The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

  “Mmmm, and I thought you were here to look after me, of Mr Luenbach. You not gonna be mean to poor Annelisa? Don’t say y’are …”

  The voice was babyish: half-whine, half-cajole. It was foolish, but repulsive too. And the look she gave me, sidelong, with half her face nuzzling Luenbach’s shirt, was challenging, as if last night had not happened, and we were rivals at High School, for the same boy.

  “Okay, Annelisa.” Gently, he disengaged her arms, and stepped backwards. Then he slapped her sharply on her bottom. “Why, I think it’s time somebody waited on me. I’ll sit right down here next to Barbara, and you bring me coffee and fresh toast. Okay?” Another slap.

  “You got it.” She giggled, the hiccough sounding odder than ever.

  I was angry with her. “Don’t wait on anybody, Annelisa,” I said.

  “Why not, hon? First lesson in Miss Kaye’s course in how to get yourself a guy! You wanna know the rest?”

  Luenbach was staring at me. “Tell her, Annelisa,” he ordered, in a quiet voice, without looking at her.

  “You got to do anything they want, that’s all. Anything, mind.”

  “Balls,” I said.

  “Oh, them too, babe!” she giggled, skittering about the kitchen, and started to hum “My Guy”.

  Luenbach laughed shortly, still staring at me. “Why-do you bother?” he asked quietly.

  “To do what?”

  Instead of replying he simply jerked his head briefly in Annelisa’s direction. She was peering into the fridge in search of a new carton of orange juice.

  “I’m-stickin-to-my-guy-like-a-stamp-to-a-letter …”

  There was such contempt in that movement of his head that I wanted to strike him. “You didn’t answer me,” I said.

  Luenbach shrugged. “Forget it.”

  There was a short silence. Annelisa put orange juice and toast before him, smiling all the time. Then she pulled up a chair close to him, and sat with her elbows on the table, leaning eagerly, like a small cat seeking contact.

  “What you gonna do today, Sam?”

  “Read a little, swim a little, eat a little, wait for tonight.”

  “Me too. And it’s a real nice day. You gonna swim in the ocean or the pool?”

  “The pool’s cleaner.” He yawned. A small frown appeared on her brow, then disappeared. But she spoke more quickly, as if afraid of losing his attention.

  “When I was a kid we used to dream of swimming in the ocean. In waves. Not much chance of that in the midwest! I always remember reading someplace that the salt keeps you up, so’s it’s easier to learn to swim. And I used to think you’d get in an’ just float about, all free and easy, you know? We never went anywhere on vacation, just stayed on the farm. Anyway, the first time I saw the ocean it was at Santa Barbara. One of my uncles lives there, and this was the Big Trip, you know? I guess I was about nine. Anyways, I thought the ocean was the prettiest thing I ever did see, but when we waded out it wasn’t like I thought. It didn’t keep you up at all! You’d sink like a stone. An’ I never was very good at swimming. Not enough practice, you know?”

  He yawned again. I said, “It must have been really exciting, to see it for the first time.”

  “Oh yeah,” she replied, absentmindedly, then giggled. “Will you teach me to get a little better, Sam? You could hold me up in the pool.” She was leaning so far towards him now that the long hair cascaded over his arm. Suddenly I was reminded of how she was with the bartender in Atlantic City, her body in automatic, no matter what the response. Here there was little, but it made no difference. She dropped her voice to a sultry, persuasive whisper, “Will you, Sam. Will you look after Annelisa?”

  It was as if I was not there. But I wasn’t angry with her, as I have been in the past in the presence of women who direct their full attention at any man in the room, even if he is a sixty-year-old cripple. We’ve all met them: they’ll trample on their sister for the sake of a bunch of flowers and a restaurant meal, and instinctively regard other women as competition as soon as they scent male hormones within a radius of five miles. Annelisa was like that, but for the first time I wondered why. The night before she had wanted to see me; she had talked to me. Now it was gone.

  “Annelisa, I know you can look after yourself,” Luenbach said, languidly.

  “Don’t be fooled. She can’t at all.”

