This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Ben looked like he’d been handed a lemon and told it was a cupcake. “Dude, you’re married. You have no social life. How am I supposed to get laid if I’m holed up in the studio with you tools every night?”

  “We all know you aren’t getting any and you won’t get any until you’re a rock star—at which point you can have all the cheap, regrettable sex you ever dreamed of. But we need to finish the album before that’ll happen. So, how about it? Every night, starting tomorrow?”

  “Not tomorrow,” said Emerson. “I’ve got a client dinner. I’d cancel if I could, but things are a little dicey at work right now.”

  “OK,” Jeremy said. “Wednesday, then, and every night thereafter.”

  Ben shrugged. “I can’t do Wednesdays or Saturday afternoon, because that’s when my other band practices. But I’ll do my best on the other nights.”

  “Deal. And we should map out a plan of attack, set some deadlines.” He turned to Daniel expectantly. But Daniel’s gaze remained firmly on the floor, just above a cigarette burn in the industrial carpet, with a persistent little smile flickering across his pink chafed lips. There was something strange about Daniel’s behavior tonight—not just his newly discovered onstage confidence, or the way he’d cradled his guitar close to his groin, fingering the frets with an absentminded caress. It was the way he just stood there in the corner now, bruised-looking eyelids swagged across his cheekbones, smiling shyly at the toes of his sneakers. Jeremy had known Daniel since fifth grade, and the only time he’d ever seen his friend look like this was when Riva Richards let him deflower her in their junior year of high school. Was Daniel in love?

  Daniel swayed with apparent exhaustion. “Sure, that all sounds fine, Jeremy, but … can we talk about all this at our next practice? I’ve gotta be somewhere.”

  “Now?” Jeremy glanced at the clock; it was eleven-thirty. “I thought we could all go out for drinks. Celebrate.” But Daniel’s words were like a recess bell, springing everyone into action. Ben tumbled off his chair and raced for the door, already dialing his cellphone. Emerson kicked at the nest of extension cords that had coiled around his feet, releasing himself. “Maybe next week,” he said, apologetically. “Things are kind of imploding at work, and I’ve got to be in the office early tomorrow.”

  Jeremy watched them collect their bags with dismay. “Fine,” he said. “We’ll make a schedule on Thursday. Just remember, guys: priorities. OK?” He smiled encouragingly, and then pitched his guitar pick across the room toward his open guitar case. He meant it to be a gentle lob, a gesture of casual confidence, but he threw it a little too hard and it skittered across the top of a box of concert posters, bounced across the industrial carpet, and landed in a forlorn cluster of dust bunnies in the corner.

  Daniel followed Jeremy out to his car, watching Jeremy heave his guitar into the backseat of the convertible. A police helicopter flew by overhead, stirring up a vortex of refuse along the wall of the nightclub. The storefronts were dark, only the red blinking eyes of their alarms keeping watch in the windows. It was mid-September and the nights had already grown heavy with dew; soon, he’d have to put the car’s top up at night.

  Daniel and Jeremy shuffled around the car, keeping its steel bulk between them. They shared that twinned quality that comes from too many years of shared taste: They cut their flyaway hair the same way, curling a bit too long around the ears; and were nearly the same height and weight, with loose spaghetti arms and sinewy legs and stomachs a little too soft from beer; and they both owned wardrobes of faded T-shirts and tenderized jeans and unshowy Converse sneakers. It was unspoken that Jeremy had always been the handsome one—he had a delicate symmetry to his face, and women had responded to his high cheekbones and blue eyes and long lashes as early as junior high, whereas Daniel’s jaw was square-boned and his ears vaguely simian. From a distance, though, they could be mistaken for each other. Seeing himself in Daniel was reassuring, proof that Jeremy hadn’t veered too far from an acceptable mean. But tonight, as he looked at Daniel, he saw that his friend was different: He had cut his hair shorter, used gel, changed into a button-front shirt, shaved.

  Daniel leaned against the hood of Jeremy’s car, bracing himself with sneakered feet. “It was a great show,” he repeated.

