This Is Where We Live (26 page)

“Abuelita,” Mary said, using the amplified speech that young people reserve exclusively for speaking to the elderly. “Abuelita, this is my teacher, Mrs. Munger.” But the old lady was shuffling toward her own front stoop, moving surprisingly quickly considering her infirmities. Mary followed, lowering her voice.
“Señora Munger es mi maestra. Maestra de cine.”

Dolores lifted a hand in a reluctant acknowledgment without bothering to turn all the way around. It was still the most friendly gesture, Jeremy thought, that he’d ever received from her. Mary put her hand out to take her grandmother’s elbow, and the old woman leaned into it. She patted her granddaughter’s arm, clutching her tightly, and let Mary steer her up the path. Beside the sturdy young teenager, Dolores looked brittle and ancient, as if the elephantine calves holding her upright might crack and crumble at any moment.

The whole scenario made Jeremy’s skin crawl. It was the first time he’d heard Claudia referred to as
Missus Munger
, and with those two words she suddenly appeared twenty years older than she was. Even worse was the fact that this girl—hardly any younger than the girls who came to see his band!—had called him
Mr. Munger
, a man who by name alone sounded like he should be mowing the lawn on Saturdays and buying life insurance policies. So far, he’d been able to regard Claudia’s new career as an abstract idea, a vague destination that swallowed up her time but nothing that tangibly manifested itself in his day-to-day, but the presence of her student, standing here, brought
Claudia the Schoolteacher
to life in a way that made him want to run down the hill as fast as he could.

“We’ve got to go,” Jeremy muttered under his breath to Claudia. “We’re really late.”

Claudia tore herself away from the spectacle of the teenager and her grandmother. She unlocked the door of her Jetta—they were driving separately tonight—and waved at Mary one last time. “See you tomorrow,” she called to Mary. “Don’t forget that the David Lynch essay is due.”

Mary nodded. “I already finished it.”

“Of course you did.” Claudia smiled, a note of indulgence in her voice, but something about the expression on her face was pinched shut, as if the existence of the girl was physically painful to her too. But Jeremy didn’t have time to wonder about this, as he gunned the engine of the convertible to life, backed out of the driveway, and headed down the hill.

They caravanned in the waning light down the 110 and then across the 10, Jeremy following behind Claudia as her car grew harder and harder to spot. Traffic was heavy. The highway pulsed, then snagged, then came to a near stop. Three of the radio stations Jeremy tuned to were playing the same song, a pop tune by Beyoncé, or was it Rihanna? He couldn’t tell the difference. The drivers in the cars on either side of him were talking on their cellphone headsets, having adamant conversations with some indeterminate point on the horizon, hermetically sealed in their air-conditioned luxury bubbles. Jeremy felt as if he were shrinking in size as the urban sprawl spread out before him; just one more set of braking red lights in a vast, convulsing automaton. Near La Cienega, they crept by the wreckage of a horrific car accident, crumpled steel and glass spattered across the road, two tow trucks waiting to hoist the twisted remains to their flatbeds. Someone, somewhere, was probably dead.

He wondered what would happen when he arrived at the opening. Would Aoki be waiting for him at the door, anxious to make a scene or to confront Claudia? Would he be some sort of demi-celebrity, still her most famous subject? Maybe her old New York art friends would be there, a crowd he’d mostly forgotten but still sometimes missed in the abstract. They were probably doing the same things they had five years before—getting falling-down drunk at art openings and then finishing the night at cheap Russian diners, hosting dinner parties that ended as all-night cocaine binges at converted warehouses in Williamsburg, having ugly affairs with each other’s significant others. Her friends were rowdy and irresponsible and always in the process of
creating
. Once, he’d fit right into this scene; maybe it wasn’t unrealistic to imagine that some things hadn’t changed. But it was hard to imagine explaining the mundane, earthly details of his current life to those nomadic butterflies.

He wanted desperately for something thrilling to happen tonight; he wanted, equally, for nothing interesting to happen at all, so he could just move on.

At the gallery, he hesitated only briefly before valeting the car, and then felt guilty when he spied Claudia in her high heels, moving painfully down the street from a parking spot two blocks away. He waited for her on the sidewalk in front of the gallery. It was an enormous white concrete box, sandwiched on either side by luxury boutiques, with a wall of glass windows giving way to the scene inside. Aoki’s name hung just inside the entrance in eight-foot-high red plastic letters—just the one word, AOKI, as if her last name had been subsumed entirely by the power of the first. He was perspiring heavily, even thought it wasn’t at all hot outside, and he worried that he might appear shiny or even start to smell.

