Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  Detective Michaels was saying something about how shock was often delayed—Robbie realized he was shaking—and it would be best if Robbie didn’t try to drive today, today he needed to take it easy, and at least the two men had each other, they would comfort each other, they would survive this together. The detective grabbed the wool throw from the guest bed and draped it over Robbie’s shoulders. She took Robbie’s hands and had him clasp the blanket.

  Robbie rejoined Carlo on the couch. He wanted to tell him about the art books but couldn’t because his teeth were chattering. Carlo reached his arm around Robbie and tried to warm him up.

  Finally Robbie had to ask: “Because we wouldn’t do a threeway?”

  Carlo didn’t say anything.

  “Because then he heard us?” Robbie asked. “Do you think he heard us?”

  Carlo tried to hush him.

  “He said he was born at the wrong time. Do people kill themselves because they’re born at the wrong time?” Robbie asked.

  Carlo started to say something but then didn’t speak.

  “What?” Robbie asked.

  Carlo shrugged.

  “No, what?” Robbie insisted.

  Carlo shook his head from side to side. He said, “Nothing.”

  “You heard him, all the things he was going to do,” Robbie said.

  Even then, already that morning, the two men were like boats in abutting berths knocking up against separate piers.

  “Don’t,” Carlo said, and he sounded tinny, ventriloquized. “Don’t try to figure him out, Robbie,” he said. “You won’t.”

  • • •

  THAT DUSK ROBBIE SAT on the piano bench by the window and peered out at the darkened lake. He was alone in the house, which he was not happy about.

  All afternoon he had shuffled around, still wrapped in the blanket, while Carlo put away the dishes and pots and pans, while Carlo swept, while Carlo stripped the guest bed and laundered the sheets and remade the bed. Despite Robbie’s admonition that for all they knew the police might want a second look at the patio, Carlo hacked up the fallen branch and stuffed the debris in the green recycling bin. It was also Carlo who went round the neighbors and told them roughly what had happened. When he returned, he reported that they were sympathetic, as if this sort of freak tragedy in one’s home could befall any of them. Then Carlo rode his bike down to the office—but why on a Sunday? To accomplish what beyond getting away from the house, and from Robbie moping about?

  The doorbell startled him. Detective Michaels had returned with a police tow truck to remove Tom’s car. As they moved the car out, the duct tape binding the front fender to the chassis came loose, and the driver had to leave the truck idling while first he tried to retape the fender before deciding to remove it.

  “How are you doing?” the detective asked. “Where’s your partner? Did he go out?”

  Robbie said, “I don’t get it. He was looking for a church to join.”

  “Your partner?”

  “Detective, what will happen to Tom’s belongings?”

  “We’ll head over to his residence shortly. Family will be contacted.”

  “There’s only his grandmother, as far as I know. He didn’t mention his parents.”

  “Mr. Field didn’t by chance leave a cell phone here, did he?”

  “He mentioned losing it,” Robbie said.

  Before leaving, the detective asked if Robbie, as Tom’s only identifiable friend, could make himself available the next day in case she had additional questions after going through Tom’s apartment.

  “If we find certain evidence, we might be able to close the case quickly,” she said.

  “Like a suicide note?”

  “Sometimes there are strong indications of a certain plan in place.”

  “A suicide note,” Robbie said.

  “If you will,” the detective said.

  Robbie said he hoped to return to the office, but in fact the next morning, Monday morning, while Carlo got up at the regular time and showered and was good to go, Robbie couldn’t get out of bed. Carlo told him to sleep in, it was fine, and Robbie insisted he’d be down the hill in an hour. An hour later, when he did get out of bed, he only made it as far as the couch. He was hung over without having had any alcohol the night before, dizzy yet not fevered. His back ached the way it did when he played too much tennis. He was still wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt when Detective Michaels came by again at noon. She was carrying an oversized manila envelope.

  Robbie tried to neaten up a bit. He combed his hair with his fingers. He fluffed couch cushions.

