A need to spend money was a more insidious side effect—an impulse fuelled by the delusion that the dollars in her hand were toy money set against the greater tragedies of love and hate, abandonment and union. It was only after she’d spent three hundred dollars at the lipstick counter at Nieman Marcus that it occurred to her that her compulsive shopping might be drug-induced. The lipsticks stood in her bathroom cabinet, balanced on their ends like a platoon of forgotten toy soldiers.
Julia had no energy left to grieve for others. The two burning towers of New York, and the ensuring implosion of the national psyche, became even more personalised for Julia, as if her own internal logic had been shattered along with what she had naively believed to be untouchable America. Nevertheless, she found herself sobbing at news images: a child-soldier leaning against an army tank; a pool of burning oil in some distant sea; the bewildered face of a juvenile gorilla trapped behind bamboo bars.
It became difficult for her to listen to music with lyrics. Most songs, she realised, were about loss or impending loss—an incessant chorus of victimhood that divided humanity into two categories: the leavers and the left. In her darkest moments, she wondered about which synapses the anti-depressants had fired and which they were repressing, but the end result was the same: her depression continued. It was a hidden iceberg, shifting and splintering; great subterranean ruptures that tore through the glittering shell of the drug, spiking in inappropriate moments of elation.
Duty of care, mouthing the words like a curse into the gathering evening shadows, Klaus and Carla had failed in their duty of care, for surely both friendship and marriage have an unspoken contract, Julia would argue with herself, trying to make logic out of the irrational.
Night became an escape from the world. Sometimes she’d sleep until 11 a.m., her limbs stretched over to the side of the bed that Klaus used to occupy. Waking, she would conjure up the fragrance of his skin, a rich mix of sweat and oils, the crook of his neck, the hollow of his thighs. She couldn’t imagine experiencing desire with anyone else. The idea of revealing her history all over again to a new man appalled her; even contemplation of the idea felt like an obscene infidelity. It was impossible to believe she would ever share the same humour, wit and sensibility. Klaus was meant to be her final relationship, and she clung to the conviction that he would return.
Desperate for a sense of family, of continuity, Julia had placed a photograph of her grandfather, Aidan Huntington, next to the bed.
He was still a boy in the image, standing posed on the docks in front of the hull of an ocean steamer, his long pale face staring bleakly into the lens. The words ‘Oona May Cork—Chicago’ were painted on the side of the ship, and streamers twisted and snaked through the air. Passengers crowded on the decks and at the portholes, punctuating the phot
o with fuzzy activity. An American flag fluttered in one corner, the stars trailing points in a lazy breeze. A blurred figure—probably a porter, Julia thought, was pushing a trolley past the boy.
The young Aidan looked about twelve, his curly hair was carefully oiled and combed behind his ears, he was dressed in a jacket and knickerbockers that reached just below his knees. There was pathos in his taut, serious thin face as he attempted to appear a man. A small suitcase sat on the ground beside him while a parcel of books, belted around with leather, dangled from his hand. The motherless child, Julia thought, and wondered about Lavinia Huntington and the demise of her marriage. Colonel James Huntington had been quite a famous scientist in his own right, so Julia remembered her father telling her, but he had never spoken about his grandfather’s death or the trial of his young wife. Some years after Julia’s own mother had died, he had told her he’d always been convinced of his grandmother’s innocence.
Switching on the lamp, Julia pulled the photo into the light. Her grandfather had died before she was born, and stories about him had always fascinated her. She remembered them vividly. Apparently, Aidan had resembled his mother, Lavinia, in colouring alone; Julia assumed the broad nose and strong chin were inherited from his father. In the photograph, his facial features were slightly blurred, as if he had moved during the long camera exposure, but his eyes were sharp. A direct stare that travelled through history and connected unswervingly with the gaze of the viewer—the child had inherited his mother’s confrontational gaze. It made Julia think about her own Aidan, the son that might have been.
As Klaus had promised, the divorce papers soon arrived, making it apparent that he must have been planning his departure for months. The revelation horrified Julia. Staring down at the documents, she found it difficult to recognise the husband she had lived with for twelve years. He must have been compartmentalising the whole time, she concluded.
Without being allowed to communicate with him, she found herself mythologising their life together. Holidays, birthdays, celebrations, conversations that had inspired her all came flooding back, filling her nights with crisp heightened images—everything they had experienced together amplified to legendary happiness. She had considered herself content; she had assumed Klaus was content, except for his work situation—a situation Julia knew Carla had the power to change. Was that it? Was Klaus that mercenary? Or was it that Julia had been so self-absorbed she’d been blind to his real needs? Obsessively she began to dismantle the marriage, to look for indications, torturing herself by analysing their last few months together over and over.
25
JULIA COULD SEE A REFLECTION OF HERSELF thrown down onto the pavement she was flying over. Even in the twilight she recognised the buildings along Sunset Boulevard: the Viper Room, the House of Blues, Sunset Five, the Chateau Marmont. It wasn’t an unpleasant sensation, floating on this thick viscous sea, a buoyant soft wind carrying her.
