This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  He backed blindly toward the front door, abandoning his clothes, his guitars, his books and papers, his wife—the assorted accumulations of thirty-four years of personal history. It didn’t seem necessary to pack anymore; Jeremy felt like he’d already immolated everything of importance, anyway. He realized he was tiptoeing, as if by being very very quiet he might somehow avert further damage.

  “I don’t understand,” Ruth was saying, as Jeremy wrestled the door open and escaped back out into the rain. “He’s not really leaving leaving, is he?”

  And Jeremy hesitated, just a fraction of a second, to hear Claudia’s answer before he closed the door behind him. “It doesn’t matter, Mom,” she said. “He was never really here in the first place.”

  Driving off, he realized he was shaking, and for a moment he thought it was fear until he realized that it was actually his body uncoiling, finally relaxing in relief. The carnage was in his rearview mirror now, and as he made his way down the hill he decided only to look forward, toward the road ahead. He’d survived the worst possible things in life—death of a mother, demise of a marriage—and everything else from here on would be easy.

  And indeed, the rest of it had come easily: just one phone call to Edgar to quit his job at BeTee; another three to coordinate the purchase of a first-class plane ticket to Paris (paid for with Pierre’s black AmEx); a quick trip to his father’s apartment to stash his car until an undetermined date (“Took my advice after all, eh?” Max had laughed. “Good for you. Just stay away from Norway. That country is bad news”). As he was leaving his father’s home, he experienced an unfamiliar sensation in his sternum, like the flutter of a moth’s wings, and for a moment he wondered whether he was about to throw up, until he realized that what he was experiencing was the weightlessness of being completely unfettered by obligations, by possessions, by expectations. I’m free, he told himself. Light seemed to crack through the cloud cover, illuminating the sky above him, settling in around his chest. I can do anything I want.

  His cellphone rang as he was hailing a taxi.

  “You could have got Louisa up to six hundred,” Aoki said. “You caved too soon.”

  “Or maybe you’re not worth as much as you think you are.”

  Aoki laughed. “You know I think I’m priceless,” she said. “Are you coming over now? I ran into that actor again, in the lobby, and he wanted to grab a drink with us before the town car comes to take us to the airport.”

  “I need to stop at the drugstore and buy a toothbrush first,” he said. “It looks like I’m going to be traveling light.”

  He waited for her to ask about Claudia, but she didn’t. What didn’t involve her didn’t really happen at all, as far as Aoki is concerned, he realized. This didn’t bother him; in fact, it was a relief not to not have to think about what he’d just done. It certainly made it easier to forget; like he’d been granted a mercy lobotomy. So simple just to slip into something new, he thought; the kind of pleasure that comes from putting on a brand-new shirt and realizing that it fits you perfectly.

  “They sell toothbrushes in France, you know,” Aoki scoffed, as if it were ridiculous that he would even consider dental hygiene at this moment. She was right, of course. He didn’t have to think about those kinds of things anymore, nothing mundane or ordinary. She continued: “Except there they don’t call it a toothbrush; they call it a brosse à dents.”

  She purred the term as if it were a form of sexual foreplay. “Say that again,” he commanded.

  “Brosse à dents,” she murmured. “Now, hurry up.”

  “I’m almost there,” he said.

  When he woke up the airplane was dark, the cabin illuminated softly by reading lights. The hour was indeterminate—it could have been midnight or five in the morning, as far as Jeremy could tell. They were flying through a thunderstorm, the plane bouncing as it passed over choppy air. Throughout the rest of the cabin the passengers lay inert in their sleeping pods, wrapped in blankets, blinded by silk sleep masks, knocked out by sleeping pills. Jeremy’s television flickered with the credits of the movie that he’d been watching when he fell asleep. The flight attendants were nowhere in sight: The only person who was awake was Brooks Brothers, two rows up, working over Excel spreadsheets with a glass of wine by his hand.

  Jeremy fumbled to remove the Bose headphones. White noise filled the cabin—the high-pitched whine of the engines, the hissing air vents, the chattering cutlery in the galley. And there was one more, unexpected, sound: the unmistakable contralto hiccup of a sobbing woman. A very familiar hiccup.

