Silver Lake

by Peter Gadol

  • • •

  HE DIDN’T LEAVE THE HOUSE all the next day because Robbie hadn’t taken a car, and so how far off could he be? Carlo had heard it said that if you pictured a lost cat appearing at your back door, summoned thus, the cat would return. Apparently this didn’t work for lost lovers.

  When the phone rang, he almost picked it up without looking at the caller ID, but he did glance at the number and listened to the message as it was recorded. Detective Michaels requested that either Carlo or Robbie call her back as soon as possible. And Happy Holidays. What an unhappy holiday it would be, Carlo thought, and if the detective needed him, she knew where he lived and worked (and hadn’t hesitated to stop by in the past). He didn’t return the call. Arrest me, he thought, run me in for resisting a phone call.

  No one arrested him, however, and no one came by the house. Carlo’s hands were ripped up from carrying the stone down the back slope, but he bandaged them and spent the day finishing the chore, leaving himself with a terrible backache that evening.

  The next day was the twenty-fourth and he couldn’t stand to be in the house alone, so he got in his car and drove slowly down the street and then even more slowly down the hill toward the lake. Once before he’d happened on Robbie, and he thought it possible again. Carlo circled the lake, hoping to find his lost lover lost in thought, but no such luck. He turned up into the hills on the west side of the Reservoir, continuing the search, pointless though he knew it was. The rains had left the roads slippery and narrowed by fallen branches and palm fronds.

  Along an especially tight curve, a military car-truck ahead of Carlo slowed and then came to an abrupt halt. Carlo slammed his foot against the brake. His car skidded and nearly hit a parked station wagon. His fender did tap something like a trash can or mailbox, and he got out of his car to see if there was any damage.

  The driver’s-side door of the car-truck swung open. The television producer climbed down to the street.

  “You,” he said. “I thought that was you.”

  “We could have had an accident,” Carlo said.

  The producer looked in every way creased: the seat of his trousers, the flaps of his shirt, his forehead. On the back of his hand, a club stamp had not yet been washed off. What hair he had was presently in motion.

  “I go away to rest up for pilot season and come back and my useless assistants tell me you’ve done nothing you promised— no plans, no permits, no nothing, and you don’t answer your phone, don’t return email—what the fuck?”

  One green vein had popped up along the producer’s neck, and Carlo thought a way out of this morass might be if his client had a stroke.

  “Nobody in this town,” the producer said, red at his temples, red in the neck. “Not with me, they don’t.”

  “I don’t think this is the best time or place to talk about your house,” Carlo said. “So if you wouldn’t mind moving your car—”

  “Oh, I mind,” the producer said.

  “Please.”

  “Please,” the producer echoed.

  “Please move your car. I’m wedged against the curb there. I can’t back it out, but I might be able to drive forward—”

  “I’m not moving my car. And let me tell you something,” the producer said, “I’m about to own you.”

  “Excuse me?” Carlo asked, and he was experiencing then the very same urge he did when he confronted Lonny in the liquor store. He wanted to grab the producer by his wrinkled shirt and throw him up against his truck. He wanted to watch the man fall to the pavement only to pick him up again and throw him again against the truck.

  “I am about to own you, see,” the producer said, “because I will sue you, and I will win, and I will own your office, I will own your house, I will own your car there—Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

  Carlo had slipped back into his driver’s seat. He reached over to the glove compartment and opened it. All he had to do was let the dim noon sun catch the gun in his hand, and then the producer would back down. Of course that might not work, and Carlo might need to fire a round into the treetops. That might get the producer to move his car …

  How tired he was, how deeply tired Carlo was of being sane.

  “I’m talking to you,” the producer said, and waddled toward Carlo’s car.

  Carlo blinked at the gun.

  “We’re having a conversation here,” the producer said.

  “I quit,” Carlo said.

  “You what?”

  “I quit,” Carlo said again, shutting the glove compartment.

