by Bel Mooney
When the telephone rang, Zandra jumped like a puppet, motioning to Anthony to stay in his place. He made no acknowledgement; he knew the phone would always be answered for him, and that his mother would as now, for no apparent reason, drape a tender hand over his. Nobody attempted conversation; there was just the clinking and chewing, and the sound of Zandra’s soft voice talking in the hall. After a couple of minutes she came back. “It’s Spiegleman – he wants to talk with you. I told him we were eating, but he said it’s urgent.”
Carl rose without a word. Peter Corelli and Sam Luenbach looked at each other with raised eyebrows, then at Zandra. “Problems?” asked Luenbach, in such a way that the question mark at the end of the word was unnecessary.
“What else?” she replied shortly.
“I tell you, Zandra, that movie will be released, even if it costs Anthony ten million dollars to do it,” Corelli said, making a wide gesture with large fleshy hands, as he named the sum. Sweat shone on his broad nose and on the curve of his forehead, reddened by the sun.
“You mean another ten million,” she replied, in a tight voice. Fragments of Carl’s conversation came through the thin wall, not the words themselves, but the tone, hard and angry. Emmeline Carl turned her ring round and round, then lit a cigarette. “Oh my,” was all she said. Suddenly Zandra noticed my expression, which must have been confused, because she changed the look on her own face in an instant, from tight resentment and worry to the kind of bland motherliness nursery teachers bestow on their charges. “We should have explained, honey. All this is … Anthony’s gone into the movies, you see.”
“Oh?” I said, feigning surprise. “You mean he’s become an actor?”
Everybody laughed; I congratulated myself for defusing the tension. Peter Corelli reached over and patted my hand, his white teeth gleaming. “Isn’t she cute?” he said, in a gravelly voice with a timbre of Brooklyn.
“No, honey,” said Zandra, smiling but still looking as if she were addressing a four-year-old. “I mean we have … uh, Anthony has … set up a movie business. Emperor Films …” Her voice faded as Carl’s words came through the wall quite clearly. “Well, for Chrissake, Spiegleman, fix it! You hear me? You get in there and fix it, and I don’t care if it is a fucking holiday! You got it? Okay … okay. Do it, man.” The phone slammed. Zandra shuddered, rolling her eyes heavenwards.
“The rough cut looked good, real good,” Corelli was saying, loudly and deliberately, to me, as Carl strode into the room, shaking his head.
“I’m gonna find myself a new lawyer, okay? That guy’s the laziest, most expensive creep I ever met,” he muttered, slumping back into his place. There was a chorus of agreement, like a small sighing wave that rose from all those throats and curled towards him, breaking gently over his head to wipe away all irritants. But Lace and Marylinne looked solemn and frightened, Miranda still petulant, Tony morose, Emmeline tense with exaggerated concern. Again her wrinkled hand, oddly coarse in contrast to the rest of her, snaked towards him and smoothed the hairs on the back of his hand. “It’ll be fine, son, just fine,” she crooned, and the effect was instantaneous. Anthony Carl looked at her softly, gratefully; uncannily the voice of a boy came from that thin mouth: “Thanks, Mom.”
The cheese was finished. Carl offered brandy, pointedly ignoring the two models. I accepted a glass, feeling in need of that flush of warmth, despite the heat of the night, and was just wondering how I could take it upstairs without being rude when Corelli mumbled around his cigar, “What time she arrive?”
“Not tonight,” said Zandra, “David’s picking her up really early tomorrow. But really early.”
“What kept her?”
Anthony Carl looked disapproving, “Oh, I guess it was some guy she’s been seeing. No one we know. He’s a real nuthin’. Stupid bitch.”
Again the small wave of agreement lapped round his head. I began to feel invisible, or as if I were in a strange land, with all those around me speaking a foreign tongue.
“I’m sorry, but who are you talking about?” I asked.
“Oh sorry, Babs,” said Zandra, with that smile again, setting my teeth on edge. “It’s one of the girls. Anthony and I wanted her here for the weekend. She’s called Annelisa.”
