This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  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.

  jeremy she will never love you the way you need to be loved. you have bled my heart dry leaving me as empty as a ghost. i know i’m supposed to wish you all the happiness in the world but that would be a lie so i’m just going to say that someday you will remember that the only true love is devastation and you will realize that i will be with you forever.

  She didn’t sign it, an egotist to the end. He had almost shared the letter with Claudia, as a way of showing her how ridiculous the whole melodramatic episode with Aoki had really been, how over it all he really was, but then he thought better of it. He tucked the note in the back of a drawer and wiped it from his mind.

  At least, that was the last time he’d heard from Aoki until two days ago, when he’d found an e-mail from her in his in-box. Just two sentences:

  Coming to Los Angeles for a gallery retrospective this fall and would love to see you if for no other reason than to apologize in person. A lot has changed and I think I’m a much more pleasant person now, and at least 43% more sane.

  He’d immediately closed the e-mail, shut down his computer, and walked away. But he hadn’t deleted it, and he hadn’t told Claudia about it, either.

  Even now, as he swung up the hill toward their house, the car’s wheels jolting across the potholes in the neglected asphalt and his wife silently fretting beside him, he could feel Aoki’s e-mail tugging at him, demanding a response. Just thinking about it made his cranium throb, as if someone had wedged it in a vise and was slowly, meticulously, tightening the screws around his temples.

  The world headquarters of BeTee sat above a discount copy shop in a rambling old Spanish building on an otherwise desolate strip of Hollywood Boulevard. BeTee had inherited this warren of rooms from a production company that went bankrupt producing straight-to-DVD fantasy films, and they had never bothered to remove the previous tenant’s posters from the walls. In the foyer, DRAGON MAGICK greeted customers. Over Jeremy’s desk loomed the sneering, black-vinyl-clad heroine of VIRAL VIXEN. Edgar, sitting directly behind Jeremy in their shared office, gazed at the surreal purple landscape of THE CRYSTAL GATES. Under their chairs, the industrial carpet was marred with violent burn marks, suggesting that the previous occupants had not left happily, and the bathroom generally smelled like mold. But the view was unbroken all the way up to the HOLLYWOOD sign, and they’d dragged a clutch of folding chairs out onto the old iron fire escape, and sometimes he and Edgar would sit out there after work drinking canned Tecate and watching the sun set over the western hills.

  It was the morning after the meeting with Tamra, and Jeremy couldn’t draw. He sat hunched over his stylus for three hours, finally doodling a cartoon house with a happy stick-person family standing in the front yard. It was something a second-grader might render in finger paint: Mommy and Daddy and little androgynous stick child, all holding hands. Their smiling faces smirked back at him from his computer monitor: In stick-person land, houses were free and no one ever worried about money and everyone grinned even in their sleep.

  The headline of the Los Angeles Times sitting on his desk read, FATHER KILLS FAMILY AND HIMSELF, DESPONDENT OVER FINANCIAL LOSSES. Jeremy dropped his stylus and scanned the first paragraph:

  The 45-year-old Agoura Hills financial manager who once made more than $1.2 million a year had lost his job. His luck playing the stock market ran out. His house was in foreclosure. On August 6, he purchased a gun. He wrote two suicide notes and a last will and testament. And then, sometime between Saturday night and Monday morning, he killed his wife, mother-in-law, and three sons, before turning the gun on himself.

  Jeremy flipped the newspaper into the trash can. He spun around in his chair and addressed Edgar’s back. “Any chance of another raise anytime soon?”

  Edgar swiveled his own chair around to face him. Jeremy’s friend was starting to go bald, and the tender areas of newly exposed skin at his hairline were pink with sunburn. The chambray button-down shirt that hung loose over his jeans didn’t quite conceal a pale swell of gut that rose over his belt. Maybe it was the stress of running a company, but Edgar—a guy who, in college, had dyed his hair blue and pierced his ear with a safety pin—increasingly resembled a middle-aged man.

  Edgar tapped a pencil against his nose and frowned. “I gave you a raise three months ago. A generous one, if I remember correctly?”

  “You can afford another. The shirts are flying out the door. The company is hugely profitable.”

  “Yeah,” said Edgar. “It’s profitable because I’m a cheapskate.”

