by Bel Mooney
She waited for a response. “No,” I prompted.
“I used to lay that book on the table, and get out my can of spray polish, and wipe their dumb greasy fingerprints off every one of those pages, so’s they’d be all shiny and new next day.”
We hardly spoke again before I left. Annelisa would spend all day on the beach with the other girls, little mirrors propped on her shoulders to deflect the sun’s rays to the pale area between her hairline and her ears, a white paste covering her nose, and the wigless head swathed in a turquoise turban. She did not look her best. Each night she did her exercises, but, full of wine, I fell asleep long before she had finished. It interested me no more.
I sat outside the private cabana on the edge of the beach, talking idly with the Carls, in between sipping champagne, reading magazines and dozing in the sun. They told me how they met, when he was a photographer on a travel magazine and she was working for an airline, and tried to start various small enterprises together until one day, some years later, they thought up Emperor, and made their fortune. “It was tough going, honey, but believe me, they grow ’em tough in Detroit” was his catch phrase.
I listened sleepily whilst he told me the “philosophy” of Emperor, knowing that I could murmur “Oh yes”, and “I hadn’t thought of it that way”, because no one I knew could hear my capitulations. “What we wanted to do was set up a magazine – okay, a girlie magazine – which was completely honest about a woman’s eroticism, in the way no men’s mag had ever been before. We would show everything, because a woman’s inner beauty, her most private self if you like, is shown as much between her legs as on her face. Why should she be ashamed of it? Why should it be hidden? Hey, you ever seen those drawings by Rodin?”
I shook my head, knowing exactly what he meant, yet surprised by the reference.
“Take a trip to Paris, honey, and see them. There’s one of the world’s finest sculptors, and what does he draw all the time as he gets older? Women with their legs apart, right apart, so there’s no other place to look but right into them. Same with Picasso. Now I want someone to tell me what’s the difference between that and what we print in Emperor. Our picture sets celebrate the eternal woman in all her glory, by showing, in beautiful artistic shots, the very core of her sexuality. These women who complain, these feminists – they ain’t got no sexuality at all, that’s what’s wrong.” Zandra Carl was nodding vigorously. “Sure. I mean, I always say, Babs, that a woman should be in love with her own body. Don’t you agree?”
I nodded weakly. They were feeding me and paying for my room, and I was inclined to be generous. In any case, I saw his point. Dirty old Rodin, churning out the same stuff for all his clients because he knew it would sell, posing those supposed sapphic couples, and all his mistress-models with their legs apart … it is not hard to imagine that his state of mind and body was not too dissimilar to that of the spotty adolescent who scrawls the unmistakable gash on the wall of the public lavatory, possibly accompanied by an unnecessarily explanatory Anglo-Saxon caption. Under the Miami sun all things seemed to melt into one.
Annelisa did not leave the beach to see me off, but Anthony and Zandra Carl seemed sad to say goodbye. They stood in the lobby of the Versailles Palace, with Sheba, and told me that I was to call them if ever I was in New York. A voice inside me told me that they were trying to create a good impression for the sake of public relations, yet it did not matter. I had had a good time and, in any case, I would be dishonest if I did not admit that I even liked them. Why? Because they seemed more honest than a lot of the people I knew in London, I suppose; and those dinners in the hotel, talking idly of films and film stars and clothes, seemed more appealing to me than the kind of evenings I was invited to regularly, where journalists and designers and radio freelances pretend to have read the latest novel from South America, and always have a complex opinion, even if it is not their own.
The Carls reminded me of holiday snapshots: simple, even crude, with no claims to art. They sat in the centre of their own simple pictures, staring straight ahead in a line as unwavering as their ideas; witnesses, they were, like those snapshots, to a certain sort of reality, which I had no right to condemn, even if I understood but little. Or so it seemed to me, as the hotel limousine carried me to the airport.
I barely thought of them again for four years, once my picture had appeared, and the magazine which contained it joined the enormous dusty pile in my cupboard. Then I wrote to them, saying that I had to be in New York for a few weeks, and perhaps I could call.
