
“Maybe you don’t,” he interrupts, holding up his hands. He sounds so reasonable and calm about it; it makes her furious. “But you expect me to just hang around. You expect me to always be around and stay . . . available.” She almost sighs in relief that he didn’t use the word single.
“That’s not true,” she says, but her voice is too quiet.
Her voice is too quiet, and he looks at her almost pityingly, like he doesn’t believe her. “If you say so,” he says. Peggy looks back at the man at the counter. He’s eating soup now.
Stan might be right. That’s the uncomfortable, unfortunate part. It’s uncomfortable and unfortunate that he’s right, and god, she hates when he’s right, he’s intolerable when he’s wrongheaded about ideas but that much worse when he’s actually right about something, but also because -- well, yeah, she does like when he’s around all the time. She does want him to always be around, or at least when she wants him there. She wants to be the one he makes exceptions for, and god, that really is uncomfortable and unfortunate and should be wrong instead of right.
What she can’t admit to herself though is what any of that might mean. Thinking about Stan that way is like trying to chase down a misplaced thought or a mostly forgotten dream and each time you try to remember, each time you think you’re getting closer, the further it recedes from your grasp.
Something like that -- something awful.
Peggy points at him with another one of his fries. “You’re drunk,” she tells him.
continued:
2. | 3.
mad men. one small step, one giant leap: peggy at the close of the 1960s and the start of something more. peggy/stan, et al. 24,370 words.
notes: consider this a faux Season 7, aka the one where Peggy and Stan, with the aid of Joan, Ken Cosgrove Accounts/Eyepatch, and Ginsberg, start their own agency -- and also start some other business. this got absurdly long and I feel like I've been writing this forever, so this is me washing my hands of this haha.
You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.
JOAN DIDION
With you or without you I’m moving on. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Will you help me?
MAD MEN
1.
Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year.
In fact, St. Joseph’s first dropped the ad, citing that original thorn, original sin: “budget issues” the Monday after Thanksgiving. And now, a week later, they’ve dropped her too, tied to a request they return to the drawing board.
Peggy’s been doing that a lot lately: returning to the drawing board.
“I never liked it in the first place,” Ginsberg had said, staring down at the storyboards, all that remained of the original idea. “Too spooky,” and then he shuddered.
2.
It’s Lou Avery who takes her off St. Joseph’s.
Lou Avery took over for Don in anticipation of the fact that Don will never come back. Don’s not anywhere Peggy knows, yet each time she steps into that office, she surprises herself by expecting to find him there.
“Your vision’s been compromised,” is what Lou says to her from behind Don’s desk. The line is delivered with the word kid implicit at the end, like he’s the good sheriff and she’s run afoul of the law. She stands there silent for a beat too long; the way he said it made it unclear whether this is an edict passed down from the St. Joe brass or Lou’s own opinion, and therefore, his own decision. She doesn’t ask for clarification; she doesn’t want to know the answer.
She leaves Lou’s office with a nod.
Something no one thinks to warn you about is that the ad world is a fishbowl and they’re all swimming in the same polluted stream. Everyone knows about her and Ted. They might not know the specifics, but they know enough.
“Discretion,” Joan had said coolly to her the day Ted left, the same day Harry Crane had been in the office and looked at Peggy like she was equal parts leper and Bond girl, “goes a long way for one’s reputation.”
“Did I ask?” Peggy had snapped before she stalked out of the conference room. The thing was: she hadn’t been mad at Joan. She hadn’t really even been mad at Harry Crane. If she was mad at anyone then and if she is still mad at someone now, it’s herself, and it’s Ted. All that effort it had taken to prove that she hadn’t gotten where she is now by sleeping with Don -- wasted, and thrown back in her face. Like she said, and like St. Joseph’s said: back to the drawing board.
Peggy walks into the creative lounge only to find it empty, save for Stan.
“Where is everyone? It’s two in the afternoon?”
He glances up at her, pen still poised against the paper in front of him. “Working, presumably.”
She frowns. “What are you doing?”
Stan sighs, drops the pen onto the table and leans back heavily in his chair. He takes a long drag off a joint before replacing it in the makeshift ashtray he’s created with a roll of mostly used masking tape and a plate from the kitchen. He casts a sidelong glance at her as he inhales, curious and challenging at once. “Working. Presumably.”
“My turn to ask what you’re doing?” he says when she continues to stand there, all pent-up energy, her hands braced on her hips. She plops down at the table across from him, watches stray wisps of smoke smolder up from his joint. She catches his eye and the lines around his eyes crinkle as he almost offers her a smile.
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” she says.
A thing to remember is that in the lead-up to the last year of the 1960s, there is a lot of promise of change. Promise, or threat, depending on one’s position on the premise, or precipice, of change.
Here is a flash to the end of the story: Peggy will not end 1969 in the same place she ends 1968. If someone was to pull Peggy aside, tell her that by the end of this year she will have everything she wanted but nothing she would ever know she she wants now, Peggy wouldn’t believe them. Peggy would ask, well, then, what should I want.
At the close of 1968, Peggy doesn’t know what she wants and she doesn’t know where she will be in one year’s time. That makes the present unbearable and the recent past something worse.
