by Bel Mooney
We found the other three playing blackjack, staring at their cards with expressions of utter seriousness. Marylinne and Lace had attracted the attention of a small group of men, who stood around watching them, and whose faces showed a mixture of disbelief and satisfaction when Annelisa arrived. David Sternberg glanced up quickly, then back down at his hand. As one of the watchers – a swarthy man in his thirties who looked as if he might be a construction worker, but dressed, on his day off, in tight white leather trousers, with a red and black checked shirt – moved, with deliberation, up close to Annelisa, she slid across to stand behind Sternberg, resting one hand on his shoulder. With the faintest of shrugs her would-be admirer moved away again; whilst the others returned their full attention to Marylinne and Lace. It was like watching a ritual dance, I thought, in which the central figure was paradoxically the most passive: the one to whom things are done. Now I was watching uncomprehendingly as Sternberg reached up his hand and encased Annelisa’s – as if the bruised arm was a figment of her imagination, and they were a freshly-loving couple on a day out. She wants to be owned, I thought, realising with a small shock of revulsion that had Annelisa been alone, and the bartender or man in white trousers been insistent enough, she would have gone with them. She was the kind of woman who had to have somebody, whatever the consequences. Or had to be had by somebody, my sour inner voice corrected, refusing at that moment to allow any sentiment to intrude; none of that cant about needing to be loved.
Sternberg was in a good mood because he had won; Marylinne and Lace were philosophical about their losses. “I mean, you come here knowing the odds are against you,” said Marylinne, “and you just play ’cos you can’t help it. Gambling’s like making love – you have to do it even if it does nothing for you in the end.”
“Slots beat sex any day – the handles always stay up,” said Lace, and the others laughed.
“Same thing, really, honey,” Marylinne replied, “and blackjack’s all ‘ups’ and ‘holes’ …”
“So it’s best to wise up and ‘surrender’!” shrieked Annelisa, tucking her arm into Sternberg’s, who stared directly into her decolletage, and added with a grin, “If Annelisa played she’d bust all the time.”
I walked a little way ahead, wanting to remove myself from their inanities. It was all harmless enough, I thought, and there was no novelty to me in spending time with stupid people, and not much hardship either. Yet a terrible boredom slid across my mind, erasing even the momentary pleasure I had felt in Annelisa’s company. And something was bothering me too, something I could not yet identify, that underpinned the ennui with unease. Rather as when you scrutinise slides on a lightbox, moving the magnifier from one to another to make a choice and analysing the infinitesimal differences in composition or expression, I shuffled through the various images of that afternoon. The thought of the Salt Water Taffy and the pen in my camera bag combined with my clear vision of the beautiful icecream shot … Oh, Annelisa … Replaced immediately by the memory of her suggestive simper in the bar – her weakness. She was giggling somewhere behind me as we drew near the Dreamdeck. I caught no fragments of their conversation; no one hailed me to join in. It was as if they had forgotten me, the outsider, and I felt as invisible as I sometimes do when working – once people have grown accustomed to my cameras’ presence and forget the eye behind them. Sometimes, even with a portrait, it can work that way, and the face before me relaxes into a glaze, a vacancy I can use as I like. That is when subjects can adopt that tailor’s dummy look photographers value because in not revealing character it masquerades as art.
Of course – that was it. The other memory. Just a moment before we entered the bar we had passed a shop selling tee-shirts and the usual mixture of things. Annelisa had paused for a second to look in the window, and I saw her stop and look more closely. I stood beside her. “Cute,” she said, pointing.
The dummy was modelled on a child of about seven, with a realistic curving stomach, and little hands stretched out, palms uppermost, as if in welcome. One knee was slightly bent, in a model’s pose. The head was sculpted well, with pink cheeks, blue eyes, a turned-up nose, and short bouffant blonde hair falling each side of a high, domed forehead. It might almost have walked, in white shoes and socks, crying, “Mama!” But the girl dummy was not wearing a frilly gingham dress, or a fashionable tracksuit – not here, not in Atlantic City. It was dressed in a minuscule gold lame bikini, the twin triangles of the top completely flat and empty, with a matching bomber jacket draped casually yet sexily around its shoulders. The face, I noticed, was painted as if with a suggestion of make-up: pale blue eye shadow, and parted pink lips.
