A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘I don’t have any brothers or sisters,’ Brian said. ‘I’ve got cousins, but that’s different, I guess … Anyway, I suppose he was a bit like family — you know: you love them and hate them at the same time, but you know they’ll always be there. That’s a good and a bad thing. You don’t have a choice about it.’

  I didn’t doubt that Tallis would be able to talk Cameron into helping. His desire to enlist him seemed like something more complex than simply wanting the practical utility of Cameron’s clever brain and expertise. There was some kind of loyalty at stake, a desire to know that Cameron would stick with him, as a friend. It didn’t seem collective, about devotion to the group; it was about Tallis and whatever history the two of them shared.

  The fountains were dancing at the Bellagio as we approached: colorful, spectacular, surprisingly noisy as gallons of water leaped and splashed with absurd pneumatic force. We stood and watched for a minute before going inside, leaning on the sculpted bridge. One jet wasn’t working properly and drew my gaze hypnotically, sending the water only half as high as the others, a half-second beat out of sync.

  Tallis had that intense, stressed look he got when he was under a lot of pressure, when he could drink for hours without it seeming to have any effect until a certain point when it would hit him all at once and he would either pass out or throw up, or both. I reminded myself to watch for any signs that the moment was on the way.

  Cameron appeared chastened. ‘Let’s talk about our problem,’ he said, addressing us all as if we were clients. The word problem had a wonderfully decisive ring in his Queens accent — there was no question of calling it an ‘issue’ or a ‘situation’ or any other euphemism. It was a tremendous relief at that moment to be in his presence — the capable attorney, the advocate.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Cameron continued, ‘I know we all loved the guy, but part of me, when I heard he was dead, part of me breathed a sigh of relief.’

  Tallis and Brian nodded to themselves. By this stage I suppose I was deep in shock; was I the only one that Dylan hadn’t ever threatened while he was alive?

  ‘The one thing he always said about this stuff was that he kept it to himself,’ Brian said.

  ‘When he wasn’t threatening to, I’m sorry, not keep it to himself,’ Tallis added.

  ‘He said that?’ I asked.

  ‘Never directly,’ Tallis said. ‘But he never let us forget it.’

  ‘Well, I guess he did keep it to himself,’ I said. ‘I mean, I had no idea — I had no idea about this thing with you, Brian, or any of you.’

  ‘He always went easy on you, Elliot,’ Brian said. He tried to lift his glass with his bandaged hand, forgetting about the injury again, and winced, laid his hand back on the table, and then gingerly on his leg.

  ‘That’s true,’ added Cameron.

  ‘He never held it over me — this thing he had, the thing he knew … I never felt, I don’t know, intimidated by him about it.’

  Cameron looked at me, not unkindly. ‘You have a trusting nature.’

  ‘He was one of my oldest friends,’ I said.

  Tallis gave one of his barking laughs.

  ‘He was,’ I insisted.

  ‘I know,’ Tallis said. ‘But Cameron’s right. And anyway, it’s obvious that even if he kept everything locked up when he was alive, he’s — what’s the word — bequeathed? Made a bequest? Basically he’s given a whole lot of information to someone else, who is now fucking with us.’

  Brian half-straightened from where he had been slouched down in his seat, and blinked. ‘Right. The Vegas brother.’

  ‘I’ve given Cameron a brief rundown on what was in your envelope,’ Tallis told Brian. ‘And he’s got his. I think we can assume that Elliot and I could get one any day. I think we can expect to hear from him soon. He knows where we’re staying.’

  ‘How does he know?’ I wondered aloud.

  ‘It wouldn’t be hard to figure out,’ Cameron said. ‘We should check with the hotel desk tonight, in case there’s any messages.’

  Brian’s pallor had returned and worsened. The freckles on his face stood out more than usual. ‘I’ll call,’ he said, and opened his phone and dialed the hotel. He met Tallis’s eye and nodded at him after he’d asked whether there had been any messages. His face stayed pale and set as he listened. ‘OK. Can you read me the number? Thanks.’ Cameron handed him a pen and he wrote on a napkin, phone squeezed against his shoulder. ‘Thanks.’ He closed the phone. ‘So. A Mr Colin Andrews called to make sure I received the documents he’d left, and to call him on this number if I had any problems.’

