This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  By the time they sat down in the living room for an interview, Claudia was depleted, as if Lucy’s soliloquy had drained her of speech too. They squared off across from each other, Lucy in the armchair and Claudia and Jeremy seated on the couch. Lucy tugged at the knees of her jeans, trying with little success to smooth out the wrinkles that strained across her thighs. Her breasts bubbled over the top of her tank top, softly rippling when she breathed like currents in a waterbed.

  “So, Lucy, why don’t you tell us about yourself?” Claudia tried to show some genuine enthusiasm for Lucy’s answer, but mentally, she’d already moved past the woman sitting before them to worry over the other potential roommates that were left on their list. There were only two, and neither sounded particularly promising. One was a forty-four-year-old divorcé who mentioned in his e-mail that he was on step eleven of his AA plan and hoped to enter a “Christian household that would support his ongoing commitment to clean living.” The other was a nineteen-year-old girl, barely older than Claudia’s students at Ennis Gates, and that just seemed wrong.

  Their ad had received a dismal response. Perhaps it was the unrecognizable Mount Washington address, or perhaps no one wanted to live with a married couple, but in the three weeks that the ad had been posted online, they’d received only eight responses. Already, they’d met and dismissed a twenty-five-year-old secretary who showed up with a six-week-old infant strapped to her chest, a comic-book-store clerk who spent most of the interview talking about his passion for squirrel hunting, and a skeletal man with no discernable profession who shut himself in the bathroom three times, each time coming out suspiciously red-eyed and runny-nosed. Two of the most promising candidates—a musician in a band that Jeremy was familiar with and a grad student at the Culinary Institute—had bailed on their interviews at the last minute, saying they’d already found other places to live. Lucy was third-to-last on the list.

  Claudia was choking down the idea of a roommate as if it were a dose of cherry-flavored Robitussin: something to be tolerated only because it would be better for her in the long run. It’s not that she was a tremendously private person—she’d lived happily in dorms and group apartments all her life, had no compunction about sharing soap or being seen in her pajamas—but she believed in the sanctity of their lifestyle. This was Jeremy-and-Claudia’s world, and—barring a roommate who magically paid for a room but never used it—she was holding out for someone who would fit unobtrusively into what they’d already begun. Someone creative and low-key like them who might even serve as a kind of sidekick, a Victor Lazslo to their Rick and Ilsa. But frankly, by this point, they were too desperate to be picky. They’d managed to pay this month’s mortgage by selling off two of Jeremy’s extra guitars and taking out a cash advance on their credit card, but next month’s was looming, and they still owed the bank nearly $7,500 in back payments. Claudia’s Ennis Gates paycheck would take up much of the slack, but it wasn’t like teaching was a high-profit position. Judging by the budgets they’d worked up, they were still going to fall hundreds of dollars short every month, even after they canceled cable and the home phone line.

  “I’m a nurse,” Lucy was saying. “I work in trauma at Good Samaritan downtown. Did you ever watch ER? That’s me! Not the George Clooney doctor, but the—you know—the Julianna Margulies.”

  Claudia sat up straight and tried to look interested. Open your mind, she thought to herself. So maybe she seems a bit … overeager, but perhaps that’s just nervousness? Which could be seen as an endearing trait, really. She glanced over at Jeremy, slumped on the couch beside her, an ironic smile flickering across his lips. He did not appear to be charmed. She kicked his ankle under the coffee table and, when he looked at her, pinched her eyebrows together in disapproval. He flared his nostrils and crossed his eyes back at her.

  “A nurse,” said Claudia. “Well, I guess we’ll know where to go if we have a splinter, then.”

  “Or a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” Jeremy added brightly.

  “God!” Lucy looked appalled. “I certainly hope not. You don’t keep a gun in the house, do you?”

  Claudia nudged Jeremy’s ankle again. “He was just joking.”

  “Whew!” Lucy breathed a sigh of relief and fanned her face, which set off a tidal wave of bosom that threatened to spill out of her top entirely.

  “I take it you grew up around here somewhere?”

