This Is Where We Live (28 page)

“I need an answer early next week,” he said. “Preproduction is scheduled for late November. We had a director signed on already but she got herself knocked up and had to drop out.”

She looked down, a new lump lodging in her throat. “Why me?” she blurted out, before she could think better of it.

Samuel sat back in his seat and flung an arm across the back of the banquette. “You’re a talented kid.” He shrugged. “I liked that film of yours. What was it called? Funny. Showed promise. Not a lot of women directors out there. And honestly, new talent is a hell of a lot cheaper on the bottom line.”

This time the infantilization didn’t even bother her. “Thank you,” she offered, sincerely. “I really appreciate your enthusiasm.”

She smiled helplessly around the room, wanting to share her joy; she found herself directing her grin at the eager waiter who was pushing a dessert cart in their direction. Gelatin confections jiggled on their plates as the cart made its bumpy way across the ancient carpet. The waiter whisked a chocolate pudding under her nose, tempting her—
“Budino cioccolato
, madam,
con panna”
—as Claudia thought,
Everything will still all be all right after all. We’re going to make it. I’m going to make another movie. I’ll get home tonight, and Jeremy will already be there. We’ll celebrate together
.

Samuel grunted. “My daughter,” he said.

“Your daughter?” She startled, realizing that she’d forgotten about Penelope entirely.

“She says she’s getting an A in your class. Is this true?”

She hesitated. “Yes,” she finally said, wondering what Penelope had told him. What part was the bogus grade playing in all this? It didn’t matter now, she supposed. The A had clearly done whatever good it could do; she could assuage her guilty conscience that she had made the right decision after all. Perhaps someday the three of them would even be able to laugh about the whole episode together. For now she could put it out of her mind, forget it ever happened.

“Good.” Samuel pulled the napkin from the neckline of his shirt and dropped it on the table, waving for the bill. He patted Claudia’s hand on the script, absently. “I’m glad it’s all working out.”

EXT. CONSTRUCTION SITE: DAY

A high-rise construction site in downtown San Francisco.

walks briskly down a plywood walkway in heels and skirt, a baby strapped to her front and back, pushing a triple stroller with three more, all wearing little hard hats.

A group of male WORKERS walk with her, led by the contractor, GUY (pronounced “ghee”).

points to sections of the half-built lobby as Beth’s ASSISTANT strides next to her, writing down her every word.

This is unacceptable. You’re going to
have to rip out this wall and redo it.

But we’re already over budget—

But it’s not right!

The baby on her back starts to cry. She stops abruptly, making a loud shushing sound, jiggling up and down. The men wait, exasperated. The baby calms.

White noise. Simulates the womb.

Then the other four start to cry.

You know, it might be better if you left them at home next time—?

You sound like my ex-husband. Anyway—I had to let another nanny go.

Now? We got the city inspector in two days!

Well, when your babies aren’t receiving the care they deserve, you act quickly. (sighs)

It’s impossible to find anyone you can trust more than yourself.

She notices the men staring at her silently.

What?

Guy points to her chest: It’s wet.

What, one of ’em piss himself?

Guffaws in the group. BETH slips her hand inside her blouse, checking her breasts. The men like this.

Shit, I’m leaking.
(to group)
That wall better be history or you’re fired.

She rushes off with the babies. GUY watches her go.

(coughs under breath) Bitch.

INT. OFFICE ROOM: CONTINUOUS

drags the stroller into an unfinished office space, juggling her five crying kids. She sits down on a stack of plywood, undoing her nursing bra.

She attaches a baby to one breast, works open the other side, and latches on another one. The other three start crying.

What do you want, I’ve only got two!

She juggles babies, her breasts hanging in full view, when she hears a catcall. She looks up.

The ceiling is incomplete. Above her, sitting on a girder, are a dozen construction workers, applauding.

Brings back mammaries of my youth.

The group cracks up. Another worker holds up an Oreo he’s eating with his lunch.

CONSTRUCTION WORKER #2

Hey sugar tits, how ’bout some milk with these cookies?

sits, smoldering, as the cacophony of her babies competes with the men’s laughter.