  Jeremy sat up. He leaned across his seat and peered over the edge of the wall that separated him from Aoki. She lay motionless on her side, facing away from him, clearly asleep. Except that she wasn’t. As he watched, her back shuddered with a suppressed convulsion.

  “Are you OK?” he whispered. The plane jerked sideways as the turbulence grew worse. Jeremy braced himself against the seat back before him.

  Aoki froze. “I’m fine,” she said, in a voice muffled by blankets.

  “You’re not fine,” he said. “What is it?”

  The engines droned as the plane began to ascend, working to rise above the storm. Throughout the cabin, the passengers were grumbling awake, jarred by one inconvenience that not even a $10,000 plane fare could circumvent. “If you don’t know already, I’m not going to tell you,” Aoki whispered. She rolled over to look at him, revealing a puffy, tearstained face—not at all beautiful, not like this—and then turned away again. She yanked the blankets tightly around her and pulled a sleep mask down over her eyes. Jeremy reached out to touch her back, tying his brain in knots as he tried to figure out what he should already know.

  And then, slowly, he withdrew his hand.

  Above his head, the seat-belt sign was illuminated. A woman back in cattle class shrieked as the plane suddenly plummeted, then righted itself. The soothing voice of a flight attendant came over the loudspeakers as the plane jolted up and down, right and left, buffeted by unpredictable currents. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are experiencing some light turbulence,” she said. “Please make sure your seatbelt is fastened. There is no cause for alarm.”

  But the hair on Jeremy’s arms was already standing on end, stirred to life by an old, long-forgotten dread.

  Claudia

  Day One

  Jeremy has only been gone twenty-two hours, according to the clock on the living room wall, but for Claudia time is just an abstract concept, the clock a torture device marking off interminable minutes of hollow pain that promise to stretch indefinitely into the future. It feels like she will be in this room forever, looking out the window at the rain while her parents fuss and flutter around her. It feels like time has gotten itself stuck, and she is doomed to live in some horrible limbo for the rest of her life.

  She waits for the tears to come, longs for the terrible catharsis of a meltdown, but what she feels instead is even worse: a crawling numbness, as if all her nerves have been frozen, and she realizes she has been anticipating this departure for some time; it’s not a surprise at all. In some ways, she’s been expecting Jeremy to leave her since the moment they first met. She thinks—and has always thought—that this is what she deserves.

  Instead of hating Jeremy, the person she hates most is herself.

  She recalls the Emily Dickinson poem about death—After great pain, a formal feeling comes—and even though the comparison may be overwrought (Jeremy is not dead, just gone of his own volition), she understands what the poet meant. The feet, mechanical, go round … a wooden way. This is how it feels, as she moves from couch to kitchen to bathroom to bedroom, and finally back to the couch, where she flips on the TV and watches something without absorbing it at all. Her heart is an empty cage where a living creature once resided, that now holds nothing meaningful at all.

  “Pancakes,” Barry announces, coming in from the kitchen. “I’m making you pancakes.”

  “You don’t need to, Dad,” Claudia says. “I don�
��t even think we have flour.”

  “You need to eat something,” Ruth chides. “You’re going to make yourself sick this way. It’s flu season.” Ruth stands at the dining room table, sorting Claudia’s underwear into piles: She has done the laundry, without asking. Claudia wants to demand that she stop folding Jeremy’s T-shirts into neat rectangles—her mother’s Mantankan-born housewifely efficiency is not going to make Jeremy come back (that least of all; that being half of Claudia’s problem in the first place), and even if he did come back, he certainly wouldn’t notice the effort Ruth has put into ironing his clothes.

