Soul

by Tobsha Learner

  Bowing, Hamish Campbell led Lavinia to the dance floor.

  ‘You have a distinct air of discontentment, my friend. At least feign happiness, James.’ Genuinely concerned, Lady Morgan placed her hand on the Colonel’s arm. Since his marriage, she had observed a new sobriety, a dull gravity, about him.

  ‘Lately, I have concluded that although I am capable of the pursuit of intimacy, I am incapable of sustaining the emotion once I have secured the object of my desire. I am, alas, fatally addicted to the chase,’ the Colonel replied. He removed his snuffbox from his waistcoat, placed a large pinch in the crook of his hand, and inhaled deeply. ‘I thought I had tired of such behaviour and could dispense with my old habits. But I fear I cannot, and it is a painful realisation.’

  He pulled out a handkerchief and sneezed, leaving an orangey-red stain in the centre of the white cotton. Lady Morgan, mistaking the watering of his eyes due to the hotness of the snuff for tears, pressed her hand to his chest.

  ‘My friend, you chastise yourself too much. You are a good husband and she is mistress of one of the more enviable households in Mayfair. And you are a loving father.’

  ‘Perhaps, but I have discovered a flaw within my physique. When I was studying phrenology, I read my own skull and found that the area for affection and friendship was overdeveloped to a degree of depravity, whereas the instinct of reproduction—located in the cerebellum—was practically non-existent. I decided then that I would not be victim to my own physiology, under any circumstance.’

  Lady Morgan laughed, then realised the Colonel was serious.

  ‘Absolute poppycock,’ she replied. ‘No wonder the Austrian Emperor banned that charlatan Franz Gall. There is nothing I hate more than the notion that anything—particularly personality—is determined. I thought you had begun to have your own doubts about the legitimacy of such a science?’

  ‘I waver; there are moments when I find the logic of it convincing, and then in the next moment I no longer know my own mind. I think it of no use as a measure of intelligence, but as a diagnostic tool I still believe it to have some value.’

  Eyes fixed on the dancers, the Colonel continued:‘I have certain penchants—some I have acted upon, others I have not. I thought marriage might be transforming, and for a few months it was.’

  He watched his wife twirling on the dance floor and marvelled at how this middle-class creature had adapted to the challenges and rigidities of the milieu he had placed her in.

  ‘I love my son, Frances, more than I could have possibly imagined.’

  Lady Morgan studied the man before her; it had been a twenty-year friendship, an odyssey that had taken them through several marriages (all hers), several deaths and, at one time, genuine affection. Suddenly she experienced a terrible epiphany that the Colonel’s self-diagnosis was probably correct; whether the science was sound or not, as long as he believed it, it was so. Not wanting to reveal her profound dismay, she studiously examined the diamond tiara of a young duchess holding court a few yards away. ‘James,’ she said, still not daring to look at him, ‘you must not condemn yourself for what you are. We all must make good within the limitations and constraints society places upon us; people look to us as an example.’

  Each fell into a brief contemplation of their emotional follies, past and present.

  Hamish and Lavinia completed their third rotation, the young man steering her around the crowded dance floor with a firm palm against the small of her back. As they waltzed he kept up a commentary on the social standing of the spectators, their faces a blur as they passed.

  ‘I am a great admirer of your husband’s work,’ he said, taking advantage of a lull in the music.

  ‘You and I both, Mr Campbell. Which particular area are you interested in?’

  ‘The application of craniology to the Amazonian savages.’

  ‘Savages? My husband would not agree with the use of that word; he has found great thinkers and artists amongst the Amazonian Indians and has the utmost respect for their rituals.’

  ‘So I have read. I have a huge respect for a man who has the independent means to explore his own interests, yet uses those interests to enhance scientific knowledge.’

  ‘And what are your professional intentions?’

  As they passed the Colonel and Lady Morgan, Lavinia noticed the sadness upon her husband’s face, but the sight was quickly replaced by others as her body moved in the dance’s hypnotic patterns guided by the young man’s hands.

