This Is Where We Live (24 page)

He stood there in the road next to Lucy, with
Beautiful Boy
propped up beside him, and watched the firemen in their reflective yellow suits run their flaccid hose in through his front door. Within minutes, water was pouring down the street in a dirty black stream. Two firemen stood on the east end of the roof, chopping away the shingles with a hatchet in order to gain access to the fire below. The sound was like breaking bones. The fire began to recede, releasing a few last angry clouds of smoke.

His neighbors had come out to watch the spectacle. Across the street, Dolores stood in her front yard, wrapping a ratty blue flannel bathrobe tightly closed around herself even though the night was warm, as if by doing so she might protect herself against the horrors she was witnessing. They made eye contact; Jeremy managed a weak shrug of acknowledgment, but Dolores’s face remained devoid of expression, her mind somewhere else completely. Jeremy took it on himself to fill in the blanks: She was judging him for being so irresponsible as to burn down his house, and for having failed to put out the fire on his own. She didn’t know how hard he had tried!
Where was Claudia, anyway?

It was only now that he was safe from harm that he finally stopped to register what had just happened. His foot throbbed. He coughed dryly, wiping black grit from his face. And then his consciousness arrived back with a rush, throwing him backward with its force as it once again collided with the present moment. What it said to him, with its insidious rationality, with its perpetually self-serving greed, was this:
You could have solved all your problems. You could have just let the damn house burn. How free you could have been!

According to the fire marshal, Jeremy’s quick work with the extinguisher and garden hose had managed to save the house—and, therefore, maybe even the entire hill of tightly packed homes—by confining the worst of the fire to the master bedroom. The kitchen and living room and dining room, at the other end of the house, were relatively unscathed, but the master bedroom was a blackened husk with a gaping hole in the ceiling, and the deck that led off it had been so weakened by the fire that it would need to be rebuilt from scratch; the adjacent guest bedroom and hall and bathroom all had heavy smoke and water damage. Still, Claudia and Jeremy were lucky: The structure remained fundamentally sound, and they could still live in their house by throwing an air mattress down in the living room, even if it was hard to sleep because of the sour, dank smell that pervaded everything.

That was about where their luck ended. The contractor who had come out last Tuesday had offered a staggering estimate of $62,000 for repairs, which at first they thought didn’t matter, because they had insurance (not by any foresight on their part; but because it had been required for the mortgage). Except that, as Jeremy discovered on the phone with their insurance agent the next day, their policy came with a $15,000 deductible.
Fifteen thousand dollars
—more than the cost of mixing and mastering an entire album!

Lucy should, of course, be paying the bill; but she’d vanished entirely after the night of the fire, leaving behind her charred belongings, the gluey marshmallows in the fridge, a stack of gossip magazines in the living room. Their furious phone calls had gone unanswered, and the taciturn brother who had arrived to pick up Lucy’s floral chaise a few days later had refused to divulge her whereabouts. They could sue her—the lawyer that Claudia had spoken with had said they had a very strong case—but it might take years to recoup their money, and they’d have to cover the cost of repairs in the interim.

The situation was impossible. They had landed back where they’d started in August, only now everything was even more dire. Without the $1,000 rent payment from Lucy there was no way they would make the mortgage payment that was due next week; how many months would the bank give them before it stepped in and foreclosed? In hindsight, the stupidest thing Jeremy had ever done was fight that fire. He was about ready to throw his hands up and tell the bank to just take the fucking albatross of a house already, he was done with it and he’d deal with the consequences. Except that he kept remembering the look on Claudia’s face when she finally arrived home that night, a look of confusion that, as he watched, evolved into an expression of personal anguish unlike anything he’d ever seen before. She’d looked from Jeremy to the painting to the smoldering house and back again, and then burst into uncontrollable tears. The sound broke his heart. He gathered Claudia in his arms, torn between relief that she had come home after all and panic that he had just made the biggest mistake of his life. “Don’t worry,” he reassured her, “it’s going to be OK. It’s fixable.”

