The Fourth of July Read online

  THE FOURTH OF JULY

  Bel Mooney

  for

  Fifi Charrington

  Contents

  Prologue: The View From The Darkroom

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  A Note on the Author

  Prologue:

  The View From The Darkroom

  I asked her once how it felt to have your legs apart, the camera poking its eye at you, the sense of being seen. She shrugged. “Don’t think about it any more. Anyways, they ain’t seeing you. They’re just looking at you. It’s, you know, different.” She paused. “Anyways, our mommas, when they had us, they lay there like that. Anybody looking up. Guess it comes to us all in the end, somehow or another.” She giggled then.

  In here I could fancy myself a prisoner, the vent a grille through which a guard might peer. The red light in the ceiling reflects from the taps: tiny, distant points of light. Some people like to paint a darkroom black but I see no point. Mine is white; I wanted a bright darkness. With the door closed, and that gentle hum, and the walls narrowing in red shadow, being in here is like going back and back, further and deeper … to the safe time before I saw, or knew, anything at all.

  I find the sheet of negatives easily, under A. (Filed there not because of her name. They changed her name, to prepare her.) On the lightbox I locate the one I want, and go through the procedure naturally, as if about to make a print. A squirt with Dustoff, then into the negative carrier of the enlarger, switch on – and the image is projected on the baseboard … a little larger I need it … There.

  It is only a shadow in a pool of light. If that sounds contradictory, it is all contradiction, this process – moving from the positive in nature to the negative here, then later (the print being made) from the negative to the positive once more. The image fixed forever as briefly seen.

  This negative blown-up is the macabre representation of a girl I barely knew. The hair looks pale, almost albino; the skin dark with blacker highlights where she sweated beneath her make-up. She is smiling: the teeth are black, the empty cave of her mouth white and endless. Around her white lips, smeared slightly, a blackish substance like blood – and the icecream held aloft like a torch of dead coal.

  But it is the eyes that are most disconcerting. Someone not trained in photographic sight would misinterpret the direction of her gaze, the whites black, the dark pupils white, the highlights black … so she seems to be gazing vacantly to one side. Me – I know exactly where she was looking. She was looking at me. No. She was looking at my lens.

  Why am I sitting here, staring at a shadow? Because I wanted to do this ever since I turned the car north back along the New Jersey Turnpike, knowing that things had changed as surely as the summer holiday landscape changes in winter. This little room now – it’s the same as four years ago, and four years before that when I first set eyes on her. Yet one change: I who would have scorned decoration in the darkroom, the functional place, the cell of chemicals and cleanliness – I have recently hung two posters on the wall. They matter to me.

  The first is for an Irving Penn exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and shows two figures, one standing, one seated, both shrouded in sacking, like dummies used to be in shop windows in the time of modesty. Look closely and you see the black hoods are veils, a hint of jewellery visible underneath. No faces; I put them there because they have no faces. They are Moroccan women of course, but I see those hooded creatures as faceless victims, ready for execution.

  The second poster came from Paris, for an exhibition held at the Musée de l’Elysée, called ‘Anatomies’. It shows what must have been a disturbing erotic photograph in 1881, when it was taken. A naked woman reclines on a curious artificial structure, her body thrown sharply to the right, both arms folded behind her head, so that her breasts are taut. The face is not pretty – a broad peasant face with full lips. Frowning slightly, her eyes closed, she does not look at peace. Why should she? She is being photographed. All about her, one fold of it pulled to cover her thighs and pubic hair in an attempt at modesty, is a delicate, gauzy fabric – a stole stuck all about with little, shining stars.

  In negative the stars would be black, like the light in Annelisa’s eyes.

  Chapter One

  The first time I met Annelisa Kaye we were sharing a room at the Versailles Palace Hotel at Miami Beach. We had never met, but I am sure I had come across her pictures. Who had not seen her pictures?

