After Bathing at Baxters: Stories

by D. J. Taylor

  Sometimes Fuchs thought (thinking it now as he wandered back to his apartment on the fringes of Harlem, where giant spades surveyed you coolly from street corners) his problems were a result of his name. Checkout assistants sniggered when he handed them his credit cards. Postmen smirked as they delivered his mail. For a time he tried to get people to pronounce it ‘Fookes’ or even ‘Futch’, had even gone so far as to ask Mr Van Oss to call him Ralph, but Mr Van Oss had just said, ‘Aw, fuckit Fuchs, whydoncha.’ Fuchs gathered that the amusement Mr Van Oss derived from his name was one of the principal reasons for Fuchs’s employment. He had tried explaining this to Ellen one night, after the third successive occasion on which he had failed to achieve an erection. ‘Jesus, why are you so hung up?’ Ellen had said and Fuchs had wanted to reply ‘Because I take dirty pictures for a living. Because my name is Ralph Waldo Fuchs. Fair enough, wouldn’t you say?’ Instead he had not said anything. ‘Maybe,’ Ellen had suggested unkindly, as a reminder of past infidelities, ‘maybe you should try making it with one of the broads at the studio.’

  But Fuchs had long ago given up attempting to score with the models. You could never be sure of their predilections. Fuchs remembered how a casual invitation from a Swedish girl and her friend had led to some very unpleasant tripartite goings-on (no thank you). Half of them wanted you to beat them up, and the other half wanted you to let them beat you up. Fuchs remembered. He remembered them all, the one who had wanted him to dress up in feathers, the one who had produced a cache of wooden phalli. Fuchs couldn’t take it any more. He remembered especially a girl called Rosa Russo, Mr Van Oss’s ‘Lay of the Month’ in three successive issues who, it transpired, had never laid anyone in her life. ‘So Jesus why didn’t you tell me?’ Fuchs had demanded. ‘You never asked,’ Rosa Russo had said after she had smacked him across the face. And Rosa Russo had been a speed-freak into the bargain. There were some girls, Fuchs thought, who were just not cut out for the modelling business.

  ‘OK Fuchs,’ said Mr Van Oss the next morning. ‘So I want three reels of fuckin’ A-Grade kiss-my-butt film.’ It was so cold in the studio that Pedro, the Rican who did the fighting, had brought in a twin-bar electric heater which he placed in the corner with an injunction to Fuchs to ‘keep y’fuckin’ hands off it turdass’. Fuchs’s breath rose to the ceiling in mushroom clouds. They were filming a short sequence based on ‘a mutha of an idea’ that had come to Mr Van Oss the previous evening, to be called ‘Women in Uniform’. Two brunettes dressed in GI battle fatigues prodded each other experimentally with dummy sten-guns, sat astride them, finally (having removed the battle fatigues) clasped the barrels between their breasts. Fuchs bobbed between them, sinking to his knees as the girls slipped into a prolonged horizontal clinch. ‘Fuck me,’ said Mr Van Oss, ‘if this doesn’t give Joe Public one hell of a horn.’

  Fuchs found himself, as he found himself most mornings, mentally checking off the reasons why he hated Ellen. Because she wore vast maternity smocks while remaining adamantly unpregnant. Because she lay in the bath like a great white whale reading Gurdjieff. Because she had been abroad. Because she expressed dissatisfaction at the ideological shortcomings of Fuchs’s job. Because Fuchs couldn’t fuck her enough.

  Fuchs slammed a new reel of film into the camera, wondered about using a filter (Mr Van Oss liked those crepuscular, fumbling in the shadows shots) and decided against it. Five shots into the second reel Mr Van Oss clapped his hands together with the suddenness of a cap-pistol. ‘OK. Cut,’ said Mr Van Oss wearily. ‘Look, we have to rethink this thing.’ The girls stood around, hands on hips, while he rifled through a back number of Penthouse for exact situational details (most of the major magazines found themselves being ripped off in this way sooner or later). Fuchs, unlit Marlboro scooped under his lower lip, asked Pedro if he had a match. ‘Don’t smoke, asshole,’ said Pedro amiably. ‘You forgot, huh?’ Fuchs watched the back of Mr Van Oss’s neck as he bent over the glistening pages. It reminded him of red tyre-rubber.