And here was Barry to fix it. He and Ruth had arrived in Los Angeles on Thursday, uninvited, two days after Claudia called to tell them about the exorbitant deductible. They settled into a Best Western downtown and arrived on their doorstep every morning at 7
A.M.
, ready to get to work. “Your pop hasn’t forgotten all his old tricks,” Barry had said, eyeing the disaster zone with a self-satisfied gleam in his eye, more energized than Jeremy had ever seen him. “Don’t forget I’m the one who built that rumpus room in the basement and your mother’s garden shed, remember, Claudie?” He could fix up the smoke-and water-damaged guest room and hallway, making the house habitable again, he promised, and probably rebuild the deck too, if Jeremy and Claudia would throw in an elbow. The bigger damage—the obliterated master bedroom, and the gaping black hole in the roof above it—required a professional. But they were making progress, and by mid-week Claudia and Jeremy would probably be able to move their air mattress (the water-logged bed had gone to the dump) into the guest bedroom.

Any time not spent pouring a new foundation for the deck had been spent poring over spreadsheets with Claudia as they tried to figure out where the money for their outrageous mortgage was going to come from now. They’d decided that Jeremy would look for a second job, maybe bartending a few nights a week like he had back in New York when he was still a struggling musician. It seemed he was slipping backward to meet an old half-formed version of himself. This was not the life that Jeremy wanted—there would be, it had gone unsaid, no time for fun at all, and certainly no time for music. It was ridiculous even to consider starting a new band right now. The charred remains of this house was his new jail cell; he was doomed to a life sentence of hard labor in its service. How ironic that he had chosen his own incarceration.

Sometimes he imagined telling Aoki what was happening to his life
(What Would Aoki Think?)
and the look of predictable contempt on her fantasy face made his heart twist.
You could be so much bigger than you are
, she’d told him. So what would she think of him now? It was a relief, he supposed, that he hadn’t spoken to her since their coffee. He was tempted to skip her opening this Wednesday entirely, and for a brief moment he’d even considered selling her painting, even though Claudia hadn’t said a single word about that. Selling it would rid him of Aoki’s voice in his head forever, and dig them out of their financial straits to boot; except that he couldn’t quite take that first step toward letting it go. Something inside him was still waiting—maybe until Aoki had finally left town?—to make that last, final break. In the meantime, he gritted his teeth and soldiered on. Yesterday he’d picked up a few job applications at bars downtown, today he would work on repairing that charred deck, and on Thursday, after Aoki’s art opening had come and gone, he would try to move on. Become the husband that Claudia wanted him to be.

And so Jeremy pushed the cart through Home Depot, obediently following Barry through
FIXTURES
and
INDOOR PLUMBING.
As Barry picked through a box of washers—letting them rain through his fingers—Jeremy stood and watched a young family trudging down the aisle. The parents were just about his age: the father with a Baby Bjorn strapped to his chest, milky spit-up stains on the shoulder of his U2 Popmart Tour T-shirt; the wife makeup-free and dumpy around the hips, furiously chasing a screaming three-year-old down the aisle. The father stopped next to a display of plastic toilet seats, right next to Jeremy.

“Honey,” he called. “What’s our budget on this?”

“We have forty bucks left,” she called, “but don’t forget we still need to get the shower curtain.” She was trying to tear a plunger from her toddler’s insistent grip. The toddler slammed the plunger against the warehouse floor, taking his boundless rage out on the handle. The plunger splintered, and the mother ripped it away, shoving it back onto the shelf.

The man turned to Jeremy with an expression of infinite fatigue. “Hey, dude,” he said. “Which brand’s supposed to be better, American Standard or Pegasus?”

Jeremy turned to stare at the toilet seat closest to him, imagining the man before him sitting on it, rereading a two-year-old copy of
Popular Mechanics
for the tenth time, lingering over his bowel movements in order to snatch just a few minutes of solitude. It seemed desperately sad. “You’re asking the wrong guy.” He shook his head, pleased for a moment not to fit here at all. This megastore was a sinkhole for humanity’s dreams, replacing lofty ideals and ambitions with soulless mundanity: self-heating toilet seats, faux-wood vinyl siding, and three-quarter-inch plastic piping.
Of course
Jeremy didn’t belong at Home Depot; he was an artist! It was a badge of goddamn honor not to know what a PNI-hardened
T
-nail was! “No, man, I have no clue.”

