by Peter Gadol
“What is it?” Detective Michaels asked. “Mr. Stein—Carlo?”
“Nothing,” Carlo said.
“You’re not holding on, say, to one last little secret, are you? You’d taken a sleeping pill that night, right? You were out cold. Ah, for all you know, Mr. Voight might have gotten up? Maybe Mr. Voight can tell us—”
“No,” Carlo snapped. “No,” he said. The detective straightened her back.
“With all due respect, I think you’re fishing,” Carlo said. “Robbie is the heaviest sleeper in California. He would have slept through the Northridge quake, if I hadn’t pushed him out of bed. No way. No.”
“You sound certain.”
He looked the detective squarely in the eye. “I am,” he said. And: “I apologize if I accused you of fishing.”
“That’s okay,” Detective Michaels said, and then as she stood, she winked. “Maybe I am.”
• • •
WHEN CARLO CAME HOME THAT EVENING, he found Robbie stretched out on the floor by the window, practically beneath the piano, Robbie looking spent and apparently truly sick. He needed little encouragement to make his way into the bedroom, leaving Carlo alone on the couch, sipping an amaretto sour, staring at the ceiling. After his long day, he was frankly better off alone on the couch than he would have been dealing with Robbie. Carlo didn’t feel as though he had his firmest footing, like a muddy hillside was giving way beneath his boot-heels. He didn’t trust himself in this too-emotional state. He didn’t know what he might say to Robbie, what he might reveal. On the off-chance Robbie might still be awake in bed and want to talk about anything deep, Carlo finished his drink and made himself another and returned to the couch.
After he’d left the gun store that day in May, Carlo had found himself on the freeway heading north into the Valley. He exited and drove along some very flat streets until he found a building identical to the apartment houses on either side, all of them stucco, all baked in the San Fernando sun down to the same overcooked salmon color. Some sort of black metal decoration affixed to the façade looked like a demented person’s idea of a sundial.
Tom’s place was on the first floor and on the side, with bars on the one window. And when he answered the door, he was wearing only jeans cut-offs, no shirt, no belt, the shorts low on his waist.
“There you are,” Tom said.
“I’m sorry I didn’t get this back to you sooner,” Carlo said. The green windbreaker was wrinkled and creased because Carlo had been stashing it in a tool box in the garage. He could have and should have mailed it, but after holding on to it a month, dropping off the jacket seemed the more courteous thing to do.
“Come in, do come in,” Tom said, stepping back into his dim dank studio.
“I don’t want to keep you, if you’re in the middle of something,” Carlo said.
“Oh right, the middle of something,” Tom said. “So many middles, so little time.”
He had been playing an opera on a boom box, which he turned off.
“Why do I bother? I really don’t like opera,” Tom said. “Do you?”
Carlo shrugged, yes, no, some not others. He handed Tom the windbreaker, and Tom promptly tossed it atop one of several piles of laundry on the floor. There were dishes stacked in the sink, and the kitchenette cupboards flung open, the shelves mostly empty. There was a jar of murky liquid on the counter and next to the jar, a stack of pocket-sized foreign language dictionaries arranged alphabetically: Arabic, French, German, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, a rhyming dictionary, Russian and Spanish.
“I just wanted to return that,” Carlo managed to say, and for some reason now, he could not look Tom in the eye.
Tom scratched his naked stomach.
“Okay, thanks,” he said.
“I should be going,” Carlo said.
He was staring at the dirty laundry, at boxers and hand towels and T-shirts. A bright-striped cloth belt looked like a tropical snake coiled around a leg of discarded jeans. The bed was a futon on the floor. By the bed, there was an ageing laptop, the Bible, a box of crackers, a jar of peanut butter, lube, and several small towers of beat-up paperbacks. There was a card table pushed into the corner and on the card table a large sketch pad open to a page with a drawing-in-progress of a younger man, maybe a teenager. Under the card table, a pair of dusty duck boots that looked out of place in Southern California. That was it. This was Tom Field’s world, and it was a little sad.
“I should go,” Carlo said again but he didn’t move.
“How have you been?” Tom asked. “I’ve wondered.”