By the time she finished reading the script, it was eleven-thirty and there was still no sign of Jeremy. She lay back on their makeshift bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking. Back in its old position on the living room wall,
Beautiful Boy
leered down at her; she rolled on her side so she wasn’t looking at it, and the plastic air mattress squeaked under her weight. The living room furniture cast menacing shadows in the glancing light from the lamp in the corner. Her footprints were visible in the dust that had settled on the hardwood floors. She imagined herself floating on an inflatable island, surrounded by sharks, buoyed by air that was slowly leaking out beneath her. Jeremy should have been home by now, even if he had gone to dinner with Aoki afterward. It didn’t bode well.

She flipped back to the first page of the script and began—reluctantly—to read it again. The elation she’d felt in the restaurant resolved itself into a tight knot of heartburn the further she read. Surely this was some kind of joke. Surely Samuel Evanovich, of all people, didn’t think that a script with
universal themes
and a
lot of promise
would feature eleven boob jokes?
Quintessence
was a 102-page high-concept chick flick about a divorced career mom who hires a male nanny to take care of her quintuplets. It was assembled out of every Hollywood cliché ever conceived, every wooden piece of dialogue and forced plot contrivance, every toothachingly sweet “meet cute” and banal character stereotype. The male lead lived on a sailboat and rescued stray puppies; the female was a controlling architect who needed to learn how to relax. Claudia counted four gags involving women’s underwear. There was a makeover montage and a drunken sing-along to a classic seventies song. The movie ended with a chase scene, the woman rowing after the love-interest nanny as he sails away, eventually repudiating her high-powered job to spend more time with her improbably adorable kids.

Skimming the pages for a second time, Claudia could see the glimmer of promise that had once lived at the center of this script—a sly inversion of gender roles, an examination of the meaning of parenting and domesticity in the twentieth century. What remained was probably just a remnant left over from the first draft of the script, before subsequent layers of development executives and producers and hundred-thousand-dollar-a-week script doctors took their stab at making the story more “audience-friendly,” the leads more “relatable.” Claudia looked at the title page again. There were four credited screenwriters, nine drafts dating back three years.

Was it still salvageable? With a new ending, and a dialogue polish, maybe it could be decent, if not great. Maybe Evanovich was hiring her specifically
to
salvage it;
You can do a rewrite if you have ideas
, he’d said. And yet—was it possible that he himself had played a role in the neutering of this script? Maybe he didn’t even
realize
it was bad; maybe he was deadly serious about his belief in the project after all. Because, to be honest—and as the clock ticked toward midnight, she acknowledged this for the first time—hadn’t Claudia kindly been overlooking the fact that he hadn’t produced a truly great movie in over a decade? Maybe he’d once been the undisputed King of Quality Cinema, back in the seventies, but his more recent filmography also included best-forgotten titles like
Crazy Girls
and
Crazy Girls 2, Sherrie and Mary Go Shopping
, and
The Defeater
. She saw him, suddenly, as a has-been clinging to the victories of his youth, regaling her with outdated wisdom in order to prove his continuing relevance. Aligning herself with him would get her nowhere.

And I gave Penelope that A for this
, she thought. Then:
Maybe this is what you deserve for doing that
.

Nonetheless, it was a directing job. And a high-profile lucrative one at that. She didn’t have any other options. What was worse, directing a sub-par movie or resigning herself to teaching for the rest of her life? There were plenty of terrible movies made by great directors, she reminded herself, many of which were commercially successful. Undoubtedly the best business decision she could make right now was to direct a big marketable movie with a well-known producer.
One for them, one for you
, she thought.
Maybe ten for them
.

