Silver Lake (2 page)

He pretended to work while playing computer solitaire. He could hear a stray arpeggio drift out of the music studio down the street and the occasional conversation as customers went in and out of antique stores, but otherwise, the only sound at Stein Voight was that of Robbie Voight’s black pen in its journey east and west, north and south across a white page. It was a sound that never failed to deliver Carlo a temporary peace.

• • •

E
VENTUALLY HE WENT ACROSS THE STREET
to buy the cheese they had talked about, to the liquor store for wine, and to chat up a friend at the framers-photo gallery. Robbie watched his lover dodge traffic and disappear, and then he put down his sketch book and rubbed his eyes.

For about five minutes indeed he’d been considering the house up the street, specifically a more integrated way to include a detached rental unit, but the rest of the time he’d been doodling. His idea of a nightmare was Carlo one day breaking a tacit rule and paging through Robbie’s stack of old black blank books piled on a credenza behind his desk. For every modern bungalow elevation Robbie allegedly was rendering, for every open-plan
floor plan, Carlo would find countless spreads of intersecting planes and graphed vortexes and plump spheres, hard-hatched, soft-shaded—islands and reefs and coves of ink coalescing into a secret atlas of lost ocean continents. Carlo would find evidence of much daydreaming, although miraculously the work always got done, rather last-minute, but done, and anyway, architects needed to daydream, didn’t they? The mission of any builder was to look at the world not as it was, but the way he believed it should be.

Robbie needed a shot of caffeine, and he was at the back kitchenette making espresso when someone walked in the front door. It was rare but happened, a passerby trying to figure out what goods were sold at Stein Voight. The man who came in was a young guy, slight, bouncing a bit off his right high-top as he glanced around. He was backlit, hard to see well, so Robbie crossed the length of the office.

“Can I help you?” Robbie asked.

A white baseball cap was jammed in a back pocket of the man’s unbelted jeans, which he had to hitch up as he regarded Robbie somewhat sideways. A worn halo of blond highlights had almost grown out. His sweater was torn under one arm and his cheek looked like it had been scratched by a cat. The man was Robbie’s height, but scrappier. He vanished from a gallery opening when you looked away, and you never saw him again. You tracked him during a plane trip and then down to the baggage carousel but lost him amid all the arrivals.

The man pointed at Robbie’s demitasse and said, “That’s exactly what I need. Better make it a double, please.”

“Oh, we’re not …” Robbie started to say. “This isn’t a café.”

The man looked around the office, squinting toward the back of the room.

“Do you mind if I use your phone?” he asked. “Car trouble,” he explained, although the two metered parking spaces in front of the office were unoccupied.

He also said, “Although maybe I should ditch my car, I hate driving. I hate Los Angeles. The worst thing you can do in Los Angeles is not make a left turn at a light. For the rest of his life, the driver behind you will never forgive you, and it’s probably a good thing I don’t carry a gun because there have been more than a few occasions when I’ve seriously wanted to—Sorry, what?”

Robbie was staring. “You’d like to call a mechanic?” he asked.

“If it’s not too much trouble,” the man said, and again he looked at Robbie sideways, half grinning, probing.

There was something unhusked about him. Robbie guessed his age to be twenty-three or twenty-four. He found the number of a garage and dialed the phone before handing it over to the man. Twenty-five maybe, twenty-six. Robbie returned to the kitchenette to make the man an espresso after all while he waited for the mechanic.

The man sat down in one of the plywood-and-leather arm chairs in the front of the office and slid back, his demitasse nearly slipping off its saucer. Robbie perched at the edge of the adjacent chair. The man looked uncomfortable.

“Y’all sell furniture here?” he asked, concerned.

“No,” Robbie said, “no,” and chose not to explain that a few years back he and Carlo had entered a design contest but nothing had come of it.

The man crossed his legs, uncrossed them, crossed them again.

“We know,” Robbie said. “It looks better than it functions.”

“It looks
okay
,” the man said.

“We’re architects mostly. Or entirely, I should say.”

“We.”

“My boyfriend is out running errands,” Robbie explained.

