by Peter Gadol
“You’re free to go,” the detective said, standing—free to go, as if Carlo had been run in and detained. “And as you can imagine, we’ll be in touch.”
Carlo left the police station feeling rattled, and while he’d had every intention of going home and confessing at least as much as he did to the detective, he found Robbie beached on the couch—he who never napped, napping, Robbie’s forehead mottled by the velvet fabric—and there was no way Carlo could be honest right then. Now Robbie was asleep again, although his sleep was restive at best. His leg twitched, he flipped around once, then back the way he was.
The deeper truth about Sunday morning was that Carlo’s guilt had been immediate and stupefying. If he had lied, it wasn’t only to keep Robbie from learning what he didn’t need to know, but also because Carlo himself couldn’t yet deal with the ways blame came back to him, and he didn’t know how Robbie would react. For who knew how long—months, years—Carlo would bear the burden of proving his integrity and goodness to his disenchanted boyfriend, or to be even more blunt about it, given all the compound secrets, it was iffy Robbie would ever trust him again. What if Robbie never forgave him?
Something else was happening while he sat in the dark and watched Robbie sleep. His initial guilt was turning into a kind of anger. For what Tom did, Carlo was beginning to see, was a cruel act not only against Tom’s own being but also against the two men, especially Robbie, who had recognized Tom as the lonely soul he was and attempted, if only for a day and a night, to make Los Angeles a less alienating city. All anyone had to do was look at Robbie these last two days to register the toll of Tom’s carelessness, his malice.
And so it was with the coagulation of this fury that Carlo resolved not to tell Robbie anything the next morning, nor probably the morning after that, maybe never. No, never. Carlo needed to nurse Robbie back to his old sanguine utopian self. The two men had made a great life for themselves, and they would ride this out, this aftermath, that was all there was to it. Carlo would hold it all together the way he always did—their finances, their office, their home. Hopefully he would get a house built for the television producer. He would find new work. He would meet the police in their queries until they closed the case. Of course he would continue to suffer remorse for what happened to Tom, of course, but in the same way Carlo could not go back to the intersection of Riverside and Fletcher and swing out wide and zoom away untouched, Tom could not be brought back. Carlo would not let any of what had happened break him, and he would focus only on the future. He had no judge to answer to but himself, and whatever amends he needed to make in time would be private. His atonement, one more secret.
3
BY THE END OF THE WEEK, Robbie returned to the office, where there was work to do because the television producer had agreed in principle to move forward with Stein Voight. In order to build on the site, they were going to have to bring in a structural engineer, but before they could do that, they needed to attend to some of the producer’s pending qualms with the overall plan. One task Robbie faced, re-siting a detached studio apartment, was tricky but not complicated, yet after only an hour back at his desk during which he did little more than stare at the street, he decided to take a walk to the producer’s property for inspiration. He set out at a brisk gait, yet instead of heading up the hill away from the lake as he approached the Reservoir, he found himself drawn toward the atomic movement of hounds in the dog park. And once he rounded the dog park, for no reason other than it was a lovely fall day, he ended up continuing north and making a circuit around the entire Reservoir.
After walking all the way around, he immediately headed into a second loop because he was finding a lot to look at while on foot that he’d long since forgotten about, or taken for granted. There was the lake itself, for one, with its ever-shifting variegations, the many indigo ponds within the cobalt basin, the lustrous patches of sapphire or circles of matte cerulean no different than the open-lidded sky. There was the white scattering of birds that settled on the lake, like a string of buoys moving up and down with the soft current until they took shape and flew and resettled elsewhere across the water. There were the hills on all sides robed with houses, and the range in the crystal distance, snow-capped, rustic, Western. How lucky he was to live here, he thought. He had the sense he’d been missing out on things, rushing, his world a world seen from a train. He had not been attentive enough to his environment, and now, given what had happened, especially in light of what had happened, he needed to celebrate Life, to cherish Life: Long live Life.