At the close of 1968 there is a lot Peggy does not know. We will land on the moon that summer, and Peggy doesn’t know that yet. She will not win a Clio and Don will not come back. Ted will not come back. Oliver! will win Best Picture and Stan will rant about Kubrick for the better part of a week and she doesn’t know that yet either. She already knows too much and not enough about Stan. That will change too. Not the part where she knows too much, but the part where she does not know enough; with him, she will find the word enough does not apply.
But it is still 1968, and Peggy sits in the creative lounge while Stan continues to sketch and to smoke and Meredith attempts to navigate a string of garland down the hall, shedding pine needles in her wake.
Peggy doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
3.
“I could never sleep with my boss,” Joyce says. “For one thing, he has this whole stomach girth thing happening. For another, he’s a he.”
Peggy makes the mistake of telling Joyce about Ted. She tells Joyce about Ted the same week she is dropped from St. Joseph’s, the week everything is too fresh for her and the city has begun to freeze over: sugar crystal ice mapping over glass window panes, storefronts glittering in red and green and plastic-faced Santas, Peggy’s hot whiskey cooling at the bar too quickly.
The whiskey warms her chest and Joyce’s eyes narrow as she considers her. “He’s old, right?” Peggy glares. “Okay, not old old, but he’s married. And your boss. So that makes him old at heart. Geriatric, even.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Peggy says and Joyce merely sighs.
“An affair doomed from the start,” Joyce says with a surprising lack of judgment (and an even more surprising amount of wistfulness). “Like all the great tragic literary heroines of yore.” Peggy quirks a brow at the word yore. Joyce leans forward, the side of her body braced against the bar; Jimmy Durante sings city sidewalks, busy sidewalks. “We need to find you a train to fall in front of, or a moor to wander, or,” and at this, Joyce lights up, her elbow bumping the full glass of beer she left unattended on the bar, “a new and improved, unattached,” she says pointedly, “gentleman caller.”
This will be how Peggy winds up meeting Ralph, a tall man with severely parted dirty blonde hair, who does accounts somewhere within the bowels of the Time-Life Building.
“Cheer up, Pegasus,” Joyce says, reaching for her beer. “At least you’re no one’s wicked stepmother. Yet.”
Peggy can’t help but grimace behind the lip of her glass. All that time spent begrudging Ted his family and she had never once considered the possibility they could have ever become hers.
“Jesus.”
Joyce raises her glass. “I’ll drink to that.”
4.
Peggy meets Ralph at a movie theater over in the East Village. Joyce had picked not only the theater but the movie they would see -- some film about a girl gang of bikers, a selection which leads Peggy to consider that maybe Joyce hasn’t fully abandoned Abe’s side of the aisle in the wake of the great bayonet-stabbing-cum-ambulance-break-up -- lending the entire evening a sentiment they are being observed by an invisible third party chaperone.
Ralph’s cringing reaction to the movie is more entertaining than anything that happens on the screen and any piece of shared conversation from earlier that evening. Peggy wants to ask him what kind of movies he actually likes, but finds that she doesn’t really care. War movies -- he looks like the sort who would like a good (or bad, taste is supposedly subjective) war movie.
By the time the houselights come up, Peggy has already written Ralph off. The future of their night ahead ends, in her mind, on the sidewalk outside the theater.
She’s wrong. As they exit the theater, awkward conversation stretches between her and Ralph, like stale taffy stuck to the pull. And it’s there that she runs into him: Stan.
Peggy had been wrong when she said the most entertaining part of the night had been Ralph’s mounting disgust at a girl gang of bikers. The most entertaining part is the way Stan does a double take when they both spot each other, how, like always, his curiosity is tempered by a profound amusement at her expense.
They both freeze by the theater’s exit, Ralph at Peggy’s side, and what appears to be Stan’s date at his, the whole encounter a low-rent West Side Story stand-off. Peggy doesn’t bother to try and disguise her surprise, but she smoothes her hands over her dress, painfully aware that she’s still wearing the same thing she wore to work. She holds her chin a little too high, a little too imperious.
“Well, well, well. She does leave the office,” Stan says, his smile impish, eyes bright. His date is tall, thin in that willowy, chicly underfed way. Peggy notices her lipstick is faded, smudged just a hint below her bottom lip. Something mean lurches in Peggy and her eye keeps wandering to this woman’s bottom lip.
“Don’t make a comment about gin joints,” Peggy says, cutting him off at the pass. His smiles grows larger, but he’s eyeing her, looking at her in a way (she thinks) he never considers her in the office. Wolfish, she thinks; that’s the word.
“I wouldn’t dare. In fact, I’m personally offended you’d even think I could be that clichéd,” he says, that stupid smile of his not faltering for a second. His gaze drifts to Ralph briefly, amused question writ obvious on his face. “What brings you out here? Didn’t think this was your kinda movie.” She wonders if this is how their entire conversation is going to progress: Stan toying with her, his growing entertainment with her discomfort, each question and statement lobbed her way loaded with an understanding only she could have. He knows this isn’t her kind of movie; he knows too much about her.