“Gee, I wish you could’ve bought stuff like that when I was a kid,” said Annelisa, turning to walk on. “Not that my Mom would have allowed me. She was real old-fashioned, you know? My Dad was better. He’d have thought that outfit was real neat, on his baby.” She had looked at me with an expression I could not read. “Some baby, huh?”
As we drove out of Atlantic City, seated as before, with Marylinne and Lace watching television again, I let my head loll back and stared gloomily at the cream roof. Annelisa’s cryptic remarks about Carl, Luenbach and Corelli puzzled me, and I knew she had not told me the truth about the film. But as I allowed myself to doze I forgot all that, and it was an absurd montage that filled my imagination. I saw her clearly – Annelisa shrunk, diminished Alice-like into childhood, standing before me in a shop window wearing gold lame and black lycra, waiting to be bought. Then the doll came to life, and stretched out those little hands as if it wanted help in walking, stepping out through the glass that protected it from the world. Down the side street it toddled, tiny, tiny beside the hard scaffolding, and approached the pretty little storybook house – the only home that was left. “Ma-ma!” it called, standing there in front. But all the doors and windows were locked and barred, and nobody came.
“Mama!” called the Annelisa-doll again.
Chapter Five
“The thing about eroticism most people don’t understand is that it’s an expression of the spirit as well as the flesh. Think of the human body, Barbara, think of its beauty, then tell me who could possibly see anything dirty in it. Huh? Our girls, they’re showing human sensuality in every pose, and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You’re not ashamed of your body, are you, honey?”
“Of course not,” Zandra replied.
“And you can’t be, that’s for sure.”
“No, I’m not,” I said.
Anthony Carl sat on the terrace, one arm flung across the back of the small cane sofa, one leg crossed over the other. Pale leather mules dangled from his bare feet; blond silk trousers and shirt exactly matched. He had left off his customarily discreet jewellery tonight, so that his neck looked disconcertingly nude. A Rolex was his only ornament. The hands waved lazily to reinforce his remarks, smooth and golden, marked by a shadowy pattern of freckles; neat white half-moons showed on immaculately-trimmed nails. His blue eyes gazed at me intently, beneath brows that were creased, as if someone had just said something hurtful, and he was trying to figure out why.
Miranda sat on a cushion at his feet. She had changed from blue jeans into white ones, and wore a black tee-shirt, plain but for the Emperor motif: a feathered turban, of the sort you associate with illustrations for the Arabian Nights. Zandra and I sat in cane chairs facing him, our drinks on the small white table in front. It had taken me fifteen minutes to change. But Lace, Annelisa and Marylinne were still upstairs, making full use (I assumed) of the contents of their large make-up bags.
Tony Carl and Peter Corelli were watching sport on the television, occasionally exchanging remarks we could not hear. Sam Luenbach had gone for a swim in the pool, Miranda said, smoothing hair that was still damp. Her father reached down and frowned. “You should blow-dry it, Mira,” he said, “style it a little.”
“Why?”
“A woman’s hair’s her greatest asset. You need to take care of it.”
“I like it. It’s just fine like it is.” She dipped away from his touch.
“I think Miranda’s hair looks real neat when it’s shorter,” Zandra said. The girl looked up. “Dad always says it’s more feminine long,” she said coolly.
“Well, of course that’s true too. But …” Zandra was flustered, and looked anxiously at me for support. I said nothing.
“So should it be long or short?” asked Miranda, in an almost bullying tone. “Oh, I’d say … long, honey,” Zandra said. Miranda smiled sweetly, “Oh, well then, I guess I’d better get it cut as soon as we get back home.”
“Go upstairs and blow-dry it a little,” Carl murmured, as if the exchange had not taken place. “Get Marylinne to do it for you if you can’t get the ends to turn under. Go on, Mira.”
Clearly irritated, she flounced into the house to obey.
“Like I was saying, human beings need erotica to remind them of their own true selves. By the way Barbara, Zandra put a copy of the new Emperor in your room, did you get to look at it?”
