by Bel Mooney
She seemed mesmerised by these visions of herself, some of them misty contradictions in which the wide-eyed innocence of her expression made the lewdness of the poses all the more disturbing. “Anthony says they’re really good,” she whispered at last, turning to me, closing the magazine and handing it to me, as if a gift. “What do you think? I mean, you’re a pro, aren’t you?”
For once, I was embarrassed. “They’re very nice,” I said. She laughed that hiccoughing giggle, her hand flying to the little gold chain, “You didn’t see this one.” Snatching the magazine from me again, possessively, turning the page to a shot of Annelisa … but I looked away this time. “Will you just listen to this crap they wrote about me? ‘Our Handmaiden of the month likes reading novels and history, and when she isn’t modelling or pursuing her film career, Annelisa likes to go to bed with a good book.’ Jeez, Babs, I haven’t read a book since I was in high school. And I guess I had enough history from my Mom and my grandma to last me the rest of my life. Anyway, I never find the time. Must be the same for you. And you’re a pictures person, I guess.”
Oh yes, I thought, I’m a pictures person. I always have been. It surprised me suddenly, to realise that, until that moment, standing in a twin-bedded bedroom high over Miami Beach, I had never considered myself as such, still less thought why. I take photographs. I freelance for the best magazines and newspapers in Britain, and sometimes for Stern and Vanity Fair too. A name, a reputation, I have; as one picture editor said to me at an office party at Christmas, “We know you’ll always deliver, Barbara, no matter what you’re asked to do.” Indeed, I have run with the pack outside the Old Bailey, holding the thing over my head for a shot of a film star on a cocaine charge; and driven to leafy Somerset to pull out the old Rolleiflex for a moody black and white study, in a pool of light by the open window, of the latest literary prize-winner. I have reassured people that a shot will probably not be used, knowing that it certainly will, but that the people in question, interviewed by a feature writer for a piece on despair in high-rise flats, or something similar, were unlikely to pick up the colour supplement to see their own misery staring at them from the page.
The highest spot (or lowest, depending on your viewpoint) of my career came when I achieved a snatch picture of a vicar who had gone into hiding because of an affair with one of his parishioners. Like Greta Garbo he never left his home, and at last they gave up the stake-out at his door. But this was years ago, when I was a hungry beginner, and I knew that a picture would gain me a good contract. So I dressed in a conventional ladylike suit, hanging my Nikon inside the boxy jacket, having carefully worked out the distance from his gate to the centre of his path. Then I waited until I could see him at the upstairs window, a shadowy, lonely figure behind the net curtain. Timing my crossing of the road so that a lorry had to slam on his brakes and the driver curse me in terror from his cab, I paused by the little green gate, and staggered, pretending to faint. I knew he would come down. No vicar, even a disgraced one, could ignore a woman in distress. The door opened. He ran down the path offering help. I said feebly that I had had a fright but would be better after a glass of water. He rushed in to get it, and after I had sipped, and brightened, and said I was much better now, thank you kindly, he said goodbye, turning with the empty glass to walk up his path. “Mr Wilcox!” I called, and as he turned in astonishment, hearing his name, I snapped him twice, and walked briskly away. It was a good picture. The fact that he was holding the empty glass added to its value, because, with nothing being said, it hinted at disintegration, alcoholism, the lowest ebb of the man of God who betrayed his calling and sinned. I can still see the look of disbelief, mingled with fury and panic.
Annelisa was still looking at her own pictures, her head on one side. This time her full mouth was pursed, in a critical expression. “Oh, but I wish my boobs were bigger. I mean, just look at them! Anthony makes me eat steaks all the time, and loads of pasta, ’cos he read somewhere that Sophia Loren owes her boobs to plates of spaghetti, and every time we go out he makes me eat a plateful. He gets quite heavy if I don’t want it. ‘Eat, baby,’ he says. I get sick of the sight of it, but I shovel it in. I said to him once, ‘How’d we know it’s going to the right points?’” The little sharp, indrawn-breath giggle again. “He just told me to shaddup and keep eating, ’cos I’d never make it in the movies if I didn’t get bigger boobs. So now I’m exercising like mad.”
