Soul

Lifting the sake bottle with a violent jerk, Carla held it over the table. ‘Wow! That’s far more important then some kooky defense department gig.’ She swung around to Klaus. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’

Klaus laid his hand on her wrist. ‘Carla…’

Ignoring him, she banged the bottle against Julia’s cup.

‘The geneticist is pregnant!’ She turned to the others. ‘Isn’t that just so poetic?’

Outside, a police car headed downtown, its siren screaming.

Klaus stood in the bathroom door, his wet hair crowning his head in a halo of curls, his chin plastered with shaving cream. ‘She’s just stressed.’

‘Evidently. The last time I saw Carla that intoxicated was at the Sony Academy Awards party, when she was dating that B-grade actor, and that was eight years ago. She was really weird about the pregnancy.’ Julia, already between the sheets of their brass bed, looked up at her husband.

‘She was just surprised. I think a lot of people are going to be surprised.’

‘Why? Aren’t I allowed to be a mother?’

‘Sure, it’s just that everyone sees you as so career orientated.’ He finished towelling his hair. ‘You should really invest more in your other friends, not be so much of a hermit.’

‘I have Naomi.’

‘You tend to have colleagues rather than friends. Women need friends; they need that support system in case of sudden disaster.’

‘Sudden disaster? You’re really uplifting tonight.’

Klaus covered his eyes with the towel for a second.

Julia sat back. ‘Okay, from now on I promise it’ll be nothing but antenatal classes, and then picketing the local kindergarten with the rest of the careerist mothers,’ she joked.

Shrugging, Klaus retreated into the bathroom.

Julia gazed up at the hand-finished roof beams of the bedroom. The second largest room in the California Craftsman bungalow, it looked out onto a large backyard planted with jasmine and bougainvillea. They’d got the house five years into their marriage, and had been clever enough to buy into Silver Lake—an area that was on the brink of gentrification. It was an idiosyncratic suburb built on the side of a hill; developed in the ’60s and ’70s, the houses were an eclectic architectural mix of bungalows, apartments and the occasional mock-Tudor cottage. Some of the houses were built on stilts sunk into the side of the valley to secure them against earthquake damage; others butted up against the hillside.

Their neighbours on one side were Latino—a retired postal worker and his wife, who often invited Klaus and Julia over for their huge family barbecues. On the other side lived Gerry, a young screenwriter who specialised in animation and never seemed to leave the house until after dark.

The rest of the street was occupied by young middle-class couples all eager to make their mark—actors, lawyers, and one director at the very end of the cul-de-sac, who was famous for a horror film everyone had forgotten but which still played late on cable.

Julia and Klaus had decorated the house with vintage furnishings that reflected the era it was built in, Klaus carefully restoring the pieces they found in markets. The walls were pine, the beamed ceiling cedar and the two fireplaces—one in the lounge and one in the bedroom—were both original. There was a ground-floor bathroom, a small study, a sitting room and a dining room off the kitchen, and a small staircase leading to the bedroom, which was a converted attic.

When Julia first met Klaus, all she owned was a shoebox of her mother’s photos, an old passport shot of her first boyfriend and several rolls of unprocessed film. She had no furniture, preferring to rent furnished accommodation. Horrified by this lack of material possessions, Klaus had called her a barbarian, attributing her lack of enthusiasm for history as inherently New World.

‘But it’s my history to immortalise or discard as I please,’ she’d exclaimed, offended by his European sensibility.

‘Okay, my love, we will rewrite it together, both present and past. And maybe, if we’re lucky, there will be a little fiction leftover for the future,’ he’d replied teasingly.

For the first twenty-five years of her life Julia had an aversion to collecting anything that reminded her of the past—even the recent past—a revulsion that had sprung from her mother’s passion for amateur photography. Her mother was a vivacious woman with extraordinary drive, who never appeared to live in the present tense, her ferocious intellect pushing her comprehension several seconds in front of everyone else. She frantically photographed every possible family event, as if by documenting the moment it negated her own responsibility for actually participating in it. The experience had left Julia with a hatred of being photographed, and a dread of collecting memories in any shape or form. Part of her even feared that a photogr

aph of a lover would curse the rapport, jinx the relationship and set it on a course of separation. It was a fatalistic superstition but one that Julia hadn’t been able to shake until her marriage.

Her mother had suddenly died when she was twelve—an event that had transformed her emotional lexicon. Frenetically energetic, her mother’s thick curly hair had been a beacon for the young girl, an image that later, as an adult, Julia would catch herself searching for over and over. Her father, already in his sixties, took over her parenting. A quietly spoken biologist, he would tell her stories about his own father—Aidan Huntington—who had emigrated when he was twelve from Ireland with a mysterious guardian. And how the old gentleman had convinced him—in the educated Irish accent of his childhood—that his mother, Lavinia Huntington, was innocent of the murder of her husband, Colonel James Huntington—stories that ballooned in the young girl’s imagination.

Ignoring Julia’s horror of investing in the material, Klaus had arranged for a linen cupboard that had belonged to his grandmother to be shipped over from Antwerp, followed by the purchase of a video camera which he used to faithfully record the minutiae of their relationship. Once, Julia had come back from a conference early and found him watching a tape of her sleeping. Other times he filmed her lacing up her climbing boots, putting on her make-up, taking a bath—every mundane gesture seem to fascinate him. There was a whole shelf dedicated to these videos labelled with his crab-like scrawl, Mijn Vrouw 1,2,3…Julia had always regarded such details as unimportant, until finally she realised that Klaus regarded them as the very cement of marriage, the pauses between arguments, negotiations, lovemaking.

She also began to see it as a way of Klaus securing himself geographically, as if the immigrant was trying to anchor himself in a sea of images that viscerally linked him to America.

Then suddenly, after five years of marriage, Julia began to take her own photos. At last, she herself had come home.

The ultrasound image was propped up against the bedside lamp. The embryo was an amorphous bundle of sudden twitches, kicks and alien sensations that Julia struggled against to maintain her own hormonal equilibrium. But there he was: flesh made into logic; chemicals, genes, all twisted up into living structure—a child, a male child. It was the final jigsaw piece of their marriage. Touching the slippery surface of the scan she whispered out loud. ‘Aidan.’