by Peter Gadol
Robbie stroked his chin with his thumb and forefinger and was reminded he hadn’t shaved in days. He looked at the book he was holding, of which he’d apparently digested a good third, except he had no idea what he’d read. He glanced back at the woman—she looked away.
What kind of lonely.
In truth Robbie lived a life nothing like the one he was playing at, nothing like it whatsoever. Every night a bright handsome man came home to him and asked, “What are you in the mood for—pasta, chicken, fish?” Robbie was not alone in the world, not remotely. He was neither divorced nor widowed nor abandoned, nor for that matter unloved, nor unloving, however he would have to admit that pretending he was single brought him perverse melancholic pleasure. And he had to wonder if he would ever return to his old self or if this was who he was now, auditioning for a role he feared he might someday play.
• • •
THEN ONE AFTERNOON one month after Tom died, a turn: Robbie returned home from his meandering at around five, and because Tuesday was trash day, there were emptied square bins up and down the street, the containers at jocular angles, the lids thrown back—nothing unusual. However, as Robbie pulled into his driveway, he noticed first that his own trash bins had been marked up with an indecipherable white graffiti, while none of his neighbors’ containers appeared similarly marked, and then, in a much more violent act of vandalism, it appeared the taggers (or someone else?) had dragged the tied-up trash onto his front lawn, ripped open the bags, and strewn the rotten content everywhere. Fruit rinds and banana peels and squashed cartons and wadded tissue and discarded mail, a week’s worth of putrid gunk, lay scattered all around the plum trees and pepper tree and across the grass and lavender beds. It was disgusting.
The wind was blowing the looser detritus toward the house, and Robbie did his best to step on envelopes and torn plastic before it all flew up into the trees and eaves. He bolted after a page of newsprint flapping off toward the neighbors. He plucked a water bottle that had somehow flown up into the fork of the tallest plum tree. He shoveled up what he could and dumped it back in the tagged bins still out by the curb, but the task became sisyphean. He thought he was making headway, but then he spotted a damp half-full coffee filter, a cereal box. Was someone trying to draw attention to how much trash the two men generated? Because they certainly had made a lot of it.
After Robbie had been cleaning up a good half hour, Carlo arrived home. He had Gabriel Sanchez with him. Robbie couldn’t recall the last time he’d spoken to the boy.
“Well, hey,” Robbie said, but declined to shake Gabriel’s hand since Robbie was holding a tomato can in one hand, a banana peel in the other.
“Hey,” Gabriel said. And then, stating the obvious: “Whoa. Your trash got messed with.”
“What the hell,” Carlo said.
“It was worse when I came home,” Robbie said.
“What the hell,” Carlo said again.
Robbie began rolling a bin back up the side of the driveway toward the garage. Gabriel waited a beat but then helped haul in the remaining bins.
Carlo looked confused, a scowl forming. “This is so foul,” he said.
“What brings you by?” Robbie asked Gabriel.
“Your boyfriend,” Gabriel answered.
“Is that a gang tag?” Carlo asked—he directed the question at Gabriel, as if the boy would know.
“Why are you asking me?” Gabriel asked.
“Do we even have gangs up here?” Robbie said.
Carlo walked out to the street and back to the stoop. “It’s not like anyone else had their garbage messed with, as far as I can tell.”
Robbie knew what Carlo was considering and said, “We’re hardly the only couple on the block.”
“I know that,” Carlo said. “You think it was random?”
“Of course,” Robbie said, and truly he did.
In a blink it was night—the clean-up would need to be finished in the morning—and so the two men and the boy went inside. As was his habit of late, Carlo poured himself a tall glass of wine.
“It’s just—,” Carlo started to say.
“Just what?” Robbie asked.
“Because of what happened,” Carlo said.
Robbie rolled his eyes, Oh please. As if they were what, marked?
“All I’m saying—,” Carlo started to say again, but cut himself off. Silence. Then, “Whatever.”
“We’ll have to finish cleaning up in the morning,” Robbie said. “I’ll take care of it.”
