A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘We are,’ Tallis said. ‘Well, no. Not scared. Concerned.’

  ‘He seemed fairly focused on money,’ Cameron said. ‘And he knows we have it.’

  ‘But I don’t.’

  ‘But we do.’

  ‘He wants other things, too,’ I said. ‘You’re the ones focusing on money. And some of those other things I suppose I could provide without really compromising myself. Minimal things. Help with his admission essay, for instance. It’s not everything he seems to expect — not everything on his terms. But we could see how it played out.’

  It was exactly the kind of conflict that Dylan would have instinctively known how to resolve while making everyone feel as though they had got what they wanted. He would have been able to create a consensus, and it would end up being a resolution that benefited him in some way, directly or indirectly. The lack of that mediating presence between us now was so strong that I expected to look down and see an empty stool next to me where there had been none before.

  At the funeral, on the phone since then, the times we’d met in Vegas so far this trip — all the times the four of us had been together since Dylan’s death — the dynamic between us had been completely in flux, not sure what form to take without him. Now for the first time it began to settle, to harden into new, determinate shapes that were still nameless, still provisional, but distinct from the old arrangements.

  ‘Are you feeling a twinge of conscience, Elliot?’ Tallis asked. ‘Feeling as though you’re ready to make amends, come clean? Deal with the consequences?’

  Cameron turned his glass around, shifted it forward, back again.

  ‘It’s a simple matter for you,’ Tallis went on. ‘You only have yourself to think about. I could tell all of you to go fuck yourselves as well, because this thing Colin has on me, it’s not on me, is it? It’s on someone else. But I’m not just thinking about myself. Unlike you.’

  For a moment I wanted to argue with Tallis, to say that he ought to let his father take responsibility for his own actions, his own failures. But it was obvious that he wasn’t ready to do that.

  ‘I have a family,’ Cameron said.

  ‘But it was so long ago,’ I said. ‘How serious would it be for Marie?’

  He cleared his throat. ‘The truth is,’ he said, ‘the truth is …’ I waited. ‘It went on for a while longer than I originally said. We stayed in touch — not regularly — it wasn’t like an affair, exactly …’

  ‘You stayed in touch — you slept together — exactly how wasn’t it like an affair?’ Tallis asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cameron said. Tallis frowned. ‘I don’t know how much Colin knows about it,’ Cameron continued. ‘I don’t want to have to find out.’

  ‘How long?’ Tallis asked.

  Cameron shook his head. ‘Couple of years. Look, it doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Jesus, Cameron,’ Tallis said. ‘After you were married?’

  Cameron tapped his foot and looked enviously at my cigarette. He’d married Marie not long after graduating; her parents were even more devout than Cameron’s, and it was the only way they would accept them living together.

  For someone who didn’t seem to take sex very seriously, Tallis could be surprisingly judgmental about other people’s infidelities, almost puritanical. To be fair, he was also hard on himself in the same way. I’d seen him racked with guilt when he’d conceived a passion at college for another student who was in a long-term relationship, living with her boyfriend. She was an economics major as well, and I used to see them reading the Wall Street Journal together in the coffee shop on campus, sitting close to each other, unmistakably about to do something stupid. When they finally started sleeping together, they carefully avoided each other in public, trying to keep it a secret. Tallis lost weight, stopped reading the Wall Street Journal, and studied by himself whenever he wasn’t with her. A few weeks later she ended it, and he became obsessed with the idea that her boyfriend was alcoholic and abusive, trapping her into some kind of loveless hell. For some reason he decided to confide in me — he thought it was a secret from the rest of us, and I let him keep thinking that it was. He went on an extended drinking binge, and would call me every couple of days after whatever girl he’d taken home had left, or after he’d come back from someone else’s bed, heartsick. He didn’t often fall in love, but when he did it was like that, hyperbolic and intense until it ended and he went back to his usual emotionally disengaged self, almost impossible to reconcile with this other side.

