The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

“She sent me five hundred dollars, Babs, with a short note saying that they were prayin’ for me every day. That’s all. I never heard from her again. An’ I didn’t write either.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nothin’ to say. ’Cept more lies … But now it’s different. You hear Anthony? He’s saying we’ll both be on TV coast to coast, and he’ll be fighting censorship in cities all over, an’ all that stuff – so it’ll all start again. And this time they’ll really know.”

  “Why is it worse?” I asked.

  She scratched and scraped odd jagged patterns in the plastic of her beach mat, the impressions remaining after her nail moved on. Now she looked up at me at last, her face hard and tight.

  “Well now, honey, you tell me. I guess it was just about possible for Mom and Dad to tell themselves that the body is God’s temple, and stuff like that, and so I should be proud of mine. Dad always said I was his pretty girl … But don’t it seem much worse in moving pictures? Huh? They’ll read about how their daughter makes it in every kind of way, with every kind of guy, and then watches and laughs and jerks herself off while those guys are tortured and killed … And waddaya think it’ll do to them, hey? Oh sweet Lord, I swear I can’t bear to think ’bout it.”

  “Nor can I,” I said.

  I had started to feel faintly sick, but put it down to the heat. The noon sun hung above us, white and pitiless. Back in front of the house I could see Miranda and Tony playing frisbee, with the loose-limbed ease of children, the scarlet disc skirling to and fro like a strange elastic insect, always under control. I could hear their laughter when one of them stumbled in the sand, distant and tantalising as a half-tuned radio. They, and the low, pretty, leaf-shaded house behind them, seemed far, far away from us, although Miranda seemed to sense me looking and waved.

  “They’ll be shamed,” she said softly. I saw a tear roll slowly down the curve of her cheek.

  Why didn’t you think of that before you did it? I thought. But I reached across to Annelisa and stroked her hand.

  “Look, I bet they won’t get it through. I’ve heard that the customs are pretty stiff, and with the whole new anti-porn backlash, nobody will want to risk an outcry.” I knew little about the law, and my words were clumsy, but she looked at me trustingly, her eyes wet.

  “You reckon?”

  “I reckon.”

  “Jesus, I hope so.”

  “Annelisa, who don’t you stop all this rubbish?”

  “Nuthin’ else for me to do.”

  We both lay back in silence, although I was so hot I longed for the shade of the house. Somehow it seemed a betrayal to leave her there. So I closed my eyes, and bore the sun’s beating, and thought of London, which was bound to be grey and drizzly – an English July.

  “I’m sorry I was like I was in the kitchen,” she murmured, after a while.

  “Yes, but why were you?” I asked.

  “I just don’t know … It’s the effect they have on me, I guess.”

  “Men?”

  “Sure. I guess I’m trained, like a lil’ dawg. I see one of’em and I jump through my hoops! Can’t help it.”

  “You could. You could change.”

  “Honey, it’s too late for me to change. Hey, but listen, what about Luenbach? What do you think?”

  I said I didn’t know what she meant. She raised herself up again, and leaned over me.

  “You have to start looking, Babs. Using those nice eyes of yours. It’s time you came on round from behind that camera of yours, and saw a thing or two. Real things, you know?”

  I nodded. “So what are you saying?”

  “Now, listen to oP Annelisa, okay? You know Corelli’s havin’ a good time with Lace and Marylinne? Sam’s a real big man in Anthony’s organisation so don’t you think he deserves a little fun too?”

  “So?”

  “I’m telling you that that’s the idea. Anthony likes to import a woman for each of his buddies. Like, it all adds to the happy family feeling round here.”

  I sat up, and sighed. “Oh God, not that too? You’re supposed to keep him happy, is that it?”

  She tapped my nose with a perfect scarlet nail, and smiled with her mouth, staring at me with huge worried eyes.

  “Nothin’ to do with me at all. I’m talking about you.”

  “What?”

  “Sure. You wrote to Anthony, and that was just when he was fixing this weekend, and I heard him tell Sam on the phone that there was this real cute English chick, just his type, a real woman with brains, and all that – and that he’d fix it up.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I said.

