Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  ‘Well, I’m definitely changed, but I’m not sure I like what I’m turning into. It’s the Minotaur syndrome—the monster within. There’s a definite danger of becoming politically cynical—the disease of the morally bereft.’

  ‘Let me guess: you don’t believe in free will and Democrats any more?’

  ‘Try secular democracy, capitalism and satellite technology…’

  ‘Wow, is there anything left?’

  Julia smiled. ‘I dunno—reproduction, white picket fences, escapist television?’

  ‘You are changed. Next thing I know we’ll be doing baby showers and the outlet malls.’

  They had slipped into their particular banter—a humorous shorthand developed over the years. Julia loved this breezy word play; it was a grounding distraction from the pressures of her work. Apart from Klaus, Carla was Julia’s closest companion, the friend who had counselled her through the bouts of professional insecurity that, at times, had threatened to overwhelm the geneticist. Julia regularly discussed her more private and lateral theories with Carla, spilling them in an impassioned stream across the warm afternoons spent together on the back porch, margaritas in hand. The two friends functioned as emotional ballast for each other; in a city as transient and disseminated as Los Angeles, one needed such camaraderie to survive.

  ‘Unconditional friendship, it’s a hell of a burden,’ Julia joked, but Carla averted her eyes. Julia wondered what was troubling her normally resilient friend. Despite the armour of her professionalism, Carla had a tenderness that shimmered at unexpected moments—an aspect of her personality Julia had always found redeeming. But now, sensing Carla was in one of her morose moods, she decided to wait before telling her she was pregnant.

  The bleeping of Carla’s pager cut through the sun-laced air.

  ‘Great, the spa’s confirmed. We have fifteen minutes to get there.’

  As she followed Carla out of the room, Julia noticed that the portrait of Lavinia Huntington was askew. While straightening it, she caught the reflection of fingerprints glistening on the brass frame.

  They lay opposite each other in the small pine-lined sauna, so tightly wrapped in towels that Julia felt as if she had been spun into a cocoon. The steamy heat sent rivulets of sweat down her body to pool in the hollows of her collarbone, between her breasts, in her navel.

  The dim light and the scent of orange and jasmine—the droplets of oil sizzling on the grid of the steamer—gave the room a confessional intimacy, as if there would be no consequences of words spoken behind the thick pine door.

  Julia closed her eyes and felt two more large drops of sweat form and then run down either side of her face.

  Restless, Carla sat up and moved to the lower shelf. Across the room Julia’s long pale form looked like a languid marble statue. She spoke out into the steam.

  ‘It’s funny, you can feel your physical self diminishing. Heat really strips us right back to essentials.’

  Carla didn’t answer. Worried, Julia opened her eyes. ‘You still with me?’

  ‘I’m here. I’m just concentrating on sweating.’

  ‘So what’s new on your emotional horizon?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘C’mon, something must have happened in two months?’

  Fearing she might betray herself, Carla stared at the light above the door until a small red dot danced in front of her retinas.

  ‘I’ve resigned myself to a kind of self-indulgent singledom. I mean, I’ve done the usual dates but nothing’s really grabbed me…’ She paused, waiting for Julia to detect the disingenuous tone she herself heard in every word. To her amazement (and strange dismay), her friend believed her.

  ‘Don’t give up. You’ll find someone, I know you will.’

  Sudden tears welling, Carla turned her face to the pine wall. ‘I should get out now.’ As she started to stand, the heat of the wooden floors burned the soles of her feet.

  Julia rolled onto her front. ‘I killed a man.’ The words leapt out of the misty steam, incongruous and unbelievable. ‘In Afghanistan. It was in self-defence, but it was a killing nevertheless.’

  Stunned, Carla sat back on the bench. ‘Oh, Julia.’

  ‘I haven’t even told Klaus. But I need to tell someone, here in Los Angeles, just to make it real.’

  ‘How? How did it happen?’

  ‘There was this ambush, my escort and driver were killed, he pulled me out of the car…’

  ‘He?’

