This Is Where We Live (30 page)

What are you doing here?

Before you sail away …. I just needed to
say—you were right.
(off
MARKS
skepticism)
I see now that my priorities were all
wrong. Why do I need big dreams about
changing the world when my family is
already
this big? So I’m giving up my
architecture practice to stay at home
with my kids. That’s enough for me. I
was thinking I’d open a day-care center
in the house.
(beat)
But I could really use some help from a
professional. Will you give me a second
chance?

MARK

looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge, then flings an anchor overboard. He leaps over to her rowboat.

Beth, you know I’ll always be your Manny.

He holds her in one arm, hugs a child with the other. MARK and BETH kiss as we pull back to see the sun setting over the San Francisco skyline.

THE END

That was enough. Jeremy dropped the script quickly, as if the execrable dialogue might infect him, just in time to see Claudia’s face turn a curious shade of violet.

“Right. No. Yeah. Circumstances changed,” she mumbled. “So what’s for dinner?”

Lying did not come naturally to Claudia. She leaned down and took off her shoes, unwilling to meet Jeremy’s eyes. He closed the script and stared at her, understanding that something critical was going unsaid. “Wait. You
didn’t
flunk her?”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Claudia wandered over to the stove, her back to him. “I smell fish?”

“Did you … ?” He didn’t finish his sentence, already understanding how the whole scenario had played itself out. The good grade, a bribe to the father; the script, his wife’s reward. She’d sold out—for
this
piece of crap? He couldn’t fathom why.

He looked up at Claudia, who had turned to measure his reaction. She leaned back against the stove and twisted her engagement ring back and forth, as if it trying to loosen it on her finger. Or maybe testing to make sure it still fit.
She’s doing this for me
. He suddenly understood.
Somehow, this is intended for me
. He wanted to throw up, finally feeling his hangover kick in for the first time that day.

“Yeah, salmon,” he said, instead.

“Yum,” Claudia peered in the oven. “Oh, the kind I like, with the mustard sauce?”

Jeremy looked down at the table, set for a romantic dinner for two people he didn’t know anymore. Who was he kidding? Even without the special wine and good china, it was all so obvious; if Claudia hadn’t been so distracted by her news, she’d have known instantly what had happened the night before. All that was missing was candles and a big rose bouquet with a card that read:
I betrayed you. Don’t be mad, OK?
He wished he’d stayed in bed instead of cooking up this charade; he wished he could just go back to bed now and sleep the rest of his life away.

Come to Paris with me
.

He could hear that annoying dripping again, under the floorboards, and Claudia’s careful breathing as she stared, for far too long, into the oven. His soup had come to a high boil, burping orange droplets of squash goo all over the stovetop.

He walked over and turned the burner off. “Yes,” he said. “I made it for you.”

Claudia

“HELLO, STRANGER!”

Claudia paused, coffee in hand, as Brenda lurched down the length of the teacher’s lounge to catch up with her. Brenda’s hemp tote had swollen over the course of the semester, spilling over into new bags, so that now three amorphous lumps hung from her shoulders, each more distended than the last. Their combined weight forced Brenda to walk with the shuffling gait of a prisoner in full-body chains. Claudia checked her watch impatiently—she had only half an hour before her senior seminar began.

Brenda arrived by Claudia’s side, groaning, and dropped her bags on the floor. “I swear the parents should be paying for my chiropractic bills,” she muttered. She peered into the pastry box that sat on the counter next to the coffee machine and selected a cranberry muffin, taking a bite. “Ew. Vegan. Must have come from the Hoyts.” She glared at the offending lump in her hand and then held the remains out to Claudia. “Want the rest? I’m not going to waste my calories.”

“I’m not hungry.” Claudia squirted a packet of creamer into her coffee and stirred it. She glanced over to the tables, where Jim Phillips (Gym) was mixing protein powder into a thermos of nonfat milk while flipping through a
Runner’s World
, and quiet Hannah Baumberg (Classic Literature) sat underlining passages in
Jude the Obscure
. Evelyn Johnson (Political Systems) lay back on a couch with a student essay tented over her face, her orthopedic shoes dangling over the arm of the couch as her feet flexed back and forth.

“I swear you’re the only new teacher to lose weight during her first semester here.” Brenda took another bite of the muffin, made a face, and kept chewing. “You’re looking skinny.”

“Let me guess.” Evelyn lifted the term paper from her face and peered over the back of the couch at them. “The brats have given you an ulcer. My first year here I spent a fortune on Xanax. Would pop two with breakfast every morning, another two for lunch.”

Claudia’s coffee tasted like wet ash. She steeled herself and drank it anyway, desperately in need of the extra caffeine jolt. “It’s not that. I needed to drop a few pounds anyway.” Brenda raised a questioning eyebrow. “Really, I’m fine,” Claudia reiterated, although she didn’t particularly feel fine today. This
should
have been her day of triumph—the beginning of a promising new chapter in her life, and the end of her brief tenure at Ennis Gates—but she’d been in a foul mood since she woke up that morning. Maybe it had something to do with dinner with Jeremy the night before, which seemed intended as some sort of mutual reconciliation and yet had been dominated by a freighted silence, as if the number of subjects they were afraid to discuss now officially outweighed the safe ones. They’d gulped down Jeremy’s salmon in less than ten minutes, and, rather than talking about the events of the previous twenty-four hours, they rehashed a debate about replacing the damaged bathroom linoleum with subway tile. Finally, they gave up any pretense of romance and ate dessert in front of the television set. Jeremy passed out on the couch by nine, and Claudia let him stay there, while she moved to the air mattress to sleep alone.