“Whatever, it’s all the fucking same.” The man grabbed the cheapest one and lugged it back to his wife, as the baby strapped to his chest began to wail.

Jeremy turned and found Barry watching him. “You want a quick lesson about how to seal a pipe joint?” Barry asked.

Jeremy’s first instinct was to shake his head—
No, absolutely not
—but something about the hardness of Barry’s face stopped him, as if Barry had realized Jeremy was headed astray and was determined to herd him back into his proper position in the pack. “Sure,” Jeremy said, weakening.

Barry smiled, revealing square white teeth that Jeremy suspected were dentures. “It’s something you really should know about. You’ll never have a leak again, I promise you.”

“Why don’t you show me when we get home,” Jeremy said, trying to sound cheerful rather than doomed, trying to sound like a man in charge of his own destiny. “We have everything we need now?”

“Yessirreebob,” Barry replied, and let Jeremy push the heavy cart down the carpentry aisle toward the front of the warehouse. There, Jeremy would pay for the supplies with his father-in-law’s money before heading back home to Claudia and Ruth for an afternoon of mixing concrete and sanding plaster. He walked as slowly as he could.

Jeremy found Ruth and Claudia in the guest bedroom: Ruth scrubbing soot from the walls with a toxic-smelling cleaning product, Claudia attempting to dry an area rug with a hair dryer. His mother-in-law wore a rubber apron over a pink-collared sweatshirt that was fronted with an appliqué of three frolicking kittens. (She’d worn this sweatshirt nearly every day since their arrival; sometimes, when Jeremy closed his eyes at night, he imagined those three kittens clawing his eyes out.) Gray hair bristled about her head in tight curls. Under the blast of the hair dryer Jeremy could hear a light-jazz song playing on the stereo—was that Herb Alpert? Claudia turned and caught the quizzical expression on Jeremy’s face.
Mom
, she mouthed, rolling her eyes. Then:
Save me
.

Ruth wiped her yellow rubber gloves on the front of her apron and shook her head. “I just don’t understand how you two could have spent so much on this house,” she shouted, over the hair dryer. “It’s less than half the size of ours, and ours cost a tenth of yours.”

“Well, it’s not worth what we paid for it now,” Jeremy said. “Maybe we should just move into my convertible. It’s probably more valuable.”

Neither woman laughed at his joke. Claudia snapped the hair dryer off. “Can you both stop it with the doom and gloom?” she complained. “We’re going to repair it. And I’m sure the market will bounce back eventually. Los Angeles is a desirable city and always will be.”

“So is Mantanka, if you ask me,” Ruth said, directing her words to the blackened patch of wall two feet above the floor.

“A house is a long-term investment, anyway,” Claudia continued, ignoring her mother. She walloped the rug with her left hand, sending black dust flying. “It’s a
home
, right? Maybe we’ll stay here for the rest of our lives, and then it won’t matter what happens to the real estate market.”

The rest of our lives
. It sounded like an ungodly long time to Jeremy. A cellphone rang out in the kitchen and Claudia rose from her seat on the floor, jogging out of the room to retrieve it. From across the house, Jeremy could hear the lilt of her voice, vowels slightly exaggerated, making it clear that she was talking to someone who needed to be impressed. Probably an insurance adjuster.

The rest of our lives
. Everything that Claudia said this week seemed to have some coded message that Jeremy couldn’t quite decipher. It hadn’t started out like this. Their first few days after the fire had ushered in a new, unexpected intimacy: Jeremy and Claudia had clung to each other on the air mattress like disaster survivors, comforted by the presence of each other’s bodies. She was so solid, so material, so familiar next to him; nothing else seemed quite as real. They’d had quick, desperate sex on the living room couch and the kitchen table, heightened by the smell of catastrophe around them.

But with the arrival of his in-laws and the dawning reality of their situation, the freeze had crept back into their marriage, as if Ruth and Barry were a magnifying lens that amplified all of Claudia and Jeremy’s problems. One of these days, they really should talk about their fight, which still hung in the air in the house, along with the lingering smell of smoke, but Jeremy was happy to avoid it for as long as he could. He was afraid of what might come out of his mouth if he wasn’t careful, what he might see if he opened his eyes and gave it all a good hard look.