This Is Where We Live

by Janelle Brown

  Could their fight tonight have tipped her over that edge again? This time, would it be for real? He knocked again, louder. “Aoki? You OK?”

  “It’s not locked,” Aoki called, her voice echoing across bathroom tile.

  He pushed the door open, ready to leap for the tub or the telephone, whichever seemed more urgent. But the bathtub was empty. Instead, his gaze went straight to the floor of the bathroom, where black webs of human hair lay scattered across peach-colored tile. The trail of hair started near the bathroom door and ended by the sink, where Aoki stood in her underwear, her bare feet buried in shiny black cuttings, nail scissors in her fist.

  She’d chopped her hair off, trimmed it all the way to the scalp. And the bizarre thing was that even nearly bald, even with the remaining tufts jutting out at strange angles from the spots she’d missed, Aoki was breathtakingly beautiful. Perhaps even more so: Her features looked huge against her exposed skull, dewy and precious as a fawn’s, and her eyes burned hot and a little insane with excitement.

  “I got tired of it getting in my eyes,” she said, in a faraway voice. “What do you think?”

  “You look great,” he said, honestly.

  “I’ve always wanted to do it.” She blew out her lips like a horse to unglue the strands that were stuck to her face. They tumbled to the floor, joining the rest. He noticed that her bare scalp was bleeding in the back, dribbling down the vulnerable base of her skull toward her neck. “I’m thinking I’ll save the hair and use it for a sculptural piece. I’ve already got a name: Artifice. Or maybe Abandonment.”

  Jeremy sat on the edge of the claw-foot tub, watching Aoki as she smoothed her hand across the back of her head, feeling for uneven sections. Her fingers forged across the blood trail and then left smudgy red fingerprints across her denuded nape. She pulled her hand away and stared at it, slightly baffled, before sticking a gory forefinger in her mouth and licking it clean. She winked at Jeremy as she did it.

  This self-abuse was intended as a message for him, he knew it; he just couldn’t figure out what the message was. And suddenly he didn’t care enough to want to figure it out.

  He knew, as he watched her, that this would never end; that as long as he was with her, he’d be anticipating the moments when she disappeared, or started crying for no discernable reason, or slit her wrists in the bathtub, or took up drugs again, and this unpredictable life no longer struck him as thrilling but as tedious. His job here was to pick up after her, to always be waiting when she returned; and he didn’t really want to do it after all. Maybe Aoki had liberated herself from a life of responsibility, but rather than releasing Jeremy from his fetters, Aoki was actually saddling him with a whole new set of even more constricting ones.

  “I’m going to order room service for dinner,” Aoki offered, as she snipped an errant strand near her earlobe. “Caviar and French toast?”

  “Get whatever you want.” Jeremy stood and walked out the door of the bathroom. He headed to the armchair where he’d deposited his jeans during their earlier sexual escapades, and began to tug them over his shins. Aoki followed him out of the bathroom, still clutching the nail scissors.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “For a walk,” he said. He tied on his shoes and grabbed his coat.

  “Oh, for God’s sake. Are you still upset about what we were discussing earlier? It’s really not a big deal.” Aoki’s face was shut tight, shrouded in the shadows cast by the light of the lamp.

  Maybe it wasn’t a big deal. Maybe he’d known all this the night that he decided to kiss Aoki at the Château Marmont or the evening he’d boarded Air France with her. Maybe this was the calculation he’d done, believing that the sum would end up net positive. Maybe he would leave and return, the way he always had in the past. All he knew was that right now, he couldn’t stand to be closed in this room with Aoki’s logic planted there between them. “I just need some fresh air,” he said. “I’ll be back in a few.”

  “You’re the one who wanted to talk about our relationship,” she said. She was looking over his shoulder to a gilt-edged decorative mirror on the wall, turning her face to the left and the right so she could examine her own profile. “Don’t ask for honesty if you can’t cope with it.”

  “Don’t tell me what I can cope with,” he said, and left.

  Outside, the rain had stopped and the clouds were clearing, and all of Rome was taking advantage of the reprieve to do their evening perambulations. In his Pierre Powers wardrobe, Jeremy looked exactly like everyone else here—no American brand names, no baseball cap or skate shoes to give him away—but as he wandered aimlessly through the stone streets, he felt both invisible and out of place: an imposter in innocuous wrappings, a pretender who hadn’t mastered any Italian beyond buon giorno and per favore. He didn’t even have his passport on him. He could die out here, in some kind of freak accident involving a Fiat or a bucket of tortelli or a collapsing Renaissance cornice, and he would be unidentifiable. Could Aoki be trusted to come looking for him eventually? He didn’t count on it.