  ‘I wish to become an anthropologist, but, unlike Colonel Huntington, I do not have independent means and my father will only finance my studies if I agree to join him later in his business. Lady Morgan is my current patron; she has generously provided the funds for my first paper—a study of primitive Celtic rituals. If Colonal Huntington would only endorse it…I have also expressed a desire to see his collection of Amazonian artefacts, but I still await a response.’

  ‘My husband is a very private man.’

  ‘A natural trait in a genius, Mrs Huntington. I believe him to be one of the most original thinkers in the field. Perhaps you could persuade him?’

  His candour made it impossible for Lavinia to refuse him. She laughed. ‘I shall try, but I must warn you I have little influence.’

  He swung her around for another rotation, his face breaking into a boyish grin that instantly dissolved the studied sophistication he affected.

  The Huntingtons collapsed across the bed cover. Lavinia, still in her ball gown, her petticoats flung in all directions, looked like some airborne vessel that had been shot to the ground. Still tipsy with exhilaration and punch, she was beyond sleep. Her feet ached; already she could feel the prickling of blisters. Forcing herself to stand, she freed the fastenings at her waist and stepped out of the crinoline and bloomers, leaving just her corset that flattened her breasts.

  The Colonel, speechless with exhaustion, had flung his jacket across the dresser in the corner. His collar and cravat were pulled open, and he lay there with one hand across his burning eyes, pondering whether he should get straight back up again and drive over to the Albemarle Hotel where a breakfast of devilled kidneys, bacon and sweetmeats would provide the perfect cure for a surfeit of wine and brandy.

  Lavinia threw herself back down beside him.

  ‘You should sleep and I should go,’ he murmured, and flung a hand in his wife’s direction to console what he assumed was a mutual malaise born of excess. To his dismay she drew the hand up to her lips and kissed it.

  ‘Stay,’ she whispered.

  The words Caress me, drummed against the inside of Lavinia’s skin, an aberrant continuation of the pulsating waltz rhythm still echoing in her head. She wondered whether she should move towards him. The waiting was more torturous then the fear of rejection. James had not moved a single limb, yet there was hope in his passivity; surely this was acquiescence, Lavinia argued to herself.

  Deciding she could no longer bear the suspense, she rolled toward him, pushing him onto his back as she moved.

  James turned his face away and looked instead at Lavinia’s silhouette thrown by candlelight against the far wall. With her breasts flattened and her hair up, she looked like a slender youth as she mounted him. With his wife now transformed into a stranger, James found this pinning down of his body, this sudden swing into submission, arousing. He hardened and she felt the thickness of him against her. She stared into his face. It was tilted to one side, his eyes now closed, his cheeks flushed.

  ‘Open your eyes.’

  He obeyed her command, his gaze directed somewhere beyond her searching look. Wrenching his arms over his head, she held him down by his wrists. I am towering over him, I am taking him, she thought as he entered her. Gasping, she stared into his eyes, refusing him this escape, this turning from her. All her sensuality was focused on one point of contact, the apex of their sex, and the friction grew and spread like a burning as both careered toward climax.

  Despite their locked gazes, James was not wi
th her. He had transported himself into a scenario that was entirely of his own construction; one in which he was making love to a completely different individual. But one who, disturbingly, was beginning to resemble someone he knew. Closing his eyes, he tried to dismiss the image that he had superimposed upon Lavinia’s body. He hauled himself back into the reality of the moment. Here was his wife, her hair wild, each nipple a hard bud, her lips hovering close to his—nothing touching except his sex inside her and her hands burning circles around each of his wrists. She was taking him, seducing him like a man, and he couldn’t deny that it was pleasuring him a great deal.

  The months of frustration swelled up in Lavinia as she rode him, legs spread, her flesh stretching and softening in response to his hard organ. Her body stilled in anticipation before wave after wave of contracting ecstasy gripped her.

  James, in the embrace of an incubus of his own making, reached his own orgasm, then buried his burning face against the coverlet.

  28

  Los Angeles, 2002

  JULIA HATED BEING OUT OF control. Hated it. ‘I believe in free will,’ she whispered in a desperate mantra as she picked up the scissors. Mania was a sinister trait; not a dramatic hijacking of the psyche, but an insidious intrusion.

