Black Diamond Fall

by Joseph Olshan

  The nurse shakes his head. “Didn’t say why. Just waiting. Now, would you like something to eat this morning?”

  Bewildered, drugged, Sam tries to figure out if he’s hungry. “I guess. Sure.”

  * * *

  In the spring of the previous year, out of boredom and loneliness, he placed an ad on Craigslist, a shirtless picture of himself posted with the stern warning that any response without including a photo would be ignored. Disappointed by the blurry, hardly revealing image Luc sent, he calculated a twenty-six-year age difference between them. But Luc e-mailed persistently until Sam gave in, thinking to himself: He’s twenty-three, how bad can he be? Never anticipating the tall, strapping guy wearing aviators who drove up to the country store in a Mini Cooper. And Sam, on his motorcycle, leaning in the passenger window and asking Luc to take his sunglasses off, awed by the pale-slate eyes against the dark hair, the blond streaks in the young man’s beard from having spent the summer working in road repair. And the very quiet moment when two people look deeply into one another and see something at once welcoming and disturbing.

  “Your picture almost lies,” was the first thing he told Luc, concealing his delight.

  “I have to . . . lie, because it’s a secret,” Luc replied, the first words that Sam, of course, should have heeded.

  But Sam had also lied. “I’m actually forty-nine, not forty-four,” he admitted.

  “It’s okay. I’m only into mature guys,” Luc told him, then winked and admonished, “But tell the truth next time!”

  Sam thought it would be quick and easy. He never dreamed he’d be compelled to tell the young man how beautiful he is or hear Luc say the same thing to him. Or that back at Sam’s house, when they were taking a breather listening to an Internet radio station that played tunes from the sixties and seventies, Luc would recognize songs like “Under Pressure” by David Bowie, able to sing the lyrics while they were lying in bed together.

  “But this is before your time,” Sam remarked.

  Good music is good music,” Luc said, with a wise grin.

  “I can’t imagine growing up listening to my parents’ music.”

  “Nobody did that . . . before the revolution,” Luc pointed out. “After the revolution everything changed.”

  “What revolution?” Sam asked with a bit of irritation.

  “Free love.” Luc laughed, and laid his head on Sam’s chest.

  Two days later, Luc texted at eleven thirty in the morning and asked if he might visit. It was raining and his roadwork company had called it a day. Sam had already spread some blueprints out on his drafting table: a house in Cornish, New Hampshire, that he was designing for a French couple, a minimalist building with walls of translucent glass, a whimsical structure that his clients loved. Due for a meeting with them at seven that evening, he’d promised to have everything finished but figured he might never get such a chance again with somebody like this, somebody so open, so youthfully unguarded in the act of love.

  When the young man walked in the door, his Adidas bag slung over his shoulder and a sheepish, slightly frightened look on his face, Sam guessed Luc had probably thought a lot about their first encounter and that sheer carnal compulsion had driven him to the second.

  As they were passing Sam’s home office, Luc noticed the plans on the drafting table and wandered in. “What are these?” he said, gently caressing the blueprints with a finger.

  Sam approached and fit his chin on Luc’s shoulder. “House I’m designing. Done a lot for these people. Did their place in France.”

  “Where at?”

  “A town called Lourmarin, it’s in—”

  “I know where it is. We know a Canadian lady who has a house there. And that guy who wrote all those books about Provence was really describing Lourmarin. Now our friend says because of those books, that town is overrun—it’s ruined.” Luc regarded the row of photographs above the drafting table and smiled goofily. “Would these houses be your designs?”

  “Yup. All local. Except for the one in France . . .” Sam pointed to a photo of the old stone house whose remodeling he’d overseen. “I’ve never done anything on a large scale, like an office building.”

  Luc shrugged it off. “So what? You make a living at it, don’t you? Better than bloodsucking on Wall Street or ambulance chasing, right?” He winked. “Plus, you’re sexy, mon,” he says with a Caribbean accent. “You’re Jewish, right?”

  “I am.”

  “Love Jewish guys. You’re too sexy, really.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Luc laughed. “I don’t know, and don’t make me explain it. Just keep being it.” And then he kissed Sam.

