This Is Where We Live (15 page)

Daniel was staring at him, and Jeremy realized he’d been silent for far too long. “I don’t think you’re insane,” he said. “I figure you’re just trying to beat Claudia and me. Remember, we got engaged in less than six months? So, see, I’m all for crazy love.”

But he knew, from the stunned expression on Daniel’s face, that this wasn’t the same as that. Not at all. His relationship with Claudia hadn’t been a grand combustion, the kind of crazy love that devours you alive, the way it had been with Aoki, and the way it apparently was with this Cristina person; it had been a mild simmer, something gentle and protective and kind. If Jillian hadn’t been dying, he probably would have dated Claudia for years before finally making the big leap. But Jillian
was
dying, her lungs were ejecting thick black clots of metastasized death as she shriveled away, week by week in her sari-covered bed; and the thought of being without a family once she died (his itinerant father hardly counted) made him go cold all over. It seemed like a last gift he could give Jillian—the chance to know her son was going to be OK once she was gone, that he had this sweet, smart, loving girl who would take care of him.

He had let himself sink into Claudia as if she were a soft velvet cushion, let her cosset him in a way Aoki never had and, frankly, never could have. He felt at peace in Claudia’s arms, even when he was in tears—he couldn’t remember the last time that a relationship had felt like that. And maybe he did hastily ask her to marry him for a lot of the wrong reasons—because he felt indebted to her, or because of the selfish impulse to be nurtured like this for the rest of his life, or to get engaged before Jillian died—but there were a lot of the right reasons too. There was also love. Yes, a different kind of love than Aoki, but that didn’t mean it was any less real.

“Aoki e-mailed me,” he blurted out.

Daniel snapped sideways. “You’re kidding. What did she want?”

“Just to say hi, I think. She’s going to be in town next month. We might have a coffee.” He didn’t mention the rest of their correspondence, or the way he’d started to check his e-mail compulsively, anticipating the electric thrill of seeing Aoki’s name in his in-box. Their communication had slipped quickly into something more than he’d intended, with his first, carefully worded responses; it had become dangerous, and he knew it. He felt like an alcoholic must when they finally fall off the wagon, when they take that first burning slug of whiskey and taste the memory of joyful obliteration.

But he couldn’t tell Daniel this. Daniel adored Claudia, had always treated her with such doting respect—bringing her flowers for her movie premiere, calling her for “girl advice”—that Jeremy had sometimes wondered whether his friend had a crush on his wife. Already, Jeremy could feel the cold front of Daniel’s disapproval, a frozen restraint in his friend’s voice. “Does Claudia know about this?”

“Not yet. But I’m going to tell her.”

“Do you really think it’s a good idea, seeing Aoki? I mean—I was there when you got back to LA. She tore you apart.”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s not a big deal. I’m married now, remember? Model husband.”

“Whatever you say, man. Just be careful.” Daniel stood up, fishing his keys from his pocket. “I gotta go. Cristina’s waiting for me at home.”

“Moving so fast.” Jeremy slid off the hood. “When do I get to meet her?”

“I don’t know. Soon?”

“You should come over to the house for cocktails.”

“That’ll mean bailing on practice that night, though. Right?” Daniel winked, and began to jog down the street to his car.

Jeremy watched him go. “Hey, Daniel,” he called. Daniel turned, kept jogging backward. “Congratulations. It’s really great news.” Daniel flashed a grin and waved a hand and then vanished.

Jeremy climbed into his convertible. The engine rumbled to life under his feet and he drove off down the street, turning right and then left, until he merged onto Sunset Boulevard. The cooling night air crisped his face as his triumphal mood began to wane in the face of Daniel’s announcement.
I shouldn’t tell Claudia about the pregnancy
, he caught himself thinking,
because then she’ll want a baby too
. He wasn’t ready for a kid yet, not by a long shot. A baby would tether them forever to a life without risks or spontaneity, and God knows they were already trapped enough these days. Against his will, he found himself thinking again of Aoki, jet-setting around in the world on impulse, lunching in French cafés and putting on shows in Tel Aviv. As he shot eastward through the deserted streets, he decided that it was time to e-mail Aoki and nail down a date.

