by Peter Gadol
“No, no, not yet,” Tom said, tapping his first two fingers against Carlo’s bare sternum. Tap, tap, tap.
Carlo stared at Tom’s hand as if he expected it to do something else.
“I’m tired, Tom,” he said.
“Not yet. Do you have any paper?”
“Paper, why?”
“Do you?”
Carlo opened a drawer and removed a letter-sized graph paper pad and pencil. He leaned against the kitchen counter, one palm flat against the granite. With his right hand, he was scratching his left clavicle.
“Stay like that,” Tom said.
“Like how?” Carlo asked. “Like this?”
Tom, with the pad balanced in the crook of his arm, began to move his drawing hand fast across the page. Glancing up at Carlo, down at the pad, up, down. Thinking that if he let Tom draw him, then they could go to bed, Carlo maintained the pose. They didn’t talk. Tom was serious, and the way he scrutinized Carlo, the way Tom touched his tongue to his lip and cocked his head, Carlo felt pinned by the artist’s stare, a specimen, trapped. Carlo shifted his weight.
“Don’t move,” Tom barked.
No longer warmed by washed dishes, Carlo got goosebumps and his nipples hardened. He couldn’t deny it, this was erotic. Tom worked at the drawing a while and when he was done, he signed it and ripped the page from the pad.
In the drawing, Carlo was looking away, yet his naked chest appeared thrust forward, as if something unseen yoked him and held him back. He appeared thin along the jaw, haggard. Here now, explicit, was what Carlo never saw when he stared in the mirror and faced off his same old self day in, day out: A man turning forty. A man once certain but no longer certain what he wanted in life. A man whose mind was a hundred places at once, never settled, never at peace. His first reaction to Tom’s handiwork was surprise, but surprise gave way to discomfort. He did not want Tom Field to know him this well.
Tom, on the other hand, seemed especially pleased with his effort and said, “I think I would have done well in fifteenth-century Florence.”
“You do have quick fingers,” Carlo said.
That night they met at the police station, in the men’s room, when Carlo was changing out of the clothes he’d soiled into borrowed prison overalls—that night Carlo suffered the same uneasiness around Tom because Tom saw Carlo for who he was: frightened, diminished, small. Was this why he’d gone to Valley and fucked Tom, to regain control, to prove himself strong? And was Carlo now stronger? No: he remained a hapless, hopeless victim, stupid, stupid.
They were standing close again, looking at the drawing.
“I did buy a gun,” Carlo whispered.
“You what?”
“I said I bought a gun. The day I came to your apartment, I went to a gun store.”
Tom squinted at him. “You didn’t tell me that. And by the way you were talking earlier tonight—”
“I never picked it up. I didn’t want it in the house.”
“You bought a gun and didn’t pick it up. Who does that? I don’t believe you.”
“Why wouldn’t you believe me?” Carlo asked.
“You told Robbie you had an accident?”
“I didn’t want him to worry. What would he do with his worry? Nothing but worry more.”
“Is that the real reason?” Tom asked, and then he said, “And you make all these claims you’re monogamous—”
“It was only that one time,” Carlo snapped.
“Right. If you say so.”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” Carlo said. “It’s not like you’ve been in any kind of real relationship.”
Tom stared at his bare feet.
“Or not that you mentioned,” Carlo said. “Sorry.”
They stood in the kitchen, Tom continuing to look at his feet, Carlo wishing he could take back his callous comment.
Tom said, “That night at the station. In the men’s room.”
“I need to go to bed,” Carlo said. “When I don’t sleep, I get depressed.”
“You’d pooped in your pants,” Tom said.
Now Carlo was the one staring at the floor.
“And correct me if I’m wrong,” Tom said, “but I don’t think you are someone who generally poops in his pants.”
“That’s great, thanks. That’s enough.”