  ‘The assailant—he was just a kid. God knows who he thought I was—maybe some VIP he could use to trade with. He had his arm around my neck, we stumbled and I managed to wrench his knife out…’

  ‘Jesus. I would’ve been petrified with terror.’

  ‘Somehow I wasn’t—everything slowed right down, into an emotionless clarity. I did what I had to do to survive.’

  ‘Are you okay now?’

  ‘That’s the obscene part—I actually feel guilty about not being more affected. It’s frightening…’

  ‘What’s frightening?’

  ‘To know I’m capable of such detachment. I feel so ashamed, like some kind of freak. Promise you won’t tell anyone. I just want to bury the whole thing, Carla. I need to.’

  Now that Julia had said the words, confided the terrible truth, she felt a tremendous sense of relief. It wasn’t absolution—that, she knew, she would never find.

  The snow that shimmered on the peaks of the San Gabriel mountains was a rare sight and always surprised Julia. Originally from San Francisco, she still found it hard to credit Los Angeles with any innate beauty, though in reality the sprawling metropolis was veined with canyon walks that, in summer, were pungent with the scent of eucalyptus and pine, while the indigenous scrub peppered the landscaped hills with a sparse beauty. And there was a splendour to the tall palms that lined even the seediest of the downtown boulevards; their languid swaying made Julia think of seaweed undulating in an invisible sea. Mi ciudad hermosa. Julia liked to think of the city as an aging actress, whose loveliness still glimmered beneath the paint and surgery.

  Several shopping bags sat next to her in the passenger seat. They were filled with baby clothes; three cotton jumper suits, two bonnets and a tiny silver rattle. She’d also bought a book on pregnancy her gynaecologist had recommended; ironically she felt as a geneticist she knew everything scientific there was to know about the developing embryo, but little as a woman. She’d even been amazed to find herself standing outside a baby clothing store in the Beverly Center shopping mall. She knew it was rash to buy such things when she hadn’t quite finished her first trimester, but she hadn’t been able to resist the temptation. Walking in and purchasing the clothes had felt like a public declaration of her pregnancy, and her exhilaration, standing there holding the small pale blue suit, the empty feet impossibly tiny, had astounded her. Julia reached across and caressed the bags, the sense of her future comforting under her hand. She turned back to the road.

  The Lexus swept past a huge poster of the latest celebrity actor with political ambitions. His resolute jaw and gunmetal eyes made it impossible to separate the man from the action hero. None of Julia’s friends—typically nonchalant Democrats—viewed his campaign as a real threat. It all seemed too bizarre—especially the rumours that he might run for Senate the following year. Julia took him seriously, however. A secondhand comprehension of the film industry made her aware of the existence of a parallel world, a universe where the slavish worship of celebrity underpinned an aberrant pecking order. Could a man who had played a robotic killing machine run for Governor? At the dawn of the twenty-first century the cult of celebrity made anything possible and the Actor/Candidate himself embodied the great dream. Darwin would have approved, Julia observed wryly.

  Lights spluttered then glowed as the local cinema switched its sign on; while on the opposite side of the street the usual line of tourists and moviegoers queued in front of Pink’s, the famous frankfurter stall that had been in existence since the 1930s, with
its hand-painted signs reading ‘Polish Dog’, ‘Hotdog’, ‘Chili Dog’ swinging from the white wooden frame beneath which three Latinos laboured over boiling pots.

  La Brea—a wide boulevard lined with furniture stores, antique shops, and the occasional shopfront with ‘Psychic’ scrawled across the glass—was imbued with the same impermanency like many of the blocks south of Hollywood, where brick veneer mixed with a frontier-town sensibility. It was as if the ever-present awareness of catastrophe, natural or otherwise, made it impossible for the Los Angelino to ever really relax into the landscape.

  The geography of Hollywood was also an atlas of Julia’s marriage. She drove past the tapas bar where she and Klaus had had their first date and remembered how he’d given off the jittery aura of the recently arrived, defiantly un-American in his formal dress pants and linen jacket.

