This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  “What about you? Are you bailing out too?”

  “Whatever.” Ben stood up, his eyes fixed on a girl across the room. “This isn’t the first band that’s ever broken up on me. It looks like the other band I’m in is getting a record deal, anyway.”

  “I feel bad, Jeremy,” Daniel said, “I really do. But you’re better off without us. Take the material and start another band. You composed the music anyway. You can use the lyrics, if you want.”

  Jeremy wouldn’t look at him, refusing to grace his best friend’s betrayal with even a smile or a nod of forgiveness. He could barely see Daniel anyway, blinded by the sudden flash of light that was his life going into supernova. It was all just a mass hallucination. Was it possible? Had everything around him been a fantasy, born from false hope and sustained by delusion? Emerson was saying something but Jeremy couldn’t hear him through the high-pitched ringing in his ears. He suddenly, desperately, missed his mother.

  “Don’t ever compromise.” That’s what Jillian told him on the day, fifteen years ago, when he moved to New York. Jillian was driving him to the airport to catch the red-eye—he still remembered that stuttering old diesel Volvo, the backseat piled so high with Jillian’s patient files that no one had sat back there in years—and as they putted along Lincoln Boulevard in the dark it had struck Jeremy for the first time that he was leaving his mother all by herself. For years, it had been the just two of them: Jillian and Jeremy, the two J’s, an impregnable unit. Puberty had exposed the claustrophobia in that intimate equation: It wasn’t easy being the sole outlet for his mother’s endless outpouring of attention, especially when all he really wanted to do was hide in his room to play guitar and memorize the one tattered copy of Playboy he’d stolen from Daniel. He’d been desperately looking forward to college and New York, the chance to be Jeremy without the Jillian. But now that he was about to climb on a plane, it suddenly occurred to him that his mother might not survive without him. She’d never been on her own, didn’t have anyone but him! How could he leave her?

  “Mom, are you going to be OK?” he’d asked her, examining the side of her face, where furrows had taken up permanent residence in the translucent skin around her eyes. Gray strands sprang free of the batik scarf that she used to fasten her ponytail. She looked drawn, frail. “On your own, I mean?”

  “What kind of question is that?” She took her foot off the gas and the car slowed, choking, to a crawl. Behind them, a Mercedes honked and then swerved to pass.

  “Just—I feel like I’m abandoning you. Maybe I shouldn’t go.”

  Jillian yanked the wheel to the right, veering over to the side of the road. She pulled to a stop before a shuttered liquor store and sat there, the idling Volvo shuddering in protest.

  “So if I said I needed you to stay here with me, you’d stay? Is that what you’re telling me?”

  He hesitated, unsure. “Maybe.”

  Jillian grabbed his hand, squeezing it so hard he thought she might crush his fingers. He wondered whether she was about to cry, to tell him that yes, he should stay, and in an instant he saw his life in New York vanishing. But then he saw the flinty, hot fury in his mother’s face.

  “Don’t ever say that again,” she hissed.

  He shrank away, his back pressing into handle of the passenger side door, but she tugged on his hand, reeling him in. With the other hand, she gripped his chin, pulling it toward her face.

  “You are not to compromise your dreams. Ever. Do not give up on what you want just to please someone else. And by that I mean, do not take a job you hate just to pay the bills, do not stay with someone you don’t love just so they don’t feel bad, do not let anyone tell you what you should and shouldn’t do or what you are or are not capable of. That’s the only rule I’ve ever lived by. You’re empathetic, Jeremy—you want to please people, you don’t want to upset the balance, and if you’re not careful that will get in the way of the things you want. But I believe, Jeremy”—and here she paused, a hitch in her throat, the intimation of tears—“I believe you really can have it all. My beautiful, talented boy. You can. Anything your heart desires.”

  He’d gotten on the plane, of course. And even though he’d never really bought into all his mother’s New Age mysticism—the energy healing, the chakra readings, the Ganeshes cluttering their coffee table—this lecture had stuck with him throughout his eleven years in New York, throughout the rise (and collapse) of This Invisible Spot and his relationship with Aoki. But now, with his disloyal bandmates sitting in front of him looking glum, having finally come to some kind of dead end in his life, Jillian’s words returned to him with a new, cruel edge. But what if you have nothing left to compromise? he asked his mother, mutely.