  “No you don’t, no way,” the producer said, and he threw his chubby fists in the air and began ranting about how no one in his career ever walked off one of his sets, ever. If someone was going to do the walking off, it was the producer, and before he turned around and lurched back toward his car, mounted it, and tore off, he said, “No, I quit, I quit—I quit.”

  Carlo grinned for about half a minute. The only money coming in for the foreseeable future would have been from building the producer’s house, and now that was gone. What had he done?

  • • •

  HE HADN’T CELEBRATED CHRISTMAS GROWING UP, and even with Robbie, the holiday had never meant so much to him, but all alone, he ached for their merest traditions: sleeping in, the recitation of an instruction manual for a new machine they’d purchased as their gift from them to them, or hanging the new work of art if it was a year of art. Maybe a movie. He was in quite a grumpy mood—not even a phone call from Robbie to say he was alright, or to allow Carlo the chance to explain (to begin to explain) about Tom’s drawing, and the rest. Did he deserve to be abandoned like this? No. Possibly. Yes, yes he probably did.

  Gabriel came by mid-afternoon. There was little Carlo could do on the fountain because the lower terrace remained muddy, so he was merely sitting atop the wobbly stack of gray slabs when the boy appeared, bearing a gift, only one gift as if he knew already that Robbie was gone. Carlo felt terrible, he had nothing in return. A small box contained a bright-striped scarf.

  “It was for my father,” Gabriel said.

  “Why didn’t you give it to him?” Carlo asked. “I can’t take his present.”

  “He left on a trip with his girlfriend this morning, so I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  Gabriel ran his fingertips over one of the cut stones. He seemed so skinny, his arms too long, too thin.

  “I hate eggnog,” he said. “I really do.”

  “Me, too,” Carlo said.

  “I hate it more than you do, I’m pretty sure.”

  “I doubt it.”

  “My aunt’s is way worse than store-bought.”

  Carlo managed a chuckle. He was staring at the lake.

  “Anyway,” he said.

  “Anyway,” Gabriel said.

  “You haven’t by any chance seen Robbie around the neighborhood, have you?” Carlo asked.

  Gabriel’s shoulders dropped. He looked suddenly pained.

  “Like, you know, with the blond dude you mentioned?”

  Gabriel didn’t say anything.

  “Never mind,” Carlo said. “I didn’t think you would have.”

  The two of them looked out at the Reservoir, like firewatchers, as if something were about to happen.

  “Robbie is one stupid fucker,” Gabriel said, “isn’t he?”

  Carlo didn’t know what to say. Or he knew what to say, that Robbie didn’t deserve the boy’s wrath, however Carlo enjoyed having someone on his side. The gift, the misguided sentiment—he became teary, unexpectedly moved.

  They went inside and Carlo made sandwiches. Now was the time to tell the kid the truth about what happened with Tom. Now was the time to tell someone. He considered getting in the car, the boy riding shotgun, to see if he couldn’t find Robbie.

  “He’s one stupid fucker,” Gabriel said again.

  “Okay, okay,” Carlo said, and hushed him this time.

  • • •

  IT WAS, HOWEVER, highly unlikely Carlo
would find Robbie by patrolling the streets, especially since Robbie had not left Jay’s apartment in three days. After he found the drawing, he’d walked down the hill and since they’d been together only a short while before, Jay had appeared surprised to see Robbie, who stepped into the apartment but didn’t take off his scarf or coat. He was shivering.

  “Look at you,” Jay said, “your lips are blue,” and took Robbie’s hands and rubbed them.

  “I’m thinking dark things,” Robbie said.

  “What? Thinking what?”

  They stood there a moment, and then Robbie tugged one hand free and with it grasped the back of Jay’s neck, his fingers sliding up through Jay’s hair, pulling Jay close, their faces close, mouths close.

  “Isn’t this a bad idea?” Jay had whispered and closed his eyes, and maybe it was a bad idea, Robbie had thought, but then welcome to a world where a kid got a rush dreaming he was a human kite aloft outside a burning tower, a world where the man you’d trusted half your life might in some shadowy way be responsible for another man’s death. Robbie had waited until Jay opened his eyes again, and then he kissed him.

