Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  Robbie sat down on edge of the couch, and Jay was saying this or that—Robbie was finding it difficult to concentrate. Eventually Jay sat down on the couch, too, handing a Robbie a mug of black soap-scented tea.

  Two differences. One: Jay didn’t look battered like Tom did nor scratched up like he’d been in a fight. And two: Jay was blond and Tom had been a brunette with a only a few blond streaks when he first appeared.

  “How are you doing now?” Jay asked, half standing and tucking his right foot under his left thigh, sitting again.

  A brief curtain of steam off the tea gave Robbie cover. He stared at the open map but couldn’t identify the featured peninsula by its shape alone.

  “Tom told me I should be embarrassed I didn’t have a world atlas handy,” Jay said. “Everyone should have a world atlas handy, and also he was appalled I didn’t properly stock my pantry, not—as you can see—that I have a pantry, and not that I’m sure I would know what a properly stocked one looks like. After my Tom weeks, once I started working at the bookstore, I used my employee discount to buy this atlas and now I can lose half a Saturday flipping through the maps—What’s wrong?”

  “Jay, you look like Tom. Am I crazy? You look an awful lot like Tom.”

  Jay tipped his head to the side (like Tom), and threw off a giggle (like Tom).

  “My friends called me a narcissist, dating him,” Jay said, “and I told Tom that, and Tom being Tom went and got his hair dyed so we’d look even more alike. Actually he dyed his own hair with something store-bought, and it came out white. You wouldn’t have recognized him. He looked more like a ghost of himself.”

  Robbie set his mug down on the floor and crossed the room to get a better look at Jay’s paintings. He studied an umber canvas, umber mostly but not entirely covering patches of viridian, that looked like a plot of rural fields as seen from a plane.

  “It’s pretentious but my idea was to start out with a pencil sketch of someone on the canvas, and then build up color, the color of the clothing the guy was wearing, his complexion, and so forth, and then add the colors I felt as though the person was throwing off, layering fields over that, until you have the final painting,” Jay said.

  “A mood portrait,” Robbie said.

  “You’re looking at Tom. He reminded me of an old growth forest. I guess I thought he’d be happier living in a cottage in the woods, a hermit. Like I said, it was a pretentious project.”

  “No, I get it,” Robbie said and turned back toward Jay, startled once again even though Jay was more Jay and less Tom now. “I like your work,” Robbie said, which he did.

  “I haven’t painted much lately.”

  “Because of Tom’s criticism.”

  “No. Maybe. No. Well, he was right, or it’s not so much I’m a dilettante as I don’t really stay with anything.”

  “Neither did Tom, I’m told,” Robbie said and sat back down on the couch, his knee under his leg the way Jay was sitting.

  “If it weren’t for Tom though, I probably wouldn’t be applying to grad schools,” Jay said.

  “Oh? For what?”

  “I can’t decide. I’m choosing between art, geology, and library science.”

  “That’s a good range,” Robbie said, trying to sound encouraging. And then he asked, “So you really don’t think it could have been an accident? Tom only goofing around? Tom tempting fate?”

  Jay didn’t appear to want to contradict whatever Robbie believed. “I can’t imagine what that was like for you,” Jay said, “finding him. And to be alone in that situation.”

  Once again Robbie opted not to correct him.

  “But you think it was deliberate,” Robbie pushed. “You’re convinced. Did the police ask you about all this, too?”

  “They did, and I’m sorry to disagree, but I think a rope is pretty deliberate. I don’t think he was playing games.”

  “I’m convinced now, too,” Robbie said. “I don’t want to be, but …”

  He recalled the horror story Tom told by the fire that night. Your kid or your eyes. Robbie formed a visor with his thumb and forefinger, shielding his brow as if the lamplight were the sun during an eclipse. Abruptly he began to sob.

  Jay slid across the couch so he could pull Robbie toward him awkwardly. This wasn’t right, Robbie thought, they didn’t know each other but then, two surprises: one, he wasn’t all that embarrassed to be losing it so openly in Jay’s apartment—and two, the way Jay held Robbie, he exhibited unexpected strength for someone as thin as he was, and Robbie didn’t want him to let go. But Robbie stopped crying and pulled away and, even if it may have been unnecessary, he apologized for his outburst.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know you.”

