A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  We found the sheet with the paper topics on it, surprisingly clean and unworn, at the very bottom of a pile of books and CDs on my desk that I thought had been there like that for at least three months. He folded it up into a neat origami square and put it in his pocket. And that’s how it happened.

  When Dylan left I rearranged the piles of books into several neater stacks by the door. He showed up two days later with the ghostwritten paper and accompanied me to turn it in, and we got drunk together, celebrating.

  Cameron offered me a ride in his car one day soon after, and I made several trips up and down the dorm stairs, carrying as many books as I could hold in my arms. They filled the back seat. I pushed them one by one through the slot in the metal return bin in front of the library, conscious of each heavy thud as they fell.

  The smell in my room lingered even though I opened the windows as wide as they could go, letting in all the chill, sharp winter air. The next morning I woke up shivering and shut the windows, deliberately lit a cigarette, and chain-smoked for the rest of the day to restore the room to its proper, non-Tennysonian state. It wasn’t anything like a conscious decision, but every part of me colluded in a resolution that I wouldn’t think about the paper again. For a week I’d been in another world, which I’d fallen into through some strange, book-lined tunnel, and now I’d followed a thread back to reality. There was no way to reconcile what I’d let Dylan do (I found it hard to think about it as something I’d actually done) with how I thought of myself. A pocket of willed amnesia formed around my decision, the dark matter of denial. I determined never to study poetry again if I could avoid it, and a lifelong aversion hardened into place.

  It’s probably significant that in my other English class that semester, Renaissance Drama, I discovered the field of study that became my academic passion. I excelled in the course and became obsessed with the complicated politics of Elizabethan England, the scandal of the Spanish match, Charles I’s abortive courtship with a Spanish princess, and the role of the theatre in the public outcry around the incident. The teacher nominated my paper on Middleton’s obscure play A Game at Chess (meticulously referenced and cross-checked) for some kind of department award, and it won an ‘honorable mention’. She wrote letters of recommendation to graduate school for me, and off I went to write a dissertation about the politics of English drama in the years 1601 to 1640. I chose to fully embrace and expand the version of myself that performed so well in that particular class, as though by doing so I could blot out the disastrous failure in that other course. I discovered that it was possible to avoid the entire nineteenth century even with the period requirements in graduate coursework. I didn’t have to think seriously about Victorian literature again.

  I had a few nightmares about the paper, dreaming that someone in my department would discover the truth about it when I was up for promotion or tenure or publication and undo my career. It was more than potentially embarrassing, but I never let myself think in any detail about what the consequences would be if it were discovered, and the pocket of forgetfulness around the whole event stayed in place most of the time. In my first year at graduate school a group of tipsy students at a party decided to play a version of ‘I’ve Never’, or ‘Truth or Dare’ — some appalling adolescent truth-telling, drinking game — and I hurried away, despite how long the odds were that it would ever come up. Odd things would bring it to mind every once in a while: a certain arrangement of books of various colored bindings on a library shelf; the smell of bourbon and fresh tobacco smoke; the sight of old, tall trees with complicated roots that matched my imaginary sense of what a yew tree might look like — one of the images from In Memoriam that had lodged itself in my memory.

  Occasionally I wound up in conversations with other graduate students about the insecurity many of us held in common: the idea that underneath our veneer of wide knowledge and showy, articulate powers of clever analysis we were frauds, and that one day we would be unmasked. It surprised me when I first learned that so many others shared that feeling, but my wonder lasted only for a moment and then it seemed somehow a natural and inevitable form of neurosis for people who did what we did, attempting to master fields of knowledge that only seemed to grow exponentially and become more impossible to grasp the further you explored and the more you learned.

  I experienced the sympathy that comes with sharing a common fear, and at the same time felt irrevocably isolated from the rest of them by my secret. For them, this anxiety was merely a phantasm they could laugh about even if it was genuinely painful and sometimes — momentarily — crippling. But mine had tangible form, an actual basis. Again, stupidly, I felt angry at Tennyson. Because of him — because of my own failure to come to terms with his writing, and the choice I made to deal with that, I reminded myself — I was vulnerable to exposure in a way that my peers were not. I compensated furiously and became obsessed with academic rigor as though it were a fetish, trying hard to complete the insanely long and difficult reading lists for class, researching thoroughly every essay, every presentation, every conference paper. I was a conscientious student. By the time my qualifying exams were over I felt as though I’d proven something to myself.

  At my first MLA conference, my doctorate freshly conferred, I wound up on the edges of a hushed after-dinner conversation about some history student at an Ivy League school who had just been stripped of his PhD after another student who had read his work tried to visit the archive in Greece on which some of this ex-PhD’s dissertation was based, only to discover that the whole thing was a fabrication. From my seat at the far end of the table I strained to hear the details, consumed with ambivalence about whether I wanted to know the whole story, or block it all out. I tried to figure out whether there was even a library or document repository in the obscure village in question, or just no file or cache of documents that mattered, as had been claimed; either way …

  ‘Can you imagine?’ said one of my friends at the table. ‘A whole archive?’