  * * *

  A lanky man of around forty-five with a trim beard and dark eyes strolls into the hospital room. “Hello, Mr. Solomon. Glad to see you’re feeling a little better,” he says with a quiet, thoughtful air. Glancing at the cast that ends just below Sam’s knee, he remarks, “Tough luck, this injury. Fortunately you’re going to be okay.”

  Sam says, “You mean that I’ll walk again.”

  “I was told you’ll be able to ski again, too, but maybe not Black Diamond Fall.”

  Black Diamond Fall. How does he know about Black Diamond Fall? “Who are you, anyway?”

  The man fixes him with a steady, importunate gaze. He’s different, bonier than the Vermont policemen Sam knows—locals, young beer-drinking guys who opt for the academy instead of college. “I’m Detective Nick Jenkins,” he says. “I’m from Carleton, Vermont. And I am here on behalf of the college. I’m here because Luc Flanders has been missing for five days. He was last seen on February eleventh.”

  The news is a slug to Sam’s chest, and for a moment he stares at Jenkins blankly. And barely has the presence of mind to say, “Missing as in he took off somewhere?”

  Gazing at Sam with a furrowed expression, the detective says, “I’m going to sit down.” He grabs a hard chair and perches in it backward next to Sam’s hospital bed. A group of chattering nurses passes the door to the room. Waiting until their voices die down, the detective says what Sam has been fearing all along. “Right now, that seems to be the likeliest possibility.”

  Sam becomes aware of avian sounds. Twitters, squawks; they must be outside the window. But then his medicated haze burns away with a realization.

  “When did you say he was last heard from?”

  “February eleventh.”

  “That’s the night I left for Utah.”

  “Yes, I know. We’ve spoken to your friend, Mike.”

  Sam peers at the detective. “It wouldn’t be the first time Luc—”

  “We understand he disappeared once before.”

  “The last time I think he forgot who he was—”

  “Because of a head injury.”

  “His parents were frantic.”

  “They’re frantic now,” Jenkins says.

  This is even more alarming. “So why are you coming to me? I haven’t seen him since December.”

  There’s a pause. “The hope originally was that he might have been with you in Utah. Or maybe you know where he is.”

  “Might have been with me,” Sam repeats. “But nobody even knew about us.”

  The detective smiles tightly. “They obviously do now.”

  Sam tries to imagine the parents, whose disapproval Luc always feared, out of their minds with worry and then having to swallow the fact that their son had fallen in love with a much older man. “So where was he last seen?”

  Jenkins explains that Luc Flanders had been playing pond hockey with his roommates, left with them and then, alone, went back to the ice later on. “And that was the last anybody saw or heard from him.”

  “Was there a search?”

  The detective nods. “Groups of students and locals. Nothing was found except his and his friend
s’ footprints. We even sent somebody down under the frozen pond.”

  The idea of a search below the icy skin of a body of water sounds urgent, like a desperate measure, and Sam shivers. “Then . . . surely he’s got to be . . . alive somewhere.”

  Jenkins waits a moment before saying, “I’d like to believe he’s alive.”

  Luc couldn’t be dead, just couldn’t. Sam looks at his immobile leg in the cast and feels even more trapped.

  The detective holds his hands up in calm surrender. “Do you want a break?”

  “No.”

  Jenkins takes out a small pad and jots something down. Then he leans back in his chair and glances toward the window and the blue, flawless curve of the western sky. “So when exactly was the last time you saw Luc Flanders?”

  “On December twenty-eighth.”

  “And you met up where?”

  “My place.”

  “In South Woodstock.”

  “Yes. He stopped by. Basically to break it off with me.”

  Jenkins jots this down. “Do you have any thoughts of where he might have gone on February eleventh?”

  “I don’t.”

  “Did you get any emails or messages from him before or after February eleventh?”

  Sam shakes his head. “Nothing. I texted him a few times after it ended and he never even answered.”

  “Emails exchanged?”

  “Nope. I managed to get him on the phone once in January. That was the only time we were in contact.”

