This Is Where We Live (9 page)

“Take a break?” He couldn’t make sense of this. “Claudia, look at me.
You do not take a break from your dreams.”
He knew that sounded like a daytime talk-show cliché—this also, he realized, sounded like something Jillian might say—but in this moment, the sentiment seemed vital. It was of critical importance that she
not
step away from the person he wanted her to be.

She whirled around. The whites of her eyes were veined and with the ashen dust caked in the cracks of her face she looked ten years older. Frazzled and defeated. Frighteningly—and this was the first time he had ever had this thought—she looked kind of like her mother, Ruth, a sweet, sagging woman with a penchant for animal appliqué sweatshirts. “It’s not like I’m going to stop trying altogether, but”—she hesitated—“I took a full-time job today, Jeremy. As a high school teacher. At Esme’s mom’s school. The money’s not great but it’ll be enough. And I can still write scripts at night. I’ll do it for a year and then see where we’re at. Or maybe you’ll finish your album and be able to pay the mortgage yourself and it will become a non-issue.”

Her words flopped onto the floor, a sodden lump. Jeremy stood regarding them balefully. “You did all this without even asking me.” His words came out colder than he intended them to; colder than her proposal merited, probably, but he felt compelled to punish her anyway, for some grievance he couldn’t quite name. “You just gave up on everything we always said we wanted for ourselves. For four stupid walls—that are crumbling, by the way, despite all your work—and a wooden floor.”

“I’m doing this to
save
what we said we wanted for ourselves.”

“Are we even talking about the same thing?”

Claudia violently kicked her work clogs off, sending them skittering across the dusty floor to land against the plastic-covered television set. She turned to look at him with fury distorting her face, rendering her unrecognizable. It stopped him cold. “Look, Jeremy.
Someone’s
got to step up to the plate.” She spat the words at him. “And since you don’t seem interested in doing it, I will.”

“This whole thing is your fault. You talked me into this house in the first place. It wasn’t my idea. We never should have bought it.” Jeremy realized he was whining. “I should have trusted my gut!”

Claudia’s voice ascended to a pitch he had never heard before, a glass-endangering vibrato. “Your gut? Well, Mr. King of Hindsight, your
gut
never spoke up about its concerns when we were house-shopping, so, too late. Your
gut
failed to pay the last two mortgage bills! It’s so much easier to blame anyone but yourself, isn’t it? Take some responsibility!”

Jeremy sat down heavily on the chair. He would have laughed at the weirdness of this moment—they were
fighting
—if it wasn’t so traumatic. He hated the sound of Claudia’s raised voice after all, and now the only way he could think to stop it was to play on her sympathies and act the part of the wounded party. “I’m just hurt that you didn’t include me in your decision-making,” he said, lowering his voice. “You don’t care what I think at all. Christ, Claudia, you advertised for a
roommate
without asking me?”

It worked. Claudia stared at him, breathing hard and visibly deflating. “Of course I care. Look, I’m sorry. I just didn’t think we had a choice.” She sighed and swiped at the dust on her face, leaving long finger marks that revealed dark crescents of exhaustion ringing her eyes. “This whole thing has taken a lot out of me. I think I need a nap. Maybe you do too.”

Jeremy wondered if there was an intimation in this statement, but the prickly expression on her face suggested a desert without an oasis. “No,” he said, cranky. “I’m going to watch TV.”

She disappeared into the bedroom. Jeremy sat down on the couch, translucent plastic sheeting crinkling under his rear. He picked up the remote and turned on the television set, not even bothering to remove the plastic, and watched the watery images that swam through with halfhearted interest. Inside him, fury and guilt engaged in a heated skirmish, one side hating Claudia for popping his bubble and the other reminding him of his old promise to take care of her. Was her proposal really so awful?
Yes;
one side brandished its bayonets.
You’ll survive
, parried the other.

After a minute, he snapped the set off. He picked up his guitar, played a few chords, then put it down again. Finally, he tiptoed to the door of the bedroom and stood there, staring at Claudia. She had taken her work clothes off and was asleep, facedown on top of the bedspread, wearing a T-shirt and a faded pair of his boxer shorts. A small puddle of drool darkened the pillow.

Jeremy closed the door and went back to the living room, where he opened his laptop. The computer whirred drowsily; the desktop photograph of a chubby five-year-old Claudia sparked up and spread across the screen. She stared at him curiously from across the years, skeptical of the person looking back, unconcerned about the melted orange popsicle smeared across her face.