  She shrugged and flopped back, covering her eyes with her arm. “Okay, honey, don’t believe me,” she mumbled. “Anyways, I’m sure you can look after yourself. That is –”, and she giggled sleepily, “if you want to. Sam Luenbach’s a real good-lookin’ guy, and most women ’ud be glad to make it with him. It’s your trip …”

  I hated her then, lying there beside me, oiled and creamed like a creature ready for the spit. So I rose quickly, rolling up the mat and tucking it under my arm, and not minding that my heels kicked a sprinkling of sand over her, as I walked off to join Miranda and her brother.

  Chapter Nine

  The scenes of that day are still illuminated sharply, running through my mind in slow motion – huge, bright, slow leaps towards the evening. The frisbee skirled in vast, freehand arcs, and I caught it once or twice, with some grace. Then, weightlessly, we drifted in to lunch, not knowing if she were following or not, and caring little. Bright spots on my retina, after-images of sun, danced about in the cool shade of the house, like the ghosts of buzzing insects, attempting torment. But insubstantial and dislocated as dreams. People spoke to me, and I answered them, with no knowledge of what was being said, as one might see mouths opening and closing under water, fish-like, yet doomed to silence in an alien element.

  Annelisa’s revelations had induced a state of torpor. Neither embarrassed nor irritated, still less rebellious, I felt only the lethargy of acceptance. I had come here. I must stay here, whatever might happen. In any case, perhaps she was not speaking the truth; I sensed in her a need for self-justification which might well make her lie, or at least exaggerate. If she was speaking the truth there was nothing I could do about it, except avoid and observe – as always, observe.

  Zandra said that lunch would be scratch: “Just grab what you want from the table, and take it wherever you like.” There were loaves, and cheese, and dishes of olives, and a bowl of fruit, containing large beef tomatoes too. They leered, round and red, amongst the pale citrus colours, their cracks and embedded stalks seeming obscene, like the hands that reached out to grab them.

  “Jeez, that was good play,” said Tony Carl, slurping the juice, and cramming bread into his mouth.

  “It was real nice Connors wanted to see his wife. And she’s a model too,” said Marylinne, as if the triumph were her own.

  “Me, I’m glad that guy got his ass whipped. He’s too much, just too much goddam mouth,” said Corelli, shaking his head.

  David Sternberg was there too; his presence and absence seemed arbitrary. Now he helped himself to food like one of the family and joined in the conversation about Jimmy Connors’s victory – indicating that he had been with them in front of the set. I noticed that he never looked at Annelisa at all.

  “Zandra,” I said, “I’ve just thought of something. What happened to Sheba? You told me you take her everywhere.”

  People stopped talking. Zandra looked upset.

  “I used to, Barbara, but …”

  “The dog’s dead,” said Carl.

  “Oh, I’m sorry for mentioning it,” I said. “Did she get run over? It’s hard to keep a dog in the city.”

  Zandra looked down, biting her lip, then up again at me, with a hard expression. “No – she was poisoned,” she said.

  “Let me tell ya’, Babs, you make a lot of enemies when you’re successful,” Carl said, with a faint s
hrug.

  Further questions died in the silence.

  Miranda was piling cheese and sliced tomato on to the large chunk of bread she had carved. She spoke to no one in particular: “Hey, d’ya know what Dad’s planned for tonight? Proper fireworks!” There was a small chorus of pleasure. Carl looked gratified. “Mira, it was supposed to be a surprise,” he said, in mock-reproof. “The guy who’s coming down, though, he’s supposed to be real good. I gues it won’t be like Liberty Island, folks, but it’ll be good. A few really good big rockets, a coupla Catherine wheels, that kinda stuff.”

  “Dad, you’re terrific,” said Miranda. Again the little swell of agreement and admiration.

  Emmeline was sitting in a corner of the room, smoking in her elegant way, the cigarette held out and away from her body at an angle. “He surely is,” she said in an almost reverential voice. “There’s no lady in the forty-nine States going to say she’s got a better son than me, and that’s for sure.” She was shaking her head from side to side with comical seriousness, but nobody laughed. Nor did they when Carl poured saccharine on sugar by picking up her hand to kiss, and saying, “Why, it’s only ’cos I got the best Momma in the world. An’ that’s enough to make any guy set off enough fireworks to light up New Jersey!”

