Silver Lake Read Free

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 finda 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