  Tall and big-boned, Klaus was a combination of French and German ancestry—his physique northern European; his high cheekbones, black eyes and black hair a throwback to the ancient Celts who had settled the cities of Flanders. Attractive in a feline, eagle-eyed manner, Klaus seemed to be both awed and revolted by the insatiable appetites of the entertainment industry. The son of a retired Belgian diplomat, he was fluent in English and had arrived in LA as a stringer for a small Belgian online magazine, which had recently been consumed by an international publishing house and was now compelled to extend its market and take a more popularist direction. Sending Klaus—popular for his satirical dissections of the big blockbusters—to LA had been their first strategy.

  By the time Julia met him, Klaus had managed, through both his natural charm and aloofness, to make himself a commodity at the press conferences held by the Foreign Press Club. However, his degree in philosophy and his leftwing leanings soon made him too sardonic a critic for the machinations of the promotion of celebrity; besides, Klaus had his own ambitions. Julia remembered her secret dismay when, over tapas, Klaus had confessed all of this.

  ‘I would like to be a real writer—a novelist, or failing that, a writer on one of those TV series about lawyers and crime. Maybe set in Antwerp,’ he confided in his curious Flemish accent, which made Julia imagine the consonants being ironed flat as they fell out of his mouth.

  Regardless of her reluctance to become involved with someone who appeared so directionless at thirty, Julia had smiled encouragingly then drunk another two glasses of chardonnay, while secretly trying to fathom whether there was a girlfriend back in Europe, and, if not, what hidden (and potentially horrendous) emotional debris could this very attractive single man be carrying? Despite her reservations, Klaus made her laugh and his attentions were flattering. Having just won her first laboratory appointment, she was swept away by optimism and so, buoyed by this, their courtship continued.

  Nevertheless, her ambivalence lingered for several weeks, but only seemed to fuel Klaus’s advances. He was, she suspected, a man not used to being refused and her hesitancy appeared to both perplex and excite him. In reality, the situation could have gone either way, Julia now reflected. But then, didn’t the most profound relationships often start in a deceptively arbitrary fashion? Two strangers waiting to board a plane, a man reading the same article as a woman in a doctor’s surgery, a car denting the bumper of another. And events that seemed initially portentous often dwindled away into meaninglessness she concluded ironically, as she accelerated through a traffic light.

  The arbitrary event that propelled her and Klaus’s relationship forward was a surprise trip to the planetarium at the Los Angeles observatory for her birthday. It was a week night and the auditorium was almost empty—a Texan family and a row of giggling Korean schoolgirls were the only other visitors. They had sat in the front row to watch the light show of the Milky Way, the guide’s prerecorded voice sounding out in the darkness like a narrator from the 1950s, from an epoch when, somehow, stars had seemed more fixed. Suddenly, another tiny beam of light had appeared on the Sagittarius–Carina arm of the galaxy.

  ‘See that?’ Klaus had whispered, concealing the torch with his sleeve. ‘That’s the Huntington star, found on the tattooed arm of the impossible-to-seduce Huntress planet formation…’

  By this time the Texan father was hushing them. Julia had broken into laughter, but to her further surprise Klaus had reached into his jacket and pulled out a certificate, which he placed onto her lap. ‘No, really—the star exists and you own it. Happy birthday.’

  Their kiss had them falling onto the empty seats alongside, and to Julia’s acute embarrassment the Korean schoolgirls broke into applause.

  That night they had slept together for the first time. There was something unnaturally familiar about Klaus’s scent and skin and, intuitively, Julia had sensed this would be a long-lasting relationship. They had a questioning intelligence in common; Klaus’s thinking skipped across disciplines in a similar manner to her own. Julia’s first degree had been psychology, her second genetics, and they shared a fascination for behaviour—human or otherwise. However his physical beauty initially made her question her own motives: his rugged masculinity had an authenticity that made people turn and stare, even in a town where physical beauty wasn’t just a commodity, it was commonplace. Julia had found it hard not to be suspicious and judgemental of his good looks, even a little intimidated. But Klaus’s own indifference to his beauty, and his deliberate negation of that power, had convinced her not only of his sincerity and monogamy but also that he, like herself, valued intellect above everything else.

