“I’m not saying it’s Tom exactly,” Carlo said. “But it’s a hanged man. Because people hang themselves at our house, and someone thinks that’s funny.”
“This sort of thing,” his father said but didn’t add more.
“If that’s true, it would be really cruel,” Robbie said, “really low.”
“Low, I agree,” Carlo said, and he took the shirt and tethered ball from Robbie and chucked it into one of the still-tagged trash bins.
Robbie stood on the front path, hands on his hips, scowling.
“We can talk about it later,” Carlo said to him. “Dad?”
“It’s so unnecessary,” his father said. “The thought, the creativity, if you want to call it that, the
expression.
So wasted on absolutely nothing.”
“Come on, Dad,” Carlo said, passing his father on the way in the house. “You have your plane.”
Robbie went in, as well, but the old man remained on the stoop a moment longer, gazing at the pepper tree as if he saw something else hanging from its limbs.
• • •
C
ARLO HAD DRIVEN HIS FATHER
most of the way to the airport before his father spoke: “It’s these idle children with too much time on their hands,” he said. “No place in this world.”
Carlo gripped the top of the steering wheel with both hands.
“Last spring,” he said, “I was driving back from a dinner party. I was alone because Robbie was home sick. Two guys rushed my car at a stoplight.”
His father shifted in the passenger seat. Carlo told him most of the rest, although not about meeting Tom at the police station, none of that or what followed.
“Son,” his father said. “You told me it was an accident.”
They had entered the airport and were working their way around the horseshoe of terminals. Carlo signaled and maneuvered toward the curb.
“When I made it home later, Robbie was already asleep,” he said, “and the next morning I didn’t tell him. I never told you, I never told him.”
His father bit his lower lip.
“You’ve been through an awful lot lately,” he said, “haven’t you?”
Carlo put the car in park.
“I don’t know. Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe? I should say so,” his father said.
His furrowed brow was easy to read: Why was his son giving him this news right as they were about to part company? In doing so, Carlo was being unkind. He got out of the car and grabbed his father’s bag from the backseat along with his hat and helped the old man out of the passenger’s side, waiting while his father smoothed back his hair with his palm and threw his overcoat over his arm and took the bag, the hat.
Father and son stood there a moment. A plane lifted off. Henry gripped Carlo’s arm. It was clear he didn’t want to leave him, not like this.
“Dad, your flight,” Carlo said.
His father kissed him on each cheek and a second time on the left before moving toward the automatic doors and heading off, turning once to wave. Carlo leaned against the car.
When they were alone in the kitchen that night, Tom had said, “And yet you believe all there is is the ground beneath your feet. Nothing more than that? That’s it?”
Maybe their house was cursed, maybe Gabriel was on the right track. Ghosts of beloved dogs, of sad young men rambled around Silver Lake. Tom as a ghost strewing trash; phantom Tom hacking the plum trees; Tom the poltergeist taunting them with a minimalist effigy. Tom was behind the pranks, insisting in some spectral way that finally he be understood for who he was, in trouble, lonesome: unseen.
If only he could subscribe to something alongside hard science, Carlo thought, a complementary unempirical system that made working sense of the proofless: Against what was known, faith in the balance. To find a place for skepticism or doubt or
cosmic ambivalence was a yearning as fast-spun, unexpected, and perplexing as any Carlo had suffered that autumn, and for one brief moment, the mere prospect of belief and, perhaps more significantly, the prospect of commune with others holding belief, left him light.
“Sir,” an airport police officer on a motorcycle said. “You can’t park here. You’ll need to move your car, sir.”
A plane descended toward the airport, lumbering, hesitant, as if it had hoped to remain airborne longer and landing were a defeat.
• • •
H
E DID NOT HEAD STRAIGHT HOME
because he did not believe in ghosts or restless spirits. He believed in real people, unknown but real, their malevolence real. Even though he hadn’t been back since May, he found the place near the airport easily enough, the acre of a parking lot, the store itself as unremarkable as any in the city except that there was an armed guard posted out front who opened and closed the door for each customer.
