This Is Where We Live (23 page)

There was nowhere to go. She wished she had a friend in Mount Washington, a safe house where she could go to sleep off the night, but the only people she knew up here were social acquaintances. RC lived across town, in Beachwood Canyon; and she’d be asleep by now, anyway. She could drop in on Esme, who had recently moved into a condo downtown, but she was in New York, doing marketing promotions for an upcoming film about parakeets with superpowers. For the first time, Claudia regretted having chosen to live on a hill, so remote from the rest of the city.

Her shaking hands were making it difficult to drive, so she pulled over to the side of the road, next to a scraggly little public park that had been wedged in the base of a ravine. One lonely streetlight cast a sulfurous glow across a square of cracked concrete. The swing set wobbled back and forth as if occupied by a forlorn ghost child. In the shadows, just beyond the light, lay an abandoned basketball, half deflated. Claudia pulled her cell phone from her pocket and impulsively dialed her mother’s phone number.

The phone rang four times. Claudia was about to hang up, having thought better of it, when Ruth picked up the other line.

“Hi, Mom.”

“Claudia? Are you OK?” Ruth’s voice was phlegmy and sandpapered. She sounded much older than Claudia wanted her to be.

“I’m fine. Did I wake you up?”

“No, I was watching Conan. But honey, why are you calling so late?”

“I just wanted to say hi.” She looked out at the barren playground, where the bushes were rattling in a soft wind—the Santa Ana was picking up—and regretted calling. Her mother hadn’t been her confidante in years, not since Claudia left Mantanka. It was inevitable. Ruth’s world wasn’t much greater than the stuffy confines of her own house—where Claudia’s semiretired father Barry spent most of his days in a recliner watching the History Channel—and her local Methodist church, where she served as a deacon and all-around do-gooder and, occasionally, the next town over, where she went to deliver noisy plastic toys to her grandchildren. Claudia’s parents’ home was frozen in time, as if a clock had stopped on some day in the past—roughly June 1986, judging by the fading teal-and-coral color scheme and white wicker furniture—when they had decided youth was officially over and there was no further reason to keep up with changing times. Claudia wasn’t sure whether she loved her parents’ reliable consistency or feared the terrifying tang of senior stagnation.

In any case, Claudia’s life in Los Angeles couldn’t be further from her mother’s, and their relationship had long ago settled into something affectionate but vaguely distant, as if Claudia were an exotic creature that Ruth couldn’t quite believe had sprung from her own loins. At Claudia’s wedding, three years earlier, her mother had worn a vaguely perplexed look on her face throughout the entire proceeding, rattled by the cupcakes and the Internet-certified officiant and bridesmaids who were wearing black, of all colors! But that didn’t mean she didn’t cry, and it didn’t mean she didn’t love her son-in-law, even if her reasoning stemmed more from the simple fact that Jeremy loved her daughter than any personal connection to him.

“No one calls this late unless something’s wrong. Here, let me go in the other room. Your father’s dead asleep and I don’t want to wake him.” In the background the television clicked off and the sheets rustled as her mother climbed out of bed and put on a bathrobe. “OK, tell me what’s wrong.”

Claudia hesitated for a long time, trying to figure out where to start, and then plunged in anyway. “Do you ever get the feeling,” she finally said, “that you’ve idealized something that never really existed in the first place? That you’ve been living on the precipice, looking straight ahead at some perfect blue horizon that you’ll never arrive at, because instead, right below you is a canyon that you’re about to fall into? That the world, as it really is, is a cruel joke and downright abusive?”

“Abusive?” Her mother’s voice grew suddenly alert. “Is Jeremy abusing you?”

“No!” She sighed. “No, I just mean … I think our ambitions have outpaced what is really possible for us, and now Jeremy and I are paying the price.”

Her mother went silent. “Oh, honey, I don’t know what advice to give you. All I know is good things happen every time an angel smiles, so you just have to be patient and keep smiling at the heavens and eventually they’ll smile back.”

