fic: in event of moon disaster (mad men) (2/3)
14.
“You’re coming tonight,” Joyce had said that morning. “I’m not above the use of brute force.”
Peggy sighs, pushes her hair out of her face and considers the dress.
It’s late that spring and the office has gone quiet. Joyce had said the party was to start at nine; it’s a little after eight-thirty now. Peggy knew even when she had agreed to go that she wasn’t going to arrive at the party at nine.
“This isn’t another set-up, is it?” Peggy had asked Joyce, and then, as though the two were somehow connected, said, “if it rains, I’m not coming.”
“No,” Joyce replied, faux-solemnly, or perhaps, earnestly and truly sorry -- her tone was difficult to parse over the phone, always that dry monotone implying casual disinterest. “I have given up on enabling your romantic prospects, or lack thereof. And it’s not going to rain.”
It hasn’t rained, which is why Peggy supposes she is still here, in her office after hours, clad in only her underwear and hosiery, pulling a fresh dress off the hanger when her door swings open.
Stan freezes in the doorway, staring at her, eyebrows raised. She stares back.
“What are you doing?”
“No one was out there!” He gestures wildly. “Your secretary wasn’t out there!”
“And you thought a closed door meant ‘please, open me,’ as opposed to, I don’t know, knock?”
Stan doesn’t reply. Instead he has that stupid slack-jawed look to him, and it’s sort of flattering. It’s like when she first started working with him, she thinks. Back at the Waldorf, he wore that same expression.
“Jesus. Shut the door!” she finally spits out. He does, though he remains on her side of it.
“I meant with you outside.” She braces her hands on her bare hips, and if it’s possible, his eyes glaze over that much more.
He ignores her, blatantly raking over her with his gaze. “This what goes on behind closed doors in your office, huh? I gotta stop by more often.”
Peggy rolls her eyes, reaching for her dress. “I think you stop by enough.” She pulls it over her head then drags it down her body. “I have to go . . . ” she grumbles, “to a party, and I’ve been lectured plenty in the past about my . . . wardrobe choices, so. I figured. I would change first.” The dress hangs on her, gaping open in the back.
“Right,” he says, but his voice has dropped to that low grumble he does. She doesn’t think he’s heard a word she said. He’s still looking at her in a way that makes something hot and needy expand inside of her, and she thinks she shouldn’t want that, that she doesn’t have time for that, not tonight, not ever.
So she says the dumbest thing she can possibly say in this scenario:
“If you’re going to stand there and gawk, you can at least zip me up.”
It is the single worst thing she could have said, and a part of her knows that. The other part of her, that dangerous part, is curious. Not if he will do it, but what it’ll feel like. What it would feel like to have his hands on her, what it would feel like to want him again, the same way she wanted him at the start of this year. She thinks that’s a thing that can be repeated; she’s felt small flashes, tugs of it, since then. She thinks that’s how it works: you let a man touch you once and you’ll continue to be drawn to him after, if only out of curiosity to see if lightning really can strike twice.
He reads the dare in her and his mouth twists. It really is the Waldorf all over again, she thinks. Another game of sexualized chicken, but the stakes are different this time.
His hand is hot on her hip and he’s slow with the zipper along the back of her dress. His knuckles brush against her spine, her exposed skin, as he goes, their breathing loud and low, and it’s the most stupidly erotic thing to happen to her in recent memory.
He pulls the zipper all the way up but neither of them moves. They just stand there, his hand still on her hip, the tips of his fingers barely brushing the nape of her neck, the only sound in the quiet office the shared rasp of their breath.
“Stan.” It’s all she says. She says his name, and she doesn’t know if she intended to say more than that, if there’s freight hidden in that even from herself, but his name is quiet when she says it, sticking in her mouth.
“Peggy.”
He slowly pulls her hips back to him, her ass pressed flush against him. He’s hard, and that makes her want to squirm, makes her want a lot of things. He presses his mouth, open and wet, to the back of her neck, and she bites the inside of her cheek after sucking in a harsh breath. She wraps her hand around his wrist when she can feel blunt teeth at her neck, heat tripping electric down her spine, and drags his hand from her hip down between her legs, under her dress. Stan’s breath stutters against her skin.
His fingers cup her and then press against her. Peggy fights the urge to make a sound, pushes her body back against his, which seems to embolden him: his fingers press firmer against her and start to rub. He’s got to be able to feel how wet she is, his hand moving roughly now, and just thinking that makes her flush. His other hand drags up her body, covering her breast and then up to the column of her throat, her pulse thumping in her ears. She can picture it perfectly, him bending her over the desk and fucking her; she gasps, and he grinds against her, his breathing loud against the back of her neck, each threatening to tip forward into a groan. Her own fingers squeeze too tight around his wrist, and when she touches his thigh with her other hand he grunts, pushing against her that much harder, like he’s actually trying to fuck her with his pants on, his mouth sucking a bruise at the base of her neck. It’s then that she realizes that she’s panting, making these high, tight noises, her head tipped back against his shoulder, mouth parted open, her hips rolling back against him and then into his hand. She needs to come, she needs him to make her come, she --
There’s a knock at the door, and they both freeze.
