The Honeymoon, page 9
“Have you come to ask me out?” she asked. One of the older men working further down the counter glanced at me over his glasses and then looked disapprovingly at Annie. I looked at my shoes.
“Have you become shy since I’ve seen you last? You weren’t shy the other night.”
“Did you get home all right?” I asked.
“No trouble,” she smiled confidently.
“I should have found you a cab.”
“No,” she picked up a large slab of the smoked ham that I like so much and dropped it on the stainless steel slicer. She wore plastic gloves and held one hand on the meat as it slid back and forth over the spinning blade and in the other she caught each ribbon of meat and piled them neatly on a piece of wax paper. “So where are you taking me?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Where do you take your girlfriends?”
“How about the Ritz for tea?” I asked. It had leapt into my mind. I had been there only once with Maureen and we hadn’t enjoyed it. They made me buy an expensive red necktie in one of the hotel shops and I spent the time miserable, scratching at my neck as Maureen looked around the room critiquing the unpleasant decor. “You’d think they could at least get some inoffensive flowers,” I remember her saying. But it had come to mind, and I could think of nothing else.
Annie wrapped up an enormous lump of ham and wrote a price on the paper with her thick black pen. When she tried to put the pen back in her pocket, she still had the cap between her lips and added another stripe to the bouquet.
“Here you are,” she said when she had recapped the pen. She had charged me only fifty pence for an amount of food that should have been far more expensive. “That would be nice,” she said. She smiled for the first time unconfidently. She looked down the counter towards the older men slicing cheese and filling paper cups with black or purple olives. She removed her plastic glove, wiped her fingers against her white coat and placed her hand open on the counter. I put my hand in hers and she stroked my skin with her nails. “This evening?” she ventured.
Ten
Maureen tried to be supportive of my study of photogra phy. She was responsible for my initial interest in the subject. She gave me my first camera when I was ten. She gave me my first set of charcoal pencils and a sketchpad a few years before, but I never took to sketching. It was my responsibility to document our travels together and between us we have a fairly detailed photographic record of most of the places we went and of our own respective physical changes as the years went by. I have, in fact, used some of those pictures in an attempt to accurately describe these events as I have put them down. She brought me that camera that I used on Annie when she came back through London from Berlin. She gave me a lesson in its mechanism sitting on my little bed. She showed me, just as the market vendor had shown her, how the film was loaded, using the empty roll of the last film to wind on the newly exposed film. She wore a hat with a slight veil covering her eyes. It was one of her favorites. I had seen her wear it many times before, but I remember noticing for the first time, as I sat beside her, how absurdly out of style it was. Through the veil, she looked down at the camera in her lap, trying to remember the market vendor’s instructions. She let her fingers move over the camera, hoping that they would remember (when she could not) the maneuver she had so easily performed standing at his stall in Berlin. “You’ll have to figure it out yourself,” she said handing me the camera in two pieces. She had lost patience with reattaching the back. “You’ll need a tripod, he said. When you can’t use one, you hang it around your neck.”
She got up from the bed and with great ceremony lifted the strap over my head. I had not yet managed to get the back closed. “You have to hold very still. This isn’t like one of those modern ones. You have to be more careful, but ultimately, you’ll get better pictures.” She was trying to convince me just as the vendor had convinced her. She could always be convinced that something older, something that had survived was, as evidenced merely by its survival, better. “Try it on me,” she smiled. She crossed the room and leaned on the win-dowsill where she struck a contemplative pose, turning partially towards the traffic outside.
“You can’t stand there,” I said as I continued to fiddle with the camera. “I don’t have a light meter, you’ll come out silhouetted.”
“Where then?” she asked.
I guided her across the room and had her sit at my table. “Sit there,” I said. “Pull the chair out, and cross your legs.” She followed my instructions. She wore a short pink skirt. “Put the light on,” I said and walked into the kitchen. I took a saucer from the cupboard and put it down in front of her. “Have a cigarette.”
She retrieved her handbag from the bed. She took out a packet of cigarettes and a lipstick before returning to her chair. “Are you gonna make me look like an old film star?” she asked. She sucked in her cheeks. “They used to have their teeth pulled for those cheekbones, those valleys.”
“Take off the hat,” I said.
“Do you think?” she asked.
“I do.”
She unpinned her hat and lay it down on the table beside her. She opened her shirt one button further and adjusted her necklace so it was visible.
“Don’t move,” I commanded.
“No,” she agreed. She turned her head, showing only slightly more than her profile to the camera, and opened her eyes very wide as if she were a little innocent thing lost in the world.
We took the whole roll, twelve pictures in all. She was very serious about each pose, trying a different expression for each one. When we were finished she was in a very good mood, and afterwards, she offered to take me to lunch.
As we stepped out onto the street she adjusted her hat and unfolded the veil down over her eyes. “Why do you wear that hat?” I asked. “It’s a little silly.”
“You don’t want me to be recognized do you?” she asked.
