This Is Where We Live Page 8

  It took only a few seconds to locate the e-mail where he’d saved it, in a folder marked PERSONAL. AOKI, he typed quickly:

  Good to hear from you. I’d love to see you. When do you get to town?

  He clicked SEND before he had a chance to think better of it and then sat and watched as the software churned, sent its feelers across the Internet, and catapulted his message out into the cooling summer night.

  Claudia

  TO GET TO ENNIS GATES ACADEMY, CLAUDIA HAD TO DRIVE WEST: down the hill, then west over the industrial flats of Glassell Park, across concrete-choked Los Angeles River and through the dismally misnamed Elysian Park. Turning up onto Beverly Boulevard, she continued through lower Hollywood, past the panaderias and pet stores with their hand-painted signs and rotting birdcages in the windows, and, to the south, the glassed-in high-rises of Koreatown. Here, she hit the first early morning traffic. Trapped between badly timed lights, the cars gunned forward en masse and then jerked to a stop, swapping lanes in a futile and dangerous dance. In this manner, she inched her way past the grand Spanish villas and SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY signs of Hancock Park, and through the Fairfax district, where Russian Hasadim in furry flying-saucer hats stalked past designer boutiques. Finally, after almost an hour, she arrived in Beverly Hills. Here sat Ennis Gates Academy, on the end of an otherwise residential street where the mansions girded themselves with high gates and the lollipop palms swayed over empty sidewalks.

  Claudia parked her aging Jetta in the half-full teacher’s lot. She was an hour early for first bell, and the campus was still quiet. She had half expected a welcoming committee, there to greet her on her first official day as an Ennis Gates Academy teacher, but the front entry was vacant save for an elderly registrar who sat at the receptionist desk reading a romance novel, a bowl of sugar-free hard candies placed before her. The registrar raised her head and looked quizzically at Claudia, noted the book bag, and smiled, apparently deciding that Claudia belonged there after all. She licked her thumb and turned a page in her novel, uninterested.

  Claudia pushed onward, through the double doors and out into a small courtyard, where a smattering of early students were gathered in clusters around a fountain, comparing summer vacation photographs on each other’s iPhones. There, Claudia hesitated, trying to remember her way. The campus of Ennis Gates was mazelike, a quirky scattering of neo-Modern boxes crosshatched with industrial steel beams and painted in creativity-stimulating hues of purple and emerald and turquoise, rising up along the base of a hill. She’d visited the campus four times in the last three weeks, and she still couldn’t quite recall the best way to her homeroom.

  When she’d called Esme, she’d half expected that the school would already have found a new film teacher. “You’re recommending yourself?” Esme blurted. “That’s not what I was expecting to hear.” But she promised to call her mother right away, and indeed, before Claudia even had a chance to step away from the telephone, it was ringing again, with Esme’s mother Nancy Friar on the other line.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard from Esme that we’re desperate,” Nancy began. “Oh, dear, that didn’t sound good, did it? Let me rephrase: Ennis Gates Academy would be thrilled to talk to you about the position. I’ve heard the most lovely things about your film—though I have to confess I haven’t had a chance to go see it yet, maybe this weekend … Oh, it’s not in theaters anymore? Shoot. Well, Esme can’t stop talking about it, and I trust my daughter’s taste. My point being—any chance we could get you to come in for an interview—well, today? We’re really in a bind.”

  It was as if Claudia was doing them a favor, not the other way around; but she couldn’t take any pleasure in this. Just the thought of teaching brought up the unsettling image of her older sister, Danielle, who substitute-taught first grade back in Mantanka. Danielle’s home had disappeared entirely underneath a blizzard of children’s artwork: Walls, cabinets, appliances, mirrors, all were taped over with gooey finger-painted landscapes, mutated puppies in dripping watercolor, lopsided daisies rendered in flesh-toned crayon. Danielle herself had a tendency to lapse into baby talk not just with her own four children but with her husband (“Aren’t you my favorite hubbie-wubbie, hmmm?”), kept a collection of shopworn stuffed animals on the marital bed, and had apparently lost the ability to maintain a conversation without at least one reference to her “little sweeties.” Teaching seemed a safe, benign sort of life, one that Claudia had never wanted for herself; the kind of life that had led her to flee the Midwest in the first place.

