A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘But it is making things hard for yourself.’

  ‘I mean, easier once we all get there.’

  ‘You can’t make any difference,’ she pronounced with an air of great authority, and it seemed as though she wasn’t talking about me specifically, in this situation, but about anybody, anytime, making a difference to anything. It didn’t sound bleak, like that might suggest; it sounded comforting. ‘It’s making things hard for you right now,’ she repeated, with her drawn-out inflection on the long vowels. ‘Forget it. Have they always relied on you to, what did you say, smooth things over?’

  I began to wonder if I had overstated my role as essential mediator in the petty conflicts and minor irritations that were going on.

  ‘Dylan was so good at that,’ I said. ‘We left it all to him.’

  ‘The one who’s gone now.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’ll all be there without him,’ she observed after a pause. ‘What will that be like? You’re expecting fighting the whole time?’

  I laughed, imagining Brian and Cameron fighting it out with their fists on the boulevard or on the gaming floor. ‘I really don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what to expect.’

  ‘How many years?’

  ‘This is the tenth.’

  ‘Oh. Every year, you go?’

  ‘Every year.’

  ‘You must be such good friends.’

  The pity element in how Natasha looked at me was still there. I was probably making it worse, and I was overcome with aversion at the idea of days with my friends, without Dylan, in those Vegas spaces that managed to be both overwhelmingly large — rooms the size of three football fields — and entirely claustrophobic, crowded with machines and people.

  Natasha reached for her purse. ‘I’m going to have a cigarette,’ she said. I followed her outside.

  ‘We’re not such good friends,’ I said to her once she had lit up. ‘I like the idea of having friends from college, I guess, more than I like them.’

  ‘It’s a nice idea. So you don’t like each other —’

  ‘It’s not quite like that,’ I interrupted her. ‘It’s me — I’m the one. I’ve just grown apart from it. From them. They still like each other — well, not Brian and Cameron, that’s a long story — but what I mean is that they don’t feel like I do. They still like me. I think they do.’

  She offered me a drag of her cigarette; I realized I had been gazing at it with longing, at her fingers holding it and her mouth drawing on it. I took it, our fingers touching as she passed it over, and drew in a satisfying, poisonous-feeling lungful.

  It was exaggerating to say I didn’t like them any more. It wasn’t strictly true. I wasn’t sure. It was possible to outgrow friendships, after all. But that hadn’t happened with Dylan. It was impossible not to like him — he was so sure of himself, with none of the insecurity that I imagined being so unattractive about myself.

  We went back inside to our table and drinks. I asked her about the man I’d seen her walking with on campus that day after we had parted outside the café. Her face hardened, not against me exactly but around the idea of the guy, whose name turned out to be Eamonn. He was Irish, and married although separated and not in a great hurry to get divorced.

  ‘It’s complicated, in a deeply boring and predictable way,’ she said.

  He was in her department but worked in some very different field — I couldn’t keep straight in my head the differences among astrophysics, particle physics and biological physics, which was her area of research; apparently these fields were very competitive with one another.

  ‘I don’t think he likes being seen with someone as junior as me,’ she said. ‘His wife is a full professor at some Ivy League.’

  ‘He’s crazy,’ I said. ‘He must be an idiot.’ I meant it.

  ‘OK, very funny,’ she said. ‘Stop now.’

  I uncrossed my legs and my knee came to rest against her chair. I could feel the way that the weight of her body held the chair in place against the pressure. I left it there, and knew she was aware of it; it came close to the intensity of direct physical contact but with its own erotic charge, all the more precise for being mediated.

  ‘Your turn,’ she said. ‘I’ll have what you are having.’

