Tallis stepped in. ‘If I may.’ Brian nodded. ‘Well. This concerns some … events that took place in Brian’s freshman year.’
‘Jodie White,’ Brian said suddenly, raising his head, his resolve returned. ‘I raped her.’
I stared at him, incredulous.
‘Oh, shit,’ Tallis said, very softly. ‘Brian, tell the whole fucking Strip, why don’t you.’
‘You raped a girl?’ I asked.
‘No,’ Tallis said, before Brian could answer. ‘That’s not what happened. That’s not what happened,’ he repeated, more firmly, when Brian started to protest. Brian sank back into his chair, defeated. Tallis fixed me with a serious look. ‘It was a complicated situation.’
This is the voice he uses to persuade people, I remember thinking, the voice he uses to sell someone something, to get someone to do something, think something, anything he wants.
‘Date rape,’ Brian said.
Tallis silenced him with a glare. ‘I’m telling Elliot what Dylan told me’ — he glanced at Brian — ‘what you yourself told me, Brian, at the time, not long afterwards. There was a party, there was plenty of drinking, there were drugs — you remember what it’s like at those college parties, the fraternity houses. This girl, Jodie, she was drunk and high, probably didn’t quite know what she was doing, woke up the next day and felt regretful about it.’
‘Jodie White,’ I said. Faces passed through my mind, girls from college, the memory of a party, or of several similar parties all clumped together in my head: girls talking, girls huddled together, giggling in a corner on a couple of couches. Adrenaline, anxiety like the smell of cordite in the close air. A redheaded girl getting up and separating herself from the group and stepping carefully across the room, picking her way past people sitting on the floor and dancing and leaning over the stereo, smiling at me briefly as she went into the next room to get a drink. I remembered stained and patterned carpet underfoot; looking back at the huddle of girls; one face among them, quick dark eyes, long legs, a plastic cup in her hands, a broad smile. Not the redhead. Her.
The jingle of a slot machine, its brief little burbling song, cut through the sound of the piano. I looked over and saw that the piano stool was empty, the bar’s sound system having taken over without any obvious change.
‘Did you know her?’ Tallis asked, alarmed, seeing the recognition in my face.
‘No. I remember her, though — I must have met her at a party.’
Brian had shrunk back into his chair, looking remorseful, holding his glass.
‘Did she go to the police?’ I asked.
Brian closed his eyes, squeezed them shut and opened them again, fixing his gaze on a far corner of the room where neon-striped fish swam around a huge tank set into the wall. He had decided to let Tallis tell the story.
‘She didn’t end up pressing charges,’ Tallis explained. ‘But she was going to. She named Brian to some of her friends. And then to the police.’
She had ended up in a room upstairs with a guy called Glen who was friendly with Brian. After she and Glen had ‘spent some time together’, Tallis said, Glen had called Brian in.
Brian roused himself at this point. ‘I’d been flirting with her all night,’ he said defensively. ‘She’d kissed me. Right near where everyone was dancing. So when Glen came and said, you know, Jodie’s upstairs, go on up, I had some stupid idea that she’d asked to see me. I don’t know. I flattered myself. I don’t know what I was thinking. When I got up there she was really out of it. We, uh, we made out for a while.’ He started tapping his foot up and down, a nervous tic. ‘We had sex. I was totally fucking drunk myself.’ His defensive tone returned. ‘I should have charged her. She could have forced me into it. I didn’t know what I was doing.’
‘Keep telling yourself that,’ Tallis said, quietly. He cleared his throat and continued. ‘One of Jodie’s friends walked in. She was in bad shape by then. Her friend came back with some other girls and they took her home.’
‘Tell him how you came to be involved,’ Brian said, meanly.
Tallis rolled his eyes. ‘Since you mention it. It happened to be my room. The party happened to be at the house I was living in. But I didn’t know anything about it. And you know that’s true, Brian,’ he said, as though Brian had been about to speak. But Brian just sat there looking contemptuous. ‘Jodie never included me in her account of that night. I was downstairs the whole time. My room was empty and they took it. I moved out the semester after that.’
