Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  “I hate to admit it,” Carlo said, “but I agree.”

  Robbie was compact again, knees pulled into his chest.

  Carlo said, “We can eat brown rice and swim an hour a day, but we’ve either got the mutation for lung cancer or we don’t. We can choose to walk instead of drive to work and be crossing the street and get slammed by someone running a red because he’s late for a hot date. So why live any safe way in particular? Why worry about anything?”

  “Because the city finally put in that traffic light,” Robbie countered, “and because the odds are very good anyway that you won’t get hit by a car when you cross the street.” Tom sipped his wine, and was he grinning? “Robbie and I have this argument every so often,” Carlo said. “Fires happen, earthquakes happen. Plagues out of nowhere suddenly in the population happen, devastating plagues—”

  “We’re not having this conversation now, thanks,” Robbie said.

  “Apparently you are,” Tom said.

  “Robbie will tell you that progress is possible. We change the world by believing in that progress. Never mind whether we do anything about it—”

  “Cut it out,” Robbie said.

  “There is a genocide in Europe. We say never forget,” Carlo said.

  “Then we forget,” Tom said.

  “Oops, genocide in Africa,” Carlo said. “Ethnic cleansing in Europe again.”

  Robbie said, “You know, if your father heard you—” “If my father heard me what?” Carlo snapped.

  “And you guys have never even had a threeway,” Tom said.

  The two men stared at their guest.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” Carlo asked.

  “Never hired a hooker at a resort, never gone out together to a sex club? I’ve had so much sex,” Tom said, “and it’s a miracle, but I’m clean. Not everything comes down to fate, that was my next thought. There’s proof someone is watching out for us. Someone is certainly watching over me.”

  “No one is watching over you,” Carlo said. “You’ve been careful is all.”

  “Oh believe me,” Tom said, his stare hard on Carlo, “I haven’t.”

  Carlo realized he was clasping his hands tightly.

  “Then you’ve been lucky,” he said. “We’ve all been lucky about something at some point.”

  Tom stood up and wobbled and fell back into the couch.

  “I think someone is watching,” he insisted.

  “I don’t think so,” Carlo said.

  “Carlo,” Robbie intervened, “you can’t deny someone his faith. That’s cruel.”

  Tom bit his lower lip. “Maybe you’re afraid of being alone,” he said to the two men. “Twenty years.”

  “You know, you’re kind of drunk,” Carlo said.

  “So are you,” Tom said.

  “A little,” Carlo admitted.

  Nothing was said for a few minutes. Then Tom, staring at the ceiling with his head resting on the back of the couch, unbuckled his belt and unbuttoned his fly—

  “Whoa,” Carlo said and leaped up from the floor.

  “Sex would make it a perfect night,” Tom said, and started to shove down his jeans and boxers but couldn’t lift up his butt sufficiently to make this happen.

  Carlo managed to grab Tom’s wrists and hold them in place. For a moment, Tom didn’t budge. Carlo stared at him. Tom stared back, his smile ebbed. Carlo released his grip. Slowly Tom rebuttoned his jeans but didn’t buckle his belt. He tried and failed to push himself up.

  “I need to go home,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” Carlo said.

  “I’m embarrassed,” Tom said.

  “You don’t need to be,” Carlo said.

  “You’ve been so kind to me and I’m embarrassed,” Tom said.

  “It’s all fine,” Robbie said. “But we can’t let you drive. You’ll sleep here.”

  “I can drive fine,” Tom said. “I …”

  “Tom?” Carlo asked.

  “You said you believe, right?” Tom asked Robbie.

  And Robbie answered, “I think something connects us, yes, something has to.”

  Tom stared at him like he wanted more.

  “There are things science will never explain,” Robbie added, “that I don’t necessarily want explained.”

  “It’s a miracle,” Tom said, and he looked at Carlo: “Someone watches.”

  “Sure, someone watches,” Carlo said.

  The two men on either side of their guest sat him up, then got him up on his feet. He was heavier than Carlo would have guessed.

  “I can drive,” Tom protested.

  “I’m sure you can,” Robbie said, “but you’re not going to.”