  He rose from his seat, stumbling blindly out of the booth with no particular destination in mind. He found himself standing just below one of the dancing girls, a pretty blonde in a spangled silver minidress, devastatingly young. She glanced down at him just as she flung her arms up over her head, in jubilant answer to the rising call of the pop tune on the jukebox, and then bestowed a fairy-tale smile on him, a smile of such pure beatific joy that Jeremy wanted to cry.

  “I’m still here,” he said out loud, unsure whether he was addressing the girl or the former members of Audiophone or himself. “I’m still here.”

  He arrived home drunk and furious. The street was quiet, the houses all locked down for the night, only the motion-detecting security lights illuminating his path as he made his way toward his front door. He slammed the door closed behind him, not thinking about whether it might wake up the tenants of the house until it was too late.

  In the living room, he could hear the buzz of the television set—was Claudia still awake?—and stumbled toward the sound, stopping first in the kitchen to raid the fridge. His beer was gone—again. He was pretty sure that Lucy was giving it to her doctor boyfriend, which just pissed him off even more. In a petulant act of minor revenge, he helped himself to her bag of toasted coconut marshmallows and popped one in his mouth, then crammed another one in and another until his mouth was stuffed full. He was still chewing his way through the toxic fluff when he arrived in the living room to find the marshmallows’ rightful owner sitting there, much to his dismay.

  Lucy sat in her floral chaise in front of the television, wrapped in a silky pink robe with some sort of feathery trim. The overhead lights were off but she’d lit a cluster of candles that sat in the center of the coffee table, releasing a faint scent of carbon and vanilla. SpongeBob SquarePants flickered on the screen.

  “Hail to the conquerer.” Jeremy intended this to be funny but he couldn’t stop the bitterness from slurring his words. “She gains mastery of the remote.”

  Lucy flinched. Her eyes flickered to the bag of marshmallows in Jeremy’s hand. He held the bag out to her and she opened her mouth to say something, but then shut it and shook her head instead.

  Jeremy sat down heavily beside her on the chaise. “Why are you watching a children’s television show?”

  Lucy shrugged. “There’s nothing in cartoons that will make me feel bad,” she said. “There’s enough horrid stuff in the world that I have to deal with every day at the hospital, so I don’t really want to watch it on TV when I come home. No one ever dies in these kinds of shows unless they’re really bad guys.”

  Jeremy was struck silent by this; in his drunken state it seemed like a rather profound thought. He examined his roommate with a new respect. Lucy sat up against the cushions, pulling the robe tighter around her. He could see the ridged outlines of her nipples under the straining satin, the drape of her fleshy thighs. He found himself getting a minor hard-on despite himself and shifted his attention to the television, where SpongeBob SquarePants was having his temperature taken by a blobby pink creature that appeared to be an obese starfish.

  Next to him, Lucy shifted away slightly, tilting her torso to maximize the space between them. She seemed vaguely frightened: Was he really that scary? Had he been too obvious a
bout his contempt for her? He wasn’t a bad guy, was he? He was suddenly desperate to know what he looked like to her. Maybe someone who was a complete outsider could look at him objectively and tell him what everything was all about. The last of his anger fizzled away, replaced by a deep, shamed sadness.

  “I’m sorry if I haven’t been very friendly to you,” he said to the television. “I’m just a little protective of my personal space.”

  Lucy turned to study him. “I’m not that bad,” she said. “Even if I’m not as interesting as you guys.”

  “I know. You’re right. I’m sorry.” He paused. “My band broke up tonight.”

  Lucy looked surprised, and he wondered whether she was surprised that the band had broken up or that Jeremy was revealing this to her in the first place. “Oh. That must be terrible.”

  “I’m the last man standing,” he continued, realizing that he really was quite intoxicated. The cartoon creatures on the television multiplied in front of his eyes, and he had to put his foot on the floor to stop the room’s wobbly spin around him. “I’ve been abandoned in limbo land, Lucy,” he said. He looked imploringly at Lucy, his newfound compatriot, waiting for whatever words of wisdom she had to offer him.

