This Is Where We Live (5 page)

Except that the following weekend a half-dozen theaters bumped her film to make way for a Ben Stiller comedy. And then, this last weekend, instead of going wide as promised, her distributor yanked the film altogether, hoping to cut its losses. Just like that, less than three weeks after opening night, the film was gone. Almost as if it had never been made in the first place. Claudia wondered if she’d hallucinated the entire thing.

There would be other movies, she reminded herself. If all went as promised, she’d be directing a new one by the end of the year. Except that Carter wasn’t returning her calls, which hardly seemed like a promising sign. She had never been an insomniac, but during the last two weeks, night after night, she had found herself awake at three in the morning. She would lie there in the dark, Jeremy placidly snoring beside her, and feel the increasingly familiar battle lines being drawn between body and mind: her thoughts setting off on a circuitous race course, denying her bleary body another night’s sleep. Three o’clock in the morning had become her hour, the Hour of Claudia, Queen of Fret.

“Breakfast?” Claudia turned to see Jeremy in the doorway, with a plate of scrambled eggs in hand.

“Aren’t you going to be late for work?” She reached out for the plate.

“Edgar’s got meetings in New York this week, so I can go in at lunchtime and no one will notice. Honestly, I could skip work entirely and he wouldn’t know the difference.”

“Nice work ethic,” she said. “Maybe you want to use this as an opportunity to patch the cracks from the earthquake?”

“That’s your job.” He flashed an apologetic grin. “I’m going to catch up on those bills. And I want to work on a new song.”

“Oh? How close are you to finishing the album?” She immediately regretted the question. In the dozen times she had asked him this over the course of the last year, the answer had consistently been the same: “Soon.” With each repetition the question sounded less like enthusiastic curiosity and more like wifely badgering. She didn’t want to be that kind of wife—like her mom, always nagging her dad to mow the lawn or winterize the attic. Anyway, the album was dependent not just on Jeremy but on the other three members of his band. But with each passing month some of the air was let out of Claudia’s excitement and she couldn’t help but wonder why, exactly, the album was taking so damn long.

“We’re close-ish,” he said. He poked at an air bubble in the paint, a cheery cerulean color that she and Jeremy had applied themselves, somewhat sloppily.

At her elbow, the phone rang. She glanced at the caller ID:
Carter Curtis
. “Finally!” she muttered, grabbing for the phone.

“Tell him to get us that check soon.” Jeremy tapped twice on the doorframe and then disappeared back into the living room.

Carter’s voice on the other end was hollow and distant, as if he were speaking from one end of a tin can.

“Claudia? Carter.”

“Please tell me you have the signed deal in front of you.” She hunched over her desk, putting her nose close to a postcard that her parents had sent her from their recent RV trip to Mount Rushmore. George Washington stared back at her with stoic resignation.

Carter hesitated a half second too long, and in that moment Claudia knew. She lowered her forehead to the desk and braced herself.

“Unfortunately, no,” he said. “Fox backed out.”

Claudia could feel her breath fogging the surface of her desk. She squeezed her eyes closed, determined not to cry while on the phone with her agent.

“OK,” she said. “Well, can we go back to Universal or Warner or any of the other studios who wanted to buy the script.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing all week. And they all passed.”

“They suddenly don’t like my script anymore? Didn’t the executive at Warner call it ‘Oscar bait’ just last month?”

Carter sighed heavily. In the background, she could hear honking—he was in his car. “You know how it is in Hollywood, Claudia. They have no sense of perspective. They see a box office flop and run away in a panic.”

She sat upright, wounded. “Flop?”

“Bad word choice, sorry.” His words were muffled as he fumbled with his cellphone. “But look, Claudia, we both know
Spare Parts
didn’t perform to expectations. I think it’s a genius film, but honestly, the timing was off. Maybe it was just too
smart
. Audiences want popcorn fluff right now; they don’t want to think. Maybe you should retool your new script as a comedy instead.”

“But it’s a drama about human smuggling in Mexico!”