  Julia placed her left hand over her womb. Aidan: her son, their child. She was determined to be a good mother, an attentive mother in a way her own had never been. She had calculated that her research would be concluded by the time she was due to give birth, and after that she planned to take a year’s maternity leave. It was going to be her year for consolidating both her career and her marriage, she decided, vowing that she would be more thoughtful of Klaus’s ambitions in the future.

  A car hooted behind her; the lights had changed to green. She swung the car into the parking lot.

  8

  The Rhineland, 1859

  HE ENTERED THE HOTEL BEDROOM unexpectedly, catching her preparing to wash, her chemise unbuttoned to the waist, her hair pinned up and flat against her scalp. Startled, Lavinia froze, staring at her new husband in the mirror, her tiny breasts and boyish figure elongated and pale in the candlelight.

  They had not yet made love. It was an act Lavinia had been anticipating ever since they had arrived by boat the night before, but sensing a delicacy, a certain ritualised timing to his courtship, she had decided to wait for his caress.

  Her excitement fluttered wildly at her throat. I have imagined this for so long, she thought, trying to guess at the unawoken lovemaking that lay under her skin like an exotic language, waiting to be translated. I am so ignorant of what is to be expected; will I know how to pleasure him? Despite her anxieties she knew she had begun to love him, her initial infatuation deepening first to admiration then to this fierce desire to please him.

  Lavinia had discovered she did not like the way other women noticed her husband; his upright handsome figure attracted glances wherever they went. She wanted him to see her only; to treat her as a peer but also as someone he could learn from, rather than always having to play the mentor. But how, when their life experience was so unequal?

  The idea that he should be as preoccupied with her as she had secretly become with him now possessed her completely. Sitting there, her skin sharpened in anticipation of his touch. But now, as their gaze met, it was not how she had imagined. His eyes held just to her face as he moved towards her. She began to turn.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said.

  Now behind her, stroking her shoulders, he lifted her to her feet, her bony back rippling out of the silk top of the undergarment. He ran his fingers lightly down her spine, over the fabric, and to her narrow buttocks, as firm and rotund as a young boy’s.

  Shivering, she watched his face in the looking glass, saw
his eyes half-close. The caress of his fingertips—the lightest of touches—sent waves of bliss down her back and into the very nucleus of her, tantalising her, promising so much more. She wanted him—she wanted him to take her, to exercise his authority over her.

  His hands encircled her buttocks, then his fingers moved over to her hips and to her sex.

  The Colonel closed his eyes fully as he touched her, dreaming of an earlier time in his life, a less complicated time. I will love this girl; I will. The sound of her quickening breath encouraged his fingers, making him forget who he was with and what he was.

  When he judged the moment to be right, he freed himself and, bending her over the chair, took her roughly and swiftly. His mind full of another scenario, he made love to a spectre of his own imaginings, but to his astonishment Lavinia cried out in ecstasy—an uninhibited sound of delight that triggered his own orgasm.

  Afterwards, with the eagerness of a child, she covered him with kisses, murmuring over and over how she loved him. The earrings he had purchased as a gift remained hidden in his trouser pocket—three gold hoops strung with pearls.

  Mama, we have been back in Ireland for six months now, in Dublin. I seem to remember Father telling me of relatives of yours in this fair city. I wish I could make their acquaintance now. But still, it has not been too lonely and you should see this place—I have my very own town house. To be sure, it’s a rented accommodation but James has given me permission to decorate it how I desire, allowing his foolish wife much expenditure. And what a folly I have made of it! It is full of feminine indulgence, with all manner of flowers and lace. More importantly, he has sanctioned a room for my own use, where I have erected a small desk for my note-taking. It is an indulgence I have only dreamed of!

  In the evenings, when he has returned from the university, James often shares his lecture papers with me and allows me to contribute. What more could a wife desire? I am most deeply in love with my husband. Oh, I know he can be a formal and cold sort of creature, but this I believe is the legacy of his intelligence. It cannot be easy carrying the experiences and weight of such a life, and I am determined to support him in whatever manner I can.