Robbie took a third turn around the lake. He wasn’t getting tired, quite the opposite. Each orbit gave him more energy, and at first he might have been thinking about the design problem back on his desk. But he was also looking at all the modern houses he walked past, including some that the two men had renovated and one or two designed from scratch, and then Robbie began lingering in front of the homes built by the celebrated mid-century architects who gave shape to the neighborhood, each house with its own pleasing geometry set against the grain of the hills. On the east side of the Reservoir, he headed up a side street and then down a dead-ended street to a collection of houses he’d originally seen what seemed like a mid-century ago in a coffee-table book (it was the history of this particular architecture in Southern California that drew the two men to Los Angeles after college), houses you could see straight through, front to back, mitered glass boxes riding mitered glass boxes, with broad flat roofs and trusses extending beyond exterior walls, houses surrounded by white-barked eucalyptus, twisted, atilt—several houses in a row, each a variation on its neighbor, movements of a sonata for glass and beam.
He was carrying a pocket-sized notebook and, standing on Neutra Place across from the houses, he began sketching a series of overlapping parallelograms, an approximate perspective, then connecting the planes with vertical scratches of black ink. He looked at his miniature drawings, at the homes up the grade, and turned the page and sketched the pavilions again, his pen grasped more firmly between his thumb and first two fingers, his ink line consequently more taut, as if in the act of sketching he could solve the eternal riddle of how a glass edge could meet a glass edge and make a room appear at once solid and transparent.
“You can drive all around the city,” he said, “and come across clusters of modern houses like on this one, and I know, I know—you’re going to tell me each of these streets is yet one more failed utopia, and all utopias are doomed. And maybe that’s true, but then maybe not. Maybe we start with islands of houses like on this street, and then each of these island-streets expands outward until eventually it meets up with another one like it, until eventually you have a whole neighborhood, and then the neighborhoods run into each other, and then you wake up and your entire city has blossomed into a Modern City—”
Robbie stopped. He’d been lecturing aloud, addressing a skeptic, trying to persuade someone, trying to persuade Tom, as if Tom were with him, Tom who had taken the art monographs into the guest room and who maybe in time could have been sold on Modern, perhaps in time, were there the time, which there wasn’t now.
Robbie didn’t return to the office. He walked home and then in the declining afternoon, from the main room, looked out back at the fall of tea bushes blossoming with tight red flowers, a thousand ruby blooms strewn amid the cindery brush.
One: a lush landscape.
Two: a house with yawning beams.
Three (later, in bed, his eyes adjusted to the dark and he was staring at the hard shallow trench of Carlo’s back): a man’s back, a thing of grace according to Tom, and maybe Robbie understood him now in a way he’d failed before. There was too much beauty in the world and Robbie didn’t know how to absorb it all, too much to take in.
• • •
WHEN HE AWOKE THE NEXT MORNING, however, nothing whatsoever looked beautiful. The man-made lake in the distance was a pathetic folly, obsolete, a blight. Concrete shores girded by a chain link fence, and the water, after all, was
dammed water, stolen water. Robbie stared out at the patio and the tree where Tom had hanged himself, and what he would give now not to have been the one who found Tom. He remembered Tom’s taxi-dermic face, bloated and grotesque. The chair on its side, his hat on the ground. The sensation of grabbing hold of his thighs and waist and losing balance and falling and semi-stiff Tom falling, too—as if that was what finally killed him, the fall. The dampness of the slate patio, the cold stone, stone-cold, death.
Time passed, one autumn day bled into the next. Robbie could not stay warm—his favorite sweater failed him, his favorite scarf, too. He had little appetite, he was losing weight. He went into the office but left early, without accomplishing anything on the producer’s house. Carlo seemed to understand, although he also seemed weary in his own way.