  He walked by the Pantheon, where the tourists were drinking watered-down cocktails in the shadow of the ancient dome, and then headed west. He ended up at the foot of the monument to King Victor Emmanuel, a gaudily illuminated fin-de-siècle confection plopped down in the middle of a busy intersection. He sat there on the steps, blinking against the glare of the spotlights and watching matchbox-sized cars weave frenzied patterns in the street below. After a while, he wandered back up the Corso. It was past eight, and the shops were closing, grates falling shut all around him. He knew exactly where he was and yet couldn’t help feeling completely lost.

  He ended up at a café in a pedestrian zone near the Navona, ordering a glass of wine he couldn’t pronounce from a waitress who looked like a young Anjelica Huston. The restaurant was packed and hot so he took his wineglass out to a streetside table, wiping the water from a chair with a damp paper napkin. Across the street was a bookstore; next to that, a delicatessen with hairy boar legs hanging from hooks and packages of pasta tied with raffia in the windows. As he watched, a young family trundled out of the delicatessen. The mother pushed an empty stroller, whose seat was occupied by a long salami and a string bag full of vegetables. The rightful tenant of the stroller stumbled alongside: a toddler in a puffy pink snowsuit, walking thanks to the assistance of her father, a leather-clad young man who was behind her holding her arms aloft. The little girl bumped across the earth, her unsure feet touching the ground only temporarily before her father lifted her up again. The family paused as they hit the chilly night air. The father bent to zip up the pink jumpsuit while the mother chattered in rapid Italian. And then they both laughed as the little girl threw her arms up toward the sky, begging to be borne aloft and rescued from the burden of gravity. The father lifted the toddler up again, this time raising her all the way to his shoulders, where he deposited her. She gripped his hair and howled with terrified pleasure as he locked her legs into place across his chest. In this fashion, the threesome wandered off down the street, toward home and dinner.

  Jeremy watched them go. That’s what love is, he thought, knowing implicitly that it’s your job to lift up your kid, and never caring that it’s a job in the first place. He tried to recall a time when his parents had carried him like that, and although he could conjure up a clear memory of Jillian dragging him by his hand as they hurried to catch a train somewhere in Southeast Asia, he couldn’t remember being raised high like that; certainly not by his father. Maybe he would have been too young to remember.

  For a fleeting, aching instant, he wanted desperately to be responsible for someone else; to sacrifice himself entirely to someone else’s needs. It wasn’t Aoki that he thought of. Instead, a clear thought crossed his mind: I’m going to carry my kid around on my shoulders, whether he knows to ask for it or not. And he had a sharp visual of it too—of the laughing, adoring toddler on his shoulders and the amusement of the mother beside him, and he realized,
as he conjured up this image, that the face of the woman he’d envisioned beside him was Claudia.

  “Another glass?” The waitress stood in front of him, speaking in nearly perfect English. “We have snacks inside, if you like. It’s warmer there.” She cocked a hip toward him as she emptied his ashtray, sliding in an empty one in its place, and then smiled flirtatiously. The implicit promise of a three-day jaunt to Neverland, no strings attached, crossed his mind. He could do it, if he wanted; he could do anything he dreamed of right now.

  “No, thank you,” he said. “I think I’m done.”

  He thought of Aoki, back in his hotel room, examining her bleeding profile in the mirror. He stood, pushing a ten-euro note under the ashtray. And then he crossed the street, drawn to the lights of the bookstore and the handwritten paper sign in the window that announced, modestly, INTERNET POINT. It was nearly closing time, and he was the only customer in the shop. A few young clerks wandered the floor, straightening stacks of paperbacks and chatting in Italian as they cashed out the register. One of them accepted a coin from Jeremy and directed him toward a computer terminal against the back wall.