“So to avoid future pants-pooping situations,” Tom said, “maybe you should go and get that gun. Maybe you’d want some way of blowing away anyone who—”
“Don’t you get it? I don’t want anything to do with that night,” Carlo said, and this sounded inane, he knew, because that night (like this night) would always have something to do with him. “And I regret, I deeply regret that we fooled around, okay?” He held up Tom’s drawing and said, “This is lovely, thanks—”
“No, no, no,” Tom said—he grabbed and released Carlo’s elbow. “Not yet. Don’t go, not yet.”
“When I don’t sleep—”
“After I finished my cigarette,” Tom said, “I was free to go, but I stuck around the station and talked to you, and not because you’re so adorable in overalls, but because you were frightened, you poor lost puppy. I stayed and I talked to you,” Tom said, “about all your modern houses and all the European cities you know your way around and your handsome boyfriend—your whole life we talked about.”
This was true enough, Carlo thought.
“I did that for you. I talked to you so you could go home in peace. I talked to you so you could go back to your life. Nobody asked me to,” Tom said. “I did that for you.”
He began pacing back and forth the length of the kitchen.
“What do you think it means,” Tom asked, “that you forgot about me?”
“I didn’t forget about you,” Carlo said. “I told you. I didn’t recognize you at first because you weren’t blond anymore.”
“But then you came to my place, and trust me, it’s not like I thought you wanted to get involved or even have a fling. But you needed something, didn’t you? Which I gave you, I think.”
“Tom.”
“What?”
What Tom was saying was true, but Carlo couldn’t think straight and wanted to get away, very far away from him.
“You said you lived in Silver Lake,” Tom said, “and that you had your office on Silver Lake Boulevard. You never told me your last name, but it wasn’t hard to find the place. Although my car really did break down.”
Carlo absorbed what Tom was telling him.
“We both need sleep,” Carlo said.
“I stayed with you. You were upset. I talked you down.”
“And I thank you for that, but—”
“You came to me.”
“I don’t deny—”
“Talk to me now.”
“I don’t do well without sleep,” Carlo said.
“Nobody else owes me anything,” Tom said. “If not you, then who?”
Carlo scratched his head. He rubbed his eyes. He’d had enough.
“Look, Tom, you seem sober. If you want to leave.”
“Leave?”
Carlo examined his portrait again, and he said, “I think you should go now. Yes. I think it would be a good idea if you left.”
And Tom asked, “That’s it?”
“That’s what?”
“That’s all you have?” Tom asked. “That’s it?”
Carlo left him in the kitchen. He tip-toed back across the main room toward the bedroom, but he was still holding the drawing. He didn’t want to risk Tom seeing him discard it because as much as he wanted Tom to disappear, he didn’t want to hurt his feelings—and he also didn’t want Robbie to find it in the morning. He didn’t want to explain what had gone on just now, didn’t want to get into it, maybe not ever. He opened the built-in linen closet in the hall, opened the door all the way. He lifted one foot onto the lowest shelf, grabbed hold of a middle shelf, and pulled himself up to reach the top shelf. He grasped his wooden art kit with his free hand and caught it w
ith his other hand as he stepped back down, landing on the floor with a thud. He paused for a moment and listened for any stirring in the bedroom—none. He set the case and the drawing on the floor and lifted himself up again, held himself in place, and shoved the book box with Robbie’s grandfather’s toy soldiers to the left, thinking he’d stash the drawing behind it, but the box fit too snugly on the shelf. Back on the floor, he glanced over his shoulder—did he see Tom peering out of the kitchen, watching? No. Carlo knelt, undid the tarnished clasps of the wooden art kit and placed Tom’s drawing atop the paint tubes and impasto and apothecary-like bottles of medium, the brushes and palette knifes. Then he closed the case and pulled himself up once more and returned the art kit to the top shelf.
In bed, Robbie was still sound asleep. Carlo washed down a sleeping pill with the remaining sip of water in the bottle on the floor. And then he lay on his back waiting for the pill to take effect. He could hear Tom moving around the house, first in the guest room, then in the main room, then back in the guest room. He wished the pill would deliver him elsewhere, but even after some time had passed, he wasn’t drowsy and lay awake tracking Tom’s continued movements, aware that he had neither gone to sleep nor departed.
