Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  Carlo caught his glance and waved hello, which brought the boy to halt. Carlo opened the door to the office and said, “Hey, stranger.”

  Gabriel nodded, the cool cat, a silent nod back, Hey.

  “It’s been, like, an ice age since we’ve seen you,” Carlo said.

  “An ice age,” Gabriel said. “Brrr.”

  “What’s your friend’s name again, the guy who works across the street? Lonny, Donny, Ronny?”

  “Something like that,” Gabriel said.

  The boy smelled a wee bit herbal. His eyes were red.

  “I don’t know about him,” Carlo said. He hadn’t meant to say this aloud, but it came out anyway, the subtext: Why are you wasting your time on him?

  “Well, there’s not all that much to know,” Gabriel said.

  He had been a cheerful boy, a slow but eager learner, loose-limbed, inquisitive. His parents, when they were around, were decent folk, but they worked in feature production and kept odd hours. They had always appreciated the willingness of the two men to baby-sit Gabriel when he was younger and monitor his whereabouts when he swerved (screeched) into adolescence. The boy had shown an early affinity for drawing, so the two men would loan him books, steer him toward Saturday art classes down at Ivanhoe, and Gabriel sometimes helped the men rake or weed and so forth. He was like a borrowed son.

  “Why don’t you come in for a drink?” Carlo asked.

  “A drink—a drink of what?”

  “I don’t know what we’ve got,” Carlo said, and headed for the kitchenette.

  Since he’d stepped back inside, this drew Gabriel in as well, although first he set his skateboard by the door and wiped his feet on the mat.

  Carlo looked in the miniature refrigerator. There was some sparkling water, some organic root beer, organic cream soda.

  “Where’s Robbie?” Gabriel asked.

  “Away from his desk,” Carlo said. “Apparently.”

  He offered Gabriel a root beer, and Gabriel eyed the bottle warily, kid stuff, but accepted it. He scratched his scruff. He had shorn his wavy black hair, and his shaved head looked like it had been dipped in magnetic filings. He wore earrings now, little dangling translucent figures that may have been miniature manga heroes. Gabriel, too, had been tattooed, albeit more tastefully: three red stars ran point-to-point up the inside of his left forearm. His jeans were especially torn, his plaid boxers half revealed, his concert-T torn, as well, and it was odd he was only wearing a T-shirt because although it was a mellow October day for Los Angeles, it wasn’t that warm. He smelled like rust, like an old sponge. He’d gained weight, he’d filled out probably by working out, although he was all yoke, his legs still skinny, knee knobs poking through the ripped denim.

  “So how’s tricks?” Carlo asked.

  Gabriel swung the question around: “I don’t know—how’s tricks with you?”

  “Fine, fine,” Carlo said.

  But there must have been something thin about his response because Gabriel said, “Yeah, I heard.”

  “You heard? You heard what?”

  “About that guy who offed himself at your place,” Gabriel said.

  Carlo felt himself turning red. He sat down at his desk and signaled Gabriel should pull up a chair. What, was the whole neighborhood gossiping about the two men? Of course they were. Silver Lake was a village in many ways. Half of him was curious to know what was being said, and the smarter half didn’t want to inquire. But he thought he should at least explain to Gabriel what had happened and maybe that explanation would whisper its way back to whoever was chattering whatever. So Carlo wound through the night in the most cursory way.

  Tom as a curious interesting guy they met. On a lark, Tom for dinner. Tom too drunk to drive home, and in the morning, the tragedy.

  “What did he use, his belt?” Gabriel asked.

  Carlo hesitated, but then he said, “A rope. A rope he had in his car.”

  “So the guy was, like, a freak?” Gabriel asked.

  And Carlo shrugged, although he knew better. It was occurring to him, however, that it might be bad for business, a rumor loose in the hills, and so he nodded, yes, sure, a freak.

  “That’s fucked up,” Gabriel said.

  And again Carlo nodded, yes, fucked up. “Anyway,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Gabriel echoed.

