by Peter Gadol
“So all you have to do is find a court.”
“Right. How hard should that be?” Tom asked.
And during another change-over: “Do you think there’s anything wrong with wanting to make pretty things?” Tom asked.
Robbie shrugged, no, why not?
“I’ve been going around to all the galleries to check out the scene, and all the art they’ve got up, blech, it’s so ugly. I think you make the world better by adding beauty to it,” Tom said, “not more ugliness. But no one seems interested in beauty any more. Are you?”
“Oh, definitely, certainly,” Robbie said.
“Well, baby, at least that makes two of us,” Tom said.
Little by little, Robbie found out more about Tom. He preferred rhyming poetry to free verse, tart-fruit desserts not chocolate ones, country music more than pop. His grandmother liked to have him read to her at night, the classics, but fell asleep early in the evening, although Tom kept reading aloud while she snored. But what about Tom’s actual parents? He didn’t mention them. Nor did Robbie discover why (beyond wanderlust) Tom had moved to Los Angeles. Nor what Tom hoped would change in his life once he arrived, or if change was what he sought. He could have been seeking escape or rescue, but escape or rescue from what exactly? What, at base, did Tom want for himself?
Robbie didn’t ask too many questions. Mostly Tom talked and Robbie listened, which seemed to please Tom, as if all he wanted was someone with whom he could hold forth. No, not a mere someone—he appeared to like Robbie. He was beginning to confide in Robbie.
After about an hour and a half of tennis, Tom said, “Lately I’ve been thinking that at any given moment in time, there can only be a maximum of two or three things you find beautiful in the world—out-and-out, breathtakingly, devastatingly beautiful. I mean two or three things you think truly possess grace.”
“What makes you say that?” Robbie asked. “Why only two or three?”
“Because any more than that, and you wouldn’t be able to function. You’d wander around with your mouth open all the time. You’d go manic.”
If Robbie understood what Tom was saying (and he wasn’t sure he did), he did not necessarily agree. But he asked, “What’s on your current list?”
“Eucalyptus trees,” Tom answered. “Bosc pears in a white bowl. A man’s back. What about you?”
Robbie didn’t know how to respond, so he said, “I like your list. I’ll borrow it, if you don’t mind.”
Tom was looking at him sideways, the way he had back in the office. He was gaunt except when he grinned, and then his face became lunar. He formed a pistol with his first and middle fingers and tapped Robbie twice against his sternum.
“What?” Robbie asked.
Tom tapped him again, bouncing off his sneaker.
He said, “I did know it was an architectural firm I was walking into and not a café or furniture store.”
“Did you?” Robbie asked. “Then why—”
With his thumb and forefinger, Tom tweaked Robbie’s left nipple once and then again.
Robbie was caught off guard. He pulled back, flustered, wondering what kind of signal if any he’d been sending that Tom would hit on him, a little miffed that his overture of friendship might be misconstrued, annoyed in general at guys always on the prowl, who viewed married men as fair game. Or maybe Tom wasn’t making a pass but merely being cocky. That could be all. Robbie returned to the baseline and sent the next several shots sailing wide or long.
A short while later, at the end of one of their longer rallies, Tom framed the ball and knocked it over the fence, over a short retaining wall, and into the adjacent slope. In all likelihood, the ball was lost, but Tom dashed through the gate, hopped up onto and over the retaining wall, and proceeded to rummage through the brush. Robbie joined him outside the court but didn’t go over the wall.
“I think it went more that way,” he directed Tom.
And sure enough, Tom disappeared and stood up with the lemon tennis ball plus some dried weeds in hand. When he hopped back over the wall, he ended up standing next to Robbie, close, and as he handed him the recovered ball, Tom leaned forward, his mouth barely open but open enough to kiss Robbie. As if to be polite, Robbie kissed him back, briefly, extremely briefly but long enough to get it, to understand the specific way someone like Tom was sexy: Tom the eternal summer kid, barefoot in the backyard. You lay in the hammock with him and he smelled of stolen cigarettes, and then he had his hand down your shorts, but the next day he pretended not to know you, and you would spend the next hundred years searching for Tom Field in every man you met and tried to love.