“Annelisa Kaye?”
“Sure. You know her?” asked Carl, with no curiosity in his voice.
“Of course. Don’t you remember? She was in Miami with you when I took your picture that time. I shared her room.”
Anthony Carl was barely listening. It was clear that he was brooding over whatever problems he had with his film. But Emmeline sat back in her chair, sent a cloud of contented smoke to the ceiling, and smiled at everybody. “Well now, isn’t that real nice? So this weekend we all will be like family.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Luenbach. He was looking at me. “Do you have family, Miss Rowe?”
“Call me Barbara, please,” I smiled. “No, nobody really.”
“You mean a girl as pretty as you’s not married?” said Emmeline softly, as if she pitied me.
“My wife, I married her when she was seventeen,” said Corelli, folding his hands across his stomach with satisfaction.
“I guess you like to be independent, Barbara, is that it?” Luenbach asked.
I nodded.
“Prettiest girl in Queens,” said Corelli.
“Oh, but I think we all need to be with our loved ones. People who love and care for us, no matter what we do …” said Emmeline dreamily. “Oh, but isn’t it nice that you can at least be here with us all – and Annelisa an old friend too. You have to be with family for the Fourth.”
“Don’t you wish you could be with, your family, Peter?” Marylinne asked, her eyes as wide and direct as ever, but a sly sidelong curve to her mouth.
“They’re just fine. My wife, she’s got plenty to do, with the big house and four children, and she knows business comes first,” he said, clipping the words as if challenging her to question further.
“Of course it does,” crooned Emmeline. “Why, Zandra understands that too, don’t you, dear?”
Zandra Carl shrugged. “I always say that when I married Anthony I married Emperor, sure, so the magazine, and everyone who works for it – that’s all my family.” And she flashed a sudden smile at her husband, which was shocking in its lack of history, of build-up – as if someone had suddenly clapped a mask of contentment on a sad woman’s face.
Anthony Carl said nothing. But Emmeline clapped her hands like a girl. “That’s just what I’m saying! All of us here together – one big happy family for the Fourth.”
Chapter Three
I woke very early on Saturday morning, and lay listening to the birds – a slight domestic wittering in the garden beneath my window, and beyond that the wilder cries of seabirds in the distance, over the low swishing of the ocean. For a moment I fancied I was back in Cornwall … but it was never so warm there, never so sultry as New Jersey in July. Breezes always blew in Cornwall, and more so on the Isle of Man, where we spent other summers. Then, as I walked along the beach with my father, warmly wrapped in an old macintosh, we wondered how the swimmers could brave the cold brown waves of the Irish Sea. Alone with him, tracing the corrugated patterns of ochre sand with my toe, or searching for pieces of flotsam, I could see what it was people loved about him, and it puzzled me that my mother could not see it too. But perhaps I sensed already that so many women see unmanliness in such gentle questing, turning from it in search for what will expose them, mercilessly. What she saw must have been distorted; yet she taught me to see it too.
Alone with him, those times, I was able to escape her, in the emptiness of the horizon, the glint of grey light on water, the ripples on the sand, the weaving of two sets of footprints, each one sinking its cup of wetness, destined to be wiped forever by the incoming sea. Those things he loved, and I loved them too for their lack of fixity and their loneliness; and all the time the sound of the seagulls screaming overhead, reminding me of everythin
g lost, reminding me now.
I turned over and buried my face in the pillow, resenting the light for waking me, and the place for not being home, and myself for being – what? Weak and dishonest, I suppose. (Thinking about my family always renders me impotent with guilt.) Bad faith – to come here for a free weekend, caring nothing for the people with whom I was to spend the next forty-eight hours, knowing I probably would not even pull out the Nikon once, not wishing to zoom in on Zandra Carl’s anxious brow, or her mother-in-law’s terrible smile. Yet, even as I thought that, I began to compose a picture: Anthony Carl full-face, with his mother and daughter in profile each side – the Emperor with his Empresses. The background dark … Then other images, which would sum up wordlessly what he was, or what I thought he was. And I knew then that, just as I was always dishonest about my dislike for my trade, I lied even to myself about my distaste for this way of life. I was there because I wanted to be there, even because I belonged there. It was easy for me. It made no demands; nobody would ask me if I had ever wanted to become a painter (which of course I did), or whether I should snatch pictures of people who feared the lens. Gradually I have seen less and less of my very old friends, because they always require me to justify what I do. With these people, in this house, no justification was necessary because they considered it admirable.