There was one night, for instance, when he came home and headed straight for a bottle of zinfandel, gulping down a full glass before admitting that since Robbie hadn’t completed certain renderings, and since the producer had asked for a modification to add a second rental studio atop the one already sketched out, Carlo had decided to open software he hadn’t used in ages and make the revision himself, and in the process he’d overlooked something extremely basic, namely that the city would require another off-street parking space to accompany the new unit (and how many times had they dealt with this issue in the past?). Given the grade of the site, this was complicated. Carlo had already informed the client one thing was possible, and now they’d have to double back and offer alternatives, and mark his word, Carlo said, the producer would use this gaffe against them. Carlo drank a lot of wine that night and fell asleep early but claimed the next morning that, no worries, everything would work out. He was glad merely to reveal his goof-up and express some passing angst. Robbie said he’d try to be more available at work, and Carlo replied that, his mistakes aside, he was on top of everything, not to worry.
Robbie made his best effort to perform his regular uxorial role, and when friends invited them to dinner parties or to play doubles (their friends notably never mentioning the Tom Field incident), Robbie went along, although he didn’t feel at all social. In a typical autumn, the two men themselves would have been hosting dinner parties because Carlo liked to cook stews and soups when the days were shorter on light, and having friends arrayed on either side of a line of votive candles at their dining table, Robbie knew, made Carlo content. However, this was no longer a typical autumn, and they didn’t invite anyone over.
It was October. Robbie helped Carlo groom the plum saplings out front, the boy trees, sprigs akimbo, and yet already elegant even in their youth, with rich leaves as red and clear as claret when the sunlight hit them. He watched the full sequence of French films Carlo rented by mail. He entered into conversation about rescuing some brother kittens, although the two men never made it down to the shelter to check out the cats. He steadied the ladder while Carlo fixed the siding under an eave. He held slats of wood in place while they repaired the fence at the bottom of the property. And the two men were making love the old way, although without the usual leisure. The old passion would return, Robbie told himself, and certainly they’d endured tides of every kind in twenty years, ebb but then full again, in time, in time, give it time.
And yet Robbie recognized that his mood again began to shift. At first he’d been grateful for Carlo’s forbearance, for putting up with his, Robbie’s, malaise and of course Robbie would do the same for Carlo, not that Carlo would ever lapse into a similar lassitude, which perhaps was a problem in and of itself: Carlo’s steely endurance wore Robbie down. Why hadn’t Carlo insisted Robbie make the modifications to the producer’s house? Was Robbie wrong to sense that Carlo did not even want Robbie at the office? Maybe not if Robbie was going to be all dour and deflated, but there was something irritating now about the way Carlo regarded him when Carlo left in the mornings ahead of Robbie. In his lover’s parting glance, Robbie read pity tinged with condescension. This much was becoming obvious: Carlo thought Robbie was weak. Carlo was repulsed.
Finally one night Robbie had to say something. He said, “I don’t know how you’re simply able—”
“Simply able to what?” Carlo interrupted.
They were reading in bed, or Robbie was pretending to read, and Carlo didn’t look up from his book.
“Oh, come on,” Robbie said. “You know.”
Carlo rubbed his eyes.
“Never mind,” Robbie said.
“What choice do we have?” Carlo asked. “We have to move on, and I have. And you only knew him one day, Robbie, one day, one night—let him go.”
“But don’t you wonder?” Robbie asked. “Okay, forget it.”
“We’ll never know what was going through his mind,” Carlo said.
“Yes, I know that,” Robbie said, “but maybe …”
Carlo blinked at him a moment, waited, and then returned to his reading. Robbie switched off the lamp on his night table and turned onto his side. Moments later, he felt Carlo’s fingers lightly running through his hair, soothing Robbie to sleep. And he did fall asleep soon enough but he was thinking this was the essential difference between them, wasn’t it? Carlo ever the rationalist, the mover-on, versus Robbie, a man still trying to read meaning in cold ashes.
