This Is Where We Live (4 page)

Claudia hugged her, smelled Ivory soap and basil oil. “Jason isn’t home with the kids?”

RC shook her head. “He’s off shooting a reality show in Singapore. So, quickly, my thoughts about your film, before I have to run: The new ending you cut really worked; that was definitely the right decision. And I know you were worried about the second-act turn but I think—”

“Claudia!”
Carter, Claudia’s agent, slid up beside her and gripped her elbow with a moist palm, interrupting them. His pink tie was loosened and his balding pate gently reflected the overhead lights, and when he leaned in to Claudia the faint scent of cigarette smoke wafted from behind his cauliflowered ears. “There she is, the
auteur
. You saw that review, I assume?”

“Hi, Carter,” RC said coolly.

“RC. Wouldn’t be a premiere without you, now, would it.” Carter bared thirty-two whitened teeth, skipping the requisite handshake.

Claudia cleared her throat. “Yes, the review. I saw it. A bit hyperbolic on their part,” she said. “I’m hardly Truffaut.”

“Well, as long as it sells tickets, right? Anyway, great notice. The people who matter will see it.”

“I’ll take that,” she said. She hesitated, knowing she shouldn’t be talking business at her own premiere, and then turned slightly away from RC to whisper in her agent’s ear. “So, has Fox signed the final paperwork yet?”

He whispered back without lowering his voice at all, speaking for RC’s benefit. “We have a sit-down with the lawyers lined up for Monday. But the way things are lining up for
Spare Parts
, I’m thinking we might even be able to drive the price up a bit. You haven’t signed anything yet; so let’s make them sweat, right? You’re a hot property right now. I’ll have you all set up by the end of the month. Trust me, OK?” He leaned away and smiled. “RC, shouldn’t she trust me?”

“As far as she can throw you, absolutely,” RC said. She shoved her hands in her pockets and rocked back and forth in her Keds.

“RC. Always such a card.”

Jeremy and Esme had joined the circle now, carrying paper napkins filled with gooey baklava. They greeted RC, then turned in unison to offer Carter politely bland smiles, wary of the presence of the suit.

“Carter, this is my friend Esme, and I think you’ve already met my husband?”

Carter gripped Jeremy’s shoulder instead of shaking the hand Jeremy had proffered. “Of course. Jeremy the rock star!”

“Ah, well, Carter,” Jeremy said, one eyebrow raised. “I’m hardly a rock star. My band has to finish its album first.” He loosened his tie reflexively, eyeing Carter’s tailored suit. Dressed up like this, Jeremy appeared more defined, handsome in an unshowy, unkempt sort of way. Claudia often thought that he looked more like a second guitarist than the lead singer of a band—he didn’t have the typical ostentatious sex appeal of the man with the microphone and generally hid behind overgrown hair and slouchy jeans. Still, he could wear a suit well when the occasion demanded it.

“But they’re almost done, and the stuff they’ve done so far is fantastic,” Claudia said. “Audiophone. They have a show at Spaceland next month—you should come. All of you.”

RC laughed. “Only if you’re planning to go on at seven. I don’t make it past ten these days.”

Carter reared backward as if Jeremy might somehow infect him. “I don’t do music, sorry. But Jeremy, I can hook you up with the right people. Do you have a manager? We need to make sure you keep up with your wife, don’t we?”

“That would be impossible,” Jeremy demurred.

“He’s already been more successful than I am,” Claudia protested. “He used to be in This Invisible Spot—you’ve heard of them?” Beside her, she sensed Jeremy protesting against the attention.

“Oh, yes, of course,” Carter said, unconvincingly. “I think my daughter has an album.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Speaking of, gotta run, but we’ll confab on Monday, OK? Go celebrate; you deserve it. RC, lovely as always.” He patted Claudia on the elbow, ignored Esme and Jeremy entirely, and made a beeline for the door, maneuvering around a table stacked with pyramids of brownies as he flipped the daisy wheel of his PDA.

“‘I don’t do music,’” Jeremy repeated to himself, laughing. “Who doesn’t
do
music?”