Her mother must have said this to her at least a hundred times over the last thirty-four years, and Claudia still didn’t think it made any sense, nor did she appreciate the suggestion that her fate was in the hands of some smirking cherubim. “I don’t think that’s going to help much, Mom,” she said.

Static blew through the line, an oceanic buzz that made her mother sound like she was speaking from some great depth. “Is this about Jeremy, honey? Are you two having problems?”

Claudia hesitated. “I’m not sure he’s cut out for married life, Mom.”

“Oh, now
that’s
a story I know,” her mother said briskly.

“It is?” She couldn’t believe she was talking to her mother about this. But her parents had been married for thirty-nine years, and they had always seemed reasonably happy; maybe not passionately in love, but at least cheerfully complacent. Maybe her mother harbored wisdom on these subjects that Claudia had missed by underestimating her. Perhaps her own life was still closer to Wisconsin than she had been willing to admit.

“Well, did Jeremy do something in particular?”

Claudia tried to figure out how to put her husband’s emotional betrayals into words, and failed. “I don’t think he likes my new teaching job, for one,” she said, lamely.

“But it’s got benefits and health insurance!? Why on earth wouldn’t he like that?”

“That’s not exactly the issue,” Claudia said, growing frustrated again. “It’s more like—he doesn’t like the direction we’re headed. With our lives.”

Ruth lowered her voice. “Did I ever tell you what your father did not long after we were married? It had been—oh, dear, maybe six years since our wedding? Your sister was four years old and you were a very colicky baby and the state of our house wasn’t very
comforting
, I’ll tell you that. Your father started coming home late from the store every night, and I was just absolutely convinced that he was having an affair. Remember Squeaky Holbrook from down the street? Her. Lord knows why—she had fat calves and a laugh like a horse, but for some reason I fixated on the fact that I’d found the two of them in the kitchen together at a party once. Anyway, I went into full battle mode. I decided to ship you and your sister off to my parents for a week, and your father and I went and spent some time in a cabin up on the lake, and there we sat down and made a list of the things we most wanted to do. Together and separately. It was like a second honeymoon, and when we got back home everything was fine again.”

“So, wait.
Was
Dad having an affair?”

The note of satisfaction faded from her mother’s voice. “Well, I never asked, to be honest. But I think he was just overwhelmed by what it all meant. Marriage and children and taking care of us.”

“Oh.” Claudia considered this. “So what were the things on your lists?”

Ruth snorted. “I can’t remember a one of mine. I think your father maybe wanted to learn how to fly-fish. I believe we did a few of them and then didn’t bother with the rest. They didn’t matter, really.”

Claudia thought this sounded terribly depressing: a list of false promises to each other, never to be redeemed. How was it going to help Claudia and Jeremy to write down on a piece of paper that they wanted to be in a rock band, to direct movies, to backpack across Bhutan, to learn to speak Japanese? Their problem wasn’t a lack of articulated desire, it was the inability to fulfill those desires. She understood, in that moment, the futility of ever trying to connect with her mother. She had become unparentable, so completely distant from everything she’d once known that she was now completely on her own. It was silly of her to have imagined that her mother would be able to offer anything but generic platitudes, anyway. How could she? Her mother only knew what Claudia told her, which wasn’t much at all. The last vestigial shred of Wisconsin inside her drained away, and she knew she could never go back. But where could she go from here?

The faint wail of a fire engine reverberated down the ravine. The wind was picking up; the swing twisted back and forth in apparent agony. The streetlight flickered in and out, making the park look spectacularly creepy, something from a bad horror movie. Claudia wanted to get off the phone. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I just needed to vent. Don’t worry.”

“Oh, I don’t really worry about you that much, honey,” her mother said. “You’ve always been a sensitive girl, too easily wounded, but underneath that you’re stubborn as a bulldog. You know how to get something when you really want it. So I know you won’t give up anything important without a fight. It’s easy to have faith in you.”

