by Peter Gadol
Robbie and Carlo have been involved professionally and personally for twenty years. Lately, though, their architectual practice and their marriage are beginning to falter.
One fall day, Tom Field, a peculiar young man, drifts into their storefront office asking to use the phone. The men get to talking; Tom is curious but enchanting and Robbie ends up playing tennis with him that afternoon, ultimately inviting him home for dinner.
The ensuing evening involves a lot of wine and banter and then increasingly dark coversation, and when the stranger has had too much to drink, the two men insist he sleep in their guest room.
During the night, Tom Field commits an act of violence which shatters the architects’ ordered lives so that each man in his own way over the days and months that follow must cope with blossoming doubt and corrosive secrets.
Also by Peter Gadol
Light at Dusk
The Long Rain
Closer to the Sun
The Mystery Roast
Coyote
Silver Lake
A novel by
Peter Gadol
A division of F+W Media, Inc.
for my brother Charlie
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
About the Author
Copyright
Also Available
1
AND THEN IT WAS AUTUMN AGAIN, and Saturdays they would wake early when the first clean light came up over the oak and fir at the top of the ridge and eased its way down across their glass house and overgrown slope, down to the pitched yards and shingled cottages along the street below their street, down across timber and brush and fallen limbs, across the boulevard all the way to the patient lake, where it would linger on the water, an ancient and forgiving light by noon.
These were cold mornings suddenly and so they dressed quickly in fraying clothes. One made coffee, the other swiped jam across toast. They traded sections of the paper. One started in on the crossword, the other scanned the financial pages. Then they headed out to the garage and pulled on work gloves and selected rakes and clippers, and there was little conversation except to agree the movie they had watched the night before was not sitting well with them. A simple story snapped when stretched into an epic. Actually one man fell asleep before the film ended, and the other man had to wake him only to guide him to the bedroom and back to sleep again.
Rain all week had left the air crisp but also made the ground behind their house muddy and not entirely suitable for the chore at hand, yet each man took a flank of hill as if it were his side of the bed and began pulling out the dead sage and trimming back the excess tea bush and clearing out the persistent sumac. There was nothing to be done about the thicket of rosemary, they’d long since given up. There was enough of a drop-off down to the backyard of the property below theirs so that even at the edge of their land, they enjoyed an unobstructed vista of the Silver Lake Reservoir.
“It’s so blue today,” Robbie said.
“Too blue,” Carlo said.
“How can it be too blue?”
“It’s like something chemical has been added.”
Robbie slid down a patch of mud so he was standing next to Carlo. This was the year they would turn forty. They had been together twenty years, not counting some early semesters of undedicated collegiate messing around. Robbie pulled off his glove and inserted his forefinger through one of Carlo’s belt loops, tugging him closer, rubbing his nose against Carlo’s neck—Carlo hummed.
It was autumn again and they always looked forward to the season, to the fires they would tend in a stone hearth and the friends at a long table, to what they would roast and what they would decant. They looked forward to the colder nights and the added blanket, the conversations past midnight about new books. The truth was that even before they knew each other (if one could speak of a time before they knew each other), each man was always eager for the decline of summer and the refuge, the rescue of school—and autumn was when they met, and another autumn when they moved to Los Angeles. It was certainly for all these reasons that every fall they felt renewed, but then also because some other heat always abated, because an annual anxiety always burned off and vanished, it seemed, for good. Anxiety related to work and income and debt. Restlessness about lives not lived, the shadow histories that now and then might haunt them, haunt any two people who found each other so early in life. An alien illogical loneliness—it was a kind of ghost grief almost, although to be clear, a grief neither as strange nor ruinous as the one about to wash over them.
“You’re a silly man,” Robbie said. “A lake can never be too blue. Who’s a silly man?”
“I am,” Carlo said.
“What are you?”
“A silly man.”
Back up by the patio off the kitchen, they collected the figs about to fall from a neighbor’s vine that coiled over a high wooden fence.
“Can we remember to pick up some smelly cheese?” Carlo asked.
“Si, signor,” Robbie said.
Also in their neighbor’s yard, there was a regal Liquidambar with broad long-suffering branches, several of which reached across their terrace, and the men liked the tree because it gave them a graceful canopy and screen, and then they could enjoy the seasonal task (a joyfully nostalgic task since they both grew up back East) of raking leaves. Leaves that this year had turned early, had begun to fall early, and so there was already need to sweep off the table and chairs and the twin cedar chaises. They took turns combing a patch of lawn with their better rake, scraping away the ochre matting to reveal grass that was surprisingly cold to the touch in the morning sun, the ground smelling like sap now, like rich dark potting soil now, like lust itself.
In the house, in their bedroom, they stripped and threw back the blankets and knelt on the bed, facing each other. Carlo fell back against his heels. Robbie held on to Carlo’s hips, pale hands against dark skin, until he let go and fell back, too. Then they remained like this a while, facing each other without touching, grinning. It was as if they were waking a second time today. Two men together, two against the world. Astonishing.