“It’s not,” Peggy says at the same instance his date says, “I loved it.”
Peggy arches her eyebrows and mouths, “She loved it,” at Stan who only smirks.
“Joyce, our friend Joyce, picked it. For us,” Ralph says haltingly, choosing this moment to speak up, and Stan laughs, like he now understands everything. “I’m Ralph,” he says, extending a hand. Peggy feels a flush of embarrassment as Stan takes his hand and shakes, offering first his own name to Ralph and then Peggy’s name to his date (Francine, he says her name is Francine).
“So J-Bird’s playing matchmaker again?” Stan says. Peggy’s eyes snap to his arm as he wraps it around Francine’s waist, and Ralph starts a little at Stan’s use of again. Peggy glares. “Good luck with this one, man,” he says to Ralph, all jocular boys’ club, and Peggy’s bites the inside of her cheek. She doesn’t know what she’s irritated by more: this dialogue between Ralph and Stan or Francine’s smudged lipstick. Either one, or both, largely informs what happens next.
“We were gonna go grab a drink,” Stan says, “if you guys wanna come.”
“I’m not -- ” Ralph says.
“Sure!” Peggy says.
Stan’s face passes from surprised to suspicious quickly, like a shade drawn at dusk, his offer clearly an empty one.
He hangs back and grabs Peggy by the elbow, leans in as they leave the theater. “Ralphie that bad, huh?”
She looks down at his fingers wrapped around her arm and then back up at his face. “Shut up,” she says lightly.
“Gonna have to save a seat for Doris Day to round out this plot.” He holds the door for her.
“Stop talking to me.” She can hear him chuckling behind her as they step out onto the sidewalk.
They grab a table at a bar near the theater, a place Peggy would never frequent. The interior is dark, dim, crowded with too many people, the heat inside near oppressive. She pulls her coat off immediately, casting an eye warily around the place.
Over their table is a giant crude painting of a shipwreck in a chipped wooden frame, an apocalyptic beginner’s attempt to crib Goya (or at least that’s what Stan says about it when he catches Ralph looking up at it).
“So how do you know Peggy?” Ralph asks.
Stan smirks as he swallows his beer. “Oh. I’m her brother.”
Peggy rolls her eyes.
Ralph looks slightly taken aback. “I didn’t know you had a brother. You mentioned a sister, not a brother.”
“He’s the black sheep of the family,” Peggy says, maintaining eye contact with Stan. He grins. She turns back to Ralph. “He’s not my brother,” she says, and Ralph only looks more confused. “I work with him.”
“So you’re both in advertising,” Francine says, her tone flat, her posture slumped, Stan still looking at Peggy like he knows what it feels like to imagine them together and alone. Peggy nods, pinned by Stan’s gaze. Peggy is a lot of things, which sometimes all too often can include naive, but she’s not stupid. There is a knot of tension pulling itself tighter at that table, something electric she has always shied away from giving too much spark. Ralph is still casting glances at the shipwreck on the wall and Francine is watching Peggy’s hands, her face bored and unreadable. She is watching the space between them and Stan’s, the two of them seated across from each other, both their hands flat on the table as though they are both waiting for someone to call the word draw! -- and then pistols, bang. Peggy doesn’t look at their hands but she thinks about Stan going home with her (with Francine, not Peggy). She thinks about the smudged lipstick, drinks her own beer greedily and feels an odd fission of something (something she refuses to call jealousy, even if it feels a lot like jealousy, and labels it as loneliness instead) spread within her.
Peggy slips her hands in her lap. The band that had been playing when they arrived has stopped and over the radio, Bing Crosby this time, sings children laughing, people passing, meeting smile after smile.
“You know,” Peggy says, and for just a beat the awkwardness at the table, that mismatched chemistry, is suspended and obvious before them all. “This song has been following me . . . for days now. Just this song, no other Christmas carol.”
“Yeah?” Stan asks, his voice a low drag. He takes his hands and he cradles his beer. He looks to Francine, the song ends, and the moment dissipates.
5.
“You enjoy the movie last night?” Stan teases her in the office the next day.
Peggy looks up from her desk. “You and I both know I only care a fraction what you do about fictional biker gangs.”
He smiles, almost laughs, pleased with either her or himself. Maybe both; maybe, sometimes, they’re knotted up that tight for him, interchangeable and indivisible. He pauses, and Peggy watches him, his face an almost comic mask of deep consideration.
“You think there’s a commercial in that?” he says finally.
Peggy crosses her arms over her chest, pushing back a little from her desk. “What? For Sunkist? Some oranges rolling down an open highway, chased by a roaring gang of bikers?”
He gets a faraway look to his face like he’s imagining exactly that. “I would watch that commercial. I would love it.”
She waves him off, returning to the notes she has scattered across her desk. “Get out of here. Go do some actual work.”
He pokes his head in on his way out.
“You think we could get Peter Fonda?”
“Good-bye,” she calls.
6.
The idea to start their own agency comes about that New Year’s Eve.