  One time several years ago, the boy was playing with some kids out in the street and had been trying, helmetless, to perform an aerial trick with his skateboard when he landed on his head, scraping his ear against the pavement. As usual, his parents weren’t home but the two men were—they heard the howling—and one man drove while the other man held a towel against the boy’s face, the boy stretched out on the backseat. He was never in mortal danger but he’d been shocked, frightened by his own blood, how easily it ran. The two men stayed at the hospital even after Gabriel’s grateful parents showed up.

  Sometimes Gabriel would tag along on weekends when the two men checked on projects. He used to drop by their office and lie on his stomach on the sisal rug between the men’s desks and do his homework. Carlo, good at math, became his best pal. Often Gabriel’s parents gave him permission from the set to stay for dinner, and he was a sport and ate whatever Carlo happened to be preparing, no matter the pancetta or fava beans or radicchio involved. But all of this was years ago, and now the boy was growing up and in some ways reminded Carlo of himself at about the same age: alternately sullen and enthused, deliberately hard to reach, elementally alone. In a different way, motherless.

  “We never do anything anymore,” Carlo said. “We should do something, you, me, Robbie.”

  “Such as what?” Gabriel asked.

  “I don’t know. Are the Dodgers at home any weekend soon?”

  Gabriel shook his head side to side and kicked his boot toe against the concrete floor.

  “Right,” Carlo said. “The season is over.”

  “I’m embarrassed for you,” Gabriel said.

  “That wouldn’t be a first.”

  “No, sir, it would not.”

  They sat there quietly in the office. Carlo needed to turn on a lamp but didn’t want to, as if any movement on his part might make the kid get up and leave. He had heard a rumor in turn about Gabriel—this was about a year ago and came from Carlo’s friend the framer up the street, who knew Gabriel’s aunt—a rumor that like his parents, the boy had gotten into some sort of trouble, drugs in the schoolyard, something like that. It wasn’t difficult to see the boy’s life one day veering off-track into some no-good rail yard. He looked like he had something on his mind, a question he couldn’t quite formulate.

  “Tell me about the girl whose heart you’re breaking,” Carlo said.

  “Dude,” Gabriel said, setting his bottle down on the desk. “Which one?

  “You rake, you,” Carlo said.

  “Oh yeah, that’s me. A rake with his hoes.”

  Carlo should not have laughed, but he laughed. He tried to redirect the conversation: “How’s school?”

  “School is school,” Gabriel answered, and Carlo didn’t know why he’d bothered asking. But then Gabriel said, “I did read a book for English that was mildly cool,” and he described the classic Paris novel—the wounded veteran, the gal about town, the bullfighter.

  Carlo could almost remember what it was like to be a sophomore and reading the book for the first time.

  “I had a paper due on it last week,” Gabriel said. “I read the whole book, I totally dug it, I really did, but why do I have to write a paper about it? Why can’t the book just be?”

  “The good news is eventually in life you can read books and not write essays about them,” Carlo said.

  “No kidding.”

  “‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” Carlo said.

  The allusion made Gabriel smile, and then they lapsed into a silent spell again, the two of them swigging their root beers, one then the other as if to a metronome. Finally the sun had gone down and the office was dark
, and Carlo had to switch on his desk lamp. As if exposed, Gabriel stood up and carried his empty bottle to the kitchenette.

  Carlo saw the boy to the door. “Seriously,” he said, “let’s hang out.”

  Gabriel rubbed his chin again.

  Carlo needed to think fast. “Maybe you can help me with a project at the house,” he said, although he was improvising and didn’t have a project in mind.

  “Why, what’s wrong with Robbie?”

  “Nothing is wrong with Robbie,” Carlo said. “I only thought …”

  Why was the kid making this so difficult? Carlo sensed something troubling the kid, and he merely wanted to avail himself should the boy need a someone older and wiser and foolish and full of himself to talk to.

  “I’ve been thinking of building a fountain at the bottom of our property, a little hideaway, maybe a koi pond, or maybe no fish—I don’t know,” Carlo said, and there was some truth to this. “But it’s not something Robbie would be all that into helping out on,” he added, again true.

