This Is Where We Live (29 page)

“Money, obviously,” Claudia said. “Keeping my career alive, no matter the cost. Because I have no other options.” She hesitated, then bit back the last and perhaps most compelling reason, the one that had taken root in her mind that morning and grown ever since:
Aoki
. In a world full of Aokis, a mundane schoolteacher couldn’t compete. It was just a matter of time before Jeremy drifted off, caught in a more alluring wake. But
Quintessence
would keep Claudia in the game. No woman would dare steer her husband away from her if she were a wealthy, successful director. And if freedom from financial obligation was what Jeremy was longing for—and it certainly seemed like this was the case—she could buy it for him: With her salary, she could support him, let him quit his day job, help him go back to making music full time. It would bring an end to
pretty fucking boring
, once and for all.

RC was watching her, waiting. “And?”

“And that’s it.”

RC tipped her head back and stared at the ceiling, transfixed by a faded blotch that appeared to be dried orange juice. “Don’t take the job. It’s not going to be a good movie.”

Something heavy crashed at the other end of the house; followed by a suspicious silence and then a keening wail, which RC ignored. Claudia fell back in the leather lounger, realizing that this was not the answer she’d wanted to hear. “But maybe I could elevate the material. Rewrite the script. Hire great actors and an amazing DP. Put my own spin on it.”

“It’s possible,” RC said. “But I have to say, I’ve been paid to polish up bad scripts a hundred times and never truly succeeded.”

Claudia considered this. “And if I don’t succeed. Would it really be so horrible to work on a bad movie?”

RC picked up the PlayStation joystick and used the hem of her T-shirt to wipe a sticky smear off it. “Well.
I’ve
worked on plenty of awful projects over the years.”

“Yes! And you’ve survived,” Claudia pointed out. “In fact, your career is in great shape. You use a Golden Globe as a toilet paper holder!”

“But I’m fine, morally speaking, with lowering my standards every once in a while, and I’m not sure you are. And directing is different from screenwriting—as director you’ll end up taking full responsibility if the film bombs. It could kill your career.” RC dropped the joystick and leaned forward, her T-shirt falling around her narrow frame. “You’re still so young, Claudia. Do what you love while you still can, before you have to take kids and aging parents and all that into consideration. Do what will make you happy.”

“Right. Just do what will
make me happy.”
She tried to imagine what this might be.
Happy
had once seemed like a baseline emotion from which all other states deviated; but right now she couldn’t even remember what
happy
felt like.

Jason marched back through the living room, this time with a plate of meat in his hand. “I think the boys are trying to murder each other,” he said. He tipped the platter to show the steaks to Claudia. “Grass-fed beef. These cows lived a finer life than any of us have. You sure I can’t tempt you?”

A cloud of barbecue smoke drifted in from the garden. The familiar smell of carbon landed with a visceral twist, and Claudia was momentarily unable to breathe—
something is burning!
—until she reminded herself that her own house wasn’t on fire anymore. Looking at Jason, Claudia thought of Jeremy and wondered if he was also cooking her dinner right now. She realized that, for the first time in nearly four years, she didn’t trust that he would be there when she got home.

“No, I have to get going.” She pushed herself upright, removing a few strands of dog hair from her skirt. “Thanks for the advice, RC.”

RC stood. “I don’t think I was very helpful.”

“Of course you were.” Claudia lied, now aware that she’d made her decision long before she ever arrived at RC’s home. She thought of Evanovich’s words:
Real life is just a never-ending string of compromises that you make in order to survive
.

Her compromise would be her career ideals in exchange for her marriage. Honestly, wasn’t she halfway down this path already anyway? She just needed to take the final step.

She barely waited until RC’s front door was shut behind her before pulling her cellphone out of her purse. There in the driveway, her hands still shaky with charcoal-fueled anxiety, she typed out an e-mail.

Samuel—Read the script: great possibilities. I’m in. I’ll call your office tomorrow to get the ball rolling on the legal work. Thanks—Claudia
.

Jeremy

SLEEP ELUDED HIM, DESPITE A HALF AN AMBIEN AND A PAIR OF
earplugs, despite the black sock he had draped over his eyes to block out the sun that streamed through the sliding glass door, despite his complete and utter exhaustion. Claudia had departed for work hours before, her parents had been dispatched for the day with a phone call to their hotel, and the faint noontime bell had come and gone. He was really pushing it with Edgar, bailing on work yet again, and there was also the troubling fact that his car was sitting with a valet in Beverly Hills. But still Jeremy lay motionless on the air mattress, the afternoon passing as he parsed through the events of the evening before.