Stan comes over, boards for Avon tucked under one arm. Before the holidays, there had been a sudden burst of momentum on the Avon front, and now, according to Lou, Pete, Joan, and probably God, they're behind. It had been Peggy’s idea to work at her place rather than the office. There was something decidedly dark and depressing about spending two New Year’s in a row at work, and considering the year that followed in the wake of last year’s, and considering (though she is loathe to admit it) Peggy takes stock in things like omens, she figured a change, if only in scenery, would be a good start.
With him, Stan brings a bottle of expensive-looking single malt whiskey someone must have bought him for Christmas.
“I didn’t get you anything,” she says when she opens the door, eyeing the bottle. She crosses her arms over her chest and leans against the doorframe.
He smirks. “Good. I didn’t either.” He raises the bottle. “This is for me.”
“So chivalrous,” she says, stepping out of his way just enough to allow him entrance. The small hallway is freezing and she closes the door quickly after he brushes past her, bits of snow from him now clinging to her sweater and her jeans. “Merry Christmas.”
“Nice tree,” he teases.
She still has her Christmas tree up, a sad little thing she had picked up on an equally sad weekend she had been determined to make not-sad (and she had mostly succeeded, buying the tree, buying the ingredients she thought went into her mother’s spice cookies but she forgot the molasses; she bought a string of lights and cheap multicolor bulbs and tinsel, and it was back at home that she realized the molasses was missing, and the cat had found the tinsel and the tree looked too bare and too small and Burl Ives was on the radio and -- )
“There’s some cookies in the kitchen,” she offers. “I don’t think they’re stale yet.”
“With an offer like that . . . ”
Peggy can smell the cold on him, snow still melting in his hair and his beard, on the shoulders of his coat. “Give me that,” she says and she takes his coat from him.
“You order food?”
“Chinese,” she calls, pulling two beers from the fridge. “How was the family?” she asks him.
He shrugs. “Familial.” He takes the beer from her. “And how was the Olson clan?”
Peggy offers him a tight-lipped smile he returns until it spreads too wide across his face and he bares teeth.
“They’re good,” she finally says. “They were good. The Christmas ham was good. Mass was good,” and Stan interrupts her with an amen. “Everything was good.”
“Good.” His smile shifts, softens even, until she thinks it’s something past friendly -- too intimate and knowing, yet there is a marked lack of judgment from him. It makes her uncomfortable, the bottle of beer clenched tightly in her hands.
“So,” she clears her throat. “Are we going to get to work, or what?”
They get to work. They eat the Chinese, they argue over the distribution of egg rolls or whether the Szechuan chicken from this place is any better than the kind they get at the office, and they drink the beer. They brainstorm idly about Avon without really getting anywhere.
Around ten, Peggy turns the television on and Stan pulls out his stash.
“Quitting time already?”
“Time,” and he pauses, his concentration split, “to usher in the New Year. Care to partake?” he asks, slow and distracted as he rolls a joint. Peggy watches him. She likes his hands, likes looking at his fingers -- thick and suggestive, yet their movement precise and adept.
“The New Year’s not really a thing that should be ushered in alone.”
“1969,” he drawls. He flicks his lighter and inhales deeply.
She picks up the bottle of unopened whiskey left on her coffee table. “This is fancy,” she says, her tone turning mocking. “You don’t do fancy. This should only be drunk by, like, the Stanley Rizzos of the world. Not the Stans.”
He snorts, passing her the joint.
He unscrews the cap on the bottle of whiskey while Peggy takes a hit, watching him through narrowed eyes. He pours a generous helping into the two coffee mugs she left out on the table, both imprinted with a faded SCDP logo.
They clink their mugs together. “To the Stanley Rizzos and Margaret Olsons of the world,” he toasts.
7.
“1969,” Peggy says. “Go.” The talk of starting their own agency is borne out of drunken talk of resolutions.
Stan sighs heavily, leaning back against the couch cushions. “No more forgetting I do not in fact enjoy tripping on acid, and trying again is really unlikely to change that.”
Peggy laughs. “There’s a morally responsible resolution.”
“I’m a paragon of moral responsibility.” He takes a long sip from his mug, punctuated by a low gasp as he swallows. “You. Go.”
“No more sleeping with married men.” She says it quickly, without thinking. She’s drunk, and she laughs at that too -- at what she said, at her own drunkenness. Stan looks at her with a creeping smile, like she might have just proven him right, answered a question she had no idea had been posed.
He sighs again, leans forward and sets his empty mug down on the table. He rubs at his beard like he’s mulling something over. “What?” she asks, halfway afraid to hear what he might say.
Instead he surprises her.
He surprises her when he says, “Start our own agency.”
Here is the thing that will carry with her throughout not just the coming year but for a long time after: he said our instead of my. He had included her from the start.
“What?” she asks again, on the verge of another laugh (she almost feels bad they’ve all but wasted this bottle of whiskey on their own unrefined, stoned palates), but this time, the caution is gone.
She knows that Stan had wanted LA. She also knows that they will never talk about it, how Stan had wanted Los Angeles and it was Ted who took his place. How in a way that could tell another story -- Stan wanted it, Ted took it -- but they’re never going to talk about that either.
“Don’t tell me you’ve never thought about it,” he says. “Striking out on your own.”