  “I’m not sure I get what you mean,” she said.

  “Help me,” he croaked.

  She looked at him with a swift, assessing gaze. “Sure, I’ll help you,” She stood up. “First of all, you really should go to bed because it sounds like you’re pretty drunk. Try taking some vitamin B-Twelve with two Advil. Or drink some pickle juice. That’s my mom’s cure. It’s nasty but it works.”

  “I don’t think we have any pickles.”

  “You can have mine, they’re in the fridge.” She turned off the television. “I’m headed to bed, OK? Feel better!” She swished off toward her bedroom—their bedroom—with the satin robe slapping around her calves, bare pink toes gripping the wooden floor.

  Jeremy lay back in the dark, disappointed, and watched the candles on the table cast flickering haloes across the ceiling. But this just made the room spin again, so he leaned over and blew them out and then lurched his way back toward the bedroom, where he found Claudia dead asleep. He located a glass of stale water on the floor and drank it greedily, then stripped his clothes off and climbed into bed beside her. He wormed his way toward the warm depression on her side of the bed and then pressed his lingering hard-on against the comforting warm cleft of her rear. She murmured something incoherent and moved away.

  “Come on,” he said, nudging her. “Wake up.”

  “Nnnnnnnnnuh,” she murmured blearily. “Time’sit?”

  “Not that late,” he said. He scooted in closer and prodded her again. “Please? I had a shitty night.”

  He waited for her to notice the intimation of disaster in his words, to roll over and reach out to him in consolation. But she had already fallen back to sleep. He flopped onto his back, listening to her breath fill the room—quick and shallow and regular—while he helplessly rode the loose circles of his inebriation, a feather circling the drain, until the metronome of his wife’s breath finally lulled him to sleep.

  Jeremy arrived at the Silver Lake café where he had arranged to meet Aoki still feeling nauseated. He’d woken up late, long after Claudia had left for work, with curdled froth in his mouth and the sensation that his brain had spent the night wedged in a car door. When he looked in the mirror, he saw bloodshot pupils and puffy crescents under his eyes. This was not the impression he’d wanted to make.

  He hadn’t bothered going in to work—Edgar was in Japan, anyway—and instead spent the early part of the morning showering and drinking cup after cup of strong coffee. He shaved, and then regretted it: It would look like he was trying too hard. He put on a T-shirt of his own design, then decided it might seem self-conscious or narcissistic and changed into a button-down shirt. Too stuffy. By the time he finally left to meet Aoki, he’d put on his usual uniform of jeans-and-T-with-cool-jacket and managed to conceal most of the damage of the night before with some of Claudia’s under-eye cream and a glass of tomato juice fortified with just a splash of vodka to settle his nerves.

  The café was packed, and a line snaked out the door across the patio. It was the kind of place where they brewed socially responsible coffee by the cup for five dollars a pop, and Jeremy could imagine Claudia cringing at this unnecessary splurge. But he’d chosen the place because he knew it was the kind of place Aoki would like, somewhere new and progressive in a neighborhood that still retained a little bit of grit. He stood in line, waiting with all the other supplicants for his moment with the award-winning barista, listening to the tattooed couple in front of him discuss global warming with heated liberal self-righteousness. By the time he reached the barista, ten minutes later, Aoki still wasn’t there. He looked at the line behind him, which now reached out to the curb, and made an impulsive decision. “An iced Guatemalan,” he said. “And a double cappuccino, nonfat milk.”

  He took the drinks out front, to a tiled patio with a view of the street, and settled in at a table between two screenwriters working on laptops. A giant abstract collage made from dried ferns and flattened bottle caps loomed above him, part of an art installation. Hope for Future, its placard said. $850. He looked at it for a minute, appalled, then switched seats so it wouldn’t be in Aoki’s line of vision. To make the minutes pass, he flicked through the messages on his BlackBerry, noting two e-mails from Daniel that he didn’t open, and one from Claudia that he did.

