This Is Where We Live (27 page)

“By the way, this is our friend Cristina,” he interrupted.

“Such a huge fan.” Cristina grabbed Aoki’s hand with both of hers and flapped it up and down. “I work at the Modern, here. We have a few pieces of yours in the collection?”

“Yes, a very pleasant little museum.” Aoki extricated her fingers from Cristina’s grasp.

“I’d love to talk with you sometime about your work, maybe do an interview with you for our patron newsletter?”

“I’m afraid I’m allergic to interviews. I break out in hideous rashes. Doctor forbade them entirely.” Aoki turned back to Jeremy, tuning out Cristina. “Come with me. I want to introduce you to a friend of mine, Pierre Powers.”

Cristina persisted. “The fashion designer? He’s here?”

“He was a huge fan of This Invisible Spot; he’s told me many times,” Aoki continued, ignoring Cristina’s outburst. “He’s here and wants to talk to you.”

Jeremy battled the murk that had settled in around his brain, making everything Aoki said seem confusing and dangerous. Claudia asked the question that he couldn’t quite seem to form. “He wants to talk to Jeremy about what?” she asked.

Aoki swung to look patiently at Claudia. “Working together, of course.”

Jeremy found his voice, finally. “He wants me to design Tshirts for him?”

Aoki laughed. “God, no. Music. It’s all about cross-platform artistic collaborations these days. I’m painting a line of bags for him. Anyway, he has money and he knows people and he just loves you.”

“Really?” His voice was uncharacteristically high; he was giddy. He turned to look at the back of the room, wondering if he would recognize Pierre Powers if he saw him. He knew the name, of course, but had no idea what he looked like in person. His expectations for the rest of the evening took an unexpected, lurching turn, headed toward a much more interesting destination.

Aoki’s face was growing pinched with impatience. She took a step away from their cluster. “Just come with me. All the fun people are in the back, in the VIP room. We’re going to have dinner after this is over and we want you to join. You don’t mind if I steal him, do you, Claudia? You’re leaving anyway, yes?”

Claudia’s face flickered unhappily. She looked from Jeremy to Aoki and then back to Jeremy again, visibly torn. “It’s fine,” she said, finally. “I’ll see you at home, honey.” She leaned over and kissed Jeremy on the mouth, a damply possessive kiss. Jeremy could feel Aoki’s cool eyes on them, assessing, patient. He realized he was reddening.

“Don’t ground him if he gets home late,” Aoki said, her voice as dry as a chilled gin martini. She put a hand on his side and began gently to press him away from the other women.

Claudia’s face seemed to freeze, with her smile half-collapsed into a distorted grimace. “Nice to meet you, Aoki,” she said, and there was a brief moment while Jeremy waited for her to shake Aoki’s hand again, or even attempt an air kiss, but Claudia just stood there, immobile. “Congratulations on a really terrific retrospective,” she finished, flatly.

“Oh, this?” Aoki glanced at the walls, gripping Jeremy’s waist harder. He felt helpless in her grasp, as if he’d voluntarily relinquished the right to his own will. “Yes, sometimes the oldest things are the best of all.”

Claudia

SAMUEL EVANOVICH TUCKED A NAPKIN INTO THE TOP OF HIS
shirt, where it protruded straight out from his bulk like a plastic baby’s bib. On the plate before him was half a cow, sitting in a pool of its own bloody juices. He smeared butter over the grill marks and then stabbed the flesh with a knife, sawing off a sizable hunk. He chewed it three times, swallowed, and grunted with satisfaction, washing the whole thing down with a slug of watery scotch. Claudia had heard about Samuel Evanovich’s legendary appetite, but seeing it in action was something else completely, like watching a private performance by an accomplished maestro. She couldn’t decide if she was fascinated or repulsed.