The clock clicked past midnight. Where was Jeremy? She imagined the things he might be doing (with Aoki?) that very minute: sitting in a trendy bar with an exclusive guest list, getting drunk with Pierre Powers; having an intimate heart-to-heart reminiscence about the old days at some all-night diner; even (she let this vision flash quickly before she banished it from her mind) having mind-blowing sex in Aoki’s suite in some hip design hotel in Beverly Hills. And yet. Jeremy had never cheated on a girlfriend in his life, he’d once told her; he didn’t have it in himself to hurt someone that way. Why would he start now?
(Because you’re not Aoki
, she answered her own question.) She flipped off the light and lay there in the dark, thinking. The night was silent—no helicopters, for once; no cars or alarms or police sirens—except for the wind that swept the fronds of their ancient palm tree across the roof, gently brushing back and forth across the charred shingles. Deep in the house, something was dripping, and she noticed a creaking sound from underneath the floorboards. The basic repairs on the house were almost finished—her parents were leaving in four days—yet something deep in the bones of their home felt permanently altered, irreparable.

The wind picked up outside, sending a loose palm frond clattering down to the almost-finished deck, where it rested for a minute, before dropping farther, into the shadowy depths of the canyon below. She picked up her cellphone and typed out a message to RC:
Career advice required. Can I come over tomorrow eve and pick your brain?
She sent it off into the night, rolled over, and closed her eyes.

By the time headlights splashed across the living room, signaling Jeremy’s arrival back home, Claudia had fallen asleep.

When her alarm went off at five-thirty, Jeremy was unconscious beside her on the air mattress, snoring and reeking of alcohol. She lay there for a while in the dark, watching him sleep, wishing she could read his mind, dreading what she might learn if she did. Eventually she rose and clattered around the house, brewing coffee, dressing for work, flipping through the paper. Jeremy rolled over on his back and flung an arm across his eyes to block out the light spilling in from the kitchen.

“Uggggh,” he muttered. “Can you keep it down?”

She stood in the doorway, watching him from a safe distance. “So was it fun? You got home awfully late.” Her words emerged stiff as planks.

“It was OK,” he muttered. The arm across his face made it impossible to decipher his expression. “I drank too much.”

“Obviously.”

“I had to take a taxi,” he continued. His breath was ragged and labored. “It was expensive. I’m really sorry.”

He moved his arm to squint at her with bleary red-rimmed eyes. The anguish in his face was clear even from across the room; Claudia softened, weak in the face of his misery. “God, Jeremy,” she began, and then stopped, knowing that whatever discussion needed to happen, it couldn’t happen now, when she was already running late.

“Really, I feel bad.” It sounded almost like a plea.

“It’s fine,” she said. “We may not have to worry about money for much longer.” She stood there, waiting for him to wonder what she meant by this; to link her words to the previous night’s meeting with Samuel Evanovich.

Jeremy pulled his arm back over his face. “Right,” he mumbled. He lay on the mattress, as still as a stone. It seemed vitally important that he remember to ask her about Samuel on his own, but as she waited it grew clear that he’d fallen back asleep. She gathered her belongings and made for the front door. Just as she was about to shut it behind her, she stopped, hearing Jeremy’s muffled voice drifting across the house.

He remembered
, she thought. “What?” she called.

His words were muted, filtered through the skin of his forearm. “I love you,” he said, to the crook of his elbow.

RC’s house was an argument against the existence of gravity, a cantilevered modernist cube that seemed to float on the edge of a ridge overlooking Beachwood Canyon. The architect had avoided right angles entirely, designing the building as an interlocking puzzle of obtuse slopes and unexpected turns and circular steel staircases that seemed to hover without any support at all. The walls facing the view were floor-to-ceiling glass, which opened up so that the home’s inhabitants could live among the clouds (on hot days, the smog layer). Floors were poured concrete, polished until they reflected the sky. The swimming pool on the terrace melted into the horizon, vanishing against the Pacific in the distance.

It was a home that would have belonged on the cover of
Architectural Digest
, were it not for the chaos that reigned inside. The living room was a makeshift garage used primarily for the storage of skateboards and bicycles; smears in hues of grass, mud, Sharpie, and ketchup marred the slipcovers on the couches; a ring of smudgy fingerprints, waist high, encircled the glass façade. Tumbleweeds of canine hairs, shed from the twins’ beloved chow-collie mutt, drifted along the concrete floors whenever a draft blew through. Ten-year-old boys had wrested control of this house, and RC and her husband had long ago given in to that inevitability. “We’ll get it back someday,” RC had told Claudia. “For now, it’s a fight we’ll never win, so I might as well embrace the chaos.”

