A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘But you know what I mean,’ Colin replied, and I did. It was a moment of understanding that included a small, wary grain of sympathy.

  I remembered my final year of high school in New Jersey, the hours of work put into college application essays, driven and buoyed by the sense that escape was possible, that if I found the right words and got the right score I’d find myself somewhere that I would fit in, somewhere that matched my own fantasy: a glamorous idea of academic labor and decadent yet sophisticated campus life. But those hours of work and study and exams had been grueling. My sense of sympathy with Colin evaporated fast when I faced up to the role he expected me to play in bringing his fantasy to fruition.

  Colin checked his watch. ‘Sorry, guys,’ he said. ‘I have to go to work. But thanks. It’s great to meet you all. Can we talk again tomorrow?’

  For a moment none of us responded, and then Cameron said, ‘Sure.’

  We made arrangements to meet the following morning, Cameron arguing over the precise time, trying to regain some measure of control over the conversation. Colin left, briefcase in hand, with a quick wave to Antony behind the counter as he walked to the door.

  The four of us sat there in silence, trying not to look at the pile of screenplays on the table. Brian reached for them, and put a ten-dollar bill in their place.

  10.

  There was a piece of paper stuck under the wiper on the windshield of the car as we approached. A ticket, I thought, and had a moment of feeling vindicated in my concern when we had parked there, followed by a sense of release: the ticket wasn’t my problem. Tallis could deal with it. As we grew closer it became obvious that it wasn’t a ticket at all, but a flyer advertising a strip joint, with a picture of a seminaked woman on it surrounded by dollar signs. Tallis reached for it and crumpled it in his hands, tossing it to the sidewalk.

  He took the driver’s seat again, Cameron next to him, while Brian and I swapped sides in the back. For a long few seconds we sat there in silence. Brian placed Colin’s screenplays in the middle of the seat between us, where they started to slide toward me. He stared at the back of the headrest in front of him. Cameron gazed at Tallis with an expression of such tender concern that I wanted to look away when I saw it. They had walked close together side by side as we left the diner and made our way to the car, Tallis shaking his head now and again, and Cameron talking softly to him in a reassuring tone.

  Brian broke the silence at last. ‘There’s no doubt that guy is Dylan’s brother.’

  Cameron nodded.

  ‘Do you remember him at the funeral?’ Brian asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Do you think Dylan was ever really going to tell us?’

  ‘To get us to meet Colin?’ Cameron asked. ‘Who knows.’

  ‘I can’t believe he could’ve kept it a secret forever,’ I said.

  Tallis sighed and shook his head; wondering at my naivety, or the inscrutability of Dylan’s plans, or both.

  ‘He’s serious about this,’ Brian said. ‘He’s fucking serious.’

  ‘Did you think he wasn’t serious?’ I asked. But I understood Brian’s incredulity in a way. It was one thing to get the envelope. It was another to be confronted by the person who had sent it.

  ‘He’s serious,’ Cameron said. ‘But it’s totally bizarre. It’s like he wants to be our friend.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘He wants some kind of relationship with us.’

  ‘Why the fuck would he go about it like this?’ Brian asked.

  ‘It’s just a version of something Dylan would do,’ Tallis said, ‘a very crude version. But that’s what it is.’

  He was answering Brian but he was talking to me, gauging whether I understood, evaluating how I was coming to terms with this new idea of Dylan. They’d all known this side of him — manipulative, opportunistic — a lot more intimately than I had; I’d been the naive one, the one he’d shown his good side to. I held Tallis’s gaze for a second and then found that I couldn’t, and closed my eyes, not wanting to see the trace of pity that was there. I didn’t tell him that I’d already figured it out, the way Colin’s scheme had something in common with how Dylan had operated. At that moment I wanted to be far away from all of them.

  ‘Imagine what it was like for him,’ Cameron said. ‘Stuck here in Vegas — not in a trailer, right, like he said, but still. It would be hell to grow up here. Can you imagine? He’s twelve, thirteen, he’s just starting to realize what a shit hole it is that he lives in, and Dylan shows up. He’s got an instant big brother from LA.’

