• • •
W
HAT ROBBIE COULDN’T SEE,
however, was that while Carlo claimed he had moved on, in truth he had not. Alone more and more at the office, every task, be it paying an electric bill or preparing a spec for the building department, took twice as long as it should have. He was irked by Robbie’s fascination with Tom even after Tom was dead and worried where this preoccupation was headed. He told himself to be patient, that Robbie would inevitably return to being his happy-go-lucky self, yet patience was not easily achieved. Carlo was unable to concentrate, and in Robbie’s absence, he became the architect who paced, the architect
who stared out windows. He walked back and forth across the office as if he were winding himself up to face a blueprint, but only ended up standing in the front window, idly monitoring the traffic.
Which was how one afternoon he found himself gazing at the shops across the boulevard, when a former neighbor boy named Gabriel loped by with another kid who was few years older and who worked in the liquor store. The older kid was long in the sideburns, and both his arms were densely tattooed with imagery including fat fish, the grim reaper, and something likely zodiac. He was friendly enough when you were picking up wine or vodka, but he always stank of cigarettes and sweat, and he couldn’t look you in the eye when he gave you your change.
Gabriel, on the other hand, fifteen now, had always been a sweetie. He had lived a few doors down from the two men for the first few years they’d owned their house, but then Gabriel’s parents had some trouble (serious drugs, it was said), split up, and Gabriel ended up staying with an elderly aunt in the four-plex adjacent to the gas station. Even though Gabriel currently lived near the office, the two men hadn’t spent time with him in a long while.
Gabriel had been slithering along on his skateboard, but once in front of the liquor store, he slipped off it and kicked it up so that the board stood beside him like a younger brother in his charge. Gabriel and the liquor store kid exchanged words, pounded fists in fraternity, and the older boy went in to work while Gabriel dropped his skateboard and glided across the street toward Carlo.
Carlo caught his glance and waved hello, which brought the boy to halt. Carlo opened the door to the office and said, “Hey, stranger.”
Gabriel nodded, the cool cat, a silent nod back, Hey.
“It’s been, like, an ice age since we’ve seen you,” Carlo said.
“An ice age,” Gabriel said. “Brrr.”
“What’s your friend’s name again, the guy who works across the street? Lonny, Donny, Ronny?”
“Something like that,” Gabriel said.
The boy smelled a wee bit herbal. His eyes were red.
“I don’t know about him,” Carlo said. He hadn’t meant to say this aloud, but it came out anyway, the subtext: Why are you wasting your time on him?
“Well, there’s not all that much to know,” Gabriel said.
He had been a cheerful boy, a slow but eager learner, loose-limbed, inquisitive. His parents, when they were around, were decent folk, but they worked in feature production and kept odd hours. They had always appreciated the willingness of the two men to baby-sit Gabriel when he was younger and monitor his whereabouts when he swerved (screeched) into adolescence. The boy had shown an early affinity for drawing, so the two men would loan him books, steer him toward Saturday art classes down at Ivanhoe, and Gabriel sometimes helped the men rake or weed and so forth. He was like a borrowed son.
“Why don’t you come in for a drink?” Carlo asked.
“A drink—a drink of what?”
“I don’t know what we’ve got,” Carlo said, and headed for the kitchenette.
Since he’d stepped back inside, this drew Gabriel in as well, although first he set his skateboard by the door and wiped his feet on the mat.
Carlo looked in the miniature refrigerator. There was some sparkling water, some organic root beer, organic cream soda.
“Where’s Robbie?” Gabriel asked.
“Away from his desk,” Carlo said. “Apparently.”
He offered Gabriel a root beer, and Gabriel eyed the bottle warily, kid stuff, but accepted it. He scratched his scruff. He had shorn his wavy black hair, and his shaved head looked like it had been dipped in magnetic filings. He wore earrings now, little dangling translucent figures that may have been miniature manga heroes. Gabriel, too, had been tattooed, albeit more tastefully: three red stars ran point-to-point up the inside of his left forearm. His jeans were especially torn, his plaid boxers half revealed, his concert-T torn, as well, and it was odd he was only wearing a T-shirt because although it was a mellow October day for Los Angeles, it wasn’t that warm. He smelled like rust, like an old sponge. He’d gained weight, he’d filled out probably by working out, although he was all yoke, his legs still skinny, knee knobs poking through the ripped denim.