  (The answer to that is easy, in a sense. Housewives in their kitchens; preachers thundering from their pulpits to the moral majority which recognises evil on sight; children smiling up at their fathers’ automatic cameras; and all the rest of those who might define their own innocence as not having viewed her. Yet I think they all had, even in their darkest and most private imaginations … they had looked at Annelisa Kaye. Even the little sons of those fathers … entering her with tentative horror, as into a forbidden place.)

  To be truthful, I detested the idea of sharing the hotel bedroom with this girl, although there was no choice. So that first night I stared with some contempt, mingled with astonishment, as the woman from small-town Nebraska, the pin-up, the cheap fantasy of millions of red-blooded, all-American men, went through her rituals.

  I watched. I saw her too, as I had just inspected those photographs.

  First she took off the auburn hair which swung in thick glossy curls down to her shoulders, revealing, by this self-inflicted scalping, a small head of close-cropped, brown straight hair. Next she spent twenty minutes peeling off eyelashes like broken spiders, and wiping, scraping, rubbing the thick but expert make-up from her features, revealing at the end (as a circus clown uncovers his anonymity) a scrubbed round face of standard prettiness. Then I watched as, with no trace of self-consciousness, she tugged and wriggled from tight white trousers, tossed the flesh-coloured, lacy push-up bra on the bed, and hauled a strange object from her suitcase. I was reminded briefly of handcuffs.

  “Here goes,” sighed Annelisa, kneeling on the floor.

  For thirty minutes, or maybe longer (it seemed interminable), I stared as the image, the fantasy, the Handmaiden, grunted and puffed her way through a set of rhythmical exercises designed to improve her bust.

  Next day, Anthony Carl explained it to me with a short laugh. “She wants to be an actress,” he said. “She wants the biggest parts.”

  Four years later, when I met Annelisa again in New Jersey, I saw in the first instant that her bosom was now enormous. She had given up her exercises, abandoned the U-Fitt patent chest expander, thrown away the Perma massage cream, and paid for a course of silicone injections. Or at least, as I discovered, Anthony Carl had paid for them. On the beach, that Fourth of July weekend, I could not take my eyes from Annelisa’s breasts: enormous, rock-hard golden globes which bulged above and below her bikini top like melons not ripe for picking.

  She saw me looking once and shrugged. “What can you do, honey? That’s what they like. That’s what you gotta give ‘em.”

  Annelisa was not her real name. Giggling over champagne, one steamy night in Miami that first time, she had confessed the truth. “Why, I’m just plain old Annie K. Cvach,” she told me. “But I mean to say, honey, whoever heard of a sex goddess called Annie K. Cvach? Turn the guys off figuring out how to say it. Like, just hand me the Czech dictionary, baby, and then we’ll get down to it!” She laughed that odd, hiccoughing laugh I can hea
r now.

  She explained how she and Anthony Carl had sat together for a couple of hours, trying to think of a suitable name, an exciting name, “a name with a come-on to it, as well as, you know, like, some mystery too”. A name to appear beneath all the softish-focus, hard-headed picture sets which Carl’s star photographer took of her, the pictures which won her the title. At last Anthony’s mother, Emmeline Carl, had wandered past, carrying a huge steak in a dish for the alsatian.

  “Why, Annie dear, what’s your Momma’s name?” she asked. Annie flinched. She did not want her mother brought into it. Still, always obedient, she replied, “Lisa.”

  “Well, there you are, dear. You’re Annie, she’s Lisa, and you got a cute little initial in the middle there. Run them together and it’s … Annelisa Kaye. How about that?”

  Anthony Carl jumped to his feet to throw an arm around his mother’s shoulders, not minding the blood from the meat which dripped on his cream silk trousers.

  “See? I always tell folks that Mom is the cleverest woman in the world. She’s given you a name, baby. You just been born again!”