A good hour after leaving Tom in the kitchen, Carlo finally heard what he thought might be Tom going out the front door, and he thought he heard a car door open and shut, or a trunk, but then Tom walking through the house again. Carlo heard something heavy rolling, the sliding door to the patio being pulled back. Then noise from the patio, a metal chair dragged across the stone. Then silence.
Carlo waited a few moments before he got out of bed—Robbie shifted onto his side—and crept across the room to the window. Light from the house spilled onto the terrace, although it wasn’t easy to see what was going on, except that Tom appeared to be pacing again like he had in the kitchen. Short steps, fast steps. There was an object lying on the table, but Carlo couldn’t make out what it was. Tom kept stepping back and forth across the slate and stopping beneath the tree and gazing up, and then he would resume pacing.
At one point when he stopped moving, Tom stared back at the house, at the bedroom window, and Carlo leaned back—he didn’t think Tom spotted him. He knew he should go out and talk to Tom, who glanced up at the tree again and began pacing again.
Nobody should be alone in the world. This was what Carlo’s father said to him when Carlo came out. Years later he realized his father wasn’t speaking so much about teenage Carlo as he was about himself, explaining his own life.
Tom stood beneath the tree.
Carlo was frozen at the window, his hands suddenly heavy, his legs weighted, too.
Like a standoff: Tom on the patio, Carlo in the bedroom, neither moving.
Until finally Tom sat down at the edge of the chair, his elbows on his knees, his head in his hands.
Carlo let his shoulders drop. His head heavy now.
Go outside, he told himself. Go.
But he did not go out to Tom, and instead Carlo got back in bed. Instead Carlo lay down next to Robbie. And he had the sense that what had been chasing him all spring and all summer, and what would follow him across the fall and winter was the fear, the cold conviction that against his father’s wishes, it was only a matter of time before he, before Carlo ended up all alone. And with this thought that night, that morning, at last he fell asleep.
• • •
“I DIDN’T TAKE CARE OF HIM,”
Carlo said. While he’d been telling Robbie what happened, several men who looked like brothers had come in the waiting room, which was not crowded, but for some reason they didn’t sit down and stood in a row in front of the wall-mounted television in the corner, watching the latest news on a slow news night.
“I should have stayed with him, I didn’t, he died,” Carlo said.
Robbie didn’t speak for a long while. Carlo expected him to say he was the worst person, Carlo was, and Robbie didn’t see a way to continue in a life with him.
“You should have, yes,” Robbie finally said. “And maybe you could have stopped him that night, but not necessarily the next night or the night after that.”
“You said you thought he didn’t mean to—”
“When I told you that Tom’s death was an accident,” Robbie interrupted, “I was wrong.”
“We don’t know,” Carlo said.
“We don’t, and then we do,” Robbie said. “There’s a detail, there was something I never understood. When we found Tom, he wasn’t wearing shoes. He ended up with splinters in his feet—remember? And why no shoes, because he was in a hurry?”
“No?”
“No, I think he didn’t put on his shoes because he didn’t want to make too much noise when he walked around the house or even out on the patio. He didn’t want to wake us. He was deliberate. He wanted to end his life.”
“I don’t know. Don’t you think that’s too small a detail to attach so much to?” Carlo asked.
“I don’t think so.”
“I think Tom wanted to come close to death without experiencing death,” Carlo said. “He set up the rope. It was a test. And at the last second, he got too close. He fell off the chair, he died.”
“You’re saying at the very final instant, it was a mistake.”
“I’m saying,” Carlo said, “that I have to believe at some point, too late, it was an accident.”
“I used to think that, but now I don’t. Anyway, we can’t know,” Robbie said.
“We can’t know,” Carlo echoed, “so we have to decide for ourselves what he was thinking.”
“You believe he wanted to get close.”
“I guess that’s what I need to believe,” Carlo said. “So, yes.”
“I wish I could agree,” Robbie said.