Claudia

THE CLOCK SAID IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING. CLAUDIA HAD TO
prop herself up on the pillow and peer over Jeremy in order to read the time; thanks to the cramped nature of their new sleeping quarters, which allotted no room for a bedside table, the alarm clock’s new home was on the floor. She flopped onto her back, tugging her half of the blanket back from its incarceration between Jeremy’s twisted legs. Whatever had disturbed her—a raccoon in the driveway? A coyote howling in the canyon?—clearly had not bothered him. He was motionless, except for the gentle fibrillations of his nose as he snored.

She lay in the dark, listening hard, waiting for the noise to come again. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she surveyed the blurred, dusky surfaces of their new makeshift bedroom. Sometimes it felt like they’d eaten Alice in Wonderland’s cake and grown three sizes too big: The possessions that had fit so comfortably into the master bedroom—the big oak chest of drawers, the television cabinet, the Queen Anne armchair she’d found in the street and repainted white—were completely out of proportion in here. For lack of space, they’d relinquished the chair completely: It was in Lucy’s bedroom now, and Claudia mourned its absence. But there was no room in here, really, for anything but the king-size bed. This nearly touched the walls on either side, which made getting dressed in the morning a hazard. Claudia had gotten in the habit of dressing in the hallway, furtively yanking up her pants in the dark in case Lucy came home and caught her.

Lucy. The noise had begun again, and now that Claudia was fully awake it was clear that the sound wasn’t animal at all. It was human: a high-pitched squeal, amplified through the grated vent in the wall. The metallic scraping that in a semiconscious state sounded plausibly like a garbage can being looted by the local wildlife was actually the damage caused by a cast-iron four-poster bed rubbing rhythmically against a wall. Lucy was having sex. Claudia listened intently, curious and repelled.

She poked Jeremy in the side. “Listen,” she said. “Lucy’s getting some action.”

Jeremy grunted and rolled over, taking the blanket back with him. He muttered something inaudible and resumed snoring.

There was no point in trying to go back to sleep; she had to get up in half an hour anyway, in order to make it to work by seven. Instead, she clambered over Jeremy’s legs, grabbed her bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door, and tiptoed past Lucy’s room to the kitchen. She stood groggily there in the dark, waiting for the coffee to percolate as the gurgling of the coffeemaker mingled with the fainter groans and muffled giggles coming from the other side of the house.

So far, Lucy had been, as promised, an invisible roommate. Claudia was usually gone by the time Lucy returned home from work, and during Lucy’s days off—which, as far as Claudia could tell, came intermittently and often during the middle of the week—she vanished to Van Nuys to visit her mother. But there were signs of their new roommate everywhere. Baroque underwear—frilly lace garments, which Lucy hand-washed in the sink—hung from a line in her bathroom. The refrigerator was packed with mysterious items only barely recognizable as food: Jello-lite strawberry pudding cups, vanilla Chug, toasted-coconut-covered marshmallows. Six unappealing watercolor landscapes, as unskilled as Lucy had promised they would be, now hung on the wall in the hallway, and a mumsy chintz love seat that Lucy had inherited from her grandmother was plopped right into the center of their otherwise carefully curated living room. Lucy had made herself right at home, and of course Claudia didn’t fault her for that; but she couldn’t help feeling that an enemy encircling their encampment was about to close in.
It’s better than the alternative
, she told herself.
It’s better than foreclosure
. From the bedroom, she heard a garbled moan and then silence.

A cup of coffee in hand, Claudia flipped through the morning paper, skipping past the graph on the front page, depicting the plummeting New York Stock Exchange, and the business section, bemoaning the government seizure of Claudia and Jeremy’s bank, and over to Real Estate. Here she found a four-page photo essay documenting the foreclosure epidemic in the Inland Empire. In the pictures, empty houses sat like tombstones, marking the death of an era. Faded for sale signs hung limply in the hot desert sun, as the desolate peaks of the San Bernardino mountains loomed overhead. Black algae blanketed the bottom of never-used swimming pools; abandoned swing sets sported rust and graffiti tags from the local delinquents. At the entrance to a half-built planned development—where the rotting houses lined the horizon, their wooden skeletons exposed to the elements—a sagging banner begged passing drivers:
PARADISE VALLEY HOMES
, $399,000
AND UP! LIVE HERE NOW
.

