This Is Where We Live Page 20

  In any case, Claudia’s life in Los Angeles couldn’t be further from her mother’s, and their relationship had long ago settled into something affectionate but vaguely distant, as if Claudia were an exotic creature that Ruth couldn’t quite believe had sprung from her own loins. At Claudia’s wedding, three years earlier, her mother had worn a vaguely perplexed look on her face throughout the entire proceeding, rattled by the cupcakes and the Internet-certified officiant and bridesmaids who were wearing black, of all colors! But that didn’t mean she didn’t cry, and it didn’t mean she didn’t love her son-in-law, even if her reasoning stemmed more from the simple fact that Jeremy loved her daughter than any personal connection to him.

  “No one calls this late unless something’s wrong. Here, let me go in the other room. Your father’s dead asleep and I don’t want to wake him.” In the background the television clicked off and the sheets rustled as her mother climbed out of bed and put on a bathrobe. “OK, tell me what’s wrong.”

  Claudia hesitated for a long time, trying to figure out where to start, and then plunged in anyway. “Do you ever get the feeling,” she finally said, “that you’ve idealized something that never really existed in the first place? That you’ve been living on the precipice, looking straight ahead at some perfect blue horizon that you’ll never arrive at, because instead, right below you is a canyon that you’re about to fall into? That the world, as it really is, is a cruel joke and downright abusive?”

  “Abusive?” Her mother’s voice grew suddenly alert. “Is Jeremy abusing you?”

  “No!” She sighed. “No, I just mean … I think our ambitions have outpaced what is really possible for us, and now Jeremy and I are paying the price.”

  Her mother went silent. “Oh, honey, I don’t know what advice to give you. All I know is good things happen every time an angel smiles, so you just have to be patient and keep smiling at the heavens and eventually they’ll smile back.”

  Her mother must have said this to her at least a hundred times over the last thirty-four years, and Claudia still didn’t think it made any sense, nor did she appreciate the suggestion that her fate was in the hands of some smirking cherubim. “I don’t think that’s going to help much, Mom,” she said.

  Static blew through the line, an oceanic buzz that made her mother sound like she was speaking from some great depth. “Is this about Jeremy, honey? Are you two having problems?”

  Claudia hesitated. “I’m not sure he’s cut out for married life, Mom.”

  “Oh, now that’s a story I know,” her mother said briskly.

  “It is?” She couldn’t believe she was talking to her mother about this. But her parents had been married for thirty-nine years, and they had always seemed reasonably happy; maybe not passionately in love, but at least cheerfully complacent. Maybe her mother harbored wisdom on these subjects that Claudia had missed by underestimating her. Perhaps her own life was still closer to Wisconsin than she had been willing to admit.

  “Well, did Jeremy do something in particular?”

  Claudia tried to figure out how to put her husband’s emotional betrayals into words, and failed. “I don’t think he likes my new teaching job, for one,” she said, lamely.

  “But it’s got benefits and health insurance!? Why on earth wouldn’t he like that?”

  “That’s not exactly the issue,” Claudia said, growing frustrated again. “It’s more like—he doesn’t like the direction we’re headed. With our lives.”

  Ruth lowered her voice. “Did I ever tell you what your father did not long after we were married? It had been—oh, dear, maybe six years since our wedding? Your sister was four years old and you were a very colicky baby and the state of our house wasn’t very comforting, I’ll tell you that. Your father started coming home late from the store every night, and I was just absolutely convinced that he was having an affair. Remember Squeaky Holbrook from down the street? Her. Lord knows why—she had fat calves and a laugh like a horse, but for some reason I fixated on the fact that I’d found the two of them in the kitchen together at a party once. Anyway, I went into full battle mode. I decided to ship you and your sister off to my parents for a week, and your father and I went and spent some time in a cabin up on the lake, and there we sat down and made a list of the things we most wanted to do. Together and separately. It was like a second honeymoon, and when we got back home everything was fine again.”

  “So, wait. Was Dad having an affair?”

