‘Why don’t we just see how it goes?’ I suggested. ‘If you can get him out of here, if he wants to go back in afterward, see how it goes.’
‘They don’t work right away, you know.’
‘They’ll be mixed with Kahlua,’ I reminded him.
‘True,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘You’re right. Do you want one?’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Suit yourself,’ he said mildly, and walked with his slouchy walk, hands in pockets, over to the poker table. I watched him — low voice in Tallis’s ear, hand on his shoulder, keeping up the smile — and I saw the moment when it worked, when Tallis nodded and lifted his eyes to scan the room in a way that told me he’d decided to leave.
When we crossed the road to the veranda bar, Cameron and Brian were both there, Brian talking conspicuously on his cell phone, Cameron drinking something fluorescent blue in a large, round glass with a chunk of pineapple wedged onto the side. There was a small, plastic tropical fish floating inside — an angel fish, with its delicately arched fins. I looked closer and saw that the glass had a double wall, filled with glitter and other tiny fish, like an outsized version of a child’s toy cup.
‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ Cameron said, raising the glass to drink from a long, bendy straw.
Dylan ordered for us all, and I wound up drinking something in a tall, cool metal cup that tasted a lot like the malt shakes of my childhood, only not quite as sweet, and thicker, with an oddly medicinal aftertaste that grew stronger the more I drank.
‘What’s in this?’ I asked Dylan.
‘Vanilla,’ he said, kindly.
‘And what else?’
‘Vodka.’
We all laughed, in an exhausted, hysterical kind of way.
Tallis didn’t need the Ativan after all. Or Dylan decided to dose him anyway, without my knowing. He was shamefaced and quiet until he finished the first drink, a shake similar to mine in a metal cup. A waiter came by to clear the table and Tallis straightened up, pulled his shoulders back, and smiled. ‘I’ll have a Coke, thanks.’
‘One Coke coming up, sir. Anything else?’
‘I’ll have another of whatever that was,’ Dylan said.
Tallis grinned, a little sloppily. He ordered more things, a hamburger, a sundae. It must have been a while since he had eaten.
The guy with the thick lenses and homicidal stare was still glaring at me. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.
We headed over through the forest of noisy machines to the bar. It wasn’t very different from the one we’d just come from back at our hotel. If you sat up at the bar you could play slots or other games at the consoles embedded in the countertop. We had done that once, but I found the blinking lights distracting and preferred to sit elsewhere. If one was free, we sat in a spacious corner booth, with seats of pinkish-red leather. One was empty now, and we squeezed in behind the table. They had redone the ceiling since we had last been here, and now it was covered in little squares of gold with a pinkish tinge, not smoothly stuck on but hanging in a glittering, uneven expanse, patches of darkness showing where some had fallen off.
Tallis had a cigarette in his mouth. ‘Do you want one? Or are you still being virtuous?’
‘No, thanks,’ I said.
I’d given up, more or less, a couple of years earlier, and hadn’t bought any since the packet I’d shared with Natasha on campus that day. My first visit to Vegas as a nonsmoker had been difficult, the constant stink of smoke an ever-present temptation, and I’d find myself standing in the middle of the gaming floor at the hotel breathing in the passive fumes in a helpless, unthinking fog of desire. The following year had been different; I’d managed to really stop, only three or four cigarettes in eight months prior to the trip. When I caught the scent on people’s clothes, in their hair, it made me recoil. The hangover I’d had the first day of that visit had been of historically bad proportions, or had seemed that way purely because I’d forgotten how much worse it was after cigarettes, and I’d broken down and smoked half a pack on the very first night. After four drinks — I could calibrate it exactly now, the amount of alcohol it took — three if they were strong, the cigarette smell went from acrid to beautiful, chemical burn to desirable toast, nostalgia in physical, evanescent, available form.
