“It was all very strange, and very sad,” Carlo said. “We’ll always be disturbed by what happened.”
This statement floored Robbie more than Gabriel’s remark. He wanted to ask, If you’re so disturbed, then why don’t we ever talk about it?
“He used a rope, you said?” the boy asked, and he made a comic gesture, bringing his thumb and forefinger up around his neck, sticking out his tongue to the side.
Carlo said, “He’d had it in his car. He probably used it to strap his belongings to the roof when he moved here cross-country.”
Again Robbie was flabbergasted: They thought that, did they?
“And when he hanged himself,” Gabriel asked, “did he, like, piss in his pants?”
“That’s enough,” Robbie said.
No one spoke.
“What?” Gabriel asked.
Robbie didn’t respond.
“What?” Gabriel asked again, looking first at Robbie, then Carlo, then Robbie again.
“It was tragic,” Robbie said.
“Okay,” Gabriel said.
“Unspeakably tragic when you think about it—”
“Okay, whatever.”
“That guy—
Tom
was his name. And Tom didn’t mean to kill himself,” Robbie said.
Carlo squinted at Robbie.
“It was an accident,” Robbie said.
“An accident,” Gabriel echoed, dismissive.
“Wait,” Carlo said, “what are you saying?”
“With the rope, with the time it took to form a noose,” Robbie said, “to rig it, the rest—” He drew a deep breath. “I’m saying he was taking his time, hoping we’d find him and stop him.”
Gabriel was standing with the heel of one boot atop the toe of the other, his fists in his pockets.
“I don’t think we can be sure what really happened,” Carlo said.
“It had to have been an accident,” Robbie insisted, and of course he’d thought this all these weeks but never come out and said it.
“We didn’t know him really,” Carlo said.
“Tom was always very dramatic,” Robbie said to Gabriel. “His grandmother told me.”
“His grandmother,” Carlo said. “Tom’s grandmother.”
“We spoke,” Robbie said.
“You spoke,” Carlo said.
Perhaps sensing a spat in the making, Gabriel led the way back inside the house. “There’s a good chance I have homework,” he said.
Carlo offered to give him a lift, but Gabriel said he wanted to walk.
“We’ll get started on clearing the brush down there soon,” Carlo said.
“Roger that,” Gabriel said, and half saluted the men, pivoted like an enlisted man, and slipped out the front door.
“Didn’t we decide against the fountain?” Robbie asked. “Not that I care a whole lot but—What?”
“You called her or she called you?” Carlo asked.
“He wanted us to find him and stop him,” Robbie said. “You’re right, we can’t know for sure, but maybe it was autoerotic asphyxiation—”
“You know we didn’t see signs of that.”
“You heard him that night. All his plans—”
“Robbie,” Carlo said softly, “what Tom did …”
“It had to have been an accident, Carlo. It’s the only explanation.”
Carlo was staring at the floor.
“I don’t know why you have to pursue this,” he said. “But if that’s what you need to believe—”
“I don’t
need
to believe it, I
do
believe it.”
“Robbie,” Carlo said again, not so soft now, “what Tom did was an assault against us, but mostly against you—look at you. You called his grandmother, you bothered that poor woman? What have you done with my boyfriend?”
Then Carlo took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry.”
Robbie wasn’t necessarily sure about what he’d declared, but on some level he knew he had to be right. If only he had proof that Tom never really meant to kill himself, then he would have a strong enough stroke to break the tide that held him from the shore. Or it wasn’t so much proof—proof per se would always elude him—but he wanted what Carlo for some Carlo-reason, born perhaps in his faithlessness, his grimmer side, would not give him: if not verification, then the validation of an idea, an alignment in thinking, a telling of the same story the same way. This seemed important to settle, like the only urgent matter in Robbie’s life right now, the only way he could move on—couldn’t Carlo see that? No, he could not. Carlo would not help him.
“I’m going to go change,” Carlo said, gentle now, his hand on Robbie’s forearm, sliding down his wrist, taking his hand, swinging his hand. “Then what, do you want fish? Or chicken? Or pasta maybe? Pasta, yes?”
Robbie may have nodded but he was no longer listening because he knew what he needed to do, what he should have done weeks ago.