He tried to understand where everything had begun to unravel, but most of the night remained a blur. Perhaps that could be blamed on the two glasses of champagne he drank at Aoki’s opening; and then the bottles of expensive burgundy that he shared at dinner with her friends, at a French restaurant whose name he could not recall; and the multiple martinis that he polished off in the lobby of the Château Marmont, where Aoki and her entourage were staying. Or perhaps it was because of the adrenaline that raced through his veins all night, an obliterating high that had nothing to do with alcohol at all. Maybe it was the relentless stimulus of new people and places and sounds and ideas that left him so addled.

Or maybe it was all inevitable in the first place, and there was nothing to be faulted at all. It was just the way things had to be.

Regardless, he couldn’t pick out a coherent narrative from the previous night, nor could he really remember any prolonged conversations or a clear sequence of events. What was left in his head, as he lay there on the air mattress, was a fuzzy recollection of prolonged pleasure.

But a few specific moments did keep returning to haunt him:

1. Aoki, steering Jeremy toward her friends at the back of the gallery and talking about Cristina. “God, that museum woman was awful. Remember what I was saying about sycophants? That’s what I meant. There’s nothing interesting about being drooled over.” She says nothing at all about Claudia.
   

2. Pierre Powers falling to one knee in mock adulation, pressing Jeremy’s hand to his forehead. Murmuring “a rock God” in accented English, as the rest of the people standing around them titter: a small man with a Dalí-esque pencil mustache and exaggerated biceps, wearing something resembling a pirate costume, with a ruffled white woman’s blouse over tight black leggings. “I design my last collection to the sound of your music. I listen to it so many times I wear a hole in the—what do you call it?”—turning to a woman standing next to him and conferring with her in French—“lamination. I did not realize that was even possible!” His breath smelling like milk and cloves. “Aoki says you want to make a new album, yes? I would like very much to be a patron, like Medici. I have too much money. I will help you.” Beside him, Aoki smiling, victorious.
   

3. The back of Aoki’s town car, drinking more champagne en route to the restaurant. A strange new view of Los Angeles, from deep leathery bucket seats. A famous actress on one side, Aoki on the other; the flash and snap of a camera shutter as a photographer from
   Vanity Fair
   takes photos from the front seat. A slice of the southern sky through the tinted windows, neon reflections on the top of buildings, the night illuminated by a full moon. Everything so bright he can’t see any stars at all.
   

4. Dinner. Eating snails drowned in butter and parsley. Speaking about Japan with the fashion editor on his right, photography with the artist across from him, and the history of R&B music with Pierre. At one point realizing that he has unconsciously slung his arm around the back of Aoki’s seat and left it there. Eating a dessert Aoki chooses, something lemony and sour. No one talking about the collapsing economy, or their day jobs or mortgages; money being a perpetual assumption they all seem to share.
   

5. Sitting in an armchair in the lobby of the Château, Aoki perched in his lap because the hotel has run out of seats. She weighs almost nothing. A new group of people around him, whose names he can’t remember, whose conversations he can’t hear over the music anyway.
   

   Aoki’s breath on his cheek. Aoki’s hand on his thigh, almost painful; his jeans far too tight. They are making a spectacle of themselves, but no one seems to notice. Aoki whispering in his ear: “Come to Paris with me.”
   

6. Kissing Aoki in the women’s bathroom, pressing her violently against a white-tiled wall. The sound of water running in the sink, a low-tempo throb from the lobby DJ vibrating the stall where they hide. Stooping to meet her upturned face, his back almost bent in two; her leg flung around his waist so he can touch the bare skin of her inner thigh. Everything so agonizingly familiar: how cool her lips and sharp her tongue, the strange way they always fit together despite their different sizes. Realizing that nothing again will ever be the same.
   

He cried as he kissed her.

Waking up on that air mattress next to Claudia, knowing what he knew and she didn’t, was a special sort of torture. For the first time since August, he was thankful for Claudia’s job and the merciful reprieve that her early departure for work gave him. And she was going to be late coming home, too—she’d e-mailed him that she was dropping by RC’s house after school—which gave him enough time to banish both the remorse and the exhilaration and settle himself into a Zen sort of state where each moment existed in a vacuum, divorced from the past and the future. Enough time to gather up his remaining fortitude and generate the best distraction that he could: cooking dinner for Claudia. (A distraction for himself? Or her? Perhaps both, he decided.)