  The note of satisfaction faded from her mother’s voice. “Well, I never asked, to be honest. But I think he was just overwhelmed by what it all meant. Marriage and children and taking care of us.”

  “Oh.” Claudia considered this. “So what were the things on your lists?”

  Ruth snorted. “I can’t remember a one of mine. I think your father maybe wanted to learn how to fly-fish. I believe we did a few of them and then didn’t bother with the rest. They didn’t matter, really.”

  Claudia thought this sounded terribly depressing: a list of false promises to each other, never to be redeemed. How was it going to help Claudia and Jeremy to write down on a piece of paper that they wanted to be in a rock band, to direct movies, to backpack across Bhutan, to learn to speak Japanese? Their problem wasn’t a lack of articulated desire, it was the inability to fulfill those desires. She understood, in that moment, the futility of ever trying to connect with her mother. She had become unparentable, so completely distant from everything she’d once known that she was now completely on her own. It was silly of her to have imagined that her mother would be able to offer anything but generic platitudes, anyway. How could she? Her mother only knew what Claudia told her, which wasn’t much at all. The last vestigial shred of Wisconsin inside her drained away, and she knew she could never go back. But where could she go from here?

  The faint wail of a fire engine reverberated down the ravine. The wind was picking up; the swing twisted back and forth in apparent agony. The streetlight flickered in and out, making the park look spectacularly creepy, something from a bad horror movie. Claudia wanted to get off the phone. “You’re right,” she said. “I guess I just needed to vent. Don’t worry.”

  “Oh, I don’t really worry about you that much, honey,” her mother said. “You’ve always been a sensitive girl, too easily wounded, but underneath that you’re stubborn as a bulldog. You know how to get something when you really want it. So I know you won’t give up anything important without a fight. It’s easy to have faith in you.”

  In the shadows of the park, the deflated ball had begun to roll slowly in the wind, on a wobbly course toward the fence. Claudia let her mother’s words—It’s easy to have faith in you—sink in. It was the most intimate observation that Ruth had made about Claudia in years, and Claudia grew quiet as she swallowed down a lump that was forming in the back of her throat.

  But her mother registered her silence as a hesitation. “Should I be worried about you?” she asked, her voice finally betraying anxiety.

  Claudia found her voice again. “Of course not, Mom. Good night,” she said, and hung up. She started the car and swung back out into the street, pointing the Jetta back up the hill.

  She was going home, of course—there was nowhere else to go. But it wasn’t just that: She was incapable of giving up. As her mother observed, it was just her nature. There were things she wanted—and they weren’t outrageous things to want—a nice home, a happy marriage, financial stability, the ability to pursue her dreams. A few bad months, one terrible fight, shouldn’t mean the end of all that. It shouldn’t mean that they suddenly didn’t love each other anymore. She would go home and save it all.

  Claudia drove slowly back through Mount Washington, passing the darkened homes of her neighbors. She passed a clutch of fading FOR SALE signs and a half-built modern monstrosity whose construction had abruptly halted in mid-September, seemingly doomed to spend the rest of its existence swathed in blue plastic. The neighborhood was changing again, she could feel it, as if a ti
de had crept up on shore and was now receding again, exposing the dead fish and strangled kelp in its wake.

  She thought of her father, probably hiding out in his hardware store just to avoid the screaming kids and demanding wife back at home. Is that what she had become to her own husband, a nag and a bore? Maybe she was being unfair. So what if he couldn’t seem to launch a viable career, or let go of his youth, or take their potential foreclosure as seriously as she did? Perhaps she’d unconsciously absorbed her parents’ middle-class American values—husband as provider—despite everything, and it was her job to expunge them, not his to meet them.

  By the time she swung her car onto her own rutted cul de sac, she almost felt OK again. It was a silly thing, what had happened—just a painting, a bit of nostalgia, too much stress on both their parts. She’d go home and they’d talk it out. We’ll go to therapy, she thought. It can’t possibly be as bad as it seemed. We just need to stay the course, communicate better. And maybe once he’s happier, he’ll be open to selling that painting. She briefly considered the Lucy issue, and what she might have to say—or, more accurately, get Jeremy to say—to their roommate to keep her from moving out. They couldn’t afford to lose the rental income.

