by Peter Gadol
“We don’t hide anything from each other,” Robbie asserted again, “and I’m sorry, but do you think we could talk another time? I should lie down.”
• • •
THAT NIGHT, a dream, Robbie’s now recurring dream, the one in which he woke up abruptly and noticed Carlo wasn’t next to him in bed but instead was standing at their bedroom window. Except this time, the dream was different: It wasn’t Carlo at the window (Carlo wasn’t in the room at all). The man at the window was looser in branch—it was Tom, Tom dressed for tennis.
He stood there, his arms at his side, staring out at the night, and Robbie pulled back the blanket and swung his legs over the side of the bed and ever so quietly crossed the room until he was standing behind Tom, and Tom didn’t appear to notice Robbie or let on if he did. Robbie inched close enough so he could feel whatever heat Tom threw off. Robbie was breathing on Tom’s shoulder, his neck. Robbie extended his hand out beyond Tom’s side, out in front of Tom, and Tom studied Robbie’s hand a while, then took it in his, and placed Robbie’s hand over his, Tom’s, heart.
When Robbie understood Tom was not going to let go, Robbie allowed his head to rest against Tom’s shoulder. And this was how he returned to sleep, standing behind Tom, head on Tom’s shoulder, hand on his slow-beating heart.
• • •
FRIDAY MORNING OF THAT WEEK, Robbie slept late and didn’t have to lie again about being sick because Carlo was long gone by the time Robbie got out of bed. He called one or two more people in Tom’s address book, as if it were a part of his morning routine, and then wanting some exercise, he went out on a brisk walk, completing two turns around the Reservoir. Back home, skimming the newspaper, he noticed a listing that Tom’s writer friend was giving a reading in a West Hollywood bookstore that night. At the end of the day, Robbie left Carlo a note and headed out.
The writer wore a narrow-cut suit. His pink pocket square matched the T-shirt he had on beneath the suit jacket. It was hard to say what the novel was about, Europhile vampires who wore expensive clothes and left messes in hotel suites, or were they pop stars and the vampire motif was metaphoric? The writer read one scene that involved a decapitation at a shoe sale. The store was packed and the audience loved it.
After the reading, Robbie hung back while a line of adoring readers snaked toward the writer, the writer who looked overlarge at the table he sat at and who kept asking a bookstore clerk if he could smoke, expecting an answer other than the one he’d received five minutes earlier. Finally, with a good number of fans still waiting for his autograph, he said he would be right back and slipped out the door to the parking lot. Robbie went out the front of the store and walked around the building. He approached the writer and apologized for pestering him while he was enjoying his cigarette, and the writer said nothing. Robbie thought of something charitable to say about the excerpt read aloud and then he explained he was a friend of Tom Field’s, and the writer immediately reached out and squeezed Robbie’s shoulder.
“It’s hideous what happened,” the writer said.
“I left you a message,” Robbie said.
“You’re not with the LAPD, are you?”
“No. Did they contact you?”
“A black-and-white came to my house. You can imagine the amount of scrambling that went on. It’s not the drugs I worry about so much as the porno.”
“What did they want to know?”
“The usual,” the writer said, and left it at that. “Actually I’d heard about Tom from the maitre d’ at the restaurant Tom and I would go to in the Valley, a steak joint we liked, very red-booth, this place. Tom was my third buddy this year to o.d. The shit out there, man, it’s shit.”
Robbie didn’t correct the writer, nor apparently had the police.
“I met him at a club in New York,” the writer said, “and I found him kind of vivid. I moved back out here to finish this book, and I ran into Tom in a pharmacy on Ventura—in fact, there’s a secondary vampire in the novel based on Tom. Anyway, I told ole Tom I’d buy him dinner and I did, and then about once a month, I met him at the steak place. He amused me. I don’t know if I amused him.”
“He had an address book full of crossed-out names,” Robbie said, “but not yours.”