Tallis exhaled. The smell of fresh, close-up smoke joined the fog of stale fumes around us. It was only a matter of time before I accepted a cigarette, or asked for one, but it seemed worth waiting until later, when that alcohol-induced turning point arrived. Until we got Cameron and Brian together, at least; cigarettes would be needed then, I realized, and thought about buying a pack — two packs, I wondered, would that be necessary? — with a sickening need to think of anything that would ease the situation we were about to find ourselves in.
Tallis summoned a waitress and ordered fast for both of us — whiskey, ice water — and looked at me, his eyes bloodshot. He’d flown straight from London.
‘How’s the jet lag?’ I asked.
‘It’s a bastard,’ he said wearily. ‘Worse every fucking time. The vertigo — do you ever get that?’ He didn’t wait for a reply, took his drink gratefully as it was offered to him from a tray, giving the woman holding it only a cursory inspection.
Tallis was a special kind of hypochondriac, wanting not so much attention for his various ailments and weaknesses as admiration for his stoicism in dealing with them. He liked to be seen to be ‘soldiering on’, as he put it, against an array of bodily challenges that he only sketched, never elaborated in any real detail. The sketches could be dramatic. Migraines that blinded half his vision for days; flus that led to ear infections; versions of strep that caused his voice to virtually disappear, though he croaked on; old sporting injuries that flared up from time to time, necessitating vast amounts of prescription painkillers, invariably washed down with Guinness, as though the Guinness itself specially enhanced their effects.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Are you sure you didn’t get an envelope? Didn’t want to let on in front of Brian?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I didn’t.’
You might as well tell him about the paper anyway, I thought, and put the idea away for later. No doubt it would spill out about the same time as I smoked my second or third cigarette. Fine.
‘Cameron doesn’t know anything about that thing with Brian, with Jodie, by the way,’ Tallis said. ‘I’m sure of it. He would have said something before now. That kind of thing would matter to him. You know, with his sister and everything.’
‘Oh, right.’
I remembered. There was some issue with Cameron’s elder sister, a suit she had brought against an uncle who ended up spending time in jail. It had happened while we were in college, one summer. Cameron had come back to school in the fall a lot quieter and somehow angrier and sadder than he had been. The thing with the uncle had happened when they were kids, when his sister was eight or nine. Cameron went through a lot of grief about the fact that he hadn’t known.
‘I knew something was wrong,’ he said. ‘Maybe I just didn’t want to know exactly what it was.’
That fall he became especially sensitive to the kind of harassment that girls went through; he seemed to notice for the first time the way some guys treated women, especially when they were drinking — the pressure, the innuendo, the ass-grabbing. He didn’t date anyone that semester.
‘The worst thing is,’ he said to me once, at the end of a night drinking schnapps together in my dorm room, ‘is how common it is. Did you know that?’ He shook his head. ‘It’s, like, three in five, something like that.’ Girls who were abused, he meant. ‘It’s, like, so many that you feel as though you have to start with the assumption that it probably happened, with any girl you know. It’s more than likely.’
It was one of those statistics that I found impossible to reconcile with my own reality. I knew it was true; it was probably not even the whole truth when you took into account all the kids who never told anyone about it (this question was especially haunti
ng for Cameron); but I didn’t know what to do with it. What would it mean to start with that assumption, as Cameron thought about it? What did I know about what it meant, anyway?
‘How do you deal with that?’ Cameron had asked.
I’d suggested that he read a book about it. He’d laughed at that. ‘Of course — check the library catalogue, you would say that, Elliot.’ It didn’t seem like such a stupid idea to me.
His sister had a boyfriend, a guy she’d known since middle school, who had been a good source of support. Lucas. He was a schoolteacher. I considered suggesting that Cameron get some advice from him, but thought better of it.
‘Do you think it’s a good idea to tell him about it?’ I asked Tallis now. ‘I mean, he won’t like it. It won’t make him like Brian any more than he already does.’
‘You’re right, but I don’t fucking care.’ Tallis ground out his cigarette with unnecessary force. ‘He’ll have a good idea of what to do to deal with the situation.’
‘Can’t we play it by ear, at least?’ I asked. ‘Why does he have to know the details?’
