This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  “I have no idea,” said Penelope. “Do you? Honestly?” She giggled and looked around the room, an invitation for the rest of the class to join her. A nervous titter started at one side of the room and passed across it, finally undoing in five seconds what Claudia had spent all semester trying to build. Her class disliked her, after all, and it didn’t respect her, either.

  Worst of all: The students were right.

  She stared at Penelope and thought of the deplorable Quintessence. What was she thinking? There was no way she could put her name on Quintessence and feel proud of herself. If that trite piece of shit was what would get her on the inside track in Hollywood, then she wanted nothing to do with Hollywood. There were better ways to win back her lost career, better ways to distract Jeremy from the glittery toy that was Aoki. She’d gone into film because of her love for a well-told story; because she wanted to make audiences feel something authentic and original, not to be a disposable hack for hire, generating garbage for America’s cultural trash heap. It was better to be broke and anonymous than to be wealthy and famous for making dreck. RC was right—she didn’t have the stomach for this. She would rather give up entirely.

  She tried to remember the person she’d been, the idealist just out of film school who carried a notebook jammed with script ideas; the woman who patched together Spare Parts with tenacity and duct tape; the “gimlet-eyed auteur” who went an entire week without sleep in order to capture just the right moment when the winter light would convey the pensive air her movie required. Who had she become? Why was she letting herself be tortured at the hands of the Evanovich family for the sake of a miserable chick flick? Father and daughter were tearing away her last vestiges of self-worth. But she didn’t have to let them do it anymore.

  “What Altman is saying,” she said, very slowly, “is that to be an insider in Hollywood—a player, so to speak—you have to sacrifice your principles.”

  “Yeah,” announced Penelope, meaningfully. “Assuming you have principles in the first place.”

  Claudia was at Penelope’s seat in three strides.

  She hadn’t intended to tell Penelope to go fuck herself; the words just slipped out of her mouth, a good three seconds before her brain was conscious that this was even what she was thinking. For two electrifying seconds after she tenderly muttered the words into Penelope’s ear—“Go fuck yourself, kiddo”—teacher and student were both frozen in time, with Claudia’s breath stirring a few fugitive tendrils of curly hair, the flush of mortified blood rising up from Penelope’s neck just inches away from Claudia’s face. The girl smelled of expensive scent, a sickly lavender that burned Claudia’s nose, and her skin was caked with a sallow concealer that failed to conceal a fresh speckling of pimples. In those two seconds before time caught up with her, Claudia was touched by her student’s surprising, ineffectual little vanities: Her fury abruptly vanished, and instead her heart swelled with painful empathy. She almost reached out and stroked Penelope’s cheek: She wasn’t the enemy after all, just a pathetic little girl who was buckling under pressure put on her by her parents; a girl who hadn’t had enough love, who wasn’t as smart as she was supposed to be, and who erected a confrontational façade in order to conceal the pain of rejection by her peers. It wasn’t too late for them to understand each other.

  And then Penelope jerked her face away, breaking the electric moment, and Claudia’s awareness finally caught up with her. She straightened up in horror, noting now the sound of Mary Hernandez gnawing wetly on her pencil, the rubber squeak of the basketball game thumping across the courts, Jordan Bigglesby tapping away at her BlackBerry—all the familiar little noises that had been the soundtrack to her life here for the last few months. The whole class was staring: She could feel it, even though she purposely looked out the window and up toward the rain-spattered sky. They had all heard.

  She knew she was fucked even before Penelope twisted her face up and around to meet Claudia’s and hissed, “You’re so screwed.”

  Claudia stood upright and turned back toward the front of the classroom. “See if I give a damn,” she said.

  Driving home, she felt free for the first time in months. It was all incredibly clear. She should have listened to Jeremy back in August. They would sell the house, even if they had to take a loss on it. Hand it over to the bank. Whatever had to be done to get rid of it. She would tell Jeremy to quit that job at BeTee, and instead they would head off to Barcelona, just as he had suggested all those months ago. They’d get jobs as bartenders, or waiters, or au pairs, and write screenplays and make music on the cheap; maybe they’d apply for art grants or find European financial backers who were more open-minded than their American counterparts. So what if they were on the downhill slide toward forty, the time in their life when they should be popping out babies and installing central air-conditioning and contributing to IRAs? That could wait another five years. Ten, even. They might be broke, starting at zero again, but they would at least be doing what they loved. At least they would be able to say they were sticking with their principles. At least they would be together.