• • •
SO THAT WAS HOW ONE SATURDAY in September began. Maybe they padded around their glass house barefoot, their feet squeaking against the dark wood, Robbie reshelving some books while Carlo hung a newly framed drawing in the guest room. Maybe they heated up some split pea soup and made grilled cheddar sandwiches for lunch. By noon they would have been riding their matching black mountain bikes, seats set to the same height, out their street to the hill, and down the hill to Silver Lake Boulevard, gliding around the dog park and the basketball court (where the shirtless were routing the shirted), down to the small-town-like commercial strip and their office in a shotgun storefront, their diagonally opposing desks in the back, a set of plywood-and-leather furniture prototypes in the window up front, two lounge chairs and a sofa. It was Carlo’s idea to go in that day. He said he wanted to sort through the mail. Robbie didn’t see the need but knew if he didn’t give Carlo half an hour at his desk, Carlo would fret away the balance of the afternoon.
They had emerged from graduate school with the idea that the best architecture came from the most local engagement, and as much as possible, they had wanted to practice where they lived. At first they were fortunate to be building houses during a boom and in a neighborhood coming into market vogue, but eventually new construction proved too expensive for their clientele, and their primary work became renovations, additions, building out, building up. Then this market slowed down, too, or at least for them it did. Carlo handled their money because Robbie was clueless about mon
ey—it was easiest to spare him explication of ledgers with numbers in parentheses—and yet as they locked their bikes in the back and let themselves in, Carlo was thinking a daily thought, that after a slow summer it was time Robbie truly understood how much they owed, how great their monthly needs were. There was some finish work to supervise on a garage-to-guest-house conversion and a maybe a pool house-studio in the works for a screenwriter, but nothing beyond that lined up. Of course Robbie had some idea where they stood, some, and if Carlo once again avoided the conversation, it was because there did remain one prospect that could turn everything around. Carlo tapped the space bar of his computer keyboard and waited as if calling for an elevator.
“He emailed me,” he said.
“From Europe?” Robbie asked.
The potential client was a television producer who wanted to build on one of the few remaining undeveloped lots up the street from the office on the sunset side of the Reservoir. The grade of the land, blanketed presently in wild fennel and poppy, was extremely steep, daunting but not impossible to engineer. The man wanted glass and he wanted steel, so he was referred to Stein Voight by a former client, and an initial meeting had gone well, leaving Carlo cautiously optimistic. And were they to build the house from the ground up, the firm would not only be able to post their sign on the property during construction, which inevitably would prompt a raft of inquiries from possible new clients, but also put in play a range of new ideas they’d been unable to try out during their long period of modest renovations. But Carlo didn’t want to get too far ahead of himself because before the television producer was willing to commit, he had wanted to be pitched some schemes—understandable but not how Carlo and Robbie operated, although they didn’t see that they had much choice and were able to exact a reduced fee for preliminary sketches. In his email now, the producer indicated his enthusiasm for what he’d seen so far. He also indicated he would have some notes, which he would reveal when he returned. When that would be, he didn’t say.
“And?” Robbie asked.
“So far, so good.”
“I told you.”
“We don’t have a contract yet.”
“We will.”
The office was stuffy, so Carlo cracked open the front door to let in some fresh air. He returned to his desk and stared at the stack of mail. It never ceased to amaze him that even when there was no work, the bureaucracy of simply existing required tracts of time. Accounts payable and correspondence with old clients about how to treat various ageing claddings. Invitations to professional association get-togethers, prefab-house competitions they could enter. Half his life was spent filing papers in folders, squaring the piles of folders across his broad plank of a desk into a neat metropolitan grid of smokeless industry.
They didn’t have a lot of time to get something going, and Carlo didn’t regard this producer well. What was to stop the man from taking the Stein Voight roughs to another architect? And it wasn’t simply their anemic finances making Carlo anxious. Ever since his car accident last April (or what he had led Robbie to believe was an accident), Carlo had the sense that he was, that they were, being tested somehow, their way of life in jeopardy. It was silly, he was being silly. Then again, he couldn’t deny the pressure—a test before them, a challenge, their future assigned in some part to chance, in greater part to will. Everything was at stake, only Robbie didn’t know it, and Carlo didn’t want him to know it.
And meanwhile, Robbie had his chair tilted back, his feet propped up, a blank book balanced across his lap, pen poised. His desk was an arctic field of discarded sketches. Robbie was good with pen and ink. Robbie was good at staring out windows. Robbie was good at pacing. He was the quicker sketcher, temperamentally the more instinctive architect (all projects initially were drafted by him), and Carlo watched Robbie now with roughly the same fascination as when he first spotted him sitting alone in an oak-paneled dining hall, hair in his eyes, his shirt cuffs unbuttoned—he remained eighteen twenty-two years later. Carlo knew he himself had grayed some, and if not gained in girth, then widened at the shoulder, whereas Robbie had always lacked weight, lacked gravity—at times he seemed feathery, a little blown about. His fingers danced across the page, Robbie sketching something, blushing the way he did when he drew. With any luck, he was hot with an idea about how to trick the second floor of the new-client project to maximize the view of the Reservoir, possibly cut away some volume for a bedroom balcony, or even go up a floor, although that might challenge codes, and Carlo was the one who pulled the permits, the one cast as the heavy who had to lay down what was and more often was not possible.
