This Is Where We Live (12 page)

Claudia and Jeremy looked at each other as they took in this promising new piece of information. They held a mute conversation with their twitching eyebrows.
She’ll never be here; we can’t do better than an invisible roommate
, Claudia said to Jeremy with one raised brow.
Yes, but she’s not like us at all
, Jeremy retorted with a double blink.
We have no choice, we need to pick
someone
and she’s not so bad, considering
, Claudia blinked back. Finally, Jeremy rolled his eyes, crossed his arms, and sighed.

“We want eight hundred, plus shared utilities,” he said. “And first and last month’s rent as a deposit. Could you handle that?”

Lucy pursed her lips. “Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said. “If I can have the other bedroom, the bigger one with the view, I’ll pay a thousand.”

A long silence passed over the room. Claudia crab-walked her hand across the pebbled leather surface of the couch and located Jeremy’s. She wormed her fingers under his, rubbed the thick guitar callus on the pad of his thumb. His hand swallowed hers, gripping it hard, a desperate sea anemone in a dying tide pool.
We’ll survive this
, Claudia tried to tell him with her palm.
We love each other. People have survived much, much worse. All this is only temporary
.

“How soon can you move in?” she said.

Jeremy

Jeremy
,

Four years. Really, it seems longer. Isn’t it curious how as time passes memory begins to smear and blur and becomes somehow less about
fact
or
event
and more about
visceral impression,
like a vaguely accelerated pulse or a dark twist in the back of the throat? You are to me a stomachache, the thought of you evokes a pang in my upper intestine. I should paint that
.

I heard Jillian died. So very sorry. I liked her
.

I’m in Paris doing an installation right now (what an odd city, really—the French, and their strange anal fixation!), but will arrive in Los Angeles in October. I’m glad you’ll see me when I’m in town. I think it will be restorative, truly. What have you made of your life? I can barely imagine what living in LA is like—are you really happy out there? I could hardly stand so much sunshine
.

I hold no grudges—tell me everything
.

aoki

Aoki—

So I’m a stomachache, huh? Not like, an itchy feeling under your armpit or a burning sensation in your left nasal passage? I’m a little bit offended to be such a pedestrian ailment
.

Honestly, though, it’s good to hear you’re still tripping the light fantastic. I would expect no less. Here’s the rundown of my world: I’m in a new
band (with Daniel, remember him?). We’re just finishing off our first album—I think you’d like it. Claudia is great; her film came out this summer and now she’s teaching. This dismal economy’s taking its toll, but overall, things are great
.

And as for LA—well, I was born here, don’t forget, so it’s home turf. Rain is overrated anyway
.

Thanks for the nice words about Jillian. I still miss her
.

Take care, Jeremy

Jeremy—

So, was that e-mail supposed to be a kind of virtual spanking (and by that I mean
not
the good kind)?? Obviously things ended rather
badly
between us, and I also know you weren’t ever a big written-word sort of man, but really, I’ve gotten more thoughtful e-mails from my senile great-uncle Hiroyuki back in the old country. Everything’s
“great.”
Could you be slightly more specific? I’m not asking you to tear your soul out and send it to me in a box wrapped with silk ribbons, but I wouldn’t object to just a bit of heartfelt detail. I know what your penis looks like. I know what it
tastes
like, so don’t pretend I’m a stranger
.

Or are you really so complacent now that you have nothing left to say? I’ve heard that this is what domestication does to men, sometimes
.

So Claudia’s a teacher? Well, now, isn’t that a respectable job!

“Take care”
(I mean
, really,
Jeremy!)

aoki

Aoki—

You think I’m domesticated? Coming from you, I suspect that’s an insult. Trust me, underneath the happy-husband exterior I’m still the spontaneous guy who went train jumping with you across East Germany; the same guy who took peyote and then went camping in Central Park in a hailstorm. OK, so maybe I haven’t gotten arrested for streaking through Union Square in a while, but just last week I had
ice cream
for
breakfast!