In their life together they had never been competitive except time to time playing certain word games or on the tennis court if one of them, say, worked out a snag with his serve into the ad court at the same time the other went through a slump with his toss. And so now, vaguely, Robbie found himself playing Carlo at some unspoken baseline game and losing every rally. Carlo had always had the edge, an unfair advantage in dealing with grief because he’d suffered a grave loss when young, which was to say he’d grown up around death, grown up on death. Robbie in the suburbs had known no equivalent. And yet wasn’t this precisely what all those years ago in college had drawn Robbie to Carlo?
He’d seen him around campus but hadn’t met him, the sexy uòmo in the pea coat, collar turned up. The guy with the long black lashes, his eyes lavender or silver or sky blue or gray—it depended on the weather and how close to the window he sat during lecture. How had Robbie gathered the facts, who had he asked? The roommate who’d gone to high school with Carlo in New York? Cute dark Carlo Stein had a sad dark past, Robbie learned, and yet—this was what was key—he proved from the first meeting to be the least moody, most self-confident, wholly self-sufficient person Robbie would ever meet.
Cut to a dorm room (complete with a dormer window), late at night: Carlo pouring wine into juice glasses. Watch the way he twisted his wrist and never spilled a drop. Look at the miniature landscape painting over his desk, not some poster from the Coop but a real and actual painting, a gift from a family friend. Note that Carlo had traveled around Europe alone as a teenager. Note he could have gone to music school to study piano. He’d had boyfriends (plural) in high school. His parents divorced when he was young and then his Italian-born mother suffered from successive cancers (lung then brain) and Carlo had taken care of her and, until close to the end, obeyed her instruction not to summon his German-born father.
Invite him over to your room, quote-unquote, to hang out and he showed up with a new album, a British-import, and a bottle of sweet riesling, cold wine on a snowy Cambridge night. Meet him in New York and he knew people working at a gallery or in a bistro kitchen. Stay over at his father’s place and no matter who was asleep at the other end of the apartment, Carlo would undress you on the persian rug in the living room and you would fool around, no worries, no worries, never any worries. The next afternoon sitting in an Upper West Side cinema, watching a foreign film you could barely follow, he took your hand, and then he held it for twenty years. Cute dark, worldly dark Carlo Stein. All these years later Robbie still couldn’t catch up, he would never catch up, and look now at the way he was looked at: Carlo was tired of waiting for him.
• • •
WHAT ROBBIE COULDN’T SEE, however, was that while Carlo claimed
he had moved on, in truth he had not. Alone more and more at the office, every task, be it paying an electric bill or preparing a spec for the building department, took twice as long as it should have. He was irked by Robbie’s fascination with Tom even after Tom was dead and worried where this preoccupation was headed. He told himself to be patient, that Robbie would inevitably return to being his happy-go-lucky self, yet patience was not easily achieved. Carlo was unable to concentrate, and in Robbie’s absence, he became the architect who paced, the architect who stared out windows. He walked back and forth across the office as if he were winding himself up to face a blueprint, but only ended up standing in the front window, idly monitoring the traffic.
Which was how one afternoon he found himself gazing at the shops across the boulevard, when a former neighbor boy named Gabriel loped by with another kid who was few years older and who worked in the liquor store. The older kid was long in the sideburns, and both his arms were densely tattooed with imagery including fat fish, the grim reaper, and something likely zodiac. He was friendly enough when you were picking up wine or vodka, but he always stank of cigarettes and sweat, and he couldn’t look you in the eye when he gave you your change.
Gabriel, on the other hand, fifteen now, had always been a sweetie. He had lived a few doors down from the two men for the first few years they’d owned their house, but then Gabriel’s parents had some trouble (serious drugs, it was said), split up, and Gabriel ended up staying with an elderly aunt in the four-plex adjacent to the gas station. Even though Gabriel currently lived near the office, the two men hadn’t spent time with him in a long while.
Gabriel had been slithering along on his skateboard, but once in front of the liquor store, he slipped off it and kicked it up so that the board stood beside him like a younger brother in his charge. Gabriel and the liquor store kid exchanged words, pounded fists in fraternity, and the older boy went in to work while Gabriel dropped his skateboard and glided across the street toward Carlo.
