Silver Lake (27 page)

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?

• • •

T
HE 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.

When he got home, Gabriel was down on the lower terrace. He was attempting to position the cut stones around the fountain pool. The rain would return soon.

“Are you growing a beard?” the boy asked.

“I misled you,” Carlo said. And then: “I misled everyone.”

The boy set the slate slab down on the ground and cocked his head.

“Two hours after we all went to sleep that night, I found Tom doing the dishes in the kitchen,” Carlo said, and once upon a time, his own story had seemed complex to him, impossible to narrate and convey the shifting moods of each moment built out from the previous moment, when in truth, his story was as simple as could be. He told Gabriel the truth and then the two of them stood there, Gabriel impassive as Carlo bowed his head, as if awaiting a verdict.

However, Gabriel only blinked a few times and then began to climb back up the slope toward the house, his feet slipping in the mud.

“Gabriel.”

The boy kept going.

“Say something,” Carlo said.

The boy turned around. “Like what?” he asked. “Like basically you’ve been lying to me?”

Carlo had allowed him to believe one thing, not another, and so yes, that was a lie.

“Like what? Like how I thought your boyfriend was the scummy one, but actually you’re both scummy?”

Carlo wasn’t sure he saw a connection, but he accepted that a web of dishonesty existed for the kid. Oh, Gabriel, you’re only a boy, he wanted to say, how could you understand, but that was the point: he’d failed a child and the child understood perfectly well what had gone on.

“Well, you know what?” Gabriel asked.

Carlo shook his head: No, what?

But Gabriel didn’t say anything more. He swung around and continued up the hill and was gone, and Carlo didn’t hear a sound anywhere, no cars, no people, nothing in the sky, nothing carried in the wind. He was alone. He was finally all alone.

• • •

A
ND THEN DECEMBER WAS GONE,
and it was the end of another year, another bright Saturday, but in no way a peaceful day. A cold gale trampled the tall trees all around Silver Lake and lifted shingles off rooftops and swept wave after wave across the Reservoir. It was a wind that showed no sign of letting up, not until it had moved everything movable, street signs, birds in flight, even, it seemed to Robbie, the afternoon sun: one of Jay’s windows did not close all the way, and enough air periodically rushed over the sill to peel back the curtain, throwing a narrow blade of light into a frantic dance.

The end of another year, Robbie thought, unlike any other because this would be the first in twenty he didn’t spend with Carlo. New Year’s Eve, their habit was to stay in and fix a leg of lamb with roasted new potatoes and sautéed cabbage, nothing special, but this in and of itself, the dinner, staying in, was a sustaining ritual. Midnight, the two of them alone in their house, safe in their own history. What was Carlo doing now? Was he sleeping in, maybe with the benefit of a narcotic? Had he left the pill bottle out on the night stand in case something went chemically awry? Had he moved yet to the center of the bed?

Robbie turned his attention back to the atlas open in his lap.

He was trying not to think about Carlo but thinking about Carlo just the same. Jay meanwhile was puttering. He rearranged the shirts hanging in his closet. He refiled books Robbie had withdrawn from his shelves. He washed out the mason jars Robbie had been using for green tea. When Jay sat at the edge of the couch next to Robbie and began putting on socks and shoes, Robbie asked him where he was going.

“I made plans,” Jay answered.

“Plans, what plans?”

“I have friends, you know,” Jay said.

“Okay. I’ll come with you.”

Jay stopped tying his shoe.

“You don’t want me to come with you,” Robbie said and fell back against a cushion that was all give. He wanted to take Jay’s hand, to massage his long fingers, but the moment wasn’t right for that. Something was coming to an end.

“You want me to leave,” Robbie said.

“I never wanted to be a cuckold,” Jay said.

“Technically Carlo is the cuckold.”

“Whatever.”

The wind tearing through the ballpark across the street was rattling something, loose fencing or trash cans or light posts.

“Sunset hikes in the hills,” Jay said, “and midweek sleepovers and deciding one Sunday breakfast that keeping two apartments is silly. Getting a place together, decorating it with no money. I want to fall in love the old-fashioned way,” Jay said. “You understand. You did that once.”

“Once,” Robbie said. “It was different.”

He placed his hand on Jay’s knee and Jay set his hand atop Robbie’s.

Robbie asked, “Why did you let me stay here all this time and have, like, a huge amount of sex with me?”

It was a relief to see Jay grin. “I’m twenty-six?” he said, he asked.

“Don’t make me go home,” Robbie said.

“I’m not making you do anything. You brought up leaving.”

“I’m not going home,” Robbie said.

“Fine.”

“Ever.”

“You weren’t supposed to find the drawing.”

“Here we go again.”

“Well, you weren’t.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” Robbie said. “Maybe
I
am the cuckold.”

“Would that be enough to make you break up?”

Robbie’s answer was no, but he didn’t respond.

“Do you think that’s what happened that night? With you asleep in the other room?” Jay asked.

“I don’t know,” Robbie said.

“But you do know.”

“Jay.”

“You do know what happened. You have a theory.”

“I do?”

Jay nodded.

“Okay,” Robbie said, and he was angry now, “fine.” He was angry he was being pushed. He said, “I’ll tell you what I think.”

After all, what he thought happened that September night was really very simple: From the bedroom, Carlo watched Tom out on the patio. He watched Tom tie a noose. He watched him stand on the chair and then stand on the fence to tie the rope. He watched him stand on the chair again and slip the noose over his
neck—and Tom in turn saw Carlo standing at the window, Tom knew Carlo was watching him. Tom took his time. He was waiting to be stopped, but Carlo didn’t stop him, and what could Tom do, as if answering a dare, but take one step closer to death? He drew the knot tight and waited and nothing. He stood up on his toes and waited and nothing. He let his hands fall to his sides and waited and nothing. And Carlo watched Tom kick away the chair. He watched the rope pull against Tom’s neck. He watched him asphyxiate. He watched Tom’s body lose its being, he watched his body go slack. He watched the urine run down Tom’s pant leg and he watched the drool run from Tom’s mouth. Carlo watched Tom leave this world, and then Carlo took a sleeping pill and got in bed next to Robbie and joined him in sleep. That was what happened.

“You don’t think that,” Jay said.

“What if I do?”

“But you don’t,” Jay said, “you don’t, you don’t. Do you really think your boyfriend would do something that heinous? This man you’ve been with for twenty years—you don’t think he’s capable of what you’re saying.”