She didn’t ask what had happened with Aoki; she didn’t want to know.
He’s here, isn’t he?
she’d told herself.
That’s what’s important. We’ll figure out the rest with time
. Or so she tried to convince herself as she lay sleepless on the mattress, in the same room as her husband and yet a world apart.

Brenda had opened the fridge and was peering in. “I also saw a fruit salad in here somewhere, if you’re doing the dieting thing, although I really don’t think you need to be,” she offered.

“That fruit is mine,” called Jim Phillips from across the room. He lifted a finger and waggled it in reproach. “And I would appreciate it if you’d stop eating my lunches, Brenda. I’m on a special diet for my ultra-marathon.”

Claudia began to edge her way toward the door. “Sorry.” Brenda rolled her eyes at Claudia, following her toward the exit. “Anyway, I wanted to confab with you before the school board meeting this week. I think the teachers need to present a united front against this new fascistic code of conduct the administration wants to implement. I’m sorry, but this is supposed to be a
liberal
arts school, don’t you agree?”

Claudia glanced at the clock on the wall again. The minutes were disappearing fast; she wanted to check her e-mail before class began to see if Samuel Evanovich had responded.
Codes of conduct
—thank God she’d never have to worry about the administrative arcana of high school teaching again, or about kissing the asses of her kid’s meddlesome parents. She almost felt sorry for Brenda and the rest of the teachers, trapped in a world where these banal worries were paramount. “I’d love to talk but I’ve got to get to class,” she said. “Maybe later?”

But Brenda was looking through the swinging glass doors that led out to the quad. “Speak of the devil,” she muttered. Claudia followed her gaze down the purple hallway to where Nancy Friar, the principal, was marching straight toward them. She wore a cerise pantsuit and a determined expression. Nancy saw that she’d been spotted and raised a hand in greeting.

“That’s my cue,” Brenda said. She melted away toward the other side of the lounge and began fiddling with the mail in her cubbyhole, leaving Claudia alone in the entry as Nancy pushed through the swinging doors.

“Just the person I was looking for!” Nancy chirped, as she approached Claudia. “Can I steal you for a moment?”

“I have to prep for my senior seminar,” Claudia objected. Nancy was the last person she wanted to talk to right now. She hadn’t yet decided how to break the news to her friend’s mother that she was going to be quitting before the semester was over. She imagined that it wouldn’t go over well.

“Don’t worry,” Nancy said. “This will only take a few minutes.”

Nancy drew her away from the door and into the corner of the lounge farthest from the other teachers. Impatient, Claudia wondered what Nancy could possibly want; it was the first time the head of school had ever bothered to seek her out.
Could she already have heard about
Quintessence
from Samuel Evanovich?
she wondered.

“I want to start by asking if you’ve been having problems with Penelope Evanovich,” Nancy began.

It took a minute for Claudia to realize what Nancy was talking about, and when she did, it felt as if a giant hand had just smacked her in the chest, sending her body backward and leaving her breath behind. “Nothing that comes to mind,” Claudia answered, wondering what Nancy knew. Had Penelope gone to talk to her about the illicit A? But why on earth would she do that? “Why? What did you hear?”

Nancy glanced over her shoulder at the other teachers and then dropped her voice. “OK, I’ll level with you. Penelope has been bragging to other students that she doesn’t have to do any of the work for your class because she has some sort of
special
arrangement with you. Do you know what that’s about?”

Claudia’s body, from temple to toe, felt as if it had been strung together with taut rubber bands. She struggled to find the appropriate response, aware that each passing moment of hesitation would simply cement her guilt. She glanced around the room, where the other four teachers were doing a bad job of concealing the fact that they were listening in. Brenda lurked by the fridge, slowly stirring her tea; Jim was fiddling with the drawstring waistband of his sweatpants, tucking his shirt in and then untucking it again; Hannah had stopped turning pages in her novel; Evelyn was holding the term paper over her face again, but her hands quivered with the effort to keep it there.

“I have no idea what that’s about,” Claudia finally said. “Have you asked Penelope what she meant?”

“I wanted to address it with you, first,” Nancy said. She fussed with the drape of the cherry-print silk scarf around her neck. “I’m sure it’s all a false alarm—this kind of thing happens more often that you’d think.”

“Teenagers aren’t exactly known for being forthright, are they,” Claudia said, and offered her employer a commiserating shrug. Nancy didn’t know anything specific, she tried to reassure herself; it was all just secondhand rumors. And in a she-said she-said situation, wouldn’t the teacher always win by default?