  And yet she saw no other option: They needed money, immediately. The phone calls she’d made to her industry contacts had gone unreturned; she couldn’t even dredge up any advertising work. And even if she did sit down to write a new, even more commercial script (with vampires or puppies or star-crossed lovers or, ideally, all three), it would take at least six months to finish and then even longer to sell, if it sold at all. She had no job prospects, no skill set other than this one marginal one. She couldn’t quite wrap her head around it: If she really was such a good director—and this was what she had always been told; surely, she was at least competent, which was more than you could say for a lot of the filmmakers out there—how was it possible to be so summarily dismissed?

  “Hollywood has a short memory,” RC told her, when Claudia called to talk through her career dilemma. “Produce something new, and they’ll forget your failures.”

  “It’s easy for you to say,” Claudia said. “You’ve already made it. No one’s going to pay me to write anything new right now, and I still have to cover our mortgage somehow.”

  RC grew quiet. “I see what you’re saying. This industry is a bitch. I wish I had the answer for you.”

  “It’s not your fault.” On the other end of the line, she could hear the shrieks of RC’s boys. “You know, I always thought there was some sort of natural forward progression to life: one event leading naturally to a better one—a line graph in constant upward motion, you know? Just look at my parents. My father got a sales job in a hardware store after college, and that eventually led to him owning one store and then two. They traded in their small house for a bigger house, they saved money, and everything just grew steadily upward until now they can retire comfortably.”

  “Yes, but they didn’t take any risks.” Something crashed and broke in the background, and RC covered the receiver to yell, “Lucas, go to your room now! … Filmmaking is a totally different industry,” she said, returning. “It’s defined by setbacks and comebacks. Not neat upward parabolas. I’m sure you’re aware of that.”

  “Of course,” Claudia agreed. But the truth was that she’d never imagined that you could be going down your carefully chosen path, taking all the right steps, and suddenly find out that it was a dead end. There was no logic to that narrative. Where was the happy ending with the uplifting credit-sequence score?

  “I just hope you don’t get cynical. Your sincerity is one of your greatest assets. It’s refreshing to meet someone nice, in this industry.”

  “Yeah, well, clearly Hollywood has no interest in sincere. What I really need is to be more of a bitch.”

  “Just hang in there,” RC offered. “You’ll figure something out eventually.”

  But Claudia couldn’t just hang in there, not right now. The past weeks of stunning defeats had drained something vital away, squeezed her heart out like a sponge and left it dry and empty on a shelf. With her career on hold and her home in imminent danger—an intangibly wrong feeling in the air—something shifted inside her, so that when she thought of the days ahead she saw not a vista of opportunity but a minefield braced with barbed wire. She was growing cynical: There was a germ of anger-fueled pessimism inside her that she’d never really noticed before.

  Extreme measures were clearly necessary. So she bit back her reservations about the teaching job and went in for the interview that same day. There she spent two hours talking with Nancy, and then three other members of the school’s hiring board, talki
ng uncomfortably about her film’s critical accolades; about the short film that won her a student Oscar back at UCLA film school; about her time working in the production offices of the famous director. She emphasized the high school English tutoring she’d done back in her post-college days in Wisconsin, in the hopes of proving that she really was qualified to teach (what other option did she have?). And when Nancy called her back, that same evening, to offer her the job—“a probationary position, you understand; we’ll see how this first semester goes, make sure it’s a comfortable fit for both of us, before we talk long-term”—she’d accepted it with resigned gratitude.

  Maybe she should have waited to talk it over with Jeremy, but it seemed better to accept quickly, before the pain of her decision sank in. That evening, while she waited for him to come home from work, she sat in the living room and polished off a bottle of shiraz. At first, she tasted defeat in the tannic dregs of her wine, but with a second glass, and then a third, it increasingly seemed like a heroic—and yes, grown-up—decision she’d made. Maybe safe and benign was the proper response to the days ahead. Maybe it would even be a relief not to be battling the film industry for a while. She’d salvaged something important by doing this, she knew: As painful as it was to take a conventional job, homelessness would be worse. That felt like a far more permanent fracture, cracking deep into her very foundation.