  “And because I’m a goddamn design genius, don’t forget that,” he reminded his friend. “Maybe I should find a job where my talents are actually ap
preciated.” This was an empty threat, and Edgar knew it. All these years on, Jeremy still felt a debt of gratitude to his old college friend for so trustingly handing him a job for which he was probably completely unqualified despite two years of figurative drawing courses in college. Jeremy had arrived back in LA bruised and gun-shy from the demise of This Invisible Spot; it had taken nearly two years to finally gather the initiative to form a new band, and this job had been the patch that filled the hole where the music had been. These days, of course, it patched the hole where the money wasn’t yet. Besides, who else but Edgar would put up with Jeremy’s band practice schedules, his somewhat erratic work ethic, his habit of scribbling down music fragments when he should have been designing decals? Jeremy often felt guilty knowing that he would eventually reward his friend’s loyalty by quitting this job when his band finally made it big. That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to take full advantage while he could.

  Edgar rocked in his chair. “What if I took you out to lunch at Burrito King? Would that make you feel appreciated?”

  “Can’t,” Jeremy said. “Having lunch with my dad.”

  “Fun times.” Edgar lifted his legs and braced them against Jeremy’s desk, rumpling a pile of sketches. “Hey, is everything OK? Any reason you’re asking for another raise?”

  Jeremy paused, resisting the temptation to fill Edgar in on the current crisis at home. Not today, he decided. He didn’t want to be the honored guest at anybody else’s pity party. “No,” he said. “Nothing to get alarmed about.”

  “Whatever you say, my friend.” Edgar dropped his legs and leaned in, peering over Jeremy’s shoulder at the image on his computer monitor. “Hey, that’s a bit rudimentary for a genius, don’t you think? Stick people?”

  “It’s an ironic commentary on the American Dream.”

  “I thought we agreed the winter line was supposed to have an organic theme. Trees, birds, wildflowers, polar bears, that kind of stuff.”

  “Times are changing,” Jeremy said. “No one gives a damn about polar bears anymore.” But he hit the delete button, sending the stick family into trash-bin purgatory, before grabbing his wallet and heading out into the hot August noon to face his father.

  Jeremy had never known his father to hold down an actual job; certainly, not one that required him to get up at a certain hour, put on a tie, or go to an office. “Instead of a vocation,” Max Munger liked to say, “I prefer a vacation.” Over the last forty years, Max had spent time as a screenwriter, a chef on the yacht of a Russian robber baron, an importer of Balinese furniture, a pot farmer, the kept husband of a Norwegian heiress, and a member of the Rolling Stones’s entourage. He had never owned a home, although he had managed to father four children by three different wives in two different countries. At age sixty-one, he still wore the same military surplus army jacket that he had worn throughout the 1970s, now trendy with kids a third of his age, many of whom he still socialized with. His face was run across with crevasses, his watery blue eyes buried deep inside a canyon that had lodged itself between hairy eyebrows and bony cheeks. He peered out opaquely from there, and sometimes it was impossible to tell whether he was quietly judging the world around him or whether he was just so stoned he wasn’t paying attention.

  Max stuck out among the lunch crowd at this West Hollywood bistro, which primarily consisted of actresses sipping Arnold Palmers and frazzled production assistants wolfing down hamburgers between phone calls. The French Bistro was neither French nor a bistro, just a brunch joint with chopped salads and egg-white omelets. The aluminum tables on the covered patio were positioned exactly four feet away from a major east-west thoroughfare, a four-lane highway down which diesel buses and Navigators and Priuses hurtled at top speeds.

  Anyone who dared to sit at these tables was not only consuming six liters of exhaust with their turkey burgers but would have to shout over the sounds of the traffic to be heard. And yet here Jeremy sat, having chosen this particular curbside table himself. The last few years back in Los Angeles had addled his brain; he had shed the New Yorker’s cynical shell that he had once worked so hard to cultivate. He believed in outdoor dining now. He believed in soy lattes. He wore shorts and flip-flops. He had even acquired a convertible, a dented European mid-century gas guzzler in sparkly green, and drove it with the top down even in the middle of winter. When his friends from New York came to visit, they made fun of him, said he’d gone soft and suburban, but in their stinging gibes he could detect a pang of envy, similar to the pang he sometimes felt when he listened to them talking about the benders they’d been on the week before, the random girls they’d hooked up with, the shows they’d been to at McCarren Pool.

  “Marital troubles,” Max offered, as an opening statement.

  “Wait. You got married again?”