  I wasn’t interested in the details of Cameron’s affair, and I’d stopped caring whether he was gay or straight or something else. If Dylan had been there, I knew what he would do — the new Dylan, the real Dylan — he would find out something compromising about Colin and counter with pressure of his own. I had no idea how to go about doing that, and doubted whether the others did either.

  ‘Can we stall for time?’ I asked. ‘Could we hire a private investigator, find out some information of our own about Colin? To help, you know, persuade him that this isn’t such a good idea?’

  Cameron seemed impressed. ‘I’ve been looking into that,’ he said. ‘And if Colin will give us some time, it might work out. But we can’t count on it. Dylan was his brother, remember. If he got into any sort of trouble Dylan would have helped him sort it out fairly efficiently, I think.’

  ‘So we need to offer him something, we need to be ready to at least make some kind of gesture when we see him tomorrow,’ Tallis said.

  ‘Have you talked to your father?’ I asked. He shook his head.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll come along tomorrow morning, tell him how I think I’ll be reasonably able to help him, get a clearer picture of how he feels about that. I’ll keep an open mind. And you do the costs.’

  Cameron nodded.

  Tallis smoked and glared at me. ‘Where’s Brian?’ he asked. ‘He’s late.’

  We waited.

  I tried to summon up the best feelings I had for Tallis against a growing tide of resentment, to reconnect with the person I’d hung out with in his apartment on those Thursday mornings in college so long ago.

  I’d visited him once in London a few years back when I had a research grant to spend at the British Library, and had stayed for a week on the couch in his small, impeccably n eat Kensington flat. The sun shone every day, miraculously, the whole time I was there, and I loved the walk through the neighborhood to the Underground station along elegantly curved streets with Georgian buildings all of the same pale gray stone, white columns supporting the small front porches. It was a fantasy of prosperous London come to life, one with carefully trimmed roses in the gardens and old-fashioned red phone boxes on every other block and a Tudorish pub at the end of the street with low ceilings, timber beams and a fireplace. There was even a tiny park nearby that you could enter only with a key. It was all very picturesque and anodyne, and then I returned one afternoon and found the front fence of the whole row of buildings that included Tallis’s flat covered with black spray-painted slogans and anarchist signs, and the letter slot on the front door covered over with a sticker that read ‘Class War’ in Helvetica Extra Bold. I smiled and realized then that I’d been feeling on edge in the area even as I’d admired it, as though I were walking each day through a film set or an elaborate, bloodless façade. Everything seemed now to be somehow more in balance. When I left the next morning the man in blue overalls and checked cap who had been clipping the roses the day before was scrubbing the graffiti with a soapy sponge, but slowly, as though he didn’t really want to wash it away.

  Tallis had been unfazed by the vandalism. ‘Every month,’ he’d said. ‘It’s the kids from one of the fucking mansions around the corner, I’m sure of it, that Tory politician. Going through their teen rebellion phase.’

  He was frantically busy at work and we hardly saw each other at the flat, only when we met for late drinks at the corner pub with the timber beams. But I enjoyed the few minutes I saw of him in the morning, eating
cereal standing up in the kitchen in his pinstriped suit, talking back to the radio with cheerful scorn, tying his tie with swift, practiced motions. It had done something to recharge my affection for him, my sense that as his friend I had privileged access to this side of him.

  There were few pictures in the flat apart from two framed movie posters, one for A Clockwork Orange that hung in the narrow hallway and one for The Conformist, a beautiful black-and-white image of two women dancing and a black-suited man, almost a silhouette, aiming a gun away from them, right over the sofa where I slept. Film was Tallis’s one area of cultural interest, and he always surprised me with his knowledge of foreign cinema, his passionate feelings about the French New Wave and what happened to Italian filmmaking in the seventies.