So, I thought (noticing with distaste a smudge of my eye make-up on the crisp linen pillowslip), gradually you slide away from all self-questioning, by seeking only the company of those you despise. Like Marylinne and Lace … and now Annelisa Kaye was coming, the prize cow, the one for whom the dealers would outbid each other. I tried to recall her real name; Polish or Czech – I could not quite remember in my early-morning laziness, and felt a familiar prick of contempt for those who would so easily surrender their own identity, becoming someone else’s creature. Primitive people think that being photographed is a capturing – an impertinent and terrifying looting of their personality. What has happened to us is that everybody wants to be photographed (or, even better, to be on television) because they see themselves as images and wish to be made real. So the creatures take off their clothes and spread their legs before the exploring camera, and court the lens as the bestower of identity – regarding my trade with awe. “How do I look”, or “Can you make me look better”, or “Wait a moment while I fix my make-up”, or “I wish, I wish my bust was bigger” … on and on: many girls I have met in the past, and some I have even photographed, and not one of them able to offer anything more than their surface, wearing their little souls on their epidermis and watching them grow tattier day by day, with use.
I would not do it, I have said to myself so many times – and so why should they?
It was 7.15. I heard a sound in the garden and rose, walking over to the window. The light was blue-grey, not golden as I expected; it added mystery and beauty to the garden on the edge of the ocean, with shady bushes whose roots must barely reach through the thin sandy soil yet still thrived. Through the trees I could see a glimmer of water; clearly the beach curved round somewhat at a point beyond us, like the bend in a river, so that the ocean was visible in the distance even from the rooms on the side. There was a steady rippling sound from the pool, which was shaded with purple shadows. The person performing that strong, rhythmical breast-stroke, remaining underwater for five or six strokes, barely made a splash. The serrated frog-like shape, dark and barred by light from the broken surface, reminded me of a Hockney – but in black-and-white, lacking the garish Californian clarity. She seemed a part of the pool and of the landscape, almost inhuman in concentration. Back and forth, back and forth, sleek head gulping air then down again – it was Miranda Carl.
I watched, fascinated. When at last she stopped, and swung her skinny brown body, gleaming in the black athlete’s one-piece, on to the pale paving, she glanced up at the house. I drew back from the window at once. I sensed that she would not like to be watched. There had been something private in her swimming ritual: a purging, a cleansing, I had witnessed. Or perhaps that is what I should have liked it to be.
I put on my bikini, with shorts and a loose tee-shirt on top, looking ruefully down at legs that were pale, and a stomach that needed tightening, after too much pasta in Little Italy. My face is thin, almost hawkish, and can sometimes look beautiful, sometimes very plain. I have heard men describe me as “beautiful in a ravaged kind of way” – as if they knew. Now I stared at my reflection, running a hand through my ragged hair, and for a second hankered after long, beautifully-styled tresses, even like Zandra Carl’s. It comforted me, though, to remember Annelisa’s wig; in any case, what was I thinking? No different from the rest, you see. Only Miranda seemed above the universal vanity.
As I was standing there, turning my mind to coffee, I heard Annelisa’s voice. I looked at my watch. 7.30. She must have left New York at six; Annelisa summoned, having incurred enough of Carl’s wrath by choosing to spend Friday night with her boyfriend, not with the household. I grinned to myself; at least the girl had courage.
At the foot of the stairs I saw her luggage – two overnight cases, a vanity box, and the same huge, heavy, cream-coloured portfolio, with a handle on its spine, that she’d shown me so proudly four years earlier. “My Book – I take it everywhere,” she had told me, and four years later it was still true. Annelisa herself was nowhere to be seen.