  The three of them shuffled toward the guest room but stopped when Tom tried to step away and speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’ve been so kind and I made you fight.”

  “No worries,” Carlo said. “Robbie and I don’t really fight.”

  “We have disagreements,” Robbie said. “Not to worry.”

  They made it to the guest room, where Tom fell back on the bed. He pulled off his sneakers from the heels.

  “‘Your kid or your eyes,’” he said weakly. “It’s just so awful, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” Robbie said.

  “What kind of world,” Tom said.

  “I know,” Carlo said. “It’s sad.”

  “Maybe you’re right, maybe,” Tom said to Robbie.

  “About?” Robbie asked.

  “Any two people. They talk long enough. If I could believe that.”

  He slipped off his sweater and shirt. His pants fell off, and he was only in his boxers and socks as the two men pulled back the blanket.

  “I’m not sure why you’ve been so kind to me,” Tom said, rolling onto his side.

  And then his head was on the pillow and he was out. The two men stared at Tom while his breathing took on added weight. The room seemed quieter than it normally did. Their guest was asleep. They left the dishes for the morning. They retreated to their own bedroom and shut the door.

  “Signor, signor,” Robbie said.

  Carlo stifled a laugh.

  “He’s a bit of a pistol, isn’t he?”

  “Speaking of gun control,” Carlo said.

  They stood next to their bureau, facing each other, taking off watches, emptying pockets of keys and coins. They unbuttoned each other’s shirts. They unzipped each other’s pants. They had a guest and took care not to make noise, which brought economy to their movement, which brought on a rush of furtive heat. And then they held each other first above and then beneath the blankets and they, too, began to fall asleep in the quiet house.

  Carlo never had dreams, which was to say he never recalled his dreams, and neither did Robbie, although that might be because he dreamed all day long and so his sleep went storyless, Robbie who was an untroubled sleeper, the first always to drift off. Tonight was no different than any other in their two decades together. One long sigh, and Robbie was out, and he made sleep look so deeply gratifying. He was like a cat this way, Carlo thought, and a cat’s sleep was a thing worth guarding.

  • • •

  IT WAS LATER THAT SUNDAY MORNING then when Robbie awoke with the uneasy sense something was wrong, that some volume of air was displaced, something fixed had been moved. He was cold and shivering, even in bed, whereas Carlo, a pillow pulled over his head, exuded warmth like a bread oven. Robbie inched closer to feed on this heat and noted the vial of sleeping pills on the night table. Their policy was that if Carlo took a pill during the night, he was not supposed to return the bottle to the drawer but leave it out so that in the case of a medical emergency, Robbie (who mistrusted all narcotics) would be able to inform the paramedics what was in Carlo’s system. So apparently Carlo had been unable to sleep—he would be out a while now.

  The alarm clock was also on Carlo’s side of the bed, and while it was only seven, there was a guest in the house. Knowing Tom, he would
expect a proper breakfast and want bacon and eggs and toast and black coffee. There was no need to interrupt Carlo’s slumber, not that Robbie could at this point, so he eased his way out of bed and found his boxer-briefs on the floor. He stepped into loose jeans. The T-shirt he reached first and put on was Carlo’s. He remained barefoot and tried to keep his step as light as possible until he was outside the bedroom.

  The guest room door was ajar, and so Robbie assumed Tom was up, but he wasn’t sure and avoided the hallway floorboards of known creak. He stopped short of the guest room and leaned forward, peering through the open door. Tom wasn’t in bed, he wasn’t in the room. The bed looked only moderately slept in, and Tom’s clothes were gone. Had he woken up still intoxicated and driven home after all? They should have taken away his keys. Next to the bed on an octagonal table, there were three books Tom must have pulled from the shelves. The one on top was the classical architecture tome he’d picked out.

  The guest was not in the guest room, nor was he in the main room, although at first Robbie thought he saw him lying on a couch because the couch cushions were still in a state of disarray. The hearth threw off heat even as the embers were ashes and the ashes were white. The corky aroma of the dinner Tom cooked hung in the air.

  Out front, his car remained parked in their driveway, blocking their wagon. He had not driven drunk, good—maybe he’d called a taxi.