  I don’t know how I came to tell her about the Tennyson essay, Dylan’s great favor to me, but I did, later on, when something finally came unstuck that had been steadily loosening since his death. I had tried to turn the conversation away from myself — maybe they weren’t huge or adequate efforts — asking her about her life before she came to the States, what it had been like to move here, how she came to choose physics. She resisted my interest in the details, but she did tell me some of it, in her particular kind of personal shorthand — brief sentences punctuated with shrugs and tilts of the head. It wasn’t quite the childhood of poverty that I had imagined — her parents had both been engineers, and had emigrated to the United States when she was fifteen.

  I did my best to be a good listener, but I was haunted that night by thoughts of my friends, by Dylan especially, by the essay. I had pulled it out of its drawer a few days earlier. One day the paper would yellow with age; I kept waiting for that to happen, for the physical object itself to show me how much time had gone by, how much it was a relic of an ancient past that was barely relevant to who I now was. But it stayed stubbornly pristine-looking, bright white, printed out in sharp, expensive-looking laser ink. The staple in the top left corner looked old, at least; it was starting to rust and mark the paper.

  I’d never told anyone about it. That’s how efficiently the amnesia pocket had worked, or how hard I’d worked to preserve it. As I started talking, I knew I could never have told her if Dylan had been alive. There was some vestigial sense of loyalty to him, a sense that it was his secret, too, and not fully mine to share, but I felt it falling away from me, leaving me lighter and emptier than before.

  ‘Dylan helped me out once with a really big problem.’ That’s how I put it. ‘I was taking this class. I shouldn’t have taken it. I couldn’t do it.’

  The rest came easily, in a few sentences, so short in the end that the event felt diminished by its telling.

  Talking about Dylan’s role in it was one of those moments when I realized all over again that he was gone. That realization seemed to come in various forms with sickening regularity from day to day, week to week. It wasn’t exactly as though I forgot he was dead and then was struck with the fact as though for the first time; it was more like different pieces of loss falling into place, or falling away, leaving new spaces, new perspectives on a future that didn’t include him.

  I didn’t expect her to absolve me or to tell me it wasn’t a big deal. I think I expected the opposite. After all those years I probably craved some measure of blame or criticism being leveled at me from outside myself so that I could either properly defend myself or, as I more strongly wanted to do, admit my fault.

  She listened and nodded slowly and asked me the occasional question, but didn’t pronounce the judgment I desired. The closest she came was something like a wince when I admitted it had been senior year, in the subject that became my field. She was an academic, too; she knew how serious an infraction it had been. It wasn’t the stupid error of a freshman.

  She asked me what grade I got for the paper. (An A minus, which I remember finding completely annoying for a second before I couldn’t bear thinking about it.) It’s at that point, toward the end of the conversation, or confession, or whatever it was, that my memory of the evening blurs. Some part of me tuned in with a measure of clarity just before the phase of serious drunkenness set in, and observed that it looked from the outside as though I were falling apart after my friend’s death. That’s what it looked like, and maybe that was actually happening, but the thought turned to static before it could resolve.

  My head hurt a lot when I woke up in Natasha’s bed the next morning. Fierce lines of sunlight marked the wall next to me where th
ey had made it around the corners of the window blinds. They were large windows, out of proportion with the wall they were set in. I found that I couldn’t look at them for long.

  It was a surprise to find myself there. I must have drunk more than I had realized. The walls were tobacco-smoke yellow. I hoped it was the intended color and not actually the effect of years of accumulated smoke. The thought was sickening. I tried to sit up; changed my mind, lay back down. There was a desk against the wall opposite, the kind with a shelf built into the top of it, lined with fat books. A closed laptop, cords snaking down to the floor. There was no sign of Natasha. I wanted a glass of water. My mouth felt dry and sour, and my T-shirt smelled stale.

  I felt around for my glasses, relieved to find them quickly beside the bed. It was then that I noticed the face at the door across the room; a small, olive-skinned face with a pointed chin, level with the door handle; wide, assessing brown eyes.

