Here's Looking At You
=====================
Sam held the black-and-white photograph of his first wife
in the gnarled fingers of his hand.
"Here's looking at you, kid," he said, holding it up
towards his failing eyes, as much aware of the liver spots
on the back of his hand as of Jenny's prim beauty. Her
delicate hands were crossed over a pleated knee-length
skirt and her face shone in the white sunlight of a distant
age.
All Sam's memories were in black and white. At the time
they were in the same colour as any photograph taken in
the modern day would be, but as all he ever had to
remember his youth, from those grainy pictures of
childhood to early middle-age, were in black and white, so
too were his memories. Young people, especially those
born since the 1960s, knew only a brilliant world of
Technicolor but for Sam the past was remembered in the
same monochrome as those Humphrey Bogart movies he
and Jenny used to watch at the flicks. Except for the odd
Hollywood epic or Disney cartoon, there was only black
and white and the various shades of grey in between.
"Play it again, Sam," he whispered, voicing one of the
catchphrases Jenny adopted from the same wartime movie
that inspired his own endearment to his dear departed
wife. At least, he thought she was departed. For all he
knew, though, Jenny might still be enjoying her dotage
somewhere, perhaps with the son and daughter she took
with her when they divorced and whom he hadn't seen for
many decades now.
Theirs was a romance, and then a marriage, that spanned
the grey days of ration books and the steadily brightening
days of the 1950s. It also spanned his years of National
Service and study for his Accountancy exams. Two
children and a house in Twickenham later, it all ended so
messily. The photographs that recorded those precious
shared moments he and Jenny had enjoyed together were
all that was left now. And she, as unable as he was still to
watch Casablanca in quite the same way, was happy to
leave these photographed memories to her ex-husband.
What tangible memories did she have now? Or were they
ones she'd still rather forget.
Sam didn't forget, couldn't forget, those happy days, even
though right from the beginning he'd been unfaithful to
her. There were the whores he visited with the lads during
his National Service. The girlfriend he had at college while
his guilt still prompted him to bring flowers back to his
wife after every evening of infidelity. The syphilis he
contracted which brought his deceit, and later his
marriage, to an end when he had two women to confess
that he'd been more unfaithful than even a mistress and a
still loving wife could ever have imagined. A pursuit of
the fairer sex that had been both his greatest source of joy
and that of his eventual downfall.
But bugger it! He'd fucked his way through more women
than most men had hot dinners and he wasn't sure he
regretted a single moment of it.
Although there was no mirror across his cluttered living
room to which he could refer, he knew he still cut a fine
figure of a man. He might be stooped, his nails as tough as
hell to cut, and his hair thinning, but he dressed well and
he could still pull the women. Okay, they were women
much the same age as him, smelling less sweet than he
remembered Jenny's teenage flesh (indeed they sometimes
smelt rather more like piss), but he was still a man who
could give pleasure. Thank Christ for Viagra! Not to
mention the lubricating creams that ensured that a woman
whose passion exceeded her stamina didn't suffer unduly
from the thrusts of his prolonged and stubborn erections.
Modern Science was a wonderful thing and Sam was glad
he'd lived long enough to benefit from it.
There'd been no mention of medical matters in his
conversation with Dorothy during the intermission of the
theatrical production they'd both seen the night before. He
was sure, however, that her interest in him was not
confined merely to his extensive knowledge of the movies
referenced by the play. What did modern theatre directors
really know about film noir anyway?
Dorothy was a stately woman who had learnt that the best
way to preserve her allure in advancing age was to be
more truly her own self and less a caricature of the girl she
once was. But even as he kissed her when their taxis drew
up after the show, he couldn't help wondering what it
might be to kiss the lips of a woman he'd seen age from
youth to maturity, rather than someone who appeared as
if she'd always been a sophisticated mature woman.
A woman, perhaps, like Jenny.
In those early days of courting, when the dance hall and
the flicks were the best places to chaperone a dame for the
evening, Sam remembered Jenny as a catch whose
virginity was as easily prised from her as it was from any
of the girls he'd dated while still at grammar school, taking
advantage of the bombsites that dotted wartime London.