He pretended to work while playing computer solitaire. He could hear a stray arpeggio drift out of the music studio down the street and the occasional conversation as customers went in and out of antique stores, but otherwise, the only sound at Stein Voight was that of Robbie Voight’s black pen in its journey east and west, north and south across a white page. It was a sound that never failed to deliver Carlo a temporary peace.
• • •
EVENTUALLY HE WENT ACROSS THE STREET to buy the cheese they had talked about, to the liquor store for wine, and to chat up a friend at the framers-photo gallery. Robbie watched his lover dodge traffic and disappear, and then he put down his sketch book and rubbed his eyes.
For about five minutes indeed he’d been considering the house up the street, specifically a more integrated way to include a detached rental unit, but the rest of the time he’d been doodling. His idea of a nightmare was Carlo one day breaking a tacit rule and paging through Robbie’s stack of old black blank books piled on a credenza behind his desk. For every modern bungalow elevation Robbie allegedly was rendering, for every open-plan floor plan, Carlo would find countless spreads of intersecting planes and graphed vortexes and plump spheres, hard-hatched, soft-shaded—islands and reefs and coves of ink coalescing into a secret atlas of lost ocean continents. Carlo would find evidence of much daydreaming, although miraculously the work always got done, rather last-minute, but done, and anyway, architects needed to daydream, didn’t they? The mission of any builder was to look at the world not as it was, but the way he believed it should be.
Robbie needed a shot of caffeine, and he was at the back kitchenette making espresso when someone walked in the front door. It was rare but happened, a passerby trying to figure out what goods were sold at Stein Voight. The man who came in was a young guy, slight, bouncing a bit off his right high-top as he glanced around. He was backlit, hard to see well, so Robbie crossed the length of the office.
“Can I help you?” Robbie asked.
A white baseball cap was jammed in a back pocket of the man’s unbelted jeans, which he had to hitch up as he regarded Robbie somewhat sideways. A worn halo of blond highlights had almost grown out. His sweater was torn under one arm and his cheek looked like it had been scratched by a cat. The man was Robbie’s height, but scrappier. He vanished from a gallery opening when you looked away, and you never saw him again. You tracked him during a plane trip and then down to the baggage carousel but lost him amid all the arrivals.
The man pointed at Robbie’s demitasse and said, “That’s exactly what I need. Better make it a double, please.”
“Oh, we’re not …” Robbie started to say. “This isn’t a café.”
The man looked around the office, squinting toward the back of the room.
“Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asked. “Car trouble,” he explained, although the two metered parking spaces in front of the office were unoccupied.
He also said, “Although maybe I should ditch my car, I hate driving. I hate Los Angeles. The worst thing you can do in Los Angeles is not make a left turn at a light. For the rest of his life, the driver behind you will never forgive you, and it’s probably a good thing I don’t carry a gun because there have been more than a few occasions when I’ve seriously wanted to—Sorry, what?”
Robbie was staring. “You’d like to call a mechanic?” he asked.
There was something unhusked about him. Robbie guessed his age to be twenty-three or twenty-four. He found the number of a garage and dialed the phone before handing it over to the man. Twenty-five maybe, twenty-six. Robbie returned to the kitchenette to make the man an espresso after all while he waited for the mechanic.
The man sat down in one of the plywood-and-leather arm chairs in the front of the office and slid back, his demitasse nearly slipping off its saucer. Robbie perched at the edge of the adjacent chair. The man looked uncomfortable.
“Y’all sell furniture here?” he asked, concerned.
“No,” Robbie said, “no,” and chose not to explain that a few years back he and Carlo had entered a design contest but nothing had come of it.
The man crossed his legs, uncrossed them, crossed them again.
“We know,” Robbie said. “It looks better than it functions.”
“It looks okay,” the man said.
“We’re architects mostly. Or entirely, I should say.”
“We.”
“My boyfriend is out running errands,” Robbie explained.
The man yanked his hat out from his back pocket and pulled it on, his eyes now in shadow. He shifted it to the side, then straightened it.
“I would have used my cell phone,” the man said, “but I lost it, of course, because I lose everything. Which is the definition of a loser.”
“Not everything,” Robbie said.
“No, everything.”
“Not your hat.”
The man extended his hand and said, “Tom Field.”
Robbie introduced himself and for some reason offered Carlo’s name, as well.
“I’m glad you didn’t say partner,” Tom Field said. “In this town, I’ve noticed, everyone has a partner. A writing partner or a business partner or a boyfriend partner. I have to get out of here.”