The police would inquire about a sexual relationship or anything proximate to one, and Robbie would not mention the kiss.
He turned around and headed back onto the court and, once through the gate, pivoted back toward Tom still on the other side of the chain-link, and said, “I shouldn’t, Tom. I don’t. We don’t.”
“You don’t,” Tom said. “Everyone does these days.”
“Not us.”
“Never?”
“Not in twenty years,” Robbie said.
“Get out. Twenty years? No way.”
“It’s fine for other people, their deals, whatever,” Robbie said. “It’s not our thing is all.”
“Really?” Tom asked—and why did he seem so astonished? “Are you sure?”
“Yes, really,” Robbie said. “I’m quite sure.”
And then Tom nodded with quick acceptance the way he had back at the office when he was told at first he wouldn’t be served espresso (and eventually he was handed an espresso). He ho-hummed, tugged up his shorts, returned to the court, picked up his racket, and headed around to the other side of the net.
Robbie glanced up at the sun. Would he tell Carlo about what had transpired? He might, he might not.
They hit balls back and forth, and a short while later, Tom yelled, “We can do this Saturdays all year long.”
Robbie was relieved Tom didn’t appear put off by being rebuffed. Maybe Tom’s pass was a mere stile to step across. This was Tom: provocative, sexual, testing. But he liked maps, which was to say he knew how borders ran, and now the lines were clear. They could keep walking the way they had been headed.
“That’s what you’re supposed to like about Los Angeles,” Tom shouted, “the weather.”
“What’s not to like?” Robbie asked.
They played for another half hour, and while Tom wanted to keep going, Robbie had to say, “I should probably get back.”
“Just a little longer,” Tom pleaded.
“I’m pooped.”
“One more game.”
“I shouldn’t.”
“Ah. Okay,” Tom said.
They walked down to the parking lot where their cars were the only ones left. It was clear Tom didn’t want to give Robbie up to the evening.
Robbie put his things in his car and said, “How about next Saturday? Do you want to play again?”
Tom wagged his head yes.
“I’ll book the court,” Robbie said, and he should have gotten in his car and driven off, but instead he lingered.
A stranger had appeared that September afternoon and presented an ancient dilemma: How did anyone become a known person in the world—how did a stranger become no longer strange? Maybe it was grand to suggest, but solve this problem, Robbie thought, and it was possible every other wrong among men might be righted.
“At some point,” he said, “we’ll have to have you over for dinner.”
“Dinner?” Tom asked, picking up a bit. “Dinner when?”
“Sometime soon,” Robbie said.
“Soon,” Tom said, and turned toward his car.
A cirrose armada overhead moved fast across the sky, gunboat clouds outpacing carrier clouds.
“Actually—,” Robbie said.
Tom was odd, but Tom had verve, and once again it was not difficult to see that he’d been feeling small in the city. Everyone needed f
riends. Though he might not readily admit it, Robbie himself had been feeling lonesome lately, for even within the walled estate of a good marriage, loneliness was possible.
So Robbie asked, “Do you have plans this evening?”
And Tom did not.
“Good,” Robbie said, grinning, which in turn made Tom grin again, too. “Then why don’t you follow me home?”
• • •
CARLO MEANWHILE spent the balance of the afternoon at the house, gardening in front. By contrast to the anarchic cascade of flora in back, the street-side landscaping remained well-legislated: There was the flat and shallow lawn, respectfully mown, bisected on the bias by a trim slate path. The two men had eschewed any fencing or border shrubs, and the only plants they’d removed on the property when they moved in were some overly groomed and desiccated arbor vitae. At the northern corner, toward the house, a wise old pepper tree, small in leaf but broad in shade, offered gracious supervision. And to counterbalance the pepper tree, to come under its tutelage, Carlo (the better gardener) planted a modest stand of plum trees at the south, by the street and front path, adjacent to the driveway and garage. These plum saplings, six in all, had grown fast this last year they’d been in the ground, although they remained very uncertain of themselves, at an awkward age, and needed with some regularity to be trimmed up.
