A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘What?’

  ‘A dandelion!’ she repeated, and grinned up at me.

  Self-consciousness overcame me then: my hand on her waist, her face upturned so close to mine, radiant, the sheen of sweat on her cheeks, and I let go.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, and took my hand again, just the fingers. ‘Let’s get another drink.’

  I led the way this time.

  ‘Do you want to go someplace else?’ she asked, when we reached the top of the flashing red-lit steps.

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘Is there some club you usually go to when you’re in town? I should have asked you earlier.’

  ‘No — I mean, nowhere in particular. There’s a bar downtown I like. But it’s quiet — no dancing. Another time, maybe.’

  ‘Downtown.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘Well, that’s interesting. There’s a place down there I want to visit. Let’s go later. Do you mind if we go to the White Room first? At Caesars? It’s one of the places on my list to check out.’

  ‘Sounds good.’

  ‘I’m trying to visit, you know, the places that are on TV a lot. For my research.’ She smiled, apologetic. ‘I’m going to text Brian.’

  She pulled a phone out — the heavy-looking leather bag had been exchanged for a small purse in crackled silver leather — and started pressing buttons.

  ‘Do you want to call him?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe when we’re on our way.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Is Tallis coming along tonight? Or Cameron?’

  ‘I don’t know, I left them playing blackjack.’

  ‘Well, let them know if you like. In case they want to come. But I know they probably don’t want to hang out with the girlfriend.’

  ‘Oh,’ I started, about to protest, then stopped, feeling sure that she didn’t need me to protect her feelings. ‘I’ll let them know anyway.’

  Her phone buzzed. She read over the text. ‘His head’s still bad. Whatever.’ She pressed a reply and flipped the phone shut. ‘You’re going to tell me what you all fought about.’

  Her voice was sweet; she took my arm and pressed lightly against me, and didn’t seem to want an answer right then and there.

  We headed for the exit. I wondered how soon it would be before she found out. It didn’t seem likely that Brian would be able to keep the secret from her for much longer, although her discovery of it seemed to be the thing he feared most. I’d seen the naked guilt in his face, the hopeless longing to confess in conflict with his desire to keep lying — to himself, to everyone. Cynthia seemed to have the kind of tenacious instinct that would keep going until she found out what was going on.

  Our walk out through the maze of the hotel took us by the lion habitat.

  ‘Look!’ she said. ‘Here it is.’

  The glass enclosure was empty. A sign explained that the lions were there daily until 7 p.m. The waterfall was still running, pouring down thinly, silently, over the fake rocks. They looked fake, at least; with rock it was hard to tell. I looked for signs: what are the signs of real as opposed to fake rock? There was a lurid greenish stain all around the waterfall that could have been natural or synthetic, or a growth of something natural on top of something synthetic. The rocks didn’t give the impression of mass and heaviness, somehow, that actual rocks gave. I couldn’t tell whether their edges were smoother, or more rough, than real rock would be. My knowledge of actual rock was very limited; I’d seen a lot of it in the form of smoothly cut and polished stone on the facades of city buildings, but not in its natural state. But then I remembered the gorge just at the edge of campus at the college where I taught: the cold, gray harshness of it. I didn’t pay attention to it whenever I had to walk by; looking down into that depth felt unsettling, even in summer when vines and other plants grew over and hid some of it. Every year at least one freshman died by jumping into the gorge, or falling into it while drunk. In spring, the vastness of the water rushing through it was a roar, all the surfaces of the gorge wet and slick with spray, and I always hurried over the bridge that spanned it. The bridge that, now I thought about it, was built of rough blocks that looked similar to these in the lion habitat — brownish-gray, not quite real.

  Cynthia pressed her hands against the thick glass wall smeared with fingerprints. It showed a faint blurry reflection of the two of us standing there.

  ‘What do you think about the rocks?’ I asked. ‘Real, or fake?’

  She frowned. ‘Of course they’re not real,’ she said, gently. ‘They’re fake.’