“No, I didn’t have time,” I said gravely, “But I’ll be sure to read it from cover to cover before I go.” Seeing the magazine lying on my bedside table like a Gideon Bible had made me giggle like a schoolgirl. I had imagined a well-trained posse of born-again Eroticans travelling the land to place the holy magazine in hotel rooms and the travelling salesmen looking at it with a yawn, shiftily pulling well-thumbed Bibles from their cases to read the steamy Old Testament alone.
“It’s one of the best yet,” he was saying, “the July Handmaiden is a knockout. Something about the look in her eyes … Mmm, mmm!”
“Does sexuality show in the eyes?” I asked.
“Sure it does, that’s where a woman shows her soul. Look, she can be lying there with her legs open, yet her eyes can be the eyes of a virgin. A virgin, okay? An’ I’ve seen women, tough executive women in their suits, women like Zandra, with all their clothes on, looking at you in a way that’s kinda obscene. Like it’s telling you that you can do anything you like to them – anything. Sure it’s the eyes. Now let’s see …” He leaned forward suddenly, resting his chin on his hands, staring at me. “Your eyes are … yeah, they’re just as I expected.”
“What’s that?” I blinked at him for a second, then looked away.
“See! You stopped looking at me! You’re scared those big brown eyes gonna give you away! Let me tell ya, honey, that when I look in your eyes I see a woman who thinks she’s real cool, but there’s a whole fire burning in there down below!” My hand fanning my face, I said, “So that’s why I’m so hot,” and they both laughed. Then Carl added, very softly, “Hot is the word for it, Babs, and I knew it the first time I set eyes on you.”
When I was a child I was told nothing about sex. My mother pushed me out into the world of the Coronation, when women wore little feathered hats and white gloves even to visit their own mothers, and no man would be seen without a collar and tie, even on holiday. We lived in Guildford, where my father taught art in a boys’ grammar school, and my mother worked as a part-time dental receptionist, spending her afternoons pruning the shrubs in our garden or drinking tea with friends. Looking at her, as I grew older, it was hard to believe that she had sweated, bled and grunted to bring us forth, my brother and I, so great was her revulsion for anything physical, even a good night kiss. Yet she was beautiful, and spent hours before her mirror in a narcissistic cloud of Yardley and Pond’s.
“Love That Pink” lipstick, and “Evening in Paris” in its little midnight blue bottle, and Bourjois rouge in the tiny black and white cardboard pots I coveted – these she used to define herself at her kidney-shaped dressing table, its rough wooden drawers hidden by a flounced frill of white nylon net. When my brother was making his model aeroplanes, and my parents sat quietly listening to comedy shows on the radio, I would creep upstairs and into her bedroom, just to smell the face powder and breathe in the odd, dry aroma of her hair that clung to her silver-backed brush. I had no need to see my mother, or even glance at a photograph of her, later when I was an adult, to summon up her image. All I had to do was to pull my own hairbrush from my bag and smell it, for my stomach to melt and dissolve, into a longing, like sex.
Slipping back into my chair, watching her bend her head over her knitting in the parchment pool of light from the standard lamp and smile at the tinny laughter from the pale blue transistor radio, I would wonder at her isolation. Across the short space of the hearth my father sat, smoking his Senior Service and reading the Daily Mail, glasses always slipping down his nose, to be pushed back hundreds of times in one evening, his floppy hair shiny with Brylcreem … The silence between them, and my brother’s mumbled repetitions of instructions as his gluey fingers rustled with tissue and balsa wood.
He wore grey shorts, and I was in neat full skirts with white blouses tucked in: in that world of the late fifties and early sixties there was nothing to corrupt us. The television was hardly ever on, since my father said that you could be creative whilst listening to the radio, whereas the television hauled your gaze, imprisoning it. We saw few magazines, read books like Children of the New Forest and David Copperfield. When I reached the age of thirteen I found in my drawer a bulky pack of sanitary towels and a booklet telling me about menstruation, with a note from my mother: “This is a woman’s problem and is a very private matter so should not be discussed with other members of the family.”
Of course I knew – about everything. I had heard their holiday rows and sniggered in school at jokes about long hairy objects, and guessed already that it was not just menstruation that was a woman’s problem. Innocence had gone somewhere between Little Women and Little Em’ly, and one dreadful day my mother realised.