  Fuchs collected travel brochures, some of the West Coast and the Rockies (Fuchs had never been further west than Cincinatti) but mostly of England. Misty, early-morning shots of the Cotswolds. The Norfolk Broads (Hell, Fuchs thought, what a title for a picture spread). His favourite brochure had on the cover a picture of St Paul’s Cathedral looming up behind the words ‘London in July’. Fuchs had a feeling that he wanted to see London. He had a vision of himself drinking beer in some quaint English pub, checking out (from a purely professional angle) Soho. Mr Van Oss was properly dismissive of English competition. ‘Amateur crap,’ he had been heard to say. ‘Like some photographer gets his girlfriend to wave her fanny about and they call it “Vixens at Play” or something.’ Fuchs had often wondered about the price of an air ticket. Fuchs had been wondering about the price of an air ticket since Watergate.

  ‘OK Fuchs, let’s hit it,’ said Mr Van Oss. Pedro flicked a few switches, bathed the stage in lurid, blood-red light. (‘Yeah,’ said Mr Van Oss, ‘tasteful.’) The girls, naked except for peaked caps and buckle belts, began to march up and down. A dummy machine-gun was brought out and fingered. Fuchs monitored the arched backs, hovered anxiously as one of the girls straddled the barrel. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Mr Van Oss as if he were singing the chorus to a Beatles number. Outside the rain spattered on the window in translucent, coin-sized blobs. Fuchs bent his head over the tapering cylinder of the zoom lens.

  Fuchs tended his collection of brochures and posters better than most people did their pets. His bedroom, in fact, was a sort of shrine to the places he had never been to. It was one of Ellen’s favourite apophthegms that you couldn’t see the wallpaper for pictures of exotic camouflage – gauchos busting steers, llamas teetering on Nepalese mountain passes. There was a line of squat, plastic-backed box-files, divided up by continent, running along the top shelf of one bookcase and a map of the world (a ‘political’ map borrowed from one of Ellen’s friends so that the NATO alliance countries were shaded electric-blue and places like Ghana had per-capita income statistics printed alongside) bluetacked to the door. Fuchs spent a lot of time in there, slicing pictures out of the National Geographic with a Stanley knife, reading illustrated travel books, bringing the box-file card index up to date. It was a good feeling, this having the world at your fingertips. Hell, Fuchs thought, it was like being a Pentagon hawk, the globe staked out in front of you, lacking only the ability to punch a few buttons and send that map on the wall shrieking up in flames.

  Mr Van Oss, Fuchs realised, was losing his grip. For every reel of film shot by Fuchs that ended up on the page, underwritten with prurient captions, approximately five went into the garbage can. This fundamentally stemmed from Mr Van Oss’s inability to handle temperamental models. There had been the time when the famous Cindy Lu Win, imported at great expense from a studio on the Bronx, had concluded one session by asking him who did he think he was, fuckin’ Van Gogh or something? (Miss Lu Win had further disgraced herself by telling Fuchs ‘that goes for you too, pervert’). This meant that the studio was having to rely on inferior models, high-school girls who thought that all you had to do was take your clothes off and pout. Hence Mr Van Oss’s gloom, hence it was hinted failing sales – not, Fuchs thought, that the readership had any particular discrimination – hence, more importantly, a cut in Fuchs’s salary. Hence too a series of late-night conversations between Fuchs and Mr Van Oss in various down-town bars. Mr Van Oss unquestionably needed a confidant. ‘It’s like this, Fuchs,’ Mr Van Oss had said morosely, ‘I get these ideas, you can’t expect an ordinary model to handle them at first. That’s why we’re wasting so much film. Hell, that’s art, I suppose. If we were one of those get-that-camera-halfway-up-her-ass studios I wouldn’t mind.’ Gradually the confidences became personal rather than professional and Fuchs had heard the tale of Mr Van Oss’s first wife whom he had married fresh out of high school (‘Hell, we were just kids’) and whose centrefold appearance in Up Front had made Mr Van Oss’s reputation. Fuchs s
ympathised. In fact, Fuchs was prepared to sympathise almost indefinitely. He enjoyed Mr Van Oss’s reminiscences of his picturesque past, the stationing in the South China Sea during ‘Nam, the hitching across Europe. Fuchs had asked Mr Van Oss what he thought of England and Mr Van Oss had looked at him solemnly and said ‘It is a goddamned shit-hole, Fuchs’ and Fuchs had nodded, inwardly disagreeing. The drinking sessions snowballed. Afterwards Fuchs went back to his apartment light-headed with alcohol, listened to Ellen extrapolating her horoscope, smoked dope, lay on his back trying to bite the head off the twisting darkness.

  One day Mr Van Oss said, ‘hell, Fuchs, if the studio goes I’ll see you’re all right.’ It was true that twenty minutes and another aborted photo session later Mr Van Oss had called him a ‘goddamned shit-stabbing motherfucker’ but on the strength of this Fuchs went to his favourite travel agent’s on 53rd and treated himself to an unusually lavish selection of brochures.

