	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.

 