Anyway. Sorry if I’m acting a little gun-shy, but … well, it’s been a long time, and I am
.

Jeremy

J—

Why? Are you still hung up on me?

a

Even now, some twenty years after the fact, Jeremy could still viscerally recall the first moment he stepped on a stage. His seventh-grade talent show was perhaps not an epic event in anyone’s memory but his own, but still, it was the night from which the rest of his life seemed to stem. All the other musical numbers that evening had involved lip syncing and dance routines—1987 was all about “Papa Don’t Preach” and neon-pink spandex—or else mediocre renderings of Beethoven on flute or piano. But not Jeremy’s. He and his new friend, Daniel, had stepped onstage with a song Jeremy had written himself to a tune that borrowed heavily from the Beastie Boys, dressed in a costume of Billy Idol-esque gel-spiked hair and shredded jeans that Daniel’s mother had gamely distressed for them. They were, of course, ridiculous, but Jeremy didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that when he stepped out there and the spotlight fell upon his face, nearly blinding him, something clicked internally. Daniel was petrified, his hands fumbling at the strings of his brand-new guitar, but Jeremy strode straight to the front of the auditorium stage as if it were the place he most belonged in the world and belted out his song with the confidence of a veteran rock star. Banging away at his guitar, screeching vaguely off-key—his voice had just started the process of changing from soprano to mild baritone—he no longer noticed the school jocks chewing spitballs in the back row, the crackle of the ancient speaker system, or the unfortunate smell of pea soup and stale grease left over from the lunch period. After years of itinerant living with his mother, feeling slightly lost in every new place they landed, he’d finally found a place where he belonged. Up there, onstage, he was someone entirely new, someone
electric
, someone
extraordinary
. And he had power over his audience: He could seduce them, he could make them adore him, he could make them
sing
.

It was true. The kids in the audience loved the song, even if the panel of adult judges awarded the top prize to a Japanese girl who played “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on her grandfather’s violin. In just three and a half glorious minutes, Jeremy’s position at Martin Luther Middle School was elevated to something close to a rock god. Throughout the rest of junior high and high school, Jeremy and Daniel’s band—which eventually traded in Daniel’s synthesizer for a real, if spectacularly untalented, drummer, and picked up the rather uninspired name Purple Voodoo Smoke—was the school’s go-to group for parties and class events. No longer was Jeremy just a misfit kid whose mother dressed him in weird cotton clothes she’d picked up in India, he was a heartthrob, sensitive and artsy and just feminine enough not to be scary to the girls in his class. He lost his virginity by ninth grade.

In some ways, the rest of Jeremy’s life had been an attempt to recapture that first transcendent moment onstage. Each time the lights came up and he found himself there, with twenty or a hundred or a thousand eyes trained on him, he felt himself on the verge of some sort of discovery, as if each new song that he delivered to the people below might sanctify him, renew him, reveal something about himself that he’d never known before. Often, he was disappointed: Even during the height of This Invisible Spot, when the band was playing to enormous crowds in Tokyo, he’d never quite experienced that same epiphany, the same giddy high of self-knowledge that he’d experienced in the seventh grade. Sometimes he was just up there, hot and self-conscious, wasting his beloved songs on an indifferent crowd. There were even periods of time—during the year that his mother died, for example—when he didn’t play music at all. Still, he always eventually came back to the same place: the front of the stage, the guitar slung around his neck, microphone poised inches away, in search of a long-lost feeling.