  “Where’s the meat?” asked Tony Carl, thickly. “Ain’t there no cold meat, Zandra?”

  “Don’t eat too much – we got a feast tonight. Sam and Peter are doing the barbecue with your Pop, and you’ve never seen steaks as big as the ones out there in that fridge. And we’ve got lamb and chicken too. We’re gonna show Barbara how we celebrate in the States, so she can tell the folks back home!” Zandra was smiling at me, then she frowned. “Are you okay, Babs? Too much sun?”

  I shook my head. It seemed that they were all looking at me. The atmosphere was oppressive: the sun outside, the warmth within this room, the expressions of varied concern on the faces that seemed to press around me. Somewhere in my head I felt as though there might be thunder, although there was no sign of it in the air. Anthony came over to me, and put an arm around my shoulders, hugging me to him. In the other hand he held a glass of white wine; I noticed the beads of chill moisture, and the way his fingers whitened where they grasped it.

  “Ah, she’s not used to New Jersey sun in July, are you, honey? You know, the last time I was in London in the summer, people were huddled in doorways wearing overcoats, for God’s sake!”

  They all laughed. England was always good for a joke. I heard them from a distance, and began to think that they were right: I had had too much sun.

  “I’m gonna look after this little lady,” Carl went on, “because we’re talkin’ business, aren’t we?” He smiled down at me, his grasp on my shoulders tightening.

  “Are we?”

  “We surely are. Zandra, honey, will you bring me and Babs some food out on to the terrace? Come on now …” He steered me out of the room, without relaxing his grip. And I was glad of it. At that point I wanted nothing more than to be taken over by something – anything – that would prevent thought. Far from being repelled by Carl’s insistence I felt myself melting towards him, passively floating out with him towards the heat of midday and its close, dry shade.

  Zandra followed on our heels with a tray of bread, cheese, fruit and wine, putting it down on the low cane table. I looked at Carl in silence, trying to connect the world Annelisa inhabited with this man opposite me, in his white shorts and pale blue polo shirt, the monogram AC embroidered in navy on one breast pocket. There were no sweat patches under his arms; in his own way he was perfect.

  The world Annelisa inhabited … but now you are there too, I thought, why try to deny it? Carl’s voice was low and soft; his smile, which could curve thinly when he was irritated, seemed pleasant to me now, soothing and protective.

  “I wanted to ask your advice about the photography in Emperor,” he said, handing me a brimming glass. I took it, knowing it would make me feel even more light-headed. Who cares, who cares? … Annelisa had said that, I remembered, and the first deep mouthful of Californian white intensified the loosening, sliding sense within me that nothing mattered.

  “The photography?” I said, my own voice sounding light and thin.

  “Sure. You see, honey, I see Emperor as in the forefront of experimentation in men’s magazines. We’ve never been content to sit back and congratulate ourselves on what we’ve already achieved, no way. No way!”

  I shook my head.

  “You remember that piece we ran on Vietnam veterans’ wives? You didn’t see it? You shoulda done; we had a journalist – Martha Peterson, you heard of her? – interview a whole lotta women whose husbands survived, but disabled, you know? My God, and the things they told her! You have no idea, honey, of the deep, deep sexual frustration those women feel, and they told Martha. They hung loose; it was one of the frankest pieces of reporting I’ve ever read. Women will talk to another woman, you know? Man, that piece shoulda won the Pulitzer, I tell ya. I’ll have the office send you a copy when I get back on Tuesday … Anyway, what I’m saying is, that was an example, hon, of the way I’m taking the magazine. I want people to think of us, not just as a sex magazine, because that’s not right. Okay, so we carry pictures of very beautiful women, and we believe in sexual freedom. But we’re about the finest journalism too. And that’s why I’m talking to you.”

  I did not need to feign my puzzled, fascinated look. I was listening to him in vague amazement, with not the faintest idea what he was talking about. Carl’s conversation was always about his magazine, and his philosophy, but this time I knew that he was going to tell me something new. My glass was empty, and he filled it, leaning forward and speaking in a low, intimate tone.

  “The fact is, Babs, that I invited you here this weekend for a reason.”

