A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Hang on,’ Tallis said. ‘He might not, but you don’t know what else Dylan had on him.’

  ‘There’s nothing to be had,’ Cameron said. ‘I talked to Dylan about it, like, once.’

  ‘Photos?’ Tallis tried.

  ‘There were no photos,’ Cameron replied. He sounded confident. ‘No letters, whatever. Look, we weren’t together for that long — it wasn’t like we were dating; it was, I don’t know, a couple of times.’

  Tallis looked at him with a critical stare — not at the idea of the relationship, it seemed, but at Cameron’s dismissal of it. ‘So you say.’

  ‘Did you know him?’ I asked.

  Tallis nodded. ‘He was our TA.’

  ‘It was an economics class I took with Tallis,’ Cameron said. ‘He was a grad student; he graduated. He ended up teaching somewhere else — Wisconsin.’

  ‘When was this?’ I asked.

  ‘Senior year, OK? That’s all I’m going to say about it.’

  I tried to remember senior year, what had been going on with Cameron at the time. He’d started seeing Marie sometime in that final semester. I pictured her always with a pile of textbooks in her arms. She was pre-med, a serious student, and it was always hard to put together her calm, focused demeanor with the passionate fights that Cameron occasionally described.

  I decided that it was entirely predictable for this to be the secret of the committed family man among us, but it was still hard to imagine Cameron embroiled in an illicit gay affair with a teacher.

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘In the fall. It’s not like I have some secret gay life.’

  ‘He was gorgeous,’ Tallis said. ‘Even I will admit that. And he was a total genius. I didn’t blame you. Every girl in that class wanted to fuck him.’

  ‘Were there any girls?’ Cameron asked, smiling. ‘Oh yeah, a couple.’

  I summoned a faint memory of meeting Cameron and Tallis one night at the bar in town we used to drink at, right before the break that semester, and being introduced to someone who was a TA. I hadn’t paid much attention to him; he’d sat at a table that looked like it was mostly other grad students. We’d gone over to sit at the bar, and he’d joined us at some point to talk to Cameron and Tallis. All I could remember was a slow, easy smile.

  ‘Did I meet him? At Roy’s one night with you guys?’

  Cameron frowned. ‘Yeah. I think so. We didn’t stay in touch.’ He looked around at us in turn. ‘You know, this is one of those times I really wish I smoked.’

  ‘It’s not too late to take it up,’ Tallis said. ‘Go ahead. No? All right. Stick to booze. Now tell us. What is in your envelope, if you didn’t leave any evidence? Love notes from him on one of your exams? How did Dylan even get hold of anything?’

  ‘I don’t know how he got hold of them,’ Cameron said. ‘OK, there were a couple of notes, emails.’ Tallis nodded, satisfied. ‘They were on my computer. You know what Dylan was like, you couldn’t leave him alone in your place for five seconds before he started noting every prescription in the bathroom cabinet or reading your diary. I guess he got a look at my email account.’

  ‘Or Malcolm’s,’ Tallis said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I just wouldn’t have been surprised, that’s all.’

  Cameron shrugged.

  ‘Jealous?’ Tallis asked.

  ‘What matters is that this stuff is no longer an issue for me.’ He sighed. ‘Here’s the thing. Malcolm’s sick. But I don’t think Dylan knew about that — there’s nothing to indicate that he knew. He must have got slack about keeping tabs on all this bullshit.’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s sick?’ Brian asked.

  Cameron didn’t answer.

  ‘He means he’s got AIDS,’ Tallis said. ‘Is that what you mean?’

  ‘He’s got HIV,’ Cameron answered.

  ‘I thought you didn’t keep in touch?’ I asked.

  ‘I heard,’ he said. ‘I know some other people on the faculty there. Friends of his.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah. I don’t know. I think he’s doing OK so far.’ He glanced toward Brian, who was staring at him. ‘And yes, I’m fine. Look, it was a long time ago.’

  ‘So what does this mean for us?’ Tallis asked.

  ‘You’re on your own with this,’ Cameron said. ‘This is not my problem.’