“So how’s tricks?” Carlo asked.
Gabriel swung the question around: “I don’t know—how’s tricks with
you?”
“Fine, fine,” Carlo said.
But there must have been something thin about his response because Gabriel said, “Yeah, I heard.”
“You heard? You heard what?”
“About that guy who offed himself at your place,” Gabriel said.
Carlo felt himself turning red. He sat down at his desk and signaled Gabriel should pull up a chair. What, was the whole neighborhood gossiping about the two men? Of course they were. Silver Lake was a village in many ways. Half of him was curious to know what was being said, and the smarter half didn’t want to inquire. But he thought he should at least explain to Gabriel what had happened and maybe that explanation would whisper its way back to whoever was chattering whatever. So Carlo wound through the night in the most cursory way.
Tom as a curious interesting guy they met. On a lark, Tom for dinner. Tom too drunk to drive home, and in the morning, the tragedy.
“What did he use, his belt?” Gabriel asked.
Carlo hesitated, but then he said, “A rope. A rope he had in his car.”
“So the guy was, like, a freak?” Gabriel asked.
And Carlo shrugged, although he knew better. It was occurring to him, however, that it might be bad for business, a rumor loose in the hills, and so he nodded, yes, sure, a freak.
“That’s fucked up,” Gabriel said.
And again Carlo nodded, yes, fucked up. “Anyway,” he said.
“Anyway,” Gabriel echoed.
One time several years ago, the boy was playing with some kids out in the street and had been trying, helmetless, to perform an aerial trick with his skateboard when he landed on his head, scraping his ear against the pavement. As usual, his parents weren’t home but the two men were—they heard the howling—and one man drove while the other man held a towel against the boy’s face, the boy stretched out on the backseat. He was never in mortal danger but he’d been shocked, frightened by his own blood, how easily it ran. The two men stayed at the hospital even after Gabriel’s grateful parents showed up.
Sometimes Gabriel would tag along on weekends when the two men checked on projects. He used to drop by their office and lie on his stomach on the sisal rug between the men’s desks and do his homework. Carlo, good at math, became his best pal. Often Gabriel’s parents gave him permission from the set to stay for dinner, and he was a sport and ate whatever Carlo happened to be preparing, no matter the pancetta or fava beans or radicchio involved. But all of this was years ago, and now the boy was growing up and in some ways reminded Carlo of himself at about the same age: alternately sullen and enthused, deliberately hard to reach, elementally alone. In a different way, motherless.
“We never do anything anymore,” Carlo said. “We should do something, you, me, Robbie.”
“Such as what?” Gabriel asked.
“I don’t know. Are the Dodgers at home any weekend soon?”
Gabriel shook his head side to side and kicked his boot toe against the concrete floor.
“Right,” Carlo said. “The season is over.”
“I’m embarrassed for you,” Gabriel said.
“That wouldn’t be a first.”
“No, sir, it would not.”
They sat there quietly in the office. Carlo needed to turn on a lamp but didn’t want to, as if any movement on his part might make the kid get up and leave. He had heard a rumor in turn about Gabriel—this was about a year ago and came from Carlo’s friend the framer up the street, who knew Gabriel’s aunt—a rumor that like his parents, the boy had gotten into some sort of trouble, drugs in the schoolyard, something like that. It wasn’t difficult to see the boy’s life one day veering off-track into some no-good rail yard. He looked like he had something on his mind, a question he couldn’t quite formulate.
“Tell me about the girl whose heart you’re breaking,” Carlo said.
“Dude,” Gabriel said, setting his bottle down on the desk. “Which one?
“You rake, you,” Carlo said.
“Oh yeah, that’s me. A rake with his hoes.”
Carlo should not have laughed, but he laughed. He tried to redirect the conversation: “How’s school?”
“School is school,” Gabriel answered, and Carlo didn’t know why he’d bothered asking. But then Gabriel said, “I did read a book
for English that was mildly cool,” and he described the classic Paris novel—the wounded veteran, the gal about town, the bullfighter.
Carlo could almost remember what it was like to be a sophomore and reading the book for the first time.