  Jenkins stares at him steadily, almost appraisingly. “He didn’t leave his phone behind, but we got the phone records. We saw the call you made to him. And we saw the texts you sent to him. But since he disappeared on February eleventh, there has been no activity, no texts, no phone calls.”

  “Maybe he lost his phone. Or somebody stole it.”

  “Certainly possible,” Jenkins says. “So on February eleventh, what time did you leave home to drive down to Boston?”

  “Around seven in the evening.”

  “Do you have any way of proving where you were at six p.m.?”

  “Not really. But I was home,” Sam says.

  Jenkins reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out a folded piece of white paper and hands it to Sam, who recognizes a color photocopy of his own Carleton College ring, which he gave to Luc. “Can you identify this?”

  “Yeah, I can. It’s mine . . . well, it was mine.”

  “Was yours?”

  “I gave it to Luc. I let him have it. He couldn’t afford one of his own at the time, and he liked the idea of wearing it.” Against a blast of anxiety, Sam forces himself to ask, “Where did you find this?”

  “He lost it. On the ice. He mentioned the loss to . . . one of his friends. We believe that’s why he went back to the pond. To look for it.”

  * * *

  The ring: a Carleton College brass signet ring cast by Jostens. Luc recognized it one afternoon in a carved mahogany box on a dresser in Sam’s bedroom. Picked it up and saw “1990” on one side and “PANTHERS” on the other, and turned it over in his palm. “Nineteen-ninety. Year I was born.”

  “You gonna get one?” Sam asked.

  “Thinking about it, but I’m not what you call sentimental.” Luc offered the ring up to the ceiling light like a jewel. “How come you never wear it?”

  “My friends were buying them in droves. I just followed them. But I never liked the way it looked. I’m not the college ring sort.”

  “It’s kind of classic. Kind of retro.”

  “Well, you are kind of retro,” Sam observed.

  “Anyway, they’re at least five hundred dollars. I don’t have the dough. And my parents would never pay for it.”

  “Then just take mine.” Sam turned his palms up, grinning goofily.

  Luc watched his expression to see if he was in earnest. “Really?”

  “Why not? I wore it maybe twice. And took it off and never wore it again. It’s been sitting there collecting dust for twenty-five years. Take it, really, if you think you’d wear it. I know I’ll never wear it again.”

  “Unless they bury you in it,” Luc joked, even though he told Sam he often conjured up his death—like from a motorcycle accident—and believed it would be impossible to bear.

  “I mean, would you wear it?”

  “Of course!”

  “But what would your parents say? The ring says ‘1990’ on it.”

  “They would never notice something like that. And if they did, I’d just tell them somebody found it in equipment storage and sold it to me. I’d tell them I bought it because it was stamped with the year I was born.” He laughed.

  “I’d hate to see you lie,” Sam pointed out sadly.

  * * *

  “In fact,” Jenkins now says, “his mother did notice the date of the ring and he did lie to her about how he got it. He also lied about it to his girlfriend, but she figured out that it was yours.”

  Sam is overwhelmed. “I think I need some water. Can you ask . . . them?”

  The detective points at a bedside table holding a large translucent plastic cup of water. “Ah.” Sam grabs it and, taking a long drink, glances out the hospital window. The hospital is on the outskirts of the city and is monolithically tall in comparison to the buildings surrounding it. From the bedside, he can actually see the round leavened shape of the Mormon Tabernacle, clusters of people swarming around it like frantic ants.

  “I think I need to rest for a bit,” he says. “That okay?”

  “That’s fine. I have to call my colleague back in Vermont, anyway. How about I come back in . . . say, an hour?

  “Whenever you want. I’m your captive audience here,” Sam tells him.

  * * *

  Once the detective leaves, Sam, woozy and bewildered, switches on the television and starts flipping through the channels. Until he comes upon a men’s soccer game.