The restaurant was Italian, a wood-paneled den with red leather booths lit from above by yellow glass shades. Waiters in tuxedos hovered just on the periphery, proffering sweaty martini shakers and enormous pepper grinders as if they were holy relics. The clientele was graying, stout, self-satisfied, predominantly male. It looked like someone’s approximation of an Old Hollywood hangout. Maybe it
was
an Old Hollywood hangout. Claudia wondered whether it was a sign of her status as an outsider that she’d never heard of it before.

She picked up her fork to prod at her own entrée, pumpkin ravioli with black truffle. It was the sort of decadent treat she would never have chosen if she was picking up the bill herself, but after watching Samuel Evanovich’s gastronomical feats she found she didn’t have much of an appetite. Instead, she pushed the ravioli around her plate, acutely conscious of the leaden silence at the table. Already they’d spent half an hour on small talk—the discovery of mutual film industry acquaintances (Samuel had once hired RC for a script rewrite), a discussion of the merits of the current Oscar contenders, and a long soliloquy from Samuel recalling a six-month sojourn in Cambodia, shooting a motorcycle movie back in 1978—before running out of comfortable conversation. The only subject they hadn’t yet touched was the only one she truly cared about. Was he waiting for dessert to mention her screenplay? Was he waiting for her to bring it up? What was the proper protocol in this scenario?

Samuel Evanovich sopped up a puddle of congealing
jus
with a golf ball of baked potato and then sighed, as if the effort of dining was almost to much to take. “It’s like this,” he began. “Your script is a smart piece of writing, but it’s absolutely unmakable. It’s not going to play in France or Germany, so you can forget foreign financing. Your leads are teenagers, so there goes your shot at getting a bankable name. And the love interest goes off to Iraq in the end? Investors are going to run screaming. Three years ago, I might have been able to scrape up ten or twenty million, but dark little dramas like this are going the way of the dodo bird.”

“I don’t need ten or twenty million. I’m sure I could make it for five,” she offered. “Maybe even less, if I had to.”

Samuel grunted and rummaged around in the bread basket, coming up empty-handed. A trail of sesame seeds led across the tablecloth from the basket to his plate, a clue to the fate of the missing loaf. He sat back in his seat and rubbed at the place where his cardigan strained across his paunch, and then took a long swallow from his scotch and soda. “Even six months ago, I would have said let’s take this around to the indie divisions, see if we can pitch a development deal,” he continued. “But honestly, I know what they’re going to say already, and I don’t want to waste my time.”

“I could revise it,” she offered, growing frantic. “I’ll make any changes you think I should to make it more commercial.”

Evanovich shook his hand. “Pointless. It is what it is.”

Claudia took a sip of wine, trying to blink back the unprofessional tears that sprang to her eyes. Stupidly, she had not prepared herself for this outcome; had naïvely assumed that their dinner could only have a positive result because why else would he want to meet? She should have known better; she
did
know better, and yet she had somehow let herself get swept away by the old, alluring dream. Now she wished Samuel had waited until dessert to deliver the bad news, because she wasn’t sure she could sit here for another half hour and make polite small talk without breaking down entirely.

Samuel continued on, explaining the current state of the film industry—
DVD market in collapse, half the indie financiers closing their doors
—as if Claudia was a naïf who’d just arrived on a plane from Poughkeepsie, but Claudia wasn’t paying attention anymore. Instead, she let her thoughts drift naturally back to the anxiety she had been suppressing since she walked in the door of the restaurant.
Aoki
. For the hundredth time, she regretted having left Jeremy behind at the art gallery. She blinked, and the momentary image that danced on the back of her eyelids was of
that woman
, steering her husband away. Her intestines twisted sourly, insisting that she had made a terrible mistake.

