Silver Lake (18 page)

And yet, that said, he still awoke in the morning with the nagging sense that some definitive discovery about Tom’s true nature could still be made, and because he hadn’t exhausted all the contacts in Tom’s address
book (which he took better care to hide deep in his sock drawer after leaving it out in the open—Carlo hadn’t mentioned anything, so Robbie assumed Carlo was none the wiser), since there were still a few more names and numbers, Robbie continued making his cold calls across time zones.

One morning after Carlo went to the office—this was the Tuesday before Thanksgiving—Robbie opened Tom’s address book from right to left to the XYZ-page, deciphered a struck-through number (although not in another time zone, but local, the same prefix as Robbie’s number), and spoke with yet one more man whom Tom had dated, in this case the previous spring.

“It’s amazing you’d call today,” the man said. “I thought I’d lost it, but last night I found the drawing Tom did of me, which I sort of hid from myself when we broke up. I couldn’t throw it out. Apparently one doesn’t throw out a Tom Field drawing.”

“He let you keep it,” Robbie said.

“Didn’t he let you keep the drawing he made of you?”

“Tom never drew me.”

“So you didn’t date?”

“No. No, we didn’t.”

“It was part of his seduction MO. Everyone naked, the sketching.”

There was something about the man’s voice uncannily Tom-like, or not so much his voice (his timbre was more the cello to Tom’s violin), as a similar crescendo of enthusiasm with each statement.

“My weeks with him were wretched on the one hand,” the man said, “but also wonderful, and then I have to say he sort of saved me. But that’s a long story. We were both artists, that was part of it. I mean that we were both artists in that if someone came up to you in a grocery store and asked, ‘Hey, so, what do you do?’ We’d say, or I’d say, ‘Artist.’”

“Tom mentioned he dated a painter,” Robbie said. “He also indicated that there were some arguments—”

“Like ever I got a word in,” the man said. “Tom has to be the first and only guy I’ve split up with over art, and I guess that’s oddly cool on some level, but mostly it was oddly odd. He called me a dilettante—h
e
of all people called me a dilettante. But he did have a sweet side. It’s horrible, not only that he checked out, but how.”

It occurred to Robbie possibly he’d reached his limit as to how much he wanted to consider Tom’s death, and he thought about exiting the conversation.

“At the bar where I met him,” the man said, “there’s a bartender who looks after me and who also found Tom amusing, and then for some wacky reason fixated on the idea of the two of us together, poured us free bourbon. The bartender had to call the police on Tom once or twice apparently, after Tom and I were finished, and he was also the one who told me Tom hanged himself. I mean, how awful. Apparently you die from asphyxiation—it’s like drowning.”

Robbie was sitting on the floor, propped up against a window. The pane was cold against his shoulder blades.

“I wish I’d done something to stop him,” the man said.

Robbie sat up. “What do you mean?” he asked.

The man hesitated, and then he said, “He wanted us to do it together.

“You have to understand,” he went on, “I had no money, I’d stayed in a ghastly relationship with a guy a year too long. I’m a little younger than Tom, and maybe he wanted me to see myself in him, like I would become him. We were drinking of course, and he brought it up, ending things together, the world be damned—I cut him off. I said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘No matter how hard it’s been, no
thanks. I want to live forever.’ And do you know what Tom said? He said, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’

“Then one of the last times I was with him, a month later but before he accused me being a dilettante who would amount to nothing, Tom said he was burned-out all the time and wasn’t sure what the difference was between being alive and being dead. I didn’t want to get into that conversation again. I didn’t say a word and he changed the subject as if he were embarrassed, like he thought we were the same person with the same experience and realized finally we weren’t. Which must have made him feel lousy, and lonely. Obviously I’ve thought a lot about this. I should have, I don’t know,
said
something.”

“But,”—Robbie had to clear his throat—”but what could you have said?”

“It’s difficult. Someone who is always over-the-top talks like that—how
do
you respond? But I was selfish. I was thinking no matter how much I struggled, living this impractical impossible life, I was in better shape than Tom.”

“This is how he saved you.”

“Kind of. And no, it’s more complicated, and a little personal.”