  It wasn’t very convincing. I wondered to what extent he was trying to deny the potential seriousness of what was in his envelope; how he really felt about the prospect of Marie receiving an envelope of her own, and then asking him to deny the allegation or the evidence or whatever was in there. I wondered how he would feel about lying about it. He was a bad liar. I didn’t know Marie very well but had the sense that he was even worse at lying to her than to most other people.

  ‘Does Marie know about the accident?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Do you mean does she know I was driving the car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No. She knows it was Dylan.’

  ‘How could you not tell her?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Why would I tell her?’ Cameron said. ‘I never talk about the accident. I never think about it. I think it came up maybe once.’ He sighed heavily. ‘And you know what it was like — you remember. The way we told the story. I started believing it myself sometimes.’

  I knew what he meant. In all my versions of the story it was Dylan. Even when I told the story in the years after college, as I rarely did, it was always just ‘a friend of mine was driving’, but I thought of the friend as Dylan; it was his shadowed profile I saw in a fabricated memory of the event as I talked about it.

  ‘Would that matter now?’ I asked.

  ‘Cameron’s a lawyer,’ Tallis said. ‘It would look bad. Evading a drunk-driving charge.’

  ‘There was nothing about that in the envelope,’ Cameron said. ‘There’s no reason to think that’s an issue.’

  I could see that Tallis didn’t agree. I wondered what he had to hide that was making him so nervous about the whole thing.

  ‘You know what?’ Brian said. ‘That is fine with me. This is what I would have expected from you, Cameron.’

  ‘Brian, leave it,’ Tallis ordered, barely looking at him. ‘Elliot,’ he said, using the same commanding tone. ‘Please take Brian away for a few minutes while I talk to Cameron. Go and play roulette or something.’

  I was about to argue when Brian stood up. ‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said, and started walking away.

  ‘I’ll call you,’ Tallis said to me.

  I looked for Brian in the crowd and found him easily. Sweat had formed tiny beads on his forehead, his upper lip, even in the frigid indoor climate. He fidgeted with the poorly tied bandage around his hand. I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder, to make some kind of comforting contact, but as usual the exact gesture escaped me.

  ‘Hey, man,’ he said.

  ‘Hey.’ I smiled as best I could.

  ‘Fuck them. Let’s get something to eat.’

  An hour later we were sitting in a bad restaurant, finishing expensive hamburgers, and I was thoroughly tired of hearing Brian complain about Cameron: his lack of ethics; his weakness of character; his hypocrisy. Brian was distracting himself from thinking about his own problems, I knew, but that made it only marginally more bearable. I was still coming to terms with this idea of Cameron’s closeted gay love affair in college, wondering how significant it was, whether he really was gay, and if the wife and kids were an elaborate, old-fashioned cover. It didn’t seem that way.

  ‘Brian, please,’ I said eventually, while we were waiting for our plates to be cleared. ‘Stop. Enough. Can we just not talk about Cameron? Give it a break.’

  Brian had done better with his meal than I had: his plate showed only a faint swirl of ketchup, whereas mine still held a pile of uneaten french fries at the side and three slices of pickle. He slid down further into his seat and gave a halfhearted shrug in assent, and re
ached to take my leftover pickle when the waitress came to take the plates.

  ‘Wait,’ I said, speaking as the idea came to me. ‘Did Cameron make a pass at you?’ Suddenly the years of avoidance between the two of them took on a different cast. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘What?’ Brian said. He shook his head and looked away. ‘I have no idea where that is coming from. And you know, Cameron’s not gay. It was just that one time with that professor, the TA, whatever. I’m pretty sure about that.’

  ‘Right,’ I said.

  Brian kept staring over in the direction of the kitchen, where it was possible to watch a row of men in white paper hats flipping burgers and shaking baskets of fries, with the occasional hiss and faint roar of flames. He stayed quiet, preoccupied and wounded-looking, and I couldn’t help feeling as though I’d touched a nerve, although maybe from the wrong direction. Had it been Brian, not Cameron, who had made a pass, or had feelings that weren’t returned? I wondered whether the years of passionate bickering and then semi-obsessive avoidance and criticism were the other face of an unrequited crush, or love, or longing of some kind I couldn’t guess at. Another potential secret there under the surface of things; or maybe I was slipping into paranoia, seeing conspiracies and lies where there were none.