  I expected her to follow up with the usual comment, ‘Like everything in Vegas,’ but she didn’t.

  She had said something earlier, by the elevators when we all arrived, about her work being about fakes and something else opposed — the real — authenticity, that was it.

  ‘So where’s the authentic stuff in Vegas?’ I asked. ‘Isn’t it all fake?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, all serious now. ‘You’ve been here so many times — you must know. It’s so important that everything isn’t fake. It’s important that so many things are real, or authentic. Like these lions — they want you to know that they’re all descended from the original MGM lion.’

  ‘His name was Leo,’ I offered. I’d learned about Leo that afternoon, when I was depressing myself in my room and reading the hotel literature.

  ‘Right, Leo. And the lions here are all sired by him. Or related to him in some way.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t see any reason to believe it or not believe it. But the point is that the lions matter — they have value — because they are the real thing. Or they claim to be.’

  ‘They cycle them in and out, you know.’

  ‘I know. There’s forty of them or something out in the desert someplace nearby. They’re all asleep now.’

  ‘Or prowling,’ I suggested.

  ‘Or prowling, yes. That sounds good. Do you think there are facilities for prowling in a lion sanctuary?’

  ‘Yes. Definitely.’

  ‘Let’s come and see them tomorrow.’

  ‘OK.’

  My phone buzzed. No number identified. I answered it.

  ‘Elliot?’ It was Brian, his voice an anxious squeak.

  ‘You sound terrible.’

  ‘Oh, yeah.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’m fine, really. Elliot …’

  Cynthia was looking at the lion enclosure again, reading one of the signs.

  ‘Do you want to talk to —’

  ‘No.’ He cut me off.

  ‘She’s right here.’ I tried to keep my voice down.

  ‘No, look, I just can’t do it, I can’t go out with her tonight. Just … you know, having some trouble dealing with … all this.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Thinking it over, man. Tallis is here.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We’re thinking it over, making a plan.’ I could begin to hear how drunk he was already.

  ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘It’s going to be fine, Elliot. Don’t sweat it.’

  ‘Just take it easy,’ I repeated.

  ‘Take care of Cynthia.’

  I looked over toward where she stood with her back to me, arms loosely by her side, the dress not showing the tattoo. The dandelion. ‘Sure. She can take care of herself.’

  ‘I know, I know, I’m just saying. Thanks for hanging out with her.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘I know that, you know, you weren’t crazy about the idea of her coming —’

  ‘Look, it’s OK. She’s great.’

  ‘Great. It’s all good.’ He sounded tired now.

  ‘Is Cameron with you?’

  A pause. ‘Cameron’s with us, yeah. We’re sorting it out, Elliot. I know it’s overdue.’

  ‘OK, good,’ I said, knowing the relief in my voice had to do with the fact that Cameron would be out of the way, that I’d have Cynthia to myself for the rest of the night. ‘I’ll
check in with you later.’

  ‘No problem.’

  We said goodbye and I closed the phone, and looked up to meet Cynthia’s eyes, greenish-looking in the pale light from the lion enclosure. I felt sure she knew it had been Brian on the phone, but she didn’t say a thing. Instead she took my arm again and we found our way to the exit.

  Her silence took on a new quality in the taxi as we rode up the Strip toward Caesars Palace. She sat still, pressed up against the end of the seat, face staring intently out the window, her knees an inch or two apart. I tried not to look. There was something transgressive in what we were doing now. Drinking and dancing at the club in the hotel was one thing, with Brian upstairs somewhere in the building; this was something else.

  They were moving in together, Brian had said. He’d lived with one girl before, a couple of years back, but somehow it hadn’t seemed serious. She had just moved to Boston from somewhere else, Connecticut or Vermont, and was staying with friends and subletting until she found her own place; and moving in with Brian had seemed like just another step toward something else that didn’t necessarily include him — or that was my impression when I’d stayed with them once while attending a small conference at Boston University. She had insisted on reading a draft of the paper I was presenting, and managed to spill red wine on it so that when I did read it at the conference the pages were stiff and warped and pink.