The man yanked his hat out from his back pocket and pulled it on, his eyes now in shadow. He shifted it to the side, then straightened it.

“I would have used my cell phone,” the man said, “but I lost it, of course, because I lose everything. Which is the definition of a loser.”

“Not everything,” Robbie said.

“No, everything.”

“Not your hat.”

The man extended his hand and said, “Tom Field.”

Robbie introduced himself and for some reason offered Carlo’s name, as well.

“I’m glad you didn’t say partner,” Tom Field said. “In this town, I’ve noticed, everyone has a partner. A writing partner or a business partner or a boyfriend partner. I have to get out of here.”

“And go where?”

Tom squeezed the bill of his cap and said, “Architecture. Nice work if you can get it.”

“How long have you been in Los Angeles? Where do you live? What kind of work do
you
do?”

“A year,” Tom said, “one eternal infernal year.”

It was a mystery to him, he said, how he had ended up living in an efficiency apartment in the Valley with only one friend left in the city (left: implying there had been others whom he no longer knew), this one friend a writer of some repute who traveled frequently (Tom didn’t name him), but there it was, that was his life. He took off his baseball cap, scratched his head, put it back on. He was fidgety, maybe coming off of something. He said he thought he merely would arrive and fall into a circle of cool friends, which had worked up and down the Eastern seaboard.

To answer the question about what he did professionally, he said, “I’m not a hooker.”

“No, of course not,” Robbie said.

“Everyone assumes I’m some kind of escort,” Tom said, and he stood briefly and hitched up his pants and then sat again.

He was not currently employed, nor had he worked since moving here, although not for lack of trying. No one would hire him to do what he was best trained to do (which he didn’t specify), and eventually he gave up and had been living off savings, which would run out next month. His grandmother who raised him had more or less cut him off and suggested he enlist in the military. What did he do? He slept twelve hours, eighteen hours at a stretch and then drank multiple pots of green tea because he believed by drinking green tea, he would live forever. Then he was awake for twelve hours, eighteen hours. He owned neither a clock nor a watch. What did he do? When he first moved here, he spent his days exploring the city, wandering the southern wharfs and the industrial east and the forested north. He drove along the spine of the hills, he traced the coast. He failed to find
a surfer who would teach him to surf. No one wanted to play volleyball on the broad empty beach. He never found anyone in the park for a pick-up game of tennis. He walked the prettier walk-streets and was unable to start up a conversation with women with dogs. He stumbled across a Venice café he liked and loitered there every morning trying to establish himself as a regular, but no one was very interested in talking to him. Or when men were friendly, generally they expected a return on their investment, which was fine, but that kind of transaction had its limits. How did anyone meet anyone? How did a stranger encounter a stranger and get to know him so he was no longer strange?

Tom stared out at the street and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been more alone than I have in Los Angeles.”

Eventually he stopped leaving his apartment very much and somehow passed his caffeinated hours fiddling therein, and the days fell away more rapidly than he would have expected, the weeks, for there was much to learn and there were many things you could teach yourself to do in a musty studio apartment in the San Fernando Valley, and naturally when he needed to go out at night and get in some trouble, he could still do that. He lived as if he were waiting for something in particular to happen, for some inevitable turn, although what he couldn’t say, when he certainly could not say.

“Why am I telling you all this?” Tom asked. “You couldn’t possibly care, although you are very kind to listen.”

The puzzle of it was that Robbie did care. He had no idea why, but he did.

He said, “But you came out into the city today. You’re here now.”

“In daylight no less. Do you have a map?” Tom asked. “I’m all turned around.”

Robbie invited Tom back to his desk and pulled open a deep file drawer that was indeed packed with maps—the top one was the city guide for Los Angeles—but while Robbie was flipping to the worn page for Silver Lake, the page pulling free from the spiral binding, Tom stared at all of the other folded maps and pocket atlases and was smiling again at Robbie in his goofy sidelong way, and it was Robbie now who had to ask, “What?”

