This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  “Yeah, there was a mix-up with the mail,” he mumbled. “But we’ve only missed two mortgage payments! Refinancing is still an option, right?”

  Tamra opened a binder and flipped through pages of cramped tables, cross-referencing what she saw there with the information on her computer screen. “No,” she said. “Things are changing rather rapidly in the mortgage industry right now. So that’s not a possibility anymore, at least not for a couple with your financial record. Your credit scores are low. I see you racked up a rather impressive credit card debt two years ago?”

  “That was for my film,” Claudia said. She leaned forward, gripping the polished edge of the desk. “We paid that off this spring, when I sold the movie.”

  “Well, all that matters is the score they give us, sorry.”

  “OK,” Jeremy said, growing impatient. “Well, what about applying for a home equity loan, then.”

  Tamra laughed, a damp little snort of surprise. “Let me get this straight. You want me to lend you money to pay back the money we already lent you?” She shook her head. “Let’s be realistic here. You have no savings of note, no investments that I am aware of, and no retirement accounts. You appear to be living month-to-month, yes?” She looked up and took their stoic silence as an affirmation. “Do you own anything of value other than the house?”

  Claudia looked at Jeremy. “The painting, maybe. What do you think it’s worth, twenty thousand?”

  Jeremy shrank back in his seat, dodging her suggestion. “No way,” he said, answering not Claudia’s actual question but the implicit one she hadn’t spoken out loud—Would you be willing to sell it?

  “Well, that wouldn’t help much anyway,” said Tamra. “You need a long-term solution. I gather from the tax returns you have here that Jeremy is the only one of you with a salaried income. Jeremy, is this a career in which you can be expecting more financial upside in the short term?”

  Jeremy felt his face redden, acutely aware that he didn’t really have a proper career to be at the beginning of. It wasn’t like there was a corporate ladder in T-shirt design that he was going to be climbing: There were only six employees at BeTee—the three Hondurans who did the screen printing and shipping, the woman who handled sales, him, and Edgar, and Edgar owned the place. In the last three years Jeremy had managed two raises, so that now he was making fifty-two thousand a year instead of forty, and his title had changed from Designer to Graphics Guru, but that was more of an in-joke between him and Edgar than a real promotion. As a day job it was bearable—and he certainly appreciated how easy it was—but it definitely was not something he considered a career. The career was his music, although the band was still stuck on song seven of their album, Daniel hadn’t written new lyrics in a month, and Jeremy was starting to get concerned about the effect that their drummer’s cocaine habit was having on their practice schedule.

  “Not exactly, no,” he said. He hated Tamra, his own age but somehow not his peer at all, with her expensive shoes and her computer spreadsheets and her long-term asset management plans. He hated that they had to sit here at all, at this woman’s mercy. How had he ended up here?

  Really, if you wanted to get nitpicky about it, the house had never been his idea in the first place. When Claudia first proposed the idea, a week after their wedding, he was horrified by the thought of mortgage payments and home repair and insurance. He had never really considered it—real estate—before; it had never seemed like something that fit his life. The places he’d lived when he was growing up had felt less like permanently fixed positions than temporary landing pads from which he and Jillian could launch a fresh assault on the world. There had been ashram stays in India and artists’ retreats in San Miguel de Allende and New Age therapy conferences in Taos and a two-year stint in a student apartment in Davis while his mother finished her PhD in psychology, but there hadn’t been anything resembling a long-term living situation until they settled into a rental bungalow in Venice during Jeremy’s high school years (Jillian’s only concession to “normalcy” for her son). And even that bungalow always felt uninhabited, with packing boxes that remained piled in the corners for years after they moved in. A house wasn’t a value for Jillian; it was, simply, a necessity. Shelter, pure and simple.

  Jeremy—a perpetual renter and couch surfer—had never bothered to take another view until Claudia changed his mind. Buying a house was a way for them to start a life that was about them, a newly married couple instead of two discrete individuals, she’d argued. An expression of their relationship, their aspirations, their vision of the world. It was what you were supposed to do at this point in your life. Anyway, mortgages were cheap. She’d run the numbers—if they got one of those interest-only adjustable rate loans everyone was offering, monthly payments would be negligible, even less than rent; with the real estate market going up 15 to 20 percent every year, they might even make money. Claudia had argued for it with a force of will that surprised him, and maybe because it was the first thing in their relationship that she had ever insisted upon, Jeremy didn’t want to disappoint her. Frankly, it all sounded pretty good. Money for nothing. A house for free.

  So he hadn’t objected—not that first day, nor any other day during the two months it took them to locate the bungalow in Mount Washington. By that point, he’d become infected by her enthusiasm; he had the real estate bug bad. He found himself gushing about their new house’s fantastic views, the quirky charm of its original details, the friendly neighborhood, the deer that occasionally ran down the street en route to the canyon. It could be their creative launching pad, they agreed; an artists’ retreat like those little cabins in Laurel Canyon where Joni Mitchell and Frank Zappa lived and worked during the 1960s. He’d write his songs; she’d direct her movies; they’d have sunset parties on the deck and serve mojitos in jelly jars, culminating in impromptu late-night jam sessions. Paradise.

  The fact that so many other people seemed to want the house—that they’d had to increase their offer twice, in order to outbid everyone else—simply cemented the fact that they’d done the smart thing. Claudia was right. The mortgage was manageable, the house value rocketed over the following years, and nothing had been sacrificed—not his ambitions, certainly not his lifestyle. It was a great house, even if it was a bit remote for his taste, and they’d fixed it up well. Really, he had kind of enjoyed the whole nesting thing: painting the walls periwinkle and lettuce, and going to the Rose Bowl flea market and IKEA to pick out furniture, and planting tomatoes in pots on the deck. They hosted several memorable summer barbecues. And if it all felt maybe a little too easy, he’d just chalked that up to his own ignorance about complicated financial matters.

  Except that now it was clear that he should have listened to that initial warning bell. Because here they were, three years later, and it was clear they’d somehow tethered themselves to a boulder that was rolling downhill. He glanced down at Claudia’s notepad. She’d written down: Look into directing commercials. Roommate? Reduce monthly budget by 30%. Cancel dinner reservations Friday night. Lose: Cable, home phone line. Sell Jeremy’s extra guitars? Yard sale. The last item—stable income!—she’d underlined three times.

  He turned his focus up toward his wife, who was now arguing with Tamra. She’d finally lost her temper, and the sound level of her voice was slowly rising, as if someone were stealthily turning up the dial on an amp. The people in line had turned to look at them, the most diverting entertainment in the bank. “So you’re saying you can’t do anything to help us?” Claudia said, with throaty indignance. “You’re telling us we’ve wasted a half hour of our lives sitting here with you, while you gloated about our situation, and now you’re unwilling to do anything?” Jeremy stared at his wife, surprised to see her lose her calm. This was new to him. He put his hand on Claudia’s leg, both as a gesture of support and a plea for her to maybe tone it down a little bit. Getting confrontational wasn’t going to help matters; he knew that much.

  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 h
er 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 ill-fated 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?