Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  He marched across the street to the liquor store, where Lonny was minding the register. No one else was in the store and Carlo stood at the counter, tapping his fingertips, until Lonny managed to lift his head from his motorcycle magazine and ask, “Help you?”

  “Well, yes actually, Lonny,” Carlo said, “yes,” and he recognized he was starting off at too sharp a pitch. “Perhaps you can.”

  Lonny made a sour-fruited face.

  “You see, we’ve had a couple of incidents up at our house,” Carlo said. “You know our house, don’t you? Of course, you do. Well, first there was garbage thrown all over our front lawn, and then yesterday, someone took an axe to two of our plum trees.”

  Lonny looked over his shoulder, toward the back room.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t an axe,” Carlo said, and he couldn’t help himself, he was getting louder. “Maybe someone snapped each tree against his boot,” he said, “one then the other. Robbie says it was the wind, but I seriously doubt that.”

  Carlo stared at Lonny—Lonny stared back at Carlo.

  “Why are you asking me?” Lonny finally asked.

  “Because you’re the top dog on the block,” Carlo said. “I’ve seen you give the other kids rides, cigarettes—who knows what else.”

  The phrase “who knows what else” did not appear to sit well with Lonny. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mr. Stein,” he said and returned to his magazine.

  Carlo knew he was approaching the matter entirely the wrong way but couldn’t correct his tone. “I am asking you, Lonny, who you think might be behind this nastiness up at our house. What can you tell me, Lonny? What do your sources say?”

  Again the sour face, a cover—he did know something, and Carlo was not going to stand there while this dumb-ass punk pretended he had no clue what Carlo was talking about.

  Lonny looked up and asked, “Do you need to buy something?”

  “I need you tell me who is trying to scare us,” Carlo said.

  “Can’t help you out there,” Lonny said.

  “Can’t help me out.”

  “Look—”

  “I think you can.”

  “I don’t know who is messing with you, okay?”

  “Oh, so you would agree someone is messing with us.”

  Lonny didn’t respond and glanced over his shoulder again, like he hoped a buddy would emerge and then Lonny would ask, Can you believe this asshole? What a freak.

  Carlo reached across the counter and with both hands grabbed Lonny’s flannel shirt, pulling him forward.

  Lonny blinked, startled.

  “Tell whoever it is to lay off,” Carlo said.

  “What the fuck,” Lonny shouted.

  “And while we’re at it,” Carlo said, “whatever business you’ve got going with Gabriel, it needs to stop right now.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Forget about whatever he owes you—”

  “Let go of me.”

  “I said, forget about—”

  “Let go.”

  Carlo looked at his fistfuls of Lonny’s shirt.

  “Jesus. Shit. Whatever,” Lonny said when Carlo released him.

  Carlo took a step back. “Sorry,” he said.

  “Whatever,” Lonny mumbled, blushing.

  Another young guy, this one wearing an apron, emerged from the back room. He was holding a case of beer. He asked, “You okay, Lon?”

  Lonny seemed more flustered than irate. The redness of his fists made him look like he was wearing mittens.

  “Sorry,” Carlo said again and waved his hand in the air, Peace, as he turned and left.

  “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Lonny said. “Fucking weirdo.”

  Out on the street, Carlo was shaking. He needed a glass of wine, or to take a sleeping pill, several pills and sleep a year. What had come over him? What was he doing? Who did he think he was?

  • • •

  HE DIDN’T HAVE MUCH TIME TO RECOVER. Given the holiday traffic, he needed to head out to the airport right away, but at least he was able to channel his anxiety elsewhere when his father did not appear among the other first-class passengers from New York making their way toward baggage claim carousel number two. Carlo stood as close as he could to the down-escalator and suffered his usual frustration at not being able to greet his octogenarian father at the gate in this, the new security age. Silver-haired men bobbed among the passengers and were greeted by family, half of them still wearing their overcoats or parka vests, but none in tweed or camel’s hair, none sporting a ribboned fedora tipped at a jaunty angle.

  Carlo saw his father only a few times a year and never knew what to expect. Would he finally look frail? Would his light blue eyes, always darting this way and that, suddenly reveal less acuity? Would he still be able to solve the crossword in ink in about the time it took to twist apart, spread almond butter across, and eat his morning croissant?

  Lo and behold, Henry Stein emerged at the top of the escalator, his hair as white as his pocket square, his overcoat a cape. The brim of his felt hat ran parallel to the slope of his nose. He did appear to be walking with some difficulty, talking to a woman around Carlo’s age and leaning into her for support. The woman in turn held the hand of a young girl, who dragged a child-size backpack with some kind of fuchsia animal-doll creature affixed. Carlo’s father’s suit looked loose on him. He did not appear to be scanning the crowd for his son—the woman had his complete attention. However, when the escalator had borne him all the way down, he stepped off the disappearing tread with an agile skip, one step ahead of the woman so he could help her disembark. Carlo realized his father wasn’t leaning on the woman and that it was the other way around, she relying on him.