Carlo had gone mute. He sipped his wine.
“It’s nice to see you,” Robbie said to Gabriel. “Did you miss the old neighborhood?”
“Kind of,” Gabriel said.
“I thought I’d show him the spot where we’d talked about putting a fountain,” Carlo said.
“Oh,” Robbie said—and now it was his turn to be confused because they’d decided against the fountain at the bottom of the slope, hadn’t they? And why would a teenager be interested in a fountain?
“Follow me,” Carlo said to Gabriel and led him out to the patio and then down the side of the hill where there was a loose stone path.
Robbie poured himself a glass of wine and stepped outside as well, but he stayed up by the house. It had been Carlo’s notion to create a little hideout down where the plot flattened out and there was some shade by a rotting fence. Robbie thought that while they could create a pleasant enough oasis that would be nice to look at, they’d never use it, and Carlo countered that the sound of trickling water would be soothing and audible everywhere on the property, and maybe they went back and forth for a couple of months, but this was ages ago. Robbie heard Carlo explaining to the boy what brush would need to be cleared out, where a pipe might be tied in to the house plumbing and buried and run down the hill. Also he mentioned rigging a hammock. He sounded like he was selling the kid something, and Gabriel, for his part, kept issuing an encouraging, “Cool.”
Back up on the patio, Carlo said to Robbie, “If we get the fountain in now, we’ll be able to enjoy it next spring. What do you think?”
It was as if they had never discussed the project before, but honestly Robbie didn’t much care. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sure.”
“Gabriel is going to help me,” Carlo explained.
“Gabriel is getting paid,” Gabriel said.
The boy had his hands in his back pockets, his elbows out wide. He’d changed, Robbie thought. In the dim light, the kid was gaunt, his eyes sunken—he was a teenager, probably up all night. Nevertheless, he didn’t look great.
“What’s new in your world?” Robbie asked. “How is your aunt?”
Gabriel didn’t answer, or what he said was a mumble. And then, out of nowhere but as if in response, he asked, “Do you guys believe in ghosts?”
“Why?” Robbie asked.
“You remember my dog,” the boy said.
“Oh sure. He was a fun dog,” Robbie said.
“I keep seeing him wandering around.”
“Oh really?”
“He’s been dead for years though, but I keep seeing him and he’s panting, tongue hanging out, wants to be wrangled, nuzzled, wrestled.”
“Can’t find his way home,” Robbie said.
“I know,” Gabriel said.
“Dreams are strange that way,” Carlo said.
“I don’t see him in my dreams. I see him during the day,” Gabriel said.
“In your daydreams,” Carlo said.
“No, for real. I see him for real, but he runs away before I can catch up with him.”
Neither man spoke.
“Maybe you should drop by the shelter and rescue another dog,” Carlo suggested.
His comment seemed misguided. Robbie glared at him.
Gabriel motioned to run his fingers through his hair and stopped, his hand in midair, maybe remembering his once long hair was now short. There was something setting the boy on edge, and he pointed at the Liquidambar and said, “So this is where t
hat guy offed himself, right?”
That burn, that grade-school burn that comes when you realize people have been talking about you made Robbie uncomfortably warm, and the word offed—there was something snide about it, as if a life could be switched on or off like light.
“It was all very strange, and very sad,” Carlo said. “We’ll always be disturbed by what happened.”
This statement floored Robbie more than Gabriel’s remark. He wanted to ask, If you’re so disturbed, then why don’t we ever talk about it?
“He used a rope, you said?” the boy asked, and he made a comic gesture, bringing his thumb and forefinger up around his neck, sticking out his tongue to the side.
Carlo said, “He’d had it in his car. He probably used it to strap his belongings to the roof when he moved here cross-country.”
Again Robbie was flabbergasted: They thought that, did they?
“And when he hanged himself,” Gabriel asked, “did he, like, piss in his pants?”
“That’s enough,” Robbie said.