  ‘He would have idolized him,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Tallis. ‘Yeah, he would have: a big brother who managed to get the fuck out of Vegas and land in fucking Laurel Canyon, and who leads you on forever about how he’s going to introduce you to his friends and family and take you to Hollywood then never does.’

  ‘It’s never the right time,’ Cameron said, quoting Colin, and shook his head.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ I said.

  On some level I suppose I felt something in common with him: we’d both loved Dylan and wanted to see the best in him. Colin didn’t want to let go of his illusions about his brother, even as he struggled with resentment about what he probably saw as Dylan’s good fortune to be adopted out of the life he himself inhabited.

  ‘He’s deranged,’ Brian said. ‘And he doesn’t just want to be our friend. He wants a lot more than that. What the fuck? What are we going to do?’

  ‘Don’t panic,’ Cameron said. It was still hard to get used to them talking directly to each other without rancor. ‘It’s not bad that he wants to be our friend. That’s something that could work to our advantage. I think he genuinely doesn’t want to hurt us.’

  ‘I don’t think our feelings matter very much in this equation,’ I said.

  ‘He’s willing to talk,’ Cameron went on. ‘It doesn’t seem impossible, Brian, really. It doesn’t.’

  ‘OK,’ Brian muttered, but he was shaking his head.

  ‘That thing about wanting to be friends was weird,’ Cameron said. ‘But overall it’s not that different from what I expected. It’s really just a matter of money.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, but the rest of them seemed convinced. It seemed more complicated than that to me: it was the connections he wanted, the connection to Dylan through us, and the steps toward mobility that Dylan had promised him.

  Tallis started the car and it came to life with a short sputter. A convertible cruised past as he started to pull out and the driver shouted, ‘It’s a hydrant, asshole!’

  Tallis squinted and shook his head. ‘Why does anyone give a fuck? There’s other hydrants.’

  I glanced back at the hydrant and saw that it was leaking: a dark circle of water around it on the concrete sidewalk, a trickle making a shiny path down its yellow-painted front.

  The air-conditioning in the car grew cold at last. Brian sulked in his corner. Tallis drove calmly. I started to feel the shadow of the claustrophobia that had come over me in the elevator the night before, hating the sensation of being in a confined space.

  I wondered again about Dylan’s relationship with Colin, the ambiguous gift — if that was what it was — of the keys. Colin was the family Dylan hadn’t chosen, the one he had discovered for himself; was that a kind of choice, I wondered. He could have decided not to go looking for his mother, after all.

  Dylan seemed to have promised Colin so much, all the assistance and protection and useful influence that you might expect from a successful, well-connected older brother. Colin had adored him and looked up to him, that much was clear; and Dylan had won all the affection he might have wanted without having to deliver things he had promised. Dylan had planned to reveal everything to us on this tenth visit, Colin claimed, but up until his death Dylan had been unwilling to bring together his two parallel lives. I tried to imagine Colin’s disappointment, the stretches of faith required as the years went by and Dylan still insisted that it wasn’t the
right time, putting it off again.

  Dylan might have deferred forever his promises to help Colin, but he’d given him the potential means to extract the assistance from us that he’d insisted we would provide. It suggested a level of antagonism toward all of us that was still hard for me to fathom. Had Dylan been envious of us, I wondered, when I’d spent so much time being envious of him? His interest in my family — in all of our families — came back to me. He visited his own family back in LA every now and again, but never for Thanksgiving; instead, he loved to accept invitations from the rest of us to join our own family celebrations. He went to New York once with Tallis and cooked a whole turkey. Tallis had complained afterward about being pressed into work in the kitchen making stuffing and pumpkin pie, which he despised, but Dylan had always talked about it in glowing terms and seemed to believe that he’d performed a public service by providing a real Thanksgiving meal for the English people in our midst.

