The Fourth of July

by Bel Mooney

  Then, dressed in the clothes I had arrived in, I packed my small suitcase, and placed it neatly by the door. Lastly, I pulled off all the bedlinen, and threw it in a heap into the bathroom I would not enter again.

  All the rest of that day, until Miranda, Tony, Emmeline and I were despatched to New York in the late afternoon, remains chaos and confusion. I have a memory of people running up and down stairs, the telephone ringing, then a dull quietness settling on the house, as we all withdrew into our private corners, waiting for it all to be over. The police were slow to come; the first thing they did was to take photographs of her body. It lay on the edge of the pool now, pulled out by the men, the sodden dress spread raggedly, like the feathers on a dead blackbird. The small cropped head dried quickly in the sun. Her mouth and eyes were open, still smeared with make-up that threw into appalling relief the yellow pallor of her face. All around her was the debris of the firework display: empty cardboard husks with their faint aftersmell of fire. Nobody bothered to fish out the auburn wig that lay like another drowned creature at the bottom of the pool. People thought it had floated off. I believed she had snatched it off herself. That thought is pleasing: the sloughing-off of a wearisome pelt, before the new skin, the final dignity.

  Marylinne and Lace sat weeping quietly in the sitting room. They were holding hands; their hair hung lank and uncombed about pallid faces, bruised with crying. Tony was watching television, although he had the sound turned so low that it was almost impossible to hear. Miranda sat reading her novel in a corner of the room, her legs over the arm of the chair. She looked sullen; I sensed resentment that Annelisa should have the impertinence to inconvenience her morning swim. Her pages turned with deliberation.

  Approaching the kitchen for coffee, I met Luenbach, and Corelli, coming out. Corelli was shaking his head. “The publicity … I don’t want my name brought into this, you hear me?”

  “We’ll handle it,” said Luenbach, raising his eyebrows when he saw me.

  I felt no embarrassment; seeing that shape at the bottom of the pool had rendered unimportant my memory of the night before. It did not matter. Nothing mattered.

  “Annelisa’s screwed things up,” he said, meeting my eyes.

  I searched his for some regret, not for me but for her. There was nothing.

  Upstairs again, cradling my coffee, I watched the police photographer from my window, and pitied her. She would never have thought that she could look so ugly at last, for the camera.

  Of course, we were all questioned – David Sternberg most of all – called one by one into the little study across the hall I did not even know was there, and interrogated idly by a large policeman who looked as though he had a hangover from the Fourth. But there was no doubt that she had killed herself; her pathetic little note to Anthony said so. Naturally I did not see it, but we all knew what it said; in any case, the newspapers next day made much of the “sex queen’s last plea”. It seems Annelisa wrote that she was sorry but she hated what she had done, and knew that if she killed herself Anthony would never release the film. “Please respect my memory,” she wrote, or so they said. (Respektuj sebe a svt bude respektovat tebe.)

  I felt awed; drunk and high though she might have been, she had nevertheless done it. She had escaped. Numb, I saw it as her first moment of honour, and I respected her.

  On the terrace, Anthony sat with his head in his hands. Zandra’s arms were round him, whilst Emmeline hovered behind, her brow creased with worry. Every so often she would pat his head or his shoulders, fluttering empty hands as if she wished Zandra would leave, so that she could fill her arms as they should be filled.

  “Darling, it’s not your fault,” crooned Zandra, rocking him slightly.

  “Of course not, she’d been taking drugs, I’m sure,” said Emmeline. “Oh Lord, such a foolish, foolish girl …” Zandra ignored her, but went on with her triumphant, possessive motion. “Her own stupid fault … She was stupid, Anthony, stupid. She used you, you hear me? This is just her way of trying to get her own back on us, darling. And after all you did for her … You made her, you gave her everything. Without you she’d have been nothing. Nothing! Never mind … never mind.” It was as if Zandra was soothing a small child.

