A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Elliot, there you are,’ he said as I walked in. He gestured toward his father. ‘This is my father, Richard Hyde. Richard: Elliot West.’

  ‘It’s delightful to meet you.’ He shook my hand with an air of arch amusement. ‘I so rarely get to know any of Tallis’s friends. Are you named after the poet?’

  He had unusual eyes, those David Bowie eyes, one blue and one brown, and I looked back and forth between them as he held my gaze. He must have been used to people staring.

  ‘No,’ I said, and felt an impulse that very rarely came, to lie about it and say yes, because it seemed like it would have pleased him. ‘Two ls.’

  ‘Ahh,’ he said, as though this were equally interesting.

  I waited for a cue from Tallis, not sure whether he was going to invite me to sit down. It wasn’t that unusual for me to drop by on a Thursday when we both had mornings free. We would drink coffee together, and he’d sometimes talk to me about those English sports he was into, cricket and soccer — football. I liked those mornings. Tallis had a calmness and confidence at home in his own space. All the public bantering, the needling and strutting, was toned down and his manic energy seemed somehow contained and focused. It was knowing him in this way, this version of him, that made it possible to put up with his overbearing behavior at other times.

  The radio was often on, playing the classical station or the BBC World Service. This, and the sport obsession, was the only sign that he missed England, something he would never admit. He kept the place scrupulously clean, to a degree that seemed slightly obsessive. There was none of the mess and accumulated grime that characterized every other student dwelling I knew. I suspected that this was one of the reasons he’d found fraternity life difficult, dealing with other people’s stuff in the communal spaces of the house.

  That morning, the apartment displayed a few glaring spots of disorder. His father’s jacket, a fine tweed blazer, had been thrown on the couch carelessly so that one sleeve hung down over the arm and the rest of the jacket was wrinkled as though it had been sat on. There was a crumpled soft pack of cigarettes and an ashtray on the coffee table next to a newspaper, folded loosely, with pages out of alignment. There was a glass there as well, half full of clear liquid that I felt sure was gin rather than water, judging from the faint smell of alcohol that permeated the room. As I glanced around, other things looked slightly wrong: chairs set at an unfamiliar angle; Tallis’s unmade bed, covers spilling onto the floor, visible through the half-open door to his bedroom. The place itself felt ill at ease. It was possible that I had walked in on an argument. I felt an instinctive desire to close the bedroom door, to avert my eyes, to straighten the chairs.

  Richard sat on the couch, crossed his legs, and dragged deeply on his cigarette, watching us patiently. Tallis didn’t look at him, but that somehow only made it more obvious how much of his attention was absorbed there. When he offered me coffee, I refused, making up some story about reading I needed to catch up on for class later that day. It didn’t seem as though he wanted me to stay.

  When I’d caught up with Cameron later, he’d explained to me about Richard’s drinking. Cameron had known Tallis longer than any of us. They’d gone to high school together for their senior year — Cameron had a scholarship to this wildly expensive prep school that Tallis got dropped into when his family moved to New York from the UK. The drinking was bad enough to cause serious problems for Tallis’s father at work and at home, Cameron said — Tallis’s parents had separated twice before and seemed to be permanently on the verge of divorce. His father lived part-time at the Four Seasons when he went on a binge and Tallis’s mother threw him out.

  ‘It’s hard on Tallis,’ Cameron had said. ‘He’s an only child. He used to think it was all up to him to solve the situation, to watch his dad’s drinking, to hide it from his mother, et cetera.’

  I didn’t tell Cameron too much about what it had been like coming across Tallis and his father together. That glimpse of the unmade bed, all the rest of it, had felt like an unauthorized moment of intimacy. It was as though Tallis had exposed something to me unintentionally, a vulnerability that he would regret.

  When Tallis showed up after that weekend with his father, he was exhausted, turning up to the bar to meet us already half drunk and drinking with a solid, troubling determination. He tried to pick fights with all of us. Cameron had treated him with patience, walked him home. I’d wondered about the drinking, the seeming irony of the way Tallis appeared to be driven to it in order to cope with the problems it caused in his own family. It made sad, complete sense.

  Tallis was looking at Cameron in the car as though waiting for Cameron to reassure him, to indicate that he should tell us the story. Cameron didn’t say anything, didn’t seem to move, but something passed between them. Tallis turned around to face Brian and me more fully.