  He had gone to Cameron’s place one year, and Brian’s, and had come with me to New Jersey in senior year. That’s when he met Lily and she formed her terrible crush on him. I’d been anxious about having Dylan around my family for such an extended period, perpetually embarrassed by them, and guilty about feeling that way. But he’d seemed to enjoy himself: he’d put on an apron and basted the turkey for my mother, and everyone agreed that it was the best turkey she’d ever made, and he refused to take credit for it. I’d felt his attention on us, his interest in the traditional ways we did things. Was there a toast we usually made, he asked; did we say grace?

  ‘Oh no,’ my mother said, charmed, ‘but if you’d like to say something about what we’re thankful for, that would be wonderful.’

  ‘All I can say is that right now I’m thankful for your delicious turkey,’ he’d said, and raised his glass, drank his red wine.

  It all looked different when I remembered it now, knowing what I did. Although there was a gulf, wide and dark, between the bare facts of my new knowledge about his origins and my sense of how he’d actually felt about it, which could only be a poor guess. In any case, I seemed to remember him scrutinizing us — my tactless, pretentious mother, my checked-out father, my angsty sister — as though we represented something foreign, almost exotic.

  ‘Your sister’s great,’ he’d said that night as we were going to sleep. My mother had set up the inflatable mattress for him in my room, with neatly folded-down sheets and more blankets than he could possibly need. ‘And your dad — he’s hilarious. He’s like Mr Bennet.’

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  My father had made some scathing comments at dinner about the new neighbors across the road and their overly large new cars, but that was about the extent of his similarity to Elizabeth Bennet’s father as far as I could see.

  ‘You never do Thanksgiving at your house,’ I said. ‘What’s that about?’

  We’d turned out the light and the conversation had the aura of childhood sleepovers, staying up past the proper bedtime.

  ‘It’s such hard work,’ he said, his voice tired and unusually cold. ‘Happy families.’ He stretched and turned over. ‘I’ll invite you next year. Want to come?’

  ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘That would be great.’

  I can’t remember what he did the following year; I think he was traveling, in London or Europe somewhere, with the writer he was working for as a personal assistant — a prelude to the first major publishing internship. He didn’t extend the invitation again. I think I recognized even at the time that it was something he’d said to change the direction of the conversation, to please and placate me, which isn’t to say that it had seemed insincere.

  ‘Elliot?’ Cameron said, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I said what do you want to do?’ We were on the Strip, not far from the hotel. ‘We’re going to the pool.’

  The idea of the pool was in some ways appealing; I imagined lying down on a flat sunlounge and closing my eyes, burning and not worrying about it, listening to the little splashes made by people swimming. But it would have involved conversation, and being around the others.

  ‘I really need some time to think,’ I said. ‘To decompress. It’s a lot to take in.’

  Cameron nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘We’ll talk tonight.’

  Tallis glanced in the rear-view mirror. I could sense that he was looking at me even through his sunglasses. He looked back at the road. I knew they’d formed an unbalanced sort of triangle that didn’t include me, but I found that I didn’t care much. I wanted to let them work it out. I had no money to worry about spending on Colin, after all.

  ‘I’ll give you a call this afternoon,’ I said. ‘After lunch.’

  ‘Sure,’ Cameron said.

  Brian smiled at me and I smiled back, and then I remembered Cynthia’s silver dress and smooth back. He pushed the screenplays toward me. ‘Take these, would you? I don’t care — I don’t want to see them.’

  I took them. Tallis pulled up outside the hotel’s front entrance and I welcomed the warm, open air as I left the car.

