This Is Where We Live (39 page)

You chose this
, he would think.
You wanted this
. And certainly, right now, looking at the naked stranger in his hotel bed, his body stirring as this fact sank in—
there’s a naked woman in your bed
—he found it hard to locate the will to complain. What right-thinking man would? There was the distinct possibility of a memorable sexual experience if he just waited this out, waited for Aoki to come back with the cheese, waited for any misgivings about his new life to pass, just as they always did.
This is why you’re here
, he reminded himself.
For moments just like this one
.

“I’m going to order some champagne from room service,” he told the woman in his bed. “Would you like anything?”

Later, after Aoki returned with two big wedges of aged pecorino and a fresh loaf of
ciabatta
under her arm; and after the three of them—Aoki, Jeremy, and the naked Ulla—ate this modest repast together, as if there were nothing abnormal about a nude Swiss woman eating cheese with two fully dressed adults; and after two bottles of champagne had been demolished, while Aoki and Ulla embarked on a long and rather titillating story about how they’d met the previous evening at an illegal burlesque nightclub; and after the three of them somehow quite naturally ended up in bed together with their clothes off, as if this had all been predestined from the start; and after Jeremy had the appealing mid-coitus epiphany that he was almost exactly reenacting a scene from a porn movie he had once watched in his midtwenties—after all that, when Ulla had finally departed with the second wedge of Pecorino stuffed in her purse, Jeremy turned to Aoki.

“So, are you going to tell me where you’ve been for the last few days?”

Aoki lay facedown on the bed. She was reading Musil, which struck Jeremy as a strange choice for post-coital reading material. The television hummed in the background as two reporters discussed the bailout of the American auto industry. The bed was full of bread crumbs, which stuck to the drying sweat that pricked Jeremy’s back. The unventilated room smelled oceanic and sour.

Aoki tilted her head sideways to look at him. At some point during their bedroom acrobatics with Ulla, her hair had fallen out of its topknot, and long black strands now stuck to her eyelashes. She swiped them off her face with the back of her hand. “Nowhere particularly interesting,” she said. She leaned over and kissed the bare flesh of his shoulder as consolation.

“I’m not supposed to ask,” he said.

“No, you aren’t.” Aoki turned a page in her book, pretending absorption in German modernist literature. “It’s better for both of us that way. Besides, you could do the same thing if you wanted to.”

“I know,” he said. “Maybe I will.”
I should
, he thought, and tried to conjure up his own equivalent adventure—hunt down Ulla and take her off for a weekend sex romp in Lausanne? Embark on a three-day drunk in Amsterdam’s red-light district? This struck him as being unlikely, unsanitary, unfathomable.

Aoki shrugged. “Anyway, you know the important thing.”

“The important thing?”

“I’m always going to come back. So why worry?”

Jeremy nodded, conscious that it was to his benefit to find this explanation not only acceptable but perfectly reasonable. Would it help him to know that she had disappeared into someone else’s bed, had a drug relapse, checked herself into an insane asylum? This was what had driven him mad before: the gaping voids in her life into which he could not enter, in which he had no place at all. This time around, he needed to be a more sanguine person, more comfortable with letting the unknown variables remain unknown, relinquishing logic and order in exchange for other, more unpredictable rewards.

Except that he wasn’t.

Petulance gripped him. It struck him that the variables in this new equation were lopsided and balanced entirely in Aoki’s favor. While he was roaming around Rome by himself, bored—let’s face it—this woman who was supposed to be his partner of some sort was having wild adventures she wouldn’t even tell him about. Maybe she’d come back pregnant or with some kind of disease. Where was the excitement in that? Instead, he felt unclean, as if he needed to take a shower as quickly as possible.

He picked the remote up and clicked the television set off. Without the illuminated cube on the wall, the room descended into rainy evening gloom.

“Why am I here?” he asked the ceiling.