“I guess I should be thankful I didn’t go into creative,” Esme said, “if that’s the kind of people you have to deal with every day.” She nervously twisted her hair back into a ponytail, clipped it, and then released it. Esme had very expensive hair, thick and black and glossy, a high-maintenance curtain that only a marketing executive could afford. She was the only person in Claudia’s class at UCLA film school who had come to her senses after graduation and taken a salaried job on the business side of moviemaking. These days, she worked eighty-hour weeks developing high-concept trailers for animated family films, which meant that Claudia rarely saw her except for the occasional Sunday morning coffee runs.

RC shook her head. “I really should find you a new agent. I remember when Carter was in the mailroom at William Morris; he was an insincere snake even back then. His type likes to devour nice girls like you as an
amuse-bouche
before the main course.”

“As long as he gets the deals done, I’m not complaining,” Claudia said. “I don’t have any clout without him.”

“You’re selling yourself short,” RC observed. Her cellphone began to bleat, and she sighed. “Crap. I’ve got to do some damage control, but call me tomorrow, OK? You two should come for dinner soon. As long as you don’t mind takeout.” She vanished toward the door.

Esme spun slowly, surveying the dwindling crowd, then turned back to Claudia. “Hey, film star, do you know anyone who might want to teach film appreciation to high school students?” she asked. “My mom just took a job as head of this private high school—Ennis Gates Academy, maybe you’ve heard of it, it’s very artsy-fartsy—and she’s looking for a teacher to replace one that just ran off with a student. Oops, right? She asked me for suggestions, but you’re better connected to that world than I am, being that I’m just a corporate drudge these days.”

Claudia didn’t feel in the least bit connected to teaching, but she didn’t want to tell Esme this. “They teach film appreciation to high school students?” she asked.

Esme wrinkled her nose. “It’s LA. Of course they do. The school got some enormous endowment from a former student who made a bundle in real estate and started a film production company. Or was it investment banking? Can’t remember. Anyway, they have a whole department, own their own film equipment, all that.”

“Seriously? At my high school in Wisconsin they cut art classes because they didn’t have enough money for the tempera paints.”

Esme twisted her hair up into a ponytail again, holding it back with one hand. “Deprivation is a foreign concept to these kids. It’s kind of sad—there’s nothing to strive for, since they have access to everything already. Honestly, I shudder at the thought of my kids growing up in this town.”

Claudia nodded. “Of course, you and Jeremy grew up here,” she said.

“And look how I turned out,” Esme observed.

“My mom let me battle it out in a public high school,” Jeremy said. “But it’s a lot worse now. I don’t think we’ll be able to do that with ours.”

Claudia glanced at Jeremy, surprised that he had brought up the subject of children. The verdict early on had been “not until our careers take off and we’re financially stable.” Then again, they were almost there now, weren’t they?

“Anyway, film teachers? Know one?”

Claudia reluctantly turned back to Esme. “What about Malcolm, the guy who won the Nichols award when we were in film school?”

Esme curled her lip. “Last time I heard, he was working at a coffee shop and applying to law school. He never even sold a script …. I’ll figure it out. I just thought I should ask while I had you in front of me. Soon you won’t even take my calls anymore. Your movie’s going to be huge and I’ll never see you again.”

“You’re the one working eighty-hour weeks,” Claudia pointed out.

“This is true. I should quit.”

The hummus plates were ravaged; the party was starting to thin out. Claudia squeezed Jeremy’s arm and left her friends to get a last drink before the bar closed. She stood in line by herself, behind two middle-aged women in head-to-toe black carrying leather satchels laden with screenplays—development executives, in all likelihood. One had Chanel sunglasses perched on top of her head, so firmly anchored in her pageboy that they might have been surgically attached.

“Two million,” Sunglasses was saying.

“No way,” said the other. “It’s going up against five other films this weekend, including
Batman
. It won’t even break a half-mil. They should have released it in the spring when there’s no other competition.”

The bartender poured them matching glasses of white wine from a bottle of cheap chardonnay. “Female audiences will love it,” Sunglasses continued.

“Women don’t go to the movies anymore, remember? They don’t
count
.”

“That doesn’t mean it’s not a shame.”

Claudia could feel her feet tremble in her stilettos; the room suddenly seemed to be slipping sideways. It was only when the two women froze in place, clutching their chardonnay with stiff fingers, and the bartender lurched forward to stabilize the vodka bottle display rattling on the bar, that Claudia realized that they were experiencing an aftershock. “Do you feel—” said Sunglasses, to no one in particular.