  “You do now,” Jay said.

  He crossed the room to the writing table and shuffled through what looked like sheet music, although what he withdrew to show Robbie was Tom’s charcoal drawing. Robbie noted the way Tom had captured Jay’s veiny forearms and hands, the same veiny forearms and hands now holding the broad page. In the sketch, Jay was reclining on his couch with one leg up on the cushions, the other knee bent, his foot on the floor, fingers laced behind his head, gleefully nude, which made Robbie blush. In the corner of the page was Tom’s familiar all-caps declarative signature: TOM FIELD, period. And after the signature, a date from last April.

  The uphill walk home wore out Robbie, especially given how windy it had become. It was late, the far edge of dusk. He wanted to make it inside and collapse, but Carlo was home and out front, kneeling, tending to the plum sapling closest to the street. Robbie didn’t want Carlo to see he’d been crying, but if Carlo noticed, he didn’t comment, perhaps because he was preoccupied. The skinny trunk of the tree had snapped halfway up, revealing a blond youthful pith, and the purple bough dangled upside down over Carlo’s shoulder. The sapling was partially uprooted, too, and pulled away from its stake, although the trunk hadn’t been completely severed.

  Then Robbie noticed that a second tree next to the first had also had been snapped, also uprooted.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “I found them like this,” Carlo said. “Your car is here—where were you?” he asked—he seemed especially upset. “Walking around the Reservoir?”

  “Yeah, around the Reservoir,” Robbie said. “These poor trees.”

  “I know,” Carlo said, he winced.

  The two damaged saplings looked liked a pair of beaten mendicants, stooped over, each extending an open palm without great hope.

  “This wind,” Robbie said. “It’s crazy.”

  “This wind.?”

  “Wind, yes. Why, what do you think happened?”

  Carlo grasped the fractured bough and stood, trying to lift it back into place.

  “Maybe we can tie the trunks together where they splintered and they’ll, I don’t know, self-graft,” he said.

  When he let the tree fall back, the wood cracked deeper along the break.

  “Who the fuck would do this?” he asked.

  “Who?” Robbie asked. “You’re saying it wasn’t the wind.”

  “Oh, come on. The wind snapped both of these trees?”

  Robbie looked out at the street and sighed.

  “Someone came along and tugged up the stakes and lifted up his boot against the trunk,” Carlo said, “and the trees gave—”

  “Seriously?”

  “Robbie. This is not the work of the wind.”

  “Nor an axe,” Robbie argued.

  “I didn’t say an axe, I said a boot.”

  “Honey, I don’t think so—”

  “I warned you we’d have more trouble. First the trash, now this—although this,” Carlo said, gripping the tree, “this is much more callous.”

  A terrier sauntered by out on the street, long-leashed, the dog walker far behind. The walker paused a moment and stared at the broken trees but didn’t engage the two men, as if they might be in the middle of a marital spat that had gotten out of hand.r />
  “You don’t see a pattern,” Carlo said.

  “The trash was a month ago. I don’t see a pattern,” Robbie said.

  “The wind?”

  “Why would anyone target us? What have we done?”

  The pepper tree was agitated by an uneasy draft. There was a thickening mist in the air. Carlo knelt again and tried to tamp the root ball back in the soil.

  “Maybe I can save them,” he said. “Saw the trunks at the break, hope they stand the shock. Maybe there will be new buds, branches. What?”

  “You’re not serious,” Robbie said.

  “It can’t hurt to try,” Carlo said.

  “I mean that because Tom killed himself at our house, you and I are now somehow undesirable and—what—need to be scared out of the neighborhood?”

  Carlo pressed his palms flat against the soil. The knees of his jeans were damp. “There are six trees here and someone picked on two,” he said.

  “This is crazy talk.”

  “A tree for each of us.”

  “That’s absurd. That’s crazy paranoid talk. Why would anyone do that?”

  “I don’t know, to threaten us like you said—I don’t know.”

  Some neighbor children carrying instrument cases wandered past the house. They lingered longer than the dog walker.

