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.