But she was someone special: one whom for so long he
was able to forego all other temptation. Indeed, if in his
days in National Service he'd never discovered the
pleasures of the ladies of the nights and the easy prey of
the servicemen's favourite haunts, perhaps he and Jenny
might have stayed together until even now.
He'd believed he was in love, and perhaps it was love he
genuinely felt as he masturbated over the grainy black-
and-white photographs he borrowed from his older
brother on those evenings he imagined and later
remembered the visual delights of Jenny's proud bosom
and the surprisingly hirsute curtains that hid the precious
trophy of romantic conquest.
Although Sam imagined himself as a Humphrey Bogart
when he was young, in his attitude towards women he
was much more like the hero of those Ian Fleming novels
he read so avidly in the 1950s. Women were easy prey
and as long as you dressed and acted the part, they were
fruit from a tree that never failed to give of its bounty.
With a winning smile and a well chosen buttonhole, no
woman was safe from his charm. Even now, as long as
you made sure you never let your sartorial standards drop,
there were plenty of women, still handsome if not as
beauteous as they might once have been, who fell prey to
his allure. A conquest, even one with hair as thin as his
own, was one to relish.
Dorothy would be but one in the series of mature
conquests that Sam was collecting. There was Betty
whose eyes sparkled with the vitality of the youth they
hadn't lost. Rose, whose naked breasts had a lift that
plastic surgery could only hope to emulate. And, of
course, Dulcinea whose exotic name promised treasures
between her thinning thighs that even the smell of
incontinence didn't lessen.
Of course, he could still afford to pay for younger flesh, a
habit he'd still not foregone, but there was more pleasure
to be gained from sex with a woman who appreciated him
for other things than the interest on his investments that
rewarded a job well done.
Sam still liked a young lady. He especially loved the way
younger women exposed so much bare flesh, often letting
their trousers hang dangerously close to the zone after
which he most lusted. Did they know how much pleasure
they brought to an old man as he waited at the bus stop or
queued at the supermarket checkout? Only a few hours
earlier, he carried with him the memory of the smell and
vital warmth of the bare waist that brushed against his left
hand while his right hand gripped the strap on the
crowded Jubilee Line. But he had lost the ability to
distinguish the age of a woman of sixteen years and one
ten years older, just as he now had a senior citizen's
appreciation of the subtle distinctions of aging flesh.
It was after seeing Casablanca with Jenny that their
relationship was first consummated. In those days, there
were many more cinemas than nowadays and a film would
continue to be shown for many months, or even years,
after its first release. After all, there was no opportunity to
rent out a film on video or to wait till it appeared on
television. The Odeon was a grand venue, still boasting a
pit where, in the days of silent film, a pianist would keep
improvised accompaniment to the madcap escapades of
Charlie Chaplin or the Keystone Kops. Sam was much
keener on more recent movies and had a talent for
mimicking the great actors. He had an excellent take on
Groucho Marks, WC Fields, James Cagney, George
Formby and Will Hay, but Humphrey Bogart was his
favourite.
"Here's looking at you, kid!" he said to Jenny.
She giggled as he kissed her decorously on the lips.
"Play it again, Sam," she said in a higher pitched imitation
of the great man's voice.
Sam complied with eagerness, grasping his beloved
around the trim waist and planting a longer smoochier kiss
on her lips. He noted with desire that she closed her eyes
in the same seductive way as the screen goddesses of his
masturbatory fantasies.
"We can make more of the evening if you like," he said at
last when their lips parted.
He was encouraged by how flushed and excited Jenny
looked.
"I don't know how," she protested unconvincingly. "My
mum will be waiting up for me."
"You can always say the bus was delayed," said Sam.
"I've borrowed the spare keys to my older brother's flat in
Chelsea. He's away on business in Gloucester and he said
it was okay."
"Blooming heck, Sam!" Jenny exclaimed. "You've got it
all planned."
Sam smiled, but he didn't want to let on that Jenny
wouldn't be the first young lady who'd joined him on the
bed in his brother's spare room. Indeed, he most certainly
wouldn't admit that his brother's complicity had once
extended to sharing a woman of particularly easy virtue
who hadn't yet learnt that she could do better by charging
her male friends for the pleasure of her company.