  Robbie was too tired to argue. However, he could see that Carlo was not himself, and so Robbie tried to be kind and said, “Look, you know more about trees than I do, so do whatever you think will work. If you can save them, sure, then it’s worth a shot.” And then he went in the house.

  • • •

  THE NEXT MORNING, he was aware of Carlo moving through his routine and leaving the house. Robbie pulled a pillow over his head and pretended to sleep, then fell back asleep. It was eleven when he got out of bed, and when he did, he had the sense something was wrong, that some extra warmth had been added to the air, as if an intruder had entered, watched him sleep, and left. He stepped out into the hallway and avoided the floorboards that creaked and approached the guest room warily, its door ajar, and peeked into the room. Nothing looked amiss. He turned to the main room and the furniture stood where the furniture always stood, the couches, the coffee table, the piano as ever, unplayed. The bookshelves were neat, the dining chairs symmetric around the table. He went into the kitchen and the only evidence of life was some crumbs on the counter from Carlo’s breakfast. Robbie turned back and looked out at the patio. He went so far as to stand at the sliding door but didn’t go outside. A low-slung breeze caught the brush running down the slope of their property, sending the tea bush and sage into ecstatic prayer.

  Usually the sky was a paler blue than the Reservoir, a grayer blue, but today it was different. The daytime sky was two shades darker than the daytime lake, pressing against the lake with new weight. Or maybe it was not the case that today the sky and lake were different fields than the day or days before, not the case that the landscape had changed, but rather that Robbie was seeing what he could have seen all along and never did.

  Fire is fire, Tom said, and he would probably look at Robbie now and say, A lake is a lake. Tom would tell him the world as Robbie wanted it to be was not the world as it was. The world as it was was what he now needed to see.

  So he thought about the two damaged plum trees in front, and he honestly did not believe anyone was out to get them, not that he necessarily thought the wind was the sole culprit, not that he had an explanation. But more troubling to him this morning than the vandalism itself was Carlo’s reaction. Why had he immediately read a pattern of malice and, without hesitation or doubt, connected the trash on the lawn with the snapped trunks? Did he have a special reason to be suspicious? What was he not saying?

  Not for a moment these last weeks that Robbie was aware of had Carlo paused to dwell on why Tom killed himself. Maybe Carlo simply didn’t want to know or care. That was what Robbie had assumed, but now what Detective Michaels said was beginning to eat at him—a long marriage, sometimes there were secrets—and for the first time, Robbie was considering another possibility: perhaps Carlo did not need to ask the ultimate question about Tom because, in fact, Carlo knew something all along that he’d kept to himself.

  Robbie wasn’t sure what he was looking for when he pulled open Carlo’s night table drawer. There were Carlo’s sleeping pills and a never-worn, tarnished silver bracelet, some euros in a money clip, lotion, his passport. His mother’s watch, her wedding ring. A pocket moleskin journal. Robbie knew better. He definitely knew better, but he slid aside the black elastic band, and turned to the last page of writing, expecting to find what, he wasn’t sure. He found nothing because Carlo hadn’t made an entry in over a year.

  He put everything back where it was and shame alone should have halted him there, but he kept going and rifled through their dresser, specifically through Carlo’s sock drawer, his underwear, his old T-shirts, nothing. He looked through Carlo’s side of closet, slipping his hand in and out of trouser pockets. He looked behind the old tennis rackets, even in the ankle boots Carlo rarely wore—nothing, but then what did he think he’d find? A billet-doux? Questionable credit card receipts? A hidden diary in round, unfaithful cursive? He was being silly, and what he was up to was absolutely wrong, and yet he couldn’t shake his suspicion that Carlo was hiding something from him.

  In the foyer closet, Carlo’s coats, the velvet-lined pockets, nothing. Amid his cookbooks, nothing but the usual bookmarks. Back to the guest room, which Robbie rarely had set foot in since Tom stayed the night, the guest closet: Amid the extra pillows and blankets, nothing. There were file boxes, taped since the last move, the seals unbroken. He looked in the built-in linen closet in the hall, slipping his hand into the stack of sheets and pillowcases. The extra toiletries, a basket of hotel loot, nothing. He opened the smaller second cabinet built-in above the lower one, and there on the left per usual was the book box packed his grandfather’s tin toy soldiers, which had some value but which Robbie had never had the heart to pawn. There on the right was Carlo’s wooden art supply kit with all the tubes of oil paints he no longer used. Nothing was disturbed, nothing out of place.