  ‘I’ve met him,’ I reminded him, trying to be encouraging. ‘Richard.’

  ‘That’s right. I forgot about that. You met him that time he came to visit. Well, this is about something fairly recent. Cameron, do you have a cigarette?’

  Cameron glanced at me with a worried frown. He was the only one of us who never smoked. I reached into my pocket. There were two cigarettes left in the pack and I gave one to Tallis. Cameron pressed the lighter in the dashboard, and handed it over. Tallis lit the cigarette carefully, first turning the key in the ignition enough so that the electronic windows worked; he wound one down, letting in a wave of heat, and blew smoke straight toward me. Brian coughed. I lowered my window as well. Tallis turned the car off.

  ‘My father’s been trying to stop drinking for a while,’ he said to us, sounding almost apologetic. ‘Going to AA and all that. My mother’s going to leave him if he doesn’t stop. It’s bad for him.’ He turned to flick ash out the window, his forearm glowing bright white in the sun for a second. ‘And it’s bad for her,’ he said, all casual understatement. ‘Last time he visited the States he fell off the wagon pretty badly — this was just last year. I was in London, I couldn’t get over here, and Dylan helped out when I got the call.’

  ‘What did he do?’ I asked.

  ‘He got into an argument with someone,’ Tallis said. ‘I don’t know exactly what happened. I think they were both pretty far gone. Drinking at the hotel bar. He ended up pushing this guy too hard — literally, he shoved him, and the guy fell over. Sprained his wrist, or his ankle. Broke a chair, a table, something else. The guy called the cops. Pressed charges. Assault.’

  Something about the way Tallis spoke made me think that he wasn’t telling us everything.

  ‘Was your father OK?’ I asked. ‘Was he injured?’

  Tallis shook his head. ‘Not badly. He hurt his hand.’

  ‘And the other guy broke his wrist?’

  Tallis paused. ‘Sprained.’

  I let it go. ‘Did Dylan get him a lawyer?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Tallis said.

  I looked at Cameron.

  ‘I couldn’t get through to Cameron,’ Tallis said. Cameron kept watching him. ‘It was an emergency,’ Tallis continued. ‘I called Dylan. I knew it was a bad idea, but, you know — I knew he’d be able to do something. He found someone who sorted it out. It was expensive, but the guy didn’t take it to court. He agreed to drop the charges. So. My mother didn’t have to know about it, and neither did the company.’

  ‘And Colin knows about the lawyer?’ Brian asked.

  ‘He has his number.’

  ‘But wouldn’t the lawyer just deny it?’

  ‘Colin’s also got a record of the arrest.’

  ‘Shit,’ Cameron said.

  ‘Obviously I’d prefer it if my mother didn’t find out about this. Or anyone else connected with my father.’

  I remembered what Cameron had said about Tallis’s feeling of responsibility, the adult part he felt he’d had to play as a child. His fury on the drive over appeared potentially more complicated now: I wondered how much of it was anger at his father, for cr
eating the situation in the first place.

  ‘Here we are, anyway,’ Tallis said, and replaced his mirrored glasses. ‘Let’s meet Colin.’

  The place said simply DINER in red block letters against white-painted concrete over the entrance. There were long glass windows onto the street. It was either self-consciously retro or just old and relatively freshly painted. The interior presented the same ambiguity: a chrome counter, red vinyl-topped stools, red vinyl booths. It was empty apart from a woman reading a battered paperback at the end of the counter. It felt as though we had walked into an Edward Hopper painting at the wrong time of day. Somewhere a radio started up, static and crackle, then a song, someone rolling through the dial, through the sound of talk and more music and the unmistakable overenthusiasm of advertisements, until they settled on a station — still staticky, but not too bad — playing seventies rock. It sounded like the Eagles.

  A tall, thin Asian man with long hair appeared behind the counter, a half-full bottle of ketchup in his hands, wearing a waiter’s half-apron. He nodded at us.

  That’s when I noticed Colin. He was sitting in the booth at the very end of the room. There was a stunted-looking plant in a pot on the floor next to him, a sickly, miniature version of the palm trees that lined the street outside. Its trunk leaned over slightly toward him.