• • •
T
HE NEXT MORNING,
he didn’t deal with the rest of the trash the way he said he would and stayed in bed while Carlo completed the chore. When Carlo came back in the house, Robbie pulled the covers up to his chin.
“I finished cleaning up that mess,” Carlo said. “I’m worried though. I’m worried this might only be the beginning of something.”
“It’s one isolated incident,” Robbie said.
“Well, you say that now, but—”
“You worry too much,” Robbie said and changed the subject: “Do I have a fever?”
Carlo placed his palm over Robbie’s forehead. “Not really,” he said.
“I think I may stay in bed a while longer. Do you mind?” Robbie asked.
“No, of course not. I’ll check in later,” Carlo said.
“I feel a little weird,” Robbie said. “I want to see if I can sleep this off.”
“We’ll have to spray-paint over the graffiti. I do hope you’re right—no more pranks.”
Carlo took a shower, dressed, and left for the office. Only then did Robbie get out of bed and retrieve Tom’s address book from where he’d stashed it in the dresser.
Tom had crossed out names two ways, either with a gouged scribble of barbed wire—these entries were entirely illegible—or with single arrows of ink shot through the names and numbers and/or email addresses, which were less illegible. Sometimes Tom had used a pencil to eliminate someone from his life, which to an extent made the expulsion reversible, although often he’d also used graphite to record the person in the first place, so erasing the strike-through risked eliminating what Robbie wanted to salvage.
He dialed several wrong or disconnected numbers before a listing from the B-page answered. The man was driving and upon hearing Tom Field’s name said he needed to pull over. Then Robbie said he didn’t want to alarm him, but—and the man interrupted, “Oh shit”—and Robbie continued, reporting Tom’s suicide and—another interruption: the man had heard Tom was dead and asked if Robbie was truly a friend or in actuality a clinic worker notifying Tom’s sexual partners that Tom had been infected. “No,” Robbie said, “oh, no. A friend, only a friend,” he
said. The man on the phone sounded relieved. He’d only known Tom a few weeks roughly a year ago, he explained, and all they had done was fool around a bit, all the while drinking more than the man was accustomed to, bourbon, wine, gin, whatever was handy. That was that, but Tom had been, how to put it, literate, and the man had hoped the two of them might become friends once the sexual relationship waned (which it did when the man wouldn’t get drunk with Tom in order to have sex). Friendship didn’t blossom and the man regretted that because Tom, he said, had been so vital and quirky and curious—”Exactly,
exactly
,” Robbie said, now the one interrupting. And then Robbie asked the looming question: “I know it’s speculation, but do you think Tom Field meant to kill himself or do you think it could have been an accident?”
A long silence followed, and Robbie thought the man had either lost his cell connection or didn’t want to engage on the subject, but then the man said he hadn’t known Tom well, and despite the fight they had the last time they got together, he remained inexplicably fond of Tom Field and thought about him surprisingly often. He’d run into someone else with whom Tom had a fling, who had heard about Tom’s death and who had relayed the rumor. And no, the man did not think it was (for lack of a better way of describing it) a straight suicide. There must have been an extenuating circumstance, some other intention now masked by the tragic outcome. He’d heard the news and it hadn’t computed. But of course, as noted, this was speculation, nothing more.
The second man, surname beginning with C, whom Robbie reached, he found at an ad agency in New York. This second man,
too, had heard how Tom died but didn’t believe it, and Robbie offered confirmation. The man said they’d dated a month and he thought it impolite to swap bedroom stories with any of Tom’s exes. Robbie made it clear he hadn’t dated Tom. The man said, “You must be the only one.” He took for granted that the suicide was alcohol-related or drug-related. He didn’t know the details but assumed all along it was an overdose, which was to say likely an accident. One great date they’d gone on was to see an old master retrospective and Tom had revealed an obvious passion for the paintings. Tom had black moods and no doubt thought about killing himself, but the man couldn’t see Tom actually going through with so ultimate an act.
“‘Vissi d’arte,
baby,’ Tom liked to say.”
To live for one’s art, Robbie thought. Once he himself might have said he did that, after a fashion, but not in recent years.