  “Hi, son,” his father said to Carlo and clutched his arm (with a fit grasp) and kissed him. Then, adoringly, he gripped the back of his son’s neck, his cold wedding band sending a shiver down Carlo’s spine. “Hi, hi,” his father said, and despite their continental drift, Carlo was aware the old man loved him.

  Carlo’s father introduced the woman. “Her poor silly foot, you see, fell asleep over the Rockies and never woke up.”

  “My first mistake was taking off these shoes,” the woman said. “I could barely get them back on. Your father has been telling me about all the houses you’ve built all over Los Angeles.”

  “All over,” Carlo echoed. “My father tends to exaggerate.”

  His father said to the woman, “You should see them, all glass. Glass, glass, glass, like it’s going out of style.”

  “It sort of has,” Carlo said.

  “I love the term the realtors use to describe these houses,” his father said. “Son, what do they call them in their listings?”

  “Architectural,” Carlo said.

  “Ha,” his father said.

  The woman smiled politely and said good-bye as her daughter tugged her toward the baggage carousel.

  “She is some kind of university professor,” Carlo’s father said. “What did she call her field, comparative geographies? She’s lovely, but the daughter is a little alien. What? You should have seen the thumbs on this girl, playing some mindless electronic game the whole flight. Would it have been too much to ask she open a book for an hour?”

  “No luggage?” Carlo asked, and relieved his father of one suede carry-on, weighted by, Carlo imagined, a bestseller, walking shoes, one change of clothes, and toiletries.

  “You know me,” his father said, and they headed for the car.

  As they worked their way through the airport traffic, Carlo asked if his father had completed the new acquisition he’d talked about weeks ago when they last spoke. He had. The drawing was especially unusual. It was Dutch, of course, another church interior, more graffiti in the nave. Yet the shadows were exquisite, the varying expressions of the churchgoers …

  Henry Stein had come to the States from Germany in 1946, having floated around Europe for a year after the liberat
ion. He was able to make some connections in New York, had limited family resources he could tap, which he parlayed into a minor fortune distributing medical supplies. Carlo was a late child and by the time he was born, his father had already sold the company and worked part-time as a consultant, mostly devoting himself to collecting art. Sunday brunch chez Stein became a salon for local and visiting scholars, who would inspect the latest procurement and then enjoy bagels and lox and a smidgen of sturgeon. For a while, Carlo’s father was a dealer, as well, working out of their apartment, and Carlo remembered their dining room (lined with drawing cabinets) after his father had seen a client and retrenched to his study: The crumpled white gloves on the table, the magnifying glass askew in its velvet box. The empty cordial glasses, the tart rueful smell of sherry.

  “But I may flip it,” his father said.

  “Sorry?” Carlo asked.

  “You weren’t listening.”

  “Yes, I was.”

  “I was saying my group and I, we’re thinking of going in on a twenty-by-thirty icescape. On canvas. It comes up in London next month.”

  “You’d part with a new drawing so soon?”

  “You have a point,” Carlo’s father said. “That’s unlikely.”

  They coasted down the highway in silence and didn’t say much again until they were back on surface streets, as if speaking on the freeway was unsafe.

  “You’ve lost weight,” Henry said.

  “I don’t think so,” Carlo said.

  “You’re trying to lose it or busy running around?”

  “I weigh the same I weighed the last time you saw me,” Carlo insisted.

  “Weight loss in young men—”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Son, is it stress?”

  “Everything is fine, Dad,” Carlo said, although he probably had lost weight—he’d not been paying attention.

  His father gazed out the car window. Los Angeles had a way of making him sigh slowly and frequently, as if breath were being drawn from him like a tire leaking air through an imperceptibly tiny puncture. In less than forty-eight hours, he would be gone, Carlo consoled himself. He needed to pace himself. Two days he could do, two days was nothing.

  They arrived home at the same time Robbie appeared to be returning from a walk, yet another walk around the lake, Carlo figured.

  His father greeted Robbie in the driveway: “My true son!” he shouted, and two days seemed like a very long time.

  • • •

  To ROBBIE, Henry had seemed old for twenty years. Spry and sharp and urbane, but white-haired at the same time, coarse-browed, prone to halitosis. He walked up the front path with a senatorial stride. He did not care for Los Angeles—”So untested as a city”—and he loathed the holiday—”What kind of ersatz palliative history is this Thanks-giving story anyway?”—and yet, he was nothing if not a traditionalist, and families saw each other at holidays, and they were still a family, and so, depending upon auction house schedules, the father came West with the proviso the son did not cook a turkey.

  Once in the house, Henry unzipped his carry-on and removed several items. About a square bottle of cranberry relish, he said: “This is not the day and age to be seen as unpatriotic—I am an American citizen—long live cranberries!” About the half-pound bag of coffee he produced: “I’m requiring this in the mornings. It contains a measure of cocoa,” he said, “which is good for my blood pressure.”

  “Is that new? You’ve never had high blood pressure before,” Carlo said.

  “Well, I don’t now because of this coffee curative,” Henry replied.

  Then he removed a wrapped gift, a book. Usually he brought the two men the biography du jour, but this time what Carlo unwrapped was an exhibition catalogue for a show in New York the two men had missed, a retrospective of an artist who had died the year before and who was an old Stein family friend. The artist-friend began his career in abstract painting but ended up making video installations, which he referred to as paintings kids today would look at.