In the shadows of the park, the deflated ball had begun to roll slowly in the wind, on a wobbly course toward the fence. Claudia let her mother’s words—
It’s easy to have faith in you
—sink in. It was the most intimate observation that Ruth had made about Claudia in years, and Claudia grew quiet as she swallowed down a lump that was forming in the back of her throat.

But her mother registered her silence as a hesitation.
“Should
I be worried about you?” she asked, her voice finally betraying anxiety.

Claudia found her voice again. “Of course not, Mom. Good night,” she said, and hung up. She started the car and swung back out into the street, pointing the Jetta back up the hill.

She was going home, of course—there was nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t just that: She was incapable of giving up. As her mother observed, it was just her nature. There were things she wanted—and they weren’t outrageous things to want—a nice home, a happy marriage, financial stability, the ability to pursue her dreams. A few bad months, one terrible fight, shouldn’t mean the end of all that. It shouldn’t mean that they suddenly didn’t love each other anymore. She would go home and save it all.

Claudia drove slowly back through Mount Washington, passing the darkened homes of her neighbors. She passed a clutch of fading
FOR SALE
signs and a half-built modern monstrosity whose construction had abruptly halted in mid-September, seemingly doomed to spend the rest of its existence swathed in blue plastic. The neighborhood was changing again, she could feel it, as if a tide had crept up on shore and was now receding again, exposing the dead fish and strangled kelp in its wake.

She thought of her father, probably hiding out in his hardware store just to avoid the screaming kids and demanding wife back at home. Is that what she had become to her own husband, a nag and a bore? Maybe she was being unfair. So what if he couldn’t seem to launch a viable career, or let go of his youth, or take their potential foreclosure as seriously as she did? Perhaps she’d unconsciously absorbed her parents’ middle-class American values—
husband as provider
—despite everything, and it was
her
job to expunge them, not his to meet them.

By the time she swung her car onto her own rutted cul de sac, she almost felt OK again. It was a silly thing, what had happened—just a painting, a bit of nostalgia, too much stress on both their parts. She’d go home and they’d talk it out.
We’ll go to therapy
, she thought.
It can’t possibly be as bad as it seemed. We just need to stay the course, communicate better. And maybe once he’s happier, he’ll be open to selling that painting
. She briefly considered the Lucy issue, and what she might have to say—or, more accurately, get Jeremy to say—to their roommate to keep her from moving out. They couldn’t afford to lose the rental income.

She noticed the light first, a red strobe coursing across the horizon, and then the smell of charred wood. A fire engine was parked on their block, with three men in yellow fire jackets winding a hose back into its housing. Water poured down the hill toward her car, a deluge that filled the divots in the asphalt and splashed up against her tires. It wasn’t until Claudia was nearly home, and could see Lucy standing helplessly in the street next to Jeremy—balancing the enormous painting upright with his left hand—that she realized that the fire truck was parked in front of her own house.

Jeremy

THERE WERE SEVENTY-EIGHT VARIETIES OF NAILS FOR SALE IN
Home Depot, and Jeremy couldn’t fathom the differences between most of them. He stood there in the carpentry aisle, contemplating the function of the
L
-shape flooring nail and the PNI hardened
T
-nail, wondering whether he needed 1⅜-inch nails or 1¼-inch nails or whether he should just buy the 2000-piece PortaNail Complete Nailing Kit and be done with it. The thrum of a forklift reverberated off the warehouse ceiling, and a red light flashed at the end of the aisle, summoning someone who never seemed to arrive. He hated this place; it was a reminder of his own inadequacies as a man. Men were supposed to know how to buy nails, why a wet/dry shop vac was necessary, the uses of plywood versus pressure-treated lumber. Not Jeremy. Three years later, he still hadn’t opened the forty-eight-bit drill set that his father-in-law had given him for their first Christmas because, frankly, the thing terrified him.