The commission was an obvious one: the new women’s glossy Minerva (“for the woman whose ideas are her own”) was preparing an “all-American issue” and wanted me to prepare a photo-feature on a day in the street-life of New York. Five or six years earlier I would have been excited by the idea, believing it to be serious and meaningful. Photo-journalism – the first stop of the imagination. But now I know how easy it is to snap a Bowery bum, or the black kids body-popping for tourists outside the New York Public Library (one two-fiftieth of a second at fll). The young mother, pushing her supermarket trolley in the Bronx, wearing that hard, bitter, sad look the poor grow on their faces before they are ten; the hookers and hustlers on West 42nd Street; the Jewish matrons in their designer clothes, hailing cabs outside Henri Bendel’s; the decrepit bag-lady I once caught squatting in the gutter to pee, just by the Rockefeller Center, in the middle of the day … it is all there. Easy to take your pictures, convincing yourself that this is true journalism and you are telling people how the world is, instead of giving them a peepshow, or a lantern lecture, and ignoring the sighs of relief as the comforting darkness blankets down once more.
I received a letter from Anthony Carl’s office the morning I was leaving. Anthony and Zandra would love to see me again, and suggested that, as they were spending the weekend of July 4 at a house they had rented on the New Jersey coast, I should come and join them, if I had no other plans. They would arrange to transport me from Manhattan, and take me back as well, and I would be very welcome. Just telephone when you reach New York to confirm the arrangements, the secretary wrote, “and Mr Carl sends his warmest wishes, and sincerely hopes you will be able to join his party”. The letter cheered me, as I locked the door of my flat, burying the thought that I was bound to have another burglary whilst I was away. I thought of the champagne and good food, and the sun, and general Independence Day jollity, and reflected that tolerating conversation about eroticism and star signs was a small price to pay. For I knew few people I liked in New York by then, and summer weekends are long, hot and empty in the city.
Chapter Two
I wish I took notes about places. I’ve worked with writers who carry small notebooks with them everywhere, jotting down details of rooms, landscapes, people’s clothes and faces, and the weather. “It will come in useful,” they have explained, and I’ve been hard put to avoid the sudden image of a predator, sucking up the whole of existence before spewing it out again. Truthfully, I’m envious of a way of seeing which at least filters what is out there through one brain, even one imagination. One day it will all come in useful … and then the mystery, of which those outward observable facts are merely an indication, may be given meaning at last, if only for a while.
But photographs record only the surface: arrested moments which distort as words and film do not. In my flat are drawers full of negatives and prints I have not looked at for years, pictures of people whose names I have forgotten, places I barely recognise and fragments I clearly thought would be haunting and artistic, all of which have lost forever the identity I thought to fix through the lens. Some of them are rejects; the gap between what I thought I saw and what the shutter caught, vast and disappointing. Some of them are “good”, although increasingly I wonder what that has to do with me. Accidents of light, and time … although the pictures inhabit timelessness: disconnected instances I cannot explain and which therefore lose all meaning.
I keep my professional portfolio quite
separate, of course, and those negatives are filed carefully. It contains portraits of the famous whose names I cannot forget because they fill the pages of newspapers and magazines; colour shots of the countryside; examples of my best photo-journalism. The usual things. I stuck a picture of Annelisa inside the front cover of my portfolio, the black and white snapshot I took in Atlantic City of her eating icecream on the boardwalk, laughing with her mouth, her eyes looking at me with a puzzled, questioning expression – and fully clothed. She looks beautiful. People always ask me, “Who’s that girl?” I never tell them.
I say all this because I can remember little of the drive from New York, and few details of that place in New Jersey. It was as if I was merely shipped there – to see. Yet I ought to remember.