She was not as supportive about Annie. I told Maureen over the phone that I had met someone. “Oh good,” she said. She let out a tremendous sigh, as if it was a great relief for her. “Oh, Gordy, wonderful news. Just wonderful.”
When Maureen next came through London, just before Easter, the three of us had a casual lunch together in a pizzeria facing Hyde Park. Maureen had spent the morning in the Serpentine Gallery. A show on contemporary British sculptors, Maureen explained to Annie, had brought her back through London. “I’m doing a book, and this fits quite neatly into the sequence.” Annie listened attentively. “Some of your country’s finest sculptors are there at the moment.”
Annie nodded. “I think you’re very fortunate to be able to travel like you do.” She smiled confidently.
“Have you been to see the exhibit?” Maureen wanted to know.
“No,” said Annie.
“I think that’s a shame.” Maureen turned to me.
“I don’t know much about art,” said Annie. “I appreciate it, but it’s not one of my interests, I’m afraid. I don’t have the time.”
“Annie loves to read,” I interjected.
“I work,” said Annie matter-of-factly.
Maureen stared at Annie for a moment. “You have an interesting face,” said Maureen.
“Do I?” asked Annie.
“In America people tend to judge a face by what it isn’t: if someone’s nose is not too big, eyes not too small, lips not too flat, they qualify as good looking, when there’s really nothing to them at all. Blink your eyes and you’ve forgotten them.” Maureen closed her eyes to show how this could happen. She kept them closed longer than I expected. “You have an interesting face,” she said and finally opened her eyes again.
“Well, thank you,” said Annie.
“It’s meant to be a compliment.”
“I think you have a beautiful face,” said Annie.
Maureen waved away the compliment as if Annie had offered to refill her wineglass.
“I can see you in Gordon,” added Annie.
On the way home, Annie was quiet and then, as if she had considered it for a long time, she announced that she liked Maureen. Maureen responded by letter: I don’t object to the fact that she’s not good-looking. It’s her ambition, Gordy. It’s palpable beneath her English-rose skin. She’s too damned eager to please and will drive you mad. Trust me . . . Love your old gal, Maureen.
Maureen’s letter did not surprise me. During lunch I had watched Maureen stare at Annie. She watched as Annie pushed her hair back and slipped, with nimble fingers, a few loose stands beneath her hair clip. I saw Maureen’s eyes slide dangerously across Annie’s soft face, and down her neck, and I wanted desperately to brush them off. To stamp on those ugly thoughts like insects. I watched Maureen look at Annie’s hand, which she had the rather annoying habit of sometimes resting on the table, lifeless, beside her plate as she ate. As I watched, I knew that Maureen was busy making ugly calculations.
“Ambition,” I said into the telephone, “is not the same as wanting to please.”
“Same church, different pew,” said Maureen.
“Maureen,” I said. “Be nice to her.” There was a long pause. “Maureen,” I said again. And then she promised she would treat her kindly.
Eleven
I remember a summer day walking in New York long before I had ever laid eyes on Annie. It was unusual for Maureen and me to be in New York in the summertime. Maureen did not like the heat. She spent her days sitting silently in one of the old chairs in the darkened apartment, as if the temperature made it impossible to read. In the late afternoons she walked across town into the park towards one of the museums. She considered this a great effort. When she returned in the evenings she collapsed on top of her bed for a nap and called out for something cold to drink.
We met for dinner in the apartment every night at eight-thirty. We ate something she had picked up on her way home or else she asked the cleaner, Delores, to make a tortilla and leave it in the refrigerator. She claimed that Delores made better tortilla than Maureen had ever tasted in Spain.
During that hot summer, I was free to move around the city by myself during the days. I had spent the afternoon in question browsing the bookstores along Fourth Avenue. There used to be a great number of them, many with fairly good selections of antique photographs. I once collected them and don’t know why I stopped. I still have them. One of my favorites is a complete book of Eadweard Muybridge’s stopped motion pictures. They have a vaguely erotic quality about them: pairs of flesh-white wrestlers with faces frozen in exertion and horses floating above the earth with rippling chests.
I worked my way from Fourteenth Street down to Ninth Street going in and out of stores. I was sixteen and had a very specific sort of picture in mind. I ended up buying a collection of German semi-nudes from the 1920’s. The pictures are attributed to “Anonymous.” I remember the book because its racy red cover and black print were what initially caught my attention. It was entitled “Frau Allein” or, Woman Alone, and looked like a political manifesto. The pictures themselves interested me because of their alluringly amateur quality. It seemed to me that the subjects (housewife-types of different shapes and sizes) knew the photographer intimately. The pictures seemed to have been taken in the women’s homes, as if he had come around and rung the bell and had, over tea, persuaded these women to take off their clothes or merely open their blouses, or lift their skirts.