He grabbed three boxes of nails at random and turned, nearly colliding into Barry, who had come up silently behind him. His father-in-law shook his head when he saw what Jeremy held in his hands.

“Those aren’t going to do us any good. They’re good for stapling paper together and that’s about it.” Barry shuffled over to the wall of nails and selected four different boxes, depositing them in the cart that sat, laden with lumber and drywall, in the center of the aisle. He scratched the liver spot that capped the bald crown of his head and then tugged at the sagging waistband of his pleat-front slacks. “For what we’re doing, we’ll also need a nail gun, preferably a Stanley, and some sturdy 3½-inchers. I can’t believe you two don’t own a nail gun. I could have sworn I gave you one. What have you been using, a regular old double-face?”

It was a pointed question, as far as Jeremy could tell: Jeremy had already given Barry ample evidence that he had no clue as to what was in their toolbox. If the seventy-one-year-old man was trying to show him up, he was succeeding. “I don’t know,” he said, and smiled to hide his humiliation. “I don’t think we’ve been using anything, actually.”

Barry ran his hands authoritatively over a stack of lethal-looking nail guns and chuckled. “You know, when Claudie was four years old she asked me for a hammer for Christmas? She had her very own toolbox, full of little kid-size tools, and she used to play with them just like they were dolls.” Jeremy did know this, since Barry liked to repeat this fact rather frequently, as if this one fleeting moment in Claudia’s otherwise undistinguished hardware career had bonded father and daughter together permanently. In the three days that Barry and Ruth had been in town, he’d already brought this fact up at least four times. It was quite likely that Barry’s memory was starting to go. He was starting to drive Jeremy a little nuts.

But really, Jeremy shouldn’t complain, because his in-laws were saving their asses. Barry, who had spent time as a general contractor before opening up two hardware stores in the Mantanka area, was going to do most of the basic repairs on the house—at least, those that didn’t require any seriously heavy labor—and it also hadn’t gone unnoticed by Jeremy that every time they ran out to buy supplies, Barry and Ruth picked up the bill. For this, Jeremy knew he should be more grateful, especially considering the financial bind that he and Claudia were in now. It was just difficult, he found, to muster the appropriate amount of appreciation for the fact that they were salvaging a house that he secretly wished had burned down entirely.

The smoke hadn’t alarmed him at first. If anything, the acrid scent that was drifting into the living room was vaguely comforting; it reminded him of a winter that he and Jillian had spent in Big Sur in an old hunting cabin that was heated only by a stone fireplace. Anyway, he was too agitated to wonder what the smell of smoke might mean. Instead, he sat alone in the living room, drinking abrasive shots of cheap rum out of a coffee mug and ruminating over the frightening expression on Claudia’s face as she shut the door on him. He had occasionally wondered if Claudia had a breaking point and somehow taken it for granted that she didn’t—had assumed that whatever he did or said, she would always forgive him for it because she was that kind of person: loving to a fault. Apparently he was wrong.
I’m done with you
, her expression had told him, as she left the house.
You are not who I thought you were
. When she shut the door in his face, his self-righteous rage had been subsumed by an alien sort of panic. She was leaving. Was she leaving
him?

Even though he’d raced out to the front of the house to try to stop her, he had waited a moment too long, and she was already gone. He dialed her cellphone number, but it went straight to voice mail five times. And so he sat there in the living room, drinking leftover rum and getting progressively more drunk. He listened for the sound of Claudia’s car turning into the driveway, but the night was silent except for the echo of Lucy’s sobs ringing through the heating grates. He had broken something tonight, he realized, and only now that it was sitting in two pieces on the floor before him—a favorite toy, dismembered in a moment of childish petulance—did he realize how much he had loved it in the first place. Why couldn’t he just sell the stupid painting, anyway? She was right—it was just a
painting
. He loathed himself for being
that
guy, the bad guy; a better sort of man would have been self-sacrificing and considerate, would put his family and home on a pedestal above everything else. No, this kind of behavior was straight out of his father’s handbook: pet lions and three divorces and abandoned children across the world. He wouldn’t blame Claudia if she never came home again.