  Somehow I’d been expecting him to look like almost a twin of Dylan’s — it must have been the thing Lily had said, about Dylan mentioning that they looked alike. But the person at the end of the room wasn’t a younger, slightly less good looking version of Dylan, as I had imagined. He was unmistakably Dylan’s brother, but not in any way I could put my finger on at first. In the hour or so that we spent with him I eventually caught sharp glimpses of resemblance: his profile, as he looked down and away to the side; something in the shape of his hands, the attractive, loose way they held a cigarette, the long fingers; and, most disarmingly, a particular way of smiling that wasn’t exactly about the shape of any distinct features but was a combination of things, the way they were put together — the angle of the head, the twist of the mouth, the look in the eyes. It was there for a moment, definitely Dylan, and then it was gone, something else. But for the seconds it was there it was so alike that I wondered whether he had actually learned this way of smiling from Dylan, seen it and emulated it and practiced it. I could imagine Dylan noticing and encouraging him.

  He was slim like Dylan, although a little shorter. That was noticeable when he stood to greet us, dragged on his cigarette, and stuck out his hand toward us. We all exchanged a nervous glance, except for Brian, who looked him right in the eye, walked over and sat down in the booth across from him, ignoring the proffered hand. Colin showed a brief second of discomfort and then lowered his hand, touched the table, and waited for us to take our seats.

  The booths were wide and long but couldn’t accommodate four people sitting in a row. I ended up next to Colin, in the corner, while he stayed on the outside, next to the drooping plant.

  The waiter came over and stood silently, pen and notebook in hand. He wore a small name tag pinned to the right-hand side of his chest: ANTONY, it said, in red letters engraved into the white plastic.

  ‘Coffee all round,’ Tallis said, and reached up to remove his sunglasses. He blinked as though he were in direct sunlight although it was dim and cool inside. Hangover.

  ‘Are you guys hungry?’ Colin asked. Those were the first words he said.

  ‘Just coffee,’ said Cameron. ‘That will be fine.’

  ‘The tuna salad sandwich is great,’ Colin said.

  He met Antony’s eyes, gave a half-hearted smile. The waiter smiled back, a look passed between them, and I wondered whether they were friends, and how often he came here. For a moment it seemed as though he was planning to order the sandwich and eat alone.

  ‘Next time,’ he said.

  The waiter came back quickly with a handful of mugs, thick porcelain ones, and poured coffee for all of us from a jug. I was cautious this time, with my burned tongue, and sipped carefully. It was weak, but fresh.

  ‘Great coffee,’ said Colin.

  He seemed to be the kind of person who wants to talk too much when he’s nervous, and tries to keep a rein on it.

  ‘I remember you,’ Tallis said, accusation in his voice, ‘from the funeral.’

  Colin nodded. ‘Semele gave me the news.’

  Tallis looked confused.

  ‘Sally,’ I said. ‘He means Sally.’

  ‘Right, right,’ Tallis muttered.

  Colin’s friendliness disarmed all of us; whatever else of Dylan we had been expecting to find in him, it hadn’t been that — the instant, hypnotic charm that sought to put everyone at ease so smoothly. Colin had only a diluted version of it, but it was undeniably present. He must have been working very hard to project it. His nervousness showed only in pieces — the slightly compulsive talking, a certain tension in the smile.

  Dylan’s skin had an olive tone that deepened whenever he tanned; Colin instead looked simply tan. Not in an overdone way, like a lot of the guys walking around Vegas. He had the kind of healthy glow that comes from just being outdoors, a look I never seemed quite able to achieve apart from a few days in the middle of summer, if it wasn’t a summer spent entirely indoors trying to finish a paper or a chapter or a research assignment, as many of my summers were.

  Whatever Colin was, he didn’t seem to be a representative of the poor and desperate Vegas underclass I’d had in mind. He looked something like a young River Phoenix, with high cheekbones and that suggestion of vulnerability. His hair was short and neatly parted, a more golden color than Dylan’s dark brown, his shirt ironed and clean, a light bluish-gray that Dylan would have worn. It looked as though he had put himself together carefully for our meeting. He reminded me of a minor star of the forties, someone whose movies I might have watched on AMC in the daytime, whose photo might hang in one of the lesser corners of the MGM Grand. With a modest mustache he would have looked the part exactly.