He rose around four. Showered and dressed. Drank two cups of coffee, then a beer to calm his nerves. Foraged in the fridge and cobbled together a gourmet feast, a greatest-hits collection composed of Claudia’s favorites: salmon in shallot-mustard sauce, roasted butternut squash soup, grilled asparagus with lemon aoli. He put a Flaming Lips CD in the stereo and then tuned it out completely as he cooked. The onion browned in the bottom of the soup pot; the food processor emulsified the eggs into a thick cream as he slowly added in a cup of olive oil; the roasting squash sizzled in the oven. He almost felt OK. And then he didn’t feel OK at all.

Come to Paris with me
.

He looked in the freezer again, discovered a bag of frozen blackberries, threw together a berry crumble. He set the table for two, but not with the good china; opened a bottle of wine, but not the Pinot Blanc that they’d bought in Santa Barbara and were saving for a special occasion. He didn’t it want it to be obvious that something had shifted.

He drank another beer and stirred his soup with a broken wooden spoon. By the time Claudia’s keys rattled in the lock, he’d finally taken the edge off his agitation and settled into a mild buzz, so that when she appeared in the kitchen he was able to look at her straight on and offer what felt like a sixty-three percent genuine grin.

“Hi,” he said. “How was your day?”

He wasn’t sure what he was expecting, but it certainly wasn’t the exultant smile that Claudia offered him in return. She was wearing her usual conservative teacher outfit—knee-length skirt, average heels, cardigan sweater over a blouse—but she looked different than she had when she left that morning. More pulled together, maybe, even a half inch taller. Her face was flushed; her eyes, usually a dark hazel, were a vivid green. She was radiant, as if she’d just claimed some victory; or maybe just had a roll in the sack. A vague stir of hopeful desire passed across him.

She stood there in the kitchen doorway, silhouetted by the lights of the dining room, holding her book bag in one hand and her purse in the other. “We can stop worrying,” she announced. “About
everything
. I got a directing job. I’m going to make another movie.”

The meeting with Evanovich—he’d forgotten all about it.
Evanovich is going to make her movie after all?
For a moment, he thought she was lying; that she had somehow sussed out his misbehavior of the previous evening and had come up with this deception to disarm him. And then he hated himself for doubting her.
Of course Evanovich wants to make her film!
All the old familiar faith in his wife flooded back, and he was almost dizzy with love and pride and shame. For just an instant, it seemed possible that the last twenty-four hours could be entirely erased; that the last three months could be rewound like a faulty film spool, and they might find themselves back in early July, with possibility still spread out before them, the two of them poised to take on the world.

He stepped forward, wooden spoon still in his hand, ready to gather Claudia in a celebratory embrace, ready to disavow Aoki once and for all. “The human trafficking script? He’s going to make it!”

Claudia hesitated. “Not exactly,” she said. “No.”

Butternut-squash puree was dripping off the spoon and onto the floor. He cupped his hand underneath it and turned back to the stove. “What is it, then, a different film?” he said, not quite understanding.

She dropped her purse and book bag on the kitchen table and smiled again. “It’s a comedy, called
Quintessence
. It’s a go film, and he needed a director.”

The garlic for the sauce was burning; he scraped at the sauté pan with the dirty soupspoon, trying to salvage the least charred bits. Something about Claudia’s reaction felt suspect, slightly forced. “What’s it about?”

Claudia rummaged in her book bag and pulled out a script in a pristine red cover. She tossed it on the table. “Kind of a … high-concept romance,” she said, staring down at it. “It needs a little work, but it’s got a lot of promise. With a strong actress, I could really say something about gender roles in the modern age. It could be my … my
Working Girl.”

Jeremy put down the spoon and picked up the script. “That’s so great,” he said. “It’s unbelievable.”

She kissed him on the cheek and walked to the sink to wash her hands. “I know! Preproduction starts in a few weeks, so I’ll be quitting Ennis Gates soon. And once the checks start rolling in you’ll be able to quit your job too. That’s what you want, right?” She turned to smile at him.

“Unbelievable,” he repeated. It
was
unbelievable; something about the whole scenario didn’t quite feel real to him, but maybe that was just because of his blurry mental state. He opened the script and flipped through it, half expecting the pages to be blank. “So I guess you didn’t have to worry about Penelope’s midterm report card after all. Or did her dad not receive it yet?”

“Oh,” Claudia said, her voice growing fainter. “No, they went out a few weeks ago.”

“So he doesn’t blame you for the fact that she’s flunking your class?” Jeremy glanced down at the script and read the last page.

BETH

rows frantically, the five babies in their life vests cooing with excitement as seawater splashes their faces. She docks alongside the sailboat just as MARK comes aboveboard. His dog barks frantically at them.