  The archive forger had just landed a job at another Ivy League school and had been forced to turn it down. It looked bad for the school; it looked bad for the field, for everyone. A whole archive — that was shocking, and an insult to scholarship, and indicated a contempt for the field as well as a neurotic desire to be exposed. My transgression was so little in comparison. I quelled the incipient anxiety, the desire to leave the table.

  I wondered how the student had felt, the one who had discovered the absence of the archive: the shock, the moments of self-doubt, wondering if she had the wrong address, or had gone to the wrong village, or had been mistaken about the name of the files … and then the dawning, unbelieving comprehension, and the decision to tell someone, and the question of what to say, the burden of knowing that her evidence would have such devastating consequences even if it was true and right to bring it forward.

  So that was my big secret, and, as far as I was aware, only Dylan knew about it. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that there would be darker, more potentially damaging secrets buried within the group, secrets that I was excluded from. I was naive, all the while thinking of myself as the knowing, insightful one.

  4.

  It was exactly a week after that lunch with Elizabeth that Natasha walked into the bar where I was sitting and drinking with two colleagues from my department, Marcus and Felix. They were both stressed to the point of physical illness by anxiety over whether they would get tenure this year. We had come for a drink following a talk by a visiting academic, who had been taken out to dinner with the chair and other colleagues more senior or more interesting than us. More in the visitor’s field. We sat at the end of the bar, and graduate students and other junior faculty members drank around us, and the occasional undergraduate. I recognized a couple of seniors from one of my classes the previous semester, serious young guys talking intensely over their beers. Everything was doubled and blurred in the stained mirror along the wall: strings of lights, bottles, faces, faded celebration banners from someb
ody’s birthday months earlier.

  Marcus and Felix had spent a while discussing their ailments — chronic sinus infection for one, or both, perhaps, and incipient ulcers. I nodded sympathetically and tried not to think about the burning feeling I sometimes experienced in my own stomach. Not an ulcer, surely. Marcus seemed to have lost some hair in the last year or so, but he’d grown it longer as well, a decision that was probably made with the idea that it would disguise the balding issue but unfortunately worked the other way. They started talking about baseball, which was less dismal than the talk about ulcers but just as alienating to me, and I lost my hold on the thread of conversation when one of them started telling the other about a website where you could order team stickers for your car, for your bike …

  Natasha appeared by my side; I looked and saw her pale profile; she was trying to catch the bartender’s eye. She turned and smiled at me. ‘Hello there.’ She brushed her fringe of hair aside, performing exactly what I had wished to do, and my own fingers tingled. For once her hair stayed where it was and I looked into her eyes, gleaming brown.

  ‘Hi, Natasha. Have you been here for a while? I didn’t see you.’

  She shrugged, looked away from me to the bartender, who had finally approached us. He asked her what she wanted. She ordered a beer.

  ‘Do you want one, Elliot?’ she asked. ‘What are you drinking?’

  I blinked down at my beer, three-quarters finished. ‘Whiskey,’ I said, on impulse. ‘On the rocks. Johnnie Walker.’

  ‘A whiskey on the rocks. Johnnie Walker,’ she repeated. I opened my wallet. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I’ll buy you a drink.’

  I started to protest and she shook her head, smiling.

  ‘OK. Thanks,’ I said. ‘Are you here with someone?’

  She shrugged again. ‘I was with some people. Over there.’ She nodded toward the other room, the one with booths and tables. ‘They just left. I saw you here and thought I would say hello.’

  ‘Well. Hello.’

  The drinks arrived. I raised my glass and she clinked hers against it with some force. ‘Cheers.’ The music that had been coming from the jukebox stopped, and the gap it left felt long and awkward. When another song eventually began it was disappointing, with too-fast, electronic beats.

  I asked how her work was going.

  ‘It’s going well, actually,’ she said. ‘I like it here. It’s nice to have no students.’

  Her research fellowship included no teaching for the first two years.

  ‘I’m envious.’

  She smiled. ‘Are your students that bad?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You are just weary.’

  ‘Yes, that’s it,’ I said, enjoying the poetic possibilities of the word.

  My colleagues were now arguing with passion about a game that had taken place two weeks ago, or two seasons.

  ‘Do you want to see if there’s a table?’ I asked Natasha.

  She shrugged again. It seemed to come with a kind of nod. I wondered whether there were different kinds of shrug for yes and no and maybe, and for not caring. I decided I was going to work it out.

  She glanced over into the adjoining room. ‘I see one.’ She led the way.

  I’ve heard it said that when you fall in love with someone, you’re really just falling in love with a mirror, the ideal version of yourself that you see reflected in the eyes of the other person. This rang true to me in some ways. Falling in love came with a need to present the best, most attractive version of myself; and then, if the feeling was returned, a short-lived period of triumph while I basked in the sense of achievement and forgot that the version of myself was just that, a limited version that hid all the things that I didn’t consider interesting or attractive — a kind of fiction. Then the less interesting and less attractive parts of myself would naturally assert themselves, and I’d spend a while feeling like a fraud.