  Thinking of how close they had come to disaster, she almost wept with happiness. The wipers squeaked against the glass of the windshield; water dripped through the faulty seal of the moon roof. The brake lights of the cars in front of her reflected red in the oily pools on the road. She passed through sodden West Hollywood and Miracle Mile and Koreatown, Silver Lake and Glassell Park, heading east and homeward.

  No one was home when she arrived back at the bungalow. Someone—her father, probably—had draped blue plastic over the back of the house, in order to prevent the rain from coming in. Went to Home Depot for more tarps read a note on the fridge, written in her mother’s neat cursive. Wound up with excitement, Claudia drifted through the empty house, examining it with fresh eyes: the patches in the plaster from the earthquake, the water damage on the walls, the smoke stains that were still visible despite her mother’s best efforts. It had been a great house once, but now it was a wreck, just four meaningless walls full of charred memories. She would be glad to see it go. She thought of calling up her parents and telling them to go back to Wisconsin today, to stop trying to save her house for her. They certainly wouldn’t approve of the step she was about to take and she didn’t want to face their approbation. It was better if they just left her alone with Jeremy.

  When she returned to the living room, she stopped. The air mattress still lay on the floor, blankets in disarray on the couch from where Jeremy had slept the night before, and the furniture was exactly where it was supposed to be, but something felt wrong. She looked out the sliding glass door, to where soaked bougainvillea leaves were plastered on the new planking of the deck, and farther, to the darkening hills across the canyon, but couldn’t quite place where this feeling had come from.

  She turned slowly in a circle, examining the room more closely. All at once, she was terribly frightened.

  The painting was gone.

  Jeremy

  THE PLANE LURCHED SLIGHTLY AS IT PULLED BACK FROM THE Jetway, and then the dark form of LAX began to glide slowly away. It was drizzling, and the orange hazard lights of the airplane, reflecting off the pools of rain on the runway, looked like watery beacons illuminating the way out. Jeremy could see nothing beyond the airport, just a veil of mist, shrouding the rest of Los Angeles in an inky fog. It was almost as if the city no longer existed, as if he were being propelled forward from a vast nothing into some kind of wonderful dream.

  Jeremy sat back in his seat, put his feet up on the footrest, and lifted his champagne flute.

  Jeremy had never been the kind of person who longed for a life in the first-class section. Instead, he’d marched gamely through the aisle of the airplane toward the economy seats in the back, feeling like a man of the people. The big leather seats up front were for those overstuffed titans of industry in their wool worsted business suits, reading the Wall Street Journal and washing down their complimentary cocktail with a Maalo
x chaser. He couldn’t see how anyone thought that a miniature bottle of scotch, a foot or two of extra legroom, and Toy Story 2 on demand could possibly be worth the extra thousand bucks you’d drop on the ticket. Not when the same money could pay for a new Ricken-backer, or a month of his band’s studio rental, or three hundred bean-and-cheese burritos. Jeremy didn’t mind it in the back, with its more egalitarian outlook on humanity; he belonged in the portion of the plane where the reasonable people—the people with the right priorities—sat.

  Or maybe this is just how he’d wanted to imagine himself. Maybe his whole image of himself as a complacently impoverished artist, a populist and proud of it, was just a form of self-justification, a way of deflecting any shame over being thirty-four years old and still making less than your average new college graduate. Because now that he was here—nestled in the cushiony leather seats of first class, sipping on a little flute of pretty good champagne, with his feet swaddled in a pair of cozy complimentary slippers—any argument in favor of sitting back in cattle class seemed ridiculous. He’d misjudged, radically, how wonderful first class (or, rather, L’Espace Première) really was. Up here the food actually smelled edible. The foie gras and lobster entrée were designed (according to the menu he’d been given) by a famous French chef whose Michelin three-star restaurant had a two-year waiting list. There were 112 channels of entertainment available on his own personal monitor. To be watched using his seat’s Bose noise-reduction headsets ($400 a pair—he’d priced them out once before settling for a cheaper brand). He had to fully extend his arm in order to get his hand anywhere remotely near his seatmate, and when he wanted to nap the stewardess would turn his fully reclining seat into a real bed with a feather duvet. Of course I wanted all this, he thought. I just didn’t admit it to myself.