I had the book under my arm. I was between Fourth Avenue and Broadway walking along in the desolation of the late-afternoon city heat. The sky, gleaming and expansive at the western end of the island, was a blinding slab of blue, like the reflection off a boat’s hull above the Hudson. From behind me I heard a series of muffled collisions, as if the largest pedestrians had begun forcefully walking into one another. I turned to find the street behind me almost empty, the last remaining people darting out of sight into doorways. I think for just an instant I imagined it had something to do with the book I had bought. Until I noticed the sky. It had become a mossy-gray behind me. I had never seen such a sky. An instant later, the raindrops, whose muffled collisions I had heard against the metal rooftops, made it to the street. My clothes stuck to my skin, the red binding of my book bled in my hand and my feet slipped in their shoes.
I ran across the street and took shelter with another man in a doorway and together we watched the downpour, the street flowing like a river, sweeping the city of its refuse.
It was like that: I realized my feeling for Annie in an instant—like weather.
When I had known Annie for just a few months, we took our first of several trips to Dorset for a visit with Sasha, her older sister. She lived in a small village, a twenty-minute walk from one of the most pleasant and tranquil rivers in the world. Their Mother had come from there.
We set off from the station on a warm Friday afternoon. Along the way we picked up schoolchildren at almost every stop. The corridors were lined with them gazing out the windows at the green fizz of passing landscape and blowing cigarette smoke through the small opening at the top of the glass. Games of flirtation were played along each corridor: school bags stolen; sweet wrappers flicked back and forth; bursts of cruel laughter. While I was only a few years older than some of these disheveled boys with their shirts hanging out or the girls with their pleated skirts and perforated knee socks, I felt a generation apart. After all, I was with Annie.
At the station, I held both bags in one hand and Annie’s hand in the other as we waited on the platform. She stood up on her tiptoes and searched amongst the crowd. The station was quite full, mostly with commuters and noisy school children. They passed around us: the commuters, silent and determined, on their way to the car park and the students still buzzing from the pleasures of the train journey on the way to the bus stop. No one seemed to be waiting for anyone like us.
“Do you see her?” asked Annie. She scanned the station anxiously and then looked up at me. “Well, do you?”
I told Annie that I had never seen her sister so I didn’t know what I was looking out for, but when I saw Sasha, I recognized her instantly. She looked like Annie, only older, a little taller and not as pretty. She emerged from the crowd smiling with a self-deprecating curve of the mouth. Annie released my hand and rushed across the platform. Sasha opened her cardigan to receive her and they embraced passionately.
We drove to Sasha’s small house in her powder-blue Volkswagen Polo. The car made pained sounds of determination from a place directly beneath my seat. I sat in the back smothered with luggage and several bags of shopping as Annie talked continually, interrupted only by bursts of not entirely natural laughter. Sasha watched the road and occasionally smiled. Once or twice, I caught her glancing at me in the rear-view mirror. I smiled and she looked away.
After I had put our bags on the guest bed I returned to the kitchen. Annie had gone to wash-up and Sasha and I were left alone. She rested her hands in the pockets of her over-sized cardigan where she fiddled with a collection of moist tissues. She had the habit of dabbing at the corners of her eyes and then blotting her forehead, as if she were an old woman suffering from cataracts and hot flashes when really she was just thirty-two. She seemed depleted and unhappy. Wilted with resignation, it seemed to me, but Annie said that in fact it was stubbornness, a lack of compromise that had hurt her sister.
We stood there watching the slow kettle. A row of souvenir mugs stood along the windowsill behind the sink. In each she had arranged a few dried flowers. Through the windows, I could see her well-tended garden. She was obviously very proud of it so I told her it was lovely.
“Oh, I need a garden,” she said. “I don’t know how you two live in that filthy city.”
“I’ve always lived in a city,” I told her. “Perhaps I should give country living a try one day.”
“You should,” she said and offered me a biscuit.
“I imagine it takes some getting used to.”
“Yes. I suppose so. But then you begin to notice things in a way you didn’t notice them before and you can really feel time passing.”
“I’m not sure I’d want that,” I said.
“No. Most people don’t,” she said.
Annie returned and we all sat down at the table for tea. Sasha warmed her hands around her mug despite the double-glazed windows that made the room almost uncomfortably warm. “Annie says that you’re a photographer?”
“I’m hoping to be,” I said.
“He’s very good,” said Annie. “He’ll take some pictures of you.” She turned towards me. “Won’t you?”
I’d never known Annie to be the excited one, the organizer. “If you won’t mind,” I said.
Sasha nodded, looking down into her tea. It was an indulgent, motherly gesture, as if she were not quite listening.
“Get your camera,” said Annie. I don’t think I’ve ever mentioned Annie’s mother. She disappeared when Annie was six and Sasha was twelve and left them in the charge of their father. She wrote birthday cards that first year, postmarked from Denmark and was not heard from again until she died seven years later in Leeds, of all places.
“Now?” I asked.
“There’s no need to take pictures of me,” protested Sasha.
“I want some,” said Annie. “I hardly have any pictures of you and they’re all from about ten years ago.”
“Well, not now,” said Sasha touching her sister’s hand. “I look awful. Not now.” Having quieted Annie, Sasha turned again to me. “You’re at Art College?” she asked, her hand still resting on Annie’s.
“Almost finished.”