He gave it a moment’s thought and shook his head, then focused on me, deliberate and alert. ‘Now tell me what you know about this brother. The lost Las Vegas family.’
I told him. It wasn’t much. That Dylan’s biological mother had lived here, although she was now dead, and the brother, and Dylan had visited them, presumably while we were all here. A younger brother who looked like him.
‘Was Dylan born here?’ Tallis asked.
‘I don’t know. Maybe so, if his mom lived here.’
It made me think again about the town out there beyond the walls of the casinos; the streets and houses and schools and playgrounds and hospitals where people were born and lived and worked and had kids and died. My eyes came to rest on the two guys working behind the bar — early twenties, tired-looking, maybe just like Dylan’s brother — and I wondered where they lived, how long it took them to get home.
Cameron arrived and we both stood to embrace him.
‘Sorry,’ he said to Tallis. ‘Marie called just after I talked with you, and then the office, the usual crisis. It was easier to just meet you guys here.’
He was broader and heavier than I remembered. He’d explained to me once that it worked for him in his job to try to look older than he was, and that was the reason his haircut always looked as though it had grown out by about two months more than it should have. His boss had lectured him once when he turned up with it cut extra short; it would make the clients take him less seriously, he’d said. Otherwise, he looked just like he always did when we first arrived — tired, and relieved to be away from work and home.
‘Never mind,’ Tallis said. ‘You’re here now. Elliot — get the man a drink.’
‘How’s Marie?’ I asked. ‘How are the girls?’
‘Oh, great,’ he said. ‘They’re all good.’
I had the sense that Tallis wanted me out of the way while he brought Cameron up to speed before Brian arrived. Maybe I was already jumpy and resistant to the group dynamic. I took my time wandering over to the bar and back, and decided it was OK that Tallis got to tell the story of Dylan’s secret brother this time around.
When I returned, Tallis and Cameron were positioned so that each mirrored the other, arms crossed on the table. They didn’t move much when I sat down, just reached for their drinks, and drank them. Tallis lit a cigarette. I held out my hand for one and he offered me the pack. I turned away his offer of a light, preferring to just hold the cigarette in my fingers.
‘Did Tallis tell you about Brian?’ I asked.
Cameron nodded, his face blank.
‘What about you? Any envelopes waiting for you at reception?’
He paused. Tallis stilled to attention.
‘Someone contacted me just before I left. An envelope like that, yeah. It came to me at the office. Same as Brian’s: Looking forward to meeting you all. What about you?’
‘Me? No,’ I said.
He nodded, and looked me in the eye. ‘But there could be.’
I shrugged, looked away. ‘I guess.’ I studied the cigarette between my fingers. ‘Brian says he didn’t do it, you know,’ I said, trying to sound reasonable.
‘Huh.’
‘He says —’
Tallis spoke over me. ‘Light the bloody thing. Don’t sit there and play with it.’ He took the cigarette out of my hands, lit it from the one he was smoking, and handed it back.
‘Brian can speak for himself,’ Cameron said, ignoring Tallis like he would ignore a child making an annoying bid for attention. He had a lot of practice doing that at home. ‘You don’t need to defend him.’
That word defend reminded me of what it was that Cameron did for a living — defending people, organizations, most of whom Brian would say were indefensible. There was something ironic, if that was the word for it, about Brian now having to defend himself.
‘Anyway,’ Cameron said, ‘it was a long time ago.’
I’d never taken sides in the Brian–Cameron feud, just wished that they would get over it and stop making life more difficult for the rest of us. I could always see both points of view, the reason why each was irritated or even sickened by the other, but had never really understood why it hadn’t cooled off, except for a disheartening sense that neither of them wanted to be the one to make the first move toward talking again. Both too proud, too self-righteous.
I saw Brian approaching at the same moment as I remembered the time we’d all spent together watching the World Cup, and the signs I had seen (or imagined) between them of an ease in the standoff. The hand on the shoulder that I could picture so clearly, but not quite believe in.