For the first fourteen minutes at the gallery, she’d been able to convince herself that all her fears about Aoki had been misplaced. Despite the portraits of him on the wall, the flesh-and-blood Jeremy looked awkward and incongruous at Aoki’s opening. He didn’t know a soul there, despite her fears that he might somehow find himself surrounded by long-lost friends, and he held himself stiffly, acutely self-conscious. Aoki hadn’t been waiting to pounce on him; in fact, she hadn’t come to find them at all, and Claudia was able to convince herself that this was because Jeremy wasn’t very high on Aoki’s priority list after all. Her jealousy suddenly seemed unmerited—it was, she decided, simply the exaggerated insecurity of a woman who, all her life, had feared that she didn’t measure up. Just because Aoki was famous and wealthy—just because that one valuable painting held some special resonance for Jeremy—didn’t mean he was going to run off with his emotionally unbalanced ex-girlfriend.

Coming here was the right thing to do
, she had thought to herself.
He’s letting go of something, accepting the fact that the past is gone forever. There’s nothing exciting for him here at all. We’ll finally be able to move on. Maybe he’ll even sell the painting
.

Even when Aoki did finally present herself, Claudia didn’t panic. Certainly the woman was stunning, if you went for that whole petite Asian thing, but her appearance was so contrived, her airs so self-consciously dramatic, that it seemed difficult to take her seriously. The Jeremy Claudia knew always gravitated to laid-back types, people who didn’t press him too hard or demand too much of him; Aoki, on the other hand, was clearly a lot of work. With just a few words, Claudia could see why that entire relationship had imploded so violently; it was impossible to imagine them ever being compatible in the first place. And so Claudia had let her guard down, had let herself believe that, if anything, Aoki was someone with whom
she
now shared more in common than Jeremy did. Weren’t they the only two women in the room—in the world, really—who had spent years of their lives trying to understand his maddening ways? It was a relief to hear that Jeremy had been just as—what was the word Aoki used?
Reticent
—with Aoki as he sometimes was with her.
It’s not just me
, she thought to herself, happily.

It wasn’t until the end of their conversation that the warning bell began to clang. It was Aoki’s hand. Aoki had placed her palm low on Jeremy’s waist as if she had every right to put it there, touched him with the possession of a girlfriend or wife. Women simply did not touch their estranged ex-boyfriends’ bodies that way. Claudia’s breath had stopped in her throat. And then, with Aoki’s blithe dismissal of her—“don’t ground him if he gets home late”—she recognized a new dynamic that Aoki had somehow forged, with Aoki as exciting lover and Claudia as nagging
(pretty fucking boring)
mom. Before she could figure out how to respond, Aoki simply steered Jeremy away, and he passively
let her do it
.

That was when she knew: Aoki wanted Jeremy back.

She stood there, for a beat too long, watching Jeremy disappear into the throng at the rear of the gallery. When she looked back, Cristina was staring at her. “Well,” Cristina said, clearly wounded, “Aoki lives up to her reputation.”

“She’s a pathological narcissist,” Claudia replied, but the insult was a weak rally against a formidable opponent. Even then, she knew she should have chased them down, forgone her meeting, glued herself to Jeremy’s side for the rest of the night.
He is vulnerable right now, and that
woman is not to be trusted
, she thought. But no. She’d stupidly put her career first and fled here, to this stuffy restaurant, trying to convince herself that Jeremy loved her and would never betray her. On the car ride here, she realized for the first time how pitiable positive thinking really was: an avenue of last resort, a candy-coated mirage for powerless people who had no other options at their disposal. Who had no other way to prevent a husband from cheating.

She’d done that, for
this:
Evanovich’s blithe dismissal of her work. She should have known better. She considered flagging down the waiter and asking for the bill, fleeing back to the gallery before it was too late, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to be so rude, despite the emotional injury Evanovich had just inflicted. What had this whole charade been about?
At least he liked the script
, she consoled herself.
At least he validated the fact that I have some talent, even if it is a completely wasted talent
. She took a sip of Pellegrino to moisten the dry paste that glued her tongue to the roof of her mouth, and realized that Samuel Evanovich was awaiting her response.