  With Natasha I’d had this sense from the start — from the conversation about Dylan’s death — that all my normal efforts at presenting a more attractive self would be transparent. But I didn’t know how to act any differently. I concentrated all my efforts on impressing her in the most invisible, least obvious way possible.

  Her main discernible attitude toward me seemed to be pity. This in itself wasn’t without potential. Pity could go hand in hand with sympathy, concern, a desire to comfort that could shade into desire. I’d probably played that hand a little with Elizabeth, who seemed to find me more attractive after Dylan’s death than she had before, her hand lingering on my shoulder when she said goodbye, or on my forearm when she was pressing home a point or trying to convince me that talking about Dylan would help me ‘process’ the experience. But pity could also go the other way, into colder territory where you just felt sorry for the other person: the other pathetic, undesirable person.

  Pity that blended into desire was something I associated with women who liked to be needed. But Natasha wasn’t like that. The sense of self-sufficiency she presented was impressively solid. It was hard to imagine her needing anyone — although I tried, and the conjured picture was disturbingly beautiful: all her strength turned to liquid distress, and me able to be of service. But this image quickly dissolved; it wasn’t her. So: pity, shading probably away from desire, and an unnerving kind of psychological X-ray vision. That’s what I thought Natasha had for me.

  As I followed her through the bar toward an empty table I found that I badly wanted to convince her. That’s how I thought about it, as though my own self was an argument I could win by some rhetorical sleight of hand, a performance of emotional sprezzatura — the art of doing everything brilliantly while looking as though you aren’t really trying.

  We found a table, its surface covered with crumbs from chips and popcorn and wet rings left by glasses. Natasha swept her hand across it, knocking most of the crumbs to the floor, and brushed her fingers against her jeans as she sat down on one of the red vinyl-covered chairs. I’d been concentrating so hard on my thoughts about being convincing and her self-sufficiency that I’d stopped noticing everything else, and as I watched her sit, it all came back — the noise and chatter of the people around us, the oppressive warmth of the air in the place, the sickly yellow of the light from the fake antique wall sconces, the music. The song finished. Another one started. It was familiar, but I couldn’t place it. It sounded right. If I could have chosen it as a soundtrack I would have. A guitar’s heavy chords, a catchy melody in the bass.

  Natasha looked up at me. She was sitting almost on her hands, thumbs tucked under her thighs, her arms straight. ‘Are you going to sit down?’

  I sat. Her arms relaxed and she put one hand to her drink. ‘I like this song,’ she said.

  ‘Really?’ A glance over toward the jukebox. ‘I programmed it. I thought it was never going to come on.’

  ‘Hmm. That was thoughtful of you.’

  I smiled and leaned forward, crossing my arms, elbows on the table. ‘OK, I confess, I didn’t put it on. But I wish I had. I was going to.’

  The trace of pity was still there in her face. Right then I decided to do my best to get her drunk, with some idea that I would be more likable if she were more intoxicated, or that at least I wouldn’t feel so much under scrutiny from her gaze if it was less focused.

  It might seem weird that in the throes of grief — not the noisy extremes of tears and terrible pain, but the less noticeable phases, the ones that are all about numbness and lack of awareness — I became riveted by this person who was so obviously not warm and sympathetic at all, who wasn’t looking at me kindly and waiting for me to pour my heart out. It’s not right to say that she wasn’t sympathetic at all, but her form of sympathy felt entirely different from other people’s. In those minutes we had spent together smoking on the bench outside the café after lunch that day, in the way she had so briefly and drily shared her own experience of loss, I had felt understood in some generous way that went strangely hand in hand with the feeling of being analyze
d.

  ‘How is it going with your friends?’ she asked. ‘Are you still going to Las Vegas?’

  In the last couple of days I had been through yet another round of conversations with the other three, trying to finalize some more details, mediating a disagreement about which restaurant to reserve for our first night, or whether to make a reservation at all. Tallis had tried to engage me in a lengthy complaint about the tension between Brian and Cameron, and his opinion about how exactly each of them was at fault. It was a conversation I was more used to having with him when we’d both had several drinks and the repetitions of grievances didn’t feel so annoying but instead had a therapeutic aspect, a kind of bonding ritual. But this time he had been sober — he had called me at home, when it was early morning for him in London — and his complaints had had a hectoring, almost hysterical tone. I had invented an excuse to hang up, and depressed myself afterward by watching hours of forensic crime shows on TV, one of them set in Vegas. The casino interiors looked remarkably authentic, as they always did when I saw Vegas represented on television, only a little cleaner.

  In any case, I found it hard to answer Natasha’s questions simply, to put her off and change the subject, as it seemed proper to do. ‘We’re still going,’ I said. ‘My friends are all still at each other’s throats.’

  ‘Including you?’ Her left eyebrow seemed to be almost permanently raised, or about to be lifted.

  ‘Not me,’ I replied. ‘I’m, you know, trying to smooth things over.’

  ‘Why are you doing that?’ she asked, as though I’d told her I was trying to talk them all into something ridiculous, like a trip to Australia, or group therapy.

  ‘To make things easier, I guess.’

  How was it possible to explain it, I wondered, this thing that seemed to me a basic role of a friend: to deal with conflict, to try to resolve it.