So it was that, with no shyness at all, she showed me her routine. I grinned inwardly and thought how many readers of Emperor would dream of being in my place, dream of pearls and velvet and lace as well as the sacred orifice, the bruised rose old before the end of the summer, never imagining the scrubbed, round face puffing and blowing with the effort of fantasy. I fell asleep before she had finished, but drifted back into consciousness as she put her contraption away, and whispered, “’Night, honey.” I cannot swear to it, for maybe I was dreaming, but I thought I heard her praying. I fancied Annelisa was on her knees by her bed. (Much later that thought was to haunt me; I wanted it not to be true.) In my memory she whispered one request to God, that he would make her just a bit fatter, and give her a “real beautiful bosom, just like Mom’s. Amen”.
The next day Anthony Carl downed an enormous glass of champagne and orange juice after his steak, smoothed his white towelling robe, and announced that we would “do the shot”. We arranged to meet at the swimming pool at 10.30, although I had suggested a photograph on the beach, with the ocean in the background – the man alone, I said to him, encouragingly, with the water as a symbol (here I faltered a little) of energy and power. No, he said, he wanted his girls around him. I wondered why I still bothered to try to release people from their own cliches into mine, when they were perfectly happy to wallow in the sticky mess. Editors, magazine-owners, most journalists too – I have spent my adult working life with these people, yet still gasp at the way they can suggest a tired old idea as if it had just that morning emerged from the egg, and staggered moistly into a welcoming world. I arrived at the pool early. The hotel manager had tried to clear a large space, but the wealthy Americans who had paid vast amounts of dollars for their holiday at the Versailles would not be shifted, not even for the owner of Emperor. I told him that it would not matter, for pale, protruding men in plaid shorts, and fat, leathery ladies smothered in oil like roasting fowls (all right, what I actually said was, “The guests are just great”) would add local colour. He nodded enthusiastically – some of them have no sense of irony.
I set up tripod and Hasselblad, chose the lens, and waited. When Carl arrived it was like the entrance of an Eastern potentate, and I could see why he was right to call his magazine Emperor. He came first, in the light cream trousers he always wore, with a yellow shirt open to reveal a single heavy gold neck-chain. Anthony Carl was not tall, but not short and stocky either; he had a compactness that reminded me of a pedigree retriever, with slender powerful shoulders. He was in his late forties, yet still wore his fairish brown hair quite long about his collar. His tan was even, and he showed good white teeth when he smiled, which was often. Pale blue eyes – Newman blue, I always call it – moved restlessly here and there as he spoke. They did not smile often. But it was the mouth I most disliked. I should have preferred the soft and rubbery lips of a true Roman sensualist to that thin line, with the complaining curve at one corner, like a scimitar. When Anthony Carl stood still he swayed slightly from side to side, as if his whole existence was acted out on a yacht rising and falling with the swell of the Atlantic.
Behind him, always a pace behind, was his wife Zandra, leading the alsatian Sheba by a short chain. She greeted me that morning, as she was to four years later in New Jersey, as effusively as if I were a little sister reclaimed from a New Orleans brothel. She was about forty, I estimated, with a stringy look about her and the over-careful make-up, too-young hairstyle (long, blonde and caught up with pretty combs each side), and fluttering, flirtatious gestures of a woman surrounded by beauty who know
s she is losing her own. Zandra Carl was not American, I discovered; she had been born and brought up in Kenya, where her parents owned a chain of small stores and lived the life of the colonial English, protected and insular yet belonging nowhere. She drifted to England to work as a secretary, then to New York, where she met Carl. Explaining this, she flattened all words into fashionable, mid-atlantic neutrality – the sound of rootlessness.
“Oh, I hope you’re going to take a real nice picture of Anthony,” she whispered, as he stood and swayed nearby, looking into the middle distance as if the fat sunbathers (who stared at him in open admiration) did not exist. “He’s really very shy, you know. He just hates having his picture taken.”
“Okay – where’s my girls?” he shouted suddenly, clicking his fingers and looking impatient, so that Zandra glided to his side, thrusting an arm through his placatingly. “It’s okay, baby, they’re just getting fixed up, they’re just coming,” she murmured.