  “We successfully accessed Mr. Field’s apartment,” the detective said.

  “And did you find a note?”

  “Not as yet,” she said. “Nor did we find any medications—”

  “Anti-depressants?”

  “Or anything else, not even aspirin. Or alcohol—only iced tea. I think it was iced tea.”

  “Green tea,” Robbie said.

  “That might explain the color. Like pond water,” the detective said. “We did, however, find a cell phone.”

  “He didn’t lose it after all?”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Field was not the tidiest person. There were some large piles of dirty laundry we had to dig through. There aren’t many numbers on the cell phone, a few, and one of them does appear to be Mr. Field’s grandmother.”

  “You called her?”

  “We have someone at the station trained for that,” the detective explained.

  Because she was sitting at the edge of couch, and because the cushions hadn’t been completely tucked back in place after Robbie’s morning nap, the seat cushion was lifting away somewhat from the upholstered frame. Robbie was going to offer to reposition the cushion to make the detective more comfortable when he noticed something small and black and square wedged between the back and seat frame. There was also a glint of gold. The detective shifted back on the couch, hiding again whatever the little object was—a wallet? A credit card case?

  “Mr. Field also seems to have been something of a musician,” the detective said. “There was an electric keyboard propped up on a workout bench and then some sheet music.”

  “What else did you find?”

  “Stacks of library books. A suit in the closet, but not much else really. Most of his clothes seemed to be scattered around the floor—”

  “What about a tux?”

  “Yes, right, also a tuxedo. So you’ve been to his place?”

  “No,” Robbie said. “He mentioned owning one.”

  “We found some art supplies, some pencils, brushes, and whatnot. And then this,” Detective Michaels said, “which I brought to show you.”

  She withdrew a large spiral-bound sketch book from the envelope and handed it to Robbie, who began leafing through it. On each page of most of the pad, there was a single portrait of a man or a woman or a kid, old, young, pretty, less pretty—it didn’t appear as though Tom had ever drawn the same subject twice. By far, the majority of charcoal portraits were of men around Tom’s age, many full nudes or nude torsos, a few of the guys with hard-ons, although most not. All of the drawings were dated, the earliest page a year ago, the most recent the previous week.

  “I’m wondering if any of these subjects are familiar to you,” the detective said. “If you recognize anyone, if you can identify anyone, then we might try contacting him.”

  Robbie began at the beginning of the sketch book and turned each page carefully. He knew no one. What he could say, however, was that Tom was deft at chiaroscuro. He used white chalk sparingly, and sometimes he rubbed in sienna or umber, which animated his portraits and gave them warmth. He was skilled and he knew it because he had enough ego to sign every page, his name in tight small caps followed by a period, an emphatic statement: TOM FIELD.

  “He was talented,” Robbie said.

  “I’d have to agree. But you can’t—”

  “All strangers,” Robbie said. “To me, anyway, they’re
all strangers.”

  The detective removed another smaller envelope from her jacket pocket. The envelope contained snapshots, which she spread out on the table as if she were going to perform a card trick. She said the photos had been stashed in the glove compartment of Tom’s car. Again she asked if they meant anything to Robbie, and he began to suspect that the detective was less interested what information he might provide than how he reacted to seeing the photos, all of which were of Tom at different ages, none recent, many of him posed with an older gentleman usually wearing a seersucker suit and leaning on a cane with an ivory handle or with an older woman who sometimes wore an auburn wig. No surprise, Tom was adorable as a little boy and he always seemed to be caught in mid-sentence. The detective herself had to chuckle at the shot of Tom and his teddy bear wearing matching lederhosen. Here was Tom in tennis whites clutching a racket. Tom by a lake, hair wet, a towel around his shoulders, lips blue. Tom as a teenager in the passenger seat of a convertible, arm over the side, too cool for school. Always speaking something and always, it seemed to Robbie, in a good mood.

  “Did Mr. Field mention anything that might have been causing him extra aggravation?” the detective asked.

  Robbie was tearing up.