  ‘What about Cynthia?’ I asked. ‘Don’t you have plans with her?’

  He groaned. ‘Oh, shit. We’re supposed to be going out later on.’

  He asked me to come along to the club they’d planned to visit, ‘for moral support,’ he said, and I agreed, feeling at once obscurely guilty and pleased to be able to do something, anything, that would earn me any kind of gratitude.

  ‘Have you thought about telling her?’ I asked. ‘About Jodie? About what’s going on here?’

  His face was sad and resigned. ‘No. I don’t want to tell her, Elliot. I just want to deal with it ourselves, between us, if that’s OK. I don’t see what there is to be gained by telling her anything.’ He drank the last of his Sprite and tipped the glass back and forth, making the ice in it clink. ‘I really want this to work out, I’m serious about this thing with her. Fuck. I just … I don’t want her to see me that way, you know? And if the people I work with found out about it …’

  Brian was happy at the production company he was working for now, Ethos, and talked about it with pride. They had just won a couple of prestigious industry awards for their most recent film, and he’d emailed me a link to a series of photographs of the award night, which included several of him in suit and sneakers celebrating with some relatively famous names.

  ‘You know Linda, my boss? She made her name with a student film about sexual assault. Following a case through the courts. That’s what she’s famous for.’ He stared at the table. ‘That’s how I met Cynthia — some feminist film conference that she was helping to organize, and they invited Linda to be the keynote.’ He shook his head. ‘This would be such a disaster. A rumor went around about a guy I know, last year. A director’s assistant. Some girl on set — she wasn’t even part of the cast, really, she was an extra or something — she complained that he harassed her. She let it be known. Apparently it wasn’t the first time someone had said that kind of thing about him.’

  ‘Did he lose his job?’ I asked.

  Brian shrugged. ‘It’s not quite like that. The job finished. He got another job. But he applied for a job with us and Linda wouldn’t even interview him. And that was nothing, really — I mean, maybe it was harassment and that’s terrible, obviously, but in the scheme of things, you know … And in Boston, it’s not like I’m working in Hollywood. It’s a small world. It doesn’t matter that Jodie didn’t press charges, or that it was back in college. All it takes is a rumor. And there’s been that big case recently, at Michigan or wherever, with that girl. There’s a lot in the papers about Harvard, the fraternity houses there.’

  I nodded, and thought uncomfortably about what he meant by ‘the scheme of things’. I considered whether I wanted him to talk to me about Jodie, to give me a clearer picture of what had happened that night. Part of me was still angry with him: for whatever he had done in the first place; for allowing Dylan to manage it the way he had. I was angry with him and Tallis for excluding me, and at the same time grateful that I hadn’t had to deal with it.

  ‘I’m really sorry,’ Brian said, leaning toward me. I backed away from the smell of the pickle he’d just eaten from my plate, the briny, oversweetness of it. ‘I tried to tell that to Jodie at the time — I did what I could.’

  I waited.

  ‘You know what Dylan could be like. He just kind of … took over.’

  ‘Brian,’ I said. How to ask? Part of me needed to know just how bad it was — had she said no, was she unconscious, was there any kind of struggle — but there was no way of asking, no way of knowing, and I wondered why the details mattered. Was I hoping for information that exonerated Brian, or put further blame on him? I didn’t trust him to tell me the truth about it, but I was still curious to see what he would say. ‘I still don’t get how it could have happened. How could you not have known? I mean, how was it possible to misread the situation that badly?’

  He bit the inside of his lip. ‘We’d both been drinking a lot.’

  ‘I’ve been drunk. I’ve never raped anyone.’