No one spoke.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
Robbie didn’t respond.
“What?” Gabriel asked again, looking first at Robbie, then Carlo, then Robbie again.
“It was tragic,” Robbie said.
“Okay,” Gabriel said.
“Unspeakably tragic when you think about it—”
“Okay, whatever.”
“That guy—Tom was his name. And Tom didn’t mean to kill himself,” Robbie said.
Carlo squinted at Robbie.
“It was an accident,” Robbie said.
“An accident,” Gabriel echoed, dismissive.
“Wait,” Carlo said, “what are you saying?”
“With the rope, with the time it took to form a noose,” Robbie said, “to rig it, the rest—” He drew a deep breath. “I’m saying he was taking his time, hoping we’d find him and stop him.”
Gabriel was standing with the heel of one boot atop the toe of the other, his fists in his pockets.
“I don’t think we can be sure what really happened,” Carlo said.
“It had to have been an accident,” Robbie insisted, and of course he’d thought this all these weeks but never come out and said it.
“We didn’t know him really,” Carlo said.
“Tom was always very dramatic,” Robbie said to Gabriel. “His grandmother told me.”
“His grandmother,” Carlo said. “Tom’s grandmother.”
“We spoke,” Robbie said.
“You spoke,” Carlo said.
Perhaps sensing a spat in the making, Gabriel led the way back inside the house. “There’s a good chance I have homework,” he said.
Carlo offered to give him a lift, but Gabriel said he wanted to walk.
“We’ll get started on clearing the brush down there soon,” Carlo said.
“Roger that,” Gabriel said, and half saluted the men, pivoted like an enlisted man, and slipped out the front door.
“Didn’t we decide against the fountain?” Robbie asked. “Not that I care a whole lot but—What?”
“You called her or she called you?” Carlo asked.
“He wanted us to find him and stop him,” Robbie said. “You’re right, we can’t know for sure, but maybe it was autoerotic asphyxiation—”
“You know we didn’t see signs of that.”
“You heard him that night. All his plans—”
“Robbie,” Carlo said softly, “what Tom did …”
“It had to have been an accident, Carlo. It’s the only explanation.”
Carlo was staring at the floor.
“I don’t know why you have to pursue this,” he said. “But if that’s what you need to believe—”
“I don’t need to believe it, I do believe it.”
“Robbie,” Carlo said again, not so soft now, “what Tom did was an assault against us, but mostly against you—look at you. You called his grandmother, you bothered that poor woman? What have you done with my boyfriend?”
Then Carlo took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry.”
Robbie wasn’t necessarily sure about what he’d declared, but on some level he knew he had to be right. If only he had proof that Tom never really meant to kill himself, then he would have a strong enough stroke to break the tide that held him from the shore. Or it wasn’t so much proof—proof per se would always elude him—but he wanted what Carlo for some Carlo-reason, born perhaps in his faithlessness, his grimmer side, would not give him: if not verification, then the validation of an idea, an alignment in thinking, a telling of the same story the same way. This seemed important to settle, like the only urgent matter in Robbie’s life right now, the only way he could move on—couldn’t Carlo see that? No, he could not. Carlo would not help him.
“I’m going to go change,” Carlo said, gentle now, his hand on Robbie’s forearm, sliding down his wrist, taking his hand, swinging his hand. “Then what, do you want fish? Or chicken? Or pasta maybe? Pasta, yes?”
Robbie may have nodded but he was no longer listening because he knew what he needed to do, what he should have done weeks ago.
• • •
THE NEXT MORNING, he didn’t deal with the rest of the trash the way he said he would and stayed in bed while Carlo completed the chore. When Carlo came back in the house, Robbie pulled the covers up to his chin.
“I finished cleaning up that mess,” Carlo said. “I’m worried though. I’m worried this might only be the beginning of something.”
“It’s one isolated incident,” Robbie said.
“Well, you say that now, but—”
“You worry too much,” Robbie said and changed the subject: “Do I have a fever?”
