“So is Mantanka, if you ask me,” Ruth said, directing her words to the blackened patch of wall two feet above the floor.
“A house is a long-term investment, anyway,” Claudia continued, ignoring her mother. She walloped the rug with her left hand, sending black dust flying. “It’s a home, right? Maybe we’ll stay here for the rest of our lives, and then it won’t matter what happens to the real estate market.”
The rest of our lives. It sounded like an ungodly long time to Jeremy. A cellphone rang out in the kitchen and Claudia rose from her seat on the floor, jogging out of the room to retrieve it. From across the house, Jeremy could hear the lilt of her voice, vowels slightly exaggerated, making it clear that she was talking to someone who needed to be impressed. Probably an insurance adjuster.
The rest of our lives. Everything that Claudia said this week seemed to have some coded message that Jeremy couldn’t quite decipher. It hadn’t started out like this. Their first few days after the fire had ushered in a new, unexpected intimacy: Jeremy and Claudia had clung to each other on the air mattress like disaster survivors, comforted by the presence of each other’s bodies. She was so solid, so material, so familiar next to him; nothing else seemed quite as real. They’d had quick, desperate sex on the living room couch and the kitchen table, heightened by the smell of catastrophe around them.
But with the arrival of his in-laws and the dawning reality of their situation, the freeze had crept back into their marriage, as if Ruth and Barry were a magnifying lens that amplified all of Claudia and Jeremy’s problems. One of these days, they really should talk about their fight, which still hung in the air in the house, along with the lingering smell of smoke, but Jeremy was happy to avoid it for as long as he could. He was afraid of what might come out of his mouth if he wasn’t careful, what he might see if he opened his eyes and gave it all a good hard look.
Late one night, as he lay on the deflating air mattress, he’d had the terrifying thought that maybe love wasn’t what he’d once thought it was. You’re supposed to love the person you’re with just because of who they are, but how are you to know who someone really is when they’ve still got fifty or sixty years ahead of them? Maybe, when you’re young, you love people as much for their potential as for who they are right now. And if that’s the case, what happens to love when time passes and that potential starts to shrivel and fade? Does love die with it? He was afraid to talk about these things with Claudia, afraid that what he might end up telling her was that he wasn’t sure how he felt about anything anymore.
With Claudia in the kitchen and Barry out in the back of the house, Jeremy was left alone with Ruth, a scenario he generally tried to avoid. The passing years had made it clear that the only thing the two of them had in common was a shared affection for Claudia. Conversations between them tended to be as stilted as those between strangers, revolving around generically safe subjects, or else uncomfortably pointed, as if Ruth were using him as a proxy to get a message across to her daughter. Judging by the tight lines that were forming around Ruth’s mouth, she was about to attempt the latter.
“It’s important to really get this room clean, if it’s going to be the kids’ room someday,” Ruth said. She didn’t look at him as she bent to attack a blackened patch near the window. “Kids are much more vulnerable to toxins in the air.”
Jeremy could hear Barry downstairs, using the new nail gun ($89.99, on Barry’s Visa) to assemble the deck. He wondered if he could excuse himself, claiming that Barry needed his assistance. At least Barry liked to work in comfortable silence, marred only by the occasional satisfied grunt of completion. “I was thinking of turning this room into a video arcade, actually,” he told Ruth. “Or maybe an indoor bowling alley.”
Ruth stood upright to assess him, her gloved hand pressed into her hip in order to balance herself. “You know, women have a much harder time getting pregnant after they turn thirty-five.”
Jeremy took a step backward, toward the door, thinking of the harried family in Home Depot. The rest of our lives. “Is that right?”
“I sent Claudia a study about it last summer,” Ruth said. “She keeps saying that you’re waiting for your careers to stabilize, but I think there’s never a bad time to have a baby. Especially now that she’s got a real job with health benefits.”
Jeremy remembered the study. It had arrived in a manila envelope, along with a collection of other magazine clippings that Ruth considered must-reads: a how-to guide for winterizing your garden, a coupon for $10 off hypoallergenic pillows at Target, an article about an e-mail scam, and six months’ worth of marriage announcements from the Mantanka Bugle, none of which featured people that Claudia recognized. It was sweet, really, the way that Ruth tried to connect with Claudia, even if her aim was generally a little off. That fertility study, though, might have been a direct hit.
