Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  “What?” Robbie asked.

  “I don’t want to irritate you,” Tom said.

  “No, go ahead.”

  “Looking at the art you have here—as someone who studied painting, I’d have to say there’s not a lot of talent involved. I dated a painter, and he makes what he calls mood portraits—or something—and they’re abstract but somehow based on guys he meets? I’m sure you’d get it, but it was over my head. We had a fight, I drove off, I haven’t spoken to him since. Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m some kind of freak anachronism.”

  The two men let Tom’s aria settle, thinking he’d said his piece, but he was all wound up.

  “I don’t mean to be rude, or maybe I do a little bit,” Tom said, “but, see, it’s the face that interests me. If you can draw a man’s smile, and draw the way the veins run down his hands, and draw the way he leans back in a chair, if you can do all that, then you will know the man intimately. It’s way hotter than sex. You will know him and you will see him—truly you will see him—and then when you show your drawing to other people, they’ll see him for who he is, too. People ask what is art? That is art.”

  The two men remained quiet.

  “I’ve insulted you,” Tom said. “I can leave.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Robbie said. “And I don’t necessarily disagree with you, at least about portraits. Do you still paint? Carlo used to paint—”

  “I want to go back to a time,” Tom interrupted, “when men wore gray wool trousers and blue blazers and felt hats and cuff links. Let’s the three of us bring back cuff links! But then I have to ask why can’t we have all the haberdashery and the civility that comes with it, and also still get all the good new science and the Internet and cancer drugs?

  “I sincerely do not get it,” Tom said, as if Robbie and Carlo might now proffer and defend a unified theory of modernity.

  And yet Tom himself was dressed the way the young men did to go out to the clubs. He wasn’t remotely dapper and in fact looked like he’d been wearing the same outfit all week, maybe sleeping in it.

  “I own a tux,” Tom said, and laughed. “I’m not sure why, it’s crazy, but I do. With velvet lapels.”

  In the far corner of the main room by the window, the men had angled a baby grand with a cushioned bench. The two men no longer played it. Tom tapped a C, then an E, a G—all three keys at once. The piano in all its traditional polish, it was obvious, appealed to him. On the way back across the house toward the kitchen, the steep shelves of books delayed him. He turned his head to the side to scan the spines and withdrew a tome about a Venetian master.

  He pulled out another text, a classic of classical architecture, and said, “Okay, you guys aren’t total cretins. We can still be friends.”

  On the back patio, they sat beneath the rustling neighbor-tree and watched the lights come on all around the Reservoir. The lights reflected in the lake looked like unstrung pearls, like loosened fragments of a mosaic.

  “We’re lucky with our view,” Robbie said.

  “I don’t know,” Tom said. “What’s the deal with that chain-link fence? I’m not sure I see the point of a lake you can’t swim in or take a boat out on.”

  “I agree with you,” Carlos said. “I’m not even sure if it’s still being tapped.”

  It was true that no one could get close to the water, and it was not as though Robbie ever wanted to scull, but it would have been fun now and again to see toy boats out there leaving toy wakes.

  He said, “It’s pretty to look at though.”

  “Admit it,” Tom said. “Say that just once you’d like to spot a sailboat on that lake.”

  “Just once I’d like to spot a sailboat on that lake,” Robbie said.

  They ate the figs the two men had collected earlier, chasing them with wedges of cambozola. They had moved on to red wine and Carlo was feeling quite aerated—Robbie, too. Tom, however, appeared unaffected. He was staring up at the tree swaying overhead, lost briefly in unshared contemplation.

  He said, “I don’t suppose you two go to church.”

  “My family is Jewish,” Carlo said. “My father is a survivor. I grew up an atheist.”

  “I’m the resident agnostic,” Robbie said.

  “All y’all are going to hell,” Tom said, and chuckled, sort of.

