by Peter Gadol
“Nothing,” Carlo said and stood and locked his office door. “Come with me,” he said, and hooked the boy’s arm, guiding him around the side of the building to his car parked in back, indicating the boy should get in.
“Where are we going?” the boy asked.
“Nowhere special,” Carlo said, and for some reason the boy did not question him and obediently slipped into the passenger seat with his skateboard resting against his knees, although when they turned out onto the street, he did sink low in his seat, very low as if to avoid being seen.
“This is kidnapping,” Gabriel said. “Help,” he said. “Help, help.”
“Oh, be quiet,” Carlo said.
“Help.”
Carlo’s first stop was the hardware store to pick up a pair of heavier-duty shears, and while he was at it, a new shovel to replace a rusted-out one. Then he drove the boy back to his house.
“You aren’t, like, expecting to put me to work or anything,” Gabriel said.
“The thought had occurred to me,” Carlo said.
“It’s supposed to rain, you know.”
“It won’t.”
There was a pause in the conversation and Gabriel looked the way he did when he stepped out of the liquor store, acidic, without bearings.
“Do you want to tell me what’s troubling you?” Carlo asked, expecting to be rebuffed.
“It’s complicated,” Gabriel said.
Pause.
“How so?” Carlo asked.
“Well, for starters, I owe someone something.”
“Owe who what?”
Gabriel didn’t answer.
“Who, Lonny?” Carlo asked.
Gabriel said nothing.
“What, money?” Carlo asked.
Again nothing.
Carlo tried and failed to contain a sigh.
“You owe Lonny money. For what?”
Gabriel gazed out the passenger-side window.
Never mind for what, Carlo thought. He didn’t want to know for what.
“How much are we talking about, a hundred?” Carlo asked.
Which elicited a laugh.
“Two hundred? More? Five? A thousand?” Carlo asked.
Gabriel shrugged.
Carlo shook his head and said, “Okay,” although he didn’t know what he meant when he said okay. “Maybe you can work it off—I’ll pay you.”
Gabriel shot him a look: Oh, right, work off a grand working for you.
“We’ll figure something out,” Carlo said. “Don’t worry about it right now,” he said.
“You’ll loan me the money?” Gabriel asked.
“I said don’t worry about it,” Carlo said.
And Gabriel relaxed his frown, grinned, and said, “Thanks.”
Carlo nodded. Had he just offered to loan a teenager a thousand dollars to pay off a drug debt, money he didn’t have in the bank to give away, which is what it would amount to, a gift? However, the boy was smiling and that was worth something for the time being.
Robbie wasn’t home. Carlo led the boy through the house and out back, the new shears and shovel in hand, collecting work gloves and trash bags and other tools on the way down to the bottom of the property. Most of the area he wanted to clear was covered with a gnarled mass of unfruited ficus, all the stalks heavy with rotting leaves. Where there wasn’t the ficus, there were menacing patches of bearish acanthus. Carlo handed the boy the shovel and a pair of gloves, saving the shears for himself, which he held in front of him like a divining rod. His only instruction was, “All this comes out,” before he began hacking indiscriminately at some acanthus vines.
Gabriel leaned on the shovel, watching.
“What are you waiting for?” Carlo asked. “Start digging.”
“You’re paying me for this, right?” Gabriel asked.
“Oh, for crying out loud,” Carlo said. “Dig.”
The boy hesitated a moment longer, but then he went at the vines, too, pulling at them, throwing his heel against the shovel head, while Carlo chopped and tugged at the waxy plants. They said nothing and worked like this for the better part of an hour, only eradicating a minor patch of the bear’s britches, not making any progress on the ficus or other weedy matter, but it was a start, and the physical work had done Carlo some good, probably the boy, too. That hour removing the vines, Carlo had thought about nothing of consequence.