  She noticed the light first, a red strobe coursing across the horizon, and then the smell of charred wood. A fire engine was parked on their block, with three men in yellow fire jackets winding a hose back into its housing. Water poured down the hill toward her car, a deluge that filled the divots in the asphalt and splashed up against her tires. It wasn’t until Claudia was nearly home, and could see Lucy standing helplessly in the street next to Jeremy—balancing the enormous painting upright with his left hand—that she realized that the fire truck was parked in front of her own house.

  Jeremy

  THERE WERE SEVENTY-EIGHT VARIETIES OF NAILS FOR SALE IN Home Depot, and Jeremy couldn’t fathom the differences between most of them. He stood there in the carpentry aisle, contemplating the function of the L-shape flooring nail and the PNI hardened T-nail, wondering whether he needed 1⅜-inch nails or 1¼-inch nails or whether he should just buy the 2000-piece PortaNail Complete Nailing Kit and be done with it. The thrum of a forklift reverberated off the warehouse ceiling, and a red light flashed at the end of the aisle, summoning someone who never seemed to arrive. He hated this place; it was a reminder of his own inadequacies as a man. Men were supposed to know how to buy nails, why a wet/dry shop vac was necessary, the uses of plywood versus pressure-treated lumber. Not Jeremy. Three years later, he still hadn’t opened the forty-eight-bit drill set that his father-in-law had given him for their first Christmas because, frankly, the thing terrified him.

  He grabbed three boxes of nails at random and turned, nearly colliding into Barry, who had come up silently behind him. His father-in-law shook his head when he saw what Jeremy held in his hands.

  “Those aren’t going to do us any good. They’re good for stapling paper together and that’s about it.” Barry shuffled over to the wall of nails and selected four different boxes, depositing them in the cart that sat, laden with lumber and drywall, in the center of the aisle. He scratched the liver spot that capped the bald crown of his head and then tugged at the sagging waistband of his pleat-front slacks. “For what we’re doing, we’ll also need a nail gun, preferably a Stanley, and some sturdy 3½-inchers. I can’t believe you two don’t own a nail gun. I could have sworn I gave you one. What have you been using, a regular old double-face?”

  It was a pointed question, as far as Jeremy could tell: Jeremy had already given Barry ample evidence that he had no clue as to what was in their toolbox. If the seventy-one-year-old man was trying to show him up, he was succeeding. “I don’t know,” he said, and smiled to hide his humiliation. “I don’t think we’ve been using anything, actually.”

  Barry ran his hands authoritatively over a stack of lethal-looking nail guns and chuckled. “You know, when Claudie was four years old she asked me for a hammer for Christmas? She had her very own toolbox, full of little kid-size tools, and she used to play with them just like they were dolls.” Jeremy did know this, since Barry liked to repeat this fact rather frequently, as if this one fleeting moment in Claudia’s otherwise undistinguished hardware career had bonded father and daughter together permanently. In the three days that Barry and Ruth had been in town, he’d already brought this fact up at least four times. It was quite likely that Barry’s memory was starting to go. He was starting to drive Jeremy a little nuts.

  But really, Jeremy shouldn’t complain, because his in-laws were saving their asses. Barry, who had spent time as a general contractor before opening up two hardware stores in the Mantanka area, was going to do most of the basic repairs on the house—at least, those that didn’t require any seriously heavy labor—and it also hadn’t gone unnoticed by Jeremy that every time they ran out to buy supplies, Barry and Ruth picked up the bill. For this, Jeremy knew he should be more grateful, especially considering the financial bind that he and Claudia were in now. It was just difficult, he found, to muster the appropriate amount of appreciation for the fact that they were salvaging a house that he secretly wished had burned down entirely.