“Peggy?” they hear Joyce call.
“Shit,” Peggy whispers, and then louder, “just a minute!”
She pushes Stan away from her, continuing to mutter the word shit under her breath. “I have to go,” she says hurriedly, running a hand through her hair and then another over her dress, ignoring the fact she seems to ache at every pulse point on her body. “Do I look . . . ”
“Presentable?” His voice is too low, too raspy, and she thinks about pushing him down into her desk chair, straddling his lap, and just ending this -- whatever the last few years have been leading up to, whatever just happened in her office -- right here.
To her credit, Stan seems to be having just as much difficulty dealing with this as she is. He fidgets, like he’s considering doing exactly what she’s thinking (or like he’s got a raging hard-on no amount of deep breathing is going to cure; it really is the Waldorf all over again).
“Okay, I’m gonna go,” he says suddenly, stepping to the door.
“She’ll see you!” Peggy hisses, snapping her compact shut and throwing it into her purse. She looks good enough.
“She’ll assume we’re working!” he hisses back, throwing the door open.
“Stanley,” Joyce says, her arms folded over her chest. Stan salutes her mockingly, and then he’s gone. Joyce continues to stand in the door.
“I’m coming,” Peggy says.
Joyce cocks her head. “And here I had hoped you already had.”
“You’re not funny,” Peggy says, shutting her office door behind her.
“I see why you weren’t into any of my prospective suitors now.”
The elevator dings.
“I’m not even going to dignify that with a response.”
15.
Peggy goes to the party with Joyce. She drinks too much and she gives her phone number to a man with glasses who tells her he reviews movies for a living. When she asks him what his favorite movie is he says Citizen Kane with too much gravitas, as though he is proud of his selection. Peggy regrets giving him her phone number but she doesn’t ask for it back.
The entire cab ride home she scrambles the numbers in Stan’s address until she convinces herself that she has remembered it wrong. She has remembered his address wrong, she has remembered the encounter earlier wrong. She’s remembered him wrong, too. She can’t recall which number goes where, and by extension, where he goes. In this city, in this situation, inside of her. She tells herself it would be pointless to try each possible combination. That there’s not enough time for that.
Instead she closes her eyes and leans her head back against the seat, remembers leaning her head back against him and doesn’t think she’s wrong about that. Stan’s favorite film is not Citizen Kane, but The Wild Angels.
She should have asked the man with the glasses what he thought about that.
The next morning Stan gets to the office before she does. He doesn’t say a word and neither does she and when it starts to rain that afternoon Peggy calls it one day late.
16.
Lou Avery is a problem.
Stan likes to tell Peggy that anyone occupying that office (Don’s) and that chair (Don’s) behind that desk (Don’s) would be considered a problem by her. He’s probably right, and he probably doesn’t need to hear that.
The pitch meeting with Palmolive does not go well. Stan’s flashes her that “shoot me in the face and pour cheap whiskey on my corpse” look of his (he only ever used that line once, accompanying the same familiar expression he’s wearing now, but the line stuck for her). She grimaces, mouths, “S.O.S.,” at him and then takes a seat.
Lou clears his throat, shifts in his chair. “Now, see, I agree: this probably wasn’t the greatest fit for your product and for your image. But sitting here got me to thinking, and all I ask is that you hear me out.” Lou clears his throat again and leans forward; Peggy casts a quick glance at Stan and finds her own confused curiosity mirrored back.
Peggy listens to Lou talk, the first line of his pitch familiar in a way she can’t place, but by the second line she knows. Stan gave the exact same pitch in yesterday’s meeting and Lou rejected it outright, deeming it “inappropriate,” or, no, “outlandish” had been his word. She listens and she tries to hide her surprise. Beside her, Stan sits very still; she watches him out of the corner of her eye.
The men from Palmolive laugh when Stan would have wanted them to laugh, and at the end, they all shake hands, Ken and Lou stepping out of the conference room with them, leaving Peggy and Stan alone.
“You didn’t say anything,” she says to him.
“Of course I didn’t! What? I was going to interrupt him mid-pitch?”
Peggy stands. “I’m gonna talk to him.”
“No you’re not,” Stan says dismissively.
“Yes. I am.”
“No, you’re not. I don’t need you riding out, tilting windmills for me, Quixote.”
Peggy scowls. She leaves Stan to the empty conference room. She talks to Lou anyway.
“Well. That went well.” It’s the first thing Lou says when she closes the door to his office, his obliviousness seemingly genuine.
“You know that was Stan’s idea, right? You rejected it.”
Lou’s expression doesn’t falter. “The clients love it.”
“The clients think it’s yours.”
“The important thing is that the client goes home happy. Mine, yours, ours, his, hers: ownership really that big of a sticking point for you?”
“You don’t care because you got the credit.”