Carlo made his way through the racks of rifles and hunting gear and approached the counter, itself a vitrine of handguns. All the pistols on glass shelves looked like reptilian specimens in a natural history museum: even inert and lifeless, a snake looked capable of harm.
All these months, he’d kept the claim check in his wallet. He slid it across the counter. He wasn’t sure what the procedure would be, if another clearance would be required. Maybe the weapon had been resold.
A sales clerk looked at the claim check and pointed at the date. His eyebrows bounced up and down twice, as if to say, Oh
my, oh my. Or. Why now, why now? He indicated he would be back in a moment, and then, as if he thought Carlo might disappear again for another six months, the clerk added, “This shouldn’t take long.”
And it didn’t take long before he returned with what could have been a shoe box. Although there weren’t shoes in the box, but rather, fitted into a foam bed, a fat, square, silver L of metal, pug-nosed, unfed, brutish: a gun.
A
FTER CARLO AND HIS FATHER
left for the airport, Robbie was dumping coffee grounds down the trash disposal when he became stuck on a thought, or less a thought than a question: If challenged by the same tragedy in their home as the two men had been this autumn, and if then subjected to the same sequence of unsettling vandalism, wouldn’t most couples, in seeing each other through the ordeal, be brought closer together? The morning Robbie found Tom, Detective Michaels had suggested as much would happen, but that had not been the case. And now this sketchy effigy hanging from the pepper tree—Robbie did not want to talk about it later. He had no desire ever to talk about it with Carlo.
He decided to change what he was wearing and put on a pair of jeans he hadn’t worn in a while, more frayed than what he usually went around in, a tighter fit in the seat. He undid an extra
button of his shirt. When he headed out, Robbie noticed the shallow craters of mud where the lost plum trees once stood. It wasn’t until that moment that he realized Carlo had apparently given up on the saplings.
Jay giggled when he answered his door because he and Robbie were dressed alike, their torn jeans, their faded black shirts. He offered to switch into something else, and Robbie said he hardly cared if they looked like twins, which they didn’t, and never could, he pointed out, not with their age difference. Then Jay said something along the lines of, Oh please, you look like you’re turning thirty, not forty.
Their afternoon together was loosely structured around Jay’s quest for a new belt buckle, thus drawing Robbie in and out of stores (and not only clothing stores) he wasn’t sure he’d ever set foot in on Vermont, on Hollywood, down Sunset a-ways. Instead of the elusive belt buckle, Jay bought inexpensive opera CDs and a set of pastel pencils. He bought two used cowboy shirts, while Robbie purchased none, although he did try on several, and when he did, Jay slipped through the curtain into the changing booth with him to assess the fit. They became familiar, easily physical, or Jay did; he had a way of tapping Robbie’s arm, shoulder, or back as if to italicize a comment or add an exclamation point. They made a date to hang out again after the weekend.
That night at the house, the two men read, one in the main room, the other in the bedroom. When Robbie came to bed, Carlo let his open book fall against his chest.
“I’m sorry if I was angry this morning,” he said.
Robbie nodded. “It was strange, I admit. Hard to read. But it will stop.”
“You think?”
Again Robbie nodded.
Then Carlo was staring out the window, not looking Robbie in the eye when he asked, “Do the police know you’ve got Tom’s address book?”
Robbie burned with blush. He said, “No,” and he explained how he’d found the address book in the couch. So Carlo had noticed it on the dresser after all, and yet all this time had gone by and he’d said nothing. That fact aroused a different kind of burning, one deep beneath Robbie’s sternum.
“You wanted something of Tom’s, a keepsake?” Carlo asked.
That sounded good, so once more Robbie nodded.
“Or were you hoping to discover . something?” Carlo asked.
Robbie surprised himself with his frankness: “That, too,” he said.
“I see. And what did you hope to learn?”
Carlo seemed extra-nervous, extra-tense, like he was wearing a stiff, cringing, papier mâché mask of his face over his true easy-grinning face.
“What have you discovered?” he asked, impatient.
Once upon a time, Robbie wanted to talk to Carlo about Tom, but now Tom was a place Robbie had journeyed to on his own, and he found he didn’t want to relay his adventures in Tomland, what he saw there, what he carried away from that trip. Tom belonged to him alone, not the two of them together.
