This Is Where We Live (19 page)

He took the drinks out front, to a tiled patio with a view of the street, and settled in at a table between two screenwriters working on laptops. A giant abstract collage made from dried ferns and flattened bottle caps loomed above him, part of an art installation.
Hope for Future
, its placard said.
$850
. He looked at it for a minute, appalled, then switched seats so it wouldn’t be in Aoki’s line of vision. To make the minutes pass, he flicked through the messages on his BlackBerry, noting two e-mails from Daniel that he didn’t open, and one from Claudia that he did.

Sorry about last night, but I’d taken an Ambien and was dead to the world. What happened that was so awful? I’ll have a break around noon—I assume by then you’ll be done with your coffee with Aoki? Please call to let me know how it went? Have fun, but not too much, OK?

The e-mail was a giant pointed question mark. He could feel the strain in her words, the effort it took to hide her anxiety and pretend she wasn’t concerned; probably he was supposed to reply with some sort of reassurance, but honestly he wasn’t in the mood. He closed the e-mail without responding.

He noticed that the barista had drawn a heart in the foam of Aoki’s cappuccino and worried that she might think he asked to put it there. Then he thought she wasn’t that stupid. He wished she’d just show up so he wouldn’t look so idiotic sitting by himself with two drinks. Why was he here anyway? What did he want? He hoped maybe she wouldn’t show up at all and he could just go home and return to his regular life, or what remained of it. His coffee was getting watery but he didn’t touch it.

“This much hasn’t changed,” he heard. “I am still always late.”

Aoki stood before him, somehow both smaller and larger than he remembered. She wore all white, a strange deconstructed skirt and a tight ribbed top that buckled across the chest, with flat purple sandals. Her hair was long now, and she had it up in an elaborate topknot, so shiny it looked lacquered. She smiled through parted lips painted with bright red lipstick. She looked … angelic, arty, beautiful, supremely self-confident, by far the most unique woman in the whole café. She looked exactly like Aoki.

He stood up, knocking the table askew as he tried to squeeze past the screenwriters to get to her. She stepped forward and there was an awkward moment—would there be physical contact, a hug?—which ended when Aoki leaned in and gave him a kiss on each cheek, European style.

“I ordered for you,” he said. “So you wouldn’t have to wait in line. Still drinking nonfat cappuccinos?”

“You remembered,” Aoki said. She sat down and drew the cappuccino toward her. “And here I thought I’d nurtured such an aura of unpredictability.”

“Some things never change.”

“It’s true,” she said, and looked down at her cup. “A heart. How cute.”

“They’ll also do a little smiley face, if you prefer.”

Aoki laughed and took a sip, mutilating the heart. She sat back and examined him. “You look exactly the same. I knew you would.”

“And here I thought I’d nurtured such an aura of unpredictability,” he said wryly. It was odd to be joking like this, to be so light with her, when so many memories of their time together were painted over in apocalyptic blacks and purples. He’d spent so much time remembering the unhinged woman who slit her wrists in the bathtub, who shot up heroin, who slept with his bandmate, that he’d almost forgotten how quickly he could be drawn in by this Aoki—witty, flirtatious, compelling.

“That was a compliment. You were always too handsome to bear.”

He flushed, incapable of resisting the flattery, thrilled that she still found him attractive, conscious of the danger in this knowledge. He didn’t think Claude would like the direction this conversation had gone already. “In that case, I’m sorry to have pained you.”

“I don’t think you are sorry,” Aoki said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have dumped me so cruelly.”

The words sat there between them, waiting to be acknowledged. He was disoriented, although he should have expected this. These had always been Aoki’s favorite conversational gambits: Disrupt, destabilize, disarm.
But that isn’t how it happened
, he thought to himself, and wondered whether she had rewritten their whole relationship as a grand betrayal. Jeremy looked at her closely to see if he could locate the hysterical Aoki, the one he’d left crying on the floor of her studio four years ago. Was her e-mail promise
—I hold no grudges
—an empty one? Was this an ambush after all, or a step on her twelve-point recovery plan?

“Do you want talk about that?” he offered, carefully. “Are we supposed to rehash our relationship now and figure out what went wrong?”

