This Is Where We Live (6 page)

Tamra raised her hands and faced her palms to them, halting the torrent of abuse in its tracks. Her hands were soft and pink and plump. “I’m not gloating. I know you want to blame me, as the face of this institution, but it’s nothing I can control. It’s not that I’m unwilling—I would help if I could. But my hands are tied. I feed the numbers into the computer, and it tells me what I can and can’t do.” She looked tired, all of a sudden, and Jeremy could see ghostly traces of puffiness under her eyes, not quite masked by a layer of flesh-tone makeup. “It’s just the reality of the mortgage industry right now. It’s not like it used to be. Money is tight.”

Claudia fell back in her seat, the anger dissipating as quickly as it came. She folded her arms tightly against her chest. “OK. Well, this is
our
reality,” she said, in a voice of glum resignation. “We don’t have enough cash on hand to cover the mortgage this month. Or next month. Not to mention the two back payments we already owe. So what happens next?”

“What happens next is foreclosure proceedings, Mrs. Munger.” Tamra snapped her binder shut with a brisk finality. It was beginning to dawn on Jeremy that their situation was fairly simple after all: They needed more money, and they didn’t have any. Unless Tamra miraculously decided to write them a personal check, he couldn’t see how this meeting could ever have had have a positive outcome. They should never have come.

He gripped Claudia’s knee harder, keeping her pressed against her seat. He could feel her straining under his hand with the impulse to flee this place as quickly as possible. But he wanted to give it one last shot, his best effort at being the family problem solver, the savior, the husband.

“Tamra,” he began, putting every ounce of sincerity and solemnity he could muster into those two syllables. He fixed his eyes on the banker’s with mute promise—of what, he wasn’t sure. “Tamra, is there anything we can do in this situation? Anything at all?”

Tamra stood up, smoothing the black skirt down over her hips. She glanced at the bank’s sign-in area, where a collection of sullen couples was seated on red vinyl divans, awaiting their turn with her. She proffered a stiff hand toward them, let it hang there in the air, unclaimed, as Jeremy and Claudia obediently rose from their seats. “My suggestion?” she said. “Get a better job.”

They drove home in silence, Jeremy behind the wheel of the Jetta, Claudia sitting stiffly beside him, flipping back and forth through her notebook. She made little strangling noises under her breath, noises that Jeremy suspected were intended as an opening for him to ask what she was thinking. He glanced over to see her staring at her little apocalyptic jottings—
stable income!
—and flipped on the radio, as if this might somehow ward off the horror of those two words. The station was in the middle of a subscriber drive, and the DJs swapped banal platitudes about the joys of supporting public radio; but even this was preferable to the painful conversation that he feared would otherwise fill the void.

As they pulled onto the highway, he had the thought that sometimes struck him on occasions like this:
What Would Aoki Think?
Aoki, his own personal Jesus, an omniscient and certainly vengeful God, was always in the wings waiting to smite Jeremy with her unsolicited opinion. Even now, as he tried to dispel the memory of Tamra’s lecture about the necessity of income management and a long-term savings plan, he could envision Aoki’s disembodied moon face, her asymmetrical black bob whipping across her cheeks, getting stuck in her fuchsia lipstick, as she shook her head in dismay.
No no no no
. He hadn’t actually seen Aoki in nearly four years, not since the day he went to retrieve his guitar from her studio and found she’d hacked it into twenty pieces, painted it Pepto-Bismol pink, and then reassembled it as an abstract sculpture entitled
Untitled 82: Fuck You Jeremy
. Still, Aoki was with him forever, judging him. And right now, he knew she would be laughing at him. He had committed the cardinal sin: He became boring.

Aoki was many things—slightly schizophrenic, maddeningly childish, disgustingly talented, and (above all) completely self-centered—but one thing that she was not, ever, was boring. The precious only child of Japanese immigrants who owned three sushi restaurants on Long Island, Aoki had been thrown out of four reform schools before her parents gave up and enrolled her in a New York art college at the age of seventeen. By the time Jeremy met her, twelve years later, she was mildly notorious within a certain downtown art set for her rococo paintings of classic cartoon characters in obscene sexual positions: Mickey Mouse sixty-nining Mary Worth. Dirty Sanchez Andy Capp.