“I can’t say I discovered anything,” he said, and his voice sounded thin, he knew.
“Do you feel, then, that you’re over Tom?” Carlo asked.
Over Tom!
As if these past months Robbie had been lovesick, and perhaps it was fair to say he’d suffered an infatuation for a
dead man, for an acquaintance whom he never got to know as a true friend, but that seemed so far from the core of what he’d felt. How misunderstood he was in that moment, he thought. How monumentally misunderstood, yet to explain why meant surrendering what he wanted to guard, so he remained cool.
“I suppose,” Robbie said, an easy exit. “Sure.”
Carlo propped up his book but didn’t read it. This was when, unplanned, Robbie asked how Carlo would feel if Robbie extended his break from the office.
“Oh,” Carlo said. “For how long do you think?”
“I’m not sure.”
Carlo didn’t blink. His mouth was open, a thought forming.
Make a demand, Robbie thought. Tell me to come to work. Say to me, Earn your keep. Say, Be my best friend. Say, We don’t talk—talk to me.
“No worries,” Carlo said. “Everything is fine. I can manage.”
And Robbie thanked him with a cursory kiss on the cheek and then switched off his night table lamp.
• • •
E
VERYTHING WAS HARDLY FINE,
and not for a moment did Carlo believe Robbie had moved beyond Tom or the tragedy at their home, nor did he think they were done being taunted by whoever wanted to prolong the aftermath of that tragedy. A liar knows when he’s being lied to, and Carlo was certain he was being misled. He regretted raising the address book but he couldn’t stand wondering any longer. Robbie knew something, and he wasn’t admitting it. Or maybe he knew nothing, and there was nothing to admit.
The only remedy for Carlo’s anxiety seemed to be working out back on his fountain. He spent that weekend digging a trench for a pipe from the house to the fountain and in the process made a muddy mess. He had to pull out some lavender that had been allowed to shrub and gather cobwebs, and dead irises, and withered flax, and then the dead plants had to be bagged and carted off to the conservation center. Also he was working on hoeing the dirt down where the fountain would go, leveling the plot. As long as he was engaged physically, he could be level. When he stopped to rest and leaned on his hoe, dark thoughts returned, although he tried to soothe himself with this thought: The holiday season was always a kind of mountain pass—make it through, and the flat valley ahead would be easy to traverse. The holidays were a time of joint-survival, and the New Year this year, he hoped, might occasion renewal and rededication. The two men would find their way. So he had to hold on. He had to hold it all together for the two men, and he could resent that burden all he wanted, but it remained his to bear.
At the office the Monday after Thanksgiving, he calculated which bills not to pay but quickly lost his focus. He made fountain doodles, cascading water doodles. He gazed out at the street. There were ten phone messages from the television producer, and so finally, reluctantly, Carlo called him back.
“Where the fuck have you been?” the producer asked. He was on a ski slope somewhere out of state. “Did you see what I got in the mail? Did you fucking see?”
Carlo had not yet opened the envelope that had been messengered from the producer’s office but did so now, skimming what turned out to be a letter from a neighborhood association.
A complaint had been filed with the buildings department protesting the scale of the producer’s house (and these were for the old non-villa plans), in particular its height, which citizens of a street up the hill claimed would obstruct their view, and which citizens across the street said would effectively block sunlight. Carlo was inclined to side with the neighbors, and the new villa scheme would be much, much worse.
“Does this happen to you often,” the producer asked, “one fuck-up after another?”
Carlo began to compose a temperate response.
“Fix it,” the producer said.
“Fix it?”
“Maybe I should have my attorney file suit to recoup the money I’ve wasted on you so far, not to mention you being in breach,” the producer said.
In breach? This was rich. “I wouldn’t worry. With the new materials, the upgrades, the neighborhood association will like your new plans much better,” Carlo said.
The producer didn’t respond. He probably could tell he was being played. It was what he did professionally, play people.
“With the revisions we’re making,” Carlo said, “you’ll end up with a more traditional home. I promise you, everyone will be happy.”