The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

  I hesitated. Then I said, “You’d pay well.”

  It was not a question; Carl looked appropriately respectful and serious.

  “Yup. I shoulda said right away. I talked to one or two executives on the magazine already, and they all want you. The deal we’ve worked out is, you get the title of ‘International Picture Consultant’, and seventy thousand dollars a year. We’ll find you an apartment, and I’ll take care of your expenses moving from London. You’ll be exclusive to us over here, but you can still freelance for your British papers. That’s good for prestige here, you know? How’s it sound? Good?”

  I nodded. It did sound good. As if unsatisfied he leaned forward anxiously. “Listen, Babs, if the money’s not quite right, we can talk. I just want you to agree to the whole idea. We really want to have you on board. You know, we can take Emperor forward, you an’ me; and listen,” (he lowered his voice) “I’m thinking of starting another magazine soon, a glossy women’s monthly with real class. You could help me, you know, like, it’s too early to say right now, but you could get yourself a slice of that action, and make a million. Listen to Anthony Carl, honey, he knows!”

  Yes, you do, I thought, gazing beyond him for a moment into the rich green foliage that sheltered him from the sun. It occurred to me that someone must water it regularly, even though this was a holiday house; just as someone must come in and keep all that wood inside polished. Money. You can care for anything, have anything, do anything, go anywhere, be whoever you like, with money.

  My mother used to say that, angry (I suppose) because my father earned as much as any teacher and was uninterested in anything else. She wanted more, I know, and passed that on to us. My brother had pretensions that expressed themselves in fast cars he could barely afford; I suppose he would have appreciated the glamour of dying in one in the end. At least it was not dull. As for me … yes, I was ambitious, as she was ambitious for me. But she wanted me to marry a rich man, and live the dinner-party-drinks-theatre life she read about in “William Hickey”. Fleet Street had no glamour for her, but my name in glossy magazines helped. She almost approved my flat on the one time she made a visit, not long before she died. “You’ll get a nice house next, dear, with a bathroom you can do something with,” she said, her mouth turning down at the corners in that old, old way.

  Discontentment, even unto death.

  I felt that voice in me now, which is why I was listening to Carl. In this great lassitude, London seemed a million miles away, and my life there stale. At least this would be new. To tell the truth, I could think of no reason not to agree to his proposition. Unless.

  “What do you say?” he asked, urgently.

  “Listen, Anthony, it’s a good offer, but I’ll have to think it through,” I said.

  “Sure you will, honey – but let us know soon, hey? Like by Tuesday?”

  “Well, it’s a bit soon, but I’ll try,” I promised. He filled both our glasses, and raised his, nodding at me with a smile to do the same. “Here’s to a creative working relationship, and a great future.” He meant it.

  I said nothing, but raised my glass in the air with the same theatrical gesture and drank deeply. Who cares? I thought again: no one to see me, or hear us, the wine warming now in the glass, a soothing buzz of conversation from the house and, in the distance, the questing call of seabirds wheeling free. Freedom. That’s what money gives, most of all. Go where you want, do as you like …

  “Barbara,” Carl said softly, “listen to me, you can do anything you like in this country. It’s wide open for you, and don’t you forget it.”

  “You read my mind,” I said.

  When we went inside, Marylinne, Lace and Peter Corelli had disappeared. “Gone for a siesta,” said Emmeline. “Poor Lace looked so tired too.”

  “Probably up half the night,” said Annelisa, who was leaning against the wall by the window, eating a banana.

  “Yes, dear,” said Emmeline, with the habitual absent-minded innocence I was beginning to think must be fake. Yet was it? Mass murderers have Moms who thought their boys were good; such single-minded fixity – ignorance in its purest form – might take a saint through hell unscathed, to emerge the other side saying that those nice people back there looked rather warm. Emmeline Carl saw what she wanted to see, and knew what she wanted to know, just as I did.

  Delusions there were in dozens, but were they lies? People say that the camera cannot lie because it captures visible truth in a second of light, and yet I know how, looking through the lens, you can see what you want to see and (more important) focus and compose so that others see it too. Look at Anthony Carl, I instructed myself, and what do we see?