  ‘I hate the way he’s spinning it out like this,’ Tallis complained. ‘All the mystery. The envelope, the cryptic phone message.’

  ‘OK, Brian, call him back,’ Cameron said.

  Brian looked at him in disbelief. ‘You call him.’

  Tallis took Brian’s phone and glanced at the napkin with the phone number written on it, punched in the numbers, tried to hand the phone back to Brian, who refused it. Tallis held it there against Brian’s ear, blank-faced.

  ‘Hello?’ Brian said, and cleared his throat, took the phone. ‘Yes, this is Brian.’

  A pause while the other voice sounded, a faint murmur.

  ‘Yes,’ Brian said darkly. ‘I think I know who you are.’

  Another pause.

  ‘Let me write that down.’ He flipped the napkin over and wrote on it; an address. ‘No problem.’ He paused. ‘Yes, the others will be there, too. See you then.’ He closed the phone carefully with his injured hand.

  ‘He wants to meet us tomorrow morning.’

  8.

  A couple of hours later, after losing a game of blackjack with Cameron and Tallis and watching them play, I made my way over to the nightclub back at the MGM where I’d arranged to meet Brian and Cynthia. I waited at the bar, long enough to order a beer and think about what Cynthia would want to drink. I thought about ordering something else, a cocktail that might make me look more sophisticated. But was sophistication something that would impress Cynthia? She was, after all, writing a dissertation about Las Vegas. Or was it only a chapter?

  There was a square, sunken dance floor in the center of the room, with wide, shallow steps leading down to it. The steps were lit from beneath, glowing red rectangles of plastic that went on and off in a pattern that created a checkerboard effect. I watched it for a while and couldn’t discern a rhythm to it, the on and off.

  I couldn’t help thinking that the steps would present a hazard for people who had been drinking and dancing all night, but they were shallow enough that you wouldn’t have far to fall. It was the kind of thing I would be likely to do, even — especially — now that I’d seen the potential danger and tried to warn myself against it. A woman in spike heels walked down the steps, followed by a man. They showed no sign of tripping over.

  A few other people were on the dance floor, under colored overhead lights that swiveled in their own random set of motions. There were cages set up at the sides of the floor, four of them, elevated on fat black podiums, with girls dancing inside. This was the kind of thing I never saw outside of Vegas, and it had taken some getting used to the first time we visited. They were everywhere.

  I saw Cynthia from the back, the only woman in the place with short hair. It was cut so close to her head at the back right near the nape of her neck that you could see the scalp through it; or should it be called skin at that point? I couldn’t see it from where I was standing, several feet away, but knew that I would be able to up close. She was wearing a sleeveless dress with a low back that showed her spine all the way down to her waist. As I watched, she raised one hand to the back of her neck, to near the place I had just been looking at. She was talking to two men, and the hand on the neck looked like a coy gesture. Brian wasn’t with her. I scanned the room once, twice, and couldn’t see him.

  She turned around then, while I was looking for Brian, and I was grateful that she hadn’t turned and looked
at me while I’d been watching her. I was able to raise my eyebrows and say ‘Hey,’ as though I hadn’t been looking at her back and her neck for a while already. She came over to me with a smile and her confident walk, her incredibly high heels.

  ‘Hi, Elliot,’ she said.

  ‘Hello. You look great.’

  ‘Thanks. So do you.’

  She was cheerful, upbeat, as she had been before, in the lobby. A couple of dimples formed when she smiled, small ones. There was a fine gold chain around her neck, of links so small that it clung to her skin, draped over her collarbone like a line painted on with a brush.

  ‘Sorry —’ I caught myself, stopped staring. ‘Do you want a drink? What are you drinking?’