Claudia arrived at his side, reached out for his arm. “That accident,” she said, with a shiver.

“I know,” he said, moving her toward the gallery door, his pulse beginning to race.

“I’ll only be able to stay fifteen minutes, now,” she said. Her face was pale and anxious.

“I’m sure that’ll be plenty of time,” he said, not knowing what he meant.
Time for what?

The gallery was packed wall-to-wall, the noise level incredibly high, thanks to atrocious acoustics. Waiters passed trays of smoked salmon canapés and champagne in glass flutes. He saw a famous actress and a Grammy-winning musician, and a smattering of artist types with neon-bright clothes and curious hair; but mostly the crowd was middle-aged and wearing conservative attire. Donna Karan and Emporio Armani. Striped ties and linen pants. An elderly lady in an argyle sweater who could have been his grandmother; women in Eileen Fisher dresses that draped over their yoga-mommy bodies. Curators and collectors, he supposed: The only people who could afford Aoki’s work anymore. He was strangely disappointed.

Jeremy looked around the room and didn’t see Aoki, though he guessed that she was somewhere in the far corner, where the flow of gawkers thickened into a dense clot. He took a glass of champagne and melted into the crowd, drifting aimlessly toward the gallery walls. The show was vast, a mix of old and new pieces. Claudia’s elbow jabbed him in the soft spot below his rib cage. “That’s you, isn’t it?” she asked, pointing to the far wall. It was. Three different times, although Claudia was probably referring specifically to the painting of his profile in orange, rendered from a strange high angle as he looked warily at some point in the distance. There was also a salmon-pink painting of his hand, thickened with calluses from his guitar, and another of his torso, limply splayed across a filthy bed.
Their
bed. He remembered it clearly; the paint-smeared sheets that smelled of unwashed hair, the mattress sitting starkly on the floor of the walk-up, the stains on the ancient ticking. Each painting landed with a visceral jolt, a reminder of a time before, and by the time he’d located them all he was short of breath, as if he’d been shocked back from near death by a defibrillator. Breathing heavily, he pointed each one out to Claudia. He could feel her tensing beside him, registering the blatant sensuality in the images. As he stood there and stared at himself replicated across the wall, he felt as if he were onstage again, the whole world waiting for him to start performing.

“Claudia? Jeremy?” They turned together, too eagerly, but it was only Cristina, weaving through the crowd toward them. She wore a long knit dress that looked purposely homespun and showed off her growing baby bump, with her hair swept behind her in a curling bun. Her cheeks were bright pink with excitement. She arrived before them and gripped them each in turn, hugging them close as if they were already old friends instead of new acquaintances.

“Have you seen the show yet? It’s transcendent,” Cristina said. “There are three of yours, Jeremy; did you see them?”

“We did. They’re very”—Claudia searched for a word—“vibrant. Obviously. They don’t look much like Jeremy. Though I’m not much of an art critic, honestly.”

Cristina smiled. “I’m sure that’s not true.”

Cristina’s presence seemed to diffuse some anxiety inside Claudia, and she laughed. “Oh, it definitely is. I’d rather not expose my ignorance, if that’s OK? I don’t want them to kick me out.”

“That wouldn’t happen,” said Cristina. “Art should be democratic. No one person’s interpretation is more valid than another’s, if you take the universalist approach. Eye of the beholder, la la la.” She stepped aside, to let an elderly bearded man who smelled strongly of pot squeeze past.

The clot in the corner had moved down the room, toward the front of the gallery. Jeremy craned his head to see if he could spot Aoki, but she was still engulfed by the crowd, just a flash of shiny black hair hinting at her position. He was crazy to have thought it was possible to have some kind meaningful interaction in this place; he’d be lucky if he even managed to squeeze in the briefest of greetings. He realized he was standing very straight, trying to increase his own profile with an inch or two of height. Would anyone here recognize him from the paintings? He glanced around and realized he might as well be invisible for all the attention being paid him. A young starlet type in a leopard-print dress pushed by, knocking him aside with her elbow.