  He said, “I can’t find a church I like—a plain, austere, white clapboard, white-spire church. And I miss the liturgy, the old songs. I went to a place near me in the Valley. What was this guy doing with a guitar? No tambourines, please. And I do not want to hear some lame sermon about doing unto others from a minister who the night before, in some sticky back room, was feeding me poppers and licking my ass. I want the old Latin—what happened to the old Latin? Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. Do you know any place like that around here? What?”

  Maybe the alcohol had coarsened him. Tom pulled down his sweater sleeves over his palms, gripping the cuffs, hiding his hands.

  As dusk settled, the glass house above them became a mirror, framing the immediate hillside. The wind had rolled in finally and scattered their conversation. They were talking about art education, and it was no surprise that Tom had been trained in the Beaux Arts tradition, that he’d stretched and gessoed his own canvases, mixed his own pigments, nor a surprise that he maintained ample disdain for the theoretical approach that had informed how Robbie and Carlo studied what they studied. Tom was in mid-rant when he paused and stared at the two men sitting next to each other.

  He said, “Twenty years,” and he looked at the men appreciatively, shaking his head, amazed. “Wow.”

  When they went inside and Carlo began to prepare dinner, Tom said, “You two have been so kind to me. Let me cook for you.”

  Carlo had planned to roast a chicken, finish it with a splash of balsamic, and also make mushroom risotto. These were recipes from a favorite Italian cookbook that had belonged to his mother.

  “I prefer French,” Tom said, and fired off a set of questions about ingredients on hand. Satisfied, he announced, “I’m making coq au vin. Try and stop me.”

  Tom himself now uncorked the bottles of red wine they drank, the same wine that went into the skillet in liberal quantities. Carlo blanched and peeled the onions as directed and chopped celery with rapid percussion. Robbie retrieved ingredients from the pantry or refrigerator: flour, parsley, thyme, bay leaves. Cognac. Mushrooms, butter, bacon. At the same time, Tom prepared rolls to bake—clouds of flour whitened the black counters. Before long there were bits of chopped herb everywhere, the stray coin of carrot, and Carlo’s well-kept kitchen was in disarray, although he didn’t care, and it was odd, very odd, but he would have to admit he was having fun.

  Tom—who ended up with flour-smudged jeans because he kept having to tug them up his hips—Tom clearly was having a good time, as well. Now and then he sang out a chorus line from a song everyone had been playing all summer. He chattered fondly about his grandmother’s cook, from whom he’d learned about French country cuisine. He recited his knowledge of the basic sauces. He had a way of bouncing whenever he dropped ingredients in the skillet and stirred them in and knocked the wooden spoon against the cast iron rim. The rolls went in the oven. Carlo insisted on something green and prepared spinach to be sautéed with broccoli rabe. They polished off another bottle of shiraz. Carlo put a symphony on the stereo. He built a fire in the hearth, the first of the season—it was cold enough—and whatever angst he’d been suffering earlier, and whatever uneasiness he had about Tom Field, abated. Carlo decided to take Tom at his word, that he’d shown up by chance, that he wanted nothing. The past was the past and would remain in the past. Life was strange. Life was grand. Maybe it was how much he’d had to drink, but then maybe not: their home was a warm home, a fast fire blazing, the loamy aroma of chicken cooked in wine in the air, an orchestra in full thunder.

  While the chicken was braising and the rolls baking, they leaned against the kitchen counters, the two men on one side, arms loosely aroun
d each other, Tom opposite, and Tom mentioned that, in case they hadn’t figured it out, he had been a bit promiscuous in his life, but he also said that it was never what he wanted or sought, it was simply what happened. He looked like fun, he was fun, but he wanted a proper boyfriend, an old-fashioned boyfriend, and sadly didn’t see how this would be in his future.

  Tom said, “Used to be a time a couple of years ago I could roll out of bed and look loveable. People invited me away for the weekend, I had places to stay. I read novels on trains. Sunday nights back in the city, I slept beautifully.”

  “We’ll have to think about who we know,” Robbie said.

  “I have no money,” Tom said. “Boys don’t want to hear that.”

  “You’re cute, you’re intelligent,” Robbie said. “Don’t give up.”