  “In the Valley, near Van Nuys. Yes, I know, I’m a Valley girl! Like, omigod! Ha-ha. Joking. I’ve been living with my parents since I got out of nursing school. I had a lot of debt to pay back, you know how it is. But we’re all settled up now.” She smiled warmly at Claudia, scanning her face. “You know,” she said, “you might want to get that mole on your neck looked at. We had someone in the ER the other day who was half dead from a malignant tumor that started as a sunspot. Just saying—”

  Taken aback, Claudia lifted her hand to her neck, feeling the mole. Jeremy chose this moment to pipe up. “What kind of music do you listen to?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Lucy said. She seemed taken aback by the question. “Mostly country western, I guess. You know, like Garth Brooks?”

  Claudia watched Jeremy’s face convulse with ill-concealed horror. “Jeremy’s a musician in a rock band,” Claudia offered quickly. “So he plays his guitar a lot. Would that be all right with you?”

  “How wonderful!” Lucy’s face lit up. “I used to play the ukulele, back in high school. I know, dorky, right? Maybe I’ll drag it out and you can teach me a few things. I’m always looking for a reason to take it up again ….”

  Jeremy looked at Claudia with silent pleading in his eyes, the wide-eyed disbelief of a puppy that can’t believe you’re making him go outside in the rain. He shook his head imperceptibly; no, we can’t do this. Claudia looked down at her lap, trying to imagine Jeremy and Lucy sitting side by side at the breakfast table, battling for the TV remote, waiting in line for the shower. He was right: Inconceivable. She reluctantly nodded in agreement. We’ll post another ad, maybe put up flyers on the community bulletin board by the school, she thought.

  “Lucy, we really appreciate—” she began, but Lucy was still talking.

  “ …. although really it’s not very likely that we’ll find the time. I’m actually on the night shift at the hospital. Did I mention that? No? Well, I work seven P.M. to seven A.M., and we’re on six-day shifts, so I’ll probably be leaving the house about the time you get home from work and I’ll get back when you’re leaving. It’ll be like I don’t even live here.” She jutted out a moist lower lip and twisted it wryly.

  Claudia and Jeremy looked at each other as they took in this promising new piece of information. They held a mute conversation with their twitching eyebrows. She’ll never be here; we can’t do better than an invisible roommate, Claudia said to Jeremy with one raised brow. Yes, but she’s not like us at all, Jeremy retorted with a double blink. We have no choice, we need to pick someone and she’s not so bad, considering, Claudia blinked back. Finally, Jeremy rolled his eyes, crossed his arms, and sighed.

  “We want eight hundred, plus shared utilities,” he said. “And first and last month’s rent as a deposit. Could you handle that?”

  Lucy pursed her lips. “Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that,” she said. “If I can have the other bedroom, the bigger one with the view, I’ll pay a thousand.”

  A long silence passed over the room. Claudia crab-walked her hand across the pebbled leather surface of the couch and located Jeremy’s. She wormed her fingers under his, rubbed the thick guitar callus on the pad of his thumb. His hand swallowed hers, gripping it hard, a desperate sea anemone in a dying tide pool. We’ll survive this, Claudia tried to tell him with her palm. We love each other. People have survived much, much worse. All this is only temporary.

  “How soon can you move in?” she said.

  Jeremy

  Jeremy,

  Four years. Really, it seems longer. Isn’t it curious how as time passes m
emory begins to smear and blur and becomes somehow less about fact or event and more about visceral impression, like a vaguely accelerated pulse or a dark twist in the back of the throat? You are to me a stomachache, the thought of you evokes a pang in my upper intestine. I should paint that.

  I heard Jillian died. So very sorry. I liked her.

  I’m in Paris doing an installation right now (what an odd city, really—the French, and their strange anal fixation!), but will arrive in Los Angeles in October. I’m glad you’ll see me when I’m in town. I think it will be restorative, truly. What have you made of your life? I can barely imagine what living in LA is like—are you really happy out there? I could hardly stand so much sunshine.

  I hold no grudges—tell me everything.

  aoki

  Aoki—

  So I’m a stomachache, huh? Not like, an itchy feeling under your armpit or a burning sensation in your left nasal passage? I’m a little bit offended to be such a pedestrian ailment.