  The computer keyboard was in Italian, and a PC to boot, so it took Jeremy a few minutes to figure out how to load the Internet browser and type a URL without making any grievous errors. When he finally logged in to his e-mail account, it was bloated with several weeks’ worth of messages. There was one from Edgar, telling him that BeTee had been acquired by a Japanese men’s clothing company and was expanding. A note from Julian Bragg, checking on Audiophone’s progress. And there was a longer e-mail from Daniel, in response to Jeremy’s previous apology for having missed his December wedding to Cristina. They’d found out that the baby was going to be a girl, Daniel wrote; they were naming her Allegra, they’d bought a house in Eagle Rock, they were planning to have the baby at home. He missed playing music, but not as much as he’d thought he would; he hoped Jeremy was making a go of it, for both of them. The last two lines of the message felt like an addendum, a momentary ray of skepticism breaking through a message otherwise dictated by good intentions: I hope you know what you’re doing, Jeremy, Daniel wrote, because from here it looks like you’re acting like a crazy man.

  There were a few invitations to Los Angeles New Year’s parties that he’d missed, and a smattering of Facebook invitations, and one petition forwarded by his father demanding the legalization of medical marijuana, but there was nothing from Claudia. There was no reason to expect anything, he thought. Still, Jeremy clicked through to the end of his mailbox, through two months’ worth of archived e-mail, just to make sure. And then he sat there, overwhelmed with disappointment.

  The overhead lights began to click off, one by one, until the only light left in the store was coming from the front window displays. The last clerk stood directly behind Jeremy and read over his shoulder, not bothering to mask his impatience.

  Ignoring him, Jeremy opened a new window. He typed Claudia’s e-mail address and then paused, unsure of himself. The clerk cleared his throat and said something incomprehensible, and before Jeremy could think better of it, he wrote three words, hit SEND, and stood up.

  I miss you.

  I love you.

  I am sorry.

  I was wrong.

  As he exited the bookstore, he couldn’t recall which three words he had written, but all of them felt true.

  Claudia

  NEW LISTING: Lovingly renovated two-bedroom bungalow in Mount Washington. Fully remodeled bathrooms; new electrical, roof and hardwood floors; weatherproofed French doors onto a deck and views all the way to downtown. Charming period details throughout. A dream starter home for a lucky couple. $589,999.

  CLAUDIA MOVED INTO HER NEW APARTMENT ON ONE OF THOSE sunny, crystalline winter days, a day that had been plucked out of bucolic May and planted serendipitously at the end of January. It hadn’t rained since December and, in the papers and on TV, meteorologists were offering ominous predictions of an impending drought, but up here, within the double-paned central-air-conditioned safety of her sixteenth-floor loft in downtown Los Angeles, Claudia felt she could ride out the weather.

  Her new home was one of fifty-three units in The Luxist, an Art Deco bank building that had spent time as a Mexican movie palace after World War II, a flophouse during the decline of the 1970s, and then abandoned entirely, before it was finally reincarnated as a luxury condo conversion during the recent real estate boom. The building was in a state of permanent near-completion, construction having halted when funds ran out the previous fall. That unintentionally left Claudia’s one-bedroom loft with exposed heating ducts overhead, flaking plaster friezes above the windows, and a sink in the open-plan kitchen that didn’t actually run hot water. Upstairs was a rooftop swimming pool, surrounded by an empty framework of cabanas that had yet to be built; in the basement was a gym, where CNBC played on television sets over a row of Stair Masters and nonfunctional treadmills. And yet there was free building-wide Wi-Fi, a doorman in the lobby, and sustainable bamboo flooring in the hallways. Besides Claudia, and Esme in her condo two floors below, only eighteen other units in the building were occupied. Claudia had rented hers for a bargain, since the building’s developers were on the verge of bankruptcy and desperate to milk every dollar from their prerecession folly that they could.

  Moving here had been Esme’s idea. When Claudia put her house on the market in December, Esme had begged her to move into her building. “I could use the company,” Esme said, “and frankly, so could you.” She wasn’t wrong. After two months of staring nightly into a dark canyon, wearing her solitude like a second skin, Claudia was looking forward to life in an urban center, to peering out at orderly grids of yellow squares glowing in the buildings around her, each cube filled with the promise of humanity. She was ready not to be isolated anymore.

  She hadn’t quite expected everything to move so quickly, though. Her house in Mount Washington had sold almost instantly, thanks to the aggressive pricing and savvy marketing of Marcie Carson. The fire turned out to be an asset in the end; all that brand-new construction brought up the value of the house, and she’d ended up listing it for only $36,000 less than they’d bought it for in the first place—a minor miracle, considering the state of the real estate market. She was in escrow with an environmental scientist and his pregnant wife before the bank had even accepted Claudia’s final offer on Dolores’s house across the street.

