This Is Where We Live - By Janelle Brown Page 0,75

called their reunion weird but uneventful and said Aoki seemed much healthier, but still pretty destabilizing, which Claudia assumed meant unpredictable and just as crazy as I remembered her. As least, she hoped that’s what he meant. He’d mentioned an upcoming opening they were both invited to, an apparent gesture of détente that had assuaged some of that residual paranoia she couldn’t quite rid herself of. There was a tinge of sadness in his voice, a hiccup of loss and remorse than brought to mind all of her own ex-boyfriends—a depressive poet from her post-college years who’d broken up with her in order to “find room for his writing” and then married another woman three months later; the year-long affair with a French carpenter with whom she had little in common but sex; the very sweet but slightly dull software engineer whom she’d heartlessly dumped not long after meeting Jeremy. She’d lost touch with all of them, but if they showed up in her life now, wouldn’t she feel the same sheen of nostalgia, the lure of what-might-have-been? In that context, Jeremy’s coffee with Aoki seemed unworthy of her concern. It was ridiculous of her to be jealous. She’d tried to put it out of her mind: There were just so many other, more important things to worry about right now than a shared cappuccino with an ex-girlfriend.

Except that here Aoki was yet again, somehow impossible to shake: It was almost as if the artist herself had materialized in the flesh, making herself at home in their living room. Cristina moved backward to get a better view of the painting, tripping against the edge of the couch. “Wow,” she said. “Have you met her? I’ve heard so many stories ….”

“No. But Jeremy always said she was kind of nuts,” Claudia said pointedly.

“That’s her reputation.” Cristina pulled her cellphone out of her pocket and held it up with a stiff arm, framing a picture. She raised an eyebrow at Claudia, as if asking permission, and then snapped a photo before Claudia had a chance to decide how she felt about this. Violated, a little bit, maybe. Overshadowed, yet again. Cristina examined the photo on her phone, and then snapped it closed and tossed it in her purse. “I hope you have it insured.”

Claudia swung to stare at the ugly painting. “Insured? Really?”

Cristina had pulled out a notepad and was taking notes. “It’s got to be worth a fortune. The MoMA already owns two of them. One from this series sold at Sotheby’s last May for about four hundred, but it was smaller and not nearly as good.”

Claudia wobbled slightly, threatening to tip to the right into Lucy’s chaise or to the left and capsize the coffee table. She put a hand up to the wall and stabilized herself, certain that the figure she had just heard was implausible, a faulty synapse sending incorrect auditory signals to her ear. “Four hundred thousand?”

“I’m not an expert….” Cristina’s voice trailed off. “You should really have an appraiser take a look at it.”

“Jesus.” The wall had begun to tip alarmingly, and in search of a more stable surface Claudia slipped carefully down into the chaise. Once seated, she still felt in danger of passing out, so she leaned forward and rested her head between her legs. Her voice came out muffled from between her knees. “I didn’t realize. I thought maybe … twenty or thirty thousand.”

“God, not in ages.” Cristina’s voice approached and then descended, hovering above Claudia’s bent back. “After she won the Venice Biennale two years ago, her prices really skyrocketed. And you know how the art market exploded.”

She won the Venice Biennale? Claudia digested this fact unhappily. What else didn’t she know? But it was her own fault. She’d prided herself on the fact that she hadn’t Googled Aoki since her engagement, but what once felt like princely self-control now looked like willful blindness. Somehow, Aoki had become downright famous while Claudia wasn’t paying attention. Does Jeremy know all this? she wondered. Does he know how much the painting is worth? She suspected that the answer was yes. If that was the case, why had he been hiding this truth from her?

Suddenly, she wasn’t jealous anymore. She was, simply, furious.

“European collectors love her,” Cristina continued, unaware of Claudia’s silent meltdown. “Are you going to her opening at the end of the month?”

“The opening.” Claudia grasped at this, finally connecting back to the present that she knew. She sat upright, feeling slightly more