  “Never mind, son, it’ll all be fine,” echoed Emmeline.

  “You got us. We’re all with you, Anthony, you hear me? You mustn’t blame yourself,” whispered Zandra.

  “Don’t blame yourself, darling, it’s nobody’s fault,” said Emmeline.

  For a moment I thought he was crying. I saw his shoulders shake with emotion, and waited for him to grieve aloud, to drive away the women whose words danced with sharp heels on her corpse. Then I heard his muffled voice. “Goddamn her!” it said. “The stupid little bitch.”

  In no time the Emperor organisation began to work with precision, and it was like watching a jagged pattern, broken up, reform itself once more. Lawyers telephoned. One even appeared in the house. Carl stood talking quietly to detectives, flanked by Luenbach and Corelli – their backs like a wall. The little scrap of paper that was her final message was taken away in a plastic bag. She actually wrote a note to Anthony, I thought. Stupid little bitch. Zandra, her face white and angry still, told me that David would take the first group of us back to New York right away. Sternberg himself stood in the kitchen by the window, not moving, his face catatonic with shock, until told sharply by Zandra to help load bags into the car. Lace and Marylinne carried their bags downstairs, their eyes cast down, like novices in a silent order.

  I went upstairs for mine, noticing again that fresh clean smell of woodwork on the stair. Before I left my room I walked to the window once more, and looked out at the empty pool. The wig had gone now, removed by the police. There was nothing left of her now. Her body, where would it be? Slotted into cold storage at the morgue, until the time came for it to be examined, dissected, all its parts seen and handled carefully by men she had never met, who would conclude in the end what we already knew – that Anna Karina Cvach had taken her own life whilst under the influence of alcohol and cocaine. No mystery there.

  I squinted into the sunlight, trying to see her. And the image was clear once more, as I had seen it when I raced downstairs to join the little crowd gazing down into the water. I knew that, long after the police photographs curled in their file, I would always be able to see the black thing, gashed by shocking pink, shimmering in the blue.

  Annelisa had been clever in the end. Drunk she may have been, and high too, and no one can know what she was thinking as she walked downstairs in the darkness – or if she thought at all. To take your life, for a stupid film? I whispered, contemplating the empty pool, wondering if she thought of her parents at the last and if she really thought this would protect them.

  But at least she had been clever, at last, not stupid at all. There was even a poetry to it, a beautiful symmetry of thought and action. She had carried down her Book, the heavy portfolio which (for God knows what reasons of insecurity or pride) she took everywhere. Then she had taken off her pink sash, knotted the ends together, and looped it through the pages and over her head. Standing on the edge, wearing her life like a medal, she had twisted the Book round and round, tightening the fabric, drawing the precious Book up under her chin, so that it could not slip away. And then, quite ready, she had simply toppled forward into the water, carried cleanly to the bottom.

  Chapter Thirteen

  You could think of this as an epilogue yet, in a sense, it is the beginning of my story. This, at last, the means of seeing in positive once more, the process finished.

  I never heard from Anthony Carl again. Of course not. No more philosophy of freedom, no more offers of work. About that (as the months passed after my return) I felt a small twinge of regret. I had wanted the dignity of refusal.

  When I returned to London few people asked me about what had happened; even in America Carl was successful in quietening any scandal. It was not surprising. I had been witness to a very small, self-in
flicted death; it had nothing of the glamour and squalor of the Dorothy Stratten murder. Nevertheless, I had been a witness, and knew I would never see any of those people in that house again. It would suit Anthony Carl to forget even that I had been there. They could not avoid each other, but I was the stranger, the real intruder – walking around across the Atlantic carrying with me the knowledge of what I had seen in New Jersey.