Lou considers Peggy from behind his desk. “Peggy,” he says, a note of condescension she thinks comes easy when you’re the one behind not in front of a desk like that. “This is no longer Don Draper’s office. I don’t know the specifics of how business was conducted here in the past, but I do know you were afforded certain liberties. That ends now.”
There’s an ugly implication in what he’s said and Peggy thinks fishbowls and Los Angeles and St. Joseph’s, she thinks there’s a truth to be found in those who say history is circular -- not so much that the events are bound to repeat themselves, but rather you can’t help but run into the past.
“Will that be all?” Lou asks. Peggy shuts the door.
17.
“I didn’t even like the work,” Stan says. He takes a drag off his cigarette and Peggy wrinkles her nose at him. She drops down in Ginsberg’s empty chair; their muted reflections stare back in the darkened window.
“You did though,” she says. “It made you laugh. It made me laugh.”
He chuckles to himself, and then he points at her with his cigarette. “You shouldn’t have talked to Lou though. He’s gonna have such a hard-on for us, gunning for our assured destruction.”
“No, he’s not. Not unless you give him the blueprints for it.”
“Lazy son of a bitch,” Stan mumbles around his cigarette, laughing softly.
Peggy reaches over and snags the cigarette hanging from his mouth. “Are you happy here?” she asks, the question quiet but sudden.
He glances sidelong at her. “It has its moments,” he says, looking at her mouth, his cigarette.
“I don’t think I’m happy here.” It’s strange saying the words out loud, putting voice to the thought that’s been biting at her for what feels like weeks now.
Stan looks up at her with resolve in his eyes, his hands clasped behind his head as he leans back in his chair.
“Hey, you remember what we talked about? New Year’s Eve?”
“Which part?” she hedges.
He smirks, and then he ignores her. “My suggestion? You open up shop.”
She considers him, inhales, and replaces the cigarette in his mouth, her fingers briefly brushing his lips.
“Would you come with me?” The question is small and nervous, and it’s her tone that catches them both by surprise, not what she said.
Stan looks at her, something bright and excited to him. “Of course,” he says. “Can you even imagine? It’d be this all the damn time.”
“You’re serious.”
“I was then and I am now.” A pause stretches between them, but it’s like they’re still communicating on the same wavelength, envisioning a similar shared future, imaginary tin cans strung between them. “I meant what I said to Don, about building one desk into an agency. I want that -- now more than ever. And you want that too. I can see it.”
“I’ve worked so hard to get here,” she says, still quiet.
“You have. But, the writing's on the wall: we’re not going any higher. Not under this regime. Get Pol Pot out as Creative Director, and maybe. But it’s . . . it’s so static here, man. You think we’re ever gonna get the kind of work we wanna be doing here?” He’s not wrong, she thinks.
“Olson and Rizzo,” she says dramatically, her hands spread like she’s showcasing a sign.
“Sounds like a semi-successful detective agency,” he says around his cigarette.
She starts to laugh. “Advertising by day . . . ”
“ . . . murder by night.” Her laugh jumps an octave and fills the room.
“I think we’d be more than semi-successful,” she says after a beat.
“As detectives?” he teases.
“As anything,” she says, and then realizes how that sounds. She looks up to find him gazing at her. There’s too much gentleness and too much of something else in how he looks at her. He smiles and her own grin reflects his.
“Though,” he says, passing her the mostly burnt-down cigarette, “we’re gonna need one more.”
“Hmm? One more what?”
“Two things,” he says, like he’s already given this a lot of thought and he was just waiting for the right moment to showcase his findings. “One: the name. O&R? R&O? Either we’re ripping Y&R or we sound like a defunct railroad.”
She snorts. “Okay. And two?”
“Two: neither of us are accounts men.”
She doesn’t argue with that. She grounds the cigarette butt out in the ashtray. “Who do you have in mind?” she asks, because he very clearly does have someone in mind. “Don’t say Pete.”
“Not Pete. Kenny. That ol’ sawbones Ken Cosgrove.”
“He doesn’t look like a pirate anymore, his eye’s fine,” she says, but she’s smiling. “We used to talk about doing something like this,” she says. It’s not entirely the truth, but Stan doesn’t know that.
“Then it’s destiny,” he says, grand and hilarious for it.
“We’re gonna have to bring Ginzo over,” he says. His tone has returned to something more serious, and he’s still looking at her like he’d follow her anywhere. It makes her not only feel powerful, but something else, too. Something she won’t name.
“Okay,” she says.
“I think he’s become my surrogate son now,” he says and she laughs. He lights another cigarette and he passes it to her.
18.
1969 is the year Peggy celebrates her thirtieth birthday.
She goes to her mother’s and her mother makes her a cake and Anita bought her a scarf they both know Peggy will never wear and at the end of the evening, Peggy splurges on a cab rather than taking the train, justifying the expense simply in her head: “It’s my birthday.”