  “Meester Munger,” a voice cooed in his ear, and he looked up, smiling involuntarily. A soignée blond flight attendant (did they keep the prettiest ones up front, too?) was leaning over him, offering a tray of Grand Marnier truffles. Her neckline was just low enough to reveal a crack of freckled décolletage, artfully framed by a silk scarf printed with the airline logo. She smelled faintly of jasmine perfume; her lashes, perilously close to his face, were heavily laden with black mascara. “Would you like to schedule a massage with our in-flight masseuse?” she murmured in accented English.

  “Why, yes,” he said, knocking back the last of the champagne and proffering the empty glass for a refill. “Yes, I would.”

  The runway was backed up due to the storm. The airplane idled in an endless queue of jumbo jets, the entire world apparently trying to flee Los Angeles at once. Jeremy didn’t care. He was already tipsy. He killed the time with a selection of complimentary magazines, blowing through a BusinessWeek (irrelevant) and a Time (depressing), before settling for the escapism of an Angelina Jolie action film.

  Cold fingers knotted themselves in his and he looked to his right, where Aoki was peeking around the curved edge of the pod wall that separated their cubbies. She was wrapped in gray cashmere, a soft fuzzy thing that encased her from chin to toe in a luxury cocoon. A biography of Max Ernst sat in her lap; the text was German and Jeremy wondered how she could possibly understand it since she didn’t speak a word. Her face was scrubbed clean, pale and glowing like the moon. Looking at her, he had another one of those electric surges, and he wondered if he could just blame everything that was happening on some kind of irrefutable chemistry that had rendered him otherwise impotent.

  She squeezed his fingers. “I know of this great little studio in the fourteenth arrondissement where you could set up a practice space. It used to belong to a Russian sculptor but he committed suicide over the summer, and now it’s just sitting there empty.”

  “That’s awful,” he said.

  Aoki let go of his hand. She flipped a page of her book and examined a surrealist print of an eagle hungrily eyeing a baby lizard. “He was a mediocre artist and unfortunately, by the time he figured that out, he’d wasted most of his life at it. My sympathy is limited.”

  “Remind me never to commit suicide. I wouldn’t want to read the epitaph you’d write for me.”

  Aoki laughed. “See, that’s why I love you. I know you would never commit suicide.”

  The use of that word—love—was startling; though shouldn’t he have expected it? Wasn’t that why he was here? Coming from her mouth it sounded like a rusty engine, revving to life for the first time in years. Jeremy smiled, skipping lightly across its presence. “You never know. I might surprise you.”

  “Don’t try, please. Oh, look, Pierre is so shameless; he’s hitting on the man sitting next to him even though it’s perfectly obvious that the guy is straight. He’s wearing Brooks Brothers, for God’s sake.” She pointed to a seat two rows up, where Pierre—today wearing some sort of haut sailor suit—was carrying on an earnest conversation in French with a man Jeremy’s age. “This is going to be great for you, you know. He’s just filthy rich and loves to spend money on people he admires. It’s like he collects people as his hobby. He funded my last art installation, and all he asked in return was that I invite him to hang out with my friends once in a while.” She laughed. “Just don’t let him tell you that you have to suck his dick.”

  “Excuse me?” Jeremy was jerked momentarily out of the pleasant fizz of anticipation.

  “I’m kidding,” she said. “Sort of. Anyway, he knows you belong to me so he’ll keep his hands off.”

  “Oh, I belong to you, do I?”

  “You always have,” she said, then vanished into her cubicle as the plane finally began to accelerate up the runway. The raindrops on the windows slid sideways as the plane picked up speed and then lifted off the ground. Jeremy let the force of the ascent drive him backward into his seat, happily relinquishing himself to the momentum.

