This Is Where We Live Page 13

  Lucy. The noise had begun again, and now that Claudia was fully awake it was clear that the sound wasn’t animal at all. It was human: a high-pitched squeal, amplified through the grated vent in the wall. The metallic scraping that in a semiconscious state sounded plausibly like a garbage can being looted by the local wildlife was actually the damage caused by a cast-iron four-poster bed rubbing rhythmically against a wall. Lucy was having sex. Claudia listened intently, curious and repelled.

  She poked Jeremy in the side. “Listen,” she said. “Lucy’s getting some action.”

  Jeremy grunted and rolled over, taking the blanket back with him. He muttered something inaudible and resumed snoring.

  There was no point in trying to go back to sleep; she had to get up in half an hour anyway, in order to make it to work by seven. Instead, she clambered over Jeremy’s legs, grabbed her bathrobe from the hook on the back of the door, and tiptoed past Lucy’s room to the kitchen. She stood groggily there in the dark, waiting for the coffee to percolate as the gurgling of the coffeemaker mingled with the fainter groans and muffled giggles coming from the other side of the house.

  So far, Lucy had been, as promised, an invisible roommate. Claudia was usually gone by the time Lucy returned home from work, and during Lucy’s days off—which, as far as Claudia could tell, came intermittently and often during the middle of the week—she vanished to Van Nuys to visit her mother. But there were signs of their new roommate everywhere. Baroque underwear—frilly lace garments, which Lucy hand-washed in the sink—hung from a line in her bathroom. The refrigerator was packed with mysterious items only barely recognizable as food: Jello-lite strawberry pudding cups, vanilla Chug, toasted-coconut-covered marshmallows. Six unappealing watercolor landscapes, as unskilled as Lucy had promised they would be, now hung on the wall in the hallway, and a mumsy chintz love seat that Lucy had inherited from her grandmother was plopped right into the center of their otherwise carefully curated living room. Lucy had made herself right at home, and of course Claudia didn’t fault her for that; but she couldn’t help feeling that an enemy encircling their encampment was about to close in. It’s better than the alternative, she told herself. It’s better than foreclosure. From the bedroom, she heard a garbled moan and then silence.

  A cup of coffee in hand, Claudia flipped through the morning paper, skipping past the graph on the front page, depicting the plummeting New York Stock Exchange, and the business section, bemoaning the government seizure of Claudia and Jeremy’s bank, and over to Real Estate. Here she found a four-page photo essay documenting the foreclosure epidemic in the Inland Empire. In the pictures, empty houses sat like tombstones, marking the death of an era. Faded for sale signs hung limply in the hot desert sun, as the desolate peaks of the San Bernardino mountains loomed overhead. Black algae blanketed the bottom of never-used swimming pools; abandoned swing sets sported rust and graffiti tags from the local delinquents. At the entrance to a half-built planned development—where the rotting houses lined the horizon, their wooden skeletons exposed to the elements—a sagging banner begged passing drivers: PARADISE VALLEY HOMES, $399,000 AND UP! LIVE HERE NOW.

  “Why don’t you sell your house for a loss and just move somewhere cheaper?” That’s what Claudia’s mother had said to her last week, when Claudia called to cry about the outrageous mortgage, the unwanted roommate, the money she was pouring into four-dollar-a-gallon gasoline for her crosstown commute. “You don’t have to live in the middle of Los Angeles, honey. You could move out to the suburbs. It’s safer there anyway, and you could still commute to work.” Thinking of Ruth’s words, Claudia stared at the tract homes in the photographs and shuddered. Was that what it was going to come to? Sure, for an hour-and-a-half drive on the Interstate (if traffic was good, which it never was), anyone could have their pick of these foreclosed homes at cut-rate prices. This was the “golden opportunity” left behind in the sludge of America’s waning economy. But Claudia wanted to be here, in the middle of the city, among the living. Wasn’t that why she had left Wisconsin in the first place? It didn’t seem fair: According to the news, the world was collapsing around them: investment banks shutting their doors daily, unemployment at six percent and rising, oil topping $100 a barrel, the stock market in free fall, and the second Depression barreling down on them. But in urban Los Angeles, a shoebox-sized starter home in a not-great neighborhood cost over half a million dollars, minimum, even now. “Why don’t you move somewhere cheaper?” She wished she had a more logical answer for her mother, one that made sense even to her.