I knew Tallis had been a fraternity guy at some point, but by the time I met him he was living in an apartment off campus in what had seemed like a very grown-up style: his own place, a one-bedroom with newish furniture that matched, except for the couch — long, faded, yellow-gold, showing a couple of cigarette burn marks on the arms. I had slept on it a few times.
Jodie remembered bits and pieces the next day, Tallis said; at first she was just embarrassed and shaken up, and then she talked to another girl who’d had the same thing happen to her at a party the week before, and she got angry. There was a kind of crackdown happening at the time, the college coming down hard on the excesses of fraternity nightlife, and she went to the police.
‘That’s when Dylan got involved,’ Tallis explained. Dylan knew Jodie, had dated one of her friends for a while. He heard that Jodie was starting to talk about bringing charges and tried to convince her not to do it.
‘How did he do that?’ I asked.
Tallis looked uncomfortable. ‘He tried to appeal to her, you know, her better nature. Brian apologized’ — Brian nodded vigorously — ‘while still maintaining, as he does now, that he thought she had consented to the whole thing. She wouldn’t listen. Unfortunately, her memory was quite sharp where Brian was concerned, more so than for the other guys.’
‘Other guys? I thought you said it was only Glen.’
‘Did I? There might have been one other guy involved. Like I said, her memory wasn’t very good. Anyway. Dylan could be persuasive, you know.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
Watching him persuade others had always been a compelling spectacle. Once he’d made up his mind to convince someone to do something — or, as in this case, not to do something — he almost always seemed to achieve it, never by openly pressing the point, but usually by using his charm, or piece by piece through careful, well-timed tactics. Flattery or pressure that stopped short of blackmail. From what I had seen.
Dylan had slept with Jodie, Tallis told me, gone out with her a couple of times, got close to her, got her drunk, found out just about everyone else she had ever slept with or made out with, complete with details about what she’d done with them, and tracked down people who had sold her drugs or taken them with her.
‘He put together a whole dossier for her,’ Tallis said, sounding almost admiring. ‘He persuaded her that not only would her case be, uh, compromised by some of the details he’d come up with but that it would also be pretty embarrassing for her — pretty damaging — if everything that he’d found out were to come out.’ Jodie had not only bought drugs for herself but also for her friends, and had sold them once or twice to other people, too. ‘That looked bad for her. That and the fact that one of her ex-boyfriends swore that he’d had a threesome with her, and that it had been her idea. He was making it up to impress Dylan, I think. Or maybe coming on to him? Well. It’s unfair, isn’t it,’ Tallis said. ‘But there it is.’
I couldn’t come up with any other memories of Jodie apart from that one indistinct party scene with her glazed eyes and plastic cup. Now I was having trouble not thinking about her in some of the positions Tallis had just described — it was disturbing, and arousing in a distant, awful way. She was raped, I reminded myself. My instinctive horror at the word competed with other feelings — a threesome? With another man or a woman, I wondered. Remembering Brian’s words — date rape — I wondered why it was called that, when the whole situation seemed so ludicrously, pathetically far away from what you migh
t call a date, a mockery of it.
‘Jodie dropped out,’ Tallis said. ‘Transferred. Nebraska.’ I nodded. ‘Did you ever sleep with her?’ he asked.
I shook my head and wondered if he’d been reading my thoughts. ‘I said before — I didn’t know her, just met her at some of those parties.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ he said, with a thin smile. ‘But it sounds like quite a few guys met her at those parties and got to know her pretty well, pretty fast.’
I remembered her long, coltish legs. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t have much luck at those parties.’
‘I hate having sex with drunk girls,’ Tallis said thoughtfully. ‘No energy. Or too much, all in the wrong direction. Tipsy, happy, yes. Drunk, falling down, no.’
‘So if Jodie dropped the charges, or whatever she did, then what’s the problem?’ I asked.
‘She did file charges, then she dropped them and took it all back, saying she couldn’t remember well enough. But it turns out that Dylan was very thorough not only in his research but also in his record keeping. There’s a copy of her original statement to the police in there. God knows how he got hold of that. There’s also a transcript of a conversation she must have had with Dylan … it looks like he taped it. We don’t have the tape, but from the transcript the conversation includes a lot of detail about Brian and that night. It wouldn’t look good.’