The writer scratched the side of his nose with his thumbnail, dragged on his cigarette.
“I went away a couple a months ago,” he said, “and didn’t tell him. I should have told him. Whenever we went out, I dressed like this—”
The writer made a gesture, open-palmed, I’m fabulous, I’m not so fabulous, whatever.
“And Tom wore his gray suit,” the writer said. “I ordered steak au poivre and Tom the béarnaise, and we went through at least one bottle of a good red if not two. I didn’t talk much. He talked quite a bit. I fed him gossip, literary, music-industry, blah-blah. I made it all up, although I think he knew. He regaled me with sex stories. I am not under the impression he was making them up. He told me he wanted to draw me, but as you may know I don’t like being photographed, and I certainly don’t want to be drawn, and also it sounded vaguely sexual and as you may also know, he was a little old for me. But I said sure, like instead of my next author photo, a Tom Field drawing, nifty. And he left a message last fall about wanting to take me out when I was back in town to celebrate the new novel. When we went out for steak, I always paid because I knew Tom didn’t have any money. But he was adamant in the message that this time he would pay.”
The writer dropped his cigarette to the pavement, but it rolled away from him before he could stub it out with his boot. “Tom in that gray suit,” he said, shaking his head, before heading back inside the store.
Robbie wanted to be by himself and went to a coffee shop, and when he arrived home late, he found Carlo waiting up, stretched out on the couch, drowsy, paging through a magazine.
“How was the reading?” he asked.
Robbie considered making the connection, the writer to Tom, why Robbie had sought him out. He didn’t want to be keeping secrets from Carlo the way the detective suggested.
“Interesting,” Robbie answered. “It was interesting.”
“Well—good. This writer, he’s someone you’ve discovered recently?”
Robbie hesitated but then said, “Tom recommended him.”
“Tom recommended him to you or someone else?”
Robbie didn’t understand the question. “To me,” he said, and he expected an immediate dismissal, a write-off, but Carlo only nodded, only blinked.
“And you’re feeling better?” Carlo asked.
“I am.”
Robbie sat at the edge of the couch. There was so much he wanted to say and nothing he thought Carlo would want to hear. They talked about how cold it was that night. A belt of constellations sagged low in the sky. They were being pleasant with one another—how practiced they were at being pleasant with one another.
“What are you looking at there?” Robbie asked.
“Nothing really. There’s an article on fountains. Oh, my father called today,” Carlo said. “He’s definitely coming this year.”
“Good,” Robbie said. “That’s good?”
“We should start the drinking now.”
“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Robbie said.
Carlo sat up on the sofa and glanced around the main room. “There were all these things I wanted to get done before he got here,” he said.
“Make a list. I can deal with it.”
“No, there’s a lot to do—”
“For crying out loud, Carlo, make a list. I’ll take care of it. Actually …”
“Actually what?”
Robbie looked at him and Carlo appeared to read his mind.
“You want to take a little break from the office,” Carlo said.
“I feel guilty about it,” Robbie said.
“Don’t. Take a week.”
“You need me on the producer’s house.”
“We’re fine. Take two weeks—take whatever time yo
u need. I’ll make the list.”
Then Carlo launched into a monologue about the fountain he had in mind, the slate he wanted to use, and Robbie hummed when appropriate, although he’d drifted. He was thinking about Tom, imagining him cleaning up and putting on his gray suit, waiting for the writer at the steak place, ordering a martini, dirty, three olives. Watching the door and when the writer sat down, Tom would have an anecdote warmed up and ready to go. They had played tennis that afternoon in September and Tom had shouted across the court at Robbie that they could play Saturdays all year long. It might have become another ritual, stitching together all the other hours, Tom’s lost hours, into a readable sequence of days.