  They both looked at me in surprise, as though I had no business to interrupt whatever game was being played. There was a shout from the sitting room. Connors was winning. I was glad when Tony Carl burst into the kitchen for a can of Coca-Cola, urging us to come and watch McEnroe “having his ass whipped”.

  I took a beach roll from the pile in the corner of the terrace, and walked out on to the sand. The sun was high, the blue of the sky dark in its intensity. I could imagine it whitening, melting at the edges, curling in over us all. People called in the distance, voices plaintive and insistent as the birds’. In the background, behind the low swish of the sea, I fancied I detected a low, continuous hypnotic thrumming, like a generator buried deep within the earth, keeping everything going. It was, I supposed, the sound of thirty million people on holiday: talking, quarrelling, making love, slapping children, driving, using power drills to put up shelves, revving motorbikes, opening fridges, popping cans of beer, setting up barbecues, playing radios too loud through open windows, careering from city to city on Greyhounds, to visit relatives for the Fourth of July.

  About fifty yards from the house I stopped and lay down. I had nothing with me, no book, or towel or suntan oil, and felt too lazy to return. A great lassitude oozed over me; it seemed that the hours of the day hung slackly like dead elastic. It may have been ten minutes later, it may have been twenty, when I heard the slight crunch of footsteps approaching me through the coarse, black-speckled sand.

  “You’ll burn. I brought you some cream.”

  She squatted down beside me, and delved into a huge floral beach bag, like a sack.

  “You want sunglasses too? And sun block? Your nose’ll go red and look real bad if you don’t use sunblock.”

  “Annelisa …”

  “Which number d’you use? I guess you tan easily so a three will be fine. Me I use different ones on different parts of me. Like a piebald!”

  She was offering me various little bottles, lining them up on her own mat as an artist might prepare his palette.

  “I wish you’d stop chattering about that stuff and tell me why you’re acting so strangely,” I said.

  “Me?” Her eyes were wide.

  “Well, I don’t see anyone else around. Honestly, you really annoyed me back there in the kitchen. You can flirt with the likes of Luenbach all you like, but I’m remembering that it was you who warned me against the lot of them, in Atlantic City. So how come you start acting as if …?”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean. As if you and Luenbach …”

  But I could not finish. I knew it would be impossible to express how her behaviour seemed to me. We had no common language of understanding; the longer I spent in the company of these people the more I felt my words assailed on all sides, besieged by the transatlantic banalities we shared through thousands of pop songs and films.

  “You jealous or somethin’?”

  “It’s nothing to do with that.”

  I knew how confused she would be by the truth: that it wasn’t to do with how she was with him, it was because of her attitude to me.

  Carefully, reverently, she stroked cream on to her arms and shoulders, saying in that light, chittery voice, “Well now, I really don’t know what you mean, Babs. I just woke up this morning and decided that everything was gonna be all right. So I’m gonna have me a good time. I mean, who cares? Who cares?”

  “About what?”

  “Anything.”

  “I don’t understand you.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  I propped myself on one elbow, and looked at her. She adopted the same posture, so it
was as if we were confronting each other. Odd distorted-mirror images we were too – both in bikinis, but my body (neat and acceptable though I thought it most of the time) dwarfed into scrawny sallowness by her statuesque golden limbs, and those awesome hard melons that defied the skimpy cloth to contain them. Even in this heat she wore the wig, as if a man with a camera might appear on the horizon any second, and she must be prepared.

  Annelisa’s eyes narrowed; her expression was almost hostile.

  “You know something, Babs? You don’t know anything about anything, do you?”

  “Oh no.” My tone matched hers.

  “You having a good time here, hey? Why, you thought this morning that you even fancied Sam Luenbach. I could tell. In the air, baby.” She clicked her fingers. “And you think I’m just some cheap trash who gets high on making a guy get a hard-on. Isn’t that what you think? Go on!”

  “If you’re so bloody sure what I think, why are you asking me?”