  I thought of what Annelisa had said, and smiled weakly, waiting.

  “The point is, I think we’ve reached a stage in our development when we need someone like you. Look, I might as well be straight right now – I want you to work for me.”

  The cane armchair seemed to rush up to meet me. “You want me to work for you?” I said, in a high voice.

  “I sure do. Listen, babe, lemma tell ya, British women are making a killing in New York, right now. You’re classy, you know that? I wouldn’t lie to you, and say that didn’t matter to me, ’cos it does. It’s good for Emperor Inc. But a combination of that and your talent – boy, oh boy! So what I wanna do is this, something that’s never been done before … You ever taken glamour pictures?”

  I shook my head.

  “How d’ya feel about it? I know you ain’t one of them crazy feminists, but …” It was unusual to see doubt wrinkle Anthony Carl’s forehead.

  “Mmmm,” I murmured doubtfully, “I don’t really think it’s my kind …”

  “Hey, honey, listen to me,” he interrupted. “You seen the Pirelli Calendars? Some of the world’s greatest photographers worked on them, am I right or wrong?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “Sure I’m right. There’s a whole tradition behind them too. Right at the beginning of this century printers wised up to the fact that pretty girls sell things, and that’s when the advertising calendar started. You ever seen those forties and fifties drawings? Say, you ever heard of Zoe Mozert?” Feeling as if I was about to be squashed by a runaway truck, I shook my head.

  “Honey, she was one of the greatest – a glamour illustrator. Not a photographer, a real artist. Forties, fifties – man, I grew up with her work. Beautiful stuff – calendars, covers for True Confessions, everything. Low-cut dresses, black suspenders, lace … lemme tell ya, to a poor boy in Detroit this stuff was dynamite. Magic! Sweethearts she called them, her pictures of girls, and she always posed her own body in the mirror. You should see a picture of her – she was real pretty. Now, there’s an example of a woman bringing her own intuition and sensitivity to the beauty of her sex – and that’s what I want you to do.”

  “How?” I
squeaked, faintly.

  He grinned. “What I want hasn’t been done before. You know every newspaper and magazine has a columnist? Well, I wanna picture columnist. We give you a spread each month, and build you up real big, with a picture of you. They’ll love that – a good-looking woman making her choice each month of one model, and telling us why. Not too many words, say a coupla paragraphs. We’ll get someone on the staff to put it together for you, if you want. All you gotta do is talk into a tape-recorder, because it’s your views we want. To direct the readers to why that girl is the one you’ve chosen. You could make the location topical too – it’s up to you. Each month you publish just one truly beautiful picture, honey, and believe me it’ll make your name in the States.”

  Anyone would be forgiven for assuming that I was listening to this with disbelief, and some hilarity. But it was not so. It’s too late for me to lie. Still afflicted by this odd, drifting feeling, and pleasantly sleepy from the effects of sun and wine, I smiled at Carl. Annelisa was clearly wrong about his motives for inviting me and I put it down to the jealousy I had seen in the kitchen. I might not like the sound of the tacky film they had made, and no doubt Carl was wrong to make any girl do something she did not want to do – but who was to stop them choosing? Lace, Marylinne, Annelisa – they all turned this way and that, every waking minute of their lives, seeking admiration, and lust too. Whose fault was it that they turned themselves into fodder for the likes of Anthony Carl? Not his.

  So I reasoned, and asked, “Would the photographs have to be … um … like the rest in the magazine.”

  He chuckled deep in his throat. “No, honey, not the same. I want these to be your own individual style. Not like the centrefolds at all. Don’t get me wrong, these are glamour pics, and so we don’t want girls in boiler suits – unless the top’s hangin’ off!” He looked even more excited: “Hey, that gives me a great idea. You could show women as achieving things men have always achieved – in the new age for women, you know? So you pick a girl as that month’s choice, and you decide, say, that she’s a mechanic, and so you take her picture in a pit stop, maybe with one guy working alongsida her, and yet tho’ she’s got a spanner in her hand she’s got her dungarees undone so you can see she’s a real feminine woman too.” He chuckled again, and rubbed his hands, “Man, this is terrific! We could fly you an’ a girl out to an oil rig – anything! Two women in a man’s world … it’s a great line.”