“Then write something new.” She could hear the impatience creeping into his voice. “It’s murder out there. You’ve read the stories. There’s no money anymore. The industry’s in the tank. The studios are running scared from anything that looks like it might require audiences to use their brains.”

“Pussies,” she hissed, surprising herself.

“Yes. Pussies.” There was a click on Carter’s end of the line. “Hey, I have to take this call. But don’t despair—get back to work writing. I’ll be in touch, OK?”

The line went dead. She sat there, clutching the phone in her damp hand. From far away, she could hear the line beeping at her, and still she sat there, staring at a blank patch of wall across the room. She picked a pen off her desk and flung it. It left a black mark on the paint just above the light switch and then clattered uselessly to the floor.

“Jeremy?” She waited for Jeremy to appear in the doorway, but a minute passed with no sound of footsteps coming her way. She pushed herself out of her chair, letting her frustration run naturally downhill toward its only available outlet: her husband. Where was he when she needed him?

“Jeremy?” she called again, as she walked down the hall to the living room.

Jeremy was sitting at their scarred dining room table, surrounded by bills. He held a letter in his hand and didn’t look up when she came in the room, not even when she crossed to stand directly before him. Vacillating between fury and misery, she felt the first tear escape from her right eye and dash down toward her nose.

“Well, that was—” she began, but then Jeremy looked up, and the rest of the tears dried up instantly. The last time she had seen him look this serious was when he told her his mother had less than a month to live: His face had the same flat quality, as if a horizontal line had been drawn across his features. He stared at her blankly.

“What is it?” she asked, wiping the solitary drop away.

“A notice of default,” he said.

“Default on what?”

“Our house.”

Somewhere in her chest, a trap door opened. “I don’t understand.”

Jeremy shook his head. “Well, the adjustable rate mortgage … it adjusted. Two months ago. Hard to believe we’ve already lived here three years. So we’re a little behind.” He shuffled the papers in his hand, stacking them neatly. “You know what? Don’t worry about it.”

“Wait—you haven’t been paying the mortgage?” Claudia could hear her voice growing increasingly shrill.

Jeremy looked down at the letter on the top of the stack, as if it might tell him what to say. “Our payments more than doubled, to thirty-seven hundred a month. And our savings are gone, and my salary at BeTee wasn’t covering expenses, and I figured the money from your deal was coming in soon so we could be a little late.”

“Our mortgage doubled? And you didn’t tell me? And you didn’t pay it?” Repeating his words didn’t imbue them with more logic.

“You were so stressed about your movie, I didn’t want to worry you even more. Anyway, I didn’t think it was a big deal to miss one or two payments. I used to do that all the time in my old place.”

“Your old place was a
rental
, Jeremy. Your landlord was your
friend,”
she said. The meaning of the notice finally sank in: “Does this mean—the bank is foreclosing?”

Jeremy looked down at the letter in his hand. “I don’t know …. There’s all this junk mail that comes from the bank ….” His voice trailed off and he looked up at her, hopeful. “But we’ll just pay it all off now. So. Did Carter have the deal signed? How soon are you getting paid?”

Claudia sat down heavily in a chair and stared up at the ceiling in supplication, noticing yet another new crack created there by the earthquake. The crack started at one corner, near the window, and darted diagonally across the room, ending just above the sliding glass door that led out to the deck. As Jeremy waited for an answer, Claudia lowered her gaze. She looked out the window past the tops of the eucalyptus trees. The wild grasses that grew up the hill across the way were the color of parchment paper, half dead from the sun, and the houses perched on the top of the hill looked like sentinels standing watch over a scorched earth. Farther out, the skyline of downtown shimmered in the summer heat. She stared long and hard at their view, as if waiting for the tectonic plates to shift once more, this time collapsing the world before her into rubble, once and for all.