New research has provided the most precise insight yet into when biological clocks start ticking loudly—and it’s sooner than once thought. A woman of 27 is already in decline; by age 35, women’s fertility levels have plunged nearly by half.
Claudia had examined the article with a pained expression and made a lame joke about her mother wanting her barefoot and pregnant, but she hadn’t thrown the study away. Jeremy knew, because he found it in the top drawer of her desk a few weeks later, buried under a box of red pencils and a booklet of obsolete thirty-five-cent stamps. He took the liberty of throwing the clipping away, since Claudia hadn’t. It didn’t seem healthy to keep it.
Footsteps echoed down the hall and Claudia appeared in the bedroom, much to Jeremy’s relief. “That was Samuel Evanovich,” she announced. She clutched Jeremy’s arm with a slightly sooty hand. Her eyes focused on some point just beyond his shoulder, as if she’d been knocked in the head and was having a hard time focusing. “He wants to meet with me.”
Her fingers were leaving black marks on his bare skin. The news seemed unreal, a pronouncement sent from a different dimension altogether; for a moment, he had to remind himself who Samuel Evanovich was.
“That’s fantastic,” he said, registering her feverish energy. Claudia was flushed, her hand hot on his arm.
“What if he wants to produce my script? It could totally make my career. This could be it, Jeremy. He’s a legend. God, if he offers me a good enough deal maybe I could even quit teaching. You wouldn’t need to get that bartending job!”
Jeremy patted her hand, curiously hesitant. He wondered, almost from a distance, if it was worth it to get his hopes up again. “What did he say, specifically? Did he say he liked your script?”
She frowned. “Well, he didn’t say anything, exactly. It was his assistant who called, to arrange a meeting.”
“He couldn’t have called you himself?” Ruth said, from across the room.
“That’s just the way it works in Hollywood, Mom,” Claudia said.
Ruth sniffed. “I don’t think it’s acceptable anywhere.”
“Well it’s still a really positive sign,” Jeremy offered. But he couldn’t make himself believe it. Instead, he was skeptical to the point of anger. Wasn’t Claudia the one who kept saying that the time for fantasies was long gone? Evanovich hadn’t even called her himself; as far as they knew, he might just want to talk about his daughter’s grades. Jeremy wondered where his pragmatic wife—the one who wanted him to give up playing music, the one who wanted him to focus on reality—had suddenly disappeared to. When had he become the realist in their relationship? She was making a meal out of one pathetic, desiccated scrap: It was just a phone call, some random guy who maybe read her script. She was still a long way away from a studio deal, let alone a massive director’s salary that could support them both. Reality meant the mortgage that was due next week, and the fifteen grand they needed to repair the house, and the lawsuit against their former tenant. Reality meant that fantasies like Claudia’s increasingly seemed reserved for indisputable geniuses with charmed lives; people like—for example—Aoki. He reached for the faith he’d
always had in Claudia and realized that, for the first time in almost four years, it had vanished. It was a horrid, unwelcome feeling, and he masked it by grabbing Claudia’s waist and squeezing tightly.
“So when are you meeting him?” he asked.
“Wednesday, in the evening.” Claudia moved Jeremy toward the door, at some remove from her mother. Her voice dropped. “At a restaurant in Beverly Hills.”
“I certainly hope he’s paying for your meal!” Ruth called.
“Yes, Mother.”
“Dinner—that’s a good sign,” he said begrudgingly.
“I’ll have to prepare a pitch,” Claudia continued, still holding his arm in a vise grip. “I wonder whether he wants to fund the movie himself, through his production company, or whether he plans to go get studio funding? I mean, ideally it would be at least a ten-million-dollar project …. I was thinking Penelope Cruz for the sister role, but she’s probably going to be expensive, especially if she gets an Oscar nomination this year—”
But Jeremy’s attention had already wandered off, toward Aoki. “So, I guess this means you won’t be going to Aoki’s opening?” Jeremy interrupted. “That’s Wednesday night too.” It was the first time he’d spoken Aoki’s name out loud since the fight, and he waited for Claudia’s face to cloud over.