During the ride back into Manhattan, Peggy thinks she hasn’t really gone anywhere. In that moment, on her birthday, it feels to her the only distance she has traveled is the one between her mother’s place in Bay Ridge and the brownstone she bought with Abe. Last year it had felt like so much, that she had managed to travel so far and there was still so much road left in front of her. This year all she feels is static, like Stan said, a television left on the same channel for too long, tuned to nothing.
“I have to work in the morning, Ma,” Peggy had said. She dried her hands on a faded dishtowel, left the plates to drip next to the sink, ignored Anita when she offered more cake.
The cab descends into the Battery Tunnel as they cross the East River.
“You have to work, you have to work, of course you have to work,” she had said, waving her off. “Always the work with you.”
19.
“Tell me what you’re going to do tomorrow,” Peggy says into the phone. Stan laughs to himself on the other end.
“Why you wanna hear what I got planned?” His voice carries lazy over the line. “You looking to ask me out? Finally make an honest man of me?”
“I’m not a miracle worker,” she says, deadpan, and he laughs again. Silence pulls between the both of them and Peggy winds the cord around her finger. The first of June brought rain this year, and now as midnight approaches the skies have cleared but the humidity remains, steam rising up off the street below. Peggy thinks that means it’s going to be a hot summer. She had told Stan that earlier in the call and he had doubted her. “It’s weather, not fortune telling,” he had said, no prophecies to be divined from a rainstorm in June.
They would talk about something as flat and impersonal as the weather rather than acknowledge that despite the fact they now spend their entire days together in the office, their nightly phone calls have continued. She thinks if she was ever to bring it up, his response would be similar: no prophecies to be divined from a rainstorm in June, a phone call after dark. She winds the cord tighter around her finger.
“Sometimes I can’t imagine the next step. Sometimes I find that impossible.”
Something must carry in her voice, a tonal shift to the conversation, because he doesn’t tease her. He doesn’t say anything at first. He clears his throat and she can hear him shifting. She imagines him in bed; she tells herself it’s innocent when it’s not.
“You’re allowed to stand still,” he finally says, playing into the metaphor she hadn’t entirely intended to set up for him. “You don’t have to be on the move all the time.”
“I do. I need that.” The abrupt vehemence of it almost surprises her. What she wants to tell him is that she feels like she has been standing still since last year. Since Ted and Don decided to merge, since Ted decided first he wanted her and then he could leave her, since Lou Avery took over that office. She hasn’t been moving in a long, long time.
“What do you want?” he asks, a low rumble of a question. “You figure that out, and you go from there.”
“Yeah,” she whispers, suddenly exhausted. She doesn’t fill in the rest. That she wants everything. That she’s tired. That it’s tiring wanting everything.
“I’m gonna go to work tomorrow,” Stan says, that same low, intimate tone. “And so are you. And depending on how you play the next ten minutes of this conversation, I might just bring you a cup of coffee. We have a status meeting . . . some time before lunch.”
“10:30,” she interrupts.
“Right, but first I’ll waste about an hour checking in with the Ginz and the state of his strange, strange little world. I’m gonna spend the rest of the day learning too much about lipstick, probably incur the wrath of Old Man Lou on Maytag again. I’ll have too many beers, smoke too much. I’ll talk to you. And I will sleep. That’s what I’m doing tomorrow, weather and lack of sudden spontaneity permitting.”
She grins and doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t either. They don’t always need to talk. She’s not sure when she realized that about him. That silence was okay. That silence was a thing that could be shared. That sometimes saying nothing said more than you could possibly shape with words. She can hear him breathing and he can hear her, and that’s enough.
“I think we should do it,” she says into the phone.
Stan pauses. “Do what?” Two words, but it’s enough or she knows him enough to read more than hesitation there. She ignores it.
“The agency.” She presses her lips together. “Our own agency. I think we should do it. We should open our own shop.”
He laughs softly. “I say? You sleep on it. And we’ll revisit this again tomorrow. After the ten o’clock meeting.”
“10:30,” she reminds.
“10:30,” he repeats.
GINSBERG.
“You guys want me to come?” Ginsberg gestures to himself. “I mean, of course you do. I’m a goddamn talent.”
Peggy rolls her eyes and there’s not a hint of surprise to Stan. When they had laid out their plan a few minutes ago, all Ginsberg could think of were those heist movies, like The Italian Job or something, the part of the movie where the heroes (or, well, villains, if you’re on the side of the law and not entertaining storytelling) try to assemble a crack team against all odds.
But if he’s being honest, with himself and with these two, he’s gotta admit he digs the idea. He likes the idea of getting away from the Cutlers and the Sterlings of the world, falling in with these two and whatever miniature empire they think they’re gonna create. It’s a slight improvement.
Peggy keeps watching the door while Stan’s sprawled lazy in his chair, slowly draining a semi-decent cup of coffee. They’re in a diner over on West 38th, and Ginsberg had fought them tooth and nail the entire walk over for the honest explanation as to why they were going over ten blocks out of their way for a mid-afternoon coffee break, a thing, he pointed out, they had never done in their shared professional lives together, not once, not ever.