  Soon they were dining by the fire, sitting on the floor and leaning back against cushions pulled down from the couches, plates propped up on knees or resting on the coffee table. The coq au vin was earthy and rich. They wiped their plates with the warm rolls. At first it appeared that Tom enjoyed his own cooking, but then Carlo noticed that Tom wasn’t eating much food. He did keep drinking, although still to no measurable effect.

  While the two men were serving themselves seconds, Tom set down his plate with a loud clink, switched off the stereo and crossed the room to the piano, where he sat down and for a held moment stared at the keys. He stretched his fingers into their fullest span. And then, delicately, tentatively, with a few notable added rests, he played a pared-back rendition of a familiar étude. He would secure a chord with his left hand, then turn his attention to his right, awkwardly slipping his thumb beneath his middle finger, safely repositioning his hand across the keys. He played only the one piece and then mock-bowed and offered an apology about how much he had to learn—he’d been teaching himself—and the men heard none of it, they were entertained.

  Back by the fire, Tom was aloft, all of a sudden talky with plans. He had never been to Italy and needed to see Florence, which somehow he would pull off in the next year. He would stay in Los Angeles after all and look again for a job. He would move from his present studio in the Valley over here to Silver Lake and drop by the offices of Stein Voight and keep everyone from getting work done. He would join a gym. He might try to date again. He might sit down in front of an easel again, paint again, because he missed the smell of linseed oil and the feeling of a sable brush against his cheek before it was used the first time. With every statement, the two men were encouraging, although Tom was all keyed up on his own and didn’t need winding.

  Finally he said, “I will look into going back to school for architecture. It’s what I always wanted to do. I will do this finally. Thank you.”

  Tom’s gratitude seemed misplaced to Carlo, given their aesthetic differences, but of course he graciously accepted it, and Robbie, who probably would have offered Tom a job on the spot if he could have, said, “It’s a plan.”

  “Hold me to it,” Tom said.

  “We will,” Robbie said.

  And then what happened? This was the moment in the evening to which the two men, days and weeks later, would have to return. There was a lull in the conversation while Robbie stacked dishes in the sink and Carlo made espresso, which Tom declined in favor of emptying a bottle into his glass. Something happened to him during this pause. When they returned to the hearth, Tom looked addled, staring slack-jawed at the fire, mystified, as if fire itself were confounding and troubling. Robbie asked him what was on his mind.

  “You don’t want to know,” Tom said.

  “Sure we do,” Robbie said.

  “Trust me, you don’t.”

  “Go on.”

  Tom pushed up his sleeves. He waited. He waited a long minute.

  “There was a story in the news a few months ago,” he said, “about a woman in New York who was home alone on a weekday afternoon with her little boy when a guy broke into her apartment. The guy had a knife.”

  Tom held out his fist as if gripping the weapon.

  “Was he going to rob her? Was he surprised to find her? Who knows? But what we do know is that he made her get down on the kitchen floor and forced her to undress at knifepoint and unzipped his pants and started raping her while holding the knife to her throat. The little boy in the next room naturally was crying …”

  Tom’s voice trailed off, and Carlo was not surprised that Tom appeared to relish narrating the story, drawing it out.

  “And I guess this meant the guy couldn’t enjoy his rape,” he went on. “So he slid the knife up from the woman’s neck to her face and held it there. He pressed the knife against her cheekbone, drawing a drop of blood. The little boy was really bawling.”

  Tom looked at each man in turn.

  “And the rapist said to the woman, ‘Your kid or your eyes.’”

  Robbie brought his knees to his chest and leaned forward, making himself compact.

  “‘Your kid or your eyes,’” Tom said again. “An act of additional violence was going to be committed and the man was giving the woman a choice.”

  Tom paused again.

  “She said her eyes,” Carlo said.

  Tom waited for Robbie, but Robbie refused to guess.

  “She said her kid?” Carlo asked.

  Tom nodded.

  “How does anyone know what she said?” Carlo asked.

  “The neighbors heard,” Tom said. “They’d called the police.”