“I had a paper due on it last week,” Gabriel said. “I read the whole book, I totally dug it, I really did, but why do I have to write a paper about it? Why can’t the book just
be?”
“The good news is eventually in life you can read books and not write essays about them,” Carlo said.
“No kidding.”
“‘Isn’t it pretty to think so?’” Carlo said.
The allusion made Gabriel smile, and then they lapsed into a silent spell again, the two of them swigging their root beers, one then the other as if to a metronome. Finally the sun had gone down and the office was dark, and Carlo had to switch on his desk lamp. As if exposed, Gabriel stood up and carried his empty bottle to the kitchenette.
Carlo saw the boy to the door. “Seriously,” he said, “let’s hang out.”
Gabriel rubbed his chin again.
Carlo needed to think fast. “Maybe you can help me with a project at the house,” he said, although he was improvising and didn’t have a project in mind.
“Why, what’s wrong with Robbie?”
“Nothing is wrong with Robbie,” Carlo said. “I only thought …”
Why was the kid making this so difficult? Carlo sensed something troubling the kid, and he merely wanted to avail himself should the boy need a someone older and wiser and foolish and full of himself to talk to.
“I’ve been thinking of building a fountain at the bottom of our property, a little hideaway, maybe a koi pond, or maybe no fish—I don’t know,” Carlo said, and there was some truth to this. “But it’s not something Robbie would be all that into helping out on,” he added, again true.
Gabriel’s expression: Oh, that sounds real fun.
“I’ll pay you,” Carlo said.
“I’m not sure you can afford me. But you know where to find me,” Gabriel said as he stepped out onto the sidewalk and dropped his board. And then with one push, another push, he was skating west toward Sunset.
Carlo returned to his desk, suddenly beat. He rested his arm on his desk, his head on his arm. He remembered a time when he and Robbie were architecture students and on a trip to Italy, specifically driving through the Veneto one day on a tour of Palladian villas with the most famous house still on the itinerary and with the goal to reach Venice by dusk. Carlo had been navigating, and after making a wrong turn, the two men were lost, although they knew they couldn’t be too far off track because they were in the right town. It was a mid-autumn Saturday, late in the afternoon—they were zooming along residential roads, houses far apart, unable to see anyone to ask directions. Then they passed a boy riding a bike. He was eight or nine and wearing a red sweater, black football shorts, and red socks. Carlo’s Italian was strictly about the accent, his vocabulary as paltry as his ability to express emotion in his mother’s language. But he said to the boy,
“Mi scusi. Dove la Rotunda?”
The boy pointed to his right and offered directions, and Carlo could have pieced together what the boy was telling him,
but there was something so lilting and joyful about the Italian, the song of the boy’s speech, that Carlo didn’t pay attention and was more confused than ever. He looked at Robbie and Robbie shrugged, and Carlo in turn shook his head and shrugged at the boy.
The boy rolled his eyes, silly Americano. He waved at the men, come along then, follow me, made a U-turn on his bike and soon veered off onto another road, the men trailing him in their rental car, the boy pedaling as fast as he could. And there were no other cars or trucks or other people who passed by, it was only the two men behind the boy on his bike, pursuing a long hill, a shallow grade, until suddenly in the distance, the famous villa appeared isolated at the crest. The great white house, the domed roof, the tidy columns and pediments, a paragon of symmetry and order against a backdrop of doom, the gathering nimbus clouds, the anxious trees.
“Mille grazie
,” Carlo said to the boy, “
mille grazie
,” and the boy grinned again his confident grin and swerved around back the way they’d come and was gone.
The rest of the week they talked about the boy and speculated about what kind of life he led. Football, pasta, ancient history. Robbie kept ribbing Carlo about how he could have had a mother from Bologna yet speak only phrasebook Italian. “That boy, that look he gave you,” Robbie would say and giggle. And then after they were back in Los Angeles, they would tease each other:
“Dove
put my sunglasses?”
“Mi scusi.
Could you scratch
mi
shoulder,
mille grazie
?
”
The boy in the red sweater who led them on his bike to the point in the road when the great house became visible, he had to be a man. Carlo wondered what had become of him. What kind
of life was his life now? Did he have any notion at all how long he had survived in the banter of two American men an ocean and a continent away?