  “That’s lovely, Dad,” Carlo said. “Thank you.”

  “Beautiful,” Robbie said, leafing through the color plates.

  “You know the story,” Henry said to Robbie.

  “Of course,” Robbie said. “It’s famous.”

  Henry told it anyway. One rainy day when Carlo was about four or five, his mother set him up with some art supplies in their kitchen. He sat at the butcher block table and made a series of tempera paintings, a bright zoo of images, and then took them back to his bedroom, where he promptly disobeyed the house rules and used scotch tape to hang his art on the walls. He came out into the living room where the adults, including the artist-friend, were enjoying cocktails and beckoned them into his gallery. He charged a nickel admission and the art was for sale at a quarter per painting, forty cents for the diptych landscape (“It was a tennis court seen from above, not a landscape,” Carlo interrupted), and the artist-friend was so amused, he bought the entire show in one swoop.

  “I was precocious,” Carlo said. “This isn’t exactly breaking news.”

  “But that’s not the point,” his father said, and continued: The family friend told Henry and his wife in front of young Carlo and then again privately that he thought their boy should be encouraged in his artmaking, that beyond his entrepreneurialism (not to be discounted), he had all the promise of a serious colorist. Note the way Carlo had juxtaposed different shades of the same color, the different weights of green. Note his preference for inebriated blues and lovesick reds—the way he took risks with color, that was what was exciting. The artist-friend kept after Carlo’s parents until finally they enrolled Carlo in a private art program intended for older children.

  “My friend had faith, and he was right,” Henry said.

  Robbie chuckled appropriately but also glanced sympathetically at Carlo, for the subtext of the story was that Carlo had given up on painting when he became an architect, which was to say an applied artist, which for Henry Stein was tantamount to retail work. The story was not dissimilar to others Robbie had heard Henry tell over the years, always implying Carlo hadn’t achieved his greatest personhood, and time to time, Robbie found ways to interrupt and sing Carlo’s praises, specifically citing whatever recent project Stein Voight had seen through. But on this particular occasion, there were no projects to extol, not really, so no praise was sung.

  Robbie patted his jeans pocket and removed his cell phone. Carlo and his father waited. The phone had beeped and the red light was flashing. He had a text message. Who sent him text messages?

  “Who sends you text messages?” Carlo asked.

  It was from Jay. He said he enjoyed their time together—they’d spent two hours in a café, chattering, two hours that could have been fifteen minutes. Jay was headed down to his parents’ for the holiday but wanted to know if Robbie was free to hang out again over the weekend.

  “It’s nothing,” Robbie lied. “A phone company promotion,” he added and then quickly replied yes to the text. “There. I told them to go away,” Robbie said.

  “I do miss that old coot,” Henry said, referring to the artist-friend. “We’re dying off, the old gang.”

  “Now, now,” Robbie said.

  “Don’t you now-now me,” Henry said. “It’s fine. It may even be natural. We’re here a time, we do what we can, which isn’t much, and then we rot and are forgotten.”

  One didn’t challenge the old man. Robbie had learned this early on in his career as a son-in-law.

  “I’m in the guest room?” Henry asked, and headed into the hall with Carlo in tow, although Carlo hesitated at the threshold.

  “What is it, son?”

  “No one has slept in here since …”

  Robbie slipped past Carlo into the room and drew the curtain. Henry sat down on the bed, slid his hand under a pillow.

  “It was a vexing episode, no?” he asked.

  Both men nodded. They were avoiding each other’s gaze, focusing inst
ead on Henry.

  “Eerie,” Henry said. “Mystifying.”

  Outside, there were abrupt gusts of wind that rattled the glass. Not a storm approaching, but something of the East Coast early winter brought along with the guest.

  Then Carlo looked at Robbie but addressed his father. “Mystifying, definitely. This man, Tom—he said all sorts of things, and who knows if any of it was true.”

  Robbie wrinkled his brow, What? Why was Carlo saying this—where was this coming from?

  “I think he could be trusted just fine,” Robbie said.

  “You yourself said he was prone to exaggeration,” Carlo said.

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Very dramatic, you said.”

  “Well,” Henry said, standing, intervening, “I am always more than happy to be the one to break a curse. And I am quite certain I shall sleep well. Robert, you know how I prefer a martini.”

  “Yes, sir,” Robbie said.

  They wore jackets and had their cocktails outside, but it was too chilly to serve dinner on the patio, as well, so they ate à table, a light supper, trout, lentil salad, red wine. The night was cold yet the sky held few stars.

  The old man removed the rubber tip from his epee when he drank. His latest diatribe was on the failure of the political parties to effect lasting growth: “I mean boom-or-bust-resistant change. I mean progress irregardless of a fickle Street.” Also he held forth on free trade, the admission of certain countries into economic unions, and the ethics of war journalism. Also the use of force by the police. Also how bored he was the other evening at the ballet.

  He asked after Robbie’s parents and sister and demanded news of them, though there was none of significance.