And
this
, this moment right now was very close indeed. The darkly cavernous club was packed to capacity, standing room only—which was really incredible for a new band showcase on a Monday night in September—and Audiophone had never played better. Two songs into their set, and already Jeremy knew that something extraordinary was taking place. Daniel, as lead guitarist, still tended to grow shy when performing, turning sideways to face Jeremy as if by doing so he might somehow deflect attention from himself. But tonight he was playing to the crowd, with a foot casually up on a speaker, his shoulders rising and falling in a dramatic flourish that underscored each new utterance from his guitar. Behind him, Ben was whaling away at the snare drum with an intense fury that was, Jeremy suspected, fueled by a line of cocaine, probably ingested when Ben vanished to the bathroom two minutes before they went onstage. But if cocaine always made Ben’s drums sound this sharp, this brutal—well, hell, Jeremy would pay for his next eight-ball himself.

But the real epiphany tonight was Emerson. Emerson had always been the most unlikely member of Audiophone. He worked at one of those three-name financial firms downtown, doing mergers and acquisitions; he drove a BMW 5 series sedan and wore suits to work and had a special rate at the Four Seasons because he stayed there so often on business trips. Even in jeans and a T-shirt he somehow looked less like an aspiring musician than a slumming yuppie. He was the weak link, the least experienced among them, and the band member most likely to forget a critical bridge or boff the tempo when they played live. Still, he played the bass with moderate skill and extreme enthusiasm, and he’d adopted the mantle of band sugar daddy with such cheerful generosity that Jeremy didn’t have the heart to tell him that his haircut was objectionably short or that basketball shoes weren’t really appropriate footwear on stage.
(They’d work on that before the band went on tour
, he thought.)

Tonight, Emerson had shown up a half hour late to sound check smelling suspiciously like whiskey and tacos. He’d barely spoken a word as they’d raced through setup, his face set with a panic that made Jeremy’s heart sink: Emerson was going to seize up again. But his fears were unfounded, because here Emerson was, improvising a new turn on the opening to “Super Special”—something he’d never done before—and doing it remarkably well. He played with his eyes closed and a blissful smile on his face, seemingly lost in a beautiful world of his own making where quarterly earnings didn’t matter and the only merging taking place was of bass with guitar.

Emerson opened his eyes and caught Jeremy looking at him. He offered an abashed smile, almost as if he felt guilty for enjoying himself so much, as Jeremy stepped forward and grabbed the microphone:

“I don’t know why you think you’re super special
,
Yes, you’re special-looking
But you’re not especially deep.”

The first few words were rough, as he fought with a burr in his throat, but then his voice opened up and the rest of the lyrics poured out in a happy growl. Singing had never been Jeremy’s true forte—his real skill lay in his one-on-one communion with his guitar—but he had a decent baritone and could sing consistently on key and had been told his voice was “arresting” by more than one critic. And he secretly enjoyed being the fulcrum around which the rest of the band rotated; enjoyed serving as a kind of medium through which everyone else onstage spoke directly to the audience; enjoyed, of course, the extra attention granted to the lead singer.

“You know what would be
Really super special to see?
The day when you wake up and realize
You’re as ordinary as me.”

He wasn’t sure who this song was about, specifically—a bitter diatribe about one of Daniel’s unrequited crushes, probably. Audiophone’s lyrics had always had a cynical bent, a result of Daniel’s chronic relationship frustration, but Jeremy liked that their music had a certain bite. He matched the melancholy of Daniel’s lovelorn words by composing haunting tunes in minor keys, but often gave them a final upward twist and an exultant journey to the finish so that the audience would be left with an indeterminate sense of victory over adversity. He didn’t want their music to be a bummer.

The band maneuvered through the tricky bridge and launched into the chorus. Stepping forward to bark out the call and response, Jeremy peered out at the audience and realized that they were dancing. That had never happened at a show before. Crowds at these kinds of showcases tended to be jaded hipsters who stayed planted in one position throughout the entire set, too concerned about appearing sincerely enthusiastic to do anything but bob their heads in time. Not tonight. These kids were
really
dancing: pogoing up and down, waving their hands above their heads, ricocheting off one another like waxed pin-balls in a vintage arcade game. The room smelled like spilled beer and fresh sweat.