Despite having attended the same New York arts college three years later, Jeremy had never heard of Aoki before the night she barged backstage after an early This Invisible Spot gig and presented herself to him. He was used to undeserved female attention—when you were the guitarist of an indie rock band, it came with the territory—but not like this. She wore a strapless white fake-fur dress of her own design, held together with strategic Velcro, which she ripped apart as he stood by the rancid cold-cut tray. The dress dropped to the floor, revealing slight breasts and a pair of faded Boba-Fett Underoos.

“So I’ve got this thing right now for transparent communication, OK?” she began, ignoring the flabbergasted groupies and his coughing bandmates, locking her dark eyes on Jeremy. “It’s kind of a social experiment, but I saw you onstage and I thought, Hey, he’s pretty cute and it would be fun to fuck him, so here I am. An offering. And this is what you get, nothing coy about it, so you can’t complain I misled you later.” The lewd content of her proposition contrasted with her high-pitched little-girl voice and the ridiculous underwear, rendering Jeremy speechless for the first time he could remember. No humorous observations, no self-effacing ripostes, no sly pop-culture references could stand up to the furious intensity of Aoki’s will.

Jeremy thought she must be a little bit insane, but he admired the sheer ballsiness of the gesture, and he was stoned, so he took her up on her offer—not right then and there but about four hours later, after they’d shared two more joints and a pint of Wild Turkey and adjourned to her East Village flat. The force of Aoki’s naked intention made him feel as if he’d looked in the mirror and discovered he was far more interesting than he had ever felt himself to be. He thought she’d somehow reinvented him, but he eventually realized, over the ensuing four years, that she’d devoured him instead, the way a scorpion eats its prey: paralyzing him and then swallowing him whole, beginning with his head.

He spent the first few years of the millennium blindly pursuing Aoki: through her two stints in rehab, three bouts of infidelity (two boys, one girl), and one attempted suicide. She was addicted to coke, and then heroin; probably sex too. And Jeremy was addicted to her, the way the space-time continuum seemed to flex and recoil when she stepped in a room. How else to explain why he benignly accepted her manic behavior, came to see it as perfectly normal? One day, he would come home and discover that she’d papered over their entire apartment (including windows, floor, and all major appliances) with smiley-face wallpaper that she’d found at a thrift store; the next he would find her naked on the fire escape, sobbing over the death of her parent’s geriatric dachshund; the day after that, she would descend on the restaurant where he was waiting tables and talk him into quitting his job on the spot and flying to Berlin with her, where they slept in a squat with a group of Slovenian anarchists.

Aoki’s life was a never-ending art project, lived as if an invisible audience were judging her work for originality and intensity of performance. Jeremy dutifully stepped into the role of muse and sidekick, a Zenlike counterweight for her unpredictable psychosis, the only person in Aoki’s life who took her stunts in stride. She saw him, she said, as her savior, a role that both thrilled and exhausted him. After her second rehab stint, a brief period of freedom and sanity when Jeremy considered but ultimately rejected the thought of sneaking off to a foreign country before she returned, a freshly committed Aoki began a series of oil portraits, all of Jeremy—his hand, his torso, his neck, but never his entire face: intensely violent, quasi-spiritual, ten-foot tall paintings that finally launched her into critical art-world fame. There were shows in Tel Aviv and Rio. She cut her hair in a spiral around her head and took to wearing only clothes that were silver. Life with her was an amusement-park ride Jeremy couldn’t seem to get off, even as the loop-de-loops nauseated him and the constant adrenaline threatened to give him a heart attack.