  He’d had to rent a truck to get the painting to the gallery. The fact that it wouldn’t fit in his convertible was only half the problem, considering that the car was still (presumably) parked with the valet from the other night, anyway. Instead, he summoned a taxi for a ride to the Ryder Rent-a-Truck downtown and then drove the truck back to the house, where he carefully wrapped the painting in a batik quilt that had once belonged to his mother. He wedged the package in the truck bed between stacks of bubble-wrap boulders and then drove this precious cargo across town, arriving at the back entrance to the gallery ten minutes before his appointment with Louisa Poppinopolis.

  Only when Louisa Poppinopolis herself came out into the alley, with an expression of mild surprise on her face, did Jeremy realize he’d wasted his entire morning (not to mention the $79 rental fee). The gallerist—a compact older woman with white-streaked Susan Sontag hair—approached the driver’s side window, one hand planted on her cardigan-wrapped waist, the other holding an umbrella aloft. “I thought you were bringing slides,” she said, “not the whole damn painting.”

  “I thought you would want to see it in person,” he said.

  “Slides would have sufficed. Anyway, next time you decide to transport irreplaceable art across Los Angeles, keep in mind that we do have our own truck. Specially designed to move large canvases. We would have picked the painting up, or even come to visit in person, if we’d realized you planned to bring it here shoved in the back of a rental.”

  “It wasn’t a big deal,” he said.

  “Let’s just hope it survived the trip unscathed.”

  A swarm of gallery staff had gathered at the back of the truck, waiting for its contents to be revealed. Jeremy rolled up the door and then stood in the rain, his jeans growing soaked from the knee down, as they extricated the batik-swaddled painting from the back of the truck and carried it into the building. Louisa herded them along, waving her umbrella and barking orders, an officious sheepdog.

  Louisa was right, of course. Even Jeremy knew the proper way to do this was to shop the painting around—have slides made, set up meetings with the major auction houses, organize home visits so that gallerists and collect
ors could make appraisals, and then take the highest bid. But he didn’t have time for any of that. Once he’d made his decision, at a groggy four o’clock in the morning, he wanted to get it all out of the way as quickly as possible before he changed his mind or otherwise came to his senses.

  Sell it, the voice had said. He’d thrashed about on the couch, worried that his spasms would wake Claudia, who slept on the air mattress below him. Sell it. It’s the only way. And as aware as he was that this was the kind of decision that required the clear light of day and a well-considered pro-con list, he was determined to stick to that middle-of-the-night impulse. Sell it: The most cogent thought he’d had in months.

  So here he was, still giddy with insomniac certainty, still intoxicated by the madness of his decision, sipping chai from a porcelain cup with a handle shaped like a human femur while staring at his painting. Louisa and three of her minions—earnest-looking young women with severe hair and minimal makeup—stood silently beside him, as politely distant as strangers at a museum. Propped against the vast white expanse of Louisa Poppinopolis’s gallery wall, Beautiful Boy looked diminished, just a little square of cheap paint in a dusty frame, and he wondered whether Cristina’s estimate of the painting’s value had been vastly overstated.

  “Normally we wouldn’t do something like this, but when you said you were that Jeremy … ” Louisa began. She stopped abruptly and took four steps back from the painting, tilting her head slightly to the left as if righting Jeremy’s twisted torso in her mind. The art minions, each cradling her own teacup, stepped backward with her, staying respectfully out of Louisa’s field of vision. Louisa straightened and walked briskly toward the canvas. She pulled bifocals out of the pocket of her cardigan and pushed them up her nose as she peered at its texture; she put her hand up and let it hover there, an inch above the surface, tracing the path of Aoki’s paintbrush with her palm. Then she stepped away from the painting and reached out to take Jeremy’s hand, shaking it as if congratulating him on the birth of a son. “Well done,” she said, smiling for the first time. “It’s an astonishing painting, really. Better than the Jeremy Series pieces we currently have up in the show, quite possibly the best of the whole series. I’m surprised Aoki didn’t clue us in to the existence of this one. We would have loved to borrow it for the retrospective, if nothing else.”