"We can get there easily on the Circle Line," he said,
indicating the drab exterior of a bomb-scarred
underground railway station.
Sam's brother's flat reminded him in later years of the
apartment featured in Brief Encounter, although it wasn't
a film he'd seen at the time. Again, although it was as
colourful as any Chelsea flat in the late 1940s might be,
his memories were in black and white despite the fact that
he had no photograph to remember it by. The
photographs he had of Jenny of that time, most of them
taken at the wedding, had none of the details of the dark
brown freckles on her cheeks or the auburn hair that
cascaded over her shoulders when she removed her
hairpins. And no photograph taken then showed her slim
naked body when after many minutes of subtle
perseverance he finally persuaded her to divest her
clothes.
Her screams of passion were unfeigned but compromised
by the pain of his initial penetration as bit by bit the
intricate folds of her previously unviolated vagina gave
way to Sam's thrusts. The second and third times that
evening, when Jenny had at last recovered from the first,
thankfully not very bloody, incursion, were even more
delightful. Jenny had a natural talent for lovemaking that
even now Sam believed was the best he'd ever known.
In those days, there were few examples, either filmed or
photographed, that could guide the happy couple in their
frequent abandon. Neither of them really appreciated the
extent to which anal intercourse, one of Jenny's 'special
treats', might be viewed as a fetish or even a perversion.
"Are you sure?" he asked nervously, as she proffered her
arse towards his twitching penis.
"As sure as I'll ever be!" she said, with a smile that lit up
her face more than any studio lights could an actress.
"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do!" said Sam, as he
entered territory he'd never appreciated before in such a
state of relative sobriety.
And the many times she arched above him as he thrust
into her from below were done more to accentuate Jenny's
desire for deep sensation than from any wish to emulate
the unnatural poses of hardcore pornography. There was
no doubt in both Sam's and Jenny's mind that sex was
both a prelude to and a reward for marriage, along with
the delights of the two children born so close together.
There were fewer photographs of Jenny in the later years
of their marriage and none at all after their shamefaced
visits to the clinic. There were no photographs at all of
Sam's other conquests in those years, except for Doris, his
secretary, on one of the Accountancy firm's occasional
excursions. It was ironically taken together with Jenny
and the other partners' wives. There she was, simpering
just behind the two of them with the sun setting over a
stately home.
Maggie, wife number two, was even less well represented
in the photograph collection. Like Jenny, all memories
were in black and white, but there were no children and
the marriage suffered very early on from his wife's all too
well founded suspicions.
His third wife, Lauren, was the first of his wives to be
photographed in colour, but now the print was faded and
her red hair had lost its tincture just as in real life it must
by now have lost all its shine.
There was remarkably little to remember Rosemary who
was very nearly his fourth wife, and would have been if
Sam had not switched his affection to the much younger
Raquel whose photographs in brilliant Kodacolor filled
more photograph albums than all his other wives put
together. Theirs was a marriage that survived for almost
as many years as his first, until the naivete of her youth
gave way to the acute disillusion of discovering that hers
was not the only young flesh Sam coveted.
Although Raquel was the conquest about which Sam
reminisced with most pleasure, she was neither as
passionate nor as fulfilling a lover as Jenny. There were no
shared moments in the 1970s that had as much mutual
significance as those early days with Jenny. She had no
fondness for Sam's mimicking of Norman Wisdom,
Spencer Tracey or Humphrey Bogart, and Sam had
difficulty in truly understanding the appeal of Robert de
Niro or Harrison Ford. They shared very few cultural
pleasures. He really did not enjoy Marc Bolan, Rod
Stewart or Elton John. The Beatles was probably as
modern as his taste in music ever progressed. And much
as he enjoyed Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly, he preferred
Frank Sinatra and Tony Bennett.