  This job is only temporary, she reminded herself now: She would come up with a new script idea, devote her evenings to writing, wait out their crisis. By next year, she could be living RC’s comeback cliché, a plot device that—it was true—was nearly as popular in Hollywood as alien invasion destroys New York or man falls in love with hooker with a heart of gold. Still, despite the forced optimism, she sensed something ominous hanging in the air, something bigger than her: A global day of reckoning was coming. As she looked around the courtyard of Ennis Gates Academy, a pernicious little voice in her head broke into her reverie: Brace yourself. This is the rest of your life.

  “You look lost.” She turned to see a middle-aged woman standing behind her, kinked to the right from the weight of the bulging hemp book bag hooked over her shoulder. Her cropped gray hair was spiked with gel, offset by red plastic cat’s-eye glasses with leopard-print earpieces.

  “The teachers’ lounge?” Claudia said helplessly.

  “Follow me.” The woman began a swift lurching gait across the quad, clutching the book bag to her side with one hand while reaching out with the other to shake Claudia’s. “Brenda,” she said. “Hunter. Philosophy and Ethics. Are you the new Modern Languages?”

  “Film.” Claudia struggled to keep up with her, aware how slight her own tote—an Amoeba Records freebie bag, half-filled with some handouts and two DVDs—seemed in comparison. “I’m replacing John Lehrmann.”

  “Oh, yes, John. The handsome fool. I never understood why everyone here loved him, and it turned out I was right, wasn’t I? Idiot.” Brenda gave Claudia a once-over. “You’re a cute young thing, aren’t you? I’m surprised they didn’t overcompensate by hiring someone repulsive.”

  “Oh, well, I’m married.”

  “So was he,” Brenda said. She pointed to the left as they passed a two-story glass building, flanked by tennis courts. “Athletic center. Tennis courts are real grass, of course. School built them a few years ago for a student competing at Wimbledon. Cost six million.”

  “Six million? Just for tennis courts?”

  “And he came in tenth. Big disappointment. Poor kid.” She turned left and up a set of stairs toward the next cluster of buildings, surprisingly quick despite her burden.

  Claudia reached the top, panting slightly. From this vantage point, she could see down the hill to the front gate, where the students were starting to arrive. A line of SUVs and Priuses emptied into the student parking lot, windows rolled down and hip-hop blaring from surround-sound stereo systems; another line of luxury sedans triple-parked by the entrance, ejecting younger children who didn’t have their driver’s licenses yet. A solitary limousine idled in the handicapped zone, regurgitating a tiny girl from its tinted-glass depths.

  Brenda followed her gaze. “That would be Clarity Schilling.”

  “Of … ?” Claudia mouthed the name of a pair of famous actors.

  “Yes. She’s the only kid whose parents are so self-important as to drop her off in a limo. Most celebrity parents here prefer to play it low key. Clarity hates it, of course.” They turned into the main quad, past an enormous array of blue solar panels that arced in a decorative curve over the path, and toward the cafeteria. Brenda flicked her hand at the solar display. “The campus went all-green three years ago. First high school in the nation to do so. Water in the toilets is all runoff from the landscaping, if you’re wondering why it looks brown.”

  Teenagers were arriving in droves now, thronging down the paths around them. At Ennis Gates Academy, the students wore a uniform of navy blue: V-neck sweaters worn snug over white polo shirts; pleated skirts of acrylic that hung stiffly around girls’ knees; for the boys, unflattering slacks, worn several sizes too big so they flapped around the legs like sails. One teenage boy, with a fedora jammed over two stubby ponytails, stopped as they passed and doffed his hat to Brenda.

  “Madam Hunter,” he said, speaking from his exaggerated bow. “I do believe I have the honor of being in your Eastern Philosophers course this semester.”

  “Oh, reeeeally. Well, this should be fun. Wait until I nail you with Berdyayev.” Brenda laughed. “And tell your housekeeper I fantasized about those brownies with the marshmallow centers all summer.” She turned to Claudia and winked as the boy jammed the hat back on his head and moved off toward the stairs.

