This Is Where We Live (38 page)

• • •

By the time she arrives home, darkness has fallen and the moon is rising over the hill. It stares baldly down at her through the eucalyptus trees. Claudia stands in her driveway for a long time, looking at the house across the street. Blue light flickers inside Dolores’s living room; she can almost make out the old woman parked on her couch, in front of the television set.

Her own house, when she goes inside, is freezing cold. It smells like fresh paint and lumber, like a place where no one has ever lived at all. Claudia flips on the new recessed overhead lighting and stands in the living room for a long time, without taking off her coat. In the kitchen, the freezer buzzes and rattles as the icemaker spits out fresh cubes. Claudia looks at the spot on the wall where
Beautiful Boy
once hung; the square patch of unfaded paint has been completely erased by the contractor’s steady brushwork. Gone, too, are the cracks in the plaster from last summer’s earthquake, and the rough splinters in the floor that used to snag her tights, and the pervasive dripping sound. The house that once seemed cozy for two people now feels unbearably large for one.

For five months she has put so much energy into saving this house; and now that it is safely hers, she realizes, she no longer wants it.

Somewhere high up in the hills, the coyotes are howling; a dog answers, defending his territory. She wishes she could hear the sounds of human existence: a party nearby, or a neighbor’s music, even the sound of traffic. But all that has been consumed by the void of the canyon. For the first time in the three years that she’s lived up in Mount Washington, Claudia feels she is on an island far out at sea, cut off from the rest of civilization. She is truly alone. And she senses that it’s time to learn how to live with that.

You need to do something drastic
.

She walks over to the silver catch-all dish on the table by the front door. She fishes through the junk stored there, pushing aside abandoned pennies and keys that open doors that no longer exist and old rubber bands before she finally locates Marcie Carson’s business card.

It is far too late to call: Marcie’s phone goes straight to voice mail. Claudia leaves a message, her voice echoing across shiny hardwood floors, newly installed bathroom tile, double-paned windows still covered with manufacturer’s stickers.

“Hi Marcie, this is Claudia, from Dolores Hernandez’s house yesterday,” she says. “Could you call me back as soon as possible, please? I’d like to put in an offer.”

Jeremy

THERE WAS A NAKED WOMAN SLEEPING IN HIS BED. JEREMY STOOD
in the hotel suite, the key card in his hand, staring at the Teutonic blonde splayed across the mattress, draped in silk damask linens. A flaxen thatch of pubic hair peeked out from behind the sheet that was wedged between her legs. A green jewel winked from her belly button. One erect nipple pointed jauntily toward the ceiling; the other slid sideways on the woman’s chest to stare at Jeremy, alert to his presence in the room.

Even six floors up, he could hear the early afternoon traffic in the streets below, the screams of an ambulance, and the caterwaul of a busker harassing the tourists down on the piazza. The open balcony doors offered a view across the street to a department store housed in a seventeenth-century palazzo, its façade hung with Italian flags. Outside, it was threatening to rain again, but this hotel room was sweltering; moisture gathered in Jeremy’s armpits, trapped underneath two layers of fine Italian wool. The table lamp in the corner of the hotel room spotlit an empty jar of Nutella sitting on an abandoned lunch cart, alongside a ravaged basket of pastries, a congealing pitcher of milk, and two espresso cups ringed with violet lip prints. It was his third day in Rome, or maybe his fourth; he couldn’t remember anymore.

The woman stirred, opening one eye to assess Jeremy. “Ciao,” she said.

Jeremy removed his coat—a Pierre Powers original, still fresh from the designer’s showroom, like the rest of his wardrobe—and dropped it on one of the armchairs. He sat down, covertly scrutinizing the shadowy region below the woman’s pubic mound. “Where’s Aoki?” he asked.

The woman turned on her side, haphazardly tugging the sheet up over her body. It slid right back off, landing in a puddle below her breasts. “Who eez Aoki?” she asked, in an indeterminate accent.

“The Japanese woman,” Jeremy said. “The artist.”

The woman smiled, revealing crooked milk teeth, and rolled onto her back. “She wanted
fromage
. She went to Roscioli.”

A little shock of excitement shot through him—
Aoki is finally back—
as he unwound the scarf from around his neck. He folded the scarf in thirds with fumbling hands. “So, who are you, where are you from?” he asked, in a voice as colloquially neutral as he could muster. “Are you Italian? German?”

“I am Ulla.” The woman pulled a feather pillow toward her and hugged it, demurely, to her chest. “You like to take a sleep?”

“No, thank you,” Jeremy said, unsure if this was an invitation. He wondered whether Aoki had just seduced this woman, or whether she had invited a stranger to take a nap in their bed for more altruistic reasons. Perhaps Ulla was a prostitute, or a homeless person, or a famous European actress in need of a disco nap. Any of the above was possible with Aoki. That’s why life with her was so exciting, wasn’t it? It was astonishing how quickly he was adjusting to this, the strangers that drifted in and out of their hotel suites, pieds-à-terre, vacation villas. Two months in Europe, and he felt as if he’d been drunk for a decade—as if existence had become an endless, intoxicating whirlwind that kept him always slightly off balance and perpetually giddy, but without the wicked hangover in the morning.