If this was what Carlo needed to think, it was because he couldn’t understand no longer wanting to experience the early winter dusk falling all around him. He could not imagine no longer wanting to see through as many seasons as possible.
“If he’d lived another day,” Carlo said, “who knows? Maybe that next day, things would have turned around for him.”
“Possibly,” Robbie said. “We can’t know,” he said again.
“I guess not,” Carlo said, and they sat a while and didn’t speak. Then Carlo said, “Tom Field.” He said, “Tom Field, Om Ield.”
Robbie smiled, but a tear formed, as well.
“Tom Field. Om Ield,” Robbie repeated. “Meld,” he said.
The two men were staring at each other in silence: How old they were in that moment, how old.
• • •
A FEW DAYS LATER, they went over to Gabriel’s aunt’s apartment. The boy had told his aunt he did not want to see them, but Gabriel’s aunt, grateful the men caught the boy when they did, perhaps fearing charges could be brought against her nephew (though bringing charges never once occurred to either man), said Gabriel didn’t have a say in the matter. Gabriel’s aunt said she knew the two men had been good to her nephew over the years, and she hoped they would forgive the boy for whatever he’d done. No, no, the two men told Gabriel’s aunt, it was the boy who needed to forgive them for however they’d tangled him up in the tragedy at their house that fall.
Then the two men talked to Gabriel alone. They tried not to be overtly amused by a teenager’s bedroom, the posters, the batik fabric across the top of the dresser. The candles next to the computer. Was that possibly an old teddy bear amid the bevy of pillows?
Gabriel sat up in bed. He pulled a flannel sleeve down over the bandage running the length of his arm. He had burns along his right side; they would heal. He was told to expect minor scarring at his hip. The side of his face had been burned, too, and was presently oily with salve, but he would recover. In the hospital, they’d had to shave his already shaved head as well as his right eyebrow. He did look a little strange, but he seemed to be his same old self once they started talking—or no, maybe he was not his same old self, not so sweet, not so innocen
t. The boy’s voice had flattened out and he sounded weary and bitter when he conveyed what he knew about all the vandalism at the house.
He did not know for certain who had tagged the trash cans and thrown the garbage all over the front yard, but it was the kind of random prank that the crew of kids who hung out with Lonny (yes, Lonny) sometimes pulled when they were drinking. But was this a mocking response to Tom’s death and what might have been rumored as the unsavory way Tom died? Probably not, but they would never know. And as for the two plum trees and whether they succumbed to the wind or were snapped against an angry boot, Gabriel didn’t have an opinion. He didn’t think it was the kind of thing Lonny would do, but then Gabriel could certify that Lonny was responsible for the effigy. Lonny had taken one of Gabriel’s old shirts and a tetherball he found in Gabriel’s backyard and then strung it up during the night—in retaliation, Lonny claimed, for Carlo having roughed him up at the liquor store.
“That kid could have made a mess of you,” Robbie said to Carlo.
“It was pretty pathetic on my part,” Carlo said. “But, Gabriel, do you know this for sure about Lonny and the effigy?”
“I was with him when he did it,” Gabriel said.
The boy hadn’t tried to stop his friend, not in front of some of the other kids also lurking around, plus Lonny was not someone you wanted to get in the way of when he was both vengeful and stoned.
“And also …” Gabriel started to say.
“And also what?” Robbie asked.
The boy seemed reluctant to go on. He was scowling at Carlo. He said, “I didn’t owe Lonny money like I said I did. I was scamming you.”
“Oh,” Carlo said.
“And Lonny wasn’t with me when I set the tree on fire. You lied. I didn’t care if your whole house burned down. I still don’t.”
Carlo shivered. The boy was becoming one more stranger to them. He had to believe it was not too late to repair the splintered trust, and yet he’d be fooling himself if he didn’t admit he was worried. If a sweet kid could grow up and light up a pepper tree, and if a man could hang himself while the two men slept, then logic meant nothing, reason nothing. In time the boy might become that man. They needed to do everything they could to prevent that from happening, but could they?
