A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘Is Brian OK?’ Cynthia asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I think so. He got into some kind of a fight with Cameron.’

  She narrowed her eyes. ‘Like a fistfight? You mean, actual fighting?’

  ‘Actual fighting.’

  We rose to leave. Cynthia’s heel snapped off again as soon as she took her first step. She cursed and slipped off both shoes, carrying them by the straps as we left and flagged down a cab.

  Tallis looked Cynthia over critically when he opened his door and greeted us both with a curt hello. ‘What happened to you?’ he asked her, but looked to me for an answer.

  I glanced at her and saw her as she might appear to him: diminutive without her high heels, barefoot, shoes in hand, grazed leg, mouth clean of the shiny lipstick she had worn before I kissed her. There were faint lines of pigment where it hadn’t rubbed off completely and a smudge on her top lip. I rubbed my hand across my mouth quickly, hoping there was no trace of it there.

  Tallis focused on me. ‘And what took you so long?’

  ‘We were downtown,’ I said. ‘I wasn’t even sure if you’d still be here. I tried calling you again but the reception on my phone screwed up.’

  I’d spent the whole ride dialing him and Cameron and Brian alternately, watching the bars on the side of the screen waver and slide down.

  ‘Downtown?’

  ‘I thought you might be at the emergency room by now.’

  Cynthia went straight to Brian, who was sitting on one of the two double beds. She sat down next to him and talked to him in a low voice, reaching out to touch his face. He flinched. She sat there patiently and took his hand, and then smoothed his hair, and placed her hand gently on his back. He nodded, head lowered, still leaning slightly away from her. There was something deeply intimate about the way they responded to each other, something unmistakably devoted in her attitude. I turned away.

  Cameron sat on the other bed with his back against the wall, looking as though he was about to tip over to one side or the other any second.

  ‘Cameron,’ I said. ‘Are you OK?’

  He nodded. A dark bruise had started to form on his left cheek, and his lower lip and the flesh around it was swollen. He held a washcloth to his face that had bloodstains on it. There was a graze and a cut near his temple.

  ‘Why are you still here?’ I asked him. ‘You need stitches.’

  ‘I don’t need stitches,’ he said. It sounded as though it was painful to talk.

  Cynthia led Brian into the bathroom. I caught a glimpse of his face on his way past, one eye swollen and bruised, a trickle of blood from one nostril. The door clicked shut behind them and the sound of running water came through, and then voices, raised in argument almost immediately, although no words were audible.

  ‘I’ve been telling him to go,’ Tallis said, his back to the bathroom door. ‘Go on, Cameron.’

  ‘It won’t hurt to get it looked at,’ I said. He gave me a weary glance. ‘And you could be concussed.’

  I knew that concussion was serious, but wasn’t sure what the treatment for it was, or whether it even needed any special treatment, or monitoring.

  ‘Maybe he’ll listen to you,’ Tallis said, folding his arms. There were spots of red on his pale gray suit. Drops of Cameron’s blood, or Brian’s; his own face was unmarked. ‘Sit down.’

  I sat at the small desk and regarded Cameron, still slumped against the wall. The blood on the washcloth was dark red against the white fabric. I wondered how it would look to the housekeeping staff when they cleared the room, whether they saw bloodstains all the time. Cameron pressed the cloth against his mouth and I noticed that his lip was also bleeding.

  Tallis sat down on the edge of the bed, facing me, elbows on knees, hands hanging loosely.

  ‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Brian looks bad, too.’

  ‘Brian had this idea after you left,’ Tallis said. ‘He wanted to talk to Colin again. This afternoon, when we were at the pool, he called around and found out that Colin works at New York, New York. Croupier at one of the blackjack tables there. You know,’ he looked up, frowning, ‘I expected him to be exaggerating. I thought we’d show up and find that he was a waiter at the fucking delicatessen or something. But no. He’s a croupier, wearing the tux, the whole thing.’

  ‘You went there?’ I asked.

  Brian and Cynthia had lowered their voices; I heard only brief exchanges, low tones, long silences between speech.

  Tallis rolled his eyes. ‘I know, it was a fucking stupid idea. Brian was obsessed. He insisted on going, we couldn’t talk him out of it. So we went. Well, of course Colin’s working, he’s behind the table, he can’t talk to us. But he gave us a smile, didn’t blink an eye, totally cool.’

  I pictured Colin, calm and expressionless as he dealt the cards, flipped them over, called the bets, pushed the chips back and forth.

  ‘Brian lost it, totally. Predictable. I think it was that cool look that Colin had on.’

  ‘He hit him?’

  ‘No, no. He tried to get his attention, started yelling at him. The security guards move pretty quickly in these places. Brian calmed down soon enough. Colin was really unfazed. Or seemed that way. He left me a message just after I called you — just finished his shift, hopes everything is OK for tomorrow.’

  ‘Maybe we should talk on the way to the hospital,’ I said. ‘We need to get someone to look at Cameron’s face.’

  ‘OK, I’ll go,’ Cameron said, lifting his head from where it had been resting against the wall. ‘But don’t come with me. I’ll take a cab. Tallis,’ he said over Tallis’s protests, ‘I’ll go. Don’t come. Get some sleep. You too, Elliot. Thanks for coming by.’

  ‘I don’t mind coming with you,’ I said. ‘Let one of us come.’