Ginsberg cocks his head towards Peggy, still watching the door. “What’s this? Your Night of Long Knives or something? Looking for spies, waiting for the brass to come through the door, jumpstart this coup.”
Peggy looks blankly at him while Stan shakes his head, clearly not interested in getting involved.
“1934,” Ginsberg says, “the Röhm-Putsch, the purge of Nazi Germany -- you know what? Nevermind. Read a book.”
“We’re not long-knifing anyone,” Peggy says. Stan raises his eyebrows, shaking his head again while he drinks the coffee he had (falsely, if only based on his facial expression following each sip is one of complacency and not newly reached nirvana) claimed was the best in the city and that was why they had to come here on what had to be the second hottest day of the summer (in Ginsberg’s opinion, the hottest day hadn’t happened yet, the worst is always waiting around the corner). Ginsberg had sweat through his shirt on the walk over, and if he had, so had Stan, and they still got another few hours left to clock in at the loony bin and ten-plus blocks left to walk back, and he’s still gotta share an office with surprise-escape-plan-mastermind Stan Rizzo, and he can only begin to imagine the stench that will emanate from their shared office and sweat-stained shirts, and it’s disgusting, he’s disgusted already.
“What?” Peggy asks Stan. “We’re not.”
“ . . . but we may be bayoneting.”
“You’re not funny.”
“I am funny. And you really should read a book.”
Peggy turns back to Ginsberg. When she talks about this new, nascent agency, she makes it sound exciting. It almost sounds like some delirious fresh start, a step into the coming decade, free of the shackles of Dow Chemical or Jim Cutler’s glasses or Bob Bensons lurking around the corner (Bob Benson is a lurker, Ginsberg’s been saying that since day one). It’s not hard to believe something this fanciful could’ve sprung from the drug-addled brain of Stan or Peggy’s starry-eyes -- it’s just kinda crazy how much thought and planning has clearly already gone into it. The tunnel out of the prison is already being dug and they want him to join them on the crawl to freedom! (he’s gonna have to remember that metaphor; he likes that one, it’s visceral).
“You know, I was wrong,” Ginsberg says after a beat. “We’re not going the German route of history here -- it’s the Russian.” He says Russian a little too loudly and the couple at the table next to them glances at them warily. Ginsberg doesn’t notice or he doesn’t care, but both Peggy and Stan do, offering small wan smiles in their direction. “This is the siege on the Winter Palace! The start of a new order!”
“Oh my god,” Stan mutters.
“You wanted him,” Peggy says, like Stan brought a pet dog home and he’s got no grounds to complain when it pisses on the rug (Ginsberg doesn’t care for that metaphor so much).
Ginsberg places his hand on Stan’s upper arm. “That is really very touching, and I thank you for it.”
And then he goes back to his oral recitation about the Winter Palace in 1917 and what he believes was called “the greatest hangover in history” thanks to the contents of a massive wine cellar discovered by the toppling army, and if he knows these two at all he’s assuming they’re gonna try and rival that historically epic hangover track record.
“Speaking of wine,” Peggy says, “you think you can bring Manischewitz with you?”
“I thought we were having a moment here, and you wanna talk business? I was having a moment!”
20.
“Are you busy?”
Joan looks up from her desk. “No more than usual.”
“I wanna run something by you,” Peggy says, stepping into her office and shutting the door.
Joan leans back in her chair and lights a cigarette. “Try me.”
It had been Peggy’s idea, not Stan’s, to ask Joan to join them. “Trying to even out the playing field?” Stan had teased. “Boy girl, girl boy.”
Now, in Joan’s office, Joan levels Peggy with a stare Peggy is far too familiar with. “Peggy. I’m a partner here.”
“I know that.”
“I just can’t leave.”
Peggy thumbs ash off the end of the cigarette she had bummed from Joan into the small gold ashtray on her desk. “But you could. They buy you out, and you’re free to do whatever you want.” Peggy pauses, trying to read Joan’s face. “You -- we could have more than this.” She gestures at Joan’s office, hopes she’s remembering all the same details that are on Peggy’s mind.
She must be, because Joan says, “I got us Avon.”
“You did.”
“And don’t for a second think a company like that will abdicate from here for some boutique shop started by a pair of unmarried women and some men they’ve never heard of before.”
Peggy frowns. “They’d like us more if we were married?”
“Not my point, Peggy.”
Peggy nods. “I know. But my point? We’re both better than this. There are better things out there. I want to go find them, and I want you to come. I think you’d be invaluable.”
Joan exhales a cloud of smoke. “Well isn’t that a thing to say to a girl.”
21.
Peggy sits on the floor of her apartment, directly in front of the television. Her legs are crossed, the phone’s receiver in between them.
“Are you still watching this?” she asks, unable to hide that little bit of awe.
“Of course I’m still watching this,” Stan says. “I’m alive and an American, I’m pretty sure the entire country is still watching.”