“God, no,” Aoki said, pursing cherry-red lips in pretty distaste. “I did all that in rehab already. I’ve spent far too much time as a victim to the tyranny of nostalgia already. Regrets take up too much room. Let’s just say, then was then. I wasn’t healthy. Your reasons for going weren’t unreasonable. And leave it at that.”

“Fine with me,” Jeremy said, relieved. Maybe she was just pretending to be so unperturbed; either way, he’d accept it. “So we’re friends?”

Aoki laughed. “Of course. Actually, you’ve been on my mind a lot lately—in a good way. I get a bit lonely, sometimes, with so many strangers tugging at me all the time that I never have time for the people who are
real
to me. So I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about the people who really understand me. Who knew me—before all
this.”
She flicked a hand abstractly, gathering the entire café and the world beyond into the circumference of her personal fame, and then gazed up at him through stubby black eyelashes. “That’s why I contacted you.”

He watched her watching him. Years of history seemed to flash between them, unspoken. It was as if they were veterans from a war that only the two of them had fought, sharing scars from battles that no one else could possibly comprehend. He had let himself forget so much. “I’m glad you did.”

She sat back, pleased. “I knew you would feel that way.”

A diesel bus groaned past, just a few feet away, bringing conversation briefly to a halt. Aoki pinched her nose to block the smell of car exhaust, and Jeremy leaned in to fill the gap of sudden silence: “Well, if we don’t want to talk about the past, what should we talk about instead?”

“Oh, you pick,” she said.

“OK. Tell me what it’s like to be a superstar artist.”

“You really want to know?” She made an exasperated face. “It’s bloody awful. Everyone wants to talk about my
myth
. The critics, they say anything they want about me, invent meanings for my work that I never imagined, deconstruct my life and then label it
me
, and I can’t do anything about it. Remember how I used to enjoy screwing with the public? Making up stories about my
time spent living with Nepalese yak herders
or my
hermaphrodite birth
and seeing how they scrambled over fictitious crumbs? But now they don’t believe me anymore and instead this whole
myth
thing has emerged. You know what some critic wrote about me the other day? ‘Aoki exemplifies the fractured soul of the post-modern media age, her constantly reinvented personae externalizing the root of human disconnection.’ It’s like I’m not a human being at all anymore.”

“Strange,” he said, surprised by the force of her diatribe. “I thought you would like that sort of thing. You used to live for it.”

She looked momentarily abashed. “I know. But that was before I knew it would become such a monumental bore.”

“So are you unhappy?”

She ran a finger along the rim of her cappuccino cup, scraping off brown froth with the raw edge of a bitten fingernail. “No. It’s very nice to be rich and respected. I get to do whatever I want whenever I want it. I keep apartments in three cities. And I love the art, of course.”

“Sounds awful,” he said, pulsing with jealousy.
That would have been my life if I stayed with her
, he thought to himself; and then, before he could stop himself,
Did I make a mistake?

“You’d love it,” she said. She smiled, and an understanding seemed to pass between them. “OK. Now you,” she said. “I’m desperately curious about who you’ve become.”

Aoki was looking at him with her head tilted to one side, her eyes narrowed in thoughtful contemplation. It stirred in him a bright shock of recognition: He remembered this look, the one that made you feel like you were the most fascinating person on the face of the planet, a person of infinite depth and undiscovered capabilities. It was the look she’d seduced him with in the first place. Was she trying to seduce him again? Did he
want
to be seduced? “I should tell you about Claudia,” he said stiffly.

Aoki shook her head vigorously. “I don’t want to hear about
her
yet. Tell me about
you
. Let’s start with your music.”

“That’s a sore subject,” he said, hoping he could stop this line of questioning, reluctant to reveal the mundane details of his life. “My band is no more.”

“I thought you were about to finish an album?”

“So did I. Events conspired against me. My bandmates bailed out. Just yesterday, in fact.”

“Daniel,” she said. “Your friend the journalist?”

“Yes, he’s having a kid and he had to quit. But he wasn’t the only one.”

Aoki made a face. “He was always too mild for my taste. Anyway, you shouldn’t have been playing with amateurs. You’re better than that.”

“They were actually quite good,” he objected. “We had a lot of potential. People were eagerly awaiting our album.”