  The Nights of Penelope grossed millions of dollars for Emperor Films. Naturally there were protests about the film: sermons were preached and newspaper columns written. But that served only to increase the queues; Annelisa Kaye was described as the “Tragic Sex Queen”, even though few who saw the film would have been able to remember her name. I heard from stringers in the States that Anthony Carl embarked on a huge promotional tour for his movie, and sat in countless studios with Zandra at his side, talking about “the freedom to love as we please”, and “censorship as the ultimate perversion”. I even saw cuttings in which women writers, describing themselves as feminists, allied themselves with him. “Above all, liberated women must not be seen to disapprove of sex,” one wrote, “or else all the freedoms which we, as women, have won for ourselves, count as nothing.”

  The argument came and went, eclipsed in the end by the creeping terror of AIDS which made all talk of sexual freedom so much squeaking in the dark. No moralist could mount any argument as powerful as the fear, not of damnation but of death. Timor mortis conturbat me, they shuddered in the thirteenth century, and that tremor reverberated with equal intensity in the second half of the 1980s. As Carl said, we had achieved our freedom. Now it was the freedom to kill ourselves, ignorantly in strange beds or public lavatories – as carelessly as Annelisa had done. Or as deliberately.

  I gave my colour film to the lab and printed the black and white shots in my dark room at home. Faces in monochrome: Luenbach bleached and Germanic-looking; Lace and Marylinne curiously old-fashioned, like images from the forties – all hair, teeth and legs; Zandra pinched and wistful and hard. It was wrong: the black and white images were unreal, dreamlike, and moved perilously close to “art”. That was not right, not for New Jersey. Grainy shades of grey, where in life there was garish colour, served only to neutralise memory; the planes of faces became interesting as composition, losing, in the process, their gloss of satiety, of corruption. Only one shot stood out as true: the picture of Annelisa eating icecream on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City. Careless as I was, I had thought to use colour, but, as if by instinct, picked up the camera loaded with black and white. I looked at the photograph for a long time; it was beautiful. Later I tucked a 5 by 4 print in the front of my portfolio, and often people ask me, “Who’s that pretty girl?” I never tell them. I say, “Just someone I saw as I was passing, a long time ago.”

  No – it was snapshots I wanted for the rest of them, not photographs. Needing crudeness, I waited eagerly for the colour, and I was not disappointed. The tiny images in strips were simplistic, almost amateurish, as I thought they would be; not wanting to capture anything of that weekend I had managed to freeze all its most fatuous moments, encapsulated most completely in that final group. My photographs of the empty pool and garden were boring – perfect representations of the mood of their maker at the time. And yet (for photographs do so many things, deceive on so many levels) they were haunting too, simply because I imposed on them a further narrative, so that they gained drama from her death, as the empty stage may be transformed in imagination by what has yet to appear on it.

  The firework shot was perfect. Looking at those frozen streaks of light, some straight, some curving like fantasy sky anemones, a line of poetry came into my head. “When the stars threw down their spears.” That was what it was like; a capitulation from above, a defeat of light. The phrase tantalised me, so that I had to go and look it up. With the book closed on my knee, I sat for a long time and thought of Annelisa. Even Blake’s “Tyger” could do that, reminding me – awe transformed into grief.

  When the stars threw down their spears

  And watered heaven with their tears,

  Did he smile his work to see?

  Did he who made the lamb make thee?

  Since then I have changed the way I work. It happened slowly, during the year after my return. More and more I wanted to take photographs that had no people in them, returning to the idea of those haunting, misty landscapes I took as a child. It had its limitations. Nobody would pay me to wander the length and breadth of England with my equipment, although I could get commissions from the tourist magazines and colour supplements from time to time. To make money I joined a studio specialising in commercial work, still-life mainly, and pictures of food for cookery books and advertisements. In the arrangement of objects I find satisfaction, sometimes beauty. They have no eyes. They do not look back at you through the lens, wondering why you are doing what you are doing, or posing, so that you may do more. Things – whether bottles of white wine dewy from the fridge, or packets of cereals arranged with scatterings of grain and nuts, or swathes of fabric draped over kitchen chair or chaise-longue – are true as a Dutch still life is true, in all their minute detail. We (my two partners and I) take great care in choosing the background, the light source – all that will provide the most fitting frame, and illuminate the meaning of these things. What they mean is what they are. Or – they are what they are. No people I have known are what they look like. This new vocabulary is the plainest; we are, each day, commemorating and making serious the most ordinary baggage of life.