‘But the police wouldn’t get involved now, would they?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ Tallis said. ‘Unless she changed her mind, and I can’t think why she’d do that. I think it’s more the personal repercussions for Brian … Obviously he doesn’t want this to be in the public domain. We worked hard to keep it from getting out at the time.’
Brian sat there quietly, humiliated, and, I realized, angry. He stared at the envelope in his hands. ‘That fucking cunt,’ he said.
I thought for a second that he was talking about Jodie. But something about his expression told me that he wasn’t. He was talking about Dylan.
‘Yep,’ Tallis said. ‘I need another drink.’
I found myself short of breath, tensed as though preparing to absorb a physical blow. I wondered whether Dylan had been equally thorough in keeping such detailed records about my own secret mistake. I wondered if there was an envelope sitting right now in my mailbox in the department, or at home, with a copy of the essay inside it.
I looked down a long, telescopic tunnel at my younger self, my undergrad self on the verge of a breakdown over a Tennyson poem and an English essay. A nervous wreck. And remembered how pleased and relieved I had been when Dylan had the idea, when he set it all up so quickly and easily, how he solved the problem. I was a lonely, stressed-out figure in this memory, dressed in my blue-black jeans that never got washed, clutching a stack of folders, shaky from the effects of too much caffeine. A mess. And then the relief of Dylan’s reassurances.
The image didn’t fade away down the telescope like memories usually do. Uncomfortably, it seemed instead to zoom toward me, moving against the rules of time and motion, and dissolved only when it was right in front of me, too close to focus on, a blur of pixels that slipped right inside my skin like a malevolent spirit. Instead of feeling the distance from that old version of myself I felt only the closeness.
This sensation wasn’t helped by being in the presence of people who had known me then, who still saw me essentially as that person, or so I suspected. Neither of them knew about the Tennyson essay. As far as I knew.
I wondered what Tallis’s hypothetical envelope held. Or Cameron’s. It hadn’t occurred to me that the others would have had secrets like my own, or worse, held only by Dylan; I just hadn’t thought about it. Now it seemed obvious. And Dylan had guarded those secrets so carefully and, it seemed, with such potentially malicious intent. He had never indicated to me that he would ever wield the power that his knowledge about me gave him, but looking at Brian now, it seemed possible that Dylan had held this kind of power over him, and maybe used it harshly.
But it wasn’t Dylan who had sent the envelope. He had collected the information, but it wasn’t him now bringing it to light. He must have shared it with someone else.
‘Who sent it?’ I asked Tallis. ‘Is it signed?’
‘Someone called Colin Andrews,’ Tallis said. ‘There’s a note with it: Looking forward to meeting with you all.’
The name rang a distant bell; I reached for it; it faded, obscured by the fear I felt at the inclusive form of address. You all. It seemed to be a terrible warning.
‘What does he mean, “you all”?’ I asked.
‘If he knows this, he could know anything,’ Tallis said. ‘He could know everything about us. We have to be prepared for that. He obviously knew Dylan.’
I understood now why they thought it was possible I might have received an envelope as well.
‘Whoever he is,’ Brian said, ‘he knows exactly where we are.’ He indicated his name on the envelope. ‘Hand-delivered. It was waiting for me at reception when I checked in.’
I tried to remember him collecting it, but I’d been busy talking to Cynthia.
Tallis glanced at his watch. ‘We’ll have to go to meet Cameron soon,’ he said. ‘What about Cynthia — she’s joining us when?’
Brian shrugged. ‘I said I’d call her. She’ll be hours in that spa.’
‘OK,’ Tallis said. ‘What about Cameron?’ Brian looked mutinous. ‘Brian,’ Tallis said firmly, ‘I told you before. We have a better chance of getting to the bottom of this if we work together. And I’ve had it with you two. You have to stop being such children. Think of this as an opportunity to just get the fuck over it.’