Aoki closed her book, marking her place with one forefinger, and rolled over onto her back. “One of my major collectors is in from Milan and wants to have dinner. I could use the sale, so I really need to stick around and make nice, play the part of Aoki, so he can go home believing he’s received his obligatory chunk of my flesh. Except that I’ve had to postpone three times. Anyway I think we’ll be able to leave by Monday. I
do
need to get back; I’ve got to finish two more paintings before the end of the month or Berlin is going to have my head on a platter. And Pierre’s probably having a conniption that you’ve been gone so long.”

“That’s not what I meant,” Jeremy said.

Aoki frowned. “Don’t tell me you’re not having fun.”

A worm of bankrupt pleasure crawled up his spine as he recalled the afternoon’s exploits. “It’s definitely been fun,” he agreed. “But I still don’t know why you came to LA to get me in the first place.”

She reached up and gripped the loose hair that fell across her cheek, twisting it up into a knot that she anchored with the free hotel pen from the bedside table. Her mascara was smeared above and below her lids, so that she resembled a badly used Kewpie doll. “Because I love you,” she said. She reached across the bed and put a hand on his thigh, pinning him in place. His leg broke out in goose bumps as five chilled fingers pressed into his flesh. He didn’t understand how she could be so cold in a room that felt to him like an overripe terrarium.

He pushed himself upright, propping himself against a pile of unpleasantly damp pillows. “I’m fairly certain that’s not the only reason,” he said, understanding for the first time that this was true. “It took you four years to have this epiphany. So why now?”

“I don’t know why you’re doing this,” Aoki said.

“I’m not doing anything,” he said. “I only want to understand what’s going on here.”

Aoki reached over the edge of the bed and retrieved an undershirt, a ribbed boy’s tank top. She pulled it over her head, letting it fall loosely over her narrow chest, and then flipped her book open again. “I was stuck,” she said. “I hadn’t painted a new canvas in six months.”

Jeremy climbed out of bed and walked to the window. The streetlights below were coming on; they glimmered diffusely under a layer of fresh rain. The Italian flags on the department store across the street flapped in slow motion, dripping water from laden folds. “And you thought I would somehow remedy that?”

Aoki ran her palm across the open page of her book and began to speak to it, as if she were addressing Musil rather than Jeremy. “You know, when I first started painting I did it because I felt
compelled
to,” she said. “I absolutely had to convey these enormous emotions that were tucked inside me. But after you left me, after my career really exploded, art became about something more than just exposing my heart on canvas. I became a kind of factory, manufacturing valuable widgets ruled by strict mathematical equations. Size of canvas plus medium used plus time spent painting minus forty-percent gallery commission equaled value of artwork. See? I had become a
commodity
. And pretty soon the very smell of my oils made me gag. And then there was rehab, and all that
talking
I was supposed to do …. By last spring, I couldn’t even remember who I’d ever been in the first place. Something finally just emptied inside me: I was completely drained, as though someone had pulled my plug in the night. I couldn’t think of a thing to paint; nothing that felt like authentic
Aoki.”

“I’m still not understanding how this relates to me,” he said stubbornly.

“I came to get you because the last period in my life where I felt truly
inspired
was when I was with you. It was like—you were the only person who knew who I was
before
, and who didn’t put any demands on me or try to shape me into something I wasn’t. And I thought if I could just see myself through your eyes again, maybe it would all come back to me. That feeling of emotional inspiration.” She smiled, triumphant. “And see? It did.”

With the balcony doors closed against the rain, the street noise six floors below was entirely absorbed by the hotel’s thick Persian carpeting and damask drapery. “So you saw me as a value-add business proposition. A small financial outlay for a big back-end return.” He knew he sounded bitter. “How much am I worth to you, a million? Two? Ten?”

“That’s a cynical way to look at it,” she said. “I came because you were my
muse
. And frankly, because I was yours too. You needed me; I
knew
that. You hadn’t exactly been thriving since I last saw you.”

Coming from her mouth, the indictment of his previous life in LA felt unfair; he had to resist the urge to defend himself and the life he’d had there with Claudia. Those four years weren’t a total waste. In fact, from the vantage point of this stuffy hotel room, they were suffused with the bucolic haze of selective memory: Cocktails on the deck on Sunday afternoons and jamming with his friends in the studio in the Valley and cooking goat-cheese omelets for Claudia and painting the bedrooms cerulean blue. Having sex in the kitchen, amid broken glass, while the house shivered around them. As for inspiration—well, he’d written more music in the last few months in Los Angeles than he had since he’d arrived in France. Julian Bragg had called his work with Audiophone
brilliant—
he might even have worked with him, had he stayed in Los Angeles—and Aoki could make no claim on that.

