Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  “And go where?”

  Tom squeezed the bill of his cap and said, “Architecture. Nice work if you can get it.”

  “How long have you been in Los Angeles? Where do you live? What kind of work do you do?”

  “A year,” Tom said, “one eternal infernal year.”

  It was a mystery to him, he said, how he had ended up living in an efficiency apartment in the Valley with only one friend left in the city (left: implying there had been others whom he no longer knew), this one friend a writer of some repute who traveled frequently (Tom didn’t name him), but there it was, that was his life. He took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, put it back on. He was fidgety, maybe coming off of something. He said he thought he merely would arrive and fall into a circle of cool friends, which had worked up and down the Eastern seaboard.

  To answer the question about what he did professionally, he said, “I’m not a hooker.”

  “No, of course not,” Robbie said.

  “Everyone assumes I’m some kind of escort,” Tom said, and he stood briefly and hitched up his pants and then sat again.

  He was not currently employed, nor had he worked since moving here, although not for lack of trying. No one would hire him to do what he was best trained to do (which he didn’t specify), and eventually he gave up and had been living off savings, which would run out next month. His grandmother who raised him had more or less cut him off and suggested he enlist in the military. What did he do? He slept twelve hours, eighteen hours at a stretch and then drank multiple pots of green tea because he believed by drinking green tea, he would live forever. Then he was awake for twelve hours, eighteen hours. He owned neither a clock nor a watch. What did he do? When he first moved here, he spent his days exploring the city, wandering the southern wharfs and the industrial east and the forested north. He drove along the spine of the hills, he traced the coast. He failed to find a surfer who would teach him to surf. No one wanted to play volleyball on the broad empty beach. He never found anyone in the park for a pick-up game of tennis. He walked the prettier walk-streets and was unable to start up a conversation with women with dogs. He stumbled across a Venice café he liked and loitered there every morning trying to establish himself as a regular, but no one was very interested in talking to him. Or when men were friendly, generally they expected a return on their investment, which was fine, but that kind of transaction had its limits. How did anyone meet anyone? How did a stranger encounter a stranger and get to know him so he was no longer strange?

  Tom stared out at the street and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been more alone than I have in Los Angeles.”

  Eventually he stopped leaving his apartment very much and somehow passed his caffeinated hours fiddling therein, and the days fell away more rapidly than he would have expected, the weeks, for there was much to learn and there were many things you could teach yourself to do in a musty studio apartment in the San Fernando Valley, and naturally when he needed to go out at night and get in some trouble, he could still do that. He lived as if he were waiting for something in particular to happen, for some inevitable turn, although what he couldn’t say, when he certainly could not say.

  “Why am I telling you all this?” Tom asked. “You couldn’t possibly care, although you are very kind to listen.”

  The puzzle of it was that Robbie did care. He had no idea why, but he did.

  He said, “But you came out into the city today. You’re here now.”

  “In daylight no less. Do you have a map?” Tom asked. “I’m all turned around.”

  Robbie invited Tom back to his desk and pulled open a deep file drawer that was indeed packed with maps—the top one was the city guide for Los Angeles—but while Robbie was flipping to the worn page for Silver Lake, the page pulling free from the spiral binding, Tom stared at all of the other folded maps and pocket atlases and was smiling again at Robbie in his goofy sidelong way, and it was Robbie now who had to ask, “What?”

  Tom took the liberty of reaching deep into the drawer with both hands to take out the pile of maps, which given their variable size, couldn’t be sustained as a single heap atop Robbie’s desk and fell in a landslide, displacing a few sheaves of discarded sketches. Tom sifted through them, the municipal guides of European capitals intermixed with pleated plats of properties Stein Voight had worked on, all of them soft at the fold. California road maps and tourist maps for archaeological sites. Canal cities, hill cities—a London A-to-Zed—river cities, island cities. There were train schedules for points back East and maps of the Moscow Metro and the Berlin U-bahn/S-bahn. Tom seemed drawn to one pocket guide in particular, the wine-dark brick called Paris par arrondissement with its gilt lettering nearly worn off the spine. He flipped to a random page, the particular neighborhood delineated in canary yellow, the streets white, places of note in pink, with the surrounding neighborhoods all a vague mint green, and he flipped the guide around as if he might actually step outside and try to head off for a certain rue or quay.