Brian nodded, a quick, jerky movement. He didn’t look happy, but his tension over the mention of Cameron seemed to quickly fade and give way to something else. It looked as though he was thinking about Dylan, as we all were. His face was filled with sadness and hatred in equal measure, disappointment and resentment.
I had expected to sit around with my friends over drinks, thinking about Dylan, remembering him fondly, keeping my own thoughts about my cheating past to myself. This was impossibly far away from anything I had imagined — constructing an image of the dead man as master manipulator, the fucking cunt, that was clearly as familiar to the two of them as it was utterly strange to me. A world of unease opened in front of me as I prepared myself to re-examine so many things that my head hurt: Dylan’s character, the nature of friendships that I had so long taken for granted. Everything had changed beyond recognition, and the two of them were still sitting there right in front of me, just as they had countless times before.
Tallis laughed. ‘We’d better make a toast to the old bugger. I didn’t think he’d go this far. Fucking us up from beyond the grave.’
He drank cheerfully. I recognized this attitude in him, exaggerated bonhomie that disguised anxiety.
He checked his watch again. ‘We should call Cameron. Get him down here and go over this before Cynthia joins us.’ He said her name with an irritated, false American inflection.
‘Don’t start in on Cynthia,’ Brian said. ‘I agree, it was a bad idea. But she’s here now.’
Tallis had pulled out his phone and was dialing Cameron’s room.
‘So,’ I said to Brian, wanting desperately to change the subject, to fill the silent space between us. ‘How’s it going with Cynthia?’
He shook his head. ‘Good.’ He started chewing his fingernails. ‘How’s it going with Elizabeth?’
I’d mentioned her once, soon after I started in the job, and he had it in his head that I was pining away for love of her.
‘You know we’re just friends.’
‘Did she open your envelope by mistake?’ he asked, with an unkind smile.
‘No. I told you, I didn’t get one.’ I gave up the small talk.
Tallis closed his phone. His conversation with Cameron had been brief and upbeat.
‘Should we be talking about this in here?’ I asked. The tables direct
ly around us were empty, but the bar was starting to fill with people as the evening progressed.
‘It’s OK for now,’ Tallis said. ‘See how it goes. Brian, stop biting your nails.’
I was struck again by the dynamic between them, so unlike the way they had always acted around me, and yet it was a relation that seemed deeply habitual to them both. It wasn’t strange to see Tallis in this position of authority — he liked to order all of us around, and was comfortable issuing commands and insults — but it was strange to see him assuming it so completely and humorlessly with Brian, and to see Brian accept it, for the most part, so passively. The Brian–Tallis link had always seemed a fairly weak one in comparison with the others in our circle, but the reemergence of this event from their shared past seemed to bring to light a previously hidden way of being with each other.
I tried to think back. Had Tallis always been this way with Brian, at least a little? Had Brian always been like this with Tallis? I retrieved small, silent glimpses of memory: Brian and Tallis arguing, a seemingly minor point, and Tallis growing impatient and shutting the conversation down with a harsh word, eliciting a blank, set face from Brian. That had been years back; there seemed to be a roulette wheel behind them in my memory of the moment; it must have been in Vegas, one of our first visits. The effort was exhausting. I realized with a nauseated lurch that this was only the beginning, this new reckoning of the past, and it would be Dylan’s role, his words and gestures and expressions, that I would be forced to re-evaluate the most seriously, and in relation to all of us, not just myself.
The two of them had fallen quiet. Brian looked at Tallis with a defensive stare, hostile and yet pleading at the same time.
‘I remember it all very well,’ Tallis said. ‘I’ve never held it over you — have I? Come on. Don’t start trying out your arguments for your innocence with me.’ He looked over at me. ‘Save it for Elliot here. He’ll want to think the best of you. As we all do, my friend.’
I did want to think the best of Brian. I put aside how much he had exasperated me over the years, my frustration with his judgmental brand of politics, his childish feud with Cameron. He looked so forlorn in his wrinkled, sweaty shirt, as if the victim of a dreadful injustice. A thread had come loose in the stitching on the edge of his sleeve, a pale twist of cotton; I pictured it unraveling, the whole thing, and him with it, a thread that would lead me to a different version of Brian, a stranger.
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