Carlo placed his palm over Robbie’s forehead. “Not really,” he said.
“I think I may stay in bed a while longer. Do you mind?” Robbie asked.
“No, of course not. I’ll check in later,” Carlo said.
“I feel a little weird,” Robbie said. “I want to see if I can sleep this off.”
“We’ll have to spray-paint over the graffiti. I do hope you’re right—no more pranks.”
Carlo took a shower, dressed, and left for the office. Only then did Robbie get out of bed and retrieve Tom’s address book from where he’d stashed it in the dresser.
Tom had crossed out names two ways, either with a gouged scribble of barbed wire—these entries were entirely illegible—or with single arrows of ink shot through the names and numbers and/or email addresses, which were less illegible. Sometimes Tom had used a pencil to eliminate someone from his life, which to an extent made the expulsion reversible, although often he’d also used graphite to record the person in the first place, so erasing the strike-through risked eliminating what Robbie wanted to salvage.
He dialed several wrong or disconnected numbers before a listing from the B-page answered. The man was driving and upon hearing Tom Field’s name said he needed to pull over. Then Robbie said he didn’t want to alarm him, but—and the man interrupted, “Oh shit”—and Robbie continued, reporting Tom’s suicide and—another interruption: the man had heard Tom was dead and asked if Robbie was truly a friend or in actuality a clinic worker notifying Tom’s sexual partners that Tom had been infected. “No,” Robbie said, “oh, no. A friend, only a friend,” he said. The man on the phone sounded relieved. He’d only known Tom a few weeks roughly a year ago, he explained, and all they had done was fool around a bit, all the while drinking more than the man was accustomed to, bourbon, wine, gin, whatever was handy. That was that, but Tom had been, how to put it, literate, and the man had hoped the two of them might become friends once the sexual relationship waned (which it did when the man wouldn’t get drunk with Tom in order to have sex). Friendship didn’t blossom and the man regretted that because Tom, he said, had been so vital and quirky and curious—”Exactly, exactly,” Robbie said, now the one interrupting. And then Robbie asked the looming question: “I know it’s speculat
ion, but do you think Tom Field meant to kill himself or do you think it could have been an accident?”
A long silence followed, and Robbie thought the man had either lost his cell connection or didn’t want to engage on the subject, but then the man said he hadn’t known Tom well, and despite the fight they had the last time they got together, he remained inexplicably fond of Tom Field and thought about him surprisingly often. He’d run into someone else with whom Tom had a fling, who had heard about Tom’s death and who had relayed the rumor. And no, the man did not think it was (for lack of a better way of describing it) a straight suicide. There must have been an extenuating circumstance, some other intention now masked by the tragic outcome. He’d heard the news and it hadn’t computed. But of course, as noted, this was speculation, nothing more.
The second man, surname beginning with C, whom Robbie reached, he found at an ad agency in New York. This second man, too, had heard how Tom died but didn’t believe it, and Robbie offered confirmation. The man said they’d dated a month and he thought it impolite to swap bedroom stories with any of Tom’s exes. Robbie made it clear he hadn’t dated Tom. The man said, “You must be the only one.” He took for granted that the suicide was alcohol-related or drug-related. He didn’t know the details but assumed all along it was an overdose, which was to say likely an accident. One great date they’d gone on was to see an old master retrospective and Tom had revealed an obvious passion for the paintings. Tom had black moods and no doubt thought about killing himself, but the man couldn’t see Tom actually going through with so ultimate an act. “‘Vissi d’arte, baby,’ Tom liked to say.”
To live for one’s art, Robbie thought. Once he himself might have said he did that, after a fashion, but not in recent years.
On the F-page of Tom’s address book, Robbie thought he’d find other relatives, but only Tom’s grandmother was entered, hers being one of the few unstruck-through names. Another name not crossed out belonged to a novelist known for over-the-top graphic depictions of urban tawdriness—the writer to whom Tom had alluded but not mentioned by name, his one friend left in Los Angeles. He did not answer his phone.