  Somebody once accused Margaret Bourke-White of having a lens for a heart. She might have riposted that the professional photographer has no business having a heart for a lens – for that is why I can no longer do what I did. My heart is here, newly-discovered these four years – and it loves, most profoundly, to focus on these honest surfaces, these textures of everyday life, recording them with absolute perfectionism. How could I do what I did before, with this heart for a lens, haunted forever by Annelisa Kaye?

  Sometimes I think we make too much fuss about death. We shrink and cry out in horror as it approaches; we have bits lopped off, suffer with drugs and deadly rays, endure any indignity, any pain, in order to stretch out our span by another few months – all this to LIVE. And yet for some people the chief achievement of their life is the manner of their leaving it – death the means of transformation from the ordinary, the dull, the small, into the sublime. Oh, I know that Annelisa failed. She ducked out, and it achieved nothing at all – zilch. Worse, she died deluding herself (if we can assume any coherent thought processes at all in that mind, that night) that her death would make a difference, that her grandmother’s vocabulary would speak at last to the man who had made millions from women’s genitals. Respect …? Zero

  And my poor fool is dead, I saw her dead, I saw her body photographed to the last, its limbs flopping like a rag-doll, its face ludicrous in its ugliness. IT. For that was not Annelisa, no more than the open-crotched creature who held herself apart, God help her, for all those men, all those strangers to finger in their thoughts, jerking off on the glossy page. First she dishonoured her own body as a piece of meat; then she made it into a stiff; now, some might believe she is a spook … but how the crassness of all those words and phrases belies the truth. I close my eyes and take her with me on a journey beyond the flesh, into the land of spirits, where the souls of the departed are the Manes, who teach us to love them forever. Love, which makes all abstracts like respect irrelevant.

  “Have you ever loved anyone, Barbara?”

  There is the mystery.

  Last year I made the journey at last. There was no job to do. I simply had a free period, and so I told my partners that I would be away for a week. On an impulse I took a cheap flight to New York, and checked into the Royalton, on West 44th Street … Oh, why am I telling you this was spontaneous? I suppose I had been planning it for a couple of years; it was inevitable that I should go back, make my pilgrimage. It was November, a time of year I love,
with its damp leaves, wind and desolation, and the sense of falling forward into darkness.

  At seven in the morning I went to Budget Rent-a-Car, producing my two major credit cards as they required. At the next counter a young couple, English, were arguing with the clerk. They had booked a car the night before, but now discovered the credit card requirements. “You don’t have two major credit cards?” said the middle-aged black woman, never lifting her eyes from the paperwork to their faces, and in a tone of disbelieving scorn.

  “TWO? God – no. We don’t.” The young man clutched his wallet, holding it like a shield.

  “We’ve got lots of cash – and traveller’s cheques,” said the girl, helplessly.

  “I can’t rent you,” said the clerk, still looking down.

  “Look, we really need the car. It’s our last day … What if we left you our airline tickets and passports?”

  “Company regulations say two major credit cards. I can’t rent you,” she said, flatly.

  “England’s not a credit card country. We use money,” the girl protested.

  “I can’t help that, ma’am. I can’t rent you.” Still the eyes were down, and I glanced sideways at them, sympathetically. “It’s a plastic country,” I said, in my best clipped Harrods English, “and you can’t go anywhere or do anything unless you’re made of plastic.” The clerks glared. At least it cheered the innocents abroad – even though they failed in their attempt, and wandered disconsolately into the street, dependent on alien mores in a land which seemed suddenly savage to me, its people fettered by false customs.