On the F-page of Tom’s address book, Robbie thought he’d find other relatives, but only Tom’s grandmother was entered, hers being one of the few unstruck-through names. Another name not crossed out belonged to a novelist known for over-the-top graphic depictions of urban tawdriness—the writer to whom Tom had alluded but not mentioned by name, his one friend left in Los Angeles. He did not answer his phone.
Robbie continued calling the numbers he could decipher, and at first it seemed odd that Tom’s deleted friends had somehow received word of his demise, but then it didn’t seem so strange: Once Tom entered someone’s life, he never really left it. Tom’s lost friends had a way of tracking him from a distance, wondering about him privately and then chattering about him when, say, at a party the discovery was made that some amount of time
spent with Tom in the past was a shared adventure. Tom was never forgotten, he became the subject of lurid gossip, and apparently he had left behind an extensive network wired by rumor, fascination, and bitterness.
While speaking to whomever he reached, Robbie paced the length of the house. He knew Carlo would say he was intruding, breaking-and-entering Tom’s life, but Robbie didn’t care. He was on to something, gathering compelling evidence, building a case, because each conversation ran the same way: An ex-fellow receptionist from the auction house in New York (from the K-page) or another ex-fellow receptionist from the lobbyist’s office in D.C. (the N-page), both had experienced (and enjoyed) limited intimacy with Tom, had heard via some faint channel that Tom was dead and more or less how he’d died, and affirmed Robbie’s hypothesis (while at the same time asserting the improvability of the conjecture), that Tom in all likelihood was messing around in some bizarre way but never intended to end his own life. True proof remained slippery, but enough people reaching the same conclusion certainly was starting to look a lot like proof.
“Did he ever cook you a meal?”
The question was posed by a woman whose maiden name began with P and who knew Tom in New York. She hadn’t heard about Tom’s suicide and needed a moment to collect herself. They had met in a weekend life drawing class when they set up their easels next to each other. Both of them had formal training and were trying to keep their eyes sharp. The woman said when Tom’s hand moved across the page—she knew this would sound cliché, but whatever—it was as if he were ever so lightly caressing the blushing skin of his subject. They saw each other in class every
Saturday and always sat together and started getting coffee after class, and then one Saturday Tom asked if he could draw the woman and she said yes, if she could draw Tom. He followed her to her apartment. She was unclear whether like the models they drew in class, they, too, would disrobe. Tom stripped everything, and so she did, as well. They drew each other drawing each other. She could remember the sound of the radiator clanking and the sound of Tom’s charcoal pencil against the paper, the way he brushed the side of his hand against the page or used his thumb, and she could remember the way they were each aroused a little bit, although that was the extent of any erotic exchange. And the hour during which they drew each other one winter Saturday years and years ago, the woman said, was one of the most beautiful she could recall. They trusted each other and respected each other and knew each other well, even if only for a short time, and in many ways she was always searching for the perfect improvised afternoon like that one, hoping for a surprise in the dwindling white light of winter. Would it be too much to say she began believing in something that afternoon?
Robbie was no longer pacing and instead sitting on the floor by the piano, one arm wrapped around his knees, the other holding the phone as close as possible to his ear.
The woman said, “After we were done drawing, Tom looked around my pantry and asked if he could cook me dinner. I told him I wished he liked girls. And then he whipped up something amazing, boeuf bourguignon or coq au vin—”
“It was coq au vin,” Robbie said.
“You think?”
“That’s what he cooked for us,” Robbie said.
“So he did cook for you,” the woman said.
“The night he died,” Robbie said. “He died here. At my house.”
The woman said, “Oh dear.” She said, “You poor dear.”
Robbie brought Tom’s address book to his cheek, like a flower, the soft pages.
“It wasn’t your fault,” the woman said. “That’s why you’re calling.”
“More that I want to understand,” Robbie said.
“You won’t.”
“I know that.”
“You can’t.”
“More that I want to figure out if it was an accident—”
“If you’re asking the question.”
“If I’m asking the question … what?”
“He cooked for you,” the woman repeated. “A lot of wine in the skillet. Extra mushrooms. I knew him a while ago, and he may have changed.”