  “A licensing rep came up to me afterward. He wants to see our album when we’re finished,” Jeremy said. He sat on the hood next to Daniel, letting the metal dimple slightly under their combined weight. “So I need you to finish those lyrics soon, OK? We’ve got a good opportunity here, and I don’t want to screw it up. I really need this.”

  This didn’t have the impact on Daniel that Jeremy expected. Daniel still looked distracted, half a world away. “Sometimes I wonder, who do we think we’re kidding?” Daniel mused. “You and I, we’re both thirty-four; Emerson is thirty-five. The only person still in his twenties is Ben, though God knows he seems to be trying to make up for all of us. But rock and roll is a business for kids, and we’re really pushing it.” He prodded his gut with an index finger. “I mean, it’s not like we’re going to make the cover of Rolling Stone with these bodies.”

  “Speak for yourself. We have a real shot, Daniel. Trust me. I’ve done this before.” He paused. “I don’t have anything else but this.”

  Daniel threw him a strange look. “Fine, I’ll get on it.” He fixed his gaze at the ground, his head bobbing slightly, as if holding a conversation in his own head. He kicked a stone and sent it skittering across the parking lot. “Where is all this coming from tonight, Jer? Did something happen?”

  Jeremy picked at a pink bougainvillea blossom that had glued itself to the hood, while he tried to figure out how to answer this. He’d already roughly sketched out the facts of the situation to Daniel—the impending foreclosure, the mortgage hike, the money crunch, Claudia’s job—and he suspected that Daniel wanted more details, a more emotional catharsis that Jeremy didn’t feel ready to give. “Oh, you know, it’s the same stuff,” he said, noncommittally. “We had to take in a roommate.”

  “No shit.” Daniel’s shoe sent another stone skittering. “That’s got to be weird.”

  Jeremy shrugged. “It’s only temporary, I hope.”

  “Guy or girl?”

  “A nurse, named Lucy.” Lucy. Oh, God, just intoning her name made him want a drink. She’d moved into their vacated bedroom that evening. It broke his heart. Waking up every morning to that view over downtown had always been his favorite thing about living in Mount Washington; it somehow made up for the isolation of living on a cul de sac on the top of a hill. The fact that he could see that little sliver of skyline from their bed—the lights of downtown, winking at him in the dark—had always given him a reassuring sense of connection with the rest of the city. For just two hundred bucks a month, he had sold out; they had shoehorned their king-size bed into the spare bedroom, whose one window looked out at a concrete retaining wall.

  He’d just been leaving that evening when Lucy arrived with her big wooden trunk in tow. She stood in the doorway of the house with a key—their key!—in one hand, an overflowing Hello Kitty duffel in the other. When they first met, he had pegged her as an average-looking girl who’d lucked out with those spectacular breasts; today, even those were hidden under floral acrylic nurse’s scrubs. She looked pleasantly forgettable, like someone’s kid cousin who worked the checkout line at the supermarket.

  “Hello there!” she said, as he tried to brush past her to the door.

  “Hello goodbye,” he mumbled. “I’m on my way out.”

  “That’s too bad. I brought a bottle of wine. I thought we could make dinner or something, get to know each other.” Big, damp brown eyes wheedled and begged behind fluttering lashes. Was she flirting with him?

  “Got a show, sorry. Maybe another time.” He barely managed to keep a straight face.

  She smiled, unperturbed, and then threw her arms around him in a hug. “I’m so happy to be here,” she offered. “There’s such a great vibe in this house. I
’m really flattered to have made the cut.”

  He’d mumbled something affirming and extricated himself from her embrace and fled, his behavior just this side of rude. I’m not a very nice person, he thought now. I should be friendly to her, if I’m going to live with her. Yes. He’d work harder at being tolerant and focus his energy on getting the album done instead: It was the wiser tactic to getting her out of the house. He flicked the bougainvillea bloom off his finger. “She’s all right,” he told Daniel now. “Bearable.”

  The police helicopter was back. It hovered overhead and skipped its spotlight across their faces. They looked up and covered their eyes with their forearms, staring up into the accusing light, until the helicopter swung south, toward downtown. Jeremy watched Daniel wipe dust from his face, smooth back his ruffled hair, tuck his shirt in.

  “So, are you going to tell me about the mystery woman?”

  Daniel flushed, a bright unseemly pink. “How did you know?”