David Sternberg, Carl’s chauffeur, picked me up at my hotel at six on Friday evening, as arranged with the efficient secretary, and we inched through the holiday weekend traffic. I was told that Anthony, Zandra and the rest of the party had gone in the morning; the driver, a swarthy, heavily-built man in his mid-twenties with a look of Robert de Niro, clearly resented the fact that he had to make the journey again, at this crawling pace, for the sake of a British nobody. Through the Lincoln Tunnel, out through the wastelands of hoardings and pylons, and up on to the New Jersey Turnpike, past parking lots and motels … it was the kind of journey you do not register because you have made it countless times in different countries, similar ugliness cancelling memory. I recall the shimmer of July heat, the purr of the air-conditioning, the words “Jesus Loves You” across the rear window of a battered Mazda pickup. “Do you mind the music, Miss Rowe?” David asked, switching on. The sound of subtle soul drowned the monotony of traffic and cool air. I told him I liked it, and added that he could call me Barbara, wondering sleepily if this was a good idea because Americans are so naturally informal that if you give them your first name they immediately feel they can put it (and you) in their pocket, cutting it down to size: “Hey, Barbie, Babsie, Babs, Ba …”
I slept for the rest of the journey, an hour or just over, I reckoned, glad to have lost the time so well. The limousine was turning up a short drive, and looking around I gained a quick impression of large houses, well separated from each other by shrubs and trees and white picket fences, all idiosyncratically designed, some with turrets, one a mock-casa with pantiled roof and belltower, most in white clapboard with wide verandahs. As David turned off the engine I could hear the soothing lap of the ocean, just beyond the house, and saw its gleam through branches, blinding gold in the low sun. “Who does the house belong to?” I asked, as he lifted my suitcase and camera-bag from the car. He shrugged. “Sure I don’t know, Miss Ro … uh, Barbara. Mr Carl’s renting the place for the whole summer, from a business associate, I guess. It’s real nice, but I tell you, I sure get sick of that drive.”
Anthony Carl had lost weight; I told him and he flushed with pleasure. He led me into a huge open living room, making curious yelping noises to draw everyone’s attention to my presence. In the almost-blinding, liquid evening light the room seemed crowded with fat people. At a second glance I saw that it was dotted with curious, squashy soft leather chairs in a golden-brown colour which exactly matched the tone of suntanned skin – so that you could imagine them coming to life in the darkness, and slummocking about the room like so many Miami matrons.
Beyond the chairs, by the open sliding glass doors that led on to a patio, stood a small group of people, one of whom detached herself from the others and half-walked, half-ran across the room to greet me. It was Zandra Carl. “Barbara, honey! – it’s been a long time! Listen, everybody, I want you all to come and meet our little British photographer, Barbara Rowe.”
I was pulled first towards a small, swarthy man in a pale blue safari suit, distended by an enormous paunch; his dark hair was thinning on top, and his shadowy jowls shook as he bent to raise my outstretched hand to his lips in an exaggerated gesture. I controlled a wince. “This is Peter Corelli, Barbara, you know? From Room 1203.” I did not know what she meant at first but, propelled onwards, I remembered the name of Manhattan’s newest exclusive restaurant. “And this is our very good friend Samson J. Luenbach. He an’ you’ll have a lot to talk about because he used to be a photographer himself. He’s just taken over the European side of Emperor Inc.”
“Delighted,” he said, putting out a languid, well-manicured hand that gripped unexpectedly, ice-cold from holding the drink. Luenbach was tall and thin, with light grey eyes, which protruded slightly from a face that seemed sandy and pale in comparison with those around. If you took his picture in black and white he would seem too bleached-out, anaemic even; colour film would more accurately capture the nuances of the kind of arrogant, aristocratic face which knows it does not have to try. The smile was thin-lipped and confident. His fair hair was brushed straight back in a version of fifties style; the light blue suit was well-cut, with wide lapels which echoed the fashionable anachronism. He was about forty-two I guessed, and it was clear from the way that Zandra Carl hung on his arm, dwarfed by his frame, that she found him attractive.
I saw a tiny shadow of a frown of Anthony’s brow as he stepped forward. “By the way, Babs, everyone calls him Sam. There’s no way he’d let no woman cut his hair!” He threw back his head and laughed at his own witticism, and Luenbach joined in, gracefully easing his arm from Zandra’s possessive grasp.