“Why don’t you sell your house for a loss and just move somewhere cheaper?” That’s what Claudia’s mother had said to her last week, when Claudia called to cry about the outrageous mortgage, the unwanted roommate, the money she was pouring into four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline for her crosstown commute. “You don’t have to live in the middle of Los Angeles, honey. You could move out to the suburbs. It’s safer there anyway, and you could still commute to work.” Thinking of Ruth’s words, Claudia stared at the tract homes in the photographs and shuddered. Was that what it was going to come to? Sure, for an hour-and-a-half drive on the Interstate (if traffic was good, which it never was), anyone could have their pick of these foreclosed homes at cut-rate prices. This was the “golden opportunity” left behind in the sludge of America’s waning economy. But Claudia wanted to be here, in the middle of the city, among the living. Wasn’t that why she had left Wisconsin in the first place? It didn’t seem fair: According to the news, the world was collapsing around them: investment banks shutting their doors daily, unemployment at six percent and rising, oil topping $100 a barrel, the stock market in free fall, and the second Depression barreling down on them. But in urban Los Angeles, a shoebox-sized starter home in a not-great neighborhood cost over half a million dollars, minimum, even now. “Why don’t you move somewhere cheaper?” She wished she had a more logical answer for her mother, one that made sense even to her.

She closed the newspaper and began going over her notes for today’s “open dialogue hours.” This was the Ennis Gates version of parent-teacher conferences; it lasted almost a month and involved lengthy one-on-one sessions with each student’s parents. Claudia felt as if she had gone on trial, with a never-ending parade of overprotective parents serving as a host of inquisitors testing her faith. “I want to make sure that you understand Robin’s special test-taking needs.” “Theodore mentioned that you assign much more
homework
than his last film teacher.” “I noticed that Jordan was writing an essay about
Taxi Driver
last week. Do you really think that’s an appropriate movie for a sixteen-year-old?” “Can you possibly check to see that Kelsey is taking her Adderall after lunch?”

After only a week of meetings, Claudia’s head was reeling with the details she needed to remember, the land mines she had to avoid in coming months. This afternoon, she had three sets of parents coming in—the parents of Mary Hernandez, Lisa Yang, and, most promising and problematic of all, Penelope Evanovich.

Claudia’s first weeks at Ennis Gates Academy had passed in a pleasant ego-affirming haze. Classes were
fun
. Her students were eager (eager!) to discuss the stylized sets of German Expressionist film and how the chiaroscuro in
Touch of Evil
reflected themes of moral ambiguity. They asked her for movie and (after learning that her husband was in a band) music recommendations. They brought her
rugelach
and brownies that their Peruvian housekeepers had baked. When she walked through the Academy’s campus, they would call out at her from across the quad.
Hey, Munger! Yo, Munger, what’s up?
Even though she probably shouldn’t have encouraged such informal intimacy with her students, she couldn’t help but love it. Here, finally, was her captive audience, an audience that spent every day staring at her attentively and (when they weren’t sending surreptitious text messages or examining their split ends or inking elaborate designs on their canvas Chuck Taylors)
listening
. They jotted down her words as if they held real value. When she graded essay tests, she was startled to recognize exact phrases that had come from her mouth, dutifully recorded and memorized and then regurgitated in smudged ballpoint pen. This was definitely the upside of teaching, she thought; no studio executive would ever look at her with the kind of trusting adoration these students offered.

But then there was Penelope. The senior was proving to be a headache, despite Claudia’s attempts to coax her out of her aggressive armor. Penelope had taken possession of a seat on the far side of the classroom, and sat there every day, slumped sideways in her chair, barely lifting her pencil, and regarding Claudia with undisguised skepticism. Rather than raise her hand now, she just blurted out her reaction to Claudia’s lectures, often before Claudia had even finished a sentence. She prefaced almost every utterance with “My dad told me that” or “I visited Redford’s set once and” or “We have an original print of that movie at home, and I’m pretty sure that” and brought almost every discussion to a dead halt.

