Christine Gillespie
DOUBLE EXPOSURE
In 1996, a picture was published in the "West Australian" weekend magazine: John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the "Morning Room" of their New York City apartment, December 8th 1980: By Annie Leibovitz. (Cover: "Rolling Stone" New York January 1981). The paper received a deluge of hate mail and outraged comments.
1996
I tore the picture out of the magazine and pinned it up, a map tack by John Lennon's buttocks, one below his curved foot and one either side of Yoko's hair that spread over the edge of the page on my notice board. I gasped when I first saw the picture. fifteen years ago. Now I gasped again. To see a man, looking like that, a human so soft, coiled around the strong, dark figure of a woman, a man without a shell, easily squashed.
Disgusting. Pornographic. That picture is disgusting, howled the white men of the West. That John Lennon is reptilian. Abasing himself publicly with a woman. An Asian woman. That photographer, that Annie Liebowitz, is nothing but a pornographer. Cheap thrills, they screamed, that's all it is. And look at her, that Yoko—she's Asian. Asian bitch. Slut.
The picture of John and Yoko is on my mind. I heave a box out of the hall cupboard from behind the coats and umbrellas. I flip through my old records.
Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band has a cover like a class photo at school. There's Marion Brando wearing that bikie cap in the third row, W.C.
Fields, Fatty Arbuckle, Karl Marx. Is that Oscar Wilde in the sun glasses? I can't remember. The Beatles are bandsmen in psychedelic yellow, blue, pink, red uniforms behind their bass drum and tuba. There is a wine stain above John's head, just to the left of Brando. Twenty years ago today, Sergeant Pepper told the band to play ... A chianti stain, the cheap red from Agostino's in Swanston Street, for sure, out of the round flagon with the ridged glass. Twenty eight years ago, we tossed our long hair, smoothed our velvet flares, smoked and danced and played Sergeant Pepper and made love not war.
I slip the record back in the box. There's a magazine sticking out. "Rolling Stone" January 1981. The pages are dog-eared. Xiang gave it to me when he
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left for Malaysia. John and Yoko are on the cover, their flesh washed out grey pallid on faded cheap newsprint. There is a crease under John's buttock, like the joint of a kid's soft toy. Something drops down from a hook at the back of the cupboard, a short skirt, very short, panels of green and pink suede with four studs down the front.
1967
I sat in the smoky VW, tugged the pink and green skirt down and brushed ash off my long grey suede boots. I was puffing on a joint in the garage with my husband and the other couple, gulping smoke into my lungs and looking at the motor mower in pieces on the bench and the painting easel draped with cobwebs in the corner.
Do you feel anything?
No.
We'll get stoned on just the air in here.
The motor mower is starting to pulsate.
We giggled, heard the guests arriving through the side gate and scrambled out of the car.
It was the other husband's birthday. We were stoned, loose-limbed and bold, smiling, dancing. His wife gave him the Sergeant Pepper album for his birthday. Twenty years ago today ..., A Day in the Life, strange sounds, strings plucked, small drum thudding.
These instruments?
Sitar, tabla: Indian. Ravi Shankar.
Who?
Ravi Shankar. Sitar, stringed instrument.
I danced, laughed and weakly clutched the arm of the other husband, spun around, popped open the suede skirt. For the Benefit of Mr Kite, there will be a show tonight ... He shook his hips and watched as I peeled off the pink clingy top with the big dark green stripes. I pulled the other husband's tee shirt up over his shoulders and head and wrapped it around my waist; it was ribbed,
purple and orange stripes. He wrapped my skirt around his hips and we danced on, danced close and looked at each other's necks, shoulders and throats.
Twenty years ago today
Two months later, I wandered through the medina in Marrakesh. My husband took me there, away from danger.
1967
Clouds hung low over the old city wall that reared up beside me. Two crows flapped black over the thin strip of sky. Cark. Cark. My husband was gone when I turned around, lost in the crowd, vanished down one of the three winding alleys that forked out before me in the medina at Marrakesh. I had stopped to feel the texture of a hand-loomed long tunic, a cream fabric like a glossy linen with bright blue braid. I looked around. Dark sky, ochre wall, women swathed in purdah and men in djellabas moving up and down the narrow alley. A brown and cream sleeve blocked out the clouds. Men in long woollen djellabahs were crowding around, several of them, speaking softly in their throats. A glossy-haired youth with a thin growth on his upper lip grinned, clutched my arm and lifted my teeshirt. The others were silent. I wore no bra. An older man pushed him aside with a curt order, grabbed my bare breast and squeezed it hard. The father, it must have been, claiming patriarchal rights. There was a muttering among the men. The young man smirked and looked at my breast in the hand of his father. White, he said, white. I wore no bra, no shell to encase me. I stood still. The men leaned back a little and stared at my bare knees, suntanned from the warm weeks on the beach in Agadir. A drop of rain fell on my breast and I shuddered. Then, I panted and stretched up to see her through the crowd of men pressing around me. A woman in purdah, eyes heavy with kajal hurried by. I cried out to the woman just as the crows flew back, cark, cark. The hand on my breast moved as the man with the grey moustache looked down at my legs and the woman disappeared through a doorway in the wall. A breach in the wall. I drew in a fast, ragged breath, crouched down, groaned and bolted through the legs, across the alley and through the doorway, through the big drops of rain. I grunted and ran to catch up with the woman in the black gown and veil picking her way over the rough stones.