  Jeremy arched an eyebrow. “You smell like a drugstore counter. Is that Aqua Velva?”

  Daniel stared down at his lap, looking for the answer to Jeremy’s questions in the crotch of his jeans. “She’s …. she’s great,” he stuttered. “Cristina Villareal. She works at a museum. Downtown. We met last month, at a dinner party. Cristina, she’s—well, she’s thirty-six. Incredibly smart. Pretty, but not the scary sort of pretty.” Jeremy watched Daniel struggle to regurgitate these details, trying to make them add up to something that he couldn’t quite articulate.

  “You’re in love.”

  Daniel’s nose flared. He looked like he might melt down entirely. Daniel had never really been in love before, not that Jeremy knew about anyway; instead, he pined after girls who had already relegated him to just-a-friend status or dated surly women who treated him like their personal assistant. His one long-term relationship—with a mousy, needy girl who was too scared to drive a car—had happened mostly out of desperation, at a point in his twenties when Daniel had been insistent on finding a girlfriend, any girlfriend. Truth was, Daniel didn’t know how to stand up for himself or how to recognize his equal in a woman. Sometimes, Jeremy thought his friend would be single forever, living in his musky bachelor pad with only a dog for company, clumsily hitting on waitresses at restaurants, eventually dying in his La-Z-Boy while a Dodgers game played on mute.

  “Yeah,” Daniel said finally. He stared at a bum down the street, who was erecting a shelter out of flattened cartons. “Yeah, it’s definitely love.”

  Jeremy considered this, circumspect. “I’m happy for you,” he said. He put his hand out and rubbed his friend’s back through the T-shirt, until the moment began to feel too loaded. “How’d you get her to date you? Club her over the head and drag her back to your lair? No, you must have taken her to a hotel. Your apartment would have scared her off by now.”

  But Daniel didn’t laugh. He just shook his head, again and again. “Jeremy—she’s pregnant.” His voice cracked on the last word, and he said it again: “We’re pregnant.”

  Daniel’s back, under his palm, was slack and hot. Jeremy pulled his hand away, trying to read the cryptic expression on his friend’s face. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Daniel use the word we regarding a relationship before; certainly he’d never used it like this, paired with that other terrifying word, pregnant. “This is—a good thing?” he asked carefully.

  Daniel’s eyes were luminous under the fluorescent streetlights. “It’s a great thing,” he said, and his voice was grave and serious. “I bet you think I’m insane, but I’m not. We just knew. Right away, from the second we met, we knew. It’s not like we intended to get pregnant, but it’s not like we really tried not to either. It just felt … right.” That word again—we—kept tumbling from his mouth, and Jeremy wanted to tell him to stop it, to stop acting as if he’d managed, in the space of less than a month, to merge himself completely with a stranger Jeremy had never met.

  Daniel was staring at him, and Jeremy realized he’d been silent for far too long. “I don’t think you’re insane,” he said. “I figure you’re just trying to beat Claudia and me. Remember, we got engaged in less than six months? So, see, I’m all for crazy love.”

  But he knew, from the stunned expression on Daniel’s face, that this wasn’t the same as that. Not at all. His relationship with Claudia hadn’t been a grand combustion, the kind of crazy love that devours you alive, the way it had been with Aoki, and the way it apparently was with this Cristina person; it had been a mild simmer, something gentle and protective and kind. If Jillian hadn’t been dying, he probably would have dated Claudia for years before finally making the big leap. But Jillian was dying, her lungs were ejecting thick black clots of metastasized death as she shriveled away, week by week in her sari-covered bed; and the thought of being without a family once she died (his itinerant father hardly counted) made him go cold all over. It seemed like a last gift he could give Jillian—the chance to know her son was going to be OK once she was gone, that he had this sweet, smart, loving girl who would take care of him.

  He had let himself sink into Claudia as if she were a soft velvet cushion, let her cosset him in a way Aoki never had and, frankly, never could have. He felt at peace in Claudia’s arms, even when he was in tears—he couldn’t remember the last time that a relationship had felt like that. And maybe he did hastily ask her to marry him for a lot of the wrong reasons—because he felt indebted to her, or because of the selfish impulse to be nurtured like this for the rest of his life, or to get engaged before Jillian died—but there were a lot of the right reasons too. There was also love. Yes, a different kind of love than Aoki, but that didn’t mean it was any less real.