  “Did he seem at all desperate?”

  What kind of lonely, Robbie thought. He couldn’t speak, and perhaps the detective knew not to push him. She gathered the photographs back in the envelope and put away the sketch book. She asked if she could step out to the patio for a brief moment to look at something again, and Robbie neither nodded nor shook his head no, but the detective went out back anyway.

  He was drenched with maudlin thoughts about how Tom’s death took time to stage: time to consider the drop, to tie the rope to the tree, to knot the rope and slip it over his neck. His death took thought, it took preparation, maybe for days, maybe for years. However, the police had not found a suicide note and they were never going to find anything resembling one, no matter how hard they searched. The dead man’s motive would remain hazy, and it was possible Tom was only messing around, inebriate, testing himself in a game of auto-brinkmanship. Also possible, he wanted to die, although Robbie could not accept this. It didn’t seem right, it didn’t fit.

  He looked out at the patio, where Detective Michaels appeared to have some interest in the wooden fence. With the detective occupied, Robbie pulled back the couch cushion and removed the black object, which was neither a wallet nor a credit card case. It was a palm-sized, gilt-edged address book. On the first page of the address book, in a somewhat younger hand but in the same firm small caps with which he’d signed his drawings, Tom had written his name. The little book must have fallen out of his pocket when he started to pull off his jeans or at some other point Saturday night.

  The pages were soft, worn by a decade of thumbing, and Robbie noted that nearly all of the entries had been struck through with a hard stroke of ink or lead, all of the names and numbers crossed out save only a few.

  The detective on the patio glanced up at the tree. She looked out toward the Reservoir, and then back at the house.

  Later, if he was going to be honest about it, Robbie would have to admit that his true adultery began here, because it was with a quickened heart and the sudden, switched-on heat of infidelity that, as Detective Michaels came back inside the house, Robbie shoved Tom’s little address book between the couch cushions, stood, and saw the detective to the door.

  • • •

  HE WAITED UNTIL THE NEXT MORNING when he was alone again in the house, Carlo having returned to the office. This time Robbie was glad to have him gone. The woman who answered the phone sounded like she’d been interrupted and Robbie identified himself as a friend of Tom’s. He was asked to hold a moment.

  He held a full minute before a decidedly older woman came on the line and said, “Yes.”

  “Mrs. Field,” Robbie said.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m Rob Voight. A friend of Tom’s. Calling from Los Angeles.”

  “Oh. Yes,” Tom’s grandmother said. “Hello.”

  “I wanted to call and say how sorry I am for your loss.”

  “Yes. Thank you, yes.”

  “I don’t know what the police told you—”

  “They told me, yes.”

  Tom’s grandmother sounded as though she were holding the phone at some distance from her face. She may not have been holding the phone for herself at all. Her breathing was arduous, her voice feeble.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry,” Robbie said again.

  “Yes. Well. Tommy was Tommy.”

  Tom was Tommy, Robbie thought.

  He said, “I don’t know what the police may have said but I want you to know—”

  “He was being dramatic,” Tom’s grandmother said. “Wasn’t he?”

  “Exactly,” Robbie said. “Dramatic,” he said.

  “Always a dramatic child,” she said. “We didn’t think he’d—”

  “No,” Robbie said.

  “That’s not Tommy.”

  “No.”

  “Poor Tommy,” Tom’s grandmother said.

  “It’s tragic.”

  “Very unexpected.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “Well,” Tom’s grandmother said.

  Then Robbie didn’t know what to say. He listened to the old woman work at each breath.

  “You sound like a young man,” Tom’s grandmother said.

  “Yes,” Robbie said, although he was thinking young relative to Tom’s grandmother, not young like Tom.

  “You have a life ahead of you,” she said.

  Robbie didn’t respond. Tom’s grandmother must have thought he was her grandson’s boyfriend.

  “And you need to live that life, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Robbie said.

  “Tommy would agree with me, I’m certain.”

  “That’s very kind of you to say.”

