Gibson and then sat there, for days on end, mostly noodling on his guitar. He became intimately familiar with the way the light crested the ornamental crosses at twilight; with the pigeons coating the ledge of his window with calcified birdshit; with the raspberry-filled mille-feuilles from the bakery downstairs, which he ate thrice daily. Sometimes, he’d take the pastry into the cemetery and sit among the graves, watching the old ladies sweep leaves off the stones. Watching them, he was overwhelmed by immense but blunted emotion, as if the world had expanded before him and there wasn’t enough room in his heart to understand everything he was feeling. He just wished he could translate this into notations on paper. Give it time, he’d think, before going to meet Aoki for martinis on the rue Saint-Honoré.
Pierre came to visit him at the studio sometimes, and Jeremy always tried to look busy. He would play music for him, acoustic versions of the songs he had written for Audiophone, to keep the impression of fresh genius alive. Pierre would clasp his hands to his legging-clad thighs and close his eyes and listen as if it were the most blissful sound he’d ever heard. Sometimes he brought friends—models, assistants, other musicians that he knew, some of whom invited Jeremy to jam with them, none of whom produced music that Jeremy particularly liked. The chunk of money Pierre had put at Jeremy’s disposal was unfathomably huge: They’d spoken, early on, about Jeremy performing new material at Pierre’s fashion show in the spring but that was the extent of their makeshift business agreement. Jeremy wasn’t quite sure what the diminutive designer really expected of him. Sometimes he suspected that he was being paid mostly to be a new friend, a novelty for Pierre’s cabinet of curiosities. He almost hoped this was it, because he was starting to worry about how he would single-handedly produce an album’s worth of original songs by March, especially without a lyricist to write the words.
He just needed to be patient, he reassured himself. He was still adjusting to a distracting new life, coming up with a new sound, trying to understand who Jeremy-the-solo-artist was going to be. Sometimes he felt like a child who had been dropped into an enormous playground and didn’t know where to start his playtime. It was almost a relief when he came back to Aoki’s apartment one afternoon in early December and found her packing their belongings into suitcases. “We’re going to Cannes,” she announced, and he shrugged and happily accepted this fate, thrilled by the spontaneity. He would use the trip as a kind of creative palette cleanse; take the opportunity to collect some new musical inspirations. He didn’t pack his guitar, assuming that they would be gone only a few days. Maybe that hadn’t been such a good idea, because here they were, five weeks later, in Rome, and it was unclear when—or if—they’d ever go back home.
Home. This word was the only hitch in an otherwise dreamlike existence. Every time it popped up in his head—as in I’m tired of traveling and ready to go home now—the image that came with it was not Aoki’s eclectic Beaux Arts pied-à-terre in Paris, piled high with art books and half-finished canvases and gold-painted scarves and musty-smelling antiques rescued from Les Puces, but the modest little bungalow in Mount Washington with the chipped IKEA coffee table and the old leather couch with a permanent indentation in the cushion from his own ass. He wondered if Claudia’s parents were still in LA, helping her finish the repairs on the house; he almost hoped they were, so Claudia wouldn’t be alone. The thought of her in their house all by herself—quite possibly unhappy, because of him—made him itch all over. Occasionally, when he was falling asleep, he would hallucinate her into being, standing on the edge of their half-finished deck, teetering on the precipice of the canyon, about to fall in. You’re supposed to be there to catch her, he would think, right before he fell asleep.
Eventually these images would pass into fogged memory. Or so he hoped. For now, they remained a wound on his conscience, and in quiet moments he couldn’t help picking at the scab and making it bleed anew. Sometimes when he rolled over in the middle of the night and woozily pressed himself against the body on the other side of the mattress, he would startle awake. That’s not Claudia! he’d think, realizing