• • •
CARLO HAD ASKED ROBBIE if he was feeling better, although he already knew the answer, and not because Robbie had driven himself to a bookstore. That morning, Carlo had spotted his boyfriend out on a hale and vigorous walk around the lake. Carlo had been late for an appointment with an engineer up at the producer’s property, but as he was driving north on Silver Lake and was about to turn left, he noticed Robbie in a fast stride headed west, coming down past the dog park and rounding the basketball court. Carlo made the left turn, but rather than stop and wave hello or roll down his window and call out to Robbie, he continued on, making another left and pulling over to the curb. He turned around and watched Robbie approach through the back window of the car—Robbie, it would seem, was too deep in thought to notice Carlo or their car, too preoccupied, elsewhere.
What a rare phenomenon it was to run into one’s spouse out in the world. Maybe now and then the two men might run errands separately, and, say, unexpectedly cross paths in the shared parking lot of the dry cleaners and supermarket, or perhaps they’d overlap at the gym, one entering as the other was leaving—but that was not running into each other really, because each always knew what the other was up to, where (at all times) the other was. Until recently, at any rate.
Robbie walked directly opposite the cross street and Carlo pivoted in the driver’s seat so that he was less obviously a man spying, although he did continue to watch Robbie in the rearview mirror, which he angled as Robbie proceeded up the hill. And what was that expression on Robbie’s face, that intentness as if he were drawing in his notebook or listening to music through headphones? Although he wasn’t wearing headphones, and he also seemed unaware of anyone coming toward him, a dog walker, a couple with a stroller. Robbie looked sealed off from the rest of the world, and for some reason this left Carlo suddenly very blue.
Once Robbie was out of view, Carlo swung into a U-turn and drove up the hill slowly, and once again, at the point where Carlo should have swerved off to the west, he paused and looked the other way down the street at Robbie, at his back as he headed around the Reservoir at an eager pace.
And Carlo let him disappear again, but why hadn’t he pulled up alongside Robbie and stopped him and shouted, Hey, handsome! Why hadn’t he pulled up alongside his boyfriend and asked how he was feeling? Why hadn’t he asked, What are you thinking about, Robbie? It wasn’t a mystery: Carlo didn’t actually want to know what Robbie was thinking about. His latest notions about Tom—Carlo didn’t want to know, and he also didn’t want Robbie politely asking the same of him. And what’s on your mind, signor? What’s your latest obsession?
The engineer called Carlo on his cell phone—he was running late, too—which left Carlo sitting in his car by a slope of weeds and remembering how in college, he and Robbie used to study at the GSD, but Robbie wasn’t nearly as engaged by design as Carlo was, not initially. When graduate school first came up, Robbie derisively labeled an MA a creative person’s law degree, a default course of study when one didn’t know what else to do with one’s life. He changed his mind about architecture and ultimately proved an abler student than Carlo, but Carlo suddenly found himself besieged by what-if’s, like what if Robbie hadn’t attended graduate school with Carlo, and what if they hadn’t gone into practice together? Robbie had been talented at so many things—would he have pursued film? Would he have followed an academic plot and gone into literature or anthropology or philosophy? Would he have become the better chef and gone to culinary school? Would he then have wanted to open a restaurant? Or would he maybe have become a psychotherapist? Because Robbie the avid listener would have made a good therapist. Would he have become a school teacher? Patient, enthusiastic-about-everything Robbie would have made a good teacher. And then would he have wanted children? What would Robbie’s life have been like if had he fallen out of love with Carlo? In what city would Robbie live? Would he still be back East and closer to his family? Would he have a boyfriend? Yes, of course he would have a boyfriend, but what would this man look like and would he be smart? Yes, of course he would be smart, but about what kind of things?
Carlo jumped when the engineer rapped his knuckles on his windshield. He hadn’t seen him pull up to the site or get out of his car. Carlo had managed to agitate himself greatly, although he wasn’t sure which was more disturbing, that he could fluidly imagine alternate lives for Robbie or that he wasn’t inclined to ask the same questions about himself. Without Robbie, what would his own life look like? Carlo had no idea. He had no idea at all.