To the west she could see the incandescent strip of blue-grey that was the horizon of the Pacific Ocean. The sky itself was the dark cobalt of just before dawn; streaks of salmon-pink had begun to bleed up from the horizon, freckling the sky. In her dreaming mind, she judged it to be about five in the morning. A minute later she was passing over the emerald and russet breasts of the Hollywood hills, sweeping up from the streaming band of car lights that was Sunset Boulevard. Below, each valley cradled residential blocks that lay across the green like embroidered handkerchiefs, each with a rectangle of glistening blue—the swimming pools—that threw back a framed reflection of the firmament. The canyons wound into the hills like hieroglyphs on a raised parchment.
Mi ciudad Hermosa: the words were whispered puffs of smoke that kept her buoyant. It was only then Julia became aware of the warm weight she held beneath her; Aidan, her lost son.
As they flew, Julia realised that she was entirely unencumbered by her waking grief, and that flying like this, united with the panorama that sweltered and muttered and glinted thousands of other stories, she was finally at peace. Aidan smiled up at her and, without thinking, Julia opened her arms. The child hovered, and for an instant they flew as one, the boy a miniature shadow of his mother, across the tiled roofs until he left her side.
‘Now, you might not have voted for Proposition 49 in the past, and you might have had strong reasons not to, but you cannot tell me, Mr and Mrs Dumont…’ The Candidate’s voice was interrupted by the automated insertion of Klaus’s and Julia’s names, a robotic rendering that destroyed the attempt at a personal tone. Julia, her head buried under the covers, her nightdress wrapped around her eyes in a desperate attempt to block out the early summer light streaming in through the cane blinds, clicked the phone off and pushed it under her pillow.
‘Christ,’ she groaned out aloud. Could she get up, did she want to? It was a month since her miscarriage, two weeks since she received the divorce papers and the day lay cavernous before her, frighteningly empty.
She curled around her pillow, wishing she wasn’t such a coward. A breeze rattled the cane blinds and jolted her back to the dream. The aerial view of Los Angeles had been so accurate she could have described the landscape to a pilot, and then there was the image of her son. Black eyes like his father; his narrow face a combination of her cheekbones and Klaus’s pointed chin.
She wrapped her hands around the pillow and almost slipped back into sleep. The alarm clock startled her awake again.
She sat up and stretched then reached for a tape recorder she kept in the bedside cabinet. A psychologist she’d spoken to at the hospital had suggested it might be therapeutic to record messages to Klaus—messages he would never get to hear. She switched on the tape recorder and waited in silence. It felt like she was whispering to a ghost. The tape ran a full three minutes before she had the courage to begin.
‘…I keep finding myself laying the table for two. Sometimes, when I’m reading or watching television, I forget and think I hear your footsteps in another part of the house and call your name. It makes me feel so goddamn stupid. You live inside someone’s skin for over a decade and then find you didn’t know them at all. Did you ever think about the consequences of your actions? You must have. You must have analysed every outcome meticulously. If I can’t live without you, how am I to live?’
Julia drove without thinking about where she was going; a hazy geographical comprehension guiding her through the maze of LA’s suburbs. Her mobile rang; she ignored it. She knew it would be Naomi who had developed the habit of ringing her twice a day to check that she was safe. Her friend’s vigilance irritated Julia. Reaching down she switched the phone off.
She turned into a narrow street where small neat lawns encircled white bungalows, jasmine climbed over trellises at the front doors, and the obligatory SUV sat in each driveway. Klaus had originally wanted to buy in the beachside area, but they hadn’t been able to afford it. Houses that were built in the Californian post Second World War industrial boom when aircraft construction usurped oranges. Julia’s knees began to tremble and her stomach clenched as she recognised where her instinct had brought her.
Lavender Street, Number Twelve; how many times had she visited this house? How many times?
Pulling into the kerb, she carefully hid the car behind a large van. The gate hadn’t changed; an old pumpkin with a grinning ghoul-face carved into its peel still sat by the fencepost—a relic from a past Halloween night.
The house was quiet; there was a light dimly visible through one of the front windows. The office, Julia thought. At least, that’s what Carla called it. It was a converted laundry, barely more than a cupboard. The house itself was an original piece of German-influenced modernist architecture, a construction of planes that translated into a spacious geometric structure designed so the sun travelled around the house, flooding each room in turn with light. It’s a sunhouse, Carla would say, I live in a sunhouse not a greenhouse. Just remembering her saying it made Julia nostalgic.
She recalled how she’d rushed here on
ce at 2 a.m., convinced that Klaus was having an affair. He was away sailing and she hadn’t been able to get through on his mobile. The image of him making love to another woman had thrashed through her head. She knew she had to talk out her fear and had immediately driven to Carla’s. Tousled, but unfazed, her friend had let her in. They’d spent the rest of the night getting drunk together on some obscenely sweet liqueur Carla had brought back from a film shoot in Krakow, regaling each other with anecdotes about the worst lovers they’d ever had. Two hours later Julia had reached Klaus; he’d told her she was paranoid but he loved her anyway.