Claudia settled into a Corbusier lounger that was losing its stuffing—Claudia couldn’t quite tell whether the chew marks at the seam were human or canine—while RC fixed her a lemonade. She wondered how much RC paid on her mortgage every month and was depressed to realize that it probably wasn’t much more than her own, since RC had purchased this house long before the real estate boom began. Back when a million-dollar house was actually a
million-dollar house
.

“
Mom!
I need you to sign a permission slip.
Mom?”
One of the twins—Lucas or Otis, Claudia could never tell them apart—drifted into the living room, sucking on a grape popsicle. He was closely followed by the dog, his focus trained on the ground by the boy’s feet. The boy’s knees were capped with raw scabs; his short brown hair was mashed flat from where he’d been wearing a baseball cap. While Claudia watched, a purple iceberg sheaved off the popsicle stick and landed on the floor; the dog swiftly lapped it up. (And
that is why RC doesn’t bother with rugs
, Claudia thought.)

RC appeared in the doorway, holding Claudia’s lemonade. “What for?” She passed the glass to Claudia and glanced at the crumpled paper in Lucas/Otis’s hand.

“Field trip?” the twin offered hopefully. “Just sign it.”

RC pulled the paper from his hand, examining it. “You want to go bungee jumping? When hell freezes over, darling beastie.” She tucked the paper in the pocket of her cargo pants.

The twin scowled. “Justin’s parents are letting him do it.”

RC kissed the boy on his rumpled head. “A valiant effort, Otis. Next time, try your father. He’s a bigger sucker than I am.”

“I’m a sucker?” Jason stood in the doorway, holding a can of charcoal lighter. He was bearded and tan from his travels, with ethnic cotton pants rolled up to his knees to reveal hairy calves and bare feet. “Thanks, honey. You’re supposed to be helping me convey manliness, not emasculating me in front of the kids, remember?”

“What’s emasculate?” Otis asked. The popsicle in his right hand sagged, and the dog dutifully lifted a tongue to finish the melting remains.

“It means your mother wears the pants in this family. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone, considering her sartorial choices. Hi, Claudia,” Jason said. “I’m grilling steaks. Will you be staying for dinner?”

“Not tonight, but thanks,” Claudia said.

RC sat down across from Claudia, pushing aside a PlayStation console to make space for her legs on the couch. “I’m declaring the living room a no-tread zone for the next half hour, OK? Claudia and I need some alone time, so go create your vortex of destruction somewhere else for a while.” The twin conceded and ran from the room, the dog at his heels. Jason disappeared in the direction of the garden.

“Can I borrow your life for a while?” Claudia asked. “You make it look easy.”

RC laughed. “Look at my house. I live in a war zone. My children are conniving heathens. I sleep three hours a night. Nothing is ever easy.”

“I hope at least it gets easier.” Claudia knew she sounded bitter.

“Don’t kid yourself.” RC rolled a basketball underneath her bare foot, her brow crinkling as she registered Claudia’s mood. “It’s all about coming up with your own coping mechanisms. So what’s the crisis?”

“I was offered a job,” Claudia said. “A directing job, on a go movie.”

“And this is a crisis?”

“It’s not a good script.”

“Oh.” RC leaned forward, bracing her hands on her knees. “What’s the project?”

“Quintessence,”
Claudia said. “Samuel Evanovich is producing. Know it?”

RC winced. “It’s been bouncing around the studios for years. In fact, I was asked to do a rewrite on it ages ago. Couldn’t do it because I was busy with pilot season. But I see your dilemma.”

Down the hall, the dog barked and the boys shrieked with pleasure. Claudia felt strangely safe here, cradled inside the familial chaos. “So should I take the job?”

RC kicked the basketball away and it rolled across the room, bouncing against the far wall. “Tell me why you wouldn’t want to do it,” RC said.

“Credibility,” Claudia began slowly. “Pride. The desire to make something great instead of something subpar.”

“Vanity.” RC nodded. “Idealism. Which is a good-enough argument, considering the soullessness of the industry we work in. OK, now tell me why you
would
take the job.”