  But she refuses to say this, because at this moment Ruth and Barry seem terrified of saying Jeremy’s name. It’s as if the mention of his existence might break something apart, tip them all down into an abyss. Instead, they tiptoe around Claudia, while she retreats behind her fortification of stony resignation. Her parents have already mopped her floors and washed her dishes and cooked her dinner while she watched TV, surfed the Web, took a sleeping pill and a twelve-hour nap. She senses that she has accidentally landed back in some sort of extended adolescence, once again a ward in her parents’ care. This is a special kind of hell reserved for those who have failed at life.

  “I’m not hungry,” she snaps at her mother, which just makes everything worse, because now she even sounds like a peevish teenager.

  Ruth turns to look at her, an expression of infinite forebearance. She walks over and sits down next to Claudia, extends her hand as if she were going to grip Claudia’s fingers, and then drops her palm to the couch. “It’s OK to go ahead and cry, honey,” she says, in a soft voice. “I know it hurts.”

  And her words almost work—they almost jolt Claudia from her stupor. But she recovers herself quickly, biting the inside of her cheek. She realizes that even if she wants to cry, she can’t—because she won’t be able to stop, and right now it is critical to show her parents that their concern for her well-being is unnecessary. Hysteria will just prove to them that she is incapable of taking care of herself, and then they will stay here forever.

  Barry appears in the kitchen doorway. “There is flour. But no syrup. I’ll go to the store. Do you want blueberries too?”

  “Blueberries! Doesn’t that sound good?” Ruth looks at Claudia expectantly. “Blueberry pancakes were always your favorite.”

  Claudia shrugs, too tired to fight them. “Sure, Dad. If it will make you happy.”

  Barry smiles, pleased to have a purpose. Ruth waits for him to leave the room again and then leans in and clutches Claudia’s hand. “You know,” she says. “I know that we’re supposed to fly home tomorrow, but we could change our flights, if you want.”

  Claudia stands up, disentangling herself. “I really appreciate what you’re trying to do for me,” she says. “But you have your own lives to get back to. I’ll be fine, Mom.”

  Once she’s uttered these words, she wishes she could take them back; she wishes they would stay here forever, cosseting her with their undemanding devotion, saving her from being alone. But it’s too late.

  Day Two

  She comes home from the airport to find a message on her voice mail. “Hi, Claudia,” it says. “This is Nancy Friar. I’ve spoken to Samuel Evanovich and am troubled by some inappropriate behavior he told me about. I think it’s best if you don’t come in to school tomorrow. Or for the rest of the week. Not until the board meets to discuss the situation. I’m very sorry about this. I’m sure that Penelope has been a rather trying student, but we do have certain codes of conduct that we really need our teachers to abide—”

  Claudia presses DELETE, cutting Nancy’s voice off.

  There has been no contact from Samuel Evanovich about the status of Quintessence, which isn’t surprising in the least. Claudia knows better than to e-mail him herself. She has been dumped twice in one week: Hollywood, her other longtime lover, has also fled to more alluring pastures. She is not sure where she went wrong, what another person in her situation might have done. Probably her failure was due to some innate character flaw, one that followed her all the way from Wisconsin and was inescapable despite her best efforts. (The same flaw that caused Jeremy to leave, she thinks.) Probably she was doomed from the start. She was never going to make it in an industry so fixated on hot and cool, no matter how hard she tried, not when she so clearly lacked either.

  “You can always move back home,” her mother said at the airport, gripping Claudia tightly, just before she and Barry boarded the plane. What had, in the moment, sounded like a last act of desperation now seems—as she stands alone in her half-repaired house—like a possible path of least resistance. Maybe I belong in Mantanka after all, she tells herself. Maybe I should have gotten on that plane with them.

  Day Four

  She has finally summoned the courage to look at her bank balance online: five hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. This is what Jeremy has left behind, his parting bribe. She sits at her laptop with a bottle of gin at her elbow, and counts the zeroes three times, sure that the alcohol is deceiving her, but no—it is over half a million dollars, all hers. No strings attached, until you consider the fact that the money is intended as a substitute for spousal love.

