Silver Lake (16 page)

“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 interrupted: 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.

“We don’t hide anything from each other,” Robbie asserted again, “and I’m sorry, but do you think we could talk another time? I should lie down.”

• • •

T
HAT NIGHT,
a dream, Robbie’s now recurring dream, the one in which he woke up abruptly and noticed Carlo wasn’t next to him in bed but instead was standing at their bedroom window. Except this time, the dream was different: It wasn’t Carlo at the window (Carlo wasn’t in the room at all). The man at the window was looser in branch—it was Tom, Tom dressed for tennis.

He stood there, his arms at his side, staring out at the night, and Robbie pulled back the blanket and swung his legs over the side of the bed and ever so quietly crossed the room until he was standing behind Tom, and Tom didn’t appear to notice Robbie or let on if he did. Robbie inched close enough so he could feel whatever
heat Tom threw off. Robbie was breathing on Tom’s shoulder, his neck. Robbie extended his hand out beyond Tom’s side, out in front of Tom, and Tom studied Robbie’s hand a while, then took it in his, and placed Robbie’s hand over his, Tom’s, heart.

When Robbie understood Tom was not going to let go, Robbie allowed his head to rest against Tom’s shoulder. And this was how he returned to sleep, standing behind Tom, head on Tom’s shoulder, hand on his slow-beating heart.

• • •

F
RIDAY MORNING OF THAT WEEK,
Robbie slept late and didn’t have to lie again about being sick because Carlo was long gone by the time Robbie got out of bed. He called one or two more people in Tom’s address book, as if it were a part of his morning routine, and then wanting some exercise, he went out on a brisk walk, completing two turns around the Reservoir. Back home, skimming the newspaper, he noticed a listing that Tom’s writer friend was giving a reading in a West Hollywood bookstore that night. At the end of the day, Robbie left Carlo a note and headed out.

The writer wore a narrow-cut suit. His pink pocket square matched the T-shirt he had on beneath the suit jacket. It was hard to say what the novel was about, Europhile vampires who wore expensive clothes and left messes in hotel suites, or were they pop stars and the vampire motif was metaphoric? The writer read one scene that involved a decapitation at a shoe sale. The store was packed and the audience loved it.

After the reading, Robbie hung back while a line of adoring readers snaked toward the writer, the writer who looked overlarge at the table he sat at and who kept asking a bookstore clerk if he
could smoke, expecting an answer other than the one he’d received five minutes earlier. Finally, with a good number of fans still waiting for his autograph, he said he would be right back and slipped out the door to the parking lot. Robbie went out the front of the store and walked around the building. He approached the writer and apologized for pestering him while he was enjoying his cigarette, and the writer said nothing. Robbie thought of something charitable to say about the excerpt read aloud and then he explained he was a friend of Tom Field’s, and the writer immediately reached out and squeezed Robbie’s shoulder.

“It’s hideous what happened,” the writer said.

“I left you a message,” Robbie said.

“You’re not with the LAPD, are you?”

“No. Did they contact you?”

“A black-and-white came to my house. You can imagine the amount of scrambling that went on. It’s not the drugs I worry about so much as the porno.”

“What did they want to know?”

“The usual,” the writer said, and left it at that. “Actually I’d heard about Tom from the maitre d’ at the restaurant Tom and I would go to in the Valley, a steak joint we liked, very red-booth, this place. Tom was my third buddy this year to o.d. The shit out there, man, it’s shit.”

Robbie didn’t correct the writer, nor apparently had the police.

“I met him at a club in New York,” the writer said, “and I found him kind of vivid. I moved back out here to finish this book, and I ran into Tom in a pharmacy on Ventura—in fact, there’s a secondary vampire in the novel based on Tom. Anyway,
I told ole Tom I’d buy him dinner and I did, and then about once a month, I met him at the steak place. He amused me. I don’t know if I amused him.”

“He had an address book full of crossed-out names,” Robbie said, “but not yours.”

The writer scratched the side of his nose with his thumbnail, dragged on his cigarette.

“I went away a couple a months ago,” he said, “and didn’t tell him. I should have told him. Whenever we went out, I dressed like this—”

The writer made a gesture, open-palmed, I’m fabulous, I’m not so fabulous, whatever.

“And Tom wore his gray suit,” the writer said. “I ordered steak au poivre and Tom the béarnaise, and we went through at least one bottle of a good red if not two. I didn’t talk much. He talked quite a bit. I fed him gossip, literary, music-industry, blah-blah. I made it all up, although I think he knew. He regaled me with sex stories. I am not under the impression he was making them up. He told me he wanted to draw me, but as you may know I don’t like being photographed, and I certainly don’t want to be
drawn,
and also it sounded vaguely sexual and as you may also know, he was a little old for me. But I said sure, like instead of my next author photo, a Tom Field drawing, nifty. And he left a message last fall about wanting to take me out when I was back in town to celebrate the new novel. When we went out for steak, I always paid because I knew Tom didn’t have any money. But he was adamant in the message that this time he would pay.”