Meanwhile, the clouds assembled overhead, and it became cooler and windier. Robbie came home while Carlo and Gabriel were taking a breather, and after he’d made his way down the hill, he nodded in approval, although he didn’t say anything. Carlo wanted to ask him if he’d been wandering around the Reservoir or rifling through Tom’s address book, which notably was no longer atop the dresser, but didn’t. Robbie picked up the shears and meekly hacked at a vine. Then Carlo took the shovel and tried to dig at some ficus roots. And Robbie clipped another vine with a little more gusto, and Gabriel gathered the trimmings and packed them into a trash bag, and the three of them worked like this another half hour before it began to drizzle. Quickly the drizzle turned into rain, and they scrambled back up the hill and into the house, kicking off boots and sneakers and tugging at damp socks. In the kitchen, Robbie took various things out of the refrigerator and set them on the counter, olive tapenade and roasted peppers and tuna fish and baba ganoush and cherry tomatoes. He sliced wheat bread. And they made sandwiches and barely spoke, and given recent events, it seemed illicit how content Carlo was at that moment. If he wanted proof that he was worrying too much, here was his proof.
The rain began to taper off, although he wished it would continue. A glass house was its most spectacular against the threat of inclement weather. All around you outside, the elements were uncharitable, unpredictable, moody. Yet inside, enclosed and dry and safe, nothing changed, you were secure. Nothing in the world could go wrong. It was then that Carlo had the vaguest premonition that his troubles, the troubles the two men faced, even whatever was bothering the boy, might be taking a turn for the better. The past would recede quietly into the deeper past. The winter ahead would be a good winter.
Later he would think back to this rainy Saturday afternoon and see that all he’d done in allowing himself this momentary satisfaction was push his luck and, even though he did not believe in such things, jinx himself.
• • •
As PROMISED in the days that followed, Robbie worked his way down Carlo’s list of tasks. He waxed the dining table. He cleaned lighting fixtures, the hood over the stove, the tool table in the garage. He recaulked the bathtub spigot. He thinned his wardrobe and packed clothes to be given away. A full pile of firewood rose up by the hearth. The silver gleamed. He seemed to be tapping a new font of energy, and at night he fell asleep with ease. He wasn’t spending all that much time with Carlo, who was either at the office or working with Gabriel to clear brush for the new patio and fountain, yet Robbie thought this separation was temporary, and he found himself actually looking forward to his father-in-law’s visit, to their Thanksgiving, the full stride of the holidays one can fall into when the meter of one’s life for whatever reasons has fallen off tempo. Two months had gone by since Tom killed himself, and while Robbie had never been searching for exculpatory evidence—whether the two men should have cut off Tom’s drinking would always be something he would turn over—the fact remained that after speaking with two dozen people who one way or another knew Tom, after a certain consensus had congealed around Tom’s intent, or probable lack of intent, Robbie did feel unshouldered of some responsibility and ready, at last, to move on with his life.
And yet, that said, he still awoke in the morning with the nagging sense that some definitive discovery about Tom’s true nature could still be made, and because he hadn’t exhausted all the contacts in Tom’s address book (which he took better care to hide deep in his sock drawer after leaving it out in the open—Carlo hadn’t mentioned anything, so Robbie assumed Carlo was none the wiser), since there were still a few more name
s and numbers, Robbie continued making his cold calls across time zones.
One morning after Carlo went to the office—this was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—Robbie opened Tom’s address book from right to left to the XYZ-page, deciphered a struck-through number (although not in another time zone, but local, the same prefix as Robbie’s number), and spoke with yet one more man whom Tom had dated, in this case the previous spring.
“It’s amazing you’d call today,” the man said. “I thought I’d lost it, but last night I found the drawing Tom did of me, which I sort of hid from myself when we broke up. I couldn’t throw it out. Apparently one doesn’t throw out a Tom Field drawing.”
“He let you keep it,” Robbie said.
“Didn’t he let you keep the drawing he made of you?”
“Tom never drew me.”
“So you didn’t date?”
“No. No, we didn’t.”
“It was part of his seduction MO. Everyone naked, the sketching.”