  I found myself wondering now whether it was true that Cynthia was moving in with him, or something he’d invented, or exaggerated. There was no reason to think he was making it up except that it was hard to reconcile how I felt at this moment, being with her in the car, with the idea of her being so committed to Brian. I wondered what it was that she saw in him, as I always did with his girlfriends — not because it seemed so crazy for them to be attracted to him, but with that sense of wondering how he appeared to people who had known him only a short time compared with how long he and I had been friends.

  In some ways Brian didn’t seem to have changed that much in the years I’d known him. His display of sensitivity to women, his openness to feminism, had perhaps become more subtle over time but was still there, a carefully calibrated performance. It wasn’t all for show, it was something he did seem to really believe in even as he appeared to perform it in a way designed to impress. The books from the college courses he’d taken on gender and sexuality in the English department and the politics of the gaze in film studies were still on his bookshelves at home, some of them fringed with old yellow Post-it notes. I wondered now whether he’d taken those courses out of guilt, or an acknowledged need of self-improvement or education in this direction, after what happened with Jodie White. It seemed more likely that he had managed to put that experience firmly away, in a compartment separated off from the rest of how he thought about himself.

  I wondered again how I ought to judge him. I understood something about how it was possible to balance desires and feelings that should have been contradictory or mutually exclusive. Maybe it looked from the outside like hypocrisy or opportunism, but I knew it was more complicated than that, more deeply and strangely felt. All the same, I saw Brian differently now; and trying to see him as Cynthia perhaps saw him involved a lot more than the usual slight shift in focus. It was as though a vein of ruthlessness in him, of manic self-interest, had risen to the surface after being carefully suppressed for so long, and now, as I thought back, I could see it everywhere — not directly, but its shadow was apparent, an inescapable element in the peripheral vision of my memory.

  It’s hard to say how I would have felt about Cynthia if I hadn’t just been exposed to this new aspect of Brian, if I hadn’t just learned that he’d done something that was impossible to justify. I don’t think I would have normally indulged in this level of moral superiority, but it was difficult to resist for the way it made me feel less treacherous, for the way it seemed to give me some kind of exemption from whatever sense of obligation or taboo I would otherwise have felt. I could feel those strictures loosening as surely as the clean thread of a screw being turned, destabilizing a whole intricate framework of connections.

  The driver accelerated to overtake another vehicle and I gave in to the way the speed of the car pressed our bodies back into the seat. I watched, transfixed, as Cynthia took a tube of lip gloss from her bag and drew it across her mouth once, twice, three times. She looked toward me then and smiled, her eyes gleaming, and her lips glittered and sparkled and shone.

  A moment later the taxi stopped and let us out into the warm night. It was a brief few steps into the cold air of the casino. I suppose I should have expected it, but her next question took me by surprise.

  ‘So what was he like, this Dylan?’

  We were in the lobby of Caesars by then, had just passed by the fountain in the middle of the room. It splashed faintly, lit pink and yellow. I’d been here with Dylan, possibly right in the exact space that Cynthia and I now occupied. I glanced over at the counters where a few weary-looking tourists were still checking in or checking out and saw Dylan there, a spectral form for a moment, leaning his long, slim body in that way he had, positioning it in relation to the person he was addressing so that he seemed to be concentrating his entire energy on them, smiling beatifically and folding his arms, unfolding them. The specter disappeared.

  ‘Hasn’t Brian talked about him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah, a little. He went through a lot in those weeks after he died.’

  We kept walking toward the elevators.

  ‘Brian didn’t want to talk about him much, actually,’ she went on. ‘Once or twice he got drunk and said how much he missed him.’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  She reached out casually and snapped her hand on the elevator button. The arrow took a second to light up, and we waited.

  ‘Once,’ she said, ‘he got really drunk and came over to my place — really late at night, like three in the morning — and said he was glad Dylan was dead. That was the last thing he said before he passed out.’