The rain swept with me across from the North towards the Atlas mountains, squally, sudden, towards the Moroccan woman in the black robe who had stopped against the wall for shelter. I tripped on the rutted ground and grabbed her arm as we looked back at the gap in the wall where the men stood and watched.
The Moroccan woman leaned forward, took the hand of the foreign woman in hers, turned it over and studied it closely, tracing the curve of the index finger.
The foreign woman still panted. The Moroccan woman's eyes were large, with black lines drawn across the lids and along the lower rim just under the lashes, the only outlines and contours of her visible to the world. Then, she spread her hand out before the foreign woman, took the white index finger in hers and moved the nail around to trace the fine lines of lacy henna crossing and re- crossing the life line and the love line on her own hand.
A neat young man in jeans on a motor scooter appeared at the top of the track.
He swooped down towards me, staring curiously at the silent men by the door and the two women against the iron red wall. The white woman waved and he stopped. My husband. Mon man. Je suis perdue. Still panting with fear.
The foreign woman sat side-saddle on the Frenchman's bike clutching the bottom of her denim miniskirt. The figure in black watched over her veil, her hennaed hands still spread out before her as the two foreigners sailed away Qver the hill. Just then, the mullah began chanting the afternoon prayer from the loudspeaker of the mosque inside the wall. The tee shirt of the foreign woman was wet and clung to her breasts.
She had been saved. She would stay for the rest of the day in the hotel, the curtains drawn. No looking. No touching. She would have a bath now, scrub herself, wrap herself tightly in the white sheet and wear different clothes tomorrow and forget the white breast in the man's hand. Scrubbed skin and a long tunic with long sleeves.
1981
Most people remember where they were the day John Lennon was shot. I can see myself in Carlton, strolling past the iron fence of the cemetery and down our street. I was living in a terrace in Amess Street with five other people after I split up with my husband. I snapped a jasmine blossom from the vine on the fence. Across the road, the big industrialist held a cue waiting for his shot at the upstairs billiard table. I stumbled over a bike in the hall, dim after the December sun and smelled the old carpet and rain coats.
Imagine all the people, living for today. The music was loud.
Oh, oh, oh oh. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. John Lennon.
Xiang sat at the table, his delicate hands hanging over the curved gold line around the edge of his guitar.
I hope some day, you'll join us. And the world will be as one, sang John Lennon.
He's dead, Xiang said.
Who?
He nodded his head at the large speaker.
John. Someone shot him. Just now.
Xiang strummed the chords of the song and I cried.
Just before dark, a few weeks later, I took a Coolabah cask and a couple of wine glasses outside to have a drink with Xiang. The cicadas vibrated shrilly. A red sock on the hills hoist brushed my forehead. I saw him kneeling on the concrete, eyes closed, his hands moving in large sweeps from the base of his plant up to the tips of the leaves. He opened his eyes. "1 am massaging my dope plant," he said solemnly.
I poured two glasses of red and splashed the airline ticket lying on the concrete.
Xiang was flying back to Singapore tomorrow. His student visa had run out and immigration would not renew it.
A copy of "Rolling Stone" lay under the dope plant. I flicked through. COVER PHOTOGRAPH: John Lennon and Yoko Ono in the "Morning Room" of their New York City apartment, December 8th 1980: By Annie Leibovitz. There was a picture of John coiled, clinging to Yoko. There was another shot of him inside, lying on the bed with his guitar, dreaming, he said, watching the park change through his window.
Yoko, seven years older than Lennon ... a grim-faced demeanour ... not your usual rock superstar's foxy lady, I read.
Xiang's delicate hands hung over the edge of his guitar.
Dependency between a man and a woman may be a scary concept, I read, theirs was always on public display.
Xiang ran his hand over the cover of the magazine. Poor Yoko, he said, poor Yoko. His fingers stroked a minor chord on the guitar. Will you sleep with me tonight, Antoinette? he asked.
Xiang put on a record from the White Album and turned it up loud as I slid into his bed. He lifted the sheet, looked at me, sighed, then kissed the knob of my collar bone, at the base of my neck and then, gently, he kissed the other side.
Your body is beautiful, lovers have said, running their eyes over the curves of my flesh, in moments of passion. I smile and look down, my gaze diving like a small plane low over the landscape of my flesh. These days, I pull the sheet up slowly, white folds like cumulus clouds and cover my breasts.
1996
John's body on the cover of the magazine is pale bronze, a warm patina of immortality fifteen years on, different from the palely cadaverous print image on the cover of Rolling Stone, printed a few weeks after his killing. The man is wrapped like a tiny ape around its mother.
Reptilian, screamed my countrymen when they saw it, their spit spraying onto the photograph. Their pens dug into the paper, tearing the white page as they scratched out their words—Asian bitch. Filthy Asian bitch. How, how, they wanted to know, their faces set like concrete, how could that John Lennon, a white man just like us, degrade himself with that woman, that Asian woman?
In the picture, John is naked and Yoko has clothes on, jeans—you can see the brown stitching on her fly—and a black long-sleeved top, so modestly dressed.
Her eyes are half-closed and there is a shine on the highest point of her left cheek bone. His nose, lips and chin curve around the other side of her face and tl3ere's a thin dark triangle of shadow where the delicate line of her square jaw curves above his bicep.
John is shelled like an oyster on a cream plate. Yoko is covered. Yoko is a strange woman. Yoko is Asian. Yoko looks past him, as if she can see something coming. People look at her and she is not safe.
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