Although the other students, themselves a fairly jaded and experienced bunch, usually rolled their eyes at Penelope, Claudia had noticed that they were beginning to be affected by her behavior. More than once, a student had unthinkingly directed a question directly to Penelope rather than Claudia. Perhaps this wasn’t so surprising, considering that Penelope’s inside knowledge of late-twentieth-century cinema, culled from her father’s filmography, occasionally seemed greater than Claudia’s own. (One evening, Claudia cross-referenced her curriculum with Samuel Evanovich’s IMDB profile, only to discover that he was linked to almost half the movies in her lesson plan.) Still, Penelope’s presence in the classroom was like a black hole, draining Claudia of energy and enthusiasm.

To make matters worse, Penelope wasn’t exactly turning out to be the star pupil that Claudia had once envisioned. (That role belonged unequivocally to Mary Hernandez: the deadly serious student hadn’t received anything lower than an A minus). Penelope offered up half-written essays, failing to complete them even when Claudia cut her a break and gave her extra time. She turned in quizzes with more doodles on them than answers. It wasn’t that Penelope didn’t know anything about film; that was abundantly clear. Was there some kind of learning disability that had yet to be diagnosed? Fear of test-taking? ADD? Dyslexia? Claudia didn’t want to consider the alternative: that Penelope had taken a dislike to her for some reason, and this was a deliberate gesture, a middle finger extended straight at her. After all, she’d borrowed that screener of
Spare Parts
and not only never gave Claudia any feedback, she never even returned it. The vision of that cozy evening chez Evanovich was fading, week by week, no matter how hard she tried to overlook Penelope’s antics and encourage some sort of camaraderie in their place.

This afternoon she would have to address these problems with the Evanoviches. It was a conversation she’d been dreading for weeks:
Hi, Mr. Evanovich, so nice to meet you, I’m a huge fan of your work. Will you please autograph my copy of
The Manchurian Candidate,
which we’re discussing in class next week? By the way, your daughter is a know-it-all who needs an attitude adjustment. Yes, I know she’s gotten this far at Ennis Gates without anyone else making a stink, but I’m just that kind of teacher. Also, I know she worships you, but can you tell her to stop mentioning you when I’m lecturing?
She could not imagine this going over well.

Her plan was to draft out her thoughts in advance, leaving no room for blurted annoyance or unintentional obsequiousness. She sat with a pencil in hand, thankful for the stillness of these dark moments before dawn, as she mulled over the most politic way to present her case.
I think we need to discuss your daughter’s motivation issues
, she wrote, then scratched it out.
Penelope is a winning kid but …
No, too pandering.
I wonder whether a consultation with a learning capabilities tutor would be useful
, she finally began, just as she heard a rustling in the hallway, footsteps approaching. A male figure appeared in the doorway, tripped over the threshold, and toppled forward into the kitchen, landing almost in Claudia’s lap. She pulled her bathrobe closed with one hand as she tried to steady him with the other.

The man was wearing nothing except for a pair of tight white cotton briefs. He was also, by Claudia’s measure, about twice Lucy’s age: A thin ruffle of hair encircled a bald patch on the top of his head, gray curls erupted off his bare barrel chest, and his fleshy face drooped, as if someone had tugged his skin loose from the bones. When she reached out to grab his hand—soft, like a baby’s—and heaved him upright, she noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring.

“Thanks,” he muttered, clearly embarrassed by her presence. “Didn’t think anyone’d be up at this hour.” He turned to flee, and bumped straight into Lucy, who had appeared in the doorway behind him. Lucy wore an astonishing garment: a floor-length silk nightgown in pink, trimmed with marabou feathers, like something the femme fatale would wear in a 1930s film noir.

“Claudia, you’re awake! I hope we didn’t wake you up?” Her face revealed none of her partner’s mortification; if anything, she looked pleased to have been caught. “I see you’ve met Pete. Pete, this is my roommate, Claudia.”

“You’re home … early,” Claudia said faintly. “I thought you got off work at seven
A.M.?”

Lucy walked to the fridge and opened it. She fished around inside, retrieving a Heineken—one of Jeremy’s, Claudia noted to herself, but said nothing—and handed it to Pete, who inched toward the doorway, clearly itching to leave. But Lucy plopped down at the kitchen table, across from Claudia. “Oh, they’re fiddling with our schedules at the hospital,” she said. “I got off early and Pete gave me a ride home. Pete’s a surgeon at Good Samaritan. Thoracic.”