  It brings him back to a lazy afternoon several months after the tsunami struck Japan, he and Luc sprawled over each other watching the Women’s World Cup. Luc was rooting for the Japanese team, claiming that the devastated country’s morale needed it. Sam was pulling for the Americans. Watching the American team struggle against a disciplined Japanese defense, Luc said, “The Japanese deserve to win. Look at how beautifully they’re playing. They’re hot!” Sam found himself plummeting into jealous silence.

  Then Luc turned to him. “I guess I won’t be able to get married,” he said wistfully.

  “Oh?”

  “Can’t stomach the idea of cheating on my wife.” Luc moved closer to him, his lips now only a few inches away. “With a man. And I would, especially if I had somebody like you,” he said sweetly. A roar erupted from the television: Japan had scored a goal. “Yes!” Luc cheered, pumping a fist. He then turned back to Sam with a more confident smile.

  “You’re right, though.” Sam picked up the thread of their discussion. “It wouldn’t be fair.” And then he watched clouds of confusion and conflict drift over Luc’s face. Hoping that this wisdom and self-awareness might come to bear on what was between them. Against his better judgment and against all the advice of his savvy, caring friends, Sam was already dreaming of the impossible: of Luc eventually coming to his senses. And when he did, Sam would be there waiting for him.

  The night of the soccer game was the first time Luc stayed over. Sam roasted a chicken, and they sat in candlelight eating and polishing off a six-pack of local beer. Luc explained that he never wanted to join a fraternity, wasn’t on Facebook, and spent his sophomore year without a cell phone.

  “I like the fact that this is uncomplicated,” Luc said at last, candlelight flickering on his face, so that in certain moments he looked older, more mature.

  “Is it?” Sam wondered.

  “Relatively, don’t you think?” Luc look
ed momentarily bewildered.

  “Yes, but only because we get together on your schedule—on your time, not mine,” Sam pointed out.

  “So are you saying I’ve inconvenienced you?” Luc carefully lined up the empty bottles of beer, not meeting Sam’s eyes.

  “Look at me,” Sam said, and when Luc did, he declared, “No!”

  “Okay.” Luc sounded relieved and smiled his sweet, intoxicating smile.

  “But this is the sort of thing that can only flourish in . . . a hothouse environment,” Sam tried to point out. “We can’t be seen together in public. You’re not out and . . . the age difference is obvious. I’m nearly the same age as your parents, so they’d certainly never understand.”

  “I guess what I mean,” Luc went on, slightly frustrated, “is that we get together, we have fun, but we don’t ask anything of each other. And then we’re back in our own lives.”

  “It’s actually a lot trickier. Because even when you don’t want or expect things to get complicated, they always seem to. Because even when you remind yourself of all the pitfalls . . .” Sam hesitated, and then said, “In the end, the heart wants what it wants.”

  The weather had changed yet again in Luc’s face; a look of deep affection suffusing it now, he reached forward with a large, chafed hand and took Sam’s. “All I know is I really want you,” he said.

  That night Luc wanted to be taken more fiercely than ever, coaxing Sam to go harder and harder so that the pleasure felt more like punishment. But Luc’s face was slack in the sublime. And then his unqualified “I love you, Sam,” in the middle of it all.

  Carried away, Luc may not have realized what he said, and although Sam felt compelled to say it back, he didn’t for fear of drawing attention to such a precious exclamation and startling this exotic bird into flight. But he carried it with him, the simple affirmation that is chanted over and over again during the life of most love affairs, but which he would hear from Luc only a few times in practically a whisper. And it would have more meaning for him than from all the declarations of people who’d ever loved him, and to all the people he’d ever loved.

  And then they spooned, Luc’s arm draped over Sam’s chest, and Luc fell asleep almost immediately. Sam knew he’d have to extricate himself to get any rest, but held the backward embrace, superstitiously telling himself if he remained this way, they could eventually be a couple. He lay awake all night, until he could spy shadows on the walls of his bedroom, until the sky faded into light. Luc slept deeply, innocently, his mouth slightly open, his breath souring. It was real life now, maybe even real love, named hours before in a sort of fever, a shiny token tossed into a deep well that still glimmered from far below. But Luc was gone by 8 a.m., and listening to his car drive away with a crushing sound of gravel, Sam felt terribly alone.