It took only a few seconds to locate the e-mail where he’d saved it, in a folder marked
PERSONAL. AOKI
, he typed quickly:

Good to hear from you. I’d love to see you. When do you get to town?

He clicked
SEND
before he had a chance to think better of it and then sat and watched as the software churned, sent its feelers across the Internet, and catapulted his message out into the cooling summer night.

Claudia

TO GET TO ENNIS GATES ACADEMY, CLAUDIA HAD TO DRIVE WEST:
down the hill, then west over the industrial flats of Glassell Park, across concrete-choked Los Angeles River and through the dismally misnamed Elysian Park. Turning up onto Beverly Boulevard, she continued through lower Hollywood, past the
panaderias
and pet stores with their hand-painted signs and rotting birdcages in the windows, and, to the south, the glassed-in high-rises of Koreatown. Here, she hit the first early morning traffic. Trapped between badly timed lights, the cars gunned forward en masse and then jerked to a stop, swapping lanes in a futile and dangerous dance. In this manner, she inched her way past the grand Spanish villas and
SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY
signs of Hancock Park, and through the Fairfax district, where Russian Hasadim in furry flying-saucer hats stalked past designer boutiques. Finally, after almost an hour, she arrived in Beverly Hills. Here sat Ennis Gates Academy, on the end of an otherwise residential street where the mansions girded themselves with high gates and the lollipop palms swayed over empty sidewalks.

Claudia parked her aging Jetta in the half-full teacher’s lot. She was an hour early for first bell, and the campus was still quiet. She had half expected a welcoming committee, there to greet her on her first official day as an Ennis Gates Academy teacher, but the front entry was vacant save for an elderly registrar who sat at the receptionist desk reading a romance novel, a bowl of sugar-free hard candies placed before her. The registrar raised her head and looked quizzically at Claudia, noted the book bag, and smiled, apparently deciding that Claudia belonged there after all. She licked her thumb and turned a page in her novel, uninterested.

Claudia pushed onward, through the double doors and out into a small courtyard, where a smattering of early students were gathered in clusters around a fountain, comparing summer vacation photographs on each other’s iPhones. There, Claudia hesitated, trying to remember her way. The campus of Ennis Gates was mazelike, a quirky scattering of neo-Modern boxes crosshatched with industrial steel beams and painted in creativity-stimulating hues of purple and emerald and turquoise, rising up along the base of a hill. She’d visited the campus four times in the last three weeks, and she still couldn’t quite recall the best way to her homeroom.

When she’d called Esme, she’d half expected that the school would already have found a new film teacher. “You’re recommending
yourself
?” Esme blurted. “That’s not what I was expecting to hear.” But she promised to call her mother right away, and indeed, before Claudia even had a chance to step away from the telephone, it was ringing again, with Esme’s mother Nancy Friar on the other line.

“I’m sure you’ve heard from Esme that we’re desperate,” Nancy began. “Oh, dear, that didn’t sound good, did it? Let me rephrase: Ennis Gates Academy would be thrilled to talk to you about the position. I’ve heard the most lovely things about your film—though I have to confess I haven’t had a chance to go see it yet, maybe this weekend … Oh, it’s not in theaters anymore? Shoot. Well, Esme can’t stop talking about it, and I trust my daughter’s taste. My point being—any chance we could get you to come in for an interview—well, today? We’re really in a bind.”

It was as if Claudia was doing them a favor, not the other way around; but she couldn’t take any pleasure in this. Just the thought of teaching brought up the unsettling image of her older sister, Danielle, who substitute-taught first grade back in Mantanka. Danielle’s home had disappeared entirely underneath a blizzard of children’s artwork: Walls, cabinets, appliances, mirrors, all were taped over with gooey finger-painted landscapes, mutated puppies in dripping watercolor, lopsided daisies rendered in flesh-toned crayon. Danielle herself had a tendency to lapse into baby talk not just with her own four children but with her husband (“Aren’t you my favorite hubbie-wubbie, hmmm?”), kept a collection of shopworn stuffed animals on the marital bed, and had apparently lost the ability to maintain a conversation without at least one reference to her “little sweeties.” Teaching seemed a safe, benign sort of life, one that Claudia had never wanted for herself; the kind of life that had led her to flee the Midwest in the first place.