  Pieces of photographic paper lay in a large spiral around her, like the gatherings of an exotic bowerbird. Julia sat in its centre, two thick photo albums beside her. She was carefully cutting Klaus’s head out of all the images. The current photograph was of a picnic they’d had while on a holiday in Taos, New Mexico, three years before. Klaus was tanned, grinning as he glanced across at Julia, who sat bare shouldered in a summer frock. It was a disconnected moment of exhilaration—no indication of impermanency, no sign that he did not love her, would leave her.

  Julia tried to remember who had taken the photo. She concluded that it must have been an anonymous tourist. The thin blades of the scissors traced Klaus’s neckline, not one millimetre over. She was as careful as a head-hunter.

  As she cut, she was reminded of a necklace of dead parrots she’d seen at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford several years before, collected from an Amazonian tribe. This bizarre marriage of death and beauty had mesmerised her. Despite the fact that the parrots were corpses hung on string, heads lolling, their feathers were as bright and shiny as they must have been in life. Oddly macabre it was also a wonderfully decorative piece of jewellery.

  There had been a glass case full of shrunken human heads in the museum too. The cephalic trinkets resembled oversized walnuts and Julia was shocked when she realised what she was actually staring at. Each mouth was sewn shut with twine, the tiny eyelids squeezed closed against terrible horror.

  She remembered a father and son standing in front of the exhibit transfixed, the eight-year-old English boy describing the process of head-shrinking as patiently and dispassionately as if reciting a recipe for muffins. All the while, the blackened wrinkled heads gazed blindly out with an air of aggrieved perplexity, as if wondering how they had ended up mummified in a Victorian glass museum case.

  Julia could hear the boy’s crisp consonants even now. So, Daddy, you pull out the skull so there’s just the skin left with the hair still sticking out. Then you stuff the head with stones so that it keeps its shape, then you boil it and it shrinks right down. It takes hours. They did it for power, you know. They believed that all the power of their enemies was kept in their heads, so if you kept the head you got the power for yourself.

  Was that what she was trying to do now? Trying to get back the power Klaus had taken from her? Trying to reclaim their history so she could magically construct her own version of a future? She paused, the blade of the scissors neatly turning around one ear, ignoring the fly that buzzed around her own ear, which had flown in through the open window. She didn’t dare speculate. Whatever her motives, she sensed that they were buried deeper than conscious thought.

  She finished cutting, careful to keep the rest of the image intact, then placed the head at the end of the spiral, next to its thirty companions. Thirty incarnations of Klaus—some smiling, some deadpan, some squinting in the light of the flash of the camera, some defiant, some sober, but all neatly severed at the chin.

  As Julia slammed her hand against the fly, killing it instantly, she wondered whether Klaus had felt her scissors.

  PART TWO

  The Serpent

  29

  Los Angeles, 2002

  NAOMI, CLUTCHING HALF A BUTTERED croissant, stood in Julia’s kitchen, attempting to make coffee with her free hand.

  ‘Think positively: now you get to sample every dysfunctional divorcé this side of Kansas.’

  ‘What am I—the wicked witch of the West?’ Julia said.

  ‘No really, now you don’t have to put up with all those disgusting habits husbands force you to accommodate—like baseball and breaking wind under the covers.’

  ‘Klaus is European, he hates baseball.’

  ‘Whatever. He’s still a total mother-fucker. God, when are you going to start hating? I so wish you would; anything’s better than this victim shit. Remember what Nietzsche said—anger is an energy.’

  ‘Naomi, you’re showing your age. That wasn’t Nietzsche; that was John Lydon of Public Image Limited.’ Julia handed the ground coffee to Naomi, whose chin was adorned with a cascade of crumbs, which, for some obscure reason, reminded Julia of the whiskers of a walrus. ‘I just wish I could stop trying to analyse what went wrong. We had great intellectual compatibility, the sex was good, we shared humour, fun…’

  ‘Well, for a start, this Alpha female, Beta male shit doesn’t work. Support a guy and he’ll end up resenting you. And as for being blatantly more successful professionally, forget it. I don’t care how much lip service a guy pays to Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag or Gertrude Stein, be more successful and it cuts their balls off. I swear, they will shoot you down. More than that, they will enjoy every goddamn minute of your screaming freefall.’