And what if she didn’t come home?
He had no one else
. He would be completely alone. He tried to imagine his life without Claudia’s comforting, cinnamon-scented presence beside him and saw himself as a boat out in the middle of the sea without an anchor. He finished up the lukewarm dregs of rum from the bottom of the bottle.

It wasn’t until Lucy began to shriek in the other room that Jeremy’s brain belatedly triggered its alarm.
Something is on fire
. Then:
The house
is going to burn down
. That was when something internal took over, some innate chemical impulse that knew exactly what to do in a situation like this, even as his consciousness lagged a few critical steps behind. He was standing, his mind slowly forming the words
fire extinguisher
, but already his feet had moved him toward the kitchen, where the red canister lived among the cleaning products under the sink. Then it was in his hand, covered with a thin layer of grime, banging heavily against his leg as he ran back across the kitchen. A shard of broken glass on the floor pierced his toe and he looked down in surprise, not from pain—that would come later—but at the fact that his left foot was suddenly misbehaving, twisting under him as he raced through the living room and down the hall toward the bedrooms. He turned right and was in Lucy’s room, where Lucy stood by the picture window in her silly frilly bathrobe, clutching the white lace comforter from her bed. The curtains were on fire. Orange flames billowed out from the window, and a cloud of charcoal smoke blackened the ceiling, ruining all Jeremy’s careful paintwork from years before. The conflagration popped and hissed and spat out sparks as it began its work on the wooden frame of the window. It was curiously beautiful, and Jeremy hesitated before the glory and power of it all.

Lucy swung the comforter at the fire and succeeded only in fanning the flames. Jeremy jolted back to life. “Move!” he screamed at her, and she turned to stare at him, struck mute by the aggression of his command. “Call the fire department!” He stepped in front of her and pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and released the trigger and just like that—just like something from a movie—a foggy white stream of retardant was spraying across the southern wall of the bedroom. The white clouds mingled with the black smoke and almost blinded him; something like ammonia stung the sensitive flesh of his nostrils. He pointed the extinguisher in the general direction of the wall and shielded his face in the crook of his shoulder, waiting for it to work.
Look at you
, Jeremy’s consciousness marveled idly, as he braced himself against the extinguisher’s kickback:
Look at you, fighting a fire!
Jeremy felt three steps removed from the scene, as if he were standing back watching a stranger: Who
was
this manly figure with the bleeding foot who was saving this house; saving the life of the hysterical woman beside him; saving the street, the city, the world?
It’s you!
he thought, amazed.
You are this man
.

Except that the fire extinguisher was fizzling now, coughing out a few last gusts of chemical powder, but the flames were still growing. The fire had finished consuming the curtains, leaving only blackened webs of fabric behind, and was now eating a hole in the wall, a hole through which Jeremy should be able to see the deck and the view down the canyon, except that the smoke was too thick to see much of anything at all. As he watched, the blaze doubled in size, and climbed north to begin greedily devouring the crown molding. Great bright sheets of flame ascended the wall and then turned left to skim across the ceiling. Jeremy dropped the useless fire extinguisher and let the heat propel him backward, out into the hallway, where a thick layer of smoke had gathered, and farther back across the hall into his own bedroom, where Lucy was clutching the telephone and watching him.

“They’re coming,” she said, whispering for some unfathomable reason. “The fire department.”

“What did you do?” he barked. “What happened?”

“I didn’t know! I didn’t know they would
burn
like that.”

“What would burn?”

“His scrubs.”

“You set Pete’s scrubs on fire?”

Snot blew from Lucy’s nose and lodged on her upper lip. “And some other things of his. I thought if I did it in the trash can ….”