She has, and he knows it, so her mouth twists slyly. She doesn’t know when they closed the distance between them on the couch -- sometime between that first sip of whiskey and this conversation -- but Stan’s still leaning forward, their knees almost touching, and she looks at him, actually looks at him. It’s a casualty of daily encounters with the same person: you stop looking at them. When they’re no longer new, you don’t pay as close attention. She’s paying attention now, and he’s paying attention to her. Stan looks like the sort of man who would want to build something (based on the beard, she thinks that should be a log cabin or a rocking chair or a better rock anthem -- not this). Like he’d want to create something from nothing and know that it was his. She supposes most men would want that, that she even wants that for herself, but as of late it’s begun to read plain and obvious in him.
“Thinking about it is one thing. Resolving to do it? That’s another.”
“Humor me,” he says, and she looks at him like that’s all she ever does. But she smiles as she imagines it. Stan with ambition, with obvious ambition, is another thing too. It’s a thing she likes.
Which she supposes is why she kisses him.
Peggy kisses him first.
In that moment, she wants him. She wants everything he’s saying but it’s also him she wants. So she leans over that much closer and she kisses him. The kiss is tentative at first, like when he had kissed her back at the office, after Ginsberg had stabbed him in the arm. She can feel him sigh against her mouth and he hesitates. He hesitates, not her. He’s too close for her to view him clearly (and hasn’t always been the case? He’s always too close, she can never comprehend what she is seeing, she has no distance and she has no bigger picture where Stan is concerned).
“You know. That wasn’t a line to get up your skirt,” he says.
“I’m not wearing a skirt,” she breathes against his mouth. His hand slides up from her knee to grip her thigh and squeezes once. So she kisses him again, more confident this time, and he kisses her back, grabbing her to him, the kiss going deep and sloppy. His tongue is hot, pushing against her own and his hand on her thigh drags her closer, her own mouth rough and aggressive with his, her hand pulling at his hair. She’s stoned and more than kind of drunk, but it all feels good, feels good in this impossible, foreign way she know she can’t fully chalk up to the weed or the whiskey. She wants this, she wants him, and that strikes her as borderline insane.
When Peggy grinds down against his thigh, she can feel the hitch in his breath, can hear the loud wet smack of their lips when they separate, his beard rubbing at first her neck and then her collarbone as he bites his way down her throat. His hand drags up her body, feeling her up through her sweater, and she can’t stop panting, feeling like she always does with Stan, but heightened: like he has managed to find that loose thread inside of her and rather than stitch her up, he’s pulling, he’s unwinding her. He’s hard against her, she can feel him, but there’s no real demand or insistence from him, instead just taking what she’ll give him.
They abruptly stop kissing when the New Year hits. The countdown on the television interrupts them, “Auld Lang Syne” playing tinny and small yet filling her apartment. They sit there together, separate, not touching, catching their breath and watching the TV coverage. Peggy’s lips feel hot, swollen and bruised, and she fights the urge to press her fingers to them. She can’t look at him, afraid she’ll have that shellshocked look to her. They’re still sitting too close and he reaches over for the smoldering joint he left in the ashtray, taking a drag. It all feels a bit like something she made up, a bizarrely graphic fantasy, if it wasn’t for the puffy mouth and the ache still pulsing between her legs.
“Happy New Year,” he says as he exhales.
She finally looks at him. His eyes drift to her mouth and his lips tip upward. They’re drunk and they’re stoned, and it will surprise her how easy this will be to push from her mind. It will be easy for business as usual to resume the following days and the days they continue to work on Avon, while he’ll draw pictures of women with full and colored lips and Peggy will attempt to plumb the depths of female desire where a pretty made-up face is concerned.
“Yeah,” she says. She takes the joint, turning her attention back to the television. “Happy New Year.”
8.
In January of 1969, here is a collection of things Peggy knows for sure: she will not trust Joyce to set her up with any more prospective blind dates; she will not return to the salon on 7th Ave., even if it is that much closer to the office; she shouldn’t kiss Stan; she shouldn’t kiss Stan and pretend that if she keeps kissing Stan it’ll be a thing that adds up to nothing; Lou Avery is not Don and Don is not coming back; the dry cleaner’s one block from her apartment is almost definitely an Italian mob front; Ted is in Los Angeles and Ted will remain in Los Angeles and when if ever she thinks of Ted she will remind herself: Los Angeles; she does not think of Ted much anymore.
9.
Peggy doesn’t think of Ted much anymore. When she does, she finds there is no longing, just a humiliating sense of futility shrouded in something darker, something angrier. When she does, she finds it’s all ruined, marred by how he left it. How he left it, not her; because of him, not her. When you have no say, she thinks, you can’t be the one who left anyone or anything behind.
Because of this, the departed party doesn’t get a say in how they are remembered after their exit, be it hastily, planned, or entirely unexpected.
For once, Ted doesn’t get a say.
Ted belongs in the dustbin now with all the other men, men who left her with a variety of things, a catalog of different adjectives for different emotions, but namely disappointed. Ted belongs to Los Angeles now -- where they say the sun is always shining, where his wife is always blonde, a place where Peggy has never been.
