Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  What did they not talk about? About Robbie’s life all that much. He disclosed he was taking time off from his architectural practice. After Tom’s suicide, Robbie said, he realized how burned out he was. Jay asked how Robbie’s firm was handling his leave, and Robbie explained his firm consisted of only him and his partner (he did not characterize Carlo with any word other than partner), who was very understanding. And so Robbie wasn’t necessarily lying, although he was hardly being truthful.

  “Don’t you want to get back to work?” Jay asked.

  “I don’t know,” Robbie said.

  “Will you go back?”

  The question surprised Robbie—or he was more surprised by his response, a shrug.

  “What do you think you’ll do?” Jay asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t seem concerned about it.”

  “I know,” Robbie said. “It’s weird, but I’m not.”

  Once upon a time, a confession like this would have been impossible, all too frightening to admit. But in Jay’s company, Robbie never had any worries—around Jay, Robbie experienced an old confidence he was unaware he’d lost. It was as if he were the same man he’d been a long time ago, even before Carlo—carefree, upbeat—and also a new man, or maybe a changed man, although changed in what ways he was unable to say.

  It was December. A daytime friendship ran into the night. When Jay didn’t have to work in the evening, Robbie left notes for Carlo saying when he expected to be home, but not where he was heading, not with whom.

  Jay turned twenty-six (twenty-six!). Robbie offered to take him out for dinner but Jay didn’t want that. He had a simpler craving: They went to the cramped bistro in Sunset Junction and sat in the corner, bunkered among jackets and scarves, and they shared a bottle of a dry bordeaux and two orders of salty pommes frites. They were seated close together on the banquette, and Jay let his hand under the table rest on Robbie’s knee. Robbie extended his arm across the back of the seat. They looked like lovers. Would anyone whom Robbie knew see them? He wasn’t sure he cared, nor did he feel reckless when at the end of the evening (and thereafter with every parting), Jay kissed Robbie on the cheek.

  They were seen together on at least one occasion that Robbie knew of, when they were walking around the corner from the bookstore and Gabriel coasted by on his low-rider bike. The boy looked back over his shoulder, briefly meeting Robbie’s glance. Without noticeable acceleration, the boy rode off down the street and disappeared, and that was that.

  One time Jay said, “You never mention past boyfriends.”

  Robbie hesitated.

  “I’m prying.”

  “No, it’s fine. There’s a reason I don’t talk about it,” Robbie said, and now he was laying on a thick varnish.

  “When did you break up?”

  Again Robbie hesitated.

  “Maybe we can talk about it some other time,” Jay said.

  They rented favorite movies from the video store on Hyperion and took them back to Jay’s studio. They each chose French films. The one Jay picked had come out forty years before Robbie’s selection, and did Jay sense how much it meant to Robbie to be watching that particular film with him? The impish schoolboy, his day playing hooky. Caught, breaking free, on the run, on the beach, looking back—freeze frame. Did Jay notice Robbie holding his breath? Robbie was staying out later and later, beyond when he told Carlo he’d be home, but Robbie accepted a glass of wine. Jay improvised something on the piano, a strain he’d picked up from the film. “I should go,” Robbie kept saying, and yet he didn’t go, not until midnight, and when he got home Carlo was asleep, awake briefly when Robbie climbed into bed, asleep again fast.

  In the morning Carlo noted how late Robbie was getting in, and Robbie apologized, and he waited, he waited a good long minute for Carlo to ask him where he’d been. Or maybe Carlo, busying himself making coffee and toasting muffins, was waiting for Robbie to volunteer the information. Ask me, Robbie was thinking, demand to know what I’ve been doing all these hours away from you, ask me.

  “I’m sorry if I woke you,” Robbie said.

  “Don’t worry. It’s fine,” Carlo said, end of discussion, and his response, his apparent lack of concern, at once confused and wounded Robbie. He thought: So be it. He had unspoken permission to do as he pleased.