Jeremy

THEIR LOAN CONSULTANT WAS UNFORTUNATELY HOT. TAMRA
Goldsmith wore a tight black skirt, a filmy white blouse that suggested transparency without quite offering a glimpse of bra, and shiny black stiletto heels with red soles that flashed up at Jeremy like an extended tongue when she crossed her legs. Tamra was slender and poised and not that much older than they were, and when they sank down in the overstuffed chairs in front of her desk, Claudia seemed visibly to shrink before her. Jeremy pushed his own chair slightly back and away to telegraph to Claudia that the pretty banker was of no interest to him, even as he couldn’t help noticing a hillock of tanned breast peeping from the top of Tamra’s blouse. The mental exertions required by this—vague lust, connubial reassurance, discomfort at the need to be there in the first place—prevented Jeremy from really focusing on the first few minutes of their meeting.

Claudia sat next to him, a spiral notebook splayed open on her lap. Her pen hovered a scant millimeter over the paper, quivering with anticipation. She had dressed up for their meeting (“so she knows we’re taking this seriously,” she had said, a comment that Jeremy had found equal parts endearing and frightening) in a button-front blouse and a skirt of some sort of stretchy material that fit snugly across her thighs.

Tamra was typing on her computer and nibbling on her red-glossed lower lip. Behind her, he could see a security guard standing by the bank’s double-doored vestibule, ushering customers in one by one. Red lights blinked on and off over the door, forbidding entry. A snaking line of customers stood waiting for their allotted time with a teller, sullenly facing forward, shifting as they read the news feed on the television monitor bolted to the wall.
Real estate prices down 18% in LA County. Gunman kills four in Monrovia. Police arrest teens for beating homeless woman. Jobless rate climbs to 5.7%
. Jeremy wondered if this was what it felt like to live in a maximum security prison.

Claudia finally broke the silence. “So we were thinking we would restructure our loan,” she said, in what Jeremy recognized as her director’s voice: friendly, firm, slightly bossy. “We were interested in finding out what options were available to us.” To emphasize his wife’s words, Jeremy offered Tamra an easygoing grin, the one that had always seemed to get him what he wanted in the past: one part dimple, one part self-effacing charm, one part happy-go-lucky reassurance. This smile had seduced jaded audiences in eleven countries, allowed him to live in friends’ guest bedrooms for months at a time, earned him a free car upon arrival in Los Angeles; it even wooed his wife. Surely, it couldn’t hurt to employ it now.

But Tamra sighed audibly. This was not a promising sound. “Interest-only adjustable-rate mortgages,” she said. “The bane of my existence. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve had in here in the last few months, panicking because their loans ballooned.”

“But it’s totally fixable,” Jeremy offered, keeping his voice varnished with a shiny coat of optimism.

“Define fixable?”

Jeremy’s smile tightened. “You tell me.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have anything to tell you.” Tamra offered a sympathetic smile, revealing red lipstick smudges across what were actually rather rabbity front teeth.

Claudia leaned in. “Wait. Are you saying we
can’t
restructure our loan? Get an extension or a waiver or something?”

“If you like, you can fill out the paperwork for an extension request, and I’ll submit it for processing. But I wouldn’t count on it.” Tamra sounded almost happy about this. Jeremy looked over at Claudia, marveling at this woman’s flippancy. Was the banker
enjoying
this? It had to be a game; she was a sadist who was taking pleasure in torturing them—just a bit—before she took on the mantle of savior.

Claudia fumbled with her notebook, flipping back and forth as she tried to read her own cramped notes. “OK,” she said. The confidence in her voice was wavering; she sounded a touch querulous. “Well, what about refinancing? I read that mortgage rates are starting to drop. Maybe we could get a new loan with better terms?”

Tamra reached up to tuck a loose strand of brown hair behind her ear, nudging it back into her bun with a long glossy nail that had been tipped with a crescent of white. Fussy nails. Jeremy was finding her less attractive by the minute. He looked at his low-maintenance wife—all no-nonsense manicure and sexily disheveled curls and artfully invisible makeup—with a new appreciation. Jeremy wanted to get this over quickly so he could take her home and climb back into bed and spend the afternoon fucking and eating peppermint ice cream and watching old cartoons in the safety of their house.