“They certainly aren’t,” Nancy agreed. “But we’ll need to investigate further, just in case parents get wind of it and kick up a fuss. You know how they are. Anyway, I hope you won’t be offended, but may I look at your records?”

Claudia swiftly calculated the possible outcomes of this. If they discovered that she had been blackmailed into doctoring Penelope’s grade, she would lose her job—which wasn’t the end of the world, of course, since she was quitting to direct
Quintessence
anyway. Except that Penelope would undoubtedly be punished by Nancy—perhaps even expelled—and for that Claudia would surely incur the wrath of Samuel Evanovich and lose the movie. No movie, no job: Penelope’s big mouth was about to cost her her entire future. What on earth had possessed her to brag?

She glanced around the room. No one was bothering to hide their curiosity now. Jim Phillips was doing some runner’s stretches in the middle of the room, staring blatantly; Brenda was standing with her hands on her hips, as if ready to barge in on the discussion; Evelyn had let the term paper fall to her chest as she watched. Even Hannah Baumberg had finally looked up from
Jude the Obscure
, marking her place with one finger.

“You know,” Claudia bluffed, “if you wait here, I could go grab a few of Penelope’s old assignments for you. Right now. Just to show you that she’s been doing the assigned work.”

Nancy smiled. “That would really clear things up.”

“I’ll be right back,” Claudia said, already moving toward the door.

“I’ll wait here,” Nancy said. Over Nancy’s shoulder, the rest of the teachers settled in to their seats, planning to wait for the finale of this show. She wondered whether they were on her side in this dispute and realized that, by keeping to herself this semester—and considering this job just a setback en route to loftier goals—she had pretty much guaranteed that they weren’t.

Claudia turned and fled.

Out in the quad, the marine layer overhead was growing dark, signaling the arrival of the first fall storm. A few students meandered across the campus, toting skateboards and iPhones. “Heya, Munger!” called one, a sophomore from her Film Noir course. Claudia jogged across a small patch of grass toward her classroom, passing underneath a polished steel sculpture that distorted her silhouette against the flat sky.

The keys slipped in her fumbling hands, requiring three tries before the door finally opened. Inside, she flipped on the lights and headed for the utility closet. There, Claudia took a deep breath, and another, trying to calm herself. The air was hot and staticky. She tore into her bag, shuffling through a batch of essay assignments, until she found what she was looking for: the most recent offering from Mary Hernandez. “Post-Structuralist Elements in David Lynch’s
Blue Velvet”
was a twelve-page tome that name-checked Foucault, Wittgenstein, and Benjamin, followed by three pages of footnotes. Emblazoned on the last page, in teacherly red ink, was an A+. She tore off the cover page and hid it in her drawer.

Digging further, she located Penelope’s submission:
“Blue Velvet
by David Lynch,” an unfinished three-page essay with no thesis to speak of. Quickly, before good sense overcame her, Claudia gently removed the cover page and stapled it to the front of Mary’s essay. Voilà! If you examined the new essay closely, you might notice that the two paper stocks didn’t quite match, and that the cover page was typed with a slightly different font, but was Nancy really going to study the essay that closely? Claudia rifled through her drawers, looking for more evidence to doctor. There: her own answer sheets for the last three multiple-choice pop quizzes. She penciled Penelope’s name on each one, and then graded each with a red-ink A. It would have to be sufficient.

She gathered her papers and raced back to the lounge. Students were arriving quickly now, gathered in clusters by their lockers, sending last-minute texts to friends who were standing just a few feet away from them. Two girls in regulation blue blazers were huddled in a corner by the entrance to the teacher’s lounge, twirling their hair around their fingers as they stared at a boy Claudia didn’t know, who was carrying an enormous plaster bust of his own torso, probably the latest assignment from Sculpture and Life Drawing. The hallways smelled like pepperoni pizza, wafting out from the cafeteria’s ovens.

Back in the teacher’s lounge no one had moved, the four teachers apparently far more riveted by the spectacle unfolding before them than by any urgency to get to their classrooms on time. Only Nancy had switched her position, from the corner of the lounge to a sentinel position by the window, where she could oversee the migrations of the kids outside. She made notations in a notebook, perhaps tracking wardrobe infractions that would later need to be addressed.

Claudia handed the stack of forged assignments to Nancy just as the first bell rang. “This is all I could find in my files,” she apologized.

Nancy examined the papers. Outside, the thundering of a thousand pairs of tennis shoes pounded through the corridors. Students shrieked and shouted in the courtyard, oblivious to anything but the melodramatic minutiae of their small sheltered lives. It was almost too much for Claudia to bear.

Nancy glanced briefly at the cover of Mary Hernandez’s essay and then turned the page, scanning the text. “They’re quoting Foucault now? Good grief. I didn’t study him until grad school. I just can’t keep up with these kids anymore.”

“They’re very bright.” Claudia held her breath as the principal riffled quickly through the rest of the papers. Nancy gave a brief glance at each quiz and then handed the stack of papers back with a smile. And it was done.

“Well, that’s a relief. I’m glad to see it was all just a misunderstanding. I swear, this group of seniors is so gossipy, I don’t know where they get it from. Their parents, I imagine.”