Certain things are ruined now, not just her idea of him.
(He’s not that virtuous -- he’s just in love with you: she had called the first a lie and the second the truth, but now she wants to flip them, revise her thinking, no longer a lie followed by the truth, but a truth paired with a lie, or two truths, she still doesn’t know what to do with that line, he’s just in love with you.
She had asked Stan about it once -- the virtue, not the love -- though not directly and not in detail. It was in early in December. It was early December and Peggy still sometimes thought of Ted. She often thought of Ted. “Who’d you say is the most virtuous person you know?” she had asked him abruptly. It was early December and it was dark out, it was late, and they were still at the office.
He had frowned when he looked up at her. He stretched back in his chair, tipping it back, mumbling to himself more so than to her, “I don’t think that word’s even in my vocabulary,” before returning the chair to the ground and on all four legs. “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “I don’t think I keep much company with the virtuous sort.” He said the word virtuous like it soured in his mouth.
“You don’t think I am?”
Stan bit down on a smile (and knowing him, a laugh as well). “No,” and he said it with pride, not for himself, but her.
Something must have shown in her face because his own gentled. “Virtue’s overrated,” he said, and either wholly unaware or all too aware of the irony, poured some whiskey into his coffee mug.
“How’s that?” she had asked, pushing her own cup forward. He took it from her.
“Because,” he said, distracted, as he poured, “you put yourself up there on that pedestal,” he paused as he screwed the cap back on the bottle, and then looked at her, “from which one can only fall,” he concluded dramatically.
She rolled her eyes and took a long pull from her cup. She smacked her lips. “Who do you think is the most virtuous in the office?”
He considered the question. “Caroline,” he said definitively.
“Roger’s secretary?” she laughed. She took another sip and then said, “Oh my god, I think you’re right.”)
Take, for example, Rosemary’s Baby. Take the film itself, take the ad, take the theater they saw it in, where Don saw them. Take it all from her -- even thinking about it makes her feel embarrassed, a tight knot that threatens in the center of her gut, making her feel small and stupid. Played. It makes her feel played.
He was right, that’s the worst of it. She could almost thank him for it, thank him for how he left it. Left her. He left no room for her to want him back, no desire to repeat any of that again, all the small humiliations lit up cruel and obvious in his wake.
So Peggy does not remember Ted fondly. For a good while there, Peggy does not remember Ted fondly, until, eventually, she will not remember him much at all.
When Ted calls the office he talks to Lou or Stan. He talks to Lou as his equal and to Stan about art; he checks in with Lou and makes demands upon Stan.
She doesn’t talk to Ted much now and when they do they talk about oranges. Peggy finds she can manage that: she’s never much cared for the taste of oranges.
10.
Ted’s departure was without ceremony. He slinked off the island of Manhattan with only a memo offered as a farewell.
“I know you will flourish and succeed in my absence,” the memo read. It had been addressed to the SC&P creative team at large, but Peggy took it personally.
Ginsberg had held the memo in his hand. “Who knew he was quite the wordsmith,” Ginsberg said. They had looked at him and he had shrugged. “Never actually read these things before. But this one was nice. I almost feel bad.”
“Don’t,” Mathis said. “He’s with the angels and the palms and Raquel Welch now.”
“And Pete Campbell,” Stan had said and they had laughed.
Peggy hadn’t said anything.
That evening she sat with Stan and a bottle of rye in the creative lounge. It went unremarked how easily they had reverted to their previous working relationship after she came back from CGC, after Ted left. Stan never talked to her about Ted, never goaded her or needled her the way he had about Abe (or about Mark, about Duck, and had there been another man who wasn’t Ted, it would have been more of the same).
The most she ever said to him on the subject of Ted was that night, and this came after three glasses of rye. The side of Stan’s hand was stained with ink and she kept staring at it, the work for Maytag abandoned between them on the table.
“People, I have found,” she had proclaimed, “disappoint you.”
“Yeah. They do,” Stan nodded. “They do do that,” he said, his understanding quiet and implicit. He sat there with her and neither of them said a thing.
And that was that.
People, she has found, not only disappoint, but they move on.
So Peggy moved on.
11.
Peggy doesn’t win a Clio that year, and in fact, she’s not even nominated. There’s a moral buried somewhere in that story, but Peggy is tired of seeking out morals almost as much as she is tired of fearing the words, “I told you so,” strung in bitter succession and then whispered in her ear.
The same month the Clios are held, the New York Ad Association holds a dinner. SC&P is invited, and by extension Peggy is invited, so Peggy buys a dress. It’s a plain dress, black, no frills, no bows, all harsh, unfeminine lines.
“It’s a dinner, Peggy,” Joan tells her at the open bar. “Not a funeral.”
It might as well be one, the serious tone struck for the night managing to be both somber and self-congratulatory. At their table, Roger is tipping towards the unseemly side of drunk. Cutler is eyeing the room, and Peggy’s unclear if he’s on the prowl for potential clients or potential employees to poach from rival firms. Ken is explaining something elaborate and mechanical, if only based on his dramatic hand gestures, to Stan. And Stan -- she’s not entirely sure how he does it, but he’s managed to make a black tie event look casual: his lazy posture at the table, his indifferent but amused attitude, and his utter lack of self-consciousness in the way he wears a tux.