  What Robbie didn’t say was that this little guide was his sentimental favorite. With his family, he’d gone to Paris as a child, then back as an exchange student his junior year of high school. It was the one foreign city he had made his own without Carlo.

  Tom looked again at the Los Angeles map open on Robbie’s desk. He said, “You can study a map of a city you’ve never been to and think you know the place, but when you finally go there, you’re always a little disappointed the actual city isn’t quite as neat or logical as the map led you to believe it would be. That’s not the case here. That’s one good thing I will say about Los Angeles—it looks like its map. The grids are grids and the squiggles are hills.”

  This was true. “When you get up in the hills at night,” Robbie said, “and you look back at the basin, you see the city lights and the traffic and it’s like you are looking at the map.”

  Tom glanced around at all the sketches on the desk. He sighed. He said, “I’ll tell you something. For a long while, I wanted to become one.”

  “A what,” Robbie asked, “a map?”

  “This,” Tom said. “An architect.”

  “And what happened to that?”

  “Do you have a cigarette? Keep it quiet that I asked though, because in theory, I quit.”

  “We don’t smoke.”

  Tom ran his fingertips across the open Los Angeles page as if encountering braille.

  “I’ve been re-reading the Bible,” he said. “Or not reading it but listening to it on tape, a little bit at a time before I go to sleep.”

  “Are you religious?”

  This question caused Tom to release a single guffaw: That’s a good one.

  “You don’t know Russian, do you?” he asked.

  Robbie did not.

  “I bought a Russian phrasebook and made these little cyrillic flashcards for myself, but that’s as far as I got. An H is an N, I think. The B is a V. But of course I lost the flashcards.”

  “Were you planning a trip?” Robbie asked.

  “I was reading one of those obese nineteenth-century novels,” Tom explained, “and I have to say the translation seemed a little lardy to me.”

  “You were going to attempt it in the original.”

  “Did you ever play an instrument?” Tom asked.

  “Clarinet,” Robbie admitted. “Very briefly. Not briefly enough.”

  “No way—me, too.”

  “I have a good ear for other people, but not for myself,” Robbie said. “My poor parents.”

  “That’s why I’m sticking with piano,” Tom said, “on behalf of my neighbors,” and the conversation skidded along like this, Tom chasing various subjects like cats in a meadow, never really grabbing hold: Did Robbie invest at all in astrology? Did he have a good history of twentieth-century physics he could recommend? Did a hammer and a feather truly fall at the same velocity and in what universe did that happen? Did Robbie know of a good place in town to get real gelato? Did Robbie like opera and wo
uld he think Tom a heathen if Tom admitted he could never sit through one in its entirety? Robbie answered each question and braced himself for the next, ably tracing the loose threading of Tom’s associations.

  Tom paused and tapped the map with his forefinger accusatorily. “Do you ever wonder what it was like here back in the day,” he asked, “before all of this land was shot through with freeways? Everyone always says it, but in my case it’s a little too true.”

  “What’s a little too true?” Robbie asked.

  But Tom didn’t answer because at that moment, laden with bags, Carlo returned. Robbie made introductions and explained the situation.

  As if waiting for his eyes to adjust, it took a moment for Carlo to say hello. The three men stood by the door an awkward moment.

  Far off, a helicopter. Nearby, a chain saw.

  “We’ve met,” Tom said to Carlo.

  “Have you?” Robbie asked.

  Carlo said, “I don’t think so. Not that I remember.”

  “Not that you remember,” Tom said.

  “Have you?” Robbie asked again, addressing Tom.

  Tom didn’t speak. He was fixing his stare on Carlo.