  “No. You. You have marital troubles.”

  Jeremy looked down at his paper place mat, where the previous occupant had doodled a purple daisy in stubby crayon. He aligned the paper with the edge of the table, seeking some kind of manageable order to counterbalance a conversation that had—as always with his father—immediately veered off course. “No! Things with Claudia are great. Why did you say that?”

  “An invitation to lunch is an invitation to unload,” Max said. He bared a wolfish smile for the waitress who was delivering their meals—flax-seed omelet and green tea for him, BLT and a boba tea for Jeremy. “Happy conversations happen over alcohol or sugar. Lunch is a virtuous sort of meal, problems that need to be witnessed in the stark light of day and all that.”

  Jeremy shifted uncomfortably in his chair, fumbling a piece of bacon out of the sandwich as a delay tactic. He hadn’t wanted to go there yet. He wasn’t sure he was even going to tell his father at all. He’d called Max last night out of an impulsive, abstract desire for the presence of some sort of parental figure, and since Jillian wasn’t around anymore Max would have to do. The minute he’d made the date, he’d regretted it. You didn’t come to Max for solace of any sort—get-togethers with his father tended to be terse affairs, bracketed by Max’s aimless self-satisfaction and Jeremy’s uncharacteristic impatience—which was probably why Jeremy hadn’t made real plans with his father in almost six months.

  But looking at Max, now, he had a sudden epiphany. There was a ridiculously easy—if somewhat personally painful—solution to this problem, one Claudia hadn’t even jotted down in her notebook. Why hadn’t he thought of this sooner?

  “I need to borrow some money,” he blurted, “Claudia and I. Our mortgage went up and we need to find some more money fast or we’ll lose the house.”

  Max threw his head back and released a wheezy whoop of glee, walloping the table with one fist for emphasis. “They got you on the house, did they? Why do you think I never bought one? Did I not teach you a thing?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer. He stared into the opaque depths of his boba tea, a drink he had chosen not because it tasted that good but because of its interactive appeal. It was not just a drink; it was a toy. He sucked hard, and a little nugget of tapioca shot up the straw to land on his tongue. It had the texture of dried glue, and he chewed on it vigorously, annoyed.

  Max eyed him more soberly. “I taught you how to roll a joint. I remember that. You were fourteen and your mother nearly had a heart attack when you told her, you little snitch.”

  “And clearly that skill has been improving the quality of my life ever since,” Jeremy said, failing to properly muster the appropriate sarcasm. It was true that his ability to roll perfect joints had served him well, once upon a time. The roller of joints was always at the center of things, the bestower of favors, all eyes eagerly focused on the paper in your hands, marveling at your ability to turn it tightly and swiftly into an aerodynamic tube. A well-rolled joint pleased your bandmates and helped you get girls. Not that this mattered much in his life these days.

  “So how much do they have you for?” Max asked. He disassembled his flax-seed omelet, on the hunt for a solitary shiitake mushroom.r />
  “We have to come up with an additional twenty-two hundred or so a month. I thought maybe we could borrow—six months’ worth from you? About twelve or fifteen grand?” Fifteen grand didn’t seem like an untenable number, but as he watched Max’s eyes dart north with surprise, he began to wonder if maybe he’d underestimated how big the sum really was.

  “And what happens after six months?”

  “It gives us enough time to figure something else out,” Jeremy said. “My band’s almost done with our album, and once we get it finished we’ll start making money. Or Claudia’s next film could get off the ground first.”

  “Claudia is a sweet girl. Pretends to be an artist, but really she wants the same things her parents did: nice house, nice car, stable income, two-point-three children, vacations in Hawaii. Born and bred in conventionality and will never truly escape it. It’s like a brand on her skin, S for square. Not her fault, probably.” Max idly stirred the shredded omelet about on his plate.

  “Stop it, Dad. That’s not true.” But he couldn’t help thinking of Claudia’s List of the Apocalypse—stable income!—with a twinge of terror.

  “Is that what you want too?”

  “I’m not asking for analysis of my marriage.”

  “No, you just want my money.” Max winked and laughed hoarsely. He caravanned three lumps of sugar over to his green tea and thrashed the spoon about in the cup, making a racket.

  Jeremy struggled to direct this discussion back on the rails. “Let’s be serious here, OK? I know you have the money. Can you to loan it to us? We’ll pay it back with interest.”