They’d lasted only twenty-six days in Paris before Aoki packed them up and sent them on a cross-continental scavenger hunt, in pursuit of an elusive art dealer from Cannes they’d never located. Instead, they’d ended up at a black-tie gala at a London museum, where Aoki had been invited as the guest of honor but left early after she slapped Damien Hirst; then Berlin, to iron over some sort of conflict with Aoki’s gallerist there; and finally a ski resort in Moldavia for the Christmas holiday, where they connected with an alcoholic journalist from
Vanity Fair
who was writing a profile of Aoki. In order to recover from
that
, Aoki required a recuperative stay at the Positano villa of an Argentinian photographer she’d met the previous summer. It rained, and the two women argued about food and fascism and the meaning of the word
obscene
. They left Positano abruptly and landed here, in Rome, for no good reason whatsoever.

Jeremy hadn’t seen Aoki since they checked into the hotel on Tuesday evening. She vanished at the concierge desk, just as a bellboy wearing a little blue fez trundled their luggage away. “I have to meet an old friend for drinks,” she said, and stood on tiptoe to kiss Jeremy. “I’ll be at this
enoteca
by Piazza Navona if you need me. We can have dinner later—there’s a place in the old Jewish ghetto I want to take you, run by this deaf old grandmama who makes the most pornographic fried artichokes.” And then she vanished back out into the night, leaving Jeremy standing alone on a flat field of marble in the chilly hotel lobby, where a pianist was mournfully playing a Liszt étude to an elderly couple swaddled in minks.

Aoki never returned. Jeremy went down to the Piazza Navona around midnight that night, thinking she might still be there with her friend, and quickly realized that there were about fifty wine bars in the three-block radius surrounding the square. Aoki was at none of them. When he woke up the next morning to see that her side of the bed was still made with crisp hospital corners, her Vuitton weekend bag still zipped closed, he realized he’d been abandoned. Temporarily? Permanently? Should it matter? It crossed his mind that she could have had a relapse and be passed out in a drug den somewhere, just like the old days. But she’d barely even touched a drink since they’d arrived in France; she instead seemed to be surfing some kind of ecstatic natural high. Really, knowing Aoki, she could be anywhere, doing absolutely anything.

The ensuing adrenaline rush kept him up all night.
You are starting each day as a blank slate
, he thought, not for the first time during this trip;
No two days will ever be the same
. That very unpredictability was why he’d come, wasn’t it? To escape the mundanity and tedium of domesticity? Maybe other guys would be upset that their lover had up and vanished with no explanation, leaving them alone in a foreign country, but not Jeremy: He was cut from different cloth.

Not that he was using this sudden independence to do anything particularly notable. Without Aoki as his social planner, Jeremy found himself settling into the role of your standard American tourist. He visited the Roman Forum during a lightning storm, eating a Magnum bar as he huddled underneath two-thousand-year-old colonnades. He took a four-hour tour of the Galleria Borghese, learning more about baroque sculpture than he ever cared to know. He threw all his spare change into the Trevi Fountain, relinquishing five euros to have his picture taken with a guy in a gladiator costume who brandished a plastic sword over his head. He thought about giving the photograph to Aoki as a joke, before deciding that she wouldn’t see the humor in it.
(You’re enabling the virulent spread of vulgarity
, he could hear her say.) He threw it away instead. To avoid the unbearable desolation of a bottle of Chianti for one, he ate most meals in their hotel room while watching CNN on satellite cable.

Even after three nights without Aoki, he was able to maintain a nonchalant attitude about her absence. He knew she would come back eventually. Besides, wasn’t their mutual freedom the whole point of this reunion? He wasn’t beholden to her, nor was she to him. It was about
passion
, about
adventure
, about being
young and wild and free
. “A symbiosis of mutualistic reinvention”—that’s what Aoki had called it on that night in Moldavia when he got drunk and asked her what she thought was going on between them. He wasn’t quite sure what that nonsense really meant, but whatever it was, Aoki seemed to be thriving on it. There had been no crying episodes since the night on the airplane; instead, upon landing at Charles de Gaulle, Aoki had reverted back to her most compelling, animated self. In Paris, they flung themselves into a series of personality-studded cocktail parties, dinners that ended at three in the morning, VIP art openings, all part of a spinning social circle that never seemed to recycle the same people twice. Aoki spoke haphazard French these days, as well as select bits of three or four other languages, and just watching her work a room in her polyglot tongue—her dazzling persona a weapon that dared anyone to misunderstand her—was an aphrodisiac in its own right.