Tom took the liberty of reaching deep into the drawer with both hands to take out the pile of maps, which given their variable size, couldn’t be sustained as a single heap atop Robbie’s desk and fell in a landslide, displacing a few sheaves of discarded sketches. Tom sifted through them, the municipal guides of European capitals intermixed with pleated plats of properties Stein Voight had worked on, all of them soft at the fold. California road maps and tourist maps for archaeological sites. Canal cities, hill cities—a London A-to-Zed—river cities, island cities. There were train schedules for points back East and maps of the Moscow Metro and the Berlin U-bahn/S-bahn. Tom seemed drawn to one pocket guide in particular, the wine-dark brick called
Paris par arrondissement
with its gilt lettering nearly worn off the spine. He flipped to a random page, the particular neighborhood delineated in canary yellow, the streets white, places of note in pink, with the surrounding neighborhoods all a vague mint green, and he flipped the guide around as if he might actually step outside and try to head off for a certain rue or quay.

What Robbie didn’t say was that this little guide was his sentimental favorite. With his family, he’d gone to Paris as a child,
then back as an exchange student his junior year of high school. It was the one foreign city he had made his own without Carlo.

Tom looked again at the Los Angeles map open on Robbie’s desk. He said, “You can study a map of a city you’ve never been to and think you know the place, but when you finally go there, you’re always a little disappointed the actual city isn’t quite as neat or logical as the map led you to believe it would be. That’s not the case here. That’s one good thing I will say about Los Angeles—it looks like its map. The grids are grids and the squiggles are hills.”

This was true. “When you get up in the hills at night,” Robbie said, “and you look back at the basin, you see the city lights and the traffic and it’s like you
are
looking at the map.”

Tom glanced around at all the sketches on the desk. He sighed. He said, “I’ll tell you something. For a long while, I wanted to become one.”

“A what,” Robbie asked, “a map?”

“This,” Tom said. “An architect.”

“And what happened to that?”

“Do you have a cigarette? Keep it quiet that I asked though, because in theory, I quit.”

“We don’t smoke.”

Tom ran his fingertips across the open Los Angeles page as if encountering braille.

“I’ve been re-reading the Bible,” he said. “Or not reading it but listening to it on tape, a little bit at a time before I go to sleep.”

“Are you religious?”

This question caused Tom to release a single guffaw: That’s a good one.

“You don’t know Russian, do you?” he asked.

Robbie did not.

“I bought a Russian phrasebook and made these little cyrillic flashcards for myself, but that’s as far as I got. An H is an N, I think. The B is a V. But of course I lost the flashcards.”

“Were you planning a trip?” Robbie asked.

“I was reading one of those obese nineteenth-century novels,” Tom explained, “and I have to say the translation seemed a little lardy to me.”

“You were going to attempt it in the original.”

“Did you ever play an instrument?” Tom asked.

“Clarinet,” Robbie admitted. “Very briefly. Not briefly enough.”

“No way—me, too.”

“I have a good ear for other people, but not for myself,” Robbie said. “My poor parents.”

“That’s why I’m sticking with piano,” Tom said, “on behalf of my neighbors,” and the conversation skidded along like this, Tom chasing various subjects like cats in a meadow, never really grabbing hold: Did Robbie invest at all in astrology? Did he have a good history of twentieth-century physics he could recommend? Did a hammer and a feather truly fall at the same velocity and in what universe did that happen? Did Robbie know of a good place in town to get real gelato? Did Robbie like opera and would he think Tom a heathen if Tom admitted he could never sit through one in its entirety? Robbie answered each question and braced himself for the next, ably tracing the loose threading of Tom’s associations.

Tom paused and tapped the map with his forefinger accusatorily. “Do you ever wonder what it was like here back in the
day,” he asked, “before all of this land was shot through with freeways? Everyone always says it, but in my case it’s a little too true.”

“What’s a little too true?” Robbie asked.

But Tom didn’t answer because at that moment, laden with bags, Carlo returned. Robbie made introductions and explained the situation.

As if waiting for his eyes to adjust, it took a moment for Carlo to say hello. The three men stood by the door an awkward moment.

Far off, a helicopter. Nearby, a chain saw.