  “And the man killed the boy?” Carlo asked. “Oh no. Did he kill them both?”

  Robbie released a muted groan.

  “The man pushed himself off of the woman,” Tom said, “and started heading for the boy, who backed up into the bedroom. And the woman, we have to assume, must have thought this would give her the chance to grab some kind of weapon, except that she didn’t own a weapon. The man turned around and slashed her throat and ran out. The woman bled to death in front of her kid.”

  The house was still except for the crackle of the fire, although Carlo had not added a new log and the blaze was tapering off.

  “What a world,” Tom said. And he also said, “Now if the woman had kept a gun in her apartment, who knows what would have happened? Maybe the guy still would have cut her before she got to the gun. But then again, maybe not.”

  Robbie said, “Then we’d be reading instead about how the little boy found the gun one day and decided to play with it—”

  “Great,” Tom said in a flat voice. “In fact, if he had been able to play with the gun, he’d have known where it was kept and how to fire it at the man who raped and killed his mother.”

  “I don’t know,” Robbie said.

  “Now what are you going to say, y’all want gun control? And let me guess, you’re also against the death penalty,” Tom said. “And you?” he asked Carlo.

  Carlo had been silent, his gaze falling elsewhere.

  He said, “I agree with Robbie.”

  “You do?” Tom asked.

  “And why are we discussing this?” Robbie asked.

  “You asked what I was thinking and lately I think about this all the time,” Tom said. “I’m sorry but I do. Somebody comes on my land without my prior invitation, I will fucking kill him cold, and that’s my right.”

  It wasn’t Tom’s actual sentiment itself that gave the two men pause (although it did) so much as his tone, caustic, bellicose.

  “Considering you don’t have any land at the moment for anyone to trespass,” Carlo said, “we don’t need to worry about you taking out any door-to-door salesmen.”

  “I’m serious,” Tom said, fixing his glare on Carlo. “Somebody messes with me, I will get a gun and I will fucking kill him.”

  “Great,” Robbie interrupted. “We get it.”

  “I doubt it,” Tom said. “I bet if someone smashed his way into your lovely glass house here and threatened to shoot you and your monogamous boyfriend for no reason other than you’re fags, I bet you’d wish you had a gun in your night table dra
wer.”

  Had they offended Tom in some way?

  Robbie said, “I’d like to believe I can reason with anyone.”

  “Reason,” Tom snapped. “‘Your kid or your eyes’—and you’d try reason? That’s rich.”

  “If any two people talk long enough,” Robbie insisted, “they will find something they have in common.”

  “Oh my goodness,” Tom said, “you actually believe that, don’t you? I don’t know what world you think you live in, baby.”

  “I forgot we have brownies for dessert,” Carlo said. To Tom: “There’s a new gourmet place across from our office we like—”

  “Talk,” Tom said. “Talk, talk, talk,” he said, pushing himself up and bumping into the bookcase on his way to the kitchen, where he opened another bottle of wine.

  “We won’t be able to let him drive,” Robbie whispered to Carlo.

  “You’re talking about me,” Tom said.

  By the fire again, he cradled his wine goblet. He was lying back in such a way that his sweater and T-shirt rode up and revealed a patch of his pale abdomen. The dark clouds had passed again—he seemed calmer. He rested his free hand on his stomach, his thumb inserted into the exposed waistband of his boxers.

  Before long, the fire was mostly embers, and Robbie claimed he saw figures moving in these embers, ecstatic dancers, dogs in full stride, cross-country skiers. Carlo pictured static things, numismatic profiles of famous men, the shapes of states, planets in revolution around minor suns. Robbie asked Tom what he saw.

  Tom said, “Fire is fire.” He said, “I guess it doesn’t much matter if someone breaks into your house and you have no gun, because you can be going in to cash your social security check in Oklahoma City or riding a bus in Tel Aviv, doing what you have to do to get through your lousy day, taking the subway in Madrid, and that’s it. You’re done, you’re cooked, game over.”