There was something about the man’s voice uncannily Tom-like, or not so much his voice (his timbre was more the cello to Tom’s violin), as a similar crescendo of enthusiasm with each statement.
“My weeks with him were wretched on the one hand,” the man said, “but also wonderful, and then I have to say he sort of saved me. But that’s a long story. We were both artists, that was part of it. I mean that we were both artists in that if someone came up to you in a grocery store and asked, ‘Hey, so, what do you do?’ We’d say, or I’d say, ‘Artist.’”
“Tom mentioned he dated a painter,” Robbie said. “He also indicated that there were some arguments—”
“Like ever I got a word in,” the man said. “Tom has to be the first and only guy I’ve split up with over art, and I guess that’s oddly cool on some level, but mostly it was oddly odd. He called me a dilettante—he of all people called me a dilettante. But he did have a sweet side. It’s horrible, not only that he checked out, but how.”
It occurred to Robbie possibly he’d reached his limit as to how much he wanted to consider Tom’s death, and he thought about exiting the conversation.
“At the bar where I met him,” the man said, “there’s a bartender who looks after me and who also found Tom amusing, and then for some wacky reason fixated on the idea of the two of us together, poured us free bourbon. The bartender had to call the police on Tom once or twice apparently, after Tom and I were finished, and he was also the one who told me Tom hanged himself. I mean, how awful. Apparently you die from asphyxiation—it’s like drowning.”
Robbie was sitting on the floor, propped up against a window. The pane was cold against his shoulder blades.
“I wish I’d done something to stop him,” the man said.
Robbie sat up. “What do you mean?” he asked.
The man hesitated, and then he said, “He wanted us to do it together.
“You have to understand,” he went on, “I had no money, I’d stayed in a ghastly relationship with a guy a year too long. I’m a little younger than Tom, and maybe he wanted me to see myself in him, like I would become him. We were drinking of course, and he brought it up, ending things together, the world be damned—I cut him off. I said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘No matter how hard it’s been, no thanks. I want to live forever.’ And do you know what Tom said? He said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’
“Then one of the last times I was with him, a month later but before he accused me being a dilettante who would amount to nothing, Tom said he was burned-out all the time and wasn’t sure what the difference was between being alive and being dead. I didn’t want to get into that conversation again. I didn’t say a word and he changed the subject as if he were embarrassed, like he thought we were the same person with the same experience and realized finally we weren’t. Which must have made him feel lousy, and lonely. Obviously I’ve thought a lot about this. I should have, I don’t know, said something.”
“But,”—Robbie had to clear his throat—”but what could you have said?”
“It’s difficult. Someone who is always over-the-top talks like that—how do you respond? But I was selfish. I was thinking no matter how much I struggled, living this impractical impossible life, I was in better shape than Tom.”
“This is how he saved you.”
“Kind of. And no, it’s more complicated, and a little personal.”
There was a pause and then the man said, his voice slightly more baritone as if sharing a secret, “My bartender friend told me Tom killed himself at a trick’s house—”
“It wasn’t a trick,” Robbie said.
“Then at some stranger’s place. And I thought, that was Tom. Make sure there’s a story people are telling about you.”
The word stranger sank like a stone in Robbie’s chest.
“I think Tom was waiting for the right time,” the man said, “the right place. I know this sounds twisted, but I think he was looking for a peaceful place to die, and maybe he found it.”
Robbie got up on his knees and pivoted so he was facing the lake, all ten fingertips against the glass.
“Hello?” the man asked.
“It is very peaceful up here, I will say that,” Robbie said.
Another pause.
“Oh no,” the man said. He said, “I’m sorry. What did I say? I’m trying to remember what I said.”
“I have his address book,” Robbie explained. “I’ve been calling people.”
“It never occurred to me—I’m so sorry.”
“I’m fine,” Robbie said, “I’ll be fine,” but he was thinking, yes, strangers—in the end, they had known each other only a day and remained strangers, Robbie and Tom, no different than Robbie and the person on the other end of the line, tenuously linked by a hanged man, yet disconnected, distanced as they listened to each other breathe. The man’s name was Jay.