Peggy snorts, her eyes still glued to the screen. A man on the moon. The surreal quality of it all has yet to fade for her. They all had watched earlier in the office, crowded around Harry Crane’s desk and television set, and then took up residence in an already overcrowded bar on West 49th.
“If you could, would you go?” she asks.
“That your idea of a solid vacation plan?”
A pause stretches as they both watch their separate televisions. “I’m serious,” she finally says.
“No,” he says, slightly distracted. “I don’t think I’d be that brave.”
“You wouldn’t want to see that?”
“Of course I’d want to see that.” She can picture him gesturing at his TV set, his eyes wide in that expression that doubles for both are you crazy and am I crazy. “But then you’d have to come back. You can’t live on the moon,” he says, like maybe he thought that she thought you could. “Can you even imagine trying to come back from that? Everything -- everything would always pale next to that.”
He says it passionately, like it would be the worst thing to happen to a human being and if she was to ask, he would say he has never felt worse for two people than Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin (Buzz especially, on account of that name and on account of being the second not the first man to step foot on the moon).
“One could even say,” he says, and she can hear the laugh buried in his voice, “everything would be eclipsed.”
“Oh my god,” she groans.
“Give me a few minutes and I’ll definitely have a few more moon puns for you.”
“No one would miss if you decided to live on the moon.”
He laughs at her faux-insult. “Are you kidding? So many people would miss me.”
“I mean real people. People other than your friendly neighborhood pot dealer.”
“He’d hold . . . a fucking vigil for me.” Peggy abandons her spot on the carpet in front of the TV for a more comfortable perch on the couch. She draws her knees to her chest, her chin balanced on top. “You’d miss me,” he says, his voice low in her ear, sounding as though he is both farther away than any distance a street in Manhattan could yield from her and close, too close. “You’d miss me so much.”
“If I did -- if!” she stresses when he makes a noise that sounds a lot like triumph, “I’d drive down to NASA -- ”
“You’d drive to NASA?” he repeats, laughing. “In what? Your moon buggy?”
“I’d go to mission control!” she says over his laughter. “And you could talk to me over your radio. Tell me all about your lunar adventures.”
“From inside my moon rock igloo.”
“That’s not a thing.”
“Neither is moon-dwelling. We’re inventing as we go here.”
He might be onto something, she thinks, as her attention drifts back to the television screen.
22.
By the end of the month, some real things are happening. Things like Joan says yes. Ken says yes. Ginsberg agrees to come onboard.
They’re at Stan’s apartment. They’re sitting on the floor behind his coffee table, the couch at their backs, his kitchen table cluttered with their earlier work -- so many lists, all she seems to do anymore is make lists: potential clients, potential expenditures, cost-benefit analysis as funneled through Joan’s sharp eye.
The two had been on the phone with Ken. When they hang up, Peggy is grinning, wide. So is Stan. The moment turns or the moment has already been there, always been there, they just have refused to recognize it as such. Their shoulders are brushing, their faces close, and they both are watching the other. His eyes drift down to her mouth and then back up again and she finds herself doing the same.
“So we’re really doing this,” she says softly.
“Yeah we’re really doing this,” he says just as quietly, but his voice is low, makes something ache within her.
So she does the inevitable, so some histories are circular: she kisses him. There’s nothing light or hesitant about it this time, more of a collision than anything else, her mouth crashing into his, their noses bumping, everything about it awkward and off. But he reaches for her, cups her jaw, and the kiss goes open and filthy.
Peggy pitches forward into Stan’s lap as they kiss noisy and frantic, like every aborted attempt in the past has done nothing to lessen this, but rather intensify it. His fingers are thick inside of her as she pushes against him, pulls at his belt, pushes him back against the couch; he jerks his wrist and his fingers push harder, deeper, into her, making her shudder, stammer out a sound that isn’t a word. Her hands are clumsy as she tries to pull his pants open while his fingers twist and she clenches hard around them on a high whine, her head dropped forward; he groans against her neck, fingers working faster. She pulls her dress over her head, he drags the straps of her bra down one-handed until she’s naked in his lap and he can’t stop touching her, she can’t stop touching him, shoving his shirt off his shoulders, her bare chest pressed against his.
Stan’s patience snaps at that point. He mumbles something down at the dip of her throat, something that sounds a lot like gonna fuck you, and even that -- his voice, those words (those stupid words), the combination of his voice and those words -- is enough to make her hips buck against him, a quiet moan caught in the back of her throat.
He lays her out naked on the carpet and he fucks her. That burn of flesh against flesh as he pushes inside of her is almost too much at first and her heel skids down the back of his thigh.
The carpet scratches against her back, must be hard on his knees, but the only he’s saying is the occasional yes murmured into her skin. He’s rough with her, and she likes that, likes the way his fingers bite into the flesh at her hips, etc. He doesn’t treat her like anything weaker than himself, anything he could break. Their teeth knock together when they kiss; she bites at his bottom lip, and he snarls at first and then he laughs. She can’t stop rocking her hips into his, urging him on, making these stupid breathless babbling sounds, his name twisted into something polysyllabic and crude. She arches up under him, almost begging please, and when she comes, it catches her by surprise.