  Later these late autumn days would be difficult to remember, pulling them apart, one from the next. The day he and Jay hiked in Vermont Canyon. The day they went to check out a desk someone was selling online. The evening—this would have been the last evening of autumn—when Jay tuned his guitar and played Robbie some songs he’d written. They were all languorous ballads, which Jay sang in a shy baritone, a suite of songs about two men, doomed lovers. Robbie was moved and profuse with compliments to the point that he worried he sounded disingenuous. Jay was young and according to his own testimony had not yet experienced the life about which he was writing: How had he been able to capture so convincingly the spirit, the longing, the bliss of decades-long love? Robbie asked him this.

  Jay blushed, took the compliment, and said, “I think about it all the time, a real relationship. It’s speculation, I guess. But it’s what I want.”

  “You want to have your heart broken, too, like in the songs?”

  It wasn’t a serious question, but Jay frowned.

  “You should write more songs,” Robbie said. “You could do a whole opera.”

  “I should,” Jay said. “And I should make more paintings, and I need to finish those grad school applications—ergh. I’m all talk. I don’t want to be all talk. Am I all talk?”

  While they were having this conversation, they were sitting on Jay’s sofa, and Robbie felt something under his thigh. He dug his fingers between the cushions and withdrew a stack of tiny index cards bound with a rubber band. Each card had a cyrillic letter on one side, the English equivalent on the other. They were Tom’s, from when he was teaching himself Russian, one more item he’d lost in the crevice of a couch.

  “I had to quiz him,” Jay said, “and so I was learning Russian, too. Or the alphabet at any rate.”

  Robbie undid the rubber band and flashed a cyrillic side at Jay.

  “That’s the Y,” Jay said.

  Robbie tried another card.

  “That’s the Zh-shound.”

  Another card.

  “Got me.”

  “That’s the D,” Robbie said.

  Something about the quiz silenced Jay.

  “He’s here in a way, isn’t he?” Robbie asked. He wound the rubber band back around the flash cards. “Maybe we should learn Russian,” he said.

  “In memorial to Tom. I like that, yes.”

  “I think you mean da,” Robbie said.

  “Da, da,” Jay said. “Spasiba.”

  Robbie glanced at his watch. It was late again.

  “Robbie, why don’t we ever spend time at your house?”

  “Oh,” Robbie said. “I like getting away.”

  “Why don’t you want to tell me about your boyfriend?” Jay asked.

  Robbie said nothing. Then: “Oh.” And: “Right.”

  Jay had seen the name of the firm stenciled on the office window on Silver Lake Boulevard and then consulted the white pages and, as he’d suspected, discovered that a Stein also cohabitated with a Voight.

  “The man I was with before Tom, that awful relationship I’ve told you about,” Jay said, “it was with a married guy, and I’m not doing that again—”

  “No, no, of course not,” Robbie rushed to say. He knew he was blushing: he was the one who was twenty-six and Jay forty.

  Jay touched Robbie’s knee and said, “Not that I don’t think about it.”

  Robbie stared at Jay’s hand on his leg.

  Jay withdrew his hand. “But I’m not going there again,” he said.

  “No,” Robbie said. “No, you shouldn’t.”

  “I’d like to know about him,” Jay said, “and whatever is going on. It’s o
kay, Robbie, you can tell me. I’m not going to like you less.”

  • • •

  AND SO THIS WAS HOW on the first day of winter, Robbie finally invited Jay up to the house while Carlo was out (although Robbie was never sure when Carlo would return). Robbie let Jay give himself his own tour. They ended up in the bedroom, Jay standing at the window, Robbie sitting at the foot of the bed.

  “It’s quiet up here,” Jay said.

  “I like quiet,” Robbie said.

  “Open. Safe.”

  “Safe?”

  “What a view,” Jay said. He was staring at the back patio. “Is that the tree?”

  Robbie joined Jay at the window. It had begun to rain and the Reservoir was disappearing in the mist. He looked at the more immediate hillside of the property and out at the patio, the stone darkening as it became wet. He stared at Jay, and in the diffused light, the blond scruff along Jay’s jaw sparkled. Robbie wanted to touch it to see if it was as soft as it appeared. Jay blinked but didn’t say anything. They were standing very close to each other.

  Then Robbie looked out again at the patio, and suddenly his pulse quickened.