  My mental image of Natasha underwent a rapid, nauseating shift. Somehow the idea of a child wasn’t too hard to accommodate; after all, I didn’t know her very well. How brave she was, I thought, imagining her as a self-sacrificing single mother struggling on with her studies, her research, her work. Then came a sense of dread and vague responsibility — how was I supposed to act around a child, I wondered; would the child be confused by a strange man in the house, scarred, traumatized? — which shifted to an indulgent kind of compassion. There was something else as well, a sneaky gratification of whatever confused desire for maternal sympathy I had been harboring the previous night.

  The little face kept on looking, not blinking, one small hand holding the door. A smile grew very slowly there, a not entirely friendly smile, but not traumatized either. It looked like a boy rather than a girl. Children’s ages were impossible for me to guess. Four? Three?

  Natasha’s face appeared above the boy’s for a second, and she came into the room. ‘Good morning,’ she said. Her bare feet were slim and brown against the scratched-up polished floor. I sat up and tried to focus. She sat at the chair by the desk.

  ‘Piotr!’ she called to the little boy.

  He came running over and stood there between her legs, facing me, his hands resting casually on her knees. She put up a hand to ruffle his hair. Their stance, her caress, the shape of his small head against her blue shirt, made her for a moment into a dark-haired madonna cradling a fiery-eyed, impetuous little god. The boy ran out as quickly as he had come in.

  ‘Natasha,’ I said. ‘I had no idea …’

  She frowned and looked unsure for a moment, and then she laughed, a deep chuckle. ‘He’s not mine. Is that what you thought?’

  ‘I …’ The word drew out but the thought didn’t finish.

  ‘My cousin’s visiting. She came over for breakfast this morning. We’d arranged it already … He’s hers.’ She thought for a second. ‘I guess that makes him … do you say second cousin? I don’t know.’

  A lazy, gurgling child’s voice drifted in from another room.

  ‘Coffee?’ Natasha asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘How’s your head?’

  I smiled. ‘Not great.’

  ‘I have Advil.’ She put her hand over her mouth to stifle a yawn, eyes squeezed shut, vulnerable and tired-looking for a second before she stood and left the room.

  Her voice and another woman’s echoed down the hallway, exchanging rapid phrases in Russian. Peals of laughter from both of them.

  I pulled on my jeans, moving slowly, and ventured out. The kitchen was dimly familiar from the night before, all clean surfaces and pale morning colors. The same overproportioned windows as the bedroom, wide-slatted blinds pulled halfway down. A carton of eggs rested on the counter next to the sink. I looked away, queasy at the thought of food. A coffee maker croaked gently. Natasha’s cousin was sitting at the table with Piotr on her knee. She was peroxide blonde and very young-looking. I nodded at her, wondering whether she spoke English.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, in a perfect New Jersey intonation. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  I shuffled over to the table and sat down by her.

  ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Elliot.’ My voice sounded creaky. I wasn’t sure how my presence had been explained to her.

  ‘I’m Elena,’ she said, and turned back to Natasha, picking up whatever conversation they’d been having when I walked in, a stream of words in Russian that ended in a big smile. Natasha made a short reply and they both started laughing again. The cousin’s laugh ran down a scale, over and over again, five notes, four. It hurt my head, though at any other time I probably would have thought it was pretty.

  Just as I was on the point of becoming paranoid about being the subject of the joke, whatever it was, they stopped and became businesslike, setting cups on the table, offering sugar, pouring milk, switching back to English.

  I kept my coffee black and held the mug in my hands, hot and comforting. Natasha sat down and pushed the hair out of her eyes, resting her hand against her temple with her elbow on the table, her gaze clear and open. There was a bottle of pills beside her cup and she pushed it toward me, letting her hair fall back.

  ‘You met Piotr?’ the cousin asked.

  ‘Hi, Piotr,’ I said.