  “Goodnight, dear,” Tom’s grandmother said, and hung up before Robbie could wish her well.

  He hid Tom’s address book his underwear drawer in the dresser and then lay on the couch a long while. He didn’t fall asleep, but he was not really in a wakeful state when Carlo returned in the early evening and found him laid out thus. Carlo switched on a lamp and sat down at the edge of the couch.

  “Maybe you’d prefer the bed,” he said.

  Robbie squeezed a corner of the velvet sofa. He’d been under the impression he was in bed.

  “What time is it?” he asked. “It seems late.”

  “I stopped by the police station,” Carlo said.

  “They called you?”

  “No, I went in.”

  “Oh. Did they ask you if Tom seemed desperate?” Robbie asked.

  Carlo was staring at him as if reading words written on his face, text Robbie would be unable to see unless staring in a mirror. Did Robbie look guilty in some way—did Carlo know Robbie had phoned Tom’s grandmother?

  “What?” Robbie asked.

  “Right,” Carlo said, “they asked if Tom seemed desperate, but I said you were the one who’d spent more time with him … “

  He reached out his forefinger and gently caressed Robbie’s left eyebrow as if flattening errant hairs, then his right. Robbie took Carlo’s hand and held it against his heart. Don’t move, he was thinking, let’s stay like this.

  But Carlo stood, said, “How about I heat up some soup for you,” and went into the kitchen.

  Robbie realized he’d been dreaming, and in his dream, it was Saturday night or maybe another night. He had imagined himself sound asleep in bed when suddenly he awoke and noticed Carlo wasn’t lying next to him. Instead Carlo stood at their bedroom window, gazing out at the patio, at the black trees of night and the black lake beyond, the slope of his shoulders in silhouette, handsome, distant. In the dream, Robbie was determined to stay awake until Carlo, apparently unaware he was being observed, returned to bed, but then Robbie yawned—then Robbie fell back asleep.
This was what he had dreamed about: not being able to stay awake.

  • • •

  HE DUTIFULLY ATE MOST OF THE SOUP that Carlo warmed up for him, but then Robbie was zonked, and so Carlo put him to bed, the blanket pulled high. Still clothed, atop the blankets, Carlo held Robbie until Robbie fell asleep. Then Carlo retreated to a chair in the corner of the dark room.

  He’d lied to the police twice Sunday morning, and initially he wasn’t going to correct the record, but then he understood that his perjury might come back to haunt him. This was why Carlo had gone to the police station to speak with Detective Michaels.

  As the detective ushered him to a windowless interrogation room where they could chat, she admitted she was not in the most jovial mood because she’d only that hour learned that in another case, a key witness questioned by an assistant district attorney had contradicted testimony he’d originally given the detective, throwing the prosecution into disarray. Which was to say Detective Michaels was probably not going to be amused to learn about a relatively less serious instance of fibbing.

  “I thought it would be best if I cleared something up,” Carlo started.

  The detective pinched the tip of her nose with her thumb and forefinger and held it a moment.

  “I said I’d never met Tom before he showed up at our office, but I had,” Carlo said.

  “Is that so?”

  The detective stared at him, waiting, but it was a difficult story to relay and even now, having decided to come clean, Carlo hesitated. The way the detective was regarding him, half squinting, didn’t help.

  “Yes,” Carlo said. “Last April.”

  One evening the previous April, he had gone alone to a dinner party at friends in Glendale while Robbie stayed home nursing a cold. Carlo left relatively early and was driving along Fletcher and had passed under the 5 and was coming up to the light at Riverside. He was in the right lane and driving at a more cautious speed than usual because he’d consumed a good amount of wine with dinner, which had been rich, all about cream sauces, a cheese course, a chocolate course, gluttony. He was woozy when he came up behind a car at the red light, and there were no other cars at the intersection. The car, a long black sedan, had its flashers on—it looked like maybe it had stalled out. Carlo was about to turn into the left lane and maneuver around it when two men shot out of the back of the sedan, flailing their arms yet making no noise he could hear.