This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,28
while.”
“That’s not true,” he protested. Her casual self-indictment made him ill. This was not the Claudia he liked the most, the woman who had breathtakingly summoned Spare Parts into being by sheer force of will, the woman who stayed up late at night watching the director commentary tracks on Criterion Collection classic film DVDs and reading cinephile magazines with titles like American Cinematographer and Cineaste. Or maybe—he thought with surprise—it was; wasn’t this approach to their foreclosure just a variation on the same stubborn nose-to-the-ground determination? Less inspired artistic vision than tortoise-like perseverance? “Of course you’re going to make another movie.”
“Not unless I take Carter’s advice and start writing wedding movies.”
Jeremy winced. “You just have to keep trying.”
“Actually, for the time being I think I need to stop trying. Take a break, for my own sanity.” The muscles of Claudia’s shoulders flexed and strained as she scraped away the last rough nubs of spackle and then stood back to survey her handiwork. The crack had been erased, leaving just a faint ghost behind as a reminder.
“Take a break?” He couldn’t make sense of this. “Claudia, look at me. You do not take a break from your dreams.” He knew that sounded like a daytime talk-show cliché—this also, he realized, sounded like something Jillian might say—but in this moment, the sentiment seemed vital. It was of critical importance that she not step away from the person he wanted her to be.
She whirled around. The whites of her eyes were veined and with the ashen dust caked in the cracks of her face she looked ten years older. Frazzled and defeated. Frighteningly—and this was the first time he had ever had this thought—she looked kind of like her mother, Ruth, a sweet, sagging woman with a penchant for animal appliqué sweatshirts. “It’s not like I’m going to stop trying altogether, but”—she hesitated—“I took a full-time job today, Jeremy. As a high school teacher. At Esme’s mom’s school. The money’s not great but it’ll be enough. And I can still write scripts at night. I’ll do it for a year and then see where we’re at. Or maybe you’ll finish your album and be able to pay the mortgage yourself and it will become a non-issue.”
Her words flopped onto the floor, a sodden lump. Jeremy stood regarding them balefully. “You did all this without even asking me.” His words came out colder than he intended them to; colder than her proposal merited, probably, but he felt compelled to punish her anyway, for some grievance he couldn’t quite name. “You just gave up on everything we always said we wanted for ourselves. For four stupid walls—that are crumbling, by the way, despite all your work—and a wooden floor.”
“I’m doing this to save what we said we wanted for ourselves.”
“Are we even talking about the same thing?”
Claudia violently kicked her work clogs off, sending them skittering across the dusty floor to land against the plastic-covered television set. She turned to look at him with fury distorting her face, rendering her unrecognizable. It stopped him cold. “Look, Jeremy. Someone’s got to step up to the plate.” She spat the words at him. “And since you don’t seem interested in doing it, I will.”
“This whole thing is your fault. You talked me into this house in the first place. It wasn’t my idea. We never should have bought it.” Jeremy realized he was whining. “I should have trusted my gut!”
Claudia’s voice ascended to a pitch he had never heard before, a glass-endangering vibrato. “Your gut? Well, Mr. King of Hindsight, your gut never spoke up about its concerns when we were house-shopping, so, too late. Your gut failed to pay the last two mortgage bills! It’s so much easier to blame anyone but yourself, isn’t it? Take some responsibility!”
Jeremy sat down heavily on the chair. He would have laughed at the weirdness of this moment—they were fighting—if it wasn’t so traumatic. He hated the sound of Claudia’s raised voice after all, and now the only way he could think to stop it was to play on her sympathies and act the part of the wounded party. “I’m just hurt that you didn’t include me in your decision-making,” he said, lowering his voice. “You don’t care what I think at all. Christ, Claudia, you advertised for a roommate without asking me?”
It worked. Claudia stared at him, breathing hard and visibly deflating. “Of course I care. Look, I’m sorry. I just didn’t think we had a choice.” She sighed