“Well, I appreciate your honesty,” she said stiffly, aware that she didn’t sound appreciative at all.

“Oh, don’t get all touchy artist on me, kiddo,” Samuel said. She wondered when she’d been demoted from
Mizz Munger
to
kiddo
. “Shelve the script for a while, and we’ll try again in a few years. The industry always goes in cycles. Just think of what we got stuck with in the 1980s.
Captain
EO.
Howard the
fucking
Duck.”

We
. She revived at his unexpected use of the pronoun. “So what do you suggest I do, then?” she said, deciding to take a chance. What did she have left to lose? “Because honestly, I’m stumped. My film career has stalled completely.”

“You know how many working feature directors there are in the United States, ones who actually make a good living doing it?” Samuel said. “My guess, less than two hundred. You have a better shot at getting hit by lightning. It’s not a profession for sensitive types. You sure you really want this? What’s wrong with the teaching thing?”

“It’s not what I want to do.”

“Ah, that old story. Let me tell you something: No one gets to do what they really want to do all the time. That’s just a pretty fairy tale. Real life is just a never-ending string of compromises that you make in order to survive.”

Claudia picked up her fork and prodded at an oily pillow of ravioli, sending orange squash squirting across her plate, and then pushed it away. The rich, loamy scent repulsed her.

“Not good?” he asked, pointing at her pasta with his fork.

“Not hungry,” she replied.

Samuel began to guffaw, a rolling, churning sound that reverberated across the restaurant, ending only when Samuel choked on his own laughter. “Ah, women,” he gasped. “Four wives and not a one who didn’t worry about her weight.”

“I’m not on a diet,” she said, growing indignant. “Can we get back to the subject of my career?”

Samuel stabbed at his eyes with the bottom of his napkin, drying invisible tears. “Of course, of course. I apologize. Let’s keep this professional, no?” He placed two meaty fists on the table, framing his plate, and leaned in. “Soderbergh.”

“Soderbergh?”

“He’s got a handle on his career. A smart kid, wife’s a real looker, even if some of his films are self-indulgent snores. Anyway, this is the way it works. You make a movie with big mainstream appeal so you can bank a reputation with the studios as someone whose name means box office.
Then
cash that in to make your quirky indie drama. You alternate, like Soderbergh. One for them, one for you. See?”

This wasn’t particularly useful advice, she thought. “You make it sound so easy—just make a movie with commercial appeal, like he does? But that’s precisely the problem. I’m
not
Soderbergh. I’m ready and willing to make a big mainstream movie but no one will give me that chance in the first place. It’s a Catch-Twenty-two.”

“Yes, I understand.” Samuel sat back in his seat with a frown. “But let me tell you. I wanted to meet with you because I have a project I think you might be right for, a project that calls for a female director. It’s not as serious as what you have here, of course, not as edgy, but I think you’ll find the themes are universal. The screenplay’s got a lot of promise, and you could do a rewrite if you have ideas. I’ve got it set up at Spyglass; it’s a go film, and they’re planning on plugging it into their summer lineup. They want it to be a vehicle for Jennifer what’sherface. Looking at a twenty million budget, in all likelihood.” He quaffed the last of his scotch while simultaneously gesturing for another one with his index finger.

Lightness, like a soap bubble, rose up in her chest. Working together! It wasn’t what she’d expected—it wouldn’t exactly be
her
movie—but it certainly wasn’t anything to sniff at.
A go film!
“What’s it about?” she asked, not bothering to mask the eagerness in her voice.

Samuel shook his head, dislodging bread crumbs from his beard. “I don’t pitch. Look, you read it; you tell me what you think. We’ll work it from there.”

He rummaged around in a battered leather satchel on the banquette next to him and withdrew a script, sliding it across the table. Claudia read the title page upside down:
QUINTESSENCE.
A felicitous name. She smiled, drawing it toward her. “I’ll get back to you in the next day or two,” she said.