Carlo wanted to tell Tom about going to the gun store and how pathetic he felt about it, him with a gun, but he couldn’t speak. Everything was coming back to him.
“Oh, what’s wrong, baby?” Tom asked the way he had in the police station, but unlike their encounter in the police station, this time Tom took a step closer to Carlo, and then Carlo was weeping. In the month since the carjacking, Carlo hadn’t cried like this, not once—finally he let go.
“It’s okay, baby,” Tom said, pulling Carlo into a hug.
It was not okay. It was not one bit okay, but Carlo knew on some level that he hadn’t mailed back Tom’s windbreaker and instead delivered it in person because he wanted to see Tom again. He wanted to see Tom because Tom would understand what Carlo was going through in a way Robbie never could (in a way Carlo would never want his sweet Robbie to), and not because Tom had been at the police station that April night, but because Tom Field comprehended violence, and not only violence in the street but also violence in one’s mind, violence in one’s heart. Tom was dark, Tom got it.
So Carlo wept, and Tom held him tightly. Carlo’s tears dripped onto Tom’s bare shoulder. Eventually Carlo cleared his throat and gained his composure, and the two of them sat down on the only place to sit in Tom’s apartment, the futon on the floor. This was not okay, but also, curiously, it wasn’t so strange, and once again, Carlo found he wasn’t embarrassed in front of Tom.
“Feeling better, baby?” Tom asked, and Carlo nodded, he was.
Tom fell back on his elbows. A blue comforter was half peeled back, and Tom’s sheets were patterned with sailboats.
Then Carlo lay on his back, too, so that the two of them, side by side, were staring at the ceiling. There was a long crack in the plaster, water damage, the crack branching like a river delta. Now that he wasn’t crying, some embarrassment returned, or not embarrassment so much as a rush of some other heat. Carlo rolled onto his side and looked at Tom and noticed specifically Tom wasn’t wearing underwear. Tom stroked his stomach, which was flat and hairless, and Carlo wanted to touch it, to trace the arc of Tom’s pelvis curving parenthetically beneath the loose denim. Did Tom know Carlo was getting hard? He must have. He took Carlo’s hand and placed firmly it on his, on Tom’s, belly.
At first Carlo was frozen—he didn’t move his hand at all. Then he rotated his fingertips in a tentative circle. Then up, down, and not so tentatively as Tom arched his back slightly, responding.
Tom slipped off his cut-offs, and when Carlo sat up, Tom pulled Carlo’s shirt over Carlo’s head. Then Carlo’s pants were down around his ankles, bunched up around his sneakers. Awkwardly Carlo had to stand and tug off his pants with his sneakers, and when he knelt again on the futon, Tom pulled Carlo on top of him. They didn’t make out, or they maybe kissed once. It was all very fast, and in short order, Tom had rolled over onto his stomach. Carlo wasn’t sure what to do. He reached for the lube. He looked for but didn’t find any condoms. How long it had been since he’d used a condom.
“I’m okay,” Tom said. A pause. “And you’re okay, I assume?”
Carlo said he was, and he knew he was fine but he also knew better. He was a little clumsy, abrupt, but Tom didn’t appear to mind, nor did he appear especially to be enjoying himself. Carlo worked to bring things to a quick end, but Tom said he didn’t want Carlo to stop. He wanted Carlo to go on a while and so Carlo went on a while. Tom seemed to want Car
lo to be rougher than Carlo was accustomed to. When he came, he didn’t come inside Tom. Tom rolled over onto his back, sweaty, and Carlo rolled onto his back again, too, strangely winded, and then thought to tend to Tom’s needs, but Tom said it was okay, he was fine, he didn’t need to get off.
“You’re sure?” Carlo asked.
Tom hummed, yes, he was quite sure, thanks. He was propped up on his elbows again, chattering. Sunlight now poured in through the one window, and the mullions and the iron bars cast a plaid shadow on the brown carpet.
“It’s almost summer,” Tom said, “and I used to like summer but now I hate summer. I especially am not looking forward to summer in this city. Such a long summer, like a prison, the summer here. Is that the way it is?”
“Is that the way what is?” Carlo asked. He felt as though he were waking from a long hibernation. “I should go,” he said.
“No, stay a little while,” Tom said.