  I thought about all of us in the hospital all those years ago after the crash, the way Cameron had wound up there the longest, and Dylan had stayed with him.

  He gazed at me wearily. ‘I could do with the time alone. I’ve had enough company for one day. I’m serious.’

  He rested his hand on Tallis’s shoulder for a moment, and I saw again the memory I’d surely invented of his hand just like that on Brian’s shoulder, the day of the World Cup game. The constricting chill of loss struck me all over again.

  Tallis walked him to the door and placed his own hand on Cameron’s shoulder as he said goodbye. Then he cracked open two miniature bottles of whiskey and poured one for each of us into the thick hotel water glasses. The dry, smoky burn of the drink felt satisfying and rough against my throat. Tallis downed half of his in one swallow and lit a cigarette, smoothing out the covers on the bed before he sat down.

  ‘So,’ he said, tilting his glass back and forth. ‘Downtown with Cynthia?’

  ‘We were having a drink,’ I said, trying not to sound defensive. ‘She was down there for her research.’

  He nodded and drank.

  ‘So you came back here with Brian,’ I prompted him.

  ‘Oh, right. You can tell me about Cynthia’s research another time. She’s very pretty. Too thin, but pretty. Yes, we came back here to talk it through. Cameron and Brian. It’s the same old, same old.’ He rubbed the spot between his eyebrows. ‘To tell the truth I can’t remember what set them off.’

  ‘They’re never going to work it out,’ I said.

  Tallis snorted. ‘Not now they’re fucking not.’ Then he shrugged. ‘Although, who knows. Bit of a black eye might clear the air.’

  I couldn’t imagine what it felt like for Brian and Cameron — being punched in the face, the bruised mouth. I’d gotten a black eye once from a stray baseball in seventh grade, which I was grateful for in the end since it gave me the excuse I’d been looking for to give up even trying to participate in the hated activity. It was dramatic and painful, a deep indigo circle that had faded to Technicolor purple and green as it healed. But this was different. This was raw aggression, an actual fistfight. There was something both primal and pathetic about i
t; Brian and Cameron seemed diminished, weakened, downcast.

  ‘No one’s ever hit me,’ I said.

  Tallis regarded me with skepticism for a moment, then shrugged again as though he could easily believe it.

  ‘Cameron got that one good punch in,’ he said. ‘You saw Brian’s eye, right? And then Brian hit back and Cameron hit the wall. That’s when he blacked out, when I called you.’

  I shook my head. I remembered my conversation with Natasha that night in the bar, when she’d asked about Brian and Cameron fighting all the time, and I’d imagined a comical, slapstick version of them punching and wrestling. Now it seemed like a gruesome premonition.

  ‘I panicked,’ Tallis said. ‘I don’t know why. Stress. Sorry. I needn’t have.’

  Brian and Cynthia emerged.

  ‘What happened to your shoe?’ Tallis asked. She had set them down outside the bathroom door and they lay there, small and fragile-looking, the broken one sole up, scuffed along the bottom. Cynthia’s face was studiously blank. She bent down to pick up the shoes without answering him. Tallis glanced at Brian with disdain.

  I checked my watch, found that I couldn’t remember whether I was supposed to add four hours or five. Or three.

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked Tallis.

  ‘Late,’ he said, exhaling smoke, and put his cigarette out neatly in an ashtray. ‘I’m ready for bed. Goodnight all.’

  Brian kept looking at him but Tallis wouldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘So we’re on for tomorrow?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘See you at breakfast. Nine sharp.’

  The three of us made our way slowly to the elevators. Cynthia pressed the up arrow, and I reached across and pressed the one going down.

  ‘I’m going to have one last drink with Elliot,’ Brian said.

  I turned to him in surprise. ‘OK.’

  ‘You go on up,’ he said to Cynthia.

  Her eyes were clear and calm when she looked at me, and I didn’t want her to go. The elevator doors opened; it was empty.

  ‘Take your time,’ she said. She squeezed Brian’s hand quickly before she stepped in and the doors shut.

  13.

  ‘I don’t know what Tallis told you,’ Brian said when we were seated at the bar downstairs, the same one we’d drunk at with Tallis the evening before. It was half-empty, no one at the piano, the same piano music in the background. ‘The security guards completely overreacted.’

  ‘You have a black eye,’ I commented, unable to look away from it. The bruise was both horrible and fascinating, seeming to darken visibly as the seconds went by. Somehow it completed the look that Brian had been edging toward since he had first opened the envelope, the victimized expression. The bartender had given him a second glance, but not much of one, when we sat at the bar. ‘It’s going to be even worse tomorrow.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, not sounding too concerned. ‘Can you give me a cigarette?’

  I passed him one and lit it for him. He held it in his bandaged hand.

  ‘Is that the hand you hit him with?’ I asked. He stared at it confusedly. ‘Shouldn’t you put some ice on it or something? Or on your eye?’

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I took some codeine Tallis had, some prescription stuff, and some Advil. It’s not hurting so much now. And drinking helps.’

  It occurred to me that I ought to lecture him for what he’d done at the casino, for getting into a fight with Cameron, or at least try to talk to him about it, but I didn’t have the heart. He looked so pathetic with his bruised face and his hair still slightly wet around his forehead from where he’d just washed his face, slicked down in a childish way.

  ‘What happened with Cynthia just now?’ I asked instead.