  As for Dolores’s house, Claudia had bought that outright, using the money from the Beautiful Boy account, knowing she’d never be approved for another mortgage. Buying Dolores’s home for her may have been a stupid move, financially speaking, but it wasn’t going to be a completely losing proposition. The monthly rent that Dolores would be paying her should cover nearly half of Claudia’s rent for this condo. Someday, far down the line, if and when the market ever bounced back, she might even be able to fix the house up and sell it at a profit.

  Not that this was the goal, it never had been. Nor had it she bought the house as a bid for ego-affirming gratitude; she knew better than to expect Dolores to be appreciative. Rather, Dolores had reacted to Claudia’s proposal—that Claudia buy Dolores’s home out of foreclosure and let Dolores rent it back from her—with her usual display of curmudgeonly skepticism. “Better to own,” she grumbled. “Not paying deposit, OK?” She then proceeded to bargain Claudia down on the rent, from $700 a month to $650.

  And it wasn’t a form of revenge, either—though Claudia had imagined how horrified Jeremy would be to know that Aoki’s museum-quality masterpiece had gone to pay for a house for Dolores, of all people. Take that, Aoki, she found herself thinking, as she signed the final documentation at the escrow agents’ office. Your precious painting paid for an aesthetic travesty. And yes, maybe that did feel good, but it certainly wasn’t what had driven her to call Marcie Carson in the first place.

  No, the only way she could explain her actions was that they were a form of secret penance only she would ever u
nderstand. Karmic compensation, as it were, for her own contributions to the world gone awry, for betrayed principles and blind self-interest. Up here on the sixteenth floor, she could think of Dolores rotting contentedly away among her dusty memories, of Mary writing college admission essays in her quiet bedroom, and feel that she’d restored some sort of order to an increasingly unpredictable world. Even if her own life still teetered on the fine edge of a precipice, she was preserving balance where it was needed even more.

  If Mary knew about the exact details of her grandmother’s new living situation, Claudia hadn’t heard about it. Maybe it wouldn’t make a bit of difference in her life, in the end, but that didn’t seem to matter either. Claudia suspected that she would never hear from or see Mary again, unless it was to read about her former student’s achievements in the paper some year in the future. That felt like enough.

  Frequently, these days, she thought of a term that the commentators on TV kept using: moral hazard. Even though Claudia wasn’t quite clear what this meant in pure economic terms (something about the reckless behavior of banks that insulate themselves from risk), the phrase felt apt and true to her own situation. Everyone pretends that their lives exist in a vacuum, she thought, but the truth is that our individual lives exist in an intimate relationship to the rest of the world. Our actions have consequences in places we are too willfully blind to imagine. Everyone was interconnected after all, and only now was the world waking up to that fact and realizing that this collectively self-centered state of perpetual adolescence—the gimme gimme era—might actually be ethically flawed. No one realizes the moral hazards of their ambitions, she thought. Not even me.

  The movers had left her belongings in one massive heap in the middle of the floor, ignoring the labels that Claudia had marked on the top and bottom of each box. Claudia found one marked GLASSWARE and unpacked a solitary tumbler. She filled it with warm soda and went to gaze out the floor-to-ceiling windows at her new view. A few blocks to the east of The Luxist was a homeless encampment the size of the town she’d grown up in, and a few blocks west was a brand-new gourmet food store paved in marble and brass that blithely sold fifty-dollar lemon tarts and baseball-sized orbs of burrata mozzarella as if the economy had never crashed. In between were blocks of crumbling Art Deco buildings that had been converted into Spanish-language theaters and iron-grated toy stores selling counterfeit SpongeBob SquarePants dolls; and splashy glass-clad bank buildings with OFFICE SPACE AVAILABLE NOW! banners flying across their fronts. Gazing directly to the south, she could see the blinding electronic billboards that fronted the new entertainment complex and convention center. In forty-foot-high LED lights, the billboards pleaded with her to drink Coke Zero, to attend a Lakers game, to visit the cineplex, to spend money she no longer had. She found it comforting to stand here, looking out at the epicenter of Los Angeles’s demise, rebirth, and demise again. These stately old buildings had survived booms and busts for a hundred years or more and were still standing, confident that they would be reinvented in perpetuity, always accommodating the world’s changing whims.