  A photograph of his parents, in a heavy silver frame, stood on a low table in the corner of the living room. It showed the two of them when they were young, his mother smiling at the camera, waves of fair hair catching the light, and his father smiling at her in profile, clearly in love. I’d been there for four days when I looked at the photograph again as I was getting ready to leave for the library and saw something I hadn’t seen or that just hadn’t registered when I’d glanced at it days earlier. Richard was holding a baby, a newborn tightly swaddled, in one arm. It must have been Tallis. His mother’s radiance was now visible as maternal happiness, but Richard still had eyes only for her; there didn’t seem to be any attention to the small bundle in his arms.

  Watching Tallis now, I tried to remember his father’s face and find some resemblance there. I’d never met his mother, only seen that photograph of her, but his smile was entirely hers.

  ‘You look like your mother,’ I said, thinking out loud.

  Tallis looked startled for a moment, and shrugged.

  ‘I’ve seen a photograph of her. At your place.’

  He nodded. ‘I know the one you mean. The lovely Diana.’ He sighed. ‘Elliot. I don’t mean to be hard on you about this. But you have no idea. My father’s not terribly stable.’

  Cameron watched him carefully, like before.

  Tallis leaned toward me. ‘He had a breakdown last year. I went on to New York after the funeral, do you remember?’

  I did. We’d traveled to the airport together and caught separate flights to JFK, where I’d changed to a small plane that took me upstate. I had noticed that Tallis was more distant than usual but thought it was all about Dylan.

  ‘Mum had kicked him out again. The drinking was out of control. He set fire to his hotel room by accident, a lit cigarette. She wouldn’t take him back. When I got to New York he’d just been released from hospital. He’d overdosed — sleeping pills and Valium. I think he stole them from Mum in the first place. He denied it, said he just got drunk and didn’t know how much he was taking, but it was pretty fucking obvious.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he said, as though I were the one who might be in need of comfort. ‘He’s cleaned up a bit since then. They’re together — not that I can really say why she took him back this time and not the other. It’s a mystery. But it’s, you know, a fragile situation.’

  ‘How badly was the other guy hurt in that fight?’ I asked. ‘The one who wanted to press charges.’

  Tallis appeared to be weighing up how much he wanted to tell me. ‘OK, it was a bit worse than I said. But not much. He broke his wrist.’ He paused. ‘His jaw was fractured. But that was from the fall. The wrist, too. It was bad luck. But, you know, it looks bad.’

  I felt sure that if I asked him again, later on, more details would emerge.

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘It’s not your responsibility.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, and actually laughed. ‘Adult child of alcoholics,’ he said, as though he were quoting a diagnostic manual. ‘I’ve heard it all, thank you very much. But what the fuck. I know, I shouldn’t have called Dylan, it was a stupid thing to do but it worked out, there was something I could do and I did it. It worked out up until now. So I don’t want to screw it up. Do you understand?’

  ‘I understand,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Good.’

  Brian arrived and clapped me on the back, hard. I slipped a little on my stool. The bandage was still there around his hand, fresh and white, and he smelled faintly of chlorine. They all did.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, and glanced around, tense but more confident than he’d looked that morning. ‘How’s everything?’

  ‘OK,’ Cameron said, and nodded. ‘It’s all good.’ I knew he was talking about me. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Great,’ Brian said, and gave me his smile, the same one from the car earlier.

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘No problem.’

  ‘Brian,’ said Tallis with great affection, another clap on the back, moving straight from morose to animated. ‘Get me another vodka, will you?’

  I heard myself repeating words, heard them saying their own words again, echoes. It was something like the uncanny sense of déjà vu, where it feels as though everything has happened before but you can’t remember the first time, only the repetition. Except it had a different sort of clarity and a relentless sense that not only had this happened before, it would happen again. The feeling that I’d forgotten something vital wouldn’t go away.

  12.

  Brian left after just one drink to go to the cancan show with Cynthia. I had a meal of patchy tapas with Tallis and Cameron and listened to them talk about trouble brewing in the financial world. It got late; they wanted to stay out playing some sports betting game and I started back in the direction of the hotel. At the end of one long block my phone buzzed.