Claudia braced herself, expecting the worst—
you were silly to think you’d escape unscathed
—but the earthquake had already dribbled away, almost before it had even begun. The noise level in the room briefly dipped, before returning to an even louder volume: A minor aftershock, barely worth mentioning. The women smiled and turned away from the bar, noting Claudia’s presence for the first time. Sunglasses stepped past, screwed her lips into a wretched smile, and moved quickly away. Her friend hesitated and then leaned in toward Claudia. “Loved the film,” she said. “Best of luck.” And then she fled, following her friend.

Claudia watched them disappear into the waning crowd.
Maybe they weren’t talking about my movie
, she told herself.
Even if they were, Hollywood is full of jaded cynics who are proved wrong every day
. Outside the theater’s glass doors, a work crew was beginning to dismantle the crowd-control barriers. Busboys had cleared the trays of crudités away, leaving behind tablecloths stained with tzatziki drips and pita crumbs. Plastic cups littered every ledge, marked with lipstick and then abandoned. Claudia moved back toward Esme and Jeremy, who had retrieved their belongings and were waiting for her to say goodbye. She tried to smile back with the same tipsy contentment that she read on their faces, but it felt forced. The aftershock had left her decidedly shaken.

Carter’s assistant had the annoying habit of turning every statement into a question. She also repeated Claudia’s name compulsively, an annoying tic that Claudia suspected was intentional, perhaps to make clients feel at ease. To Claudia’s ear, it sounded patronizing. “Carter Curtis’s office?” the assistant queried, her voice squeaky and distracted. “Oh, Claudia again? Claudia, I’m sorry, but he’s in a meeting? I’ll take a message?”

Claudia sat, breathing heavily into her end of the phone, trying to quell her anxiety. Carter’s meeting was taking an inordinately long time—by her count, he had been in a meeting for fourteen days now, since she first called him on the Monday after her film premiere. It was apparently a meeting that lasted all day and all night, leaving him only enough time to fire off a three-word e-mail to her—“No news yet.” That message had come a week ago, at two in the morning. She had heard nothing since.

“Just tell him I’m trying to get a status update on the Fox deal,” she said.

Frantic typing on the other end. “The Fox deal? OK? Anything else, Claudia?”

“That’s it,” she said, and hung up.

She sat at her desk in their guest bedroom and looked out the window at the retaining wall, a ten-foot concrete edifice that kept the uphill neighbor’s yard from sliding down into theirs. If she craned her head, she could see the sky, painfully bright, with a brown scrim of haze collecting across the horizon. It was barely nine in the morning, but the early August heat had already settled on the house, baking into the walls and turning their home into an oven. Sweat trickled down Claudia’s back, collecting in a puddle at the waistband of her pajamas. She leaned back in her chair and stared at the ceiling, fretting.

The audiences hadn’t materialized. Maybe it was the earthquakes (unlikely) or maybe it
was
the fact that women didn’t go to movies (possible) or maybe people just didn’t like it (she hoped not), but regardless, the audiences never came out to see her film. Not the first night and not any other night. They had avoided it entirely, all opening weekend; had ignored the politely positive reviews in the Friday papers and Ebert’s genial thumbs-up. Claudia had read the box office report that first post-premiere Monday (outside, an unusual summer storm, violent spatters of rain against the sliding glass door even though the temperature outside was still above ninety), letting her eyes scan farther down the list of films in release, and still farther, all the way to the very bottom of the page, where her film had lodged just above a documentary about freedom fighters in Gaza and just below a slapstick comedy about competitive air hockey starring Cheech Marin that had already been out for forty-two weeks. Total box office take: $39,000.

Reading the box office reports that morning, she felt something burrowing deep in her gut, a tiny worm of panic taking up residence. “But that’s just one weekend. It’s way too soon to know what your movie’s going to do,” Jeremy comforted her, and she reassured herself that he was right: There was plenty of time for word of mouth to gather and grow, and even if first-weekend grosses had been frankly dismal the film could still evolve into a bonafide sleeper hit over the course of the next months. The film hadn’t even been released in most of America yet; it was in less than two dozen theaters! Once it was in wider release, once it received more press, it was possible that the rest of the country would finally catch on.