Silver Lake (26 page)

So Carlo made it from the stone yard back to the house, up the rain-slick hill roads, to await the delivery of his slate and saw Robbie’s car parked on the street and thought maybe Robbie would be home and could help when the stone arrived. However, Robbie wasn’t home. Carlo found the step ladder in the hall and the upper cabinet flung open, his art kit on the floor. On the bed: Tom’s sketch.

Carlo sat on the bed, frozen. Everything was catching up with him.

It had occurred to him to get rid of the drawing, but it seemed wrong to destroy something Tom had made, another betrayal. He supposed in time he’d throw it out, and Carlo had thought his art kit was safe (sometimes he’d hidden small gifts for Robbie in it). No one could have seen him hide the drawing except Tom (and Carlo was pretty sure he didn’t), and obviously Tom did not tell Robbie it was in there.

A trunk honked, the delivery. The rain was coming down hard now, a cold rain at that, and the men from the stone yard were in a foul mood. Carlo was not at his best and so there was a disagreement about where they’d deposit the slate—not around back like Carlo wanted, only on the front driveway by the garage.

Fine, fine. Carlo threw up his hands. And so the men lowered the pallets at the foot of the driveway, and no one was home to help, and the boy was nowhere when he was needed, and so Carlo himself had to load the slate in a wheelbarrow and maneuver the
heavy cart around the side of the garage. It was cumbersome but easy enough with the pre-cut pieces that would be positioned around the sides and base of the fountain pool, but the terrace pieces were large and difficult to lift, only fit one at a time in the wheelbarrow. And Carlo kept slipping in the mud, his ankles turning. And the rain came down and came down, and he was soaked and his boots were coated in muck, his jeans, but he managed to get the stone around to the back patio, great. Great, great—he couldn’t actually use the wheelbarrow to get the stone down to the lower terrace—no path was clear and the drop was too steep anyway—and he should have waited until he could get Gabriel to help him, and everything was catching up with him, and the only way to avoid being sunk entirely was to keep moving, to carry the slate down the hill by hand.

Which he started to do, but when he picked up one of the smaller rough-edged islands of slate, the wet stone was slippery against his work gloves, and so he had to carry the piece with his bare hands. And he managed to get a good grip on the flat, heavy piece of slate, even though it was difficult to hold, and he headed down the hill with it along a foot-wide path through the tea bushes and sage and other brush, slipping as he went, losing his footing, sliding on his ass. He got up and headed down and slipped again, but he made it down the hill, and if he was crying, he wouldn’t have been able to tell because his face was so wet from the rain. And then he climbed back up to the patio and grabbed another piece and went back down the hill, slipping three times, sliding part of the way on his side. And again, up the hill and down with the slate. And again. And again.

He managed to make a dozen trips up and down the back slope before he sat down in the mud and rain at the bottom of the
hill and could carry no more. Everything had caught up with him.

He had walked into the kitchen that night and found Tom at the sink. “What are you doing up?” Carlo had asked, and he said, “You don’t have to do the dishes.” And Tom had answered, “I was raised a certain way.” Tom said: “Nobody else owes me anything.” Tom asked: “If not you, then who?”

Autumn was gone and the winter would be a long winter, and Carlo let the rain surround him. He wondered, Must atonement be theater, must there be an audience? And if a man said he was full of remorse but no one heard him say it, did it matter? In the end, with no one to listen, with everyone gone, how would he redeem himself?

• • •

H
E 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?

• • •

H
E 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.