And then there was the
art
. During those few weeks in Paris, Aoki vanished into her studio for days at a time, returning back to her pied-à-terre with paint in her hair and a feral, consumed expression in her eyes. “I’m doing the best work I’ve ever done, and it’s because of you,” she told him, when she climbed into bed at four in the morning. “I’m doing a canvas that’s twenty feet long. It’s an allegory about art as sex and the importance of the masculine gaze. I painted you into it. You’re naked and masturbating.”

“You probably had to add a whole extra foot of canvas just to fit my penis,” he joked, feeling slightly exploited but also wildly titillated, as if he’d once again located his proper place in the world, memorialized in flesh-colored oils.

“Two,” she said, reaching for him.

His own artistic endeavors were bubbling along, albeit a bit slower. He’d moved his new recording equipment—paid for with money that Pierre had transferred into Aoki’s bank account—into the Russian sculptor’s studio, set a stack of empty sheet music by the window with the view down into Montparnasse cemetery, tuned the borrowed Gibson and then sat there, for days on end, mostly noodling on his guitar. He became intimately familiar with the way the light crested the ornamental crosses at twilight; with the pigeons coating the ledge of his window with calcified birdshit; with the raspberry-filled mille-feuilles from the bakery downstairs, which he ate thrice daily. Sometimes, he’d take the pastry into the cemetery and sit among the graves, watching the old ladies sweep leaves off the stones. Watching them, he was overwhelmed by immense but blunted emotion, as if the world had expanded before him and there wasn’t enough room in his heart to understand everything he was feeling. He just wished he could translate this into notations on paper.
Give it time
, he’d think, before going to meet Aoki for martinis on the rue Saint-Honoré.

Pierre came to visit him at the studio sometimes, and Jeremy always tried to look busy. He would play music for him, acoustic versions of the songs he had written for Audiophone, to keep the impression of fresh genius alive. Pierre would clasp his hands to his legging-clad thighs and close his eyes and listen as if it were the most blissful sound he’d ever heard. Sometimes he brought friends—models, assistants, other musicians that he knew, some of whom invited Jeremy to jam with them, none of whom produced music that Jeremy particularly liked. The chunk of money Pierre had put at Jeremy’s disposal was unfathomably huge: They’d spoken, early on, about Jeremy performing new material at Pierre’s fashion show in the spring but that was the extent of their makeshift business agreement. Jeremy wasn’t quite sure what the diminutive designer really expected of him. Sometimes he suspected that he was being paid mostly to be a new friend, a novelty for Pierre’s cabinet of curiosities. He almost hoped this was it, because he was starting to worry about how he would single-handedly produce an album’s worth of original songs by March, especially without a lyricist to write the words.

He just needed to be patient, he reassured himself. He was still adjusting to a distracting new life, coming up with a new sound, trying to understand who Jeremy-the-solo-artist was going to be. Sometimes he felt like a child who had been dropped into an enormous playground and didn’t know where to start his playtime. It was almost a relief when he came back to Aoki’s apartment one afternoon in early December and found her packing their belongings into suitcases. “We’re going to Cannes,” she announced, and he shrugged and happily accepted this fate, thrilled by the spontaneity. He would use the trip as a kind of creative palette cleanse; take the opportunity to collect some new musical inspirations. He didn’t pack his guitar, assuming that they would be gone only a few days. Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea, because here they were, five weeks later, in Rome, and it was unclear when—or if—they’d ever go back home.

Home
. This word was the only hitch in an otherwise dreamlike existence. Every time it popped up in his head—as in
I’m tired of traveling and ready to go home now
—the image that came with it was not Aoki’s eclectic Beaux Arts pied-à-terre in Paris, piled high with art books and half-finished canvases and gold-painted scarves and musty-smelling antiques rescued from Les Puces, but the modest little bungalow in Mount Washington with the chipped IKEA coffee table and the old leather couch with a permanent indentation in the cushion from his own ass. He wondered if Claudia’s parents were still in LA, helping her finish the repairs on the house; he almost hoped they were, so Claudia wouldn’t be alone. The thought of her in their house all by herself—quite possibly unhappy, because of him—made him itch all over. Occasionally, when he was falling asleep, he would hallucinate her into being, standing on the edge of their half-finished deck, teetering on the precipice of the canyon, about to fall in.
You’re supposed to be there to catch her
, he would think, right before he fell asleep.

Eventually these images would pass into fogged memory. Or so he hoped. For now, they remained a wound on his conscience, and in quiet moments he couldn’t help picking at the scab and making it bleed anew. Sometimes when he rolled over in the middle of the night and woozily pressed himself against the body on the other side of the mattress, he would startle awake.
That’s not Claudia!
he’d think, realizing that his body hadn’t latched into a soft and yielding wall of flesh but had landed against something hard-edged and sharp-boned and tiny. Resisting the thought, he’d wake Aoki up, and they’d have rough, burning, breathtaking sex that made the memory of Claudia disappear for the rest of the night.