On cue the rest of the entourage arrived, led by Annelisa in a black one-piece swimsuit that plunged to her navel, cinched by a wide gold belt, and displayed large areas of golden thighs in the high-cut legs. With her were four girls I had never met, wearing skimpy bikinis, with that acute air models have, a way of posing even in repose in case someone, somewhere, has trained a telephoto. There was a twitter of “Hi’s” and “Honeys”, and I moved forward to pose them, to get the whole thing over as soon as possible. But Anthony Carl frowned. Immediately a rustle of anxiety swept through the group.
“What’s that?” he asked, staring at Annelisa.
“Uh … what, Anthony?” she replied, glancing nervously over her shoulder, as if some unwelcome incubus might be squatting there, drawing his displeasure.
“That outfit.”
“Oh, this is my new swimsuit. It’s the latest style, Anthony, one-pieces are the latest fashion. In all the magazines right now. I bought it in Bloomies just before we left.”
“Sure, honey, it’s the new thing, real neat,” murmured Zandra soothingly, and all the girls nodded and assented like a chorus.
“I don’t give a shit if it’s the fashion, I don’t like it,” he growled. “Go up and change.”
“But, Anthony …” she protested.
“I said go and change. Put that gold bikini on, for Chrissake – the Sunday Post wants to see some flesh. This magazine’s called Emperor, not Vogue. Just go do it!”
She turned and went, biting her lower lip, her cheeks scarlet. I thought of standing up for her, saying that I should prefer her and the other girls to be covered up, wear dresses even – but, of course, that would not have been true. I had been told to take a certain kind of photograph, one that Anthony Carl understood well, and I had to take it. My ocean shot would have been a self-deception; any attempt to create a radically different kind of picture would have astonished the picture editor. Too much astonishment, and you risk losing a valuable source of work.
I should have left at that point, and not seen any of them ever again. But that would not have protected Annelisa from disaster; it would simply have protected me from the knowledge of it. And increasingly of late I have begun to feel that I deserve no protection at all, not from anything. After all, she had none.
When she returned, Carl grinned, showing his good teeth, and everybody relaxed. “That’s much better, babe. Now you look yourself.”
Herself. Which of us had any means of knowing if that lithe, golden creature, the advertising executive’s fantasy and truck driver’s dream, was really herself, was Annie K. Cvach? I noticed that her bikini top was a size too small, so that the breasts were crammed and fuller. That was “herself too, that fear, merely the insecurity of a million housewives who would never look at Emperor but wished that they had bigger breasts.
Oh, that preoccupation with measurements … Mammary glands. Mom … No accident that, as anyone who has spent half an hour reading skin magazines could tell you, one of the favourite male fantasies is what they call tit-fucking – for in ejaculating between a passive woman’s breasts you protect yourself from the vagina dentata and abuse your mother at the same time.
By this time the tourists were crowding us, staring at the five girls whose bikinis barely covered carefully trimmed pubic hair. Their gold or silver high-heeled sandals glinted in the sunlight, like the lip gloss and gold chains and synthetic sheen of bikinis. Middle-aged men stared, legs splayed, lips slightly apart. The wives smiled, fascinated by the tableau until, after a moment or two, they twitched at sleeves and pulled their husbands away. Sheba panted in the heat, a string of saliva glittering from the corner of her mouth, tongue lolling to one side.
“Okay, sweetheart, okay, honey child,” crooned Zandra Carl to the dog. “It’s too hot for my baby, isn’t it too hot?”
It was. The sun vibrated in the deep blue sky over Miami, making skin tauten with its strength, and eyes ache. An hour ago I had hauled my camera bag down to the pool, an hour of wasted time through which I had smiled, grimly.
“Ready?” I said.
Anthony Carl spread his arms wide, gathering girls as if he were clasping two armfuls of groceries. Good. Then he reclined on an enormous sunbed, upholstered in pink and orange stripes against which his shirt shouted horribly. The girls arranged themselves each side of him, looking up with open-mouthed admiring expressions, and Annelisa stood behind, giving a good triangular point to the composition, I thought. One of her arms rested lightly on his shoulder; through my lens I saw her smiling, still smiling as he reached up, took hold of the hand and moved it so that the long scarlet fingernails disappeared within his shirt. Her smile never changed. She put her head on one side and let her lips fall apart, as if the expression had been sprayed on with fixative. Good. Thirty-six shots with variations on those two themes and the job was done. When at last it was over my roommate took me on one side, the smile gone now. “Did I look okay, Babs? Are you sure I looked okay?”