  But finally Tom said, “My mistake.” And then: “If this mechanic doesn’t come in five minutes, I’ll walk home. I don’t want to inconvenience you.”

  “You’re not,” Robbie said, and it was true. He was enjoying talking to this Tom Field, quite a bit.

  Tom looked at Carlo again, and Carlo appeared to nod before retreating to his desk. Tom drifted toward the wall of the office decorated with framed photographs and dry-mounted computer-assisted renderings of Stein Voight projects. On another wall, rough schematics of the (hopefully) current project were tacked up.

  “Tom thought about becoming an architect,” Robbie said.

  “Did you?” Carlo asked.

  Tom was lingering in front of photographs of a project that went up five years ago, another tricky property that required siting the house so it would back out onto the Ivanhoe Reservoir while saving a pair of listing eucalyptus trees, accommodating them with holes through the two stories of decking. The entire house, generous in the eaves, glass-walled, powered by solar panels and built with reclaimed wood, turned into a kind of sophisticated tree house that Robbie and Carlo considered their best work.

  However, Tom looked dismayed. He said, “I hope you’ll forgive me.” He said, “I like windsor chairs and fainting couches. I like shingled siding and bay windows and shutters. Every house should have a big front porch.” He said, “Maybe I was born at the wrong time.”

  A tow truck pulled up outside and he dashed out to point the mechanic toward his car. He was gone a full minute before the two men spoke.

  “He just wandered in,” Robbie said.

  “Did he?” Carlo asked.

  “I feel sorry for him. No friends, no money. You don’t like him.”

  “It’s not that,” Carlo said, and looked as though he wanted to add more but held back.

  “You think he’s got a grift going,” Robbie said.

  Carlo shrugged.

  “Nobody should be alone,” Robbie said.

  “You’re quoting my father now?” Carlo asked.

  “Did you notice the scratch on his face?”

  “He’s looking for someone to take him to London. New York for a shopping weekend.”

  “No, see, that’s the thing. I don’t think he’s your typical party boy,” Robbie said. “I don’t get that sense.”

  “He just wandered in? He has his price,” Carlo said.

  “I don’t think so,” Robbie said. “He’s curious—”

  “He is curious.”

  “I mean that he’s curious about the world.”

  A short while later Tom returned and said all that was wrong could be fixed with a new fan belt. The mechanic had the part in his truck, and Tom was good to go. Uno problemo. He was short what he owed by twenty-three dollars and change, so he gave the mechanic a credit card, which the mechanic called in to his garage, and the card was declined.

  Robbie glanced at Carlo, and Carlo withdrew his money clip. Perhaps this would seem an extravagant gesture to some, but Robbie knew Carlo could read him well enough and knew it would please Robbie to help Tom. Again Tom went outside and said he’d be right back to discuss how he’d go about repaying the loan, and of course it occurred to Robbie that Tom might not return this time. However, he did reappear, dangling something in one hand that resembled a garden snake, the snapped fan belt. Maybe Tom wanted to make sure the men knew he hadn’t been conning them.

  Tom said, “I’ll write down your address here and send you a check. Don’t wait too long to cash it though.”

  The three men stood again by the door. They shook hands and Tom turned to leave.

  “So Tom,” Robbie said.

  Tom was likely a man without a date book, he probably didn’t answer his phone, and his sleep cycle would always be too irregular to follow. They would make a plan, Tom wouldn’t show up. And yet he was a fellow map enthusiast and deep allegiances had been based in less. What he needed was obvious and not expensive in the scheme of things.

  “You mentioned you play tennis,” Robbie said.

  “Once upon a time,” Tom said, “in a galaxy far, far away.”

  “We should find a fourth and play doubles sometime.”

  “A fourth?” Tom asked, peering beyond the men into the office as if a doubles partner might be lurking in the shadows.

  “Or we could switch off playing singles,” Robbie suggested, and he glanced at Carlo.

  Cued thus, Carlo said, “That might be fun.”

  “Tennis,” Tom said as if the word were foreign. “Tennis when?”