  Most of their time the following days had been spent in bed. Jay went off to work his shifts at the bookstore and came home with groceries. Christmas Eve was all about sex. The next morning, they slept in, or rather Jay slept and Robbie watched him turn onto his side and pull a pillow over his head. He was not used to spending the night with a man who, impossibly, was an even deeper sleeper than Robbie himself. He was not used to spending the night with a man who wasn’t Carlo. Robbie pushed back a stretch of blanket, exposing the bowl of Jay’s hip. Robbie didn’t know the exact hour because there had apparently been a blackout and the alarm clock was flashing midnight. It was, literally, a lost time.

  From the moment they’d added sex to their friendship, their regular conversation had noticeably dwindled, which was fine because Jay made sex so sexy. To look at his long-fingered hands and thin wrists, one wouldn’t expect strength, yet there was something supremely confident about his touch, reassuring, rejuvenating. There was one moment during the love-making for which Robbie found himself yearning, and not a dual climax, everyone going everywhere, hardly that. It was the point, say, in the middle of the story after Robbie had stood up to pull off Jay’s jeans, his underwear, and then stepped out of his own jeans and underwear, when he lowered himself back across Jay’s body, when they found themselves suddenly and entirely naked together, the moment when their hips were snug and Jay’s arms came around Robbie once more, when their cheeks brushed, always Robbie’s left to Jay’s left, with Robbie’s nose ending up near Jay’s ear—when Robbie pulled back a bit and lifted himself up so he was looking at Jay—it was when they were holding each other with their bodies warm the same way, and how they fit then, as if they’d been coming together like this for years, it was at that moment that time passing became imperceptible. Who they were beyond this apartment, everything from any previous life, fell away.

  While Jay was out, Robbie fantasized about what the future with him would look like: One day soon, Robbie would retrieve a few things from the house (he’d worn the same jeans all week, but borrowed Jay’s T-shirts and freeballed it and didn’t need to worry about socks, since he wasn’t going out at all), and then he and Jay would light out toward some new Western city and rent an apartment with high ceilings and an enamel stove, and each would find work, and they would learn the new city together, its farmers’ markets and revival cinemas. They would share shirts and make omelets for supper. After a time, they would pack up their few belongings and move on to another city, and one day perhaps they’d settle somewhere for good. They would not need friends in the world or family, it would be only the two of them. Their exile from everyone (everyone) who once knew them would be total.

  Whenever Jay was home, however, Robbie didn’t conjure this or any other vision. They rolled around, and Robbie made noise in a way he’d stopped doing with Carlo. Perhaps this was what Robbie needed, to make noise with someone new, but it became difficult to know if it was what Jay needed, as well. In the beginning, sure, but thereafter, post-sex, Jay started gazing at the wall or out the windows, anywhere but at Robbie lying next to him.

  “Merry Christmas,” Jay said, awake now. “What time is it?”

  Robbie had to find his watch in his discarded jeans, which meant getting out of bed and stepping over to the couch. It was going on noon.

  “Ah,” Jay groaned. “I should be on the road.”

  He scrambled out of bed, stepped into the shallow bathroom, took a record-fast shower, and, wrapped loosely (enticingly) in his towel, began gathering laundry in a pillowcase to do at his parents’ house. Robbie made toast and prepared cereal for Jay.

  “I can’t believe you’re abandoning me,” he said, watching Jay dress.

  “Are you going to do what we talked about?” Jay asked.

  The night before he’d insisted that Robbie had to go home and see Carlo today. It was Christmas.

  “I told you,” Robbie said.

  “You should go home to him,” Jay said.

  Robbie tried to be light: “You always take his side.”

  Jay stopped what he was doing and sat on the edge of the bed. “You weren’t supposed to find the drawing,” he said.

  Robbie rolled his eyes. “So you keep saying,” he said.