Now Carl himself took me by the elbow. “You gotta meet my girls,” he said, “Marylinne and Lace – they’ve both done sets for the magazine, and now I’m training them for promotions. Hey, d’ya see the whip in the hall?” More laughter. The two girls were dressed almost identically in brief shorts, halter tops, and white high-heeled sandals. He gave the dark-haired one a slap on the buttocks. “Say hallo to the pretty lady, girls. You might get lucky and get your picture in a British magazine.”
They smiled that dead, prearranged model’s smile, and shook my hand, each repeating her name.
“Lace?” I queried, thinking I must have misheard.
The girl with waist-length straight black hair opened her mouth. But Carl was speaking, so she closed it again. He threw an arm heavily round her slender shoulders. “Sure, her real name was Lucinda, would’ya believe it – but we call her Lace ’cos she’s expensive and pretty and full of holes.” Peter Corelli guffawed. It was an unpleasant noise. Zandra Carl’s giggle chimed thinly with the little twittering from the girls, an obedient routine sound which suggested they had heard the line before. Sam Luenbach, I noticed, merely smiled quietly, turning his glass round and round in his long fingers.
Lace tossed her hair back from her face like a pony irritated by flies, but went on smiling. I was smiling too. Then she opened her shiny mouth again but once again Carl got in first. “Don’t say anything honey,” he said, dropping his arm to her waist, “you know it always spoils the effect.”
Lace had delicate features, with an almost oriental cast to her cheekbones; perhaps a grandmother from the Philippines, I thought, someone that far back – someone probably forgotten now, who had given this girl her beauty. The other girl’s looks were more conventional; taller, with curly blonde hair that fell past her shoulders, she had a tough, direct expression that matched her almost aggressive bearing. She was staring at me with cobalt blue eyes. “I think your earrings are real neat, Babs,” she said with intensity, “Where’d you buy them?”
“London,” I said.
She continued to stare, and shook her head saying, “I never did see any like that.”
By the end of the weekend I wanted to confess that I hadn’t bought them at all, that they had been my mother’s, because I felt ashamed by then that my first instinct had been to push Marylinne away – to keep her at the precisely-focused distance in which she lived out her life. But by that time there was no opportunity for talking, and sometimes now I look at the tiny tortoiseshell and gold pieces of Victorian mourning jewellery, remembering the big curly blonde from Texas who liked them so much.
>
Zandra Carl pushed a glass of champagne into my hand. A note of something like reverence entered her voice as she said, “Now, honey, you got to meet the real family – Anthony’s family.” I had not noticed the large, somewhat spotty youth who slouched in one of the leather chairs in a far corner of the room, watching television. “This is Anthony Carl Junior,” said Zandra, adding “Anthony’s son” in a way that told me he was not hers, informing me of the previous marriage in case I should say something tactless. The boy – he was about nineteen – was swigging Coca-Cola from a can, and barely looked up to say “Hi” before returning his gaze to the screen. A helicopter was bursting into flames, little bodies falling from it through the air. He leaned forward and pushed a button. Words of love and heavy breathing. He switched channels again. A raucous game show. This he settled back to watch.
At that point an elderly woman with bouffant grey hair walked in through the patio doors. She was small and rounded, with a floury pink and white complexion and a small mouth that seemed fixed in a vague, gentle smile that spoke of certainty and an accompanying magnanimity. She was wearing the kind of frock, in fine sprigged cotton lawn, you associate with afternoon tea in English country houses, and leaned lightly on the arm of a young girl who had the face of a Renaissance madonna. In strange contrast to Marylinne, Lace and Zandra Carl, this girl wore no make-up, and was dressed simply in a white tee-shirt and blue jeans.
Anthony Carl had moved forward quickly, his voice softening as he said, “Now, Barbara, these are the real women in my life.” I glanced at Zandra to see if her expression changed. It did not. She only ever looked at her husband with anxious devotion, laughing even before his jokes were finished, so that I felt that when the day came for her to be cast aside for a younger woman she would nod with complaisance and say, “Sure, Anthony darling, I’ll go now.” Peter Corelli and Sam Luenbach stood aside to let the women pass.