After:
She looks up from her vantage point on the floor and the lamp looming above her, that halo of light, the bright bulb. She stares at it as she steadies her breath, her thighs wet from him.
“Oh god,” Stan groans, rolling off of her, his shoulder colliding with the leg of the coffee table, his hair messy from her hands.
“Shit,” Peggy says, still naked, still flat on her back. And then she starts to laugh.
23.
They quit their jobs that August. That August is heavy and hot, merciless, and if Peggy was a better Catholic, she might even call it punishing.
Ted calls her office on her last day. They’ve done a decent job of dodging each other the rare times he’s visited the office in the last six months. He never calls her directly, like he worries that even her voice would result in another lapse in marital fidelity. She supposes that should be flattering, and maybe a year ago it would have been. Now all it inspires is another bout of weary disdain.
“I imagine you’ve heard,” she says, and for a moment she sounds like the sort of woman free of all past attachments. “The transcontinental grapevine, as conducted by Harry Crane.”
Ted doesn’t laugh. “Peggy,” and he doesn’t so much as say but rather sighs her name. “Have you really thought this through? I mean, really, really thought about this?”
“Of course I have.” It’s funny, she thinks, how quickly she can get mad. Her anger still feels as new as it did back in November, but now she finds it’s tempered by something else. She’s angry, but she’s not invested. She still feels insulted, but she’s tired of nursing that hurt. She rustles though an old file on her desk purposefully, trying to distract herself. She can picture Ted’s face in her mind, can see clearly the way he’d stand in front of her desk, one hand raised as he tries to make a point, like a professor speaking behind a lectern. Like a man who thinks he already knows everything and there’s still so much left for her to learn. She knows now that he’s wrong: when it comes to her, he doesn’t know a goddamn thing.
“It’s . . . I would hate to see you go. I’d hate to see you risk so much for so little. I’ve been there before, and it is a hard, hard road. And there’s so much that we could still do for you here, with the firm. So much I -- ”
“Don’t,” she bites off. “Do not say another word.” She scrubs at her face quickly, grateful this conversation is happening over the phone rather than face-to-face. “I am so tired of men like you promising to do things for me.”
“Peggy,” that same sigh again. “I just think -- ”
“I don’t care what you think, Ted.” Her voice is tight but calm, and she finds the words are true.
“All right then,” he concedes.
“All right,” she repeats.
A pause stretches, punctuated by yet another sigh from Ted. “Peggy. I didn’t want to end things the way we did, when I left, and I don’t want to end them like this either.”
“But you wanted to end it, isn’t that the point.”
He sighs, again. At this point, it’s almost comical: he’s one belabored sigh away from a feigned asthma attack. “I didn’t want to. I had to.”
“I’m not getting into an argument about semantics with you,” she snaps.
He chuckles. “No. We won’t do that.” He pauses. “We never did argue much, did we.”
“We didn’t do a lot of things.”
“Why didn’t we ever argue?”
“I don’t know,” she says, but she does. Arguing would’ve broken the spell, arguing would have made the both of them real and fallible. They only time they ever fought brought him first into her bed and then out the door, out of New York.
“What if we could do it right. What if I came back.”
Peggy’s speechless for a beat. “You are unbelievable,” she says. It surprises her, that animal outrage burning in her veins is absent from her voice.
“Excuse me?”
“You find out I’m moving on, that I’m making my life happen, I’m -- what were your words? ‘Flourishing and succeeding in your absence?’ And you pull this?” She’s yelling now. She rubs at her temples, takes a deep breath, and in her head, she dares him to sigh again, like it must be so goddamn hard being him. “You’re just like the rest of them,” she snarls. “You don’t just want to have it all, you think you deserve it. That you’re entitled to it. That I’ll take you back after . . . after all that. That I ever even had you.” Her voice has dropped, quiet now, belying more hurt than she’d ever want him to hear.
“Peggy -- ”
“I’m done,” she interrupts him. She takes another deep breath. She takes a look around her office and wonders if there will come a time when she will miss it. “I deserve it all too, you know,” she says, her voice quiet but sure. “Not just a piece of something, or someone. But the whole thing. I deserve that.”
Ted doesn’t respond.
“I’m going to go now,” she says.
“Good luck,” Ted finally says.
“Good bye,” she says.
24.
For the first time in a long time, she thinks about Don. She thinks of the good things about him. She makes herself remember that. She thinks he’d be excited for them. A part of her longs to confirm this, but she knows she won’t make an effort to do so.
With change you don’t so much forget, but you step away. You make that distance grow and you grow from that. Peggy has taken a lot of steps.
“Are you going to miss it?” Stan asks as they leave the SC&P lobby that evening. Peggy smiles, looks back at the sign just the once. She looks to Stan.