The writer dropped his cigarette to the pavement, but it rolled away from him before he could stub it out with his boot. “Tom in that gray suit,” he said, shaking his head, before heading back inside the store.

Robbie wanted to be by himself and went to a coffee shop, and when he arrived home late, he found Carlo waiting up, stretched out on the couch, drowsy, paging through a magazine.

“How was the reading?” he asked.

Robbie considered making the connection, the writer to Tom, why Robbie had sought him out. He didn’t want to be keeping secrets from Carlo the way the detective suggested.

“Interesting,” Robbie answered. “It was interesting.”

“Well—good. This writer, he’s someone you’ve discovered recently?”

Robbie hesitated but then said, “Tom recommended him.”

“Tom recommended him to you or someone else?”

Robbie didn’t understand the question. “To me,” he said, and he expected an immediate dismissal, a write-off, but Carlo only nodded, only blinked.

“And you’re feeling better?” Carlo asked.

“I am.”

Robbie sat at the edge of the couch. There was so much he wanted to say and nothing he thought Carlo would want to hear. They talked about how cold it was that night. A belt of constellations sagged low in the sky. They were being pleasant with one another—how practiced they were at being pleasant with one another.

“What are you looking at there?” Robbie asked.

“Nothing really. There’s an article on fountains. Oh, my father called today,” Carlo said. “He’s definitely coming this year.”

“Good,” Robbie said. “That’s good?”

“We should start the drinking now.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad,” Robbie said.

Carlo sat up on the sofa and glanced around the main room. “There were all these things I wanted to get done before he got here,” he said.

“Make a list. I can deal with it.”

“No, there’s a lot to do—”

“For crying out loud, Carlo, make a list. I’ll take care of it. Actually …”

“Actually what?”

Robbie looked at him and Carlo appeared to read his mind.

“You want to take a little break from the office,” Carlo said.

“I feel guilty about it,” Robbie said.

“Don’t. Take a week.”

“You need me on the producer’s house.”

“We’re fine. Take two weeks—take whatever time you need. I’ll make the list.”

Then Carlo launched into a monologue about the fountain he had in mind, the slate he wanted to use, and Robbie hummed when appropriate, although he’d drifted. He was thinking about Tom, imagining him cleaning up and putting on his gray suit, waiting for the writer at the steak place, ordering a martini, dirty, three olives. Watching the door and when the writer sat down, Tom would have an anecdote warmed up and ready to go. They had played tennis that afternoon in September and Tom had shouted across the court at Robbie that they could play Saturdays all year long. It might have become another ritual, stitching together all the other hours, Tom’s lost hours, into a readable sequence of days.

• • •

C
ARLO HAD ASKED ROBBIE
if he was feeling better, although he already knew the answer, and not because Robbie had driven himself to a bookstore. That morning, Carlo had spotted his boyfriend out on a hale and vigorous walk around the lake. Carlo had been late for an appointment with an engineer up at the producer’s property, but as he was driving north on Silver Lake and was about to turn left, he noticed Robbie in a fast stride headed
west, coming down past the dog park and rounding the basketball court. Carlo made the left turn, but rather than stop and wave hello or roll down his window and call out to Robbie, he continued on, making another left and pulling over to the curb. He turned around and watched Robbie approach through the back window of the car—Robbie, it would seem, was too deep in thought to notice Carlo or their car, too preoccupied, elsewhere.

What a rare phenomenon it was to run into one’s spouse out in the world. Maybe now and then the two men might run errands separately, and, say, unexpectedly cross paths in the shared parking lot of the dry cleaners and supermarket, or perhaps they’d overlap at the gym, one entering as the other was leaving—but that was not running into each other really, because each always knew what the other was up to, where (at all times) the other was. Until recently, at any rate.

Robbie walked directly opposite the cross street and Carlo pivoted in the driver’s seat so that he was less obviously a man spying, although he did continue to watch Robbie in the rearview mirror, which he angled as Robbie proceeded up the hill. And what was that expression on Robbie’s face, that intentness as if he were drawing in his notebook or listening to music through headphones? Although he wasn’t wearing headphones, and he also seemed unaware of anyone coming toward him, a dog walker, a couple with a stroller. Robbie looked sealed off from the rest of the world, and for some reason this left Carlo suddenly very blue.