  Honestly, though, it’s good to hear you’re still tripping the light fantastic. I would expect no less. Here’s the rundown of my world: I’m in a new band (with Daniel, remember him?). We’re just finishing off our first album—I think you’d like it. Claudia is great; her film came out this summer and now she’s teaching. This dismal economy’s taking its toll, but overall, things are great.

  And as for LA—well, I was born here, don’t forget, so it’s home turf. Rain is overrated anyway.

  Thanks for the nice words about Jillian. I still miss her.

  Take care, Jeremy

  Jeremy—

  So, was that e-mail supposed to be a kind of virtual spanking (and by that I mean not the good kind)?? Obviously things ended rather badly between us, and I also know you weren’t ever a big written-word sort of man, but really, I’ve gotten more thoughtful e-mails from my senile great-uncle Hiroyuki back in the old country. Everything’s “great.” Could you be slightly more specific? I’m not asking you to tear your soul out and send it to me in a box wrapped with silk ribbons, but I wouldn’t object to just a bit of heartfelt detail. I know what your penis looks like. I know what it tastes like, so don’t pretend I’m a stranger.

  Or are you really so complacent now that you have nothing left to say? I’ve heard that this is what domestication does to men, sometimes.

  So Claudia’s a teacher? Well, now, isn’t that a respectable job!

  “Take care” (I mean, really, Jeremy!)

  aoki

  Aoki—

  You think I’m domesticated? Coming from you, I suspect that’s an insult. Trust me, underneath the happy-husband exterior I’m still the spontaneous guy who went train jumping with you across East Germany; the same guy who took peyote and then went camping in Central Park in a hailstorm. OK, so maybe I haven’t gotten arrested for streaking through Union Square in a while, but just last week I had ice cream for breakfast!

  Anyway. Sorry if I’m acting a little gun-shy, but … well, it’s been a long time, and I am.

  Jeremy

  J—

  Why? Are you still hung up on me?

  a

  Even now, some twenty years after the fact, Jeremy could still viscerally recall the first moment he stepped on a stage. His seventh-grade talent show was perhaps not an epic event in anyone’s memory but his own, but still, it was the night from which the rest of his life seemed to stem. All the other musical numbers that evening had involved lip syncing and dance routines—1987 was all about “Papa Don’t Preach” and neon-pink spandex—or else mediocre renderings of Beethoven on flute or piano. But not Jeremy’s. He and his new friend, Daniel, had stepped onstage with a song Jeremy had written himself to a tune that borrowed heavily from the Beastie Boys, dressed in a costume of Billy Idol-esque gel-spiked hair and shredded jeans that Daniel’s mother had gamely distressed for them. They were, of course, ridiculous, but Jeremy didn’t know that at the time. All he knew was that when he stepped out there and the spotlight fell upon his face, nearly blinding him, something clicked internally. Daniel was petrified, his hands fumbling at the strings of his brand-new guitar, but Jeremy strode straight to the front of the auditorium stage as if it were the place he most belonged in the world and belted out his song with the confidence of a veteran rock star. Banging away at his guitar, screeching vaguely off-key—his voice had just started the process of changing from soprano to mild baritone—he no longer noticed the school jocks chewing spitballs in the back row, the crackle of the ancient speaker system, or the unfortunate smell of pea soup and stale grease left over from the lunch period. After years of itinerant living with his mother, feeling slightly lost in every new place they landed, he’d finally found a place where he belonged. Up there, onstage, he was someone entirely new, someone electric, someone extraordinary. And he had power over his audience: He could seduce them, he could make them adore him, he could make them sing.

  It was true. The kids in the audience loved the song, even if the panel of adult judges awarded the top prize to a Japanese girl who played “The Flight of the Bumblebee” on her grandfather’s violin. In just three and a half glorious minutes, Jeremy’s position at Martin Luther Middle School was elevated to something close to a rock god. Throughout the rest of junior high and high school, Jeremy and Daniel’s band—which eventually traded in Daniel’s synthesizer for a real, if spectacularly untalented, drummer, and picked up the rather uninspired name Purple Voodoo Smoke—was the school’s go-to group for parties and class events. No longer was Jeremy just a misfit kid whose mother dressed him in weird cotton clothes she’d picked up in India, he was a heartthrob, sensitive and artsy and just feminine enough not to be scary to the girls in his class. He lost his virginity by ninth grade.