  Robbie rounded the corner into the kitchen and noticed immediately that the dishes had been washed and dried and stacked on the counters. The pots and pans had been scrubbed and also left out to be put away by someone who knew in what cabinets everything belonged. Tom had cleaned up, which was generous of him, and it could be he wanted to apologize for his brasher behavior. Truth be told, by the end of the night Robbie wasn’t sure he was eager for Tom’s continued friendship, but this minor act of etiquette returned Robbie toward a fonder feeling. He turned around and looked beyond the dining table toward the sliding doors that led out to the patio and saw one was wide open. No wonder the house was as cold as it was—

  Robbie caught a chair with his hip as he vaulted across the room. He was out on the patio in seconds, his heel turning against the damp slate.

  Tom was hanging from a noose tied to the lowest branch of their neighbor’s tree.

  His body made a quarter turn toward the lake. A thin rope wound tightly under his chin pulled his neck inhumanly long, his chin resting against his collarbone, his legs long, his arms loose, his eyes wide, mouth agape, jaw aslant. Spit drooling from one corner of his mouth had turned to ice. A patio chair lay on its side beneath him, his baseball cap on the ground. High up the limb of the Liquidambar to which the rope had been knotted, the branch had snapped halfway but not broken free. Tom’s body turned back toward the house.

  His feet were bare and hanging a yard off the ground, plumb like the rest of him.

  Robbie became deaf to his own voice but knew he was screaming because Carlo appeared, nearly naked, bounding toward the patio, slipping—but before Carlo could reach the patio, Robbie had already righted the chair and was standing on it and grabbing hold of Tom’s waist, tugging him down—and why, when it was obvious his neck was broken?

  He pulled at Tom by his legs and Tom’s loose jeans indecorously slid halfway down his ass, and the motion caused the branch to break all the way, to snap free from the tree, and Robbie fell over, lost his grip on Tom—Tom came down and landed on the slate. His body was not warm.

  Carlo helped Robbie to his feet, and Robbie could not remember a time he’d seen Carlo so white.

  First their guest Tom Field had done the dishes, and then he hanged himself. And in the distance was the lake, always the lake, annealed, unrevealing, the water an unforgiving blue in the ante meridiem light.

  2

  THEIR HOUSE BECAME A CRIME SCENE. The two men received a gentle reprimand from the police for disturbing it by pulling Tom down, although it was considered understandable they thought they might revive him. They were asked to wait in the main room. Carlo, dressed now, sat with both his arms and legs crossed. He’d barely spoken since they found Tom, or rather, since Robbie found Tom. An ambulance was parked out front, strobe off. A gurney had been rolled through the house and out to the patio, a body bag unzipped, yet Tom’s corpse had not yet been removed. It was possible the sleeping pill Carlo had taken allowed him to be calmer, Robbie thought, because through it all, Carlo remained seated while Robbie could not stay still. He needed at least to neaten the couch cushions or return a stray wine glass to the kitchen, where an officer asked politely if Robbie would confine himself to the other room a short while longer and then they would ask more questions, although what more could they ask?

  Two officers had already run through the previous evening in detail. “Coq au vin has wine in it, doesn’t it?” they asked. They inquired about drugs last night and drug use in general and appeared dismayed no drugs were involved. “So then only a fair amount of drinking,” they said.

  Questions: Did Tom say he owed money? Was Tom in some kind of trouble or hiding from anyone? And precisely how much did Tom have to drink?

  Too much, Robbie thought to himself, although when they got him to bed he could barely stand, let alone hang himself, and so maybe he wasn’t as intoxicated as he seemed.

  “He was alone and lonely,” Robbie told the police.

  “What kind of lonely?” the lead officer asked.

  “What kind of lonely?” Robbie asked back. “Lonesome lonely,” he said.

  “When you played tennis,” the lead officer asked Robbie, “who won?”

  “This matters?” Carlo asked.

  “We didn’t keep score,” Robbie said.

  “Didn’t keep score. So you weren’t gambling,” the officer said.

  The two men were asked if the rope Tom used belonged to them, and they said it did not.