That night we sat on the beach together, watching an eclipse. The sky was inky-purple; the regular sound of the waves refreshed the stifling night, as if they were washing us all, washing us clean. Annelisa lay back in a low beach chair next to me, staring at the sky. I could hear the rasp of crickets in the hotel grounds, a hot dry sound, like a million bronchitics wheezing “Wish, wish, wish” into the darkness.
Suddenly Annelisa sighed. “Look at all the stars up there,” she said. “You know, something, Babs? I never thought of the word ‘star’, like I mean, you know, movie star, as being anything like one of those stars. Isn’t that weird? Why’d we call them stars, d’you think?”
“In the movies?”
“Sure.”
“Well, I suppose it’s because they hang above everything else, like something fabulous you can’t reach, and everybody stares, just like you’re staring now,” I said wisely.
“But just look up there,” she said, with a wistful note in her voice. “There’s so many of them, millions of them. An’ here’s little ol’ me, wanting to be a real special one. It’s kinda sad, looking up there, because there’s so many of them.”
The moon disappeared then, for a few minutes, and along the beach I heard the sound of scattered applause, as if the phenomenon had been staged as a celestial cabaret for the patrons of the Versailles Palace. People rose to drift back, and the swishing of the waves was lost in a harsh crackle of laughter and click of folding chairs. From somewhere I heard Anthony Carl’s voice, calling us to join them for a drink. Annelisa said nothing, so I shouted that we would follow them soon. They all drifted away. Willing Annelisa to stay silent I stared up at the sky, which had a strange luminous transparency now, as if it were chiffon, not velvet, and might envelop the land in gossamer folds – such a delicate suffocation.
“I haven’t shown you all my pictures yet, have I, Babs?”
I sighed. “What pictures?”
“My book? You know. My Book.”
“What book?” I felt exasperated once more.
“My model book. Whad
’ they call it … my portfolio. It’s got all the first pictures of me, modelling back in Omaha, for God’s sake! When I first left home to try an’ make it.”
I asked when that was, but she shifted suddenly in her chair as if she did not want to talk. “Oh, ages, honey. I must show you the pictures. I wanted to be in fashion then, ’cos I’m the right height, but there’s more money in this, that’s for sure. You know something, Babs. I carry that stupid ol’ book everywhere I go. Still. And it’s real heavy, you know? I don’t need to, but, like, I get a kick from looking at it at night, to see how I’ve changed. Those first pictures, they’re me, sure enough, but I know I’m much better now.”
I could imagine the shots – self-consciously posed “fashion”, meaning halter tops and skimpy skirts or a wet tee-shirt, taken by a small-time hustler in Omaha who assured her he could get her picture into Cosmopolitan, knowing all the time that he could certainly get her into bed … “Hold it right there, baby, hold it … you’re beautiful,” he would say … Annelisa arranging her arms and legs into parodies of Christie Brinkley and the rest, offering a naive schoolgirlish smile to the lens as later she was to offer her genitals. Heaven protect me from seeing those images, I thought.
She had not noticed my silence, but chattered on. “Yeah, I’ll show you my book when we get upstairs, because I want your serious opinion, Babs, on how I’m getting on. As a professional, you know? I’ll tell you something, I used to carry that book all round New York, and it really is heavy, and I’d be taking it to all these offices to show it to guys, like the ones producing calendars and stuff like that. I’d sit there real nervous as they flicked over the pages. All the pictures are in plastic, right? Both sides – you can see both sides of a sheet. So these guys are turning the pages and saying ‘Uhhhh huhh’ and looking at me, and telling me they’ll ring me, you know? Sometimes they would, sometimes they wouldn’t. Sometimes they’d make, like … uh … suggestions to me. Whad’ you expect? And I used to go to this little apartment I had, a real tacky little place on East 48th, and you know the first thing I’d do?”