“You don’t sound like you’ll be fine,” Jay said. “You found him?”
“I did,” Robbie said.
“You found him, and you were all alone,” Jay said.
He’d made a leap, but Robbie chose not to correct him.
“I’m sorry, the way I was talking—I should have been more careful. Is there anything I can do for you?” Jay asked.
“No,” Robbie said at first. But then he looked again at Jay’s address on Waterloo Street and added, “Or maybe we can meet up sometime and talk more. We live in walking distance.”
“Anytime. You can come over.”
“Right now?”
“Right now,” Jay said, “my place isn’t very tidy.”
“I’ve been deluding myself about Tom. I’m a fool. I’ve been selling myself a story—”
“Give me fifteen minutes,” Jay said.
Robbie stood slowly, muddled with vertigo but clearer now. If he had continued contacting Tom’s friends, it was because he never completely bought what anyone told him. All along he’d been waiting for confirmation of a blacker doubt. Tom in his gray suit at the steak house with the writer, Tom looking for a peaceful place to die—both habits sustained him in different ways, and one ultimately won out over the other. Nobody should be alone, and they had left Tom alone. Tom’s whole life, everyone had left him alone.
• • •
TO WALK TO JAY’S PLACE, Robbie headed down his street to Duane and down the hill away from the Reservoir toward Glendale Boulevard, a steep pitch made unpleasant by the wind. He clutched his scarf over his nose. Jay’s address was difficult to locate because the street number was both scraped from the curb and missing from the building, a triplex with one unit tucked in back and upstairs, which turned out to be Jay’s apartment. At the end of the street was a freeway on-ramp, and directly opposite Jay’s building there was a triangular park, a baseball diamond on which at that hour, a man stood on the mound side-winding pitches at a boy-catcher who dropped every ball.
Robbie climbed a staircase rising over trash bins and knocked on the metal door, but no one appeared. He waited, knocked
again, and Jay did not answer. When he knocked a third time, the door swung open wide, and Robbie took a step back and hit the railing. What kind of weird trick was this?
Jay extended his hand, the open cuff of his half-buttoned, wrinkled shirt falling away to reveal the raised vine of veins in his forearm. Cold hand, firm shake. He bounced a bit off one foot as he ushered (pulled) Robbie inside.
His apartment was a studio, longer than it was deep and surveyable in a blink. It was, yes, a bit of a mess, and yet also a calm forest because the walls had been painted a mossy color and the partially drawn matchstick blinds were a dark wood. An upright piano stood in one corner, sheet music open, sheet music scattered across the bench and spilling onto the floor. A guitar was propped up against the wall like a cowboy enjoying a standing siesta. In the opposite corner, piles of books banked up against a bed like cottages set into the foothills. There was a small writing desk, a shallow kitchenette, empty wine bottles on the counter, a bathroom with dated tile. In the center of the room was an ornate upholstered couch, a burgundy brocade, an atlas open on the couch to a map more lake than land.
Jay was barefoot and wearing paint-streaked jeans, which, as he asked Robbie if he wanted some tea, as he bounced across the studio to turn on the kettle when Robbie didn’t respond, he had to hitch up because they were more or less falling off his narrow hips.
The wind rattled the glass as if a train tore past.
Also in the studio, in the vicinity of the couch, Jay had set up an easel (presently unoccupied by a canvas) and another wooden table layered in squeezed-out tubes of paint, jars of ratty brushes and crusted palette knives. The long wall across from the window wall was covered with small unframed square canvases that at first looked like monochromatic color field paintings, one black, one brown, one deep gray, and so on, although as Robbie’s eyes adjusted, he could see they were more complex. The darker colors had been painted over grids of brighter hues, although not completely, and here and there cadmium lines of orange and red, electric blues and greens, all very fine-lined, emerged, suggesting a hidden heat source.