“According to our records, we sent you a letter several months ago setting out your refinancing options. Any particular reason why you didn’t take us up on our offer then? You’re already two months behind on your payments.”

Claudia looked at Jeremy. He felt himself shrinking under the women’s shared gaze, as if by neglecting to read every single piece of mail the bank sent (and it sent so many! disclosure notices and monthly statements and privacy notifications and credit card solicitations!) he had caused this situation. Maybe he had. In fact, over the course of the last anxious week, he had been plagued by the unpleasant suspicion that this current mortgage mess was entirely his fault—he wasn’t exactly a
provider
, and his approach to bill-paying was best described as a healthy serving of enthusiastic procrastination with a hasty chaser of last-minute panic. It was obvious now that he should have told Claudia when the mortgage ballooned, should have warned her they were missing payments, should never have listened to the gremlin in his head that told him if he ignored the situation it would somehow work itself out. Now, some internal husbandly impulse that he wasn’t previously aware he possessed had kicked in; he felt the need to
fix things
. One way or another, he would extricate them from this mess.

“Yeah, there was a mix-up with the mail,” he mumbled. “But we’ve only missed two mortgage payments! Refinancing is still an option, right?”

Tamra opened a binder and flipped through pages of cramped tables, cross-referencing what she saw there with the information on her computer screen. “No,” she said. “Things are changing rather rapidly in the mortgage industry right now. So that’s not a possibility anymore, at least not for a couple with your financial record. Your credit scores are low. I see you racked up a rather impressive credit card debt two years ago?”

“That was for my film,” Claudia said. She leaned forward, gripping the polished edge of the desk. “We paid that off this spring, when I sold the movie.”

“Well, all that matters is the score they give us, sorry.”

“OK,” Jeremy said, growing impatient. “Well, what about applying for a home equity loan, then.”

Tamra laughed, a damp little snort of surprise. “Let me get this straight. You want me to lend you money to pay back the money we already lent you?” She shook her head. “Let’s be realistic here. You have no savings of note, no investments that I am aware of, and no retirement accounts. You appear to be living month-to-month, yes?” She looked up and took their stoic silence as an affirmation. “Do you own anything of value other than the house?”

Claudia looked at Jeremy. “The painting, maybe. What do you think it’s worth, twenty thousand?”

Jeremy shrank back in his seat, dodging her suggestion. “No way,” he said, answering not Claudia’s actual question but the implicit one she hadn’t spoken out loud—
Would you be willing to sell it?

“Well, that wouldn’t help much anyway,” said Tamra. “You need a long-term solution. I gather from the tax returns you have here that Jeremy is the only one of you with a salaried income. Jeremy, is this a career in which you can be expecting more financial upside in the short term?”

Jeremy felt his face redden, acutely aware that he didn’t really have a proper career to be at the beginning of. It wasn’t like there was a corporate ladder in T-shirt design that he was going to be climbing: There were only six employees at BeTee—the three Hondurans who did the screen printing and shipping, the woman who handled sales, him, and Edgar, and Edgar owned the place. In the last three years Jeremy had managed two raises, so that now he was making fifty-two thousand a year instead of forty, and his title had changed from Designer to Graphics Guru, but that was more of an in-joke between him and Edgar than a real promotion. As a day job it was bearable—and he certainly appreciated how easy it was—but it definitely was not something he considered a career. The
career
was his music, although the band was still stuck on song seven of their album, Daniel hadn’t written new lyrics in a month, and Jeremy was starting to get concerned about the effect that their drummer’s cocaine habit was having on their practice schedule.

“Not exactly, no,” he said. He hated Tamra, his own age but somehow not his peer at all, with her expensive shoes and her computer spreadsheets and her long-term asset management plans. He hated that they had to sit here at all, at this woman’s mercy. How had he ended up here?