  They veered right, around the side of the cafeteria and toward a set of glass double doors. Brenda shoved the doors open with one hip, gesturing grandly with her free arm. “And here we are. Home sweet home.”

  The teacher’s lounge was a vast room, as sleek and gleaming as a cruise ship. It boasted a buzzing double refrigerator, a shiny row of stainless steel microwaves, and a half-dozen round lunch tables topped with flowering cactus arrangements. A glass picture window faced out onto the quad, allowing the teachers to view their charges while eating lunch. Stiff couches in bold primary colors faced off at jarring angles. On one of them reclined a lumpy older woman in high-waisted mom slacks and orthopedic shoes. She slurped at brown liquid from a Ritalin promotional mug as she flipped rapidly through a Prentice Hall catalog. She looked up at them. “Hi there, Brenda,” she said. “Ready to face the hounds of hell?”

  Brenda shook her head at Claudia as they walked toward the kitchenette. “That’s Evelyn. Political Systems. Don’t mind her, she’s all bark. And the kids are great.” She extricated a tea bag from her voluminous tote and plunked it in a mug emblazoned with the Ennis Gates logo. Claudia pulled the coffee pot out of the machine and tentatively sniffed its contents. It smelled fresh enough.

  “If you want the good stuff, you have to wait for the cafeteria to open at first break,” Brenda said, bobbing her tea bag up and down in the steaming depths of her mug. “There’s an espresso machine in there.”

  Claudia opened her mouth to marvel at this latest revelation and then snapped it shut again, realizing that she was starting to look like a wide-eyed naïf. Instead, she filled a mug and took a tentative sip. “It’s OK. My parents raised me on Sanka,” she said, “so I have plebeian tastes.” This wasn’t quite true—living in LA, she’d grown to appreciate a single-source, fair-trade, microbrewed latte—but that didn’t mean she couldn’t still summon that older Claudia, the one who’d never tasted sushi until she arrived in California and who used to eat her mother’s meat loaf and Tater Tot dinners without flinching. The coffee was bearable; anyway, she was still too groggy from getting up at such an unreasonable hour to be picky. Tomorrow she’d look for the espresso machine.

  Brenda had wandered over to an enormous bakery box packed tight with croissants. “Who is this courtesy of?” Brend
a called to Evelyn.

  Evelyn shrugged. “Who knows. The Hoffmans?”

  Brenda picked the top layer off a croissant with her fingernail, then gave up and lifted the whole thing to her mouth. “I lost six pounds this summer and I swear it’ll all be back on my ass within the week. I don’t know what the parents think they’re doing to us. Making us all too fat and lazy to chase their kids around, maybe.”

  “Speaking of—ask her,” said Evelyn, sitting up.

  “Right!” Brenda leaned in close. “I don’t know what you’re doing this Thursday night, but some of us—teachers, I mean—get together weekly. There’s no union here, of course, so we formed a kind of ad hoc support group. We need to stick together, you know. Us versus them.”

  “I doubt I’ll have time,” Claudia said. “I need my evenings to write.”

  “Write?”

  “Screenplays.” She lowered her voice. “I’m actually not a teacher. In real life, I’m a filmmaker.”

  Brenda flinched visibly. Oh God, Claudia thought, I managed to insult her in less than fifteen minutes on the job. Still, her goal here wasn’t to get cozy with the other teachers, but to put in her time and take home a weekly paycheck. “In real life. Right. Of course not. Well, invitation stands,” Brenda mumbled. Flakes of pastry clung to the front of her blouse, and she knocked them off with the palm of her hand. “So, Claudia, let’s see your roster. I’ll tell you about your students.”

  Claudia pulled the sheaf of paperwork from her bag. She’d spent the previous evening scrutinizing these pages, as if they were in code and she needed to locate a hidden key to unlock their meaning. There were convoluted class schedules, indecipherable campus maps, board meeting agendas, lists of school rules (“Do not fraternize with parents outside of school” and “No sexual contact with students, including hugging or kissing” and “Do not accept gifts of more than $200 in value from any parent,” the last of which stopped her cold: Who were these people?), and three pages of names that she studied, trying to envision the faces behind them. She handed these over to Brenda, and watched the other woman’s twitching face as she scanned the list.