“I don’t think we’ll have time for that,” she says.
She’s started to leave it all behind.
25.
Since they arrived at the bar, some upscale place in Midtown not all that far from the Time-Life Building (“it’s poetic, in a way,” Ginsberg had said; “no it’s not,” Stan said), Ginsberg has been making a spectacle of having only one beer.
“We’ll probably never be able to afford this again -- so, bottom’s up.” Stan raises his glass.
“That’s a terrible toast,” Ginsberg scowls. “A celebration of poverty is hardly a celebration at all!”
Peggy grimaces as she takes a sip. “This is . . . not good. It’s all vermouth.” She takes another sip. “This is why I never order martinis.”
“Then why’d you order a martini?” Stan asks with that oversized incredulity that always seems to creep into his voice.
“I thought this place was supposed to be nice! People drink martinis in nice places! This? Is not a nice martini.” She pushes the overly full glass towards Stan. “Drink some -- it’s awful.”
“With a glowing testimony like that . . . ” he says, but he hasn’t reached for the glass. She arches her eyebrows at him in expectation.
“For the love of all that is pickled and holy, order the girl another drink. Please,” Ginsberg says.
“Why don’t you order me a drink?” Peggy asks Ginsberg, theatrically coquettish and definitely already drunk. She’s almost glad they decided against champagne to accompany their final day at SC&P; she’d be even drunker by now. Stan laughs.
“No. Never. I have zero interest in your . . . school dance, swing set, pigtail-pulling,” he waves his hands at both of them like he’s trying to find the right words, “ . . . flirtation tactics. Whatever this is. I wash my hands of the both of you.” Peggy’s eyes widen.
“What are you talking about?” Peggy asks. She doesn’t look at Stan because if she looks at Stan, that would give them away. Ginsberg would know then. Rationally she knows that makes little to no sense, but the martini in front of her and all the drinks that came before that are telling her otherwise.
It’s at that point that Ken arrives. At that point, the conversation is abandoned.
Ginsberg holds fast to his One Drink Only rule; the rest of them abide by their own rules of conduct.
They sit there, drinking rail whiskey (Ken’s cut with water, Stan’s with ice, Peggy’s straight). Their idle chit chat gives way to grandiose borderline delusional plans for their future agency, jokes about Pete in Los Angeles (most of which seem to revolve around his hairline and the probability of a sunburnt scalp), and a recap of past office antics (Harry Crane a star of most of the stories).
You do that, Peggy thinks. Look back before moving forward.
Towards the end of the night, Stan and Peggy find themselves alone at the table. Ginsberg’s gone to the bathroom and Ken is at the bar ordering another round.
“We can’t . . . do that again,” Peggy says quietly. Her head’s bowed when she says it, penitent, if only for a moment, before she raises her eyes to him.
“What a shame,” he says, looking directly at her mouth, no need for her to clarify.
“We’re business partners,” she says. She wanted to sound decisive, the way a business partner would sound (or at least the way she imagines someone who can call themselves a business partner would sound), but instead it sounds like a not-so-subtle innuendo. She really has had too much to drink.
Stan smiles wide. “That we are.”
26.
When they leave the bar, the sun has set, the city dark, heat still thick.
Doubts surface in her mind. Doubts tied to nerves, and for the first time since they started all this, it strikes her as a terrible idea. They’re unemployed. They have no clients, at least not for sure. Tomorrow morning she’ll wake up and for the first day in a long time, she doesn’t know what happens next. They start from the bottom, she supposes, and then work their way up. No, not the bottom entirely. Even now, she thinks, they’re a long way from where she started.
She grabs Stan’s arm as they step out onto the sidewalk. The side of her body bumps against his. “Aren’t you afraid?” she asks, apropos of nothing.
He shrugs, like he hadn’t considered that until now. “Part of the fun, I guess.”
“It’s not going to be fun if we fail.”
He stubs out his cigarette under his show on the sidewalk and he looks down at her. “We’re not going to fail,” he says. She must look at him with too much doubt in her eyes, because the cockiness slips from him, just a little. He steps closer to her. She can smell the cigarettes on him, the beer he switched to after the whiskey, heat, his skin.
“It’s gonna be great,” he says, too quiet, almost tender. His words are threatened by the roar of the traffic beside them, a car horn blaring at the end of the block, the crush of equally drunk and equally sweaty people passing around them on the sidewalk. Stan cups her face with her hands and he kisses her forehead. She smiles small, looking down at their feet, her breath stuck in her chest. He’s still holding her face and she’s still looking down when she places her own hands on his forearms, her grip loose. He rolled his shirtsleeves back at the bar and his skin is hot and damp under her hands.
Peggy glances up at Stan. She looks away quickly, and she will remember this later as foolish. It’s just she doesn’t think she’s ever seen a man look at her with that much open kindness before.
Someone bumps into her back, and she stumbles into Stan before stepping away entirely.
“See you tomorrow.”
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