He had clipped a few new twigs and untied all the twine binding the trunks to their stakes, and he was kneeling in the dirt, in the process of retying the bands so they were neatly parallel and taut, when he stopped what he was doing for the tenth time in the last hour. Why had he let Tom Field take his place on the tennis court?
In the moment, back in the office, he hadn’t known what to do. He couldn’t very well tell Robbie not to invite a seemingly fun friendly man with random car trouble to join them—Robbie might have suspected something. But then Carlo should have insisted he still wanted to play and gone to the park, too, if for no other reason than to keep tabs on what Tom might say—and what, he had to wonder now, had Tom said? Why wasn’t Robbie home yet?
That Robbie would want to make a fast friend of a stranger like Tom wasn’t surprising, because whenever the two men used to travel to Europe, Robbie was always the one who approached scarved widows sitting alone in hotel bars, reliving their honeymoons, or the professors in cafés marking up guidebooks, or the young dark rakes smoking unfiltered cigarettes while writing first novels. Carlo never minded Robbie’s transient biergarten friendships—he never was made to suffer any subtraction of loyalty, engagement, or lust. If anything, Carlo fed off Robbie’s gregariousness, because while Carlo wasn’t shy professionally, outside of their practice, were it not for Robbie they would inhabit a world of two people total, them alone. And then Robbie also had a history of befriending the strangers he would start talking to at openings here at home, or in restaurants, or when infrequently they went out to a bar. It was easy for him, given his innate solicitousness, and at times it seemed like Robbie had too much affection to dispense, more love than could be contained in his life with Carlo, and Carlo didn’t like seeing Robbie wounded when inevitably the new friendship lost air. They were younger men mostly—Tom fit the mold—and usually Robbie provided distraction between their romances. They phoned Robbie late and came to rely on his confidence, and (to give them collectively the benefit of the doubt) maybe they thought because Robbie was settled, he wouldn’t need anything in return. Fortunately he could never be jammed into a darker mood for very long.
That said, the stakes were different now and Carlo had no idea what Tom’s game was—well, blackmail came to mind.
He pulled off his work gloves and dropped them by the ball of twine and clippers. He went inside ostensibly for a glass of lemonade but once in the kitchen, he noticed Robbie’s plain canvas sneakers kicked off by the dining table and stared at the way one was caught in the angled afternoon light, its heel fraying, laces fraying, tongue and toe shaped according to his lover’s foot—how well he knew this foot, its arch, veins, and freckles; how to hold it so as not to tickle Robbie—
And suddenly a squall: Carlo gripped the counter with both hands to steady himself while he cried. Hours earlier he’d felt good, like a turnaround might finally be in the making—but now? Now he was not so sure. Now he found himself anticipating the expression on Robbie’s face when he came home (assuming, as Carlo began to assume, that Tom had in fact revealed something), Robbie looking shocked, enraged, bereft. At first Carlo imagined being relieved, unburdened of his secrets, but then he heard himself spinning an explanation, and he considered getting in the car instead and driving, driving anywhere, giving Robbie space to storm about, and then later on Carlo would return, rueful, the first to speak, apologizing as profoundly as he could.
He took a series of deep breaths. The house was quiet—he tried to quiet his mind, too. Lately he’d been thinking a lot about the man and woman who purchased this home new and lived here for thirty-five years. The husband worked in a studio props department, the wife at the same studio in accounting, and they raised one son, who became a man in the second bedroom, who moved out when he married. His father suffered a fatal heart attack while driving and crashed his car where Silver Lake crossed under Sunset. Thereafter his mother lapsed into a permanent distracted state and died elsewhere. The son sold the house to a single man (according to the title search) who tried to write screenplays and owned a restaurant on Hillhurst that didn’t last long (so reported a long-time neighbor down the street), and like many of his friends, he became sick young and died here at home. Other owners briefly held the deed: a decorator who replaced the windows but then faced foreclosure, a sculptor who rented the place to art school kids with dogs. And then Carlo and Robbie arrived eight years ago, this house the first they owned, and given his profession, Carlo had thought he would understand the sentimental grounding that homeownership would entail, but he had not anticipated the daily elation that came with rootedness. Here in Silver Lake, amid the rambling hills that resisted the syntax of any grid, with ambitious trees all around, and of course the placid lake at the heart of the place—in this neighborhood, he could say he belonged.