But Claudia seemed too giddy to care. “Oh,” she said. “Well, this is more important, obviously.”
“Of course. I’ll just go by myself,” Jeremy said, as a wave of unexpected relief washed over him. Only now could he admit to himself how little he had wanted to take Claudia along. He suspected that nothing good would come from them all being in the same room together; although he wasn’t quite sure who, exactly, it was he didn’t trust. But was it more dangerous to take Claudia with him, so that her presence would keep him from doing anything regrettable with Aoki (and why did he suddenly think that he might do something regrettable?), or to leave her behind, to save her from Aoki’s potential cattiness and the unflattering spotlight of inevitable comparison? “It’ll probably be boring anyway.”
His response was a touch too quick. Claudia looked at him hard, then shrugged. “Maybe I can drop by for a few minutes before my meeting. The opening is at six-thirty, right? Dinner isn’t until seven-thirty.”
“Best of both worlds,” he offered, not believing this at all.
“Exactly,” she said, and smiled, triumphant.
“Who’s Aoki?” Ruth called.
“No one,” they replied, simultaneously.
They dressed in the living room, in front of a blackened mirror that they’d salvaged from the closet of the guest bedroom. Their clothes still smelled, almost imperceptibly, of charcoal, even after being dry-cleaned. Jeremy had decided three days earlier what he would wear—dark jeans, white button-down, gray sweater under a black jacket with shoulder epaulets; standard male uniform, innocuous enough—and was ready to go in five minutes. It took Claudia nearly an hour to attire herself.
Jeremy sat in an armchair and paged through a water-damaged Richard Price novel he had been reading for six months, absorbing nothing. Human detritus drifted in piles across the living room floor, each precarious island (clothes, books, shoes, linens) representing a group of possessions that had been salvaged from the other end of the house and sorted and stored here, in Jeremy and Claudia’s temporary living quarters. In his peripheral vision Jeremy could see Claudia trying on first a silk dress and then a long velvet skirt; a green dress with glittery appliqués at the neck which was far too dressy, and then a pair of jeans with a floral blouse. Everything was slightly wrinkled. She wore a lacy black bra she usually saved for romantic nights out, one that Jeremy hadn’t seen in many months.
She caught him watching her in the mirror. “I have to find an outfit that’ll work for both an art opening and a business meeting,” she apologized, through the filter of the darkened mirror, but Jeremy suspected that wasn’t really what concerned her. She was dressing for Aoki, for some illusory vision of her that Claudia had been carrying in her head for the last four years. Jeremy wondered what Claudia’s Aoki looked like, whether she was as intimidating and imposing as the real one.
Ruth and Barry were back at their motel room downtown, in all likelihood watching Animal Planet from the comfort of their twin beds. Jeremy suspected they were glad to have a night off from hard labor, but the house was dangerously silent without them. Somewhere, deep inside the bowels of the cottage, something was leaking, a maddeningly slow drip. Barry hadn’t been able to find the source, even after ripping open the wall in the bathroom and peering down into the guts of the plumbing. “Maybe the house is still draining,” he’d said. Jeremy thought it sounded as if the house were crying.
Claudia tried on a snug black dress that Jeremy hadn’t seen her wear before. “That’s nice,” he said, eager to go. “Wear that.”
Claudia examined herself critically. “It’s too tight,” she said. She yanked the dress over her head and flung it on the floor. “Oh, screw this,” she muttered. She dug through another pile of clothes and pulled out a knit wrap top and a plain denim skirt, one he’d seen her wear a hundred times. She zipped it and turned to him, pointing her index fingers down at the skirt for his approval. He gave her the thumbs-up, eager to get on the road.
“We’re going to be late,” he pointed out.
“Aoki can wait,” Claudia said to the mirror. But she sat down on the couch across from him and wedged on a pair of heels, apparently finished. Standing, she wobbled slightly, her lips set in a grim line of determination.