It was strange enough to spy on Robbie walking around the lake and strange, too, when Carlo came home in the early evening and found Robbie’s note saying he’d gone to a reading, but it was beyond strange, it was disconcerting and unsettling when Carlo went into the bedroom to change and noticed a slim black object atop the dresser: an address book, an old address book of soft pages and years of notations—Tom Field’s address book.
Which explained how Robbie had located Tom’s grandmother. Carlo left the address book where he’d found it and decided not to mention it to Robbie, but he had to wonder, why did Robbie have this thing in his possession and did the police know he did? What was Robbie up to, what kind of sleuthing? Had Tom said something to someone about his encounters with Carlo? Was Robbie now trying to trace Tom back to Carlo? Could he?
• • •
HE TRIED TO CONVINCE HIMSELF he was becoming paranoid, but Carlo couldn’t stop fretting and during the night got up and went into the kitchen, where he drafted an ambitious to-do list, improvising extra tasks because keeping Robbie busy, especially if he wasn’t going to come in to work, might prevent him from over-pondering Tom’s death, or Tom’s life, from looking into matters Carlo did not want Robbie looking into. This way, too, Carlo could keep better tabs on Robbie’s whereabouts if Robbie was home polishing the silver et cetera and not at large in the city. Not that this would work, but it was the only thing Carlo could think of at the moment to move Robbie away from Tom.
Saturday morning Carlo went into the office because there was plenty of work to do on the television producer’s house (the producer phoned twice while Carlo sat at his desk letting the calls go to voice-mail), yet he found himself thinking about his fountain, which he now envisioned as a slate square pool amid a little slate patio, with moss growing up at the edges, and some wildflowers, and maybe grasses, maybe a row of hopseed bushes to screen the neighbors on the property below. What he was picturing was a neat hideaway that you wouldn’t be able to see from the house or even the upper patio, a retreat where he would, well, retreat. What he imagined was taking a very long nap, with a pond gurgle in the background, a rejuvenating bise brushing down the hillside, rocking him in his hammock.
He pushed aside the specs he’d been working on for the producer’s villa and began doodling what he had in mind for his secret garden, and his doodles gradually became more composed illustrations. He had some pastel pencils in his desk drawer, and he began adding color. He lost himself in the movement of his pencil-gripping hand and there was something delightfully familiar about the emerging indentation in his index finger, the soft pencil against his skin. He used to draw, once, and he used to paint in oils, and painting had brought him such an unabashed joy. He was never so very brilliant an abstractionist, but he liked mixing color
, juxtaposing fields of color, dense saturated color. He’d stopped making canvases when he and Robbie bought their house. When they were moving, he’d either given away or sold all of his paintings. Why had he given up something he loved doing? Because painting wasn’t serious and he needed strictly to engage in serious endeavors?
As was his habit lately, he ended up standing in the front window, pensive, staring at nothing in particular. When he saw Gabriel coast up to the liquor store across the street, Carlo stepped out to the sidewalk to shout hello, but before he did, he fell back against the door because a car drove past, coasting toward the lake, a long black sedan. It didn’t slow down, but Carlo could see them, the men in the front seat, the men in the backseat, dark hair, scruffy, trouble.
It was the ambush car, it was the carjackers, the fuckers, it was them.
Or not. No, of course it wasn’t them, how could it be them, he was being silly. The car sped up the hill toward the lake. Who’s a silly man? It wasn’t them, he told himself again, even as a part of him held on to that possibility.
A short while later, Gabriel emerged from the liquor store. By this point, Carlo was sitting on the shallow stoop of his building, his elbows on his knees. Gabriel looked at him a moment, weighing, it seemed, whether to cross the boulevard, which he did on foot, his skateboard tucked under his arm. He stood in front of Carlo a moment.
“What’s wrong?” the boy asked.
Which was what Carlo was about to ask him—Gabriel was squinting as if he had the sun in his eyes, which he didn’t. Something was eating him.