  “Aoki e-mailed me,” he blurted out.

  Daniel snapped sideways. “You’re kidding. What did she want?”

  “Just to say hi, I think. She’s going to be in town next month. We might have a coffee.” He didn’t mention the rest of their correspondence, or the way he’d started to check his e-mail compulsively, anticipating the electric thrill of seeing Aoki’s name in his in-box. Their communication had slipped quickly into something more than he’d intended, with his first, carefully worded responses; it had become dangerous, and he knew it. He felt like an alcoholic must when they finally fall off the wagon, when they take that first burning slug of whiskey and taste the memory of joyful obliteration.

  But he couldn’t tell Daniel this. Daniel adored Claudia, had always treated her with such doting respect—bringing her flowers for her movie premiere, calling her for “girl advice”—that Jeremy had sometimes wondered whether his friend had a crush on his wife. Already, Jeremy could feel the cold front of Daniel’s disapproval, a frozen restraint in his friend’s voice. “Does Claudia know about this?”

  “Not yet. But I’m going to tell her.”

  “Do you really think it’s a good idea, seeing Aoki? I mean—I was there when you got back to LA. She tore you apart.”

  “It’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s not a big deal. I’m married now, remember? Model husband.”

  “Whatever you say, man. Just be careful.” Daniel stood up, fishing his keys from his pocket. “I gotta go. Cristina’s waiting for me at home.”

  “Moving so fast.” Jeremy slid off the hood. “When do I get to meet her?”

  “I don’t know. Soon?”

  “You should come over to the house for cocktails.”

  “That’ll mean bailing on practice that night, though. Right?” Daniel winked, and began to jog down the street to his car.

  Jeremy watched him go. “Hey, Daniel,” he called. Daniel turned, kept jogging backward. “Congratulations. It’s really great news.” Daniel flashed a grin and waved a hand and then vanished.

  Jeremy climbed into his convertible. The engine rumbled to life under his feet and he drove off down the street, turning right and then left, until he merged onto Sunset Boulevard. The cooling night air crisped his face as his triumphal mood began to wane in the face of Daniel’s a
nnouncement. I shouldn’t tell Claudia about the pregnancy, he caught himself thinking, because then she’ll want a baby too. He wasn’t ready for a kid yet, not by a long shot. A baby would tether them forever to a life without risks or spontaneity, and God knows they were already trapped enough these days. Against his will, he found himself thinking again of Aoki, jet-setting around in the world on impulse, lunching in French cafés and putting on shows in Tel Aviv. As he shot eastward through the deserted streets, he decided that it was time to e-mail Aoki and nail down a date.

  Claudia

  THE CLOCK SAID IT WAS FIVE IN THE MORNING. CLAUDIA HAD TO prop herself up on the pillow and peer over Jeremy in order to read the time; thanks to the cramped nature of their new sleeping quarters, which allotted no room for a bedside table, the alarm clock’s new home was on the floor. She flopped onto her back, tugging her half of the blanket back from its incarceration between Jeremy’s twisted legs. Whatever had disturbed her—a raccoon in the driveway? A coyote howling in the canyon?—clearly had not bothered him. He was motionless, except for the gentle fibrillations of his nose as he snored.

  She lay in the dark, listening hard, waiting for the noise to come again. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she surveyed the blurred, dusky surfaces of their new makeshift bedroom. Sometimes it felt like they’d eaten Alice in Wonderland’s cake and grown three sizes too big: The possessions that had fit so comfortably into the master bedroom—the big oak chest of drawers, the television cabinet, the Queen Anne armchair she’d found in the street and repainted white—were completely out of proportion in here. For lack of space, they’d relinquished the chair completely: It was in Lucy’s bedroom now, and Claudia mourned its absence. But there was no room in here, really, for anything but the king-size bed. This nearly touched the walls on either side, which made getting dressed in the morning a hazard. Claudia had gotten in the habit of dressing in the hallway, furtively yanking up her pants in the dark in case Lucy came home and caught her.