  “Sometime soon,” Robbie said.

  “Soon,” Tom echoed and turned to leave again.

  Robbie looked at Carlo, and Carlo hesitated a beat but gave his assent, an almost imperceptible, reluctant arcing of an eyebrow.

  “What about this afternoon?” Robbie asked. “We’ve got a court booked.”

  Tom looked at Carlo again and said, “You’ve already been so kind. I wouldn’t want to ruin your Saturday.”

  Robbie was waiting for Carlo, as well, but Carlo didn’t respond, and so Robbie said, “You wouldn’t be ruining anything. Carlo wasn’t even all that eager to play today—Carlo? Would you mind terribly if Tom here and I took the court? You said you had some more gardening—”

  “Oh, gosh no,” Tom started to say, “I wouldn’t want to—”

  “That would be fine,” Carlo said softly.

  “No,” Tom said.

  “Honestly,” Robbie said to Tom, “he would rather putter.”

  “It’s fine, it’s true,” Carlo said. “I have some things I’d love to do around the house.”

  Tom flashed his goofy grin at Robbie and said, “I might be terrible.”

  “Oh don’t worry, it doesn’t matter,” Robbie said, and once again he studied Tom Field and tried to guess his age and settled on twenty-seven. Robbie never actually asked Tom, but later the police would confirm his estimate.

  • • •

  AN HOUR LATER, Robbie met Tom in Griffith Park. Robbie had gone home to change but Tom apparently had not. When Robbie drove into the parking lot, Tom was standing at the open trunk of his banged-up jalopy (its front fender was held on with duct tape), withdrawing clothing from a duffel bag and changing out in the open, without apparent vanity or concern about all the tennis players and hikers coming and going. Robbie was driving a recently washed new car, the foreign wagon that the two men had selected for its safety ratings and reinforced chassis, which educed from Tom an ooh-la-la.

  “Nice ride,” he said as he pulled a T-shirt over his head.

  “Carlo was in a bad accident last spring,” Robbie explained, “and we wanted something sturdy.”

  “An accident,” Tom said.

  “Fortunately no one was hurt,” Robbie said.

  The upper four tennis courts in Ve
rmont Canyon were ringed by hills dried gold after an arid summer. Occasionally, preceded by a labrador with a stick in its mouth, a hiker emerged from a trail and headed down the main dirt path. There was no wind, and the dead stillness meant that as the men began to play, their syncopated shots reverberated around the bowl of hills.

  It took Tom time to recall his game. Between rallies, he had to tug up his wrinkled cut-offs, and then he would bounce the ball three times before whacking it across the court as if striking a piñata. He had no backhand to speak of and ran around to his forehand, and yet despite his drooping attire and spastic ground strokes, Tom hunted down every ball. He may have been the less fit player—he was panting between points—yet he ceded no corner of the court, and Robbie found it difficult to hit a winner. In this doggedness, there was something appealingly boyish about Tom, at once earnest and playful. Eventually they played points but didn’t keep score and whenever the mood suited him, the server opted instead to receive.

  On a change-over, they swigged bottled water.

  “I’m excited to have a new hitting partner,” Robbie said.

  Tom rolled his eyes.

  “Oops,” Robbie said. “Another kind of partner.”

  They switched sides to share the burden of the angled sun. Then they rallied again without conversation, or the rally was in itself a form of banter. Tom issued involuntary grunts. The longer they played, the more he came into net. Several times he guessed which way Robbie would try to pass him and punched out a professional-looking volley. Quickly his game improved.

  At the next change-over, Tom said, “I’ve been trying to come up with my next career move.”

  “And what have you decided?” Robbie asked.

  “That I want to become a court painter.”

  “A court painter—like what, a tennis court painter?”

  “No, silly,” Tom said. “You know, a court painter. All you have to do now and then is make a portrait of a princess with some spaniels or a king with his hand on a map, and the rest of the time, you get to work on whatever you want. Ruins, mountains, lakes. Think about it. It’s a great gig.”