  ‘A vodka martini, Grey Goose, dirty, two olives,’ she said brightly. ‘Thanks.’

  Once she had her drink in hand, I thought about asking her whether Brian was coming. It was an unreasonably complicated question to construct. ‘Where’s Brian?’ sounded wrong, petulant somehow. ‘Is Brian with you?’ was a possibility; ‘Is Brian going to join us?’ could work, but sounded overly formal. In my head, at least.

  ‘Brian has a headache,’ she offered, sparing me the question. I must have acted unsurprised. ‘Did something happen earlier?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘It seemed like something might have happened with you guys, you know, when you had that drink together.’

  I was aware of gripping my glass too tightly and forced my hand to relax.

  ‘What did Brian say?’ I asked.

  ‘So something did happen? Did you have a fight?’

  ‘No — no one had a fight. Is that what he told you?’

  ‘He didn’t tell me anything.’ She moved closer in. ‘That’s why I’m asking you. He seemed … unsettled.’

  I decided to fall back on the grief argument. ‘It’s hard for all of us, you know, being here without Dylan. Maybe it’s just hit Brian hard all of a sudden. I wouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said.

  The music grew louder. At the other end of the bar two women climbed onto it using a step stool that the bartender held for them. Their expressions changed from flat to glossy smiles once they stood up there in tight, black shorts and cowboy boots. They clapped their hands together as though they were going to start playing patty-cake, then turned and bumped their asses together, and started dancing. It was fairly restrained compared with the dancing going on inside the cages on the dance floor; they had to think harder about questions of balance. I saw them share a glance, and one of them rolled her eyes with an ironic smile, performing all her motions with a kind of amused detachment.

  Cynthia stared at them thoughtfully. ‘I guess regular women get up there to dance by the end of the night,’ she said. ‘This must be some kind of encouragement.’

  I imagined that Dylan or Tallis would have known exactly how to handle this situation: standing at a bar with someone else’s girlfriend while half-naked women were gyrating on it, and in cages a few feet away. For me it was impossibly awkward. I tried not to look at the women. I looked at Cynthia instead. Her short hair framed her face, falling onto her forehead just a little, not nearly long enough to cover her eyes. She didn’t ever reach up to touch it. I thought of Natasha and felt a swift pang of longing from my hands to a place inside my chest, like a branching vein.

  Cynthia gave me an appraising glance. ‘I don’t have any plans for getting up there myself, in case you’re wondering.’ I smiled. ‘But who knows what might happen after a few more of these.’ She stirred her drink with the toothpick, then picked it up and ate one of the olives, pulling it off with her teeth. ‘I suppose it could be, you know, research,’ she said when she’d swallowed it.

  ‘Are you writing about tabletop dancing?’

  ‘Not specifically. But it’s Vegas. Naked girls will have to come into it somehow.’

  ‘There’s a few of those.’

  ‘Do you ever go to the shows? You know, the naked girl shows?’

  I shook my head. She had put the question to me casually, but at the same time as though I were an informant. It wasn’t clear exactly what I would be informing on: she could have been curious about what Brian got up to normally when we were here, or it could have just been a question about Vegas. For her research.

  ‘We’re going to one tomorrow night,’ she said. ‘The one at the Paris casino. The cancan show.’

  ‘I don’t think they’re completely naked. If that’s what you’re looking for.’

  She smiled again, broadly. ‘No, I’ll be happy with some strategically placed feathers. Or sequins.’

  It was hard to not think about Brian’s pornography collection, his own interest in naked women, pictures of them at least, lacking in strategically placed anything. I wondered how much Cynthia knew about it. She seemed like a tolerant person. She seemed as though she might even take an academic interest, or be the kind of girl who was interested in porn. There was a graduate student in my department while I was finishing my PhD who’d claimed to be a ‘sex-positive’ feminist, which seemed to show mainly in her talking with unembarrassed enthusiasm about pornography in the student lounge and at department functions. From being on the edge of those conversations I had learned that there was such a thing as pornography produced by and for women. Apparently it avoided all the patriarchal power issues of regular pornography.