  She closed the newspaper and began going over her notes for today’s “open dialogue hours.” This was the Ennis Gates version of parent-teacher conferences; it lasted almost a month and involved lengthy one-on-one sessions with each student’s parents. Claudia felt as if she had gone on trial, with a never-ending parade of overprotective parents serving as a host of inquisitors testing her faith. “I want to make sure that you understand Robin’s special test-taking needs.” “Theodore mentioned that you assign much more homework than his last film teacher.” “I noticed that Jordan was writing an essay about Taxi Driver last week. Do you really think that’s an appropriate movie for a sixteen-year-old?” “Can you possibly check to see that Kelsey is taking her Adderall after lunch?”

  After only a week of meetings, Claudia’s head was reeling with the details she needed to remember, the land mines she had to avoid in coming months. This afternoon, she had three sets of parents coming in—the parents of Mary Hernandez, Lisa Yang, and, most promising and problematic of all, Penelope Evanovich.

  Claudia’s first weeks at Ennis Gates Academy had passed in a pleasant ego-affirming haze. Classes were fun. Her students were eager (eager!) to discuss the stylized sets of German Expressionist film and how the chiaroscuro in Touch of Evil reflected themes of moral ambiguity. They asked her for movie and (after learning that her husband was in a band) music recommendations. They brought her rugelach and brownies that their Peruvian housekeepers had baked. When she walked through the Academy’s campus, they would call out at her from across the quad. Hey, Munger! Yo, Munger, what’s up? Even though she probably shouldn’t have encouraged such informal intimacy with her students, she couldn’t help but love it. Here, finally, was her captive audience, an audience that spent every day staring at her attentively and (when they weren’t sending surreptitious text messages or examining their split ends or inking elaborate designs on their canvas Chuck Taylors) listening. They jotted down her words as if they held real value. When she graded essay tests, she was startled to recognize exact phrases that had come from her mouth, dutifully recorded and memorized and then regurgitated in smudged ballpoint pen. This was definitely the upside of teaching, she thought; no studio executive would ever look at her with the kind of trusting adoration these students offered.

  But then there was Penelope. The senior was proving to be a headache, despite Claudia’s attempts to coax her out of her aggressive armor. Penelope had taken possession of a seat on the far side of the classroom, and sat there every day, slumped sideways in her chair, barely lifting her pencil, and regarding Claudia with undisguised skepticism. Rather than raise her hand now, she just blurted out her reaction to Claudia’s lectures, often before Claudia had even finished a sentence. She prefaced almost every utterance with “My dad told me that” or “I visited Redford’s set once and” or “We have an original print of that movie at home, and I’m pretty sure that” and brought almost every discussion to a dead halt.

  Although the other students, themselves a fairly jaded and experienced bunch, usually rolled their eyes at Penelope, Claudia had noticed that they were beginning to be affected by her behavior. More than once, a student had unthinkingly directed a question directly to Penelope rather than Claudia. Perhaps this wasn’t so surprising, considering that Penelope’s inside knowledge of late-twentieth-century cinema, culled from her father’s filmography, occasionally seemed greater than Claudia’s own. (One evening, Claudia cross-ref
erenced her curriculum with Samuel Evanovich’s IMDB profile, only to discover that he was linked to almost half the movies in her lesson plan.) Still, Penelope’s presence in the classroom was like a black hole, draining Claudia of energy and enthusiasm.

  To make matters worse, Penelope wasn’t exactly turning out to be the star pupil that Claudia had once envisioned. (That role belonged unequivocally to Mary Hernandez: the deadly serious student hadn’t received anything lower than an A minus). Penelope offered up half-written essays, failing to complete them even when Claudia cut her a break and gave her extra time. She turned in quizzes with more doodles on them than answers. It wasn’t that Penelope didn’t know anything about film; that was abundantly clear. Was there some kind of learning disability that had yet to be diagnosed? Fear of test-taking? ADD? Dyslexia? Claudia didn’t want to consider the alternative: that Penelope had taken a dislike to her for some reason, and this was a deliberate gesture, a middle finger extended straight at her. After all, she’d borrowed that screener of Spare Parts and not only never gave Claudia any feedback, she never even returned it. The vision of that cozy evening chez Evanovich was fading, week by week, no matter how hard she tried to overlook Penelope’s antics and encourage some sort of camaraderie in their place.