  I hadn’t given much thought to what I would do with myself for the afternoon, consumed simply by the desire to be alone, to be away from the other three. My room was blissfully quiet, the bed neatly made, all objects carefully straightened and aligned, the remote control sitting there on the desk. I turned to the heavy stack of paper I’d carried up from the car. Colin’s screenplays. I lifted the one on top, the thinnest one. Recession Road, an original screenplay by Colin Andrews. I leafed through it, enough to gather that the movie started with a car crash: car wrecked in a ditch, a group of friends inside the car, one of them badly injured. I paged forward. One of the survivors pretends to have been the driver, the one who wasn’t drinking. He grips the steering wheel to make sure his prints are there. I paged forward again. Injured friend on life support. Later on a scene heading: INT. FUNERAL HOME — DAY. I thought at first it would be the funeral of the protagonist, the pretend driver, but it appeared to be his father’s. I suspected that if I read on, I’d find a blackmail plot. My memories of the hours immediately following the crash had always remained sketchy. I wondered whether Colin’s script would be able to fill in the gaps, or provide fictional pieces of memory in place of those that had fallen victim to the blackout effect of shock.

  I glanced at the next one in the pile. Farewell, My Lovely. An adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel. I knew the book from having read it years earlier; I tried to remember whether there was a film of it already. In my mind it was confused with another book, The Lady in the Lake. I looked through it and thought I recognized pieces of Chandler’s dialogue, but couldn’t tell what time it was set in; it seemed to be contemporary, or possibly futuristic. One of the characters grabbed another character’s cell phone and threw it out the window. That wasn’t in the book. Pages later, an old-fashioned radio was turned up too loud. I leafed through it, confused, and put it down.

  Somehow it made sense that Colin would be obsessed with the movies, with noir plots; that explained the heavy-handed envelope trick, the weird sense that he was following a formula or enacting a familiar piece of a story. But in that case, I guessed, he should be prepared for it all to turn out badly for him. Wasn’t it usually the blackmailers themselves — the anonymous voices on the phone, the shady pornography dealers, the sly amateur gangsters — who wound up with a bullet in the first or second act? He must have had some other genre in mind, or maybe he thought it would turn into a different kind of movie. A buddy film; an upward-mobility story; a melodrama? I didn’t like the idea that he was drawing inspiration from our experiences, from stories that Dylan must have related to him. I wondered whether there were other outlines or scripts in his drawer, about plagiarism and date rape and illicit affairs between students and teachers.

  I turned on the television and made my way through a complicated menu, past the expensive new-release movies and porn to the free stations. Commercials seemed to be on every station except some shopping channels and a children’s c
artoon — a smiling, inane, computer-animated Winnie the Pooh — which went to a commercial in the two seconds I spent looking at it. A woman’s excited voice pronounced the positive educational attributes of a miniature, candy-pink computer. Little fingers hovered over the keyboard. I moved on and came to something that looked like a soap opera, with that yellowish false light and thin-walled sets. A dark-haired woman stared pensively at a point just above and to the left of the camera; a man entered and they argued; he grabbed the phone in her hand and threw it to the ground and she pressed her hands to her face; a commercial began. Startled, I glanced back at the script I’d just read with an unnerving sense of having seen it played out on the screen before me.

  Pressing the buttons on the remote control made no difference to the volume; a line of white bars appeared on screen but remained the same whether I pushed up or down. I found the button to turn the sound off completely and it worked. I kept scanning and wound up with the hotel’s guide to Vegas. The camera panned over the pool in silence — blue water, palm trees, sky, bikinis, white tiles — and I thought about the others down there in the expensive cabana. The image on the screen switched to a lion opening its mouth in a wide, exaggerated yawn, a lazy roar. I turned it off.

  I hadn’t wanted to think about the funeral when Brian mentioned it in the car, but now it was all I could think about. My mind swung back in what was becoming a sickeningly familiar movement, the reassessment of memory in light of new discoveries. I thought about Colin, his slim, dark figure at the back of the room gathering mass and shadows to itself in my remembered image of the event.

  Leo had invited all four of us to speak if we wanted to as part of the service. Cameron and Tallis had declined. I had talked briefly, found a quote from Robert Burton about friendship and what a powerful medicine it was against the evils of melancholy. It was a clumsy speech. I hadn’t reckoned sufficiently with my own nerves and hadn’t written it down in enough detail; I found myself staring at two small crumpled pieces of notepaper covered with dot points and a page from Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy with a star in the margin next to the relevant lines. I muddled through, forgave myself; everyone else was stumbling, too.