  What’s up? C.

  How was the show? I typed back.

  Feathers, sequins, flesh etc, you should have come. Just got out. Brian gone back to Flamingo. Where are you?

  We made an arrangement to meet at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. It felt like an imitation of a romantic assignation. I wondered whether it really was one. It was crowded there, with people waiting in line to take the elevator up to see the view. I felt a hand on my arm and there she was, dressed in black.

  ‘Do you want to go up?’ I asked, indicating the line.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not right now. I don’t need to see the view again.’

  ‘So Brian’s gone to the Flamingo? I just left Tallis and Cameron there.’

  ‘Yeah, he called them and they said you’d just left. I promised I wouldn’t cut into his guy time, you know. And he’s really moody, it’s crazy. I don’t think he even noticed all these seminaked women we just saw. I might go meet him for a drink later but I don’t know.’ She sighed. ‘He’s doing his thing. So. Can I ask you a favor?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I need some assistance with my research.’

  ‘Research. Does it involve dancing girls?’

  ‘I told you, you should have come! And no, not exactly. I might just need a male escort for this one thing. Come and get a cab with me and I’ll tell you. It’s downtown.’

  ‘So you didn’t want to go out bonding with the guys?’ she asked once we were in the car and traveling along the expressway off the Strip. ‘You don’t like gambling?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘I hope Brian doesn’t have some secret gambling addiction he hasn’t told me about.’ She smiled. She was joking.

  ‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘He’s still under the weather or something. I hope it’s good for him to hang out with those two.’

  We rode the rest of the way in silence, her mouth shining in the dark just as it had the night before. She directed the cab past the horrendous neon tunnel of Fremont Street and I breathed a sigh of relief. That place was guaranteed to spark my new-found claustrophobia with its illuminated artificial ceiling spread over several blocks. We stopped outside one of the old casinos in a neglected-looking street, and walked in through elaborately carved doors. Inside it was fitted
out in Victorian style, all fake Tiffany stained glass and overstained oak and bronze.

  Cynthia consulted her guidebook. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Here’s the thing. They have an actual piece of the Berlin Wall here.’

  ‘An actual piece?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s right — the real Berlin Wall. They acquired it just after the Wall came down.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the men’s restroom. There you go. I told you it was research. Come on.’

  We followed signs for the restroom, and wandered through a room of antique slot machines under glass and two player pianos pushed against the wall in a haphazard way as though they were in the process of being moved to somewhere else, wood paneling all around us and darkly patterned carpet underfoot. There was a restroom at one end.

  ‘Do you want me to look inside?’ I offered. ‘See if the Wall’s there?’ Cynthia agreed.

  There were a couple of guys at the urinals, but nothing that looked like the Berlin Wall. Just Victorian-looking tiles everywhere, geometrical black-and-white patterns.

  ‘No?’ she said when I came back out. She looked in her guidebook again; we went back past the room of antiques and through the gaming floor. The only other people in the place under forty-five were behind the bars and the card tables. There was a faint smell of overcooked vegetables underneath the usual smoke and chemical aroma. I thought of my grandmother’s house, visiting when I was a small child, the plates of faded, boiled carrots and green peas.

  ‘OK, I think this is it,’ Cynthia said outside the restroom door just off the main floor.

  ‘Can we leave after this?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, we can leave after this. I know — this place is horrible. I need a drink.’

  There it was when I entered the bathroom: pieces of the famous Wall installed behind the urinals, each separated by a cherry-colored wood panel. The panels seemed to provide protection against splashes of urine falling on the Wall, as well as some extra privacy. The fragments were all heavily graffitied in bright colors. There was a crudely drawn red hammer and sickle on one piece, heavy layers of varnish over the original paint. A beer bottle lay smashed on the hexagonal black-and-white tiles beneath.