  This afternoon she would have to address these problems with the Evanoviches. It was a conversation she’d been dreading for weeks: Hi, Mr. Evanovich, so nice to meet you, I’m a huge fan of your work. Will you please autograph my copy of The Manchurian Candidate, which we’re discussing in class next week? By the way, your daughter is a know-it-all who needs an attitude adjustment. Yes, I know she’s gotten this far at Ennis Gates without anyone else making a stink, but I’m just that kind of teacher. Also, I know she worships you, but can you tell her to stop mentioning you when I’m lecturing? She could not imagine this going over well.

  Her plan was to draft out her thoughts in advance, leaving no room for blurted annoyance or unintentional obsequiousness. She sat with a pencil in hand, thankful for the stillness of these dark moments before dawn, as she mulled over the most politic way to present her case. I think we need to discuss your daughter’s motivation issues, she wrote, then scratched it out. Penelope is a winning kid but … No, too pandering. I wonder whether a consultation with a learning capabilities tutor would be useful, she finally began, just as she heard a rustling in the hallway, footsteps approaching. A male figure appeared in the doorway, tripped over the threshold, and toppled forward into the kitchen, landing almost in Claudia’s lap. She pulled her bathrobe closed with one hand as she tried to steady him with the other.

  The man was wearing nothing except for a pair of tight white cotton briefs. He was also, by Claudia’s measure, about twice Lucy’s age: A thin ruffle of hair encircled a bald patch on the top of his head, gray curls erupted off his bare barrel chest, and his fleshy face drooped, as if someone had tugged his skin loose from the bones. When she reached out to grab his hand—soft, like a baby’s—and heaved him upright, she noticed that he was wearing a wedding ring.

  “Thanks,” he muttered, clearly embarrassed by her presence. “Didn’t think anyone’d be up at this hour.” He turned to flee, and bumped straight into Lucy, who had appeared in the doorway behind him. Lucy wore an astonishing garment: a floor-length silk nightgown in pink, trimmed with marabou feathers, like something the femme fatale would wear in a 1930s film noir.

  “Claudia, you’re awake! I hope we didn’t wake you up?” Her face revealed none of her partner’s mortification; if anything, she looked pleased to have been caught. “I see you’ve met Pete. Pete, this is my roommate, Claudia.”

  “You’re home … early,” Claudia said faintly. “I thought you got off work at seven A.M.?”

  Lucy walked to the fridge and opened it. She fished around inside, retrieving a Heineken—one of Jeremy’s, Claudia noted to herself, but said nothing—and handed it to Pete, who inched toward the doorway, clearly itching to leave. But Lucy plopped down at the kitchen table, across from Claudia. “Oh, they’re fiddling with our schedules at the hospital,” she said. “I got off early and Pete gave me a ride home. Pete’s a surgeon at Good Samaritan. Thoracic.”

  “Thoracic. Is that the—the throat?” They were all smiling at each other, but only Lucy’s grin seemed genuine.

  “Actually, lungs and diaphragm …. You know, Lucy, I should probably get going,” Pete muttered, putting the beer bottle down on the counter.

  “Oh!” Lucy popped up from her seat. “Don’t go yet! I’m sure Claudia doesn’t mind us being here, do you?”

  “Of course not,” Claudia lied, eyeing the scratch paper under her hand, the clock ticking away the minutes until she had to leave.

  But Pete was already out the door. Lucy sighed and rolled her eyes, as if he were a rogue child who must be humored. “Don’t mind him, he’s just tired,” she whispered. “Surgeons put in such long hours and the late nights really start to mess with your head after a while. Oh, by the way! They’re changing my schedule at the hospital. I’m back on day shift starting tomorrow, so, back to real life for me! Maybe we can all go to see a movie together this weekend?”

  Claudia felt her smile ossifying across her face. Day shifts? Movies together? What happened to invisibility? “I’m not sure about our plans,” she said carefully. “But I’ll talk to Jeremy about it.”

  “Fabulous.” Lucy turned to pursue Dr. Pete back to her bedroom. The dawn was starting to break outside, with gray morning light washing in from the east. Claudia rose from her chair and went to the sink to pour out the cold remains of her coffee, before heading down the hall to break the bad news to Jeremy.

  Lisa Yang’s parents were the first of the afternoon—a brash movie publicist and her real estate magnate husband who peppered Claudia with concerns about their daughter’s GPA, argued that a B-plus on an essay should have been an A-minus, wondered aloud whether Lisa’s extensive extracurricular activities (soccer, debate, student council) merited more grading leniency, and generally made it clear that Claudia’s primary concern should be helping their daughter get into Yale. By the time Luz Hernandez marched through the classroom door, fifteen minutes late for her meeting, Claudia was already exhausted.