I had a very private hobby (one of which I was deeply ashamed) of using my considerable drawing skill to create detailed pencil sketches of naked women. Always they had bouffant hair with flicked-up ends, and widely-spaced eyes with stark, spidery lashes. Since I had never seen a picture of a naked woman much of the rest was conjecture, but I knew about nipples and drew them lovingly, almost as if they were little eyes. And – this is the worst thing, what would have shocked my mother profoundly – my ladies were always urinating. They would stand there, splay-legged, grinning cheerfully with dark lipsticked mouths, peeing into thin air, with an occasional speech bubble which contained the superfluous but gleeful syllable “Psssss”.
One day I went into my room to find her standing by the wardrobe, her eyes bright, the “Silvine” drawing book in her hand, two crimson spots in her cheeks that had nothing to do with Bourjois. I experienced that trapped panic children feel, when found out, with nowhere to run and no possibility of denial. “Are these drawings yours?” she asked, unnecessarily, in a curious high-pitched voice. I nodded mutely. “I’m taking them away. They’re dirty, do you hear me? Dirty! And I thought you were a nice little girl.”
“I am, Mum, I am!” I sobbed.
“No, you’re not, you’re disgusting!” she hissed.
Marylinne and Lace had joined Corelli and Tony in front of the television. Lace sat on Corelli’s huge knees, her straight black hair sweeping across one of his shoulders like a pall. Marylinne started pitching a cushion at Tony, who returned it with some force; their laughter drifted to the terrace.
“Do you have a … a relationship at the moment, honey?” Zandra was asking. I shook my head, but it wasn’t enough. “That sure surprises me, ’cos you’re a vurry pretty lady,” Carl said, with a question-mark in his voice. “If you knew the men I know you wouldn’t be surprised,” I said lightly, and for some reason this seemed to please him, as though I had paid him a compliment.
“Yeah, the English guys I know are all uptight about women. Now what you need is to meet some real all-American men. Talking of which, I’ve got one in view right now …”
Sam Luenbach had come round the side of the house wearing a white robe, his hair plastered to his head, a towel draped elegantly around his neck precisely matchin
g his mules in its rich dark blue. He looked good. Zandra’s face said so. “I thought he was partly German,” I said, wanting Luenbach to hear.
“Aw, what the hell. All of us Americans are mixtures – immigrants into the land of the free. It’s what makes the US of A great.”
“Now you wouldn’t expect your guest to understand that, Anthony,” drawled Luenbach, looking at me lazily. “The British spend so much time fighting amongst themselves, bits wanting to break free from the rest, that they don’t know what it’s like to feel one country. Americans – we may be different but we know where we belong, and we all think the same when we pass Liberty Island.”
“Me – I always think her torch looks sexy,” I said lightly. Carl threw back his head and laughed. “See, I was right! Really hot – underneath that cool English stare.”
“I’m sure you’re right, Anthony,” Luenbach said, adding, as he looked impenetrably at me, “Mr Carl’s always right.” Zandra had risen, made an almost imperceptible movement with one hand, as if her instinct was to tuck it through Luenbach’s arm, then raised it awkwardly to the back of her own neck, in a gesture that was half a scratch, half a caress. I always notice such things – the uncompleted moment that contains a residue of character and event. Theorists from as long ago as the thirties, like Edward Weston, have said that the photographer’s business is the celebration of The Moment, the important moment, the moment of perfection that comes once and is never repeated. Not just any moment, he said, but the one moment out of time that is all-revealing. I can imagine him, staring unblinkingly down into the twin-reflex, waiting for the Revelation. I suppose that is the business of art, remote from all that I have done. Yet what of the unimportant split seconds that are necessary to my trade, the motorised snapping? No photograph could have caught Zandra Carl’s little hand movement, for it was arrested before it began, yet in it I read a relationship past: her still adoring, Luenbach bored, Carl suspecting all along yet needing whatever it was Luenbach provided too much to object. All of that left behind there in the vacancy of what her hand did not do. What visual image, awaited and created, can narrate what words and memory tell? None. Yet at the same time I know that, with no record of ordinariness, no lucky snap to stop me, I impose too much on that moment, in recollection. And her hand, next to Luenbach, becomes my hand, and Annelisa’s too; the gesture a warding-off of all that was to happen.