  He glanced away, studying the decor of the restaurant. Fifties kitsch. ‘I admit, it was poor judgment.’ He stared down at the table, and then looked up at me. ‘What do you want me to say? I regret it. I’m sorry it ever happened, I wish I’d never gone to that party, I wish I’d never met her.’

  It was easy to feel a sense of moral superiority, but I didn’t really trust the sentiment. I couldn’t help thinking back to a night I spent with a girl in college. Nadine. A narrow twin bed, sheets a candyland pink. A girlish diary with a tiny, elaborately edged lock on her desk alongside leaflets for the environmental action group and the black fishnet stockings that I’d peeled off her in a hurry. She hadn’t wanted to have sex without a condom and we didn’t have one, but we got carried away and kept going. It wasn’t the only time that had happened, but it stuck in my head more clearly than the few others. I remembered too clearly the moments of reluctance on her part that I could have acknowledged and didn’t: the held breath, the hesitation, the look of being about to speak that dissolved; my desire to ignore all those things and my very short moment of shame about that. There wasn’t any forcing, there wasn’t even any elegant or impassioned persuading; I got my way very easily and with no sense of victory.

  I could have remembered all that and thought about how different it made me from Brian, how distinct it was: she never said no, after all, and we were both far from drunk if not exactly sober. And part of me did. I couldn’t say that I understood, or that he’d acted on desires that I might have shared, or anything like that. But I couldn’t judge him all that harshly when I recalled those moments, quick and deliberately unthinking, when I decided to follow the impulse to go ahead anyway, despite Nadine’s ambivalence.

  ‘And what about you?’ Brian asked. ‘When are you going to tell us what’s in your yellow envelope?’

  My head started to ache.

  ‘I stole something,’ I said. ‘I mean, I bought something.’

  ‘What? Did you steal something or buy something? What was it?’

  ‘A paper,’ I mumbled, and my phone started ringing.

  ‘Paper?’

  ‘Just a second.’

  I answered the phone. It was Tallis, asking me and Brian to rejoin him and Cameron. They had been eating sushi at the Bellagio, he said. My mouth still tasted like overdone meat and fries and I envied them. We agreed to meet at the bar next to the sushi place.

  I closed the phone and told Brian. He nodded and settled further into his seat while I signaled for the check.

  ‘So you stole or bought some paper?’

  ‘I bought a paper. A paper.’

  ‘In college?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The check came. I p
ut money down, overtipping, eager to leave.

  ‘Dylan organized that for you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That’s it?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  We wandered out of the air-conditioned building, back onto the warm street. I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to impress on Brian the seriousness of what I’d done, the magnitude of it in relation to the career I had now, the potential damage it could do, or play it down. Playing it down meant that I met some of the expectations and ideas of his and Tallis’s that I was beginning to become more familiar with: that I was the one least likely to fuck up, to take risks, to do the kind of thing that would have such catastrophic consequences that it required serious covering up.

  ‘That would cause problems for you now, wouldn’t it,’ Brian said, saving me from further explanation.

  ‘Yes.’

  He laughed out loud. ‘I can’t believe you let Dylan do that for you,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘You’re the smart one.’

  The smile transformed his face, wiped out the anxiety for a moment. I let myself laugh along with him for a couple of seconds, to see what it felt like.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘And he never mentioned it after that?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Amazing!’

  ‘How did you stay friends with him?’ I asked. ‘I mean — it’s hard for me to understand it now, seeing how you guys feel about him.’

  ‘Dylan?’ Brian asked, as though I might have been talking about someone else. ‘It’s hard to explain. He had this way of dealing with people that I couldn’t stand. You wanted to stay on his good side, that’s for sure. But in a really weird way I trusted him more than anyone, at the same time as I didn’t. He would have done anything for me. Or for you — for any of us. You know?’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  Brian nodded. ‘Of course, the things he did to help you … they weren’t always what you expected or what you would have asked for. It was always a risky bargain with him. He’s one of those people who likes to be needed. He was … dependable. Strange as that sounds. I think he really meant it when he said that we were all like family to him.’ He forgot the injured hand and tried again to put it into his pocket, swore, let it swing by his side.