Sentimental fool that he was, Sam once took a holiday to
Casablanca in the long gap between wives number three
and four. This was a disappointment in one sense. The
crowded, sweaty North African city hardly resembled at
all the Casablanca of his imagination, except for the
minarets and djellabas. There was no Rick's Bar and
certainly no eponymous black piano player. He met more
possible Ricks in the dives of Tangiers than in the bustling
run-down streets of the newly independent kingdom's
commercial capital. But, in one way, his holiday was no
disappointment at all. The whores he sampled were
amongst the very best he'd ever enjoyed and he was able
to relish all the more sophisticated pleasures of the flesh
that greater exposure to imported, under-the-counter,
Soho pornography had stimulated in his imagination.
If only he'd known such diversions when he could have
shared them with Jenny! He was sure that she'd have been
as game as any prostitute and would have enjoyed his
experiments very much more.
Sam doubted he'd ever be able to relish such deviations
now. Even with the prostitutes whose telephone numbers
he snatched from telephone booths, he wasn't able to rise
beyond the vanilla challenge. However, Sam still enjoyed
the thrill of the chase. The women he pursued with such
success might be mere shadows of their earlier selves, but
he had an eye for which women were still up for it. Many
older women had lost the urge, but there were those who
were still well turned out and responded enthusiastically
to his gentlemanly persuasion.
Although his more recent photograph albums were full of
pictures of mature women with stockinged ankles, tight
jeans, hair dyed deceptively young, and full bosoms in
their final bloom, it was the more innocent photographs of
a smiling Jenny who hid well the extent of her animal
appetite that Sam returned to.
"Aren't I enough for you?" she asked, when they'd made
up for perhaps the last time, not many months before their
relationship approached its final most ugly death throes.
She held his erect penis between her fingers, his semen
dripping down her cheek as much as it was into the fine
hair of his thighs.
"Of course you are, my love," he said, sincerely meaning it
whilst at the same time reflecting that Doris for all her
passion still drew the line at sex that took her mouth away
from his towards the true proof of his manhood.
"Are you sure?"
"There'll never be anyone better in my life," he answered
prophetically. "Why would I ever want to leave you?"
Jenny smiled as Sam's penis stirred back into full life, in
those days with no assistance from a little blue pill.
"Ooh!" she said with delight. "Play it again, Sam!"
"Here's looking at you, kid!" he said in his best Bogart
voice, positioning himself for re-entry into his wife's
welcoming vaginal grip.
The memory stirred something inside Sam. He held the
photograph of his first wife arm-in-arm with him on their
wedding. It was a posed photograph, but it captured a
truly happy day. At the time he thought himself the
luckiest man in the world and he resolved as the rings
were exchanged that this ceremony would have real
meaning. She would be his Lauren Bacall and he the once
dissolute but now reformed Humphrey Bogart. Surely,
they would end their lives together with the same
schmaltzy sincerity of the best Hollywood movie.
What would it be like now if he'd not so foolishly
squandered his good fortune? He was sure that hers was
an appetite like his that age could never diminish, even if
she, like him, would need that little extra help to satisfy it.
If only... If only...
Sam brushed his hand against his eyes. They felt moist,
though he couldn't be sure if it was rheumy old age or
sorrow that had made them so. If Jenny were here now,
how different would his life be? How much better would
it be to have memories he could share?
The phone rang. Sam was still not used to the
strangulated warbling of a modern telephone and took a
moment to stand up and answer it.
It was Dorothy, the woman with whom he'd exchanged
numbers at the theatre the night before. She had noticed
an advertisement in the Evening Standard for a
retrospective of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall
films at the National Film Theatre, and was wondering
whether they should make the journey to the South Bank
to watch them together.
"You might remember the films from when they were
new," she remarked.
Sam most certainly did, but he wondered whether even
now he could bear to see films that he recalled watching
hand-in-hand with Jenny. Would it be unfaithful to her
memory to be seeing the same films with Dorothy?
"I have very fond memories," Sam admitted. And then
noticing a slight maudlin tone to his voice, he added: "But
I'm sure there'll be as nothing to the memory of spending
the evening with you!"
As a flattered Dorothy giggled, Sam's eyes scanned the
room away from the piles of photograph albums he'd
pulled out from the chest of drawers towards the
collection of blue pills on the dresser.
Tonight was going to be another good one, he could see
that. And good as his memories might be, and however
much he still loved Jenny, nothing, but nothing, could
match the pleasures Sam was still able and willing to
enjoy.