  In some ways, the rest of Jeremy’s life had been an attempt to recapture that first transcendent moment onstage. Each time the lights came up and he found himself there, with twenty or a hundred or a thousand eyes trained on him, he felt himself on the verge of some sort of discovery, as if each new song that he delivered to the people below might sanctify him, renew him, reveal something about himself that he’d never known before. Often, he was disappointed: Even during the height of This Invisible Spot, when the band was playing to enormous crowds in Tokyo, he’d never quite experienced that same epiphany, the same giddy high of self-knowledge that he’d experienced in the seventh grade. Sometimes he was just up there, hot and self-conscious, wasting his beloved songs on an indifferent crowd. There were even periods of time—during the year that his mother died, for example—when he didn’t play music at all. Still, he always eventually came back to the same place: the front of the stage, the guitar slung around his neck, microphone poised inches away, in search of a long-lost feeling.

  And this, this moment right now was very close indeed. The darkly cavernous club was packed to capacity, standing room only—which was really incredible for a new band showcase on a Monday night in September—and Audiophone had never played better. Two songs into their set, and already Jeremy knew that something extraordinary was taking place. Daniel, as lead guitarist, still tended to grow shy when performing, turning sideways to face Jeremy as if by doing so he might somehow deflect attention from himself. But tonight he was playing to the crowd, with a foot casually up on a speaker, his shoulders rising and falling in a dramatic flourish that underscored each new utterance from his guitar. Behind him, Ben was whaling away at the snare drum with an intense fury that was, Jeremy suspected, fueled by a line of cocaine, probably ingested when Ben vanished to the bathroom two minutes before they went onstage. But if cocaine always made Ben’s drums sound this sharp, this brutal—well, hell, Jeremy would pay for his next eight-ball himself.

  But the real epiphany tonight was Emerson. Emerson had always been the most unlikely member of Audiophone. He worked at one of those three-name financial firms downtown, doing mergers and acquisitions; he drove a BMW 5 series sedan and wore suits to work and had a special rate at the Four Seasons because he stayed there so oft
en on business trips. Even in jeans and a T-shirt he somehow looked less like an aspiring musician than a slumming yuppie. He was the weak link, the least experienced among them, and the band member most likely to forget a critical bridge or boff the tempo when they played live. Still, he played the bass with moderate skill and extreme enthusiasm, and he’d adopted the mantle of band sugar daddy with such cheerful generosity that Jeremy didn’t have the heart to tell him that his haircut was objectionably short or that basketball shoes weren’t really appropriate footwear on stage. (They’d work on that before the band went on tour, he thought.)

  Tonight, Emerson had shown up a half hour late to sound check smelling suspiciously like whiskey and tacos. He’d barely spoken a word as they’d raced through setup, his face set with a panic that made Jeremy’s heart sink: Emerson was going to seize up again. But his fears were unfounded, because here Emerson was, improvising a new turn on the opening to “Super Special”—something he’d never done before—and doing it remarkably well. He played with his eyes closed and a blissful smile on his face, seemingly lost in a beautiful world of his own making where quarterly earnings didn’t matter and the only merging taking place was of bass with guitar.

  Emerson opened his eyes and caught Jeremy looking at him. He offered an abashed smile, almost as if he felt guilty for enjoying himself so much, as Jeremy stepped forward and grabbed the microphone:

  “I don’t know why you think you’re super special,

  Yes, you’re special-looking

  But you’re not especially deep.”

  The first few words were rough, as he fought with a burr in his throat, but then his voice opened up and the rest of the lyrics poured out in a happy growl. Singing had never been Jeremy’s true forte—his real skill lay in his one-on-one communion with his guitar—but he had a decent baritone and could sing consistently on key and had been told his voice was “arresting” by more than one critic. And he secretly enjoyed being the fulcrum around which the rest of the band rotated; enjoyed serving as a kind of medium through which everyone else onstage spoke directly to the audience; enjoyed, of course, the extra attention granted to the lead singer.