Embarrassment crept in. Who was he, really? Just a guy in some pictures. He was an outsider here; it was idiotic ever to have imagined anything different. The Jeremy he’d become didn’t belong here at all; he understood. Once Claudia left for her meeting and he was on his own, he would probably end up standing lamely in a corner by himself or following Cristina around the room, waiting pathetically for a moment when he could break in and say hello to Aoki. Maybe he would just leave with Claudia. It might even be a relief—honestly, he didn’t need any more confusing distractions in his life.

“Is Daniel here?” he asked Cristina.

Cristina shook her head. “I’m here with my boss.”

He turned to Claudia. “What time do you have to leave?”

She checked her watch for the third time, visibly twitchy. “Now-ish. Are you going to introduce me to Aoki?”

If they left now, he could avoid that encounter entirely, he realized. They would escape completely unscathed. “If we can find her. I don’t even know where she is. Too popular for us, I guess.”

“Well, I guess this was a waste of time?” Claudia didn’t look like she thought this had been a waste of time; she looked happy, as if the last quarter hour had proved something important to her. Jeremy could guess what it was: that Aoki was no threat to Claudia after all. That here, in Aoki’s world, Jeremy was now just as much of a stranger as she herself was. “Are you going to leave too?”

“You can’t go yet.” Jeremy felt a hand on his arm, freezing cold even through his shirt. The expression on Claudia’s face had changed, from relief to cordial wariness. The flush on Cristina’s face increased in intensity, to a giddy violet. He looked down to his left and there was Aoki, wedged in just beside him. Her high-pitched voice broke through the din, almost childlike with disappointment. “You just got here,” Aoki complained, “and already you want to ditch me?”

She wore a loose white shift that shimmered silver when she moved, tall mirrored gladiator sandals that snaked up her calves, and almost no makeup at all except for a slash of red lipstick. Her hair was twisted into two thick braided buns, which braced her head like apostrophe marks, signing
Here is Aoki!
She looked like a creature you might find dancing in the woods in the moonlight, barefoot. Next to Aoki, all three of them—Claudia, Cristina, and Jeremy too—appeared enormous and ungainly, humans who had stumbled into a fairy’s nest.

“Oh, I don’t have to leave yet,” Jeremy found himself saying. “Just Claudia. She has a meeting to get to.” Claudia glanced sharply at him, and he realized that he hadn’t introduced her yet.

Before he could, Aoki reached across to grasp Claudia’s hand, pulling her in. Claudia tipped over uncomfortably, a strange smile on her face. “So you must be Claudia, then?” Aoki asked.

“And you’re Aoki,” Claudia said as she pumped Aoki’s hand nervously up and down like an overeager discount rug salesman. “Thank you so much for inviting me.”

Aoki smiled and released Claudia’s hand. “Of course! I was desperate to meet the
mysterious
Claudia. I wish I knew more about you. Jeremy is so reticent sometimes, isn’t he?”

You didn’t want to hear about her
, Jeremy thought to himself. And:
Reticent?

Claudia blinked. “Oh, I’m not so very mysterious,” she said. “It’s just that Jeremy likes keeping secrets. Sometimes it takes a crowbar to get information out of him.”

“Oh, I remember that well,” said Aoki, and rolled her eyes, and then the women both laughed, a touch too loudly.

“How long are you in town for?” Claudia asked.

“I take the red-eye out Friday night, headed back to Europe for a while,” Aoki said. “Frankly, it couldn’t be soon enough. I loathe Los Angeles.”

Jeremy absorbed this with a dismay that startled him; but Claudia was looking looser and more relaxed by the minute. “I used to hate it too, when I first got here,” she said chummily. “I know a lot of New Yorkers can’t stand the concrete sprawl. But it grows on you after a while. It’s a really complex city, so many layers, if you give it a chance.”

“It’s the cars that get me,” Aoki continued, half-ignoring Claudia’s explanation. “People here seem to live their entire lives in these rolling leather-lined coffins.”

Jeremy was beginning to feel left out. He should have been relieved—the fireworks he’d feared weren’t materializing at all; it was all just a cordial meeting between two women who happened to have a person in common—but instead he found himself resenting the fact that he’d been somehow rendered invisible by this conversation. It was as if he weren’t standing there at all. Had he
wanted
to be fought over?