And yet she saw no other option: They needed money,
immediately
. The phone calls she’d made to her industry contacts had gone unreturned; she couldn’t even dredge up any advertising work. And even if she did sit down to write a new, even more commercial script (with vampires or puppies or star-crossed lovers or, ideally, all three), it would take at least six months to finish and then even longer to sell, if it sold at all. She had no job prospects, no skill set other than this one marginal one. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around it: If she really was such a good director—and this was what she had always been told; surely, she was at least
competent
, which was more than you could say for a lot of the filmmakers out there—how was it possible to be so summarily dismissed?

“Hollywood has a short memory,” RC told her, when Claudia called to talk through her career dilemma. “Produce something new, and they’ll forget your failures.”

“It’s easy for you to say,” Claudia said. “You’ve already made it. No one’s going to pay me to write anything new right now, and I still have to cover our mortgage somehow.”

RC grew quiet. “I see what you’re saying. This industry is a bitch. I wish I had the answer for you.”

“It’s not your fault.” On the other end of the line, she could hear the shrieks of RC’s boys. “You know, I always thought there was some sort of natural forward progression to life: one event leading naturally to a better one—a line graph in constant upward motion, you know? Just look at my parents. My father got a sales job in a hardware store after college, and that eventually led to him owning one store and then two. They traded in their small house for a bigger house, they saved money, and everything just grew steadily upward until now they can retire comfortably.”

“Yes, but they didn’t take any risks.” Something crashed and broke in the background, and RC covered the receiver to yell, “Lucas, go to your room
now!
… Filmmaking is a totally different industry,” she said, returning. “It’s
defined
by setbacks and comebacks. Not neat upward parabolas. I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

“Of course,” Claudia agreed. But the truth was that she’d never imagined that you could be going down your carefully chosen path, taking all the right steps, and suddenly find out that it was a dead end. There was no
logic
to that narrative. Where was the happy ending with the uplifting credit-sequence score?

“I just hope you don’t get cynical. Your sincerity is one of your greatest assets. It’s refreshing to meet someone nice, in this industry.”

“Yeah, well, clearly Hollywood has no interest in
sincere
. What I really need is to be more of a bitch.”

“Just hang in there,” RC offered. “You’ll figure something out eventually.”

But Claudia couldn’t
just hang in there
, not right now. The past weeks of stunning defeats had drained something vital away, squeezed her heart out like a sponge and left it dry and empty on a shelf. With her career on hold and her home in imminent danger—an intangibly
wrong
feeling in the air—something shifted inside her, so that when she thought of the days ahead she saw not a vista of opportunity but a minefield braced with barbed wire. She
was
growing cynical: There was a germ of anger-fueled pessimism inside her that she’d never really noticed before.

Extreme measures were clearly necessary. So she bit back her reservations about the teaching job and went in for the interview that same day. There she spent two hours talking with Nancy, and then three other members of the school’s hiring board, talking uncomfortably about her film’s critical accolades; about the short film that won her a student Oscar back at UCLA film school; about her time working in the production offices of the famous director. She emphasized the high school English tutoring she’d done back in her post-college days in Wisconsin, in the hopes of proving that she really was qualified to teach (what other option did she have?). And when Nancy called her back, that same evening, to offer her the job—“a probationary position, you understand; we’ll see how this first semester goes, make sure it’s a comfortable fit for both of us, before we talk long-term”—she’d accepted it with resigned gratitude.

Maybe she should have waited to talk it over with Jeremy, but it seemed better to accept quickly, before the pain of her decision sank in. That evening, while she waited for him to come home from work, she sat in the living room and polished off a bottle of shiraz. At first, she tasted defeat in the tannic dregs of her wine, but with a second glass, and then a third, it increasingly seemed like a heroic—and yes,
grown-up
—decision she’d made. Maybe safe and benign
was
the proper response to the days ahead. Maybe it would even be a
relief
not to be battling the film industry for a while. She’d salvaged something important by doing this, she knew: As painful as it was to take a conventional job, homelessness would be worse.
That
felt like a far more permanent fracture, cracking deep into her very foundation.

This job is only temporary, she reminded herself now: She would come up with a new script idea, devote her evenings to writing, wait out their crisis. By next year, she could be living RC’s comeback cliché, a plot device that—it was true—was nearly as popular in Hollywood as
alien invasion destroys New York
or
man falls in love with hooker with a heart of gold
. Still, despite the forced optimism, she sensed something ominous hanging in the air, something bigger than her: A global day of reckoning was coming. As she looked around the courtyard of Ennis Gates Academy, a pernicious little voice in her head broke into her reverie:
Brace yourself. This is the rest of your life
.