And Carlo felt obliged then to stay, considering Tom’s hospitality, as it were. He lingered, and Tom rambled about something, quite excited about something or other involving the audio-book he’d been listening to a little bit every night, but Carlo wasn’t paying attention. His head was clearing, a lucidity returning, a sense of logic—of right versus wrong, too.
Carlo glanced at his watch. Knocking on Tom’s door, weeping, fucking—remarkably he had only been at Tom’s place for forty-five minutes, although it felt like hours.
“I want to play you some of this book,” Tom said. “A few pages—you’ll like it.”
Carlo sighed.
“I guess you have to go,” Tom said, resigned.
“I’ll be expected back,” Carlo said.
“I suppose you will,” Tom said.
Carlo got dressed.
“Hopefully that did the trick,” Tom said, and Carlo didn’t know what he meant at first, but then of course, as he drove away, as he looked for the freeway, he knew perfectly well what Tom meant.
Carlo had not only cheated on his boyfriend but also used someone, used poor Tom, and yet Carlo didn’t experience any remorse, the contrary. As opposed to back in the gun store parking lot when he’d felt helpless and foolish, now Carlo raced east on the freeway with a sense of empowerment—why? Because he’d figured out what he needed and sought it out? Because he’d done something for himself, yes, ridiculous but true, and he was laughing because life was absurd. He ended up exiting the freeway early and driving surface the rest of the way home because he was a bit discombobulated. Over the hills and back into the city basin, laughing out loud—why? Because he felt released from his anxiety, and like he was breathing the air of a higher altitude, and alive again. Life was so very strange, wasn’t it? It was when one understood that strangeness, the randomness, the swerves, it was being able to see all that from above that made one feel more perceptive, and thus invigorated, thus vital.
He made it back to the house in one piece, and Robbie wasn’t home yet, and Carlo took a long hot shower. All these revelations—he was exhausted, and after his shower he ended up on the couch, which was where Robbie found him. And Robbie kissed him hi and stretched out next to him, and the two men lay there very close and plotted their evening, not that it would be so different from most every other evening, but they had their rituals, the most mundane lovely rituals like discussing what to eat for dinner, whether to go see a movie, or stay in and read, or take a walk, or maybe even drop by a bar. Life was going to be normal again, life prosperous, life good.
Carlo thought he would never see Tom again, and Tom had no way of knowing where Carlo lived. Yes, that did the trick. He was alive and on the other side of something now, he’d thought—wrongly as it would turn out, but that was what he’d believed that night, that a turnaround was inevitable, for him, for the two men: How could it be otherwise?
• • •
IN THE MORNING, Robbie again told Carlo he was sick so he could continue making phone calls. Not everyone he contacted, however, was willing to speculate about Tom’s suicide, although these tended to be the same canceled acquaintances who didn’t sound all that wistful about Tom in the first place. Only one person, a screenwriter who dated Tom last summer and endured a rather bad bar crawl with him on the Fourth of July, during which Tom downed a dozen lagers and made out with two other guys at the last stop—”I didn’t ditch him,” the man said, “because I didn’t want him on the road drunk, less for his sake than the other drivers’, but at the end of the night we had a fight when he accused me of thinking he was an escort, and he drove off drunk anyway”—only this man was willing to speak harshly of the dead. He said, “If the sex hadn’t been so hot, I’d never have agreed to a second date. Tom Field was the most self-fascinated person I’ve ever met, and that’s what I told the police.”
The police, it turned out, had recently contacted this man because apparently Tom still had the man’s number in his cell phone. The detective who phoned had more or less run the same interrogation as Robbie.
“This was a Detective Michaels?” he asked.
“Michaels, yeah,” the man said. “She said they were looking into different scenarios.”
“Different scenarios—what different scenarios?”
“I don’t know,” the man said. “It was probably an accident because I can’t imagine Tom being the kind of person who would think the world could go on without him in it.”