Was that still the case? Did they, did he still belong here? How did one know when it was time to move on? Where would he, would they go?
Carlo went out front again and finished his chore. He was collecting his tools when he heard Robbie’s car pull into the driveway, and his heart skipped—although it wasn’t only Robbie arriving home. Robbie pulled in all the way up to the garage, making room for Tom Field’s car, which Tom parked in tandem.
“I invited Tom to dinner,” Robbie explained as he removed his tennis bag from the backseat.
“Oh,” Carlo said. “Did you?”
“I wasn’t sure what you were planning on making,” Robbie said.
“Nice house,” Tom said to Carlo. “Nice street.”
“Thank you,” Carlo said.
“Or if there’s enough,” Robbie said. “Do you want me to run out and get something?”
Tom’s driver’s-side door had been stripped of paint but not reprimed or repainted. He had some difficulty opening his trunk, which was packed with stuff, including a crate of CDs he shoved aside so he could pluck clothing from a duffel bag.
“No need,” Carlo said.
“Tom, I’ll go and put out a towel for you. You should take the first shower,” Robbie said, and then he went inside.
Tom slammed shut his trunk.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Carlo said.
“My car really did break down. It’s not like I’m stalking you.”
“I know that,” Carlo said, unconvincingly.
“There you were, crossing the street,” Tom said. “I saw your office, I went in. Look, if I’m not welcome—”
“Robbie invited you.”
“I meant by you.”
“I didn’t recognize you at first,” Carlo said, “because last spring you were blond. And I think you’ve lost we
ight.”
Tom brushed his now-brown hair forward with his palm.
“Don’t look so worried,” he said. “I didn’t say anything.”
Carlo nodded, wary.
“I don’t want anything,” Tom said.
Carlo squinted. Why should he trust him?
“Honestly,” Tom said, “I don’t.”
And so Carlo nodded again.
“He doesn’t know anything,” Tom said.
“Robbie? No,” Carlo said.
“You told him it was an accident,” Tom said.
Carlo didn’t have a chance to respond because Robbie appeared at the front door.
“Tom,” he called out, “you’re good to go. What? Come inside, for crying out loud, come inside.”
• • •
WHEN THE TWO MEN BOUGHT THE HOUSE it was because they could not yet afford to build one, and the plan had been to find a place with some clean lines and a clear view, dwell there some months, get to know it, and then renovate. The house was small, and the assumption was they’d add rooms, yet very quickly they came to appreciate the choices made by an unknown peer—the squared-off intimacy of the bedrooms, the simple gesture in main room of a ceiling sloped two feet higher toward the Reservoir, the built-ins banking the dining area, no cabinets over the extra-deep counters here in the kitchen, the way the patio off the kitchen was submerged three steps so as not to obscure the span of the lake, and so on—and in the end, they decided not to meddle. They did not add a mantle to the wide stone hearth. They did not enclose the front entry porch. What they did was install single-lite doors and floor-to-ceiling birch shelves for their collection of art books. What they did was paint the rooms green, forest in the bedrooms, sage everywhere else.
Robbie was doing all the talking while giving Tom a tour after they had cleaned up, and Carlo couldn’t tell whether Tom cared where the hearth stone purportedly was quarried or what designer was responsible for the low flat-armed furniture arranged minimally in the main room. Everyone had quickly emptied their flutes of prosecco, which Carlo refilled. Their guest nodded politely while Robbie rambled on about the artist-friend who did the abstract painting over the bed, the mountain browns and the gash of cadmium red, the lightning cracks of neon green. In the guest room, however, fingering the fringe of a mohair throw, staring at a color-field triptych, a landscape after a fashion of horizontal bands, Tom was audible when he winced.