  Sorry about last night, but I’d taken an Ambien and was dead to the world. What happened that was so awful? I’ll have a break around noon—I assume by then you’ll be done with your coffee with Aoki? Please call to let me know how it went? Have fun, but not too much, OK?

  The e-mail was a giant pointed question mark. He could feel the strain in her words, the effort it took to hide her anxiety and pretend she wasn’t concerned; probably he was supposed to reply with some sort of reassurance, but honestly he wasn’t in the mood. He closed the e-mail without responding.

  He noticed that the barista had drawn a heart in the foam of Aoki’s cappuccino and worried that she might think he asked to put it there. Then he thought she wasn’t that stupid. He wished she’d just show up so he wouldn’t look so idiotic sitting by himself with two drinks. Why was he here anyway? What did he want? He hoped maybe she wouldn’t show up at all and he could just go home and return to his regular life, or what remained of it. His coffee was getting watery but he didn’t touch it.

  “This much hasn’t changed,” he heard. “I am still always late.”

  Aoki stood before him, somehow both smaller and larger than he remembered. She wore all white, a strange deconstructed skirt and a tight ribbed top that buckled across the chest, with flat purple sandals. Her hair was long now, and she had it up in an elaborate topknot, so shiny it looked lacquered. She smiled through parted lips painted with bright red lipstick. She looked … angelic, arty, beautiful, supremely self-confident, by far the most unique woman in the whole café. She looked exactly like Aoki.

  He stood up, knocking the table askew as he tried to squeeze past the screenwriters to get to her. She stepped forward and there was an awkward moment—would there be physical contact, a hug?—which ended when Aoki leaned in and gave him a kiss on each cheek, European style.

  “I ordered for you,” he said. “So you wouldn’t have to wait in line. Still drinking nonfat cappuccinos?”

  “You remembered,” Aoki said. She sat down and drew the cappuccino toward her. “And here I thought I’d nurtured such an aura of unpredictability.”

  “Some things never change.”

  “It’s true,” she said, and looked down at her cup. “A heart. How cute.”

  “They’ll also do a little smiley face, if you prefer.”

  Aoki laughed and took a sip, mutilating the heart. She sat back and examined him. “You look exactly the same. I knew you would.”

  “And here I thought I’d nurture
d such an aura of unpredictability,” he said wryly. It was odd to be joking like this, to be so light with her, when so many memories of their time together were painted over in apocalyptic blacks and purples. He’d spent so much time remembering the unhinged woman who slit her wrists in the bathtub, who shot up heroin, who slept with his bandmate, that he’d almost forgotten how quickly he could be drawn in by this Aoki—witty, flirtatious, compelling.

  “That was a compliment. You were always too handsome to bear.”

  He flushed, incapable of resisting the flattery, thrilled that she still found him attractive, conscious of the danger in this knowledge. He didn’t think Claude would like the direction this conversation had gone already. “In that case, I’m sorry to have pained you.”

  “I don’t think you are sorry,” Aoki said. “Otherwise you wouldn’t have dumped me so cruelly.”

  The words sat there between them, waiting to be acknowledged. He was disoriented, although he should have expected this. These had always been Aoki’s favorite conversational gambits: Disrupt, destabilize, disarm. But that isn’t how it happened, he thought to himself, and wondered whether she had rewritten their whole relationship as a grand betrayal. Jeremy looked at her closely to see if he could locate the hysterical Aoki, the one he’d left crying on the floor of her studio four years ago. Was her e-mail promise—I hold no grudges—an empty one? Was this an ambush after all, or a step on her twelve-point recovery plan?

  “Do you want talk about that?” he offered, carefully. “Are we supposed to rehash our relationship now and figure out what went wrong?”

  “God, no,” Aoki said, pursing cherry-red lips in pretty distaste. “I did all that in rehab already. I’ve spent far too much time as a victim to the tyranny of nostalgia already. Regrets take up too much room. Let’s just say, then was then. I wasn’t healthy. Your reasons for going weren’t unreasonable. And leave it at that.”

  “Fine with me,” Jeremy said, relieved. Maybe she was just pretending to be so unperturbed; either way, he’d accept it. “So we’re friends?”