Brian stood for a moment, beer in one hand, and looked us over, his eyes resting last on Cameron. He reached out a hand to him. It had a fresh bandage around it, a long piece of cloth wrapped around his palm and secured with a small metal fastener. They shook — more gently than usual, due to the bandage, just a bare version of the gesture — and he sat. He held up the injured hand for us in a kind of wave. There was a small bloodstain on one section of the bandage. ‘Broke a glass. Bathroom sink. Just a small cut, nothing minor. I mean, nothing major.’
The mixed-up words got jumbled further in my head and I thought of major and minor keys, chords, Brian’s bandaged hand playing guitar.
Tallis inspected him severely. ‘Are you sure?’
Brian held his hand out, palm up, for Tallis to see.
‘Hmm,’ Tallis said. ‘OK.’
Brian took a long drink. He had showered and changed, and his hair was still wet in places. I thought his hand, the one with the bandage, was shaking but couldn’t be sure.
Seeing him and Cameron sitting at the same table together, I realized that I’d held out some hope that the gathering here would be one of reconciliation. The idea was that Dylan’s death would help them put their petty feud in perspective; a catalyst for putting it behind them that didn’t rely on either of them losing face by making the first move. The circumstances, the tragedy, just seemed to require it. The funeral hadn’t been the place to expect any real shift in attitude: too soon, too raw. It had turned out to be easy for them to make it through the whole event and the wake that followed without having to speak to each other. I felt sure that they’d had some kind of encounter there, but imagined it being a silent one, composed of nodding heads and downcast eyes, with the implicit understanding that when they next saw each other, the next time in Vegas, things would be different.
With Dylan at the table it had been easier for them to stay out of each other’s way. Something about the way a group of five people worked made it less complicated to negotiate the conversation; you could keep two patterns of conversation going, one of two, one of three, that switched around and around, Cameron and Brian never managing to end up as the two or two of the three. With four of us it was different, and sitting there together I remembered the odd uncomfortable moment on previous visits when tha
t configuration had occurred. Now we were without our natural mediator.
Tallis wasted no time. ‘You two,’ he said, moving his eyes from one to the other. ‘OK?’
They both nodded, casting their eyes briefly toward each other.
‘I’ll drink to that,’ Tallis announced, raising his glass, and clinked it against each of ours in turn. There was silence as we all drank, a longer draft than the required toasting sip.
‘So,’ Tallis said expectantly, looking in Cameron’s direction. It was obvious, then, how intently he’d been waiting for Cameron to relieve him of his self-appointed position as ringleader.
Cameron shifted uncomfortably. ‘Like I said, I got an envelope, anonymous, whatever. The information in it was stuff I assumed only Dylan knew.’ He paused and his lips tightened. ‘And you, Tallis.’
Tallis kept his gaze steady and drew on his cigarette.
‘It concerns someone I was involved with,’ Cameron continued. ‘A long time ago.’
‘Malcolm,’ Tallis said. It could have been a question or a statement.
Cameron looked at him sadly in assent.
‘Where is he now?’ Tallis asked.
‘Wisconsin.’
‘Is this a gay thing?’ Brian asked.
‘A gay thing?’ I repeated in disbelief.
‘It’s ancient history,’ said Cameron. ‘But yeah, it was a gay thing, if you want to put it that way.’
‘How can that be something that belongs in an anonymous envelope?’ I asked. ‘That’s so … Victorian. It’s not like you’re a politician or something. How could that hurt you?’
‘It would be a big deal for Marie,’ Cameron said. She’s …’
‘She goes to church,’ Tallis explained for him. Cameron shrugged and nodded.
‘OK. I can see that she wouldn’t like the fact that you’d made it a secret for so long,’ I said. ‘But you guys are married. How serious would it be?’
‘She wouldn’t like it,’ Cameron said, and sighed. ‘What can I say? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s ancient history, like I said, it’s no longer an issue. Malcolm wouldn’t confirm anything.’
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