There was a pause and then the man said, his voice slightly more baritone as if sharing a secret, “My bartender friend told me Tom killed himself at a trick’s house—”

“It wasn’t a trick,” Robbie said.

“Then at some stranger’s place. And I thought, that was Tom. Make sure there’s a story people are telling about you.”

The word
stranger
sank like a stone in Robbie’s chest.

“I think Tom was waiting for the right time,” the man said, “the right place. I know this sounds twisted, but I think he was looking for a peaceful place to die, and maybe he found it.”

Robbie got up on his knees and pivoted so he was facing the lake, all ten fingertips against the glass.

“Hello?” the man asked.

“It is very peaceful up here, I will say that,” Robbie said.

Another pause.

“Oh no,” the man said. He said, “I’m sorry. What did I say? I’m trying to remember what I said.”

“I have his address book,” Robbie explained. “I’ve been calling people.”

“It never occurred to me—I’m so sorry.”

“I’m fine,” Robbie said, “I’ll be fine,” but he was thinking, yes,
strangers
—in the end, they had known each other only a day and remained strangers, Robbie and Tom, no different than Robbie and the person on the other end of the line, tenuously linked by a hanged man, yet disconnected, distanced as they listened to each other breathe. The man’s name was Jay.

“You don’t sound like you’ll be fine,” Jay said. “You found him?”

“I did,” Robbie said.

“You found him, and you were all alone,” Jay said.

He’d made a leap, but Robbie chose not to correct him.

“I’m sorry, the way I was talking—I should have been more careful. Is there anything I can do for you?” Jay asked.

“No,” Robbie said at first. But then he looked again at Jay’s address on Waterloo Street and added, “Or maybe we can meet up sometime and talk more. We live in walking distance.”

“Anytime. You can come over.”

“Right now?”

“Right now,” Jay said, “my place isn’t very tidy.”

“I’ve been deluding myself about Tom. I’m a fool. I’ve been selling myself a story—”

“Give me fifteen minutes,” Jay said.

Robbie stood slowly, muddled with vertigo but clearer now. If he had continued contacting Tom’s friends, it was because he never completely bought what anyone told him. All along he’d been waiting for confirmation of a blacker doubt. Tom in his gray suit at the steak house with the writer, Tom looking for a peaceful place to die—both habits sustained him in different ways, and one ultimately won out over the other. Nobody should be alone, and they had left Tom alone. Tom’s whole life, everyone had left him alone.

• • •

T
O WALK TO JAY’S PLACE,
Robbie headed down his street to Duane and down the hill away from the Reservoir toward Glendale Boulevard, a steep pitch made unpleasant by the wind. He clutched his scarf over his nose. Jay’s address was difficult to locate because the street number was both scraped from the curb and missing from the building, a triplex with one unit tucked in back and upstairs, which turned out to be Jay’s apartment. At the end of the street was a freeway on-ramp, and directly opposite Jay’s building there was a triangular park, a baseball diamond on which at that hour, a man stood on the mound side-winding pitches at a boy-catcher who dropped every ball.

Robbie climbed a staircase rising over trash bins and knocked on the metal door, but no one appeared. He waited, knocked again, and Jay did not answer. When he knocked a third time, the door swung open wide, and Robbie took a step back and hit the railing. What kind of weird trick was this?

Jay extended his hand, the open cuff of his half-buttoned, wrinkled shirt falling away to reveal the raised vine of veins in his forearm. Cold hand, firm shake. He bounced a bit off one foot as he ushered (pulled) Robbie inside.

His apartment was a studio, longer than it was deep and surveyable in a blink. It was, yes, a bit of a mess, and yet also a calm forest because the walls had been painted a mossy color and the partially drawn matchstick blinds were a dark wood. An upright piano stood in one corner, sheet music open, sheet music scattered across the bench and spilling onto the floor. A guitar was propped up against the wall like a cowboy enjoying a standing siesta. In the opposite corner, piles of books banked up against a bed like cottages set into the foothills. There was a small writing desk, a shallow kitchenette, empty wine bottles on the counter, a bathroom with dated tile. In the center of the room was an ornate upholstered couch, a burgundy brocade, an atlas open on the couch to a map more lake than land.