  Telling me the story, Annelisa laughed and fingered the gold chain that she wore, with the tiny initials A.K. suspended from it, and a diamond between them. “He gave me this to celebrate, Barbara – ain’t it cute? He’s real good to me, real kind. You know? He’s gonna make me a real big name, he says. My pictures, they’ve been seen by everybody, he says, talked about by just everybody. And he’s seeing a producer next week … He says he can fix it so’s the readers vote me Handmaiden of the Year – that’s five thousand dollars and a car!” She was breathless; her eyes gleamed. “I never did learn to drive, but who cares?”

  All the time she touched the chain, turning the initials, with their little squashed diamond, over and over in her fingers. That chain was never off her neck, not even four years later in New Jersey, when she pulled and pulled at it like worry beads, and I thought it must surely snap under the strain.

  Anthony Carl’s magazine, Emperor, made him a multimillionaire in four or five years. That was why I met him in the first place. The Sunday Post had commissioned a profile of him, sending one of its best feature writers to sit at his feet and note down his views on women, drugs, pornography, and the importance of the American nuclear deterrent. Anthony Carl always had much to say about the Free World, and there was usually the hint of a catch in his voice when he did.

  I was in New York at the time, so the picture editor rang me from London, and asked me to fly down to Miami Beach to photograph Carl. “You know the kind of thing, love … love,” he told me thinly down the line, the transatlantic echo giving his voice an eerie, sing-song quality. “Get the bloke lolling by the pool with lots of girls … girls. If one or two of them are topless, well great, but nothing tacky. Make it stylish … stylish.”

  “Colour?” I asked, hearing my own mournful echo too.

  “‘Course, it’s for the Magazine. Er … on second thoughts, forget the topless … less.” There was a pause. “Is that okay, love? Got it … otit .. otit?”

  Naturally, Anthony Carl was amused by me, so much so that he invited me to stay for a couple of extra days as his guest. He liked my accent, he said, and introduced me to the members of his entourage as if I were a freakish child who showed precocious talent. “Hey, you haven’t met Barbara Rowe. She’s our British photographer. I tell you, I have my picture taken some, and they don’t come much more professional than this little lady!” The writer had gone; there was no one to witness my performance, and so I waved my telephoto lens like an outsize phallus and smiled until my cheek muscles ached. I felt that I would never stop smirking, that the wind would shift its direction and the inane, ingratiating look remain fixed on my face for all time, as a reminder of how easily I could be bought. Feeling above everything and everyone around me, I knew it was not often I was offered three free days in Miami Beach, and thought it worth some charm. Like those simple snapshots you take of people’s children, or themselves, to please them, knowing that you will then be able to photograph their damp and peeling homes, or deformed parents without protest. Transactions – I have known them, done them, until I cannot distinguish any longer between what I want to do and what I know I ought to want to do, knowing only that I have to go on taking the pictures, free of charge. Free, that is, to me.

  Carl had insisted that we delay the shoot until his “best girl” arrived. I was to share her twin-bedded room, as the hotel was full when Carl extended his invitation. My first sight of Annelisa was daunting, and I reached immediately for the Nikon, noting with some satisfaction how she registered this involuntary movement and thrust one shoulder forward, her mouth in a neat pout. She was over six feet tall in the five-inch-heeled sandals, and wore a designer trouser suit in white studded with silver. A white stetson crowned thick auburn hair, which I guessed was not her own. Beneath the heavy make-up, though, her face was that of a cheerleader, broad and enthusiastic.

  This was the “best girl”, smiling at me with perfect white porcelains.

  “Hi, Anthony tells me we’re gonna be roomies for a couple of days,” she said, in that odd staccato which (although I did not know it at the time) betrayed her origins.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I said.

  “Mind? I think it’s a great idea. It’ll keep that creep David out of my room.”

  “David?”