  It made no sense, and it made perfect sense: Tom was not a stranger. Carlo knew him, but Robbie had given up trying to figure out what had gone on between them, who Tom was to Carlo. And then for Tom’s part, well, Tom was Tom. He might have been playing an angle, making a pass at Robbie on the tennis court that first afternoon: revenge. Coming over for dinner even though Carlo couldn’t have wanted that: spite. Tom committing the ultimate act of self-annihilation—why, because he meant to injure Carlo? And did Carlo deserve this retribution? What if he did? What if he had brought about the entire sequence of misfortunes that autumn, grave and ruinous? What if all fell to him?

  “I can’t go home. I told you,” Robbie said. “I half woke up that night and saw Carlo standing at the window.”

  “And so?”

  “I have dark thoughts,” Robbie said.

  “So you keep saying. But I think you know what happened,” Jay said.

  “I don’t.”

  “You do.”

  “I saw Carlo at the bedroom window,” Robbie said, “and he had to have been looking out at the patio, and then—I don’t know.”

  “What do you think happened next?”

  “I’m telling you, I can’t say.”

  “You can say,” Jay insisted, “but you won’t say.”

  He finished getting dressed. He sat on the couch to tie his sneakers and Robbie sat next to him, gently gripping his arm.

  “Don’t be mad,” Robbie said.

  “I’m not mad,” Jay said.

  “Do I have to leave?” Robbie asked.

  “You should go home. For today. Then come back.”

  “I can’t.”

  Jay sighed. “I’ll see you later on,” he said and left.

  Robbie removed a jar of green tea from the refrigerator (he’d found some bags in the back of a cabinet and been drinking it steadily). He sipped the tea straight from the jar and stepped over to the piano and swung his feet around the bench. He studied the sheet music. He had been reteaching himself to play, although his technique was slow coming back. An hour a day, he told himself, an hour every day, although he suspected it wasn’t a regimen he’d stick to. Also he wanted to try to recover his French and planned on picking up a Paris newspaper if he ever made it over to the international newsstand, if he ever left the apartment. Once upon a time, in another lifetime, he’d been able to think in French. This was when he was an exchange student. It had been a long while since he’d thought about the disorientation he’d suffered when he first traveled abroad by himself, those early alienating nights. He knew no one, no one yet knew him, and he wanted to go home but couldn’t—too
high the cost of return, too far, too soon, too great the sense of defeat to give up and make his way back. He was almost forty but he felt like he was sixteen again and in Europe and unable to go home. Nothing had changed. But he reassured himself with the additional memory that eventually he got over his homesickness the way one did, and he had a grand time in France—didn’t he?

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY Carlo drove around the neighborhood, and what did he look like, a long lost relative who couldn’t locate an address? He saw family members carrying foil-covered platters into warmly lit houses, and he saw kids in the street playing with brand new plastic things. He didn’t spot Robbie and on some level knew he wouldn’t, but he headed west at five mile an hour, which was tricky to maintain and not either irritate other drivers buzzing around the lake or arouse suspicion among all the walkers and joggers braving the wind to orbit the Reservoir. It was easier to skim the hill streets and the foothill streets, the flat streets with their evenly spaced bungalows. He made it as far as the middle school on Fountain and parked in front of a small church that it had never occurred to him to enter. Pale gray stucco, tall black doors, cold, imposing, uninviting, and yet … One of the doors was ajar. He stepped inside and waited for his eyes to adjust.

  The church was smaller than he imagined it would be, white walls, neat pews, cork soundproofing panels, a low dais, at the center of which was a modestly decorated Christmas tree. He took a seat in the back row, folded his hands across his lap, closed his eyes. He tried (failed) to unclutter his mind. What a mess he’d made of things. What should he do? He wasn’t praying, but for the first time in days, a tension in his shoulders eased up, in his neck. He thought if he could remain still long enough, his old clarity would return, a pragmatism. He relaxed, but the spell then was broken quickly when a woman entered the hall from a side door and rolled in an industrial vacuum cleaner, its cord like a lasso in her hand. She plugged it in and began cleaning the carpeted dais. It didn’t seem right to Carlo that a church should need to be vacuumed. Some mystery was diminished.