“OK,” she said. “Let’s do this.”
In the driveway, their sooty cars sat side by side, streaked with calcified ash and dried morning dew. The days were growing short—daylight savings time would end that weekend—and overhead the sky was momentarily the color of a crossing guard’s uniform, a lurid sentinel orange. Jeremy unlocked his car door and then paused as he realized that Claudia was staring across the street.
“Mary?” Claudia asked. It was neither a shout nor a statement, more of a whimper of surprise.
In the road stood a short teenage girl, her hair plaited in two prim braids and an oversized Mickey Mouse T-shirt hanging over her jeans. The girl—Mary?—had just exited the driver’s seat of a blue Honda Civic with a sticker that said JESUS ES EL REY on the battered bumper. The girl looked at Claudia, and Claudia looked at her; there was a clear minute when both seemed to be wishing that the other person would disappear, before Mary unleashed a bright gap-toothed smile.
“Hi, Mrs. Munger,” she called.
Claudia turned to Jeremy and muttered under her breath. “It’s my student. The one who writes those over-the-top essays. This is just creepy. Is she stalking me?” Then she turned back to Mary and waved.
Mary walked closer. “Is this your house?” She looked at the house, with the building supplies piled up in the driveway; and then at Jeremy; and then back at Claudia. “Is this your husband?”
Claudia hesitated, visibly flustered by the girl’s presence, so Jeremy took it upon himself to make the introduction. “Yes, I’m the husband,” he said. “I’m Jeremy.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Munger,” Mary offered.
“What are you doing here, Mary?” Claudia asked, her voice pitching two levels too high.
Mary hesitated in the middle of the road. The horn of the Honda Civic sounded twice, causing all three of them to jump. They turned to stare at the car. In the passenger seat, Jeremy could make out the recognizable bulk of Dolores, staring at them through the windshield. The horn honked again, and Mary backed away.
“My grandma,” she said. “She lives over there. I gave her a ride to the doctor. She has lupus.”
“Oh.” The expression on Claudia’s face morphed into one of confused relief as Mary turned away from them and jogged to the Civic’s passenger-side door. Jeremy watched as the girl reached in and used both hands to heave her grandmother up from the seat. She nearly buckled under the old woman’s weight, enve
loped in an acre of floral housedress as she propped Dolores upright into a standing position. The old woman trained her rheumy eyes on Jeremy and Claudia and then turned away, pretending she hadn’t seen them. Jeremy thought, for just a moment, that the old lady looked embarrassed.
“Abuelita,” Mary said, using the amplified speech that young people reserve exclusively for speaking to the elderly. “Abuelita, this is my teacher, Mrs. Munger.” But the old lady was shuffling toward her own front stoop, moving surprisingly quickly considering her infirmities. Mary followed, lowering her voice. “Señora Munger es mi maestra. Maestra de cine.”
Dolores lifted a hand in a reluctant acknowledgment without bothering to turn all the way around. It was still the most friendly gesture, Jeremy thought, that he’d ever received from her. Mary put her hand out to take her grandmother’s elbow, and the old woman leaned into it. She patted her granddaughter’s arm, clutching her tightly, and let Mary steer her up the path. Beside the sturdy young teenager, Dolores looked brittle and ancient, as if the elephantine calves holding her upright might crack and crumble at any moment.
The whole scenario made Jeremy’s skin crawl. It was the first time he’d heard Claudia referred to as Missus Munger, and with those two words she suddenly appeared twenty years older than she was. Even worse was the fact that this girl—hardly any younger than the girls who came to see his band!—had called him Mr. Munger, a man who by name alone sounded like he should be mowing the lawn on Saturdays and buying life insurance policies. So far, he’d been able to regard Claudia’s new career as an abstract idea, a vague destination that swallowed up her time but nothing that tangibly manifested itself in his day-to-day, but the presence of her student, standing here, brought Claudia the Schoolteacher to life in a way that made him want to run down the hill as fast as he could.
“We’ve got to go,” Jeremy muttered under his breath to Claudia. “We’re really late.”
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