  She said nothing. Her scarlet nails gripped a bottle of suntan oil, and drummed it up and down on the padded plastic – the little insistent sound reminding me of a heart beating fast. It was as if we were suspended there, with nobody else for miles and miles, in an appalling hell of proximity – this girl who had nothing but insecure abuse to give me, and I who despised her.

  Yet lying with barely eight inches between our mats, waiting.

  Annelisa sighed at last. “You know what’s wrong with you, Babs?” All the anger had gone from her voice. She paused, waiting for me to speak, but I was silent.

  “You think you know a lot, but you don’t know nothing.”

  (Yes, I thought, you’re absolutely right, and my lack of knowing has shown, like my lack of love, in a thousand perfect prints, which have made my name. What better qualification for a photographer than to be distanced from knowledge, and from inhibiting affection?)

  “Tell me then,” I said.

  “Oh my gahd … How’d I start? Listen, what do you think of Peter Corelli?”

  “He’s a bit of a slob. But no worse than a lot of the guys I’ve worked for.”

  “Really? What about the girls?”

  “Lace and Marylinne? Oh, they’re okay. Both tough as anything, I’d guess. They seem a bit jealous of you, though.”

  Her mouth curled in an expression I could not interpret, although there was definitely a note of triumph in it. “Tell me why you think they’re here,” she said.

  I hesitated. “Well, I remember reading that Carl always likes to be surrounded by an entourage, and I suppose that since he’s training them, or whatever he said, it was easy to invite them here for the weekend. Dress up the party.”

  “That it?”

  I nodded.

  “Well now, honey, I guess I’d better put you right. Just so’s you don’t go back to London thinking that nice kind Mr Carl gives poor little lorn gals free weekends with his Mom … Peter Corelli now, he owns the 1203 Rooms, okay? Carl and Zandra used to eat there an’ that’s how they met. Anthony wants Corelli to come in on the Emperor’s Palace in Atlantic City …”

  “Presumably Corelli’s keen because he’ll make money,” I interrupted.

  “You got it wrong, babe. Point is that Corelli’s more useful to Anthony than Anthony is to Corelli, ’cos Corelli’s got real good connexions, you know?”

  I shook my head. She looked impatient.

  “I mean, Corelli’s known – not by everybody a’course – to be involved with the mob, and Anthony needs that sort of help to get his license. So he wants Corelli to come in in a big way. I hear a lot, hangin’ around. Nobody thinks the dumb broads are takin’ anything in.”

  “Where do the girls come into it?”

  “Uh, huh! Well they come into the category of what used to be called R and R. Remember?”

  “Vietnam?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Sure thing! Stands for Rest and Recreation, and it was what the guys got when they were off duty. Usually meant with kid hookers, but never mind.”

  “So?”

  “Okay, Corelli’s in London to see a rough cut of the movie. He just took himself there for a vacation with Zandra and Anthony. He’s loaded too, you know? So he’s watching the movie and there’s one scene that really turns him on. It ain’t me at all, Babs, it’s Lace and Marylinne. Their big moment. You wanna know about it?”

  I nodded.

  “Like, they’re these two slave girls and they work in my palace. Early on in the movie they’re hiding behind a curtain, and they see me screwing with this guy – one of the suitors. So they fall back on a kind of couch that’s there and have a little scene together, you know? Anthony says that guys really like to see women making it together.”

  “Did they like it?” I asked.

  “Oh my! They ain’t lesbians, you know. Lace an’ Marylinne, they’re all-American het-er-oh gals, no doubt about it. I mean, they like each other, an’all, but that’s it. No, they had to get stoned out of their little minds

  “Did Anthony …?”

  “Sure … ’nuff dope and coke to send the Statue of Liberty into orbit. Me – I’m just amazed they could manage to find their way to each other’s …” She giggled – a schoolgirlish sound which managed to sound crude and voluptuous too, a contrast as disturbing as that which I saw in her pictures, years ago.

  “So what about Corelli?”

  “Oh yeah, I was forgettin’. Simple. Corelli finds this a real turn-on, like I said, so when Anthony invites him here for this weekend, he says, you know, what about some R and R? So Lace and Marylinne get invited to keep him company, make him real happy. Then the deal’ll go well, see?”