She seemed not to have heard this. “You want to know what I would have done, if I were you? I would have set up meetings with managers the minute I got to Los Angeles, used all those contacts from your This Invisible Spot days. You could have found
professionals
, other high-profile veterans like yourself—like that guy who played guitar for The Villains, remember? He’s out here; he started a kind of—what’s that hokey word they use now?—superband. LA is the music capital of the world, even if it doesn’t have much else going for it, and I’m sure people would have died to work with you. You could have gone solo, even. Honestly, you missed an opportunity.”

Jeremy took a sip of cold coffee, registering this truth for the first time. He saw the last two years with Audiophone reflected in a whole new and far less flattering light. She was right; he hadn’t ever tried to succeed on his own, not in any kind of significant way. He’d just let his music career proceed in the easiest way possible, had succumbed to complacency and the comfort of friendship. Only now did he realize that he’d completely failed to think strategically; had failed to realize that was even a concern.

“I was distracted, I guess,” he said. “By—other things.”

“Right. Claudia,” she stated flatly.

Claudia’s name on Aoki’s tongue made him cringe. Shame tugged at his sleeve, reminding him who he was now. “Not just Claudia. It’s also … well, we own a house, which is a time and money suck, particularly now with the economy the way it is.” Aoki arched an eyebrow, which Jeremy ignored. “And I’ve got a day job, of course.”

“Yes. Designing Tshirts. A lifelong ambition of yours, I remember.”

He retreated from her, falling back in his seat. “What’s your point?”

She leaned in and—another shock—put her hand on top of his. Her palm was cool and soft, and he looked down at it there, a pale starfish impaled on his fist. He suddenly recalled a hundred vivid moments with that hand, paint-speckled and tiny and always so cold. When she used to grip his body it tingled and burned, as if he were naked in a snowstorm. Claudia’s hands were much bigger and warmer but somehow less possessive. He thought of pulling his hand away from Aoki but he couldn’t quite do it. His heart flopped and thudded as the years of pent-up emotional memory flickered back and forth between them, an electric current.

“You could be so much bigger than you are,” she said.

“Being rich and successful isn’t the only way to be happy.” He said it instinctively, the old cliché falling from his lips before he had a chance to really decide whether or not he believed this. Of course he did. But it might make you
happier
.

“It’s not just about that. It’s about fulfilling your potential.” She shook her head. “And so?
Are
you happy?”

He paused, too long, to ask himself a question he hadn’t really asked before. He waded through the quagmire of the last few months—the career failures, the money troubles, the disaster of their home, and the quickening fear that he was headed toward a life of mediocrity—and then clambered out again, ticking off items in the plus column: his marriage to a lovely woman, old friends, a pleasant enough lifestyle. It was depressing that he had to work to list these things at all, though, and by the time he’d readied himself to answer in the affirmative—
happy enough
—Aoki was already shaking her head. “I refuse to let this happen, Jeremy.”

“I don’t think you have much say in the matter.”

“I’m sure I can do
something
. I know so many people. I’ll make some calls.” She was so familiar, this Aoki; he used to admire her blithe self-confidence, the way she believed she could make almost anything happen just with the force of her desire. But suddenly he didn’t like this aspect of Aoki at all: Who was she to march in after all this time and tell him what to do? He didn’t want to be her pet project.
I’m perfectly capable of running my own life
, he told himself, despite the evidence suggesting otherwise.

“Thanks for your support, anyway,” he said, halfheartedly.

“Not at all. If anything, I owe it to you. After all, you left This Invisible Spot because of me, so really all
this”
—she held up her free palm and once again described a semicircle that encompassed the entire city; did everyone else’s world belong to her, too?—“is my fault.” Aoki smiled apologetically; and as she did something seemed to shift, so that once again she was the woman he’d always known—beautiful and compelling and slightly unstable but, still, someone who believed in him right from the start. She wanted to throw him a lifeline, and he should be grateful for that even if he hated the fact that she saw him as a cause to be saved. He knew he could never turn down her offer of help. Maybe she knew that too. He felt himself slipping into a neat little web that Aoki had woven, wondering whether she had planned this all along and hating himself for being so willing to get trapped in it.
In order not to be a failure
, he realized,
I may have to become a bad person
.