  “You don’t look so hot,” Jay said. “Are you okay?”

  Robbie’s dream, his recurring dream of waking and seeing Carlo at the window or seeing Tom at the window—it was no dream at all. It had happened, and not with Tom but with Carlo. Robbie had woken up at one point during the night Tom killed himself and seen Carlo standing at the window, gazing out, and Robbie had tried to stay awake but fell back asleep. This was what happened, he was sure of it.

  “Thanks for showing me your house,” Jay said.

  Robbie did not want to think about what he might have been piecing together, and he said, “I need to get out of here. I haven’t eaten much. Should we go to the diner?”

  They went to the diner down on Glendale and then parted ways, and as soon as Robbie was home again and alone at the end of the afternoon, he had to know: he could pretend all he wanted nothing had happened, but something had happened. He opened Carlo’s night table drawer: pills, bracelet, foreign currency, pocket diary, et cetera—nothing. He went through Carlo’s dresser drawers. Carlo’s trouser pockets. He unzipped tennis racket covers. He had no idea what he was looking for. He patted down Carlo’s coats. He opened and shut all the kitchen cabinets. He checked the garage this time around, tool bins, the drill case. Their luggage. He pulled out books from the shelves and found only dust. Again he stumbled on nothing in the guest room closet. He circled through the whole house and found nothing and ended up once again checking amid the stacks of extra sheets and pillowcases, the spare comforter in the built-in linen closet in the hallway. One more time he stood on tip-toes and flung open the upper cabinet. There on the left was the book box with his grandfather’s toys, and there on the right was Carlo’s art supply kit—Wait a minute. Hold on.

  The two men were alike in so many ways: Their favorite color was forest green. They preferred colder weather to warm. They never tired of dark chocolate. They loved clean square lines, glass, brushed steel. And, with the exception perhaps of Robbie’s desk at the office, they were neat the same way, orderly, things had their place. Robbie hadn’t noticed it before, but for as long as he could remember, in the upper cabinet, they had stowed the box of toy soldiers on the right, Carlo’s art kit on the left—the reverse of the way they were now.

  A part of him knew he was being ridiculous. And a part of him wasn’t sure—maybe he had it turned around, and even if the storage box and art kit had been swapped, so what? What was he looking for anyway?

  Robbie went back to the kitchen, into the pantry for the step ladder, and carried the ladder across the house to the hall. He climbed up two steps and saw that like the file boxes in the guest room closet, the book box with the toys remained sealed with packing tape. However, he noticed that Carlo’s art kit, a wooden briefcase, mostly dusty, was not dusty everywhere. There were finger marks. Robbie could tell that the kit had been touched recently. He pulled it out. He stepped back down the ladder and set the kit on the floor, undid its twin metal hasps, and pushed back the lid. And he gasped.

  For inside the briefcase there were stiff brushes and dull palette knives and silver tubes of oil paint that looked like dented miniature race cars—and lying atop the knives, brushes, and paints was a pencil sketch on a page of graph paper. The sketch was a portrait of Carlo, his face and torso, his naked torso.

  Carlo’s head was turned to the right, his chin angled down toward his collarbone, his eyes cast down, his right hand resting lazily across the left side of his bare chest, his palm flat across his heart. The charcoal channel of hair that ran down Carlo’s chest, the more feathery hair on his forearm, the orion of freckles between his index finger and thumb—the artist was good, he was very good. He’d captured Carlo’s whole being in that gesture, modest yet knowing, open yet covering himself up, gazing elsewhere yet present, very aware of, in wordless dialogue with his viewer. His viewer, which was to say the portrait artist.

  Robbie stared at the bottom of the page, first at the date, the day a man had hanged himself, and then at the signature in neat small caps, that of the hanged man himself: TOM FIELD.

  6

  AND SO IT WAS WINTER AGAIN. On the shortest day of the year, first there was rain, then wind, then wind and rain. Carlo had headed out early, not to the office but to the home supply center to pick up the fountain filtration system and pump and other hardware, and then to the stone yard, where he needed to look over his order of slate before heading home again to await its delivery.