  Gabriel’s expression: Oh, that sounds real fun.

  “I’ll pay you,” Carlo said.

  “I’m not sure you can afford me. But you know where to find me,” Gabriel said as he stepped out onto the sidewalk and dropped his board. And then with one push, another push, he was skating west toward Sunset.

  Carlo returned to his desk, suddenly beat. He rested his arm on his desk, his head on his arm. He remembered a time when he and Robbie were architecture students and on a trip to Italy, specifically driving through the Veneto one day on a tour of Palladian villas with the most famous house still on the itinerary and with the goal to reach Venice by dusk. Carlo had been navigating, and after making a wrong turn, the two men were lost, although they knew they couldn’t be too far off track because they were in the right town. It was a mid-autumn Saturday, late in the afternoon—they were zooming along residential roads, houses far apart, unable to see anyone to ask directions. Then they passed a boy riding a bike. He was eight or nine and wearing a red sweater, black football shorts, and red socks. Carlo’s Italian was strictly about the accent, his vocabulary as paltry as his ability to express emotion in his mother’s language. But he said to the boy, “Mi scusi. Dove la Rotunda?”

  The boy pointed to his right and offered directions, and Carlo could have pieced together what the boy was telling him, but there was something so lilting and joyful about the Italian, the song of the boy’s speech, that Carlo didn’t pay attention and was more confused than ever. He looked at Robbie and Robbie shrugged, and Carlo in turn shook his head and shrugged at the boy.

  The boy rolled his eyes, silly Americano. He waved at the men, come along then, follow me, made a U-turn on his bike and soon veered off onto another road, the men trailing him in their rental car, the boy pedaling as fast as he could. And there were no other cars or trucks or other people who passed by, it was only the two men behind the boy on his bike, pursuing a long hill, a shallow grade, until suddenly in the distance, the famous villa appeared isolated at the crest. The great white house, the domed roof, the tidy columns and pediments, a paragon of symmetry and order against a backdrop of doom, the gathering nimbus clouds, the anxious trees.

  “Mille grazie,” Carlo said to the boy, “mille grazie,” and the boy grinned again his confident grin and swerved around back the way they’d come and was gone.

  The rest of the week they talked about the boy and speculated about what kind of life he led. Football, pasta, ancient history. Robbie kept ribbing Carlo about how he could have had a mother from Bologna yet speak only phrasebook Italian. “That boy, that look he gave you,” Robbie would say and giggle. And then after they were back in Los Angeles, they would tease each other: “Dove put my sunglasses?” “Mi scusi. Could you scratch mi shoulder, mille grazie?”

  The boy in the red sweater who led them on his bike to the point in the road when the great house became visible, he had to be a man. Carlo wondered what had become of him. What kind of life was his life now? Did he have any notion at all how long he had survived in the banter of two American men an ocean and a continent away?

  Across the years there had been so many strangers who each in his or her way had become a hero for a day, and lasted a while, and who eventually slipped from conversation, who was forgotten. It was inevitable, and yet each perishing memory weighed against Carlo as it sank. Someone went missing—this was always the sense he had—yet he couldn’t say who. He experienced at once a burden to track so many memories and a sense of defeat, a loss, all the people they’d met year by year slipping away. And Carlo also had to wonder if he himself had played the part of the stranger in the lives of other people. If so, how many times a day was he forgotten? Or recalled?

  The first time he met Tom, at the police station, as Carlo was leaving, he’d said, “Thank you for talking to me,” and Tom had replied, “No, thank you for talking to me.” The second time Carlo saw Tom, Tom didn’t seemed at all surprised, as if he’d been expecting Carlo one day to turn up …

  It wouldn’t necessarily right anything, and it would hardly constitute any major recompense for the way he’d betrayed Tom, or Robbie—Carlo wasn’t deluding himself—but when he sat up and noticed it was evening, he resolved to seek out Gabriel and engage him and make a point of spending time with the boy, if for no other reason than to watch out for him.