  “And before he showed up at your office yesterday morning,” the lead officer asked, “you had never met Mr. Field, is that correct?”

  “Yes,” Robbie said.

  The officer looked at Carlo. Robbie looked at Carlo.

  Carlo said, “That’s right.”

  Did the two men hear anyone else enter or leave the premises? No. Was it possible someone came inside and they simply didn’t hear him? Probably not, but the men had to admit they were sound asleep and Carlo had taken a pill—when did he take the pill?

  “Not long after we went to bed,” Carlo said, and his frown deepened. He was sitting now with his legs still crossed at the ankle, his hands plunged into his pockets.

  The lead officer was needed outside. Robbie listened to her talk with a forensics man wearing surgical gloves, and Robbie wasn’t sure whether he and Carlo should have overheard what they did, but then, it wasn’t like they were true suspects in any crime.

  Details emerged, like about how because Tom was barefoot, he ended up with splinters in his feet, probably from standing on the wooden fence to tie the rope to the neighbor’s tree. It was unclear whether he used the chair to step up on the fence and then jumped from the fence or if he stood on the chair and kicked it away. He may have had plenty to drink, but not so much he lost his balance or rope-tying skill.

  Details: The rough estimate was that he had been dead for two to three hours before Robbie found him. Tom’s car keys were found in his trunk—he must have retrieved the rope from the car.

  Questions: When did the branch snap, when Tom jumped off the fence or kicked away the patio chair? Or later after he’d been swinging a while?

  An officer carried away the rope in an evidence bag. The lead officer, a detective named Michaels, talked to the two men again while the body in the body bag was wheeled out. She was saying something about removing Tom’s car later in the day.

  Details: Tom stuffed his socks into his high-tops and left his sneakers by the patio door. Tom folded a dishtowel and left it on the dining table.

  What kind of lonely.

  The two men were told that the police wo
uld be leaving soon but wished to ask them a few more questions, if they didn’t mind, and they wanted to put the questions to each man separately. Robbie didn’t like this. Would a husband and wife be split up for an interrogation as if they were suspects? But Carlo didn’t behave like it was a big deal and stepped into the kitchen with one officer while Robbie followed Detective Michaels into the guest room.

  The detective wore a uniform that made her look round in the shoulders and square in frame, probably due to the bulletproof vest beneath her shirt. The arc of her brow mirrored the arc of her mouth. The guest room window looked out toward the street, and Robbie could see neighbors had gathered, like their next-door neighbors on whose property the aggravated Liquidambar sat as well as some from across the street. The ambulance drove away, lights on for some reason, siren off.

  The detective presented Robbie the exact same questionnaire the two men together had already answered. How long was Tom Field known to them. Tennis played weekly. The rope, not from this household, not given to Tom by anyone present.

  And then Detective Michaels asked: “So there wasn’t any kind of sexual activity last night with Mr. Field?”

  “No,” Robbie said, and he knew she was doing her best, yet Robbie was irked. He said, “Because that’s what we guys do when we hang out together.”

  Detective Michaels tapped her pen against her pad.

  “I’m sorry,” Robbie said, and responded more cordially, “Nothing happened, no. I don’t know whether Tom would have wanted it to, but nothing did.”

  Robbie stared at the table by the guest bed with the three books Tom had taken down from the shelves. One was the text on classical architecture, but the two others were monographs on modern artists, not old masters but twentieth-century painters, two painters whom Robbie revered. There had been a stretch of conversation at some point out on the patio when Tom rued what he perceived as the havoc Modernism had wrought, the downfall of figurative painting, and Robbie in defense had waxed on about the aesthetic discoveries one artist made when he painted a landscape and then scraped the surface of the canvas with a squeegee, ruining the landscape but producing an abstraction with mesmerizing striations. Robbie spoke about how his other favorite painter’s best work was in fact inspired by the hill streets of Ocean Park as if seen in a squint: abstract, yes, but born from a figurative imagination. And Tom had pooh-poohed Robbie, but then look, he’d been listening. In the middle of the night, Tom Field got up and located the art books for himself, and at least he had enough curiosity to try to figure out what it was that Robbie saw where he, Tom, saw nothing. Tom had wanted to understand.