“I freed you,” Aoki continued, without waiting for him to respond. “This is what a liberated relationship is like, Jeremy. It’s about doing what you want, when you want to do it, being able to fulfill all your dreams and urges without worrying about anyone else’s demands. And knowing that love is something completely separate from that—love is just an
emotion
, it shouldn’t be a
trap
. You know, acting in your own self-interest isn’t the horrible thing that our world makes it out to be; it’s actually the best way to become an individual. To avoid a life of averages and conformity. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it?”

It was
, he thought, and then corrected himself—
It is
. But for some reason he didn’t want to gratify Aoki with this answer. “So what if I’d needed you while you were off living your liberated life for the last few days?” he asked, instead.

Aoki groaned loudly. “Are you having a little-boy tantrum like you did last time around? Because I thought you were grown up enough to handle this now.”

He turned from the window and walked slowly back to the bed. He stared down at Aoki, a tiny little lump in the vast overupholstered bed, and found he didn’t have the energy to pursue this argument to its end point. He was afraid to know what the end point even was. “Forget I said anything,” he said. He climbed under the covers and rolled on his side so he was facing the wall.

“Fine,” Aoki said. She snapped the bedside lamp off, plunging them into darkness.

He woke to a dark room and an empty bed. For a moment, as he fumbled for the light switch, he thought Aoki had vanished again. But he could see, once the lamp was on, that her clothes were still in a heap by the side of the bed, her suitcase was open in the corner, and her purse sat on an armchair.

On the far side of the suite, a bright bar of light under the bathroom door offered a clue to Aoki’s whereabouts. Jeremy climbed out of bed and crossed to the door. He knocked softly. “You in there?” he asked.

There was no response. Jeremy recalled, as he stood there, the evening five years earlier when he’d come home to their New York walk-up and found Aoki naked in the bathtub, bleeding profusely from her wrists. He couldn’t recall exactly why she tried to commit suicide—something to do with his spending the previous evening talking to a female drummer he’d met at a gig—but he did remember the heart-stopping sight of the nail file in her hands, sawing away at her artery. He understood, now, the artifice in the entire setup: how Aoki must have chosen to remove her clothes before climbing in the tub, anticipating the aesthetic jolt provided by her pale naked body and scarlet blood against the stark white porcelain. She must have known, too, that a nail file was a weak weapon of choice, and that if she
really
wanted to die she would be cutting down the vein instead of crossways. She probably even timed it so that the deepest, most dangerous gashes happened as his key rattled in the door, giving him plenty of time to call an ambulance. It was all so obviously a cry for attention. But that hadn’t occurred to him then. He’d seen her death wish as an indictment of his own behavior: He was accountable to her and had somehow failed her. So even though he had already been starting to wonder whether their relationship was a healthy one, he’d stayed with her for nearly a year after the suicide attempt before he finally made his break.

Could their fight tonight have tipped her over that edge again? This time, would it be for real? He knocked again, louder. “Aoki? You OK?”

“It’s not locked,” Aoki called, her voice echoing across bathroom tile.

He pushed the door open, ready to leap for the tub or the telephone, whichever seemed more urgent. But the bathtub was empty. Instead, his gaze went straight to the floor of the bathroom, where black webs of human hair lay scattered across peach-colored tile. The trail of hair started near the bathroom door and ended by the sink, where Aoki stood in her underwear, her bare feet buried in shiny black cuttings, nail scissors in her fist.

She’d chopped her hair off, trimmed it all the way to the scalp. And the bizarre thing was that even nearly bald, even with the remaining tufts jutting out at strange angles from the spots she’d missed, Aoki was breathtakingly beautiful. Perhaps even more so: Her features looked huge against her exposed skull, dewy and precious as a fawn’s, and her eyes burned hot and a little insane with excitement.