He glances over at Peggy and Joan as they approach, raking his eyes deliberately over Peggy before meeting her face with a smirk. Peggy takes the empty seat next to Stan, waving him off when he -- after a delay -- attempts the gentlemanly and stands, reaching for her chair.
“You clean up nice and severe,” Stan says, his eyes drifting over her and her dress again.
She narrows her eyes at him. “Your tie’s crooked.”
His grin is loose and boyish. “Wanna fix it for me? Tell me I’ve been a bad boy? Get you a whip and you’d definitely have that whole disciplinarian, dominatrix-y vibe -- ”
“Please stop talking.”
He laughs. “Yes, ma’am,” he says as the emcee takes his place at his podium, the banquet hall going quiet in drips and drabs around the room.
It’s a boring speech, and she finds herself watching Stan out of the corner of her eye. He traces a finger over the condensation dripping down the side of his glass. She didn’t eat enough earlier and they have yet to be served dinner; she feels lightheaded, which is what she’s choosing to blame for any and all thoughts running through her head right now (all thoughts dealing exclusively, it would seem, with Stan, Stan and his crooked tie, Stan and his wet fingers, that tux, his mouth on New Year’s Eve, his mouth now -- all bad thoughts).
She turns her attention back to the speech, cheeks slightly flushed. Stan doesn’t fix his tie.
They’re at the bar after dinner, waiting on another round of drinks.
The man next to her introduces himself. Peggy misses his name, but she catches that he’s from Geyer. That’s the important part, she assumes, at an event like this.
“I’m Peggy. Peggy Olson. SC&P.” She leans to the side a little, reaches back and grabs Stan’s arm. “This is Stan. This is . . . ” she turns her head towards Stan and mumbles indistinctly, “from Geyer.” She really should have eaten more for dinner and drank less. A lot less.
The nameless man from Geyer takes Stan’s hand and shakes it. “You’re the husband?” Geyer says. Peggy freezes, and so does Stan, still holding this guy from Geyer’s hand. He drops his hand and they stare at him wide-eyed. Oddly, it’s Peggy who recovers first.
She laughs, the sound high and nervous. “Might as well be,” she says, but she says it too cheerfully. Stan just squints at her before laughing to himself, taking their drinks from the bartender and standing there with both in his hands.
“Give me that,” she mutters, taking her drink from Stan.
It’s not long after that when he asks her if she wants to get out of there. It’s like a line from those dumb biker movies he likes so much, only he’s wearing a tux instead of leather, and she’s Peggy and not anybody else. She grins all the same, trying on her own version of a Hollywood line:
“What you got in mind?”
12.
“Whose party is it?” Peggy asks.
He shrugs, his hand bumping against her thigh. “A friend.”
They are in a cab, en route to a party over on Mercer in the Village. Peggy’s loaded already, crowded in the backseat with Stan, and this close, she can smell him: the cigarettes he smoked one after the other at the bar, a faint hint of aftershave he never wears, the clean starch of his shirt, and him, the heat of him. She rolls her head towards him.
“We’re gonna be so fancy,” she says, “so, so fancy,” and then she starts to laugh.
She has no idea whose party this is or who Stan’s friend is hosting it. Peggy had been right in the cab: they are grossly overdressed. A friend of Stan’s -- his name either Karl or Carl -- will only refer to her as “Pat Nixon,” laughing each time like it’s the funniest joke. “Look at you two,” a man in a frayed Army vest and a tattoo of a dreamcatcher covering most of his upper arm says (a man who turns out to be Stan’s dealer, a fact that makes itself known to Peggy when she witnesses their exchange of cash for grass), “a fucking portrait of upstanding Manhattan citizenry. You the mayor yet?”
The party is its own carnival of lost and chemically-altered souls, Peggy thinks. A girl with tall white boots and a wide mouth, drinking tequila neat, keeps describing Peggy as being “familiar” with Stan -- as in, “This one, in the dress, she’s familiar with Stan,” like Peggy not only knows Stan, but she has learned all his tricks. A skinny guy with his shirt unbuttoned, his hipbones poking out above the low waistband of his jeans, is holding court over by a dented keg, telling about the time he spent an entire night with The Doors, his sermon infused with the fervor of an evangelical, though his every word a blaspheme.
Stan catches Peggy’s eye. “He spent two hours at a diner with a roadie for the band. That’s his story.”
“Do they know that?” Peggy asks, pointing at the meager crowd surrounding the guy, now proclaiming the inherent apocalyptic eroticism of The Doors’ music.
Stan shrugs. “Doesn’t matter. They just wanna hear a story.”