  And that, for some reason, is what triggers the great deluge. She finds that she is crying at last. Crying so hard she thinks her tears might fry the circuit board on her laptop. Heaving, painful, blubbery sobs. If her life were a movie, she would instruct the actress playing Claudia to tone the hysteria down a little bit, maybe lose some of the snot and drool and effluvia. She would call her own performance overwrought. Even Dolores, across the street, can probably hear her. But she can’t seem to stop herself: everything that has been bottled up over the last few days has finally erupted.

  He’s gone, she thinks, and it feels like the first time she has really understood this. And I don’t think he’s ever coming back. My entire life has vanished, just like that.

  The tears aren’t cathartic in the least.

  Day Eight

  Today, she is trying to decide what to do with the ring.

  Claudia never expected Jeremy to give her an engagement ring. She certainly didn’t expect the princess-cut diamond solitaire that he picked out at a downtown jewelers. The stone is a tiny half-carat speck that is dwarfed by its platinum pronged setting, and the delicate narrow band rattles against Claudia’s knobby knuckle. When Jeremy presented the ring to her, a week after their spontaneous engagement, she at first suggested that he return it. It seemed a waste of money, this fussy, traditional memento that suited neither Claudia’s hand nor Jeremy’s budget. Looking at the ring wedged in its velvet coffin, Claudia had experienced an unexpected wave of disappointment—in the ring, whose exceedingly modest size would be a permanent advertisement for their penurious state; in herself, for noting this and for still being so shallow and old-fashioned as to lust secretly for a wastefully frivolous two-carat token; and in her new fiancé, for trying to read her mind and failing.

  Over time, she came to love it because of its modesty; came to see all the emotion and sacrifice and intention on Jeremy’s part that it did represent. Or so she thought. Because now, when she looks down at it on her finger, what she sees is Claude the Clod, the type of girl who did want a traditional diamond ring. The type of girl who Jeremy had maybe once thought he wanted to be with but clearly changed his mind about.

  Aoki would never lust after a diamond engagement ring, she thinks. And Jeremy would never think to buy her one. She probably doesn’t even want to get married.

  If only she had insisted that he return it to the jeweler where he bought it. If only they had done something reckless and silly instead—like getting matching tattoos or buying novelty rings in plastic eggs from a supermarket vending machine or just spending the money on a trip to India. Maybe he would still be here now.

  It is an idiotic, reductive thought, but one she can’t quite banish from her mind.

  The ring is suddenly a symbol of everything that was wrong wi
th their marriage, right from the start. Wearing it is unbearably painful. Should she take it off? Jeremy said he was coming back. Maybe he will; maybe he is just “taking a break,” a period with a finite end. And yet—the irreducible fact is that he has gone off with another woman. It feels farcical to still be wearing it, this carbonized promise of eternal faithfulness.

  She removes it from her finger and tucks it away in a drawer.

  An hour later, she retrieves it from the drawer and puts it on again.

  Day Thirteen

  Her house is knee-deep in plastic and drop cloths. The contractor has moved in with his cavalry of plumbers and carpenters and electricians and roofers and painters, so that the only part of her home that is not currently a construction zone is the kitchen. She has handed over fifteen thousand dollars to cover her insurance deductible, the first check to be written on her new bank account. Her contractor, a diminuitive Salvadoran man named Santos, has sketched out plans not just to repair the essential fire damage but also to remodel the bathrooms, install new floors and windows, add French doors in the master bedroom and living room, and paint the whole house for good measure. He will also undo the mistakes that Barry has made, which apparently are numerous.

  Hiring the contractor is step one in Claudia’s End the Pity Party Plan, but that’s where the plan ends. There is no step two yet. Logically, what she should do next is figure out what to do with the rest of the Beautiful Boy money that sits in her bank account, torturing her. But what does one do with half a million dollars? Her first impulse is to give all the money to charity, as some sort of self-punishing, to-hell-with-it gesture, but that seems impetuous and unwise. Then she thinks she’ll just pay the mortgage off in its near-entirety, as Jeremy instructed her—but that would be giving him the upper hand. Screw him, she thinks, growing angry. Who is he to tell me what to do with my life?

  Instead of feeling hollow and frozen, she finally melts into a simmering fury.