  Luz was a stout woman in unfashionable high-waisted jeans and generic white basketball shoes, toting an overstuffed fake Chanel purse in one hand and the now-familiar Chicken Kitchen bag in the other. As the woman came closer, Claudia was shocked to realize that Mary’s mother was roughly her own age. Her brow was etched with exhaustion, but her black hair—braided, just like Mary’s—was still free of stray grays. Unlike Mrs. Yang, and most of the other Ennis Gates mothers, who painted their faces with an artful rainbow of age-defying concealers and neutral eyeshadows and smoothing creams and self-tanners, Luz Hernandez wore no makeup at all. Somehow this made her look even younger. She must have been in high school when she had Mary, Claudia realized.

  “Quince pie, I assume?” Claudia said, masking her surprise by reaching out for the bag.

  “Pastelitos de membrillo,” Luz corrected her, rolling her r with pointed brio. “My mother’s recipe.”

  “I always enjoy the treats Mary brings. It’s very generous of you.”

  “Mary says all the students bring food,” Luz said flatly.

  “Yes, but—” Claudia said, and stopped without finishing the rest of her sentence—Yes, but most of them bring things their housekeepers bake—as she recalled that Luz was, in fact, a single mother who made her living as a housekeeper and nanny to Hollywood-type families living up in the hills. Her quince pies were undoubtedly being delivered to other teachers at other private schools at that very moment. Although probably not in Chicken Kitchen take-out bags.

  Claudia gestured toward the chairs that she’d set up in a triangle on the stage, and Luz settled uncomfortably in one of the plastic bucket seats across from her. She didn’t bother examining the room as the other parents did; it was as if the physical trappings of Ennis Gates were of no concern to
her whatsoever. She wondered if Luz resented the very existence of Ennis Gates in all its sanctified bourgeois privilege, or whether she saw it as her daughter’s golden ticket out of an economic sinkhole. Probably some combination of the two, she thought.

  “My daughter is a good student,” Luz announced, out of the blue.

  “Yes,” Claudia agreed. “My top student.”

  Luz smiled, revealing coffee-stained teeth. It wasn’t a smile of pleasure; it was the smile of a woman who already knew. “She’s going to go to UCLA”

  “Yes, she mentioned that was her goal,” Claudia said, sensing that she was not the one running this meeting. She glanced at the clock—the allotted half hour was nearly gone already, and the Evanoviches would arrive in a few minutes. “With her grades she can go anywhere she wants. Ivy League, even.”

  “State school is cheaper than Ivy League,” Luz said. She scrutinized Claudia. “Better financial aid. And she can live at home. You’re writing her recommendation, right?”

  Claudia’s chest lurched uncomfortably as she remembered this long-forgotten promise; she hadn’t even set up the meeting that Mary requested. Apparently Mary had been too shy to ask twice. “Soon,” she apologized.

  “Well, she needs it next month for early admission, so don’t wait too long, OK?” Luz said, vague confrontation larding her words. “October thirty.”

  “Of course.” Claudia scribbled this down in the margin of her notebook, page fifty-six of the must-remember items that had been conveyed to her over the last few days.

  “You have anything bad to say about my daughter?” Luz continued.

  “No,” Claudia said, truthfully. She didn’t have much to say about Mary that hadn’t just been acknowledged. Mary was a great student; she never missed class; she sat quietly in the front of the classroom and always raised her hand instead of blurting out the answer. She was sincere—annoyingly sincere, with her perpetual supply of quince pastries in Chicken Kitchen bags. Watching inoffensive little Mary sitting quietly on her own, earnestly scribbling down every word Claudia spoke—a clear outsider at Ennis Gates—Claudia occasionally glimpsed echoes of herself: the orthodontic headgear–wearing adolescent who, at five foot eight by her freshman year of high school, had been a gangling, shy Architeuthis doomed to attend the homecoming ball stag and dance only one slow song with a pitying member of the boy’s basketball team. For some reason, this didn’t endear Mary to her. Instead, she wanted to look quickly away, as if Mary represented a familiar overeagerness and yearning intention that Claudia had once shared but now wanted to shed entirely. (Nice girls like you are devoured as an amuse-bouche before the main course, she’d remember RC’s words, looking at her.) So she let her attention be dominated instead by the brattish Evanovich scion sitting behind her, the brutal RST CLASS BITC who knew how the game of life was played. Somehow, in that process, she’d managed to block Mary’s request from her mind entirely. Write the recommendation, she told herself. She needs it more than anyone else here.