The Peach Motif

The peach motif gives physical form to the narrator’s uncertain readings of desire and intention. Peach pits appear on his blotter, a ripe peach later takes their place, and another peach becomes a prop in a brief office-waiting-room mishap. The fruit prompts literary speculation and comic business, but its meaning never settles: it may signal Meg Quigley’s interest, mock the narrator, or simply expose how readily he turns ambiguous details into stories about himself.

The Pits and Their Possible Meanings

The motif first arrives as five peach pits at the center of the narrator’s blotter, surrounded by a dark, wet mark. He has been told there is another message on his desk, but the pits themselves carry no explanation. Their placement makes them seem deliberate, and he immediately treats them as communication. His irritation at people taking liberties with him as a temporarily appointed department chair sits alongside his curiosity about what the arrangement might mean.

The narrator considers whether Meg has eaten the peaches and left the pits, then reaches for a literary interpretation. He wonders whether they extend the peach imagery associated with Eliot’s Prufrock, recasting a timid figure as someone daring enough to eat peaches. He asks himself what such a gesture might imply in sexual terms, but also considers the less flattering possibility that Meg is calling him a pit. These alternatives are not confirmations of what Meg intended; they show the narrator trying to convert an unexplained object into a message about his own desirability.

That uncertainty overlaps with his awareness of Rachel. After sending her stories to her agent, Wendy, without permission, he waits to see how she responds and recognizes that Rachel may suspect he wants to take their relationship beyond work. The narrator imagines himself with both Rachel and Meg, yet cannot make the fantasy convincing. The peach pits remain in his attention as he searches his memos for a message from Lily, who is expected in Philadelphia. In this sequence, the fruit sits among competing attachments and imagined possibilities rather than pointing cleanly toward one person.

A Peach Replaces the Pits

On a later visit, Meg’s apparent message is a single ripe peach left on the ruined blotter. Rachel has also brought the narrator a note that Bodie Pie in Women’s Studies has been trying to reach him. The peach and the note are distinct kinds of communication: Bodie’s message has an identifiable source and purpose, while the peach again invites speculation without explaining itself.

The narrator takes the peach with him when he leaves to meet Dickie Pope, joking with Rachel about the possibility of being fired and asking her to find him a new blotter. He hands her the soiled one, whose condition he describes through an embarrassed sexual comparison, while keeping the peach in his jacket pocket. The contrast makes the fruit seem both discreet and conspicuous: it can be carried away, but the narrator cannot stop assigning it meanings. The blotter, meanwhile, has become an object he wants replaced, its damage now part of the office’s visible record of the episode.

Guilt, Meg, and the Peach

The peach returns in the narrator’s meeting with Billy Quigley. Billy asks him to do a favor by telling Meg that she cannot be rehired for the fall. The narrator finds a peach in his pocket, removes his hands, and experiences guilt because of his flirtation with Billy’s daughter. His conscience connects that attraction not only to Billy but also to his wife and secretary. The object therefore accompanies a concrete professional request with personal consequences: Meg’s employment is at issue, while the narrator’s private uncertainty complicates his response to her father.

The narrator associates this guilt with advice from his father: eating the peach would be preferable to feeling guilty about it anyway. The thought does not resolve what he should do about Meg’s job or his attraction to her. Instead, it gives the fruit a second, more pointed function. Earlier, it was a possible message whose author and meaning were unclear; here, it becomes an occasion for the narrator to recognize the conflict between desire and responsibility.

Comic Business and Unresolved Meaning

At Dickie Pope’s office, the narrator entertains himself by tossing the peach toward the ceiling, trying not to hit the acoustic tiles. The game ends when he lunges to catch it, brushes a lamp, and the peach falls onto the rug just as Dickie and two men emerge. Their attention moves from the lamp to the narrator and then to the peach. No one explains the fruit, but its appearance turns an otherwise formal waiting-room encounter into a comic tableau of misplaced composure.

Across these scenes, the peaches move between possible message, private temptation, source of guilt, and physical prop. The narrator’s interpretations are revealing precisely because the evidence does not confirm them: Meg’s intention remains unknown, and the allusion to Prufrock is part of his own speculation. The motif thus makes the gap between an object and the story attached to it visible. Its humor depends on that gap, while its recurrence shows how the narrator’s desires and obligations keep returning even when the peach itself offers no clear answer.