  “Anthony’s driver. He used to be my boyfriend. Once, when I got started, He still wants to be, but he’s real small-time stuff, you know?” I nodded, but she needed no response. “Hey, is it true, that you’re a real big lady photographer, back in Britain?” I nodded and, when she asked me who I worked for, started to describe my life, using the broadest strokes of course – polaroids of my days which faded as the images reached the air. She was not interested. Soon she interrupted me to exclaim, “Hey, Babs, did anybody ever tell you what a cute accent you have?” Even then I could not be angry with her. I simply despised her a little, yet thought it befitted me to be kind, since the big dumb broad (looking at her it was easy to let your interior monologue run into Chandler) could not possibly know that nobody ever shortens my name. I would not be harsh – simply add it to the rest of her ignorance. For, under the wig, the stetson and the make-up, Annelisa looked so eager to please that she reminded me, even then, of a little dog, a mongrel, my mother once had, which always ran to meet me yelping out its affection, its desperate need to be stroked.

  She blushed a little when later she showed me her photographs in the current issue of Emperor. “You know, Babs, sometimes I look at them and think it can’t be me – not really me, you know? – because when I was a kid I wouldn’t even take my clothes off in front of my mother. But … well, you know what it’s like.” Her voice tailed off. I looked at the magazine open before me, and wondered if I could possibly know what it it like. Doing it for money, of course, what else? But that? Of course I had seen the stuff before, but realised with a small shock that I had never stood in the same room, having a friendly conversation with a woman whose image also lay before me, legs outsplayed for the lens.

  – Annelisa lying on a velvet chaise-longue, a lace camisole slipping off her shoulders, undone at the front, the pose foreshortened so that her head, slightly out of focus, lolled soft and dreamy in the distance, whilst between her thighs, at the centre of the composition, the inner folds of her vulva opened like the bruised petals of an old rose. “(Emperor is proud to present, for the first time as Handmaiden, Annelisa Kaye, an old-fashioned girl who likes velvet and lace, and other old-fashioned sensations.”)

  – Annnelisa wearing nothing but cowboy boots on all fours in a pile of hay, a stock whip lying beside her, hair tumbling over her face so that little of it could be seen, her suntanned rump thrust towards the camera and her hand thrust backwards between her legs, holding herself open, one pink-varnished fingernail pointing delicately up towards the just-concealed anus. (“Twenty-year-old Annelisa grew up in Nebraska where folks are
still wild and woolly, and girls soon learn the pioneering breeding methods, down on the ol’ farm.”)

  – Annelisa in a marble bath, hair pinned up roughly, her body covered in foam, one leg thrown carelessly over the side of the bath so that she might the more easily finger herself, her other hand toying with a nipple. The expression on her face was vague and dreamy again, a state beyond sexuality, more an ecstasy of narcissism, so powerful and all-consuming that you could imagine that body wasting away by its own mirrored reflection, and dwindling into a small new flower by a pool. (“Annelisa says that she likes powerful men who will give her all the good things. ‘Jewels and marble halls and furs and silks are what I go for. A real man knows that a lady needs to be pampered. But if I can’t find a man to do it for me, you can be sure I’ll pamper myself.’”)

  – Annelisa in black suspenders, fishnet stockings and scarlet high-heeled shoes, one leg bent so that the stiletto looked about to penetrate her. (“Annelisa says she has a split personality. Half of her longs for love, the other half dreams of a violent stud who will take her by force, ignoring her cries of pain.”)

  – Annelisa bare-breasted on a football pitch, in the act of pulling down a tiny pair of white shorts, pubic hair exposed, smile wide and glossy, eyes shadowed by a plastic shield. (“This all-American co-ed loves to party, as long as her men know the games she likes to play. She makes sure she has at least two early nights a week, to keep herself fresh for her favorite sports. Annelisa’s ambition, she says, is to take on the Mets. All of them.”)

  The worst shot of all was the centrefold itself. Annelisa contorted, so that her eyes, peering over the edge of a cushion, heavily ringed with black, stared out from a page that seemed only to consist of thighs and hair and labia. Her breasts were hidden, and her arms too, buried deep in the cushion; there were no romantic accoutrements like pearl necklaces or frilly garters. One leg raised uncomfortably in the air, Annelisa sprawled, revealing her pink clitoris in close-up. The photograph was captioned, “Miss Annelisa Kaye – the Emperor’s Handmaiden of the Month.”