  All he’d done these last weeks was work on the fountain, refining his design—a four-by-four pool, elevated one foot, would sit at the back edge of the lower terrace, pressed against the brush, leaving room on the terrace for a hammock and two chairs, and the fountain itself would gurgle up in the rear-most corner of the pool, an asymmetric plan—and figuring out all the proper piping and pumping and recycling of water. Also how to run the electrical. Also how to program the control box. All he’d done these last weeks was finish laying in the piping and grading the terrace. He’d built forms for the fountain pool, and with Gabriel’s help one afternoon, he’d poured a quick-setting concrete, making sure (according to everything he’d read online) the drainage would work well, and then even the jaded teenager had to grin a toothy grin because at last there was a there there.

  So Carlo made it from the stone yard back to the house, up the rain-slick hill roads, to await the delivery of his slate and saw Robbie’s car parked on the street and thought maybe Robbie would be home and could help when the stone arrived. However, Robbie wasn’t home. Carlo found the step ladder in the hall and the upper cabinet flung open, his art kit on the floor. On the bed: Tom’s sketch.

  Carlo sat on the bed, frozen. Everything was catching up with him.

  It had occurred to him to get rid of the drawing, but it seemed wrong to destroy something Tom had made, another betrayal. He supposed in time he’d throw it out, and Carlo had thought his art kit was safe (sometimes he’d hidden small gifts for Robbie in it). No one could have seen him hide the drawing except Tom (and Carlo was pretty sure he didn’t), and obviously Tom did not tell Robbie it was in there.

  A trunk honked, the delivery. The rain was coming down hard now, a cold rain at that, and the men from the stone yard were in a foul mood. Carlo was not at his best and so there was a disagreement about where they’d deposit the slate—not around back like Carlo wanted, only on the front driveway by the garage.

  Fine, fine. Carlo threw up his hands. And so the men lowered the pallets at the foot of the driveway, and no one was home to help, and the boy was nowhere when he was needed, and so Carlo himself had to load the slate in a wheelbarrow and maneuver the heavy cart around the side of the garage. It was cumbersome but easy enough with the pre-cut pieces that would be positioned around the sides and base of the fountain pool, but the terrace pieces were large and difficult to lift, only fit one at a time i
n the wheelbarrow. And Carlo kept slipping in the mud, his ankles turning. And the rain came down and came down, and he was soaked and his boots were coated in muck, his jeans, but he managed to get the stone around to the back patio, great. Great, great—he couldn’t actually use the wheelbarrow to get the stone down to the lower terrace—no path was clear and the drop was too steep anyway—and he should have waited until he could get Gabriel to help him, and everything was catching up with him, and the only way to avoid being sunk entirely was to keep moving, to carry the slate down the hill by hand.

  Which he started to do, but when he picked up one of the smaller rough-edged islands of slate, the wet stone was slippery against his work gloves, and so he had to carry the piece with his bare hands. And he managed to get a good grip on the flat, heavy piece of slate, even though it was difficult to hold, and he headed down the hill with it along a foot-wide path through the tea bushes and sage and other brush, slipping as he went, losing his footing, sliding on his ass. He got up and headed down and slipped again, but he made it down the hill, and if he was crying, he wouldn’t have been able to tell because his face was so wet from the rain. And then he climbed back up to the patio and grabbed another piece and went back down the hill, slipping three times, sliding part of the way on his side. And again, up the hill and down with the slate. And again. And again.

  He managed to make a dozen trips up and down the back slope before he sat down in the mud and rain at the bottom of the hill and could carry no more. Everything had caught up with him.

  He had walked into the kitchen that night and found Tom at the sink. “What are you doing up?” Carlo had asked, and he said, “You don’t have to do the dishes.” And Tom had answered, “I was raised a certain way.” Tom said: “Nobody else owes me anything.” Tom asked: “If not you, then who?”

  Autumn was gone and the winter would be a long winter, and Carlo let the rain surround him. He wondered, Must atonement be theater, must there be an audience? And if a man said he was full of remorse but no one heard him say it, did it matter? In the end, with no one to listen, with everyone gone, how would he redeem himself?