Besides, This Invisible Spot, too, was coming into its own. The band fired their atonal lead singer and promoted Jeremy from backup to lead; they hired an old friend of Aoki’s, a manic Belgian named Anton, to write new material for them; they abandoned their melancholic slow-core sound, added a DJ, and began playing their songs at double speed. In 2003, they were signed to a prominent indie record label and released an album,
Feeling Fantastik
. It sold eighty thousand copies in the States, garnered raves from previously dismissive music critics, and briefly launched them to number two on the college charts. In America, they were respected; in Asia, they were huge. During that illfated February, the band toured in Singapore and Seoul and Tokyo, where they played to a crowd of ten thousand screaming
harajuko
girls and Aoki signed with a prestigious gallery. On a train to Kyoto, with his bandmates listening to their iPods in complicit silence and Aoki asleep with her head on his lap, Jeremy decided that he would propose to Aoki at the Temple of the Golden Pavilion, just so that this hallucination—the frozen rice fields spinning past, the world unfurling before him—would never end. Except that when they got to Kyoto, Aoki disappeared for two days and returned so hung over that she spent the last leg of the trip vomiting blood in the bathroom. On the plane home, Aoki confessed that she’d been sleeping with Anton since Singapore. “He was seeking artistic inspiration, and I knew I could give it to him. It was really for the good of the whole band, including you,” she explained to Jeremy, as if he would understand.

Considering his history, he might have given in to her twisted logic, if it hadn’t been for the message on his answering machine when he finally arrived home, bleary and jet-lagged and shell-shocked. The message was from Jillian, his mother, informing him that she’d been diagnosed with stage-three breast cancer and her boyfriend had moved out because he couldn’t handle the pressure of watching her die and would he mind coming out to Los Angeles to take care of her?

He moved a week later, quitting the band and breaking up with Aoki in an epic six-hour screaming match that ended with her threatening to jump off the Williamsburg Bridge if he got on the plane. He went anyway, and as he flew over the Great Plains toward the West Coast, looking down at the golden-brown fields that covered the country like a warm patchwork quilt, it was as if he’d expunged a poison from his bloodstream and was waking up, slowly, from a very long intoxication.

Things changed in LA, so rapidly that it felt like his years with Aoki in New York were a dream sequence from someone else’s biopic. Reality was his sick mother, wasting away in her stuffy bungalow bedroom as she ejected an astonishing quantity of pus and blood and other vile secretions from her dying body. And there was a whole new social world for him to navigate, with long-neglected school friends like Daniel and Edgar. And then, only a few months after arriving home, there was Claudia. They’d met at the barbecue of a mutual friend, and he’d been struck by her immediately—not that she was the prettiest girl he’d met (though she was sexy in an endearing, guileless sort of way), but that she was so open, so free of artifice, in a way Aoki had never been. She didn’t try to command attention but gathered it slowly to herself with easy humor and an earnestness that was foreign to him. She was chronically insecure, there was no doubt about that. But underneath that nice-Midwestern-girl exterior was a stubborn streak and willful ambition. Bonus: she was creative, like Aoki, only
without
the exhausting chaos. Being with Claudia felt like being wrapped in a down duvet; it was comforting to be in a relationship of equals, one where he could sometimes—hell,
often
—even be at its center. During the endless months of Jillian’s dying, he cried in Claudia’s soft arms so many times that he eventually couldn’t imagine ever living without them again.

He’d since lost touch with many of his friends from New York, including his bandmates, who had hired a new lead singer, renamed the band, released a second album that flopped, and finally disbanded when Anton died of a heroin overdose. Aoki’s star had risen since their breakup; she was genuinely famous now, and he saw her name and face in hip lifestyle magazines every once in a while. He’d look at these photographs intently, trying to connect the woman in the pictures, blazing intention and icy confidence, with the screaming hysteric he’d left in a heap on her paint-splattered concrete floor. He threw these magazines away at work, so Claudia wouldn’t run across them.

Otherwise, the only reminder he kept of their years together—besides the annoying voice that lingered in his head, judging him—was the painting hanging in the living room, an image of his own twisted torso reaching out for something just off-canvas. She’d given him the painting for his thirtieth birthday, right before they broke up. It was so monstrously monumental, so desperately needy, and so intensely personal that getting rid of it would be like throwing away a chunk of his own flesh. Even after everything had changed, he couldn’t quite make that final break. So the painting hung there above the worn leather couch, a reminder of a Jeremy he no longer really recognized but sometimes missed, the way you get nostalgic for a long-lost college friend.

The last time he’d heard from Aoki was a letter she sent him when she found out about his wedding, three years ago. The message was scrawled in crayon, on the back of an old pen-and-ink sketch she’d made of him, sleeping.