She wants to accuse him of being cynical, yet she also thinks he’s probably right. She loses Stan soon after to some guy with a bolo tie and a freckled complexion hidden by aviator shades. She loses him to an argument about Cambodia or Nixon’s bombs or both Cambodia and Nixon’s bombs, or they’re not arguing, they’re agreeing, their voices are merely raised. Peggy bums a cigarette off a crying woman in harlequin checkered pants, sitting on the floor alone like a jester without a court to serve. Peggy is told this woman is having a bad trip (either meaning the acid she took when she got here or her entire stay in New York) and that she is to be ignored. She is also told that no one knows who the woman belongs to, and that’s almost enough to make Peggy feel sad. Instead she takes her cigarette, lights it with a book of matches she finds next to the phone, which she notices, is off the hook. Peggy replaces the receiver back into the cradle then sits down, ignoring the crying woman, watching Stan argue or agree, smoking her cigarette. A girl with smudged eyeliner and tanned bony shoulders sits down next to Peggy on an old love seat that threatens to buckle under their weight. She recommends to Peggy a cocktail of Dexedrine and gin, for, she tells her, when the times are hard. The girl leans in to Peggy, as though she has a secret in mind.
“The times,” she says, “are always hard.”
13.
The bottle of ketchup at their table is empty.
Back at the party, Stan had said, “I’m starving. You starving? I’m starving,” his shadow looming over her as she sat looking up at him. He led her out of the apartment, his hand pressed against the small of her back, fingers flexing, and down three blocks into a diner.
He’s bleary-eyed across from her in a booth, the red vinyl cracked, his tie undone, and she has his tux jacket draped over her shoulders. Her hair’s gone limp, her lipstick completely faded, and she thinks they’re both approaching the other side of drunk, a headache already starting to threaten. They order greasy cheeseburgers and she chokes down some burnt-tasting coffee.
“Your friends are weird,” she says, picking at the remains of her burger.
“They’re just some people I know.” She’s not sure if that’s supposed to be a mitigating statement, if he’s trying to pardon himself, or if that’s really how he sees them.
She takes another sip of her coffee and regrets it immediately. She makes a sour face. “Tomorrow’s Friday,” she says.
“It is.”
“I don’t want it to be Friday.”
“It’s basically the weekend.”
“Yeah,” she concedes. “Wild weekend plans?” she teases.
“Oh yeah.” He stifles a yawn. “Hot date Saturday.”
“I pity the lucky lady.”
“You met her actually.” He says it too casually, and Peggy blanches, pictures the woman with the white boots at the party, the crying woman, the girl who warned her, the times are always hard. “Francine?” he adds.
It takes Peggy a beat, and then she remembers. Francine. Francine and the girl gang of bikers, the bar with the shipwreck and “Silver Bells.” The smudged lipstick. “Oh, right. Her,” she says. “That was awhile ago,” she says after a too-long pause. “The same girl, all these months later. And she hasn’t kicked you to the curb yet.” She had aimed for levity, but even to herself she sounds like a woman scorned. Stan must hear it too.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
A bell chimes over the door and Peggy looks over. An anonymous man in a hat shuffles his way to the counter and she watches. She looks back at Stan.
“Do what?” Peggy plays innocent, snags a French fry off his plate and eats it even though it’s cold.
“You don’t get to do that.” It’s been a long night, she thinks, and now it feels like it has taken yet another turn. Stan’s expression is not unkind, but it is also without patience. It makes her wonder how long she’s been working to earn that, his lack of patience. She own expression goes stony as she looks at him, a half-eaten fry held up to her mouth.
“You comment about the men in my life all the time,” she says. She’s already gone defensive and they both know it.
Stan shakes his head. “Not the same.”
“Oh? Really?”
He looks away and then back at her, everything about him long-suffering, and she thinks that’s unfair. “Yeah. Really.”
She leans forward, her elbows on the table. “Explain that to me then. Dazzle me with your reasoning.”
“No dazzle necessary.” He says it lazily, like this isn’t even worth talking about it, but he pauses too. He pauses too long. They’re at the edge, the place they don’t ever go further than, at least not with words. “I never resent you for it,” he finally says.
“I don’t -- ”
“Maybe you don’t,” he interrupts, holding up his hands. He sounds so reasonable and calm about it; it makes her furious. “But you expect me to just hang around. You expect me to always be around and stay . . . available.” She almost sighs in relief that he didn’t use the word single.
“That’s not true,” she says, but her voice is too quiet.
Her voice is too quiet, and he looks at her almost pityingly, like he doesn’t believe her. “If you say so,” he says. Peggy looks back at the man at the counter. He’s eating soup now.
Stan might be right. That’s the uncomfortable, unfortunate part. It’s uncomfortable and unfortunate that he’s right, and god, she hates when he’s right, he’s intolerable when he’s wrongheaded about ideas but that much worse when he’s actually right about something, but also because -- well, yeah, she does like when he’s around all the time. She does want him to always be around, or at least when she wants him there. She wants to be the one he makes exceptions for, and god, that really is uncomfortable and unfortunate and should be wrong instead of right.
What she can’t admit to herself though is what any of that might mean. Thinking about Stan that way is like trying to chase down a misplaced thought or a mostly forgotten dream and each time you try to remember, each time you think you’re getting closer, the further it recedes from your grasp.
Something like that -- something awful.
Peggy points at him with another one of his fries. “You’re drunk,” she tells him.
continued:
2. | 3.