Through two doorways he could see the flames advancing across the master bedroom, making their way toward the hallway and the rest of the house. “That was really stupid,” he said.

She nodded meekly, and then began to cry. “My things! Can you save my trunk?”

His throat was scorched, his tongue thick and dry; he couldn’t summon the saliva to swallow. He was going to lose the whole house, and what would Claudia think of him then? “No,” he barked, and then lunged back into the hallway, ducking low to avoid the smoke, this time turning right into the bathroom. There, he closed his watering eyes and blindly felt for the bath towels, dousing them with water from the sink.
(How did he know to do this? Why wasn’t he frightened? Who was this fascinating
person who was so calm and efficient in the face of disaster?)
He lurched back out and yanked the door to the master bedroom closed, pressing a wet towel against the crack in the door.

“Go outside,” he told Lucy, handing her a wet washcloth. She stared at him with moist boiled-egg eyes, clutching her robe around her, then pressed the washcloth against her nose and ran down the hallway. Jeremy followed her.

A thin haze of smoke was collecting near the ceiling of the living and dining rooms. Lucy ran toward the front door and yanked it open. Jeremy watched her flee into the darkness, the marabou feathers that trimmed her robe trailing along behind her like an obedient pet. He didn’t follow. He turned in the opposite direction, crossing the living room to the sliding glass doors, and stepped out onto the deck. The clear night air was a balm for his lungs. The black void of the canyon fell away below him. Above, the moon was obscured by a thick cloud cover that reflected the glow of the city lights back down at him. He limped down the deck toward the outer wall of the bedroom, where flames were pouring out through the hole that had burned through the wall. They licked at the outside wall, tasting it and finding it to their liking.

The garden hose was coiled in a pile at the end of the deck, next to the potted tomato plants. Jeremy turned it on full blast, and the hose began to buck and flip, spurting water in every direction. He seized the nozzle and pointed it in the general direction of the house. The jet of water was depressingly anemic compared to the voracious appetite of the fire. Flames were climbing up toward the vulnerable shingles of the roof and out toward the rotting wooden rail of the deck; and so he directed the hose first at one, then the other, and back again, soaking the back of the house with a gentle arcing motion. Water droplets drenched his shirt and cooled his blistered lips and clung to his chin.

Time passed obliquely; he wasn’t sure whether he’d been out there for a minute or an hour. He was in a curious meditative state, nearly hypnotized by the motion from the hose. The fire spat at him as it battled to surge forward; he pushed it back with a blast of water. Out here, it was the just the two of them, a battle of wills, and he was determined to win. The world beyond this deck ceased to exist. He forgot that the fire truck was even coming. He began to feel almost fond of the fire, as if it were holding up a mirror and showing him something about himself that he’d never imagined before. Even as the flames took hold of the drenched deck and began crawling toward him, he was strangely calm, unwilling to flee to the safety of the front yard. His body proceeded mechanically forward, insisting on its moment of victory, while his thoughts mindlessly trailed behind.
I can still beat this. Claudia will come home and see that I saved the house and I will be the hero. I will save the house for her!

It wasn’t until he heard the sirens screaming up the hill that Jeremy finally broke out of his trance. The fire was dangerously close. He dropped the garden hose and ran through the sliding glass doors back into the house. The east end of the house had vanished in smoke, and he wondered how much was lost. At the front door, he paused: What else should he save? Looking around the living room, he considered their possessions: The photos arranged on the wall, the guitars propped against the couch, the furniture crouching low in the smoky gloom, Claudia’s laptop blinking sleepily on the dining room table. He found himself standing underneath
Beautiful Boy
, prying it off its hook. He wobbled under the painting’s weight: it would be impossible to carry anything else. Bracing the canvas against his chest, he awkwardly steered it out the front door and into the driveway, where the orange and red lights from the fire truck were illuminating the street like an apocalyptic disco.