  • • •

  ALTHOUGH HE WAS NOT AT THE OFFICE when Gabriel was there, Robbie had gone in earlier and in general was making an effort to show up every day, refusing to give in to his malaise. However, there was no avoiding that he didn’t want to be at his desk, and he jumped at any opportunity to run an errand, the longer and more involved, the better.

  He drove, for example, over to the hardware store on Tracy to pick up replacement parts to fix the running office toilet but couldn’t find what he needed and ended up at a box store in Hollywood, but from the roof level of the parking lot, he gazed out at the ileal ripple of hills in the distance and then before long found himself taking the very long way home, following the arid crevasses, past carports, past stilted cottages, reminded of a time when he and Carlo first came to Los Angeles and would take Sunday drives, peeling off narrow known roads onto narrower unknown ones, pursuing them less to master the city than to lose themselves in this exotic new habitat of mudslides and fire and earthquakes, acclimating fast to the local arrogance: Angelinos built wherever they damn well pleased, no matter the threat of natural calamity, no matter the paucity of water, no matter the unwelcoming carve of the land. Now, even though he knew well enough how the roads ran, he still got turned around and drove in loops, what with no navigator with an open map on his lap in the passenger seat. Remembering the Sunday drives, he was warmed by nostalgia, and yet he didn’t quite feel like the same man who made those tours so many years ago for the simple reason that now he was alone.

  He went to the grocery store and procured the ingredients Carlo had scribbled out, and at the grocery store, in the checkout line one afternoon, Robbie observed an old woman he’d never seen before (or had he?). She was wearing a formal wool coat and matching navy-blue pillbox hat and walking with cane. Clutching her arm was a middle-aged woman who looked exactly like the older woman—the younger woman could only be her daughter. The daughter’s hair was graying and she was wearing a black coat and hat of the same style as her mother—also they had the same sprayed coif and the same unevenly penciled eyebrows, but the daughter walked with a limp and her eyes appeared to focus on nothing, and Robbie guessed she was mentally retarded. The daughter had the mother, the mother the daughter, they weren’t alone (quite literally, they looked as though they were propping each other up), yet each in her way certainly looked lonesome. And Robbie wondered what would happen when the frail mother died or could no longer care for her daughter, not provisionally because provisions were likely in place, but emotionally. If the daughter already looked easily frightened, then what would her years be like without the only person on who
m she could settle her glance with any modicum of peace?

  He knew better than to decide what was and was not going on in other people’s lives, but likewise the stooping man shuffling around pots of desiccated plants in the nursery across Hyperion, this man with his trousers belted high, who was going to provide for him when he could no longer eke out a wilting profit? Robbie didn’t want to go straight home and headed out on a short drive through Griffith Park but ended up in the Valley at rush hour. It took the better part of an hour to make it back to the house, by which point some of the things he’d purchased, cheese, butter, frozen yogurt, were getting soft or melting.

  In the morning he would tell Carlo what errands he would take care of, sometimes in lieu of heading in to the office at all, and Robbie did fulfill each mission, but after selecting new sheets and towels at a white sale in West Hollywood, he continued driving west toward the ocean, thinking he’d scoot up the Coast Road a-ways, except the traffic became overbearing once again and he ended up buying a cultural history of cats in a Brentwood bookstore and sat in a coffee shop reading the book, or pretending to read it while instead surveilling all the other readers and computer-tappers who sat solo at tables-for-two. He couldn’t help himself: he kept ascribing to them the same smallness-in-the-world he was experiencing. Everywhere he looked now, no matter where he was, he saw lonely people, as if for years he’d been wearing sunglasses that filtered out anyone in unwanted solitude, anyone filling his or her day with tasks that should have taken a quarter the time to complete, all the loiterers and lingerers and blank-starers of the city, whose legion apparently he had joined. For didn’t the woman leaning back in her chair, both hands gripping an unsipped cup of cappuccino, not really reading the Weekly open on the table, didn’t she notice Robbie and think, He’s just like me? We could disappear and it would take a month for anyone to notice. We can go an entire day and the only thing we say is, Medium non-fat latte, please—oh sure, whipped cream. We confide too much in our dogs. We sleep in the middle of the bed.