  The smoke hadn’t alarmed him at first. If anything, the acrid scent that was drifting into the living room was vaguely comforting; it reminded him of a winter that he and Jillian had spent in Big Sur in an old hunting cabin that was heated only by a stone fireplace. Anyway, he was too agitated to wonder what the smell of smoke might mean. Instead, he sat alone in the living room, drinking abrasive shots of cheap rum out of a coffee mug and ruminating over the frightening expression on Claudia’s face as she shut the door on him. He had occasionally wondered if Claudia had a breaking point and somehow taken it for granted that she didn’t—had assumed that whatever he did or said, she would always forgive him for it because she was that kind of person: loving to a fault. Apparently he was wrong. I’m done with you, her expression had told him, as she left the house. You are not who I thought you were. When she shut the door in his face, his self-righteous rage had been subsumed by an alien sort of panic. She was leaving. Was she leaving him?

  Even though he’d raced out to the front of the house to try to stop her, he had waited a moment too long, and she was already gone. He dialed her cellphone number, but it went straight to voice mail five times. And so he sat there in the living room, drinking leftover rum and getting progressively more drunk. He listened for the sound of Claudia’s car turning into the driveway, but the night was silent except for the echo of Lucy’s sobs ringing through the heating grates. He had broken something tonight, he realized, and only now that it was sitting in two pieces on the floor before him—a favorite toy, dismembered in a moment of childish petulance—did he realize how much he had loved it in the first place. Why couldn’t he just sell the stupid painting, anyway? She was right—it was just a painting. He loathed himself for being that guy, the bad guy; a better sort of man would have been self-sacrificing and considerate, would put his family and home on a pedestal above everything else. No, this kind of behavior was straight out of his father’s handbook: pet lions and three divorces and abandoned children across the world. He wouldn’t blame Claudia if she never came home again.

  And what if she didn’t come home? He had no one else. He would be completely alone. He tried to imagine his life without Claudia’s comforting, cinnamon-scented presence beside him and saw himself as a boat out in the middle of the sea without an anchor. He finished up the lukewarm dregs of rum from the bottom of the bottle.

  It wasn’t until Lucy began to shriek in the other room that Jeremy’s brain belatedly triggered its alarm. Something is on fire. Then: The house is going to burn down. That was when something internal took over, some innate chemical impulse that knew exactly what to do in a situation like this, even as his consciousness lagged a few critical steps behind. He was standing, his mind slowly forming the words fire extinguisher, but already his feet had moved him toward the kitchen, where the red canis
ter lived among the cleaning products under the sink. Then it was in his hand, covered with a thin layer of grime, banging heavily against his leg as he ran back across the kitchen. A shard of broken glass on the floor pierced his toe and he looked down in surprise, not from pain—that would come later—but at the fact that his left foot was suddenly misbehaving, twisting under him as he raced through the living room and down the hall toward the bedrooms. He turned right and was in Lucy’s room, where Lucy stood by the picture window in her silly frilly bathrobe, clutching the white lace comforter from her bed. The curtains were on fire. Orange flames billowed out from the window, and a cloud of charcoal smoke blackened the ceiling, ruining all Jeremy’s careful paintwork from years before. The conflagration popped and hissed and spat out sparks as it began its work on the wooden frame of the window. It was curiously beautiful, and Jeremy hesitated before the glory and power of it all.

  Lucy swung the comforter at the fire and succeeded only in fanning the flames. Jeremy jolted back to life. “Move!” he screamed at her, and she turned to stare at him, struck mute by the aggression of his command. “Call the fire department!” He stepped in front of her and pulled the pin on the fire extinguisher and released the trigger and just like that—just like something from a movie—a foggy white stream of retardant was spraying across the southern wall of the bedroom. The white clouds mingled with the black smoke and almost blinded him; something like ammonia stung the sensitive flesh of his nostrils. He pointed the extinguisher in the general direction of the wall and shielded his face in the crook of his shoulder, waiting for it to work. Look at you, Jeremy’s consciousness marveled idly, as he braced himself against the extinguisher’s kickback: Look at you, fighting a fire! Jeremy felt three steps removed from the scene, as if he were standing back watching a stranger: Who was this manly figure with the bleeding foot who was saving this house; saving the life of the hysterical woman beside him; saving the street, the city, the world? It’s you! he thought, amazed. You are this man.