Jay was barefoot and wearing paint-streaked jeans, which, as he asked Robbie if he wanted some tea, as he bounced across the studio to turn on the kettle when Robbie didn’t respond, he had to hitch up because they were more or less falling off his narrow hips.

The wind rattled the glass as if a train tore past.

Also in the studio, in the vicinity of the couch, Jay had set up an easel (presently unoccupied by a canvas) and another wooden table layered in squeezed-out tubes of paint, jars of ratty brushes and crusted palette knives. The long wall across from the window wall was covered with small unframed square canvases that at first looked like monochromatic color field paintings, one
black, one brown, one deep gray, and so on, although as Robbie’s eyes adjusted, he could see they were more complex. The darker colors had been painted over grids of brighter hues, although not completely, and here and there cadmium lines of orange and red, electric blues and greens, all very fine-lined, emerged, suggesting a hidden heat source.

Robbie sat down on edge of the couch, and Jay was saying this or that—Robbie was finding it difficult to concentrate. Eventually Jay sat down on the couch, too, handing a Robbie a mug of black soap-scented tea.

Two differences. One: Jay didn’t look battered like Tom did nor scratched up like he’d been in a fight. And two: Jay was blond and Tom had been a brunette with a only a few blond streaks when he first appeared.

“How are you doing now?” Jay asked, half standing and tucking his right foot under his left thigh, sitting again.

A brief curtain of steam off the tea gave Robbie cover. He stared at the open map but couldn’t identify the featured peninsula by its shape alone.

“Tom told me I should be embarrassed I didn’t have a world atlas handy,” Jay said. “Everyone should have a world atlas handy, and also he was appalled I didn’t properly stock my pantry, not—as you can see—that I have a pantry, and not that I’m sure I would know what a properly stocked one looks like. After my Tom weeks, once I started working at the bookstore, I used my employee discount to buy this atlas and now I can lose half a Saturday flipping through the maps—What’s wrong?”

“Jay, you look like Tom. Am I crazy? You look an awful lot like Tom.”

Jay tipped his head to the side (like Tom), and threw off a giggle (like Tom).

“My friends called me a narcissist, dating him,” Jay said, “and I told Tom that, and Tom being Tom went and got his hair dyed so we’d look even
more
alike. Actually he dyed his own hair with something store-bought, and it came out white. You wouldn’t have recognized him. He looked more like a ghost of himself.”

Robbie set his mug down on the floor and crossed the room to get a better look at Jay’s paintings. He studied an umber canvas, umber mostly but not entirely covering patches of viridian, that looked like a plot of rural fields as seen from a plane.

“It’s pretentious but my idea was to start out with a pencil sketch of someone on the canvas, and then build up color, the color of the clothing the guy was wearing, his complexion, and so forth, and then add the colors I felt as though the person was throwing off, layering fields over that, until you have the final painting,” Jay said.

“A mood portrait,” Robbie said.

“You’re looking at Tom. He reminded me of an old growth forest. I guess I thought he’d be happier living in a cottage in the woods, a hermit. Like I said, it was a pretentious project.”

“No, I get it,” Robbie said and turned back toward Jay, startled once again even though Jay was more Jay and less Tom now. “I like your work,” Robbie said, which he did.

“I haven’t painted much lately.”

“Because of Tom’s criticism.”

“No. Maybe. No. Well, he was right, or it’s not so much I’m a dilettante as I don’t really stay with anything.”

“Neither did Tom, I’m told,” Robbie said and sat back down on the couch, his knee under his leg the way Jay was sitting.

“If it weren’t for Tom though, I probably wouldn’t be applying to grad schools,” Jay said.

“Oh? For what?”

“I can’t decide. I’m choosing between art, geology, and library science.”

“That’s a good range,” Robbie said, trying to sound encouraging. And then he asked, “So you really don’t think it could have been an accident? Tom only goofing around? Tom tempting fate?”

Jay didn’t appear to want to contradict whatever Robbie believed. “I can’t imagine what that was like for you,” Jay said, “finding him. And to be alone in that situation.”

Once again Robbie opted not to correct him.

“But you think it was deliberate,” Robbie pushed. “You’re convinced. Did the police ask you about all this, too?”

“They did, and I’m sorry to disagree, but I think a rope is pretty deliberate. I don’t think he was playing games.”