  The elevator doors pinged open, disgorging a crowd of women and clouds of perfume. We let them pass. Cynthia looked over at me, eyebrows raised, once we were inside.

  ‘It’s not the kind of thing you want to bring up again the next morning over coffee,’ she said.

  ‘I guess not,’ I replied. ‘Did you ever bring it up again?’

  She shook her head. ‘He didn’t either. He didn’t mention him again after that.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So I’m sort of curious to hear more about him. From his other friends — from Brian’s other friends. You guys were all so close.’

  ‘We were.’

  ‘I’m still in touch with some of my friends from college, from high school, even. But not in that kind of, I don’t know, group sense that you all have.’

  We were on familiar ground now and I began to relax. Most people expressed admiration and envy at the way we had managed to stay friends and meet up together every year. The loyalty, the commitment, the affection for one another, the fact that we did what everyone else said they would like to but never got around to doing — whatever it was that people saw in us. But Cynthia didn’t take it in that direction.

  ‘Doesn’t it ever feel … well, claustrophobic?’

  ‘Claustrophobic?’

  As the word left my mouth, I began to be conscious of the smallness of the space we were in. The elevator slowed and opened its doors just as I was beginning to stare at the red panic button. We stepped out not far from the entrance to the club. Twenty or more people were waiting in a ragged line behind a white velvet rope strung along silver posts.

  Cynthia walked up to the door and handed a couple of cards to the woman controlling access. She towered over us both, dressed in white leather with skin like espresso and a mane of dark hair, her eyelids encrusted with silver glitter. The cards were line passes, I saw, supposed to get you past the rope and in the door; guys sometimes sold them or handed them out on the Strip. The woman gla
nced at the cards and looked carefully at us both before nodding approval and finally smiling, showing oddly pointed incisors, and motioning us through with a bored wave of her arm. The doors were heavy, thick glass and made me think of the lion enclosure. Through them the space was dark and blue-lit. I followed Cynthia inside, and recognized the place, roughly, from having seen it on TV.

  ‘What show was this on?’ I asked.

  ‘What?’

  A group of people next to us, shrieking and laughing, drowned out our voices.

  ‘What show was this on?’

  ‘What show did I see? Are you talking about the naked girls? The Paris show?’

  ‘No, no, doesn’t matter.’ I decided to wait until we had drinks and a quieter place to stand or sit, or just to forget it.

  The crowd cleared all of a sudden and I could see our way through to the doors that led to a large outdoor terrace overlooking the Strip.

  ‘Do you want to go outside?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes! Oh, you know, I have to go to the bathroom. You go — I’ll meet you out there.’

  ‘Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll get the next one.’

  I started to say no, don’t worry about it, but she was gone.

  There was a long, low white leather couch free at the end of the terrace, a candle glowing in a round glass holder on the table in front of it. I caught the eye of a waitress passing with a tray full of empty glasses and trashed paper umbrellas, and ordered our drinks. It was quieter outside than inside, but still loud with music coming from speakers set around the terrace.

  I thought about what Cynthia had said in the elevators. Claustrophobic. It described pretty well what I’d felt earlier that evening when I’d sat with Brian and Tallis, that terrible yellow envelope on the table between us, all feeling trapped by the past, trapped by our knowledge of one another. Cynthia, I thought, you have no idea. But I liked her for saying it — for having something to say apart from the usual comments about how great it must be, and how good it was that we all had one another, that we could be there for one another after Dylan passed away.

  I wondered whether she was going to ask about him again. What I had to say about him now was different from anything I would have said a day or so earlier, or so it seemed. I considered the things that were different, and the things that were the same. It was still true to say that he was likable, and funny, and persuasive. And resourceful — the kind of person you could turn to in order to solve any kind of troublesome situation, no matter how impossible. I’d always had some sense of the more disturbing aspects of his problem-solving capacities but had never felt them so keenly. He convinced you that there was a solution for every difficulty; he could provide it, and he didn’t ask you to look very carefully at the real cost of the answers he offered.