  There remained the business of telling Ellen. ‘So you want to go to England?’ said Ellen incredulously, eyes darting like fish behind her aquarium spectacles and then, when she realised what Fuchs was getting at, ‘So you want to go to England without me?’ ‘Sure,’ said Fuchs, trying to sound reasonable, ‘sure, I want to go to England without you.’ ‘Fine,’ said Ellen, ‘if that’s the way you want it.’ Fuchs gazed out of the window at the pale, early-evening light, suddenly hating America so much that he wanted to smother it. Three hours later he discovered Ellen lying in the bath, nervously contemplating the two-inch razor blade with which she had halfheartedly nicked herself. ‘Oh Ralph,’ she said mistily, ‘oh Ralph, you shouldn’t have said that. You just shouldn’t have.’ Fuchs called an ambulance, stood in the kitchen thinking of the early times with Ellen, concerts, Zappa and the Mothers at the Filmore East in the early seventies, the day Carter got the Democratic nomination and Ellen saying that she always preferred Kennedy and anyway where was he on women’s rights. It all seemed a very long time ago.

  In the studio the air was already a smoky blue, though it was barely eleven o’clock in the morning. Fuchs lounged by the electric heater. Pedro said in an amphetamine monotone: ‘Yeah, I been to Cal, man, Frisco, but that whole West Coast scene is dead.’ Two kimono-clad strawberry blondes sat in the corner under the arc-light, one painting her nails, the other reading a paperback. Mr Van Oss said suddenly. ‘Yeah I got it’ to no one in particular. A light bulb fizzed and then went dead. Fuchs thought of Ellen staked out on the hospital bed in Central, surrounded by levees of friends, each of whom regarded Fuchs with thin contempt. ‘Yeah,’ said Pedro. ‘The surf out there. Coming through the breakers, man … it’s like fucking.’

  Mr Van Oss clapped his hands. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘I got it.’ He began to run his fingers through his sandy, greaseball hair, capered crazily in the middle of the floor. ‘Yeah, this centrefold, no make it a whole fuckin’ series (Fuchs get off your ass and grab that camera).’ The room lurched into activity. Fuchs wearily manhandled a tripod. Mr Van Oss went on: ‘Right. We call it “Dreams of Leaving” see. This chick, her boyfriend’s away and she’s lonely.’ He began to pace up and down, punched the empty air. ‘So she looks at his photograph, right – first frame – then she starts packin’ suitcases: close-ups. Oh Fuchs – I want that camera so near you can count the goddamned stitches on her appendix scar!’

  Fuchs felt himself sweating, yanked his tie so the knot hung low on his neck. Tonight he thought, tonight he would collect Ellen from the hospital, hell, maybe even fuck her for old times’ sake. He felt good. He felt like superman. ‘Shit,’ said Mr Van Oss, suddenly deflated. ‘Gonna take us a day to get the props. Hell though, we can wait. This one’s gonna be a mutha.’ But Fuchs, who had run his eye over the morning’s mail, whistling shrewdly through his teeth over the two biggest bills, hoped that it wasn’t going to be a mutha, hoped, in fact, that it was going to be absolute crap.

  Fuchs went home that night to find Ellen, her left wrist still bandaged, hunched rheumy-eyed over a bottle of Bourbon. She appeared not to notice him. Fuchs tiptoed past, spun on his heel, snaked into the bedroom, stopped dead. The walls gleamed at him palely. Cascades of torn paper arched over his feet, undulated as he moved. A gawky pile of ransacked, split-open box-files lurched against the bed. Fuchs twitched the coverlet, discovered beneath it the greater part of the world, shredded and curling at the edges, Washington DC and Surinam lodged in uneasy juxtaposition. From the kitchen came the sound of keening. Fuchs dragged himself into the bed, fully clothed, and sobbed himself to sleep.