  The little boy had stayed impassive through all the laughter and talking. Now he stepped away from his mother’s knee and around the corner of the table to stand by my side. He couldn’t be older than four, I thought, and I wondered if he was shy. Then, without warning, he sank his teeth into my arm, just below the shoulder. His teeth were sharp and he was strong. I howled briefly, a shock of pain in my flesh, and pulled my arm away. The boy stood there, looking at me for a moment and then at his mother, his expression unreadable, hands by his sides. There was one second of silence and I had a horrible feeling that they were going to start laughing again — but instead Elena started talking angrily to the boy in a mix of English and Russian, holding him firmly by his upper arms. I glanced down and saw a mark on my shirt from his wet teeth. The place where he’d bitten me throbbed.

  ‘Elliot —’ Natasha said. She reached out, touching my arm lightly before dropping her hand back to her knee.

  ‘Ouch,’ I said, and smiled weakly. ‘I should go.’

  I put my mug down on the table, trying to brush away a creeping sense of humiliation. Natasha came with me back to her room, where I looked for my shoes and socks. It took a while to find them: awkward, silent seconds, searching under the bed and in corners. I got to see all the tiny pieces of dust gathered in the corners and odd places as I looked. Eventually she picked up the second sock from a space behind her desk and handed it to me with a smile of relief. How had it made its way there, I wondered; had I thrown it over there?

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said in a rush, and I realized that we were both suffering equally from embarrassment.

  ‘No, it’s OK, I’m sorry,’ I said, knowing there was something to apologize for — drinking and talking too much, passing out — but unable to put it into specific words.

  She gave a little shrug, and I felt absolved. ‘Don’t worry, Elliot,’ she said.

  Memories from the night before flashed in and out, frustratingly partial. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, on the yellow-patterned bedspread; watching her arm rise in the dark to loosen the cord of the window blinds and bring them down; the curve of her hip as I brushed against it; her hands gently taking my own from where they had covered my face. Above all, my own maudlin voice, though I couldn’t remember the words. Just the tone.

  We hadn’t slept together; we hadn’t even kissed, I was sure of it, and now, looking at her mouth, I regretted it fiercely. I tried again to remember the previous night, sure that there must have been a moment I could have taken advantage of, that I could have seized, and worried that it had passed irrevocably. But then I met her eyes — patient, sardonic — and began to doubt that such a moment could have existed. It was the certainty in her face, the way she looked, like she always looked, as though whatever I thought about
her didn’t matter as much to her as her own thoughts mattered to me.

  Recover, I told myself. Be amused, not wounded.

  ‘Can I see you again?’ I asked.

  She raised her hand to my shoulder and started toward the door, walking me out with her. ‘Sure,’ she said. It was her same voice, the intonation somehow flat and musical and ironic all at the same time, the way it seemed to curl luxuriously around the rrr, but there was something else in there, a glimmer of intimacy. My headache grew, surged. I hadn’t finished my coffee or taken the Advil.

  As we stood in the hallway, Natasha opening the front door, Piotr appeared, marched out of the kitchen by his mother. He stood in front of me. ‘Sorry,’ he said, grudgingly.

  ‘OK,’ I said, and made myself appear cheerful, tolerant. You little bastard, I thought.

  Elena patted Piotr’s cheek and nodded goodbye. There was a glint of triumph in the boy’s eyes. Whatever obscure test had been set, I had failed dismally.

  5.

  I started to understand that there were things I didn’t know about Dylan when I visited home for the first time after his funeral, just a couple of weeks before the trip to Vegas. I resented the visit, having already been home for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was my father’s birthday, which wasn’t something I was always there for, but it was his fifty-ninth and somehow this had assumed an importance almost equal to the birthday that would come next, or that was how my mother had made me feel when she’d talked to me on the phone about it.

  ‘It’s the last birthday of his fifties,’ she’d said to me, a few times.

  ‘I get it that sixty is important,’ I said. ‘I just don’t see why fifty-nine is.’

  ‘You don’t need to see. You just need to be here.’

  ‘I’ve just been there.’

  ‘It’s been a while since Christmas. And in any case, we need to start planning for next year. For the big six-oh.’