There were also several long conversations that never quite wound down to Robbie’s principle question. In these instances the people with whom he spoke might have assumed Robbie wanted to trade anecdotes the way one might at a funeral, and while Robbie may not have polled them the way he did others, information nevertheless surfaced:
An older woman who had been one of Tom’s high school history teachers (and why had Tom drawn a line through her name? what possible trespass against him had she committed?), recalled the way Tom would visit her after school and sit in her office and talk to her as long as she would let him. Young Tommy always seemed dismayed when she said she needed to go home and feed her family. She taught ancient and medieval history, and in her classroom she kept her own library of texts that she never loaned out, except to Tommy, to whom she recalled lending many reproductions of illuminated manuscripts and in particular a definitive tome on hieroglyphics. She felt a certain duty to him, she said, given his parents. Robbie knew nothing about Tom’s parents, only his grandparents, and the old teacher said, “The mother was something of the town floozy, disappearing one day when Tom was ten, never to be heard from again. Tom’s father was believed to be schizophrenic or manic-depressive or borderline—something. He self-medicated, you could say, and was never able to support himself, and when Tom was a toddler, his father went off hiking on his own one winter, out into the bitterest of nights. By the time he was located, he had frozen to death.”
“Tom loved beautiful things,” a different woman said, someone who knew him during his Boston school days. “He bought a cashmere scarf, the palest gray scarf, and from that day forward wore it, all fall, all winter, every day, into the spring, that scarf, which he referred to as his signature scarf. He wound it twice tightly around his neck, then tied the ends loosely in front, never tucking it in his coat. He had a clear image of himself,” she said, “or who he wanted to be, which was a portrait painter for good families. A society artist. Did you ever see any of his drawings?”
Robbie was about to ask the woman whether she thought a true aesthete and epicurean like Tom could really kill himself, but he had to end the call early because the doorbell rang. It was Detective Michaels.
“Sorry,” she said. “I understand you’ve not been feeling well.”
In pajama bottoms, an old T-shirt, and slippers, certainly Robbie looked like he’d climbed out of bed to answer the door. He invited the detective in. They stood awkwardly in the kitchen. Detective Michaels apologized for not calling first, but she was in the neighborhood. She mentioned that she’d been in contact with Carlo. Robbie inter
rupted: Wasn’t she getting from him whatever assistance she needed?
“Yes,” the detective said, “yes. However, I’ve still got one or two questions—”
“You’re considering different scenarios,” Robbie said.
“That’s my job. Ruling things out.”
“You’re wondering whether it was an accident? Whether Tom really meant to kill himself or if he might only have been messing around?”
“Is that something you’re asking yourself?”
Robbie nodded. The detective waited for him to say more but he didn’t. She had her pad out, her pen.
“Awkward question, Mr. Voight,” she said. “It’s about your relationship with Mr. Stein.”
“Oh? Why?”
“Well, you understand. I’m trying to close this case, but I have this funny feeling I’m overlooking something.”
“About Carlo and me?”
“Would you say your relationship is solid?”
Solid? For sure, they’d known more solid autumns in the past.
“Like granite,” Robbie said, and he tapped the kitchen counter.
“And you and Mr. Stein—you’d say, as a rule, you tell each other everything?”
Robbie squinted at the detective. What was she getting at?
He said, “Everything, yes.”
The detective made a note but shook her head in puzzlement. She said, “In a long marriage, sometimes one partner goes and does something the other partner wouldn’t want him to.”
“Detective, I’m not sure what you’re after. And I’m not feeling well—”
“A long marriage,” Detective Michaels said again. “Sometimes there are secrets.”
“Maybe for some, but we’re simply not like that,” Robbie said, as if Stein Voight were a nation and his patriotism were being tested. “Carlo and I don’t keep secrets.”
“Oh, go on.”
“Honestly we don’t.”
“You have nothing, say, you’re keeping from Mr. Stein? Nothing about Mr. Field, about what happened that night?”
If Robbie began to form an uncomfortable smile it was because he’d assumed that in querying about matters unspoken or covert between the two men, the detective was wondering if Carlo kept things from Robbie, not the other way around. As a matter of fact, it was Robbie who held a secret at the moment: There was Tom’s address book, which Carlo didn’t know about and which, Robbie realized, sat in plain view atop the piano. There were the calls he’d been making. There were all of his alien thoughts of the last weeks, each a secret in its way. One of these days, he was going to be found out, if not by the detective, then by Carlo.