  Robbie had reason to be embarrassed. Carlo was the most remarkably reliable man Robbie had ever known or would ever meet. On the one hand, he wanted to atone for his temporary loss of faith and go buy his lover a box of dark chocolates. What’s this for? Carlo would ask and Robbie would answer, No reason, signor, an early Valentine. And yet, he couldn’t help it, his suspicion lingered. He needed to get out of the house to clear his head.

  A dense piano étude emanating from Jay’s apartment stopped when Robbie knocked.

  “Hey,” Jay said cheerfully. He had on the same jeans as the day before, although today he was wearing a faded blue T-shirt, ripped along his collarbone.

  “Sorry to disturb you,” Robbie said.

  “No, it’s cool,” Jay said.

  Robbie took one step inside and said, “I want to thank you for yesterday.”

  Jay flapped his hand, think nothing of it.

  “No,” Robbie said, “listen, thank you.”

  Jay dug his hands in his pockets, which had the effect of pulling his jeans lower down his waist and revealing a sliver of underwear.

  “If you’re not too busy …” Robbie started to say.

  He glanced down at the floorboards and noticed two dark nail heads, close together, serpent eyes staring back.

  “If you’re not too busy, can I buy you coffee?”

  4

  THERE WAS NEVER ANY QUESTION in Carlo’s mind that whoever had thrown the trash around the yard had come back to commit another act of vandalism, this time to do more harm, and no matter Robbie’s denial—what kind of wind could partially uproot the saplings and their stakes and snap the trunks!—the near-felling of two trees was unambiguously symbolic: two broken trees, two broken men.

  In the morning he tried again to lift a fractured bough back in place, wondering what magical regrafting might oc
cur were he to secure the split wood at the break. He was kidding himself. He retrieved the handsaw from the garage, got down on his knees, and pressed the roots of the tree back in the earth, patting down the mud into a berm, all the while trying to hold the trunk steady. He began sawing the trunk beneath the break, but it had rained overnight, making the bark slippery, and he could see he was doing more harm than good, not so much cutting through the wood as scarring it. He tried again at a different angle because he thought maybe if he cut the trunk cleanly, and the roots were reestablished, then the tree might survive the shock and continue to grow and eventually develop new buds, which would yield new branches, and with proper nurturing, one day the tree might look no different than its siblings.

  For about fifteen minutes, this was a potent fantasy. However, he couldn’t saw the tree the way he wanted, and also, the root ball was more disturbed than he was admitting. He told himself he was doing the right thing when he went back to the garage for a shovel, and dug at the roots and uprooted the sapling (which proved to be more of a chore than he’d imagined), and dragged the ruined thing around to the side of the house, out of sight. Then he went at the second tree and removed it, as well. He kicked what mud he could into the cone-shaped craters where the trees had stood.

  The yard work had been messy and he had to take a second shower of the morning, and meanwhile Robbie slept, which maybe was best. Carlo didn’t want to talk about the plum trees, he didn’t want to argue about where to lay blame, and while Robbie’s inability to perceive a blatant threat was infuriating, Carlo also didn’t want to drift back into conversation that would bleed into a larger meditation on Tom—blessedly, Tom hadn’t come up at all recently, and Carlo wanted to keep it that way. It was better not to involve Robbie and handle things on his own, and besides, any further back-and-forth about why anyone would harass them was pointless: action was required.

  All morning at his desk, he pondered what to do, and one thought was to drive over to the nursery and pick up two new saplings. Like whitewashing graffiti the morning after it was sprayed (not that they had done anything about the tagged trash bins), they would get the new trees in the ground immediately so that whoever was attacking them would see that the two men refused to be intimidated. But then planting new trees, a kind of digging in (as it were), could be perceived the wrong way. Challenged thus, the vandals might be inspired to attack once more. Another thought was to call the police, but Carlo didn’t want the police up at the house again anytime soon, and anyway, he’d already disturbed the scene of the crime. He would need to pursue his own leads, and he did have one idea.