The kitchen was dominated by two huge fridge-freezers, one of them with a crushed-ice dispenser in the door. A frieze of blue and white Mexican tiles gleamed beneath white walls, and the shining white surfaces of the units were empty – a kitchen which had never seen a brownie baked, or suffered the clutter of children’s toys. I was standing watching the ice skitter down into my juice when I sensed, rather than heard, someone walk up behind me. Before I could turn round I felt a hand press itself briefly into the small of my back. The touch lasted for barely a second, yet there was an intimacy about it which chilled me, spreading the coldness of my glass right through my body. It wasn’t the kind of drunken, clumsy pass you get from oafish journalists late at night in foreign hotels, done as a matter of rote. This was a cool statement, a gesture of confident complicity. Before I turned I guessed who would be standing there.
Sam Luenbach was dressed like an Emperor executive: white shorts and loose white cotton shirt, monogrammed S.L. and left unbuttoned so that his golden chest and stomach were exposed, sinewy and lean. He had thrust both hands into the pockets of his shorts, which gave him an insolently nonchalant air, as he said softly, “I guess you got up so early because there was nothing to keep you in bed.”
“That’s right,” I said.
“It doesn’t have to be that way, Barbara.”
“Oh yes, it does,” I replied coldly, “because that’s the way I want it.”
“And you always get what you want?”
“Always.”
“Well now, then I’m sure you will, this wunnerful family weekend.”
That made me smile, as with a slight shrug he reached past me, with perfect politeness, for the fridge door-handle. I had to step aside and move somewhat clumsily out of his way. He had gained the first point.
“How do you think Shultz will do, Miss Rowe?” he asked, after a short silence, in which I cut myself a chunk of bread.
“Shultz?”
His smile was mocking. “I’m sorry, I thought that as you’re a journalist you’d follow American politics.”
Irritation with myself made my reply sound school-girlish, petulant. “Of course, I should think anyone must be better than Al Haig. But, by the way, I don’t call myself a journalist, I’m just a photographer.”
“Just a photographer, Miss Rowe?”
“Why don’t you stick to calling me Barbara? Formality doesn’t suit you.”
It was as if I hadn’t spoken. “I should have thought a woman as clever as you would have known that it’s not easy to draw a distinction between the narrative in a piece of reportage, and the narrative contained in one of your
pictures,”
I couldn’t believe it. Was he mocking me? The pale blue eyes were watching me carefully, the expression totally serious. “I can draw that distinction easily,” I said languidly, sipping my juice.
“Oh really? I’d be very interested …” I interrupted him, thinking quickly. “It’s obvious – the difference is to do with the context. Take a word out of the piece and the context is destroyed – but pictures have no context. They are what they are. They don’t have a past or a future.”
“Isn’t it your job to give them one?”
“How?”
“By choosing the precise moment that will persuade the viewer to create a past and future for that image. They may be writing their own stories, but a story is still being written. D’you see what I mean?”
He was talking to me like a professor in a seminar on the meaning of photography, and it infuriated me. Luenbach was watching me carefully too; he could see I was confused. Without giving myself any time to consider, I replied boorishly, “Well, I think all that kind of theorising is just so much posturing. Polytechnic stuff. As far as I’m concerned you just lift the camera and click. That’s all.” I paused deliberately and added, “Tell me, did you use to take girly photographs? You know, Emperor-type … er … work?”
His gaze did not flicker. “No, I worked for Time and then for Stern for a long time. Portraits were what interested me most, and I did that whenever I could. Faces are their own narrative … take yours for example. If I was photographing you it would be in black and white, three-quarter profile, eyes looking out though as they are now, telling me so much about you.”
He wanted me to ask what. I said nothing. He continued anyway. “It’s a very simple story, Miss Rowe.” This time the mockery was unmistakable, and I could not stop myself from responding, “Is it?”
“Why, yes,” he drawled. “There’s a kind of deprived look there which I would put down to … uh … sexual frustration.”