“You look lost.” She turned to see a middle-aged woman standing behind her, kinked to the right from the weight of the bulging hemp book bag hooked over her shoulder. Her cropped gray hair was spiked with gel, offset by red plastic cat’s-eye glasses with leopard-print earpieces.

“The teachers’ lounge?” Claudia said helplessly.

“Follow me.” The woman began a swift lurching gait across the quad, clutching the book bag to her side with one hand while reaching out with the other to shake Claudia’s. “Brenda,” she said. “Hunter. Philosophy and Ethics. Are you the new Modern Languages?”

“Film.” Claudia struggled to keep up with her, aware how slight her own tote—an Amoeba Records freebie bag, half-filled with some handouts and two DVDs—seemed in comparison. “I’m replacing John Lehrmann.”

“Oh, yes, John. The handsome fool. I never understood why everyone here loved him, and it turned out I was right, wasn’t I? Idiot.” Brenda gave Claudia a once-over. “You’re a cute young thing, aren’t you? I’m surprised they didn’t overcompensate by hiring someone repulsive.”

“Oh, well, I’m married.”

“So was he,” Brenda said. She pointed to the left as they passed a two-story glass building, flanked by tennis courts. “Athletic center. Tennis courts are real grass, of course. School built them a few years ago for a student competing at Wimbledon. Cost six million.”

“Six
million?
Just for tennis courts?”

“And he came in tenth. Big disappointment. Poor kid.” She turned left and up a set of stairs toward the next cluster of buildings, surprisingly quick despite her burden.

Claudia reached the top, panting slightly. From this vantage point, she could see down the hill to the front gate, where the students were starting to arrive. A line of SUVs and Priuses emptied into the student parking lot, windows rolled down and hip-hop blaring from surround-sound stereo systems; another line of luxury sedans triple-parked by the entrance, ejecting younger children who didn’t have their driver’s licenses yet. A solitary limousine idled in the handicapped zone, regurgitating a tiny girl from its tinted-glass depths.

Brenda followed her gaze. “That would be Clarity Schilling.”

“Of … ?” Claudia mouthed the name of a pair of famous actors.

“Yes. She’s the only kid whose parents are so self-important as to drop her off in a limo. Most celebrity parents here prefer to play it low key. Clarity hates it, of course.” They turned into the main quad, past an enormous array of blue solar panels that arced in a decorative curve over the path, and toward the cafeteria. Brenda flicked her hand at the solar display. “The campus went all-green three years ago. First high school in the nation to do so. Water in the toilets is all runoff from the landscaping, if you’re wondering why it looks brown.”

Teenagers were arriving in droves now, thronging down the paths around them. At Ennis Gates Academy, the students wore a uniform of navy blue: V-neck sweaters worn snug over white polo shirts; pleated skirts of acrylic that hung stiffly around girls’ knees; for the boys, unflattering slacks, worn several sizes too big so they flapped around the legs like sails. One teenage boy, with a fedora jammed over two stubby ponytails, stopped as they passed and doffed his hat to Brenda.

“Madam Hunter,” he said, speaking from his exaggerated bow. “I do believe I have the honor of being in your Eastern Philosophers course this semester.”

“Oh,
reeeeally
. Well, this should be fun. Wait until I nail you with Berdyayev.” Brenda laughed. “And tell your housekeeper I fantasized about those brownies with the marshmallow centers all summer.” She turned to Claudia and winked as the boy jammed the hat back on his head and moved off toward the stairs.

They veered right, around the side of the cafeteria and toward a set of glass double doors. Brenda shoved the doors open with one hip, gesturing grandly with her free arm. “And here we are. Home sweet home.”

The teacher’s lounge was a vast room, as sleek and gleaming as a cruise ship. It boasted a buzzing double refrigerator, a shiny row of stainless steel microwaves, and a half-dozen round lunch tables topped with flowering cactus arrangements. A glass picture window faced out onto the quad, allowing the teachers to view their charges while eating lunch. Stiff couches in bold primary colors faced off at jarring angles. On one of them reclined a lumpy older woman in high-waisted mom slacks and orthopedic shoes. She slurped at brown liquid from a Ritalin promotional mug as she flipped rapidly through a Prentice Hall catalog. She looked up at them. “Hi there, Brenda,” she said. “Ready to face the hounds of hell?”