  “Are you kidding?” I knew, of course, that she wasn’t.

  “Nobody kids round here. Hey, why’d you think they’re sharing a room? There’s enough empty rooms in that house … But they told me, the girls, it’s what he gets off on. He likes to pretend they’re two college roomies, and he comes in, and first he likes them to make it with each other, and he watches, and kinda plays with himself. Lace told me. He can’t make it, see, not like normally. So, when they’ve finished, one of them has to give him head, while the other one watches. He likes Lace best. An’ Marylinne sure as hell don’t mind!”

  Her hand had stopped that nervous drumming. Annelisa was waiting for me to respond, and again I detected that infinitesimal curl of triumph at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She had shocked me, and she was pleased.

  “God, it disgusts me,” I said.

  “Like I said, honey, you don’t know nothing, do you?”

  “I’m not sure I don’t prefer ignorance.”

  “Sure. Most people do.”

  She lay back, and stretched out. The heat made her skin shimmer, a mixture of oil and sweat. The silicone breasts did not submit to gravity, but stood unnaturally firm and upright, like two plastic apricot mousses in a diner display.

  After a while I asked, “Why do they let it happen?”

  “Who?” she mumbled sleepily.

  “The girls.”

  A small shrug rippled her flesh. “It’s business. They know if they go along with it, Anthony’ll be good to them. Corelli too. What d’ya expect? Just business.”

  “You accept every damn thing, don’t you?”

  “Nope.”

  “Tell me.”

  She sat up suddenly. “I’ll tell you what bothers me. Not them, and Corelli, because it’s goin’ on all the time, and me or you worrying about it don’t make no difference. Lace and Marylinne, they’re big girls. Nobody’s standing over them with a whip. Nobody’s standing over any of us. This is a free country, you know? America’s the land of the free, honey. But let me tell ya, when I make my choices it’s okay for me, but it’s not okay for the folks I drag along with me. You know?”

  Her voice had risen, a blade of tension in it that was absent before.

  “Who do you mean?”

  “It’s this goddam movie … Oh, I don’t, I mean, it was my decision to do it, because I wa
nted to be a movie star, you know? But like, I didn’t know it was gonna be like it was, not so bad. So when I heard that it might never be shown here, ’cos they couldn’t get it into the country, I was real glad, Babs, I was too … But now I got this feeling that Anthony’s gonna fix it like he fixes everything.”

  “How?”

  She rubbed fingers and thumb together, making the money sign. “And, if he does, I don’t know what I’ll do.” Her voice, on these last words, wound itself tight into a near-squeak. Then the nervous tattoo began again.

  I cannot understand, even now, why it took me so long to see. Even when she told me about her childhood, I still did not make the most obvious connexion. After all that I had heard, I had not bothered to link Annelisa Kaye with Anna Cvach, still less with the Angelus – not even when she had spelt it out for me so clearly. And so I was as culpable as all of them, if not more so.

  “Because of your parents?” I asked.

  She nodded mutely, her face creased by misery.

  “Don’t they know what you do?”

  She nodded again, then dropped her head. “I guess it was obvious they’d find out, but I thought they wouldn’t. ’Cos of the name. And nothing ever gets to Wahoo, never mind our farm. I wrote them from Anthony’s place, and said I was working on a glossy magazine, as a sort of assistant, and Mom wrote back and said she was real pleased with me. Then I did the first pictures, and I didn’t write again. I had nothin’ to say to them, you know? Months later I get a letter saying that she’ll pray for me. Some guy at the cattle market ’ud seen Emperor and recognised me. Mom said Dad nearly collapsed. But they didn’t tell my grandmother. Jesus, when I think of them knowing … seeing …”

  “You don’t know that they did,” I said gently. “And knowing isn’t half so bad as seeing.”

  “Maybe. Anyways, I wrote back and said that that was just a one-time thing, ’cos I needed the money, and now I had a straight job on the magazine. An’ you know what she did?”

  I shook my head.