  ‘Klaus isn’t like that.’

  ‘Sure, he’s Mister Born-Again Humanitarian and Enlightened Male.’

  Naomi shoved the remaining croissant into Julia’s hand then slammed a mug of black coffee in front of her. ‘Eat. You look like some abandoned anorexic forty-year-old extrophy wife they’ve just found wandering through Bel Air.’

  Julia took a tentative bite then realised she was ravenous.

  Naomi perched on the bench, her ample curves spilling out of her brightly coloured capri pants and tight T-shirt. ‘Let me guess, in your heart of hearts you’re hoping Klaus is going through some temporary mid-life madness, and one day he’ll wake up, look across and think what am I doing in bed with my wife’s best friend? And then he’s going to come running back, screaming “I was wrong, I love you, I’ve always loved you” or some such total crap, right?’

  Julia looked at her croissant. ‘He is at that age…’ she ventured.

  ‘God! Julia! You’re an award-winning scientist! Women like me look at women like you and we think, Yes! It is possible! We can transcend our emotional destinies, we can be rationalists, we can beat them at their own fucking game.’

  ‘Naomi, it is not a gender war out there! You are talking about individuals, complex creatures that are all different from each other, regardless of their sex.’

  ‘Right, whatever. Reality check number one: guess who I bumped into at the Latons’ place?’

  Fear snapped Julia’s appetite in half. Gillian Laton was an older academic who had mentored Julia when she first arrived in LA from San Francisco. Dick, Gillian’s husband, was a powerful television producer at the apex of his career. Originally Julia’s friends, they had also grown close to Klaus.

  ‘Don’t…’

  ‘You’ve got to pull your head out of the sand, girl. Personally I couldn’t believe their fucking chutzpah, but then I never liked Carla. I’m telling you, the industry fucks with their heads, and after a while any semblance of ethics, humanity or empathy evaporates and what you’re
left with is one smoking skeleton of white-hot ambition. That’s all Carla is—a glorified development girl who got lucky. Bitch.’

  ‘They weren’t…’

  ‘As bold as friggin’ brass. All over each other—and I can tell you, Klaus didn’t look remorseful in the slightest. The guy’s not having some mid-life crisis; he’s just as emotionally shallow as a kiddies’ blow-up paddling pool. But boy, was that bitch working poor Dick. They’re up to something together, I swear it. Probably some dumb TV series about abandoned wives.’

  ‘Enough!’ Julia put down her cup, her hand shaking, then took a deep breath. ‘They are both persona non grata,’ she said softly.

  ‘But is that healthy? Denial isn’t closure.’

  ‘Don’t let Mom fob you off with that psychobabble.’

  Julia looked up at the unfamiliar voice. A lithe adolescent was lounging against the kitchen door frame. His shoulder-length black hair was swept back in a ponytail incongruously fastened with a girl’s plastic bauble, and ridiculously skinny wrists poked out from a very loose long-sleeved T-shirt printed with Che Guevara’s face and the words ‘Freedom does not lie in martyrdom’ in Spanish. The crotch of his baggy jeans appeared to hang less than a foot from the ground and on his feet he wore state-of-the-art Adidas sneakers—constructions of gold latex and red suede that resembled miniature racing cars.

  ‘Please excuse my son,’ Naomi put her hand on Gabriel’s shoulder. ‘His emotional development is AWOL thanks to his father’s influence. I knew it was a mistake to let him go live with José.’

  ‘Mom! I’ve told you before, don’t talk about me in the third person. I am here.’ He shrugged her hand off.

  ‘Gabriel?’ Julia stared at the youth, who was over six foot and quite possibly shaved. The last time she saw him, he’d been an ethereal-looking fourteen year old who hid behind large glasses and mouth braces.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Hormones happen. Like the fucking weather—predictable, but difficult to pinpoint exactly when,’ he replied nonchalantly, then looked at Naomi. ‘Have you asked her yet?’ His voice dipped suddenly into a child-like appeal, opening a chink in his aggressive persona.