  ‘Sheeit. Wow!’ said Mr Van Oss the next morning. ‘Ten minutes OK. Then we shoot.’ Fuchs watched, resentfully, the assemblage of props, a chintz sofa, a framed photograph, a set of sleek leather suitcases and handgrips. Too many studios, Mr Van Oss explained, scrimped on the accessories budget. Fuchs, whose career had begun when the only accessory you needed was a bed, could believe it. Doors opened and slammed shut. Pedro ripped the plastic seal off a batch of 100-watt bulbs, plaited hanks of Rapunzel-hair fuse-wire. ‘OK,’ said Mr Van Oss. ‘Hit it.’ One of the strawberry blondes appeared on the stage dressed in a lacy if exiguous peignoir, clutched the framed photograph, after first holding it up to the camera for inspection, to her breast. Fuchs took a deep breath, the thoughts piling up in his head like windfall apples, took some pictures, obsessed by the memory of the previous night’s reconciliation. ‘Oh Ralph, lay it on me,’ Ellen had sobbed and Fuchs had laid it on her strenuously yet with diffidence, as if he had been fucking an armadillo. The fan rasped. Pedro, unfurling a copy of the NYT said, ‘Mandate my ass.’ Mr Van Oss said, ‘OK. Great.’ On the stage the other strawberry blonde draped herself over an empty suitcase, arched a finger over the downy lining. Mr Van Oss said, ‘Man, this is one way to pay the fuckin’ bills whydoncha.’ Fuchs remembered the puzzled look on Rosa Russo’s face as he had backed away, thought of all the places he would never see, realised derisively how little he cared, and glared like a malignant sibyl down the aperture of the zoom lens, his eyes smouldering like dying suns.

  Summer People

  The summer people began arriving in May. They came in small, rickety trains on the branch line from Cromer, in smoking cars, or were disgorged from charabancs and coaches in the marketplace. From his vantage point at an upstairs window Julian watched them toil to the crest of the hill, where the rows of holiday cottages began: framed by his moving hand they re-emerged as perspiring, red-faced men awkwardly manhandling cases, children in the skimpy clothing their parents had thought suitable for a Norfolk summer, frozen by the wind. There was a pattern to their migrations. May brought young, childless couples who loitered hand-in-hand along the front or turned over the bric-à-brac in the sixpenny arcade. In July came holidaying families who foraged over the rock-pools for crabs and crayfish; in late August a few pensioners who drowsed in the end-of-season sun. By September the town had reverted to its antique state: rain falling over the pebble-dash houses, sending the high street shoppers scurrying for cover beneath awnings or into the porch of St Peter’s Church. In the distance cloud hung over the long grey spar of the sea.

  As the town’s second-largest newsagent-cum-stationer, Mr Holroyd could not afford to despise the Summer People, but he allowed himself sardonic remarks over their choice of newspaper – which, for example, preferred the Guardian to The Times or the Daily Telegraph, or declined to place sixpences in the box held up by the imploring blind boy. Once, in distant days, a man had requested the Morning Star. Mr Holroyd had pushed it with his own hands through the narrow holiday-home letterbox, so great was his disgust. The Summer People irked Mr Holroyd. He disliked their grainy Midlands accents, the too-easily earned five-pound notes picked up in the engineering shops of Wolverhampton and Dudley which they flicked over the counter in exchange for cigarettes and ice-cream, and he suspected them of sexual irregularity, or what passed for sexual irregularity in Sheringham in the 1960s. But he made an exception of Miss Hoare, who arrived in the town halfway through July, rented
an expensive property on the cliff and spent fifty shillings on sketching pads on her first visit to the shop.

  ‘A very personable woman,’ he informed the silent breakfast table audience of wife and son. ‘She was staying at the Saracen’s Head, but apparently the light wasn’t what she wanted.’

  The Saracen’s Head was the most expensive hotel in Sheringham. The town’s masonic lodge met in its back-parlour on alternate Thursdays. Mr and Mrs Holroyd occasionally took afternoon tea there in a rather ostentatious way on winter Saturdays.

  Julian first caught sight of Miss Hoare two days later in the shop, where she was making a fuss about cartridge paper. She was a large, fat but undoubtedly stylish woman in early middle age, her clothes of a kind not generally seen in Sheringham: a billowing dirndl skirt, white blouse patterned with sunflowers, wide-brimmed Panama hat. Stepping suddenly from the street into the cool interior, Julian heard her say: ‘Of course the A4 is no good at all. Would it be possible to get the A3 do you think?’ Unexpectedly, Julian heard his mother agreeing to this request: similar demands, made by sun-cured old men for obscure angling magazines, had not been so kindly received. ‘This is Julian,’ she said in a slightly subdued way, as he moved further into the shop towards the counter. Miss Hoare gave him a frank, appraising stare of the kind that old farmers at the County Show bestowed on horses, ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘You’re the young man who’s so keen on art,’ and Julian smiled wretchedly, not wanting his private experiments with watercolours and charcoal to be known to a pale-faced woman of forty with cropped hair and scarlet lipstick. ‘I’ll call again then, about the paper,’ Miss Hoare said briskly to his mother, gathering up a little pile of purchases that included three packets of Park Drive cigarettes and a sophisticated women’s magazine in which Mrs Holroyd made occasional scandalised forays.