Really, if you wanted to get nitpicky about it, the house had never been his idea in the first place. When Claudia first proposed the idea, a week after their wedding, he was horrified by the thought of mortgage payments and home repair and insurance. He had never really considered it—
real estate
—before; it had never seemed like something that fit his life. The places he’d lived when he was growing up had felt less like permanently fixed positions than temporary landing pads from which he and Jillian could launch a fresh assault on the world. There had been ashram stays in India and artists’ retreats in San Miguel de Allende and New Age therapy conferences in Taos and a two-year stint in a student apartment in Davis while his mother finished her PhD in psychology, but there hadn’t been anything resembling a long-term living situation until they settled into a rental bungalow in Venice during Jeremy’s high school years (Jillian’s only concession to “normalcy” for her son). And even that bungalow always felt uninhabited, with packing boxes that remained piled in the corners for years after they moved in. A house wasn’t a value for Jillian; it was, simply, a necessity. Shelter, pure and simple.

Jeremy—a perpetual renter and couch surfer—had never bothered to take another view until Claudia changed his mind. Buying a house was a way for them to start a life that was about
them
, a newly married couple instead of two discrete individuals, she’d argued. An expression of their relationship, their aspirations, their vision of the world. It was what you were
supposed to do
at this point in your life. Anyway, mortgages were cheap. She’d run the numbers—if they got one of those interest-only adjustable rate loans everyone was offering, monthly payments would be negligible, even less than rent; with the real estate market going up 15 to 20 percent every year, they might even
make
money. Claudia had argued for it with a force of will that surprised him, and maybe because it was the first thing in their relationship that she had ever insisted upon, Jeremy didn’t want to disappoint her. Frankly, it all sounded pretty good. Money for nothing. A house for free.

So he hadn’t objected—not that first day, nor any other day during the two months it took them to locate the bungalow in Mount Washington. By that point, he’d become infected by her enthusiasm; he had the real estate bug bad. He found himself gushing about their new house’s fantastic views, the quirky charm of its original details, the friendly neighborhood, the deer that occasionally ran down the street en route to the canyon. It could be their creative launching pad, they agreed; an artists’ retreat like those little cabins in Laurel Canyon where Joni Mitchell and Frank Zappa lived and worked during the 1960s. He’d write his songs; she’d direct her movies; they’d have sunset parties on the deck and serve
mojitos
in jelly jars, culminating in impromptu late-night jam sessions. Paradise.

The fact that so many other people seemed to want the house—that they’d had to increase their offer twice, in order to outbid everyone else—simply cemented the fact that they’d done the smart thing. Claudia was right. The mortgage was manageable, the house value rocketed over the following years, and nothing had been sacrificed—not his ambitions, certainly not his lifestyle. It was a great house, even if it was a bit remote for his taste, and they’d fixed it up well. Really, he had kind of enjoyed the whole nesting thing: painting the walls periwinkle and lettuce, and going to the Rose Bowl flea market and IKEA to pick out furniture, and planting tomatoes in pots on the deck. They hosted several memorable summer barbecues. And if it all felt maybe a little
too
easy, he’d just chalked that up to his own ignorance about complicated financial matters.

Except that now it was clear that he should have listened to that initial warning bell. Because here they were, three years later, and it was clear they’d somehow tethered themselves to a boulder that was rolling downhill. He glanced down at Claudia’s notepad. She’d written down:
Look into directing commercials. Roommate? Reduce monthly budget by 30%. Cancel dinner reservations Friday night. Lose: Cable, home phone line. Sell Jeremy’s extra guitars? Yard sale
. The last item—
stable income!
—she’d underlined three times.

He turned his focus up toward his wife, who was now arguing with Tamra. She’d finally lost her temper, and the sound level of her voice was slowly rising, as if someone were stealthily turning up the dial on an amp. The people in line had turned to look at them, the most diverting entertainment in the bank. “So you’re saying you can’t do anything to help us?” Claudia said, with throaty indignance. “You’re telling us we’ve wasted a half hour of our lives sitting here with you, while you gloated about our situation, and now you’re unwilling to do anything?” Jeremy stared at his wife, surprised to see her lose her calm. This was new to him. He put his hand on Claudia’s leg, both as a gesture of support and a plea for her to maybe tone it down a little bit. Getting confrontational wasn’t going to help matters; he knew that much.