  I was the only one looking at him. Brian had fixed his eyes on some point in the middle distance outside the window, his mouth fixed into a compressed pout; Tallis kept glancing at his sunglasses and squinting, as if he wanted to put them back on; Cameron looked at his coffee, and eventually met my eyes.

  ‘How did you get to know Dylan?’ I asked. It was somewhere to start.

  ‘You’re Elliot, right?’

  ‘Sorry, yes — I’m Elliot, this is Cameron —’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said. ‘I recognize you. I’ve seen you all in photographs — I asked Dylan to show me once. So I know your faces, I put the names to the faces. You’re Brian, Tallis, Cameron.’ His eyes moved over them one by one, and drew their gaze at last.

  ‘Dylan contacted Diedre, our mom, a few years ago. When was it — about ten years ago. I was really young, like twelve or thirteen. That’s right. He’d found out, about the adoption thing, and got in touch with her. He came out here — came to our house.’

  ‘Had you known?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I had no idea. Mom had never told me, she’d never talked about it. She didn’t want to see him at first. She tried to close the door. But, you know, he convinced her.’

  Something in the air changed — the others shifted slightly in their seats, and so did I. In that ‘you know’ there was something true. An acknowledgment; a point of connection, of recognition.

  ‘Anyway, he said he wanted to get to know her a little, and he stayed and talked for a while. And then he came back a few months later, and then he visited about every year. Mom died three years back. It was a heart attack, kind of sudden, but she’d had problems, some health problems.’

  I wanted to ask him what she had been like. No picture of her would come into my mind, no matter how hard I tried to imagine her, beyond a shadowy image of a young, thin woman, faceless. It was too difficult to separate the image of Greta from Dylan in connection with the idea of motherhood.

  ‘What did your m
other do?’ Cameron asked.

  ‘She worked for the city,’ Colin said. ‘She was a secretary. In the Office of Water Management.’ He faced Cameron. ‘You expected her to be a showgirl, right? You probably came here thinking I grew up in a trailer.’ He kept up the smile and the friendly tone but there was something else under it now, more brittle.

  ‘I don’t particularly trust anything you have to say,’ Tallis said.

  Colin ignored him. ‘She grew up in Vegas. She went to secretarial school here. When she had Dylan she was, like, sixteen or something, she’d just dropped out of high school. Her mom had worked in a casino; she was a waitress. There you go — teen mom, no job, no money. Is that more like what you had in mind?’

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’m sure there was a good reason for it.’

  ‘Dylan did all right out of it, didn’t he?’ Colin said, with an affectionate smile but the same unsettling tension in his voice. ‘He knew it. He never said a bad word about his parents, his new parents. He never blamed Mom. It wasn’t like that.’

  ‘Is your father alive?’ I asked.

  He glanced out the window. ‘He’s not around.’ He looked back at me, smile in place. ‘Dylan’s either. That’s obvious, I guess.’

  I think everyone goes through fantasies of having been adopted when they’re a little kid — the idea that your real parents must be kings and queens, fabulously powerful and rich, and one day they’ll come to claim you and take you away to a world of power and prestige, a fairytale. What must it be like to find out that it’s true — your parents aren’t your real parents — and then discover that you don’t come from Camelot or anything like it, but instead Las Vegas? And that you have a brother: the baby your mother decided to keep.

  It was Dylan’s adoptive parents, Greta and Leo, who were, in my eyes at least, close to the kind of royalty you’d dream about being descended from as a child, with their glass palace on the hill and Hollywood clout. Thinking about Greta, about the times I’d spent at their house, the soft, almost fascinated way she had of watching Dylan, reminded me now of how she had been in grief. Once that memory came it obliterated the others like a rapidly spreading dark stain. She had worn large sunglasses at the funeral, at the wake; her face was pale next to them and the indigo silk shirt she wore. I saw her eyes only once that day, when we were all filtering out of the building after the service and I’d come upon her standing outside, waiting for the car to arrive. She’d taken the glasses off — why, I didn’t know, since the sun was a bright, uncompromising midday glare — and her eyes were red-rimmed, palest blue and naked without the heavy eyeliner she usually wore, the whites a spidery network of red.