  ‘She has great curves,’ Cynthia said, indicating the dancer closest to us. The surface of the bar vibrated a little from their movements. Some kind of agreement seemed to be called for. I nodded.

  ‘Oh, you’re not even looking,’ Cynthia scolded me. ‘I’ve always been envious of women with bodies like that,’ she said.

  This seemed like the perfect example of a trap. ‘They’re probably envious of yours,’ I tried.

  ‘Small, but perfectly formed,’ she said, with heavy irony. ‘Do you want another drink? No, wait, let’s dance.’ She issued it as a sort of gentle command, rather than an invitation.

  I followed her down the shallow steps, eyes on her revealed back, concentrating hard on keeping my footing. The dance floor was alternately slick and sticky in places, from spilled drinks and wear. Everyone in the club seemed to have the same idea at the same time we did and the space was suddenly crowded with bodies. I tried to pay attention to the music, to see if the song had changed, but it sounded just the same — monotonous, bass-heavy techno — as it had the whole time we had been there.

  Cynthia reached one arm out behind her as we made our way, and turned her face toward me, smiling with her lips closed and dimple showing. Just as I reached forward to take her offered hand, the music changed, or the song stayed essentially the same but a faster, more insistent beat emerged. Her hand was small against mine, as I had expected; it was just our fingers touching, lightly. Skin warm and dry, fingers alive. She turned her face so that she was facing forward again and led me through the throng to a space near the center of the floor. I wondered what she was up to; how to read this invitation to dance, this outstretched hand, the liveness of her slim fingers.

  It was a relief to be away from the dancing girls on the bar. We were now closer to the ones in cages, but they were easier to ignore, raised up on their platforms and less in the line of sight. Cynthia moved with ease, all sinuous motion, arms lifted, hips twisting. She spun around slowly and shifted so that her dress crept lower and revealed the top of a tattoo low on her waist at the back, just below the line of fabric. I couldn’t see the whole design; it could have been the curve of a dragon’s tail or a bluebird’s wing or a stroke of a Chinese character, anything. She moved again and it was gone from view.

  She looked down at the floor; she looked up and arched her neck so that her throat showed, and tilted her head to the side; it felt like a performance designed solely for me, like a careful piece of persuasion, an argument, a deliberately labored point. The point wasn’t just that she was beautiful and that I was allowed to desire her, although that was part of it. I gave myself time to work it o
ut, to allow myself to be persuaded of whatever it was. I had drunk enough that I was willing to dance, although it would take a couple more before I was really relaxed about it.

  We stayed on the dance floor for what seemed like a long time. The songs changed. I caught another glimpse of the tattoo, and another, and was no closer to figuring out what it was. The straps of Cynthia’s dress seemed always poised on the point of slipping off, but never actually did. She didn’t adjust them, as some women around us were doing — pulling back sleeves, hitching fallen bra straps — just as she never touched her hair; she seemed to be so much all in place, and so unthinkingly sure about it. I pushed my glasses back up my face, sweating, and envied her.

  The place where her dress shifted to reveal her tattoo began to obsess me, and I started to wonder whether this was part of the point of the dress. It began to seem obvious that it was, even though that seemed like an overly blunt device for Cynthia, with her subtly crafted beauty argument. But then I looked at it for long enough that it didn’t seem blunt at all, but simply maddening, and more than anything I wanted to know how the fabric would feel if I touched my fingers to it, and pulled it down just enough to show the design of the tattoo more clearly. Texture — that was what I wanted to know more about — the silver-gray dress; the tan, vulnerable-looking skin. Would the tattooed skin feel different from the skin around it?

  A couple moved by on their way to another part of the dance floor and pushed us momentarily very close together so that we touched. ‘What’s that tattoo on your back?’ I asked, trying not to shout to be heard over the music. As if in unconscious response to the words in my mouth, my right hand moved to touch her waist.

  She moved in even closer and stretched up to speak into my ear, a word I couldn’t make out.