  Emmeline sees her son, who is good to her. Period.

  Miranda and Tony see their father, just as I saw my own father, without too much thought until, years later, death brings with it the mystification of unknowing. Forever. They haven’t got to that stage yet. For now, he is simply Dad. Period.

  I see the man who is my host, who has never done anything to offend me personally, and who has just offered me a job by which I am tempted.

  And Annelisa – what does she see?

  I looked at her, leaning there with the piece of fruit, and reversed the mental game. I thought, what do we see when we look at her?

  Shivering suddenly, I knew: we all see the same – exactly the same – looking at that. Annelisa had inflicted this on herself, long, long ago, so who was to blame for the uniformity in seeing her, when as much thought had been given to creating that image as Madison Avenue money is spent on a major advertising campaign? I call her that, I make her sound like a thing, and it will seem harsh. But you have to see. I ask you, picture her: the white short open down the front, the practised self-consciousness in the arrangement of her limbs as she leans against the wall, the exaggerated theatricality of the make-up, framed by that thick, long hair, and, at the centre, the shiny and obscene voluptuousness of her O-mouth as it closes around the shaft of the fruit, deliberately.

  In any other century she would have been seen just once to be branded. Baggage. Slut. Strumpet. Slag. Trollop. Trull. Piece. Hussy. Harlot. Whore.

  “Now I think we should all have ourselves a little siesta,” said Emmeline, folding her hands decisively in her lap. “Like they do in Spain. It wouldn’t do to be tired at the party, folks, would it now?”

  Luenbach leaned towards her with European gallantry, offering his arm. “You’re right as usual, ma’am, so may I have the honour of escorting you safely to your room?” She rose like an elderly actress, whilst everyone smiled, making way for them as if in a play, and united in the gentle amusement that took its genuine dignity from shared respect for the grandmother.

  No dreams that afternoon; just a deep, heavy sleep – until I was awakened by a light touch on my forehead.

  “Mother?” I said.

  She told me that later but, even in half-consciousness, I knew what I had said, and wondered at it. In that waking moment I wandered back, despite myself, to a long-forgotten morning when I eased myself from sleep at the touch of a hand, amazed by the promise of gentleness.

  “Mother, Mother …” said the present voice, teasing. But it was soft, where that voice had been harsh, long ago. “You must have gone down in the night, and you left the kitchen light on all night, you stupid girl. Don’t you know who has to pay the bills? It’s not your father, I can tell you … Now don’t you do it again!”

  “There’s no mothers here, ’cept ol’ Emmeline,” said the voice sadly. And the hand stroked my forehead slowly, rhythmically, pushing me back into sleep, and forgetfulness. At last I opened my eyes. She had pulled back the curtains so that the room was full of light, and Annelisa looked down at me, the afternoon sun setting her hair on fire. She smiled, dreamily.

  “Hi … I thought you were never gonna wake up, honey.”

  I stared up at her, confused. With the light behind and the S-bend of her body, and (above all) that expression of slow, peaceful wonder, Anneli
sa was transfigured. It was no whore, but a strange Renaissance creature of extraordinary beauty which bent over me – so that, in the haze between sleep and waking, I blinked at her in awe. Where she had come from eluded me for a second; it was as if she had always been there, a different vision which had only been waiting for my perception.

  “Babs, the reason I woke you up is … Will you play a game with me, honey?”

  “A what?”

  “A game! Look, I brought a pack of cards.” She held them out, and I looked from them to her and back again in disbelief.

  “I got bored. No one’s around. So I thought you’d play with me.” She sounded like a child, petulant because the street or park is empty and its silence, absorbed by no companion, deep and unsettling.

  I detest cards, in fact most games. They are a substitute for conversation, or companionable silence. When I was a child Sunday afternoons or evenings used to be spent around the Monopoly board, my mother and brother avidly attempting to cram Park Lane and Mayfair with hotels, whilst my father and I paid up or went to jail without complaint. “You have to take this game seriously,” she said if we attempted to joke. “It’s a good training for life.” Those were times my mother looked happy, her eyes bright with competition, and her little property cards ranged out before her: blue, magenta, and brown. The colours of money.

  “I’m sorry, Annelisa, but I don’t want to play cards. I don’t really enjoy cards,” I said. She looked disappointed. “It passes the time,” she said, then, “What did Anthony want to talk to you about? I mean, I know I should mind my business, but …”

  “Oh, it was nothing,” I mumbled.

  “Sure,” she said flatly, straightening her back. It was gone – the line, the look on her face. And the light had moved away around the room, falling now on my bag of cameras in the middle of the floor, dousing her hair.

  “Yeah, sure,” she repeated, looking away, hurt.

  I sat up, knowing I had to tell her, yet unwilling to do so. Maybe I knew already what her judgement would be, knowing, even before it came, that my unease would make me angry with her.

  “He wants you to work for Emperor? Man, I don’t believe it’s for real! He wants you to take pictures for Emperor? You on his payroll!” She shook her head.

  “They’d be a special sort of photograph,” I said. “Not like the ones in your wretched book.”

  She was still shaking her head, slowly from side to side, like a large beast tormented by something behind its ears. “He must be fucking crazy, Babs! What d’ya tell him?”

  “I told him I’d think about it.”

  “You what? Lady, if I’d had to put money on the table I’d have staked everything I have on you saying ‘No’ right away. You thinkin’ about it? You givin’ it house-room in your head, even for five seconds? Oh-oh, it ain’t Anthony who’s fuckin’ crazy, it’s you,”

  “Why?”

  “I can’t be plainer, honey. You’d be crazy to work for him.”

  “But you work for him,” I said.

  Annelisa’s brow was wrinkled; her expression now was pitying. “Don’t you listen to things, Babs? Haven’t you been hearing what I’ve been laying down the past coupla days? Yeah, I work for him, sure as hell I work for him – but, you an’ me, we’re different,”

  I looked at her silently for a few minutes. Her conviction was unsettling, throwing as it did, with absolute clarity, a beam on the idea of our difference. I imagined us both in the studio, light reflected evenly from the huge silver umbrellas, sitting side by side on simple wooden chairs for a portrait. No props. Of course, in this picture we look different. In 1982 she was twenty-four and I was thirty-one; next to her I was as a sprig of mistletoe next to a full summer rose. But now I wanted to separate myself from the look of things – change the lighting, have us in silhouette, photograph us in X-ray, anything to take me within. And there, I knew now (with a shock of humility and helplessness), Annelisa Kaye and I were not so different after all. It was not just that I was prepared to be bought by Anthony Carl as she had been bought; it went further …

  This hint, rather than realisation, confounded me with its strangeness. What was it … what was it? As she rose to walk over to the window and look out, I watched her back – a broad back, the strong shoulders of Czech peasant stock – and began to understand. Annelisa and I were both rootless; we had deliberately cut ourselves off from all that made us, and were lost as a result. Such a huge gap between Nebraska and Surrey, between the farm and the semi-detached, and yet still something vibrated across that void. Her background, tight and loving, the product of many generations’ faith, could not accommodate her, for reasons no one could ever know; although I imagined her mother lying awake most nights, after her prayers, trying to find an answer. Too easy to say that Annie had rebelled; what she had done was try to succeed, to show them that she could stand on her own. Look at me now: I want to be a star, a real special one, and there’s so many millions of them … Me, on the other hand … my background, tight and unloving, could not accommodate me either. Like her, I couldn’t wait to get out. As soon as I left for art school I knew I would return as little as possible, because I blamed them for my own lovelessness. They made me; they could pay for it. And in my own way I wanted to be a star as well, to make it, to be famous, to go back and say to my mother, Look what I have done. Look at me for the first time. For I doubt that my mother lay awake at night and thought about me, although I will never know. But she is the key – like Lisa, Annie’s mother. Both of us were haunted, like so many women I have met since, by the sense that we failed the person of whom we were a part (no closer closeness than that) but, no matter how far we try to run from that knowledge, it is there in the glass, and in the very timbre of our voices, and in the smell of our own flesh.

  “Annelisa,” I said, “have you ever really loved anyone?”

  “Only my Mom and Dad. And Grandmother. Oh, and I guess my brothers too,” she said quietly, without turning round. Then, after a short pause, “Have you ever loved anyone, Babs?”

  “No, I haven’t,” I said.

  She turned sharply, looking amazed. “Not your parents?”

  “Nobody really.”

  “Not your mother?” Her eyes were wide; it was the first time she had ever wanted to know anything about me, and I was glad to have shocked her.

  “I don’t think she ever loved me. My brother and I were the weights on her feet. We kept her with my father; if she’d gone she’d have been happier. Somewhere else.”

  “Didn’t she love anybody?”

  “No, I don’t think she did.”

  Annelisa paused. Then she said, “You’re like her then.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I’m like her.”

  Out on the terrace and around by the pool, a young man in cut-off jeans and a white tee-shirt emblazoned with the one word “SMILE!” was fixing up the fireworks. David Sternberg stood by, helping now and then. It was four o’clock; the white heat of midday had softened into gold; the shadows around the bushes were violet. Emmeline sat reading a Barbara Cartland novel, which amused me; misinterpreting my look she smiled sweetly up as I passed, nodding wordlessly in the direction of the book as if to invite my pride in the British bestseller.

  In the background, from the hall, I could hear Anthony speaking low and urgently on the telephone. Somewhere in the house a radio was playing a song a few years old: Minnie Ripperton’s sweet, clear voice singing joyfully – “Loving you, is easy ’cos you’re beautiful …”

  There was a sound of splashing and laughter. I rounded the corner to see four people tossing a beach ball back and forth, whilst Sam Luenbach and Peter Corelli sat on the edge of the swimming pool, smiling indulgently as if they were watching the antics of young children. Miranda and Lace were playing Tony Carl and Marylinne in a rough water rugby, the first two outweighed and outmanoeuvred by the tougher team. Lace, ducked by Tony, broke the surface like a seal, the straight hair pouring water like a black waterfall. Miran
da grabbed her brother round the neck, and the two girls, shrieking with laughter, pulled him beneath the surface. The scarlet ball bobbed free, and Marylinne struck out towards it with a powerful crawl, her long blonde hair crinkled into little curls now, and floating around her head. It took a few seconds for her to grab it and reach the end of the pool nearest the house, the deep end. “All right!” she yelled, bouncing the ball on the side and jumping up to punch the air with her fist.

  “The girls ain’t doin’ too well,” said Corelli, as I approached, “that’s fifteen to Tony and Marylinne now.”

  “Good job you ain’t got money on the others,” grinned Luenbach. “Now if Babs was to leap in and help the girls I reckon it’d be just about even.”

  I smiled and shook my head. But already they were yelling to me to come in. The scene reminded me of schooldays, and the local swimming pool, all the boys and girls congregated there to show off to each other in those elaborate ancient rituals. A smell of chlorine. The exciting, forbidden, and wonderfully dirty sensation of peeing in the water. Girls casting sidelong, private glances at the bulge in the boys’ trunks; they in their turn quite openly exchanging loud opinions about girls’ figures. Shyness. Gold gooseflesh, and clothes half-sticking to damp flesh. An intimate smell of strangers in small, grubby changing cubicles. Alien hairs in shower plugs. Shouts to hurry. And afterwards, in the park, the taste of other people’s mouths on the shared bottle of lemonade, and chocolate melting in the hand.

  “C’mon in!”

  “Come on, Babs!”

  “Be on our side!”

  “And, boy, do they need it!”

  It was the first time I had seen Tony Carl look other than lumpy and uncouth; the water lent him grace, and he wheeled and dived like a young otter. It made all of them seem younger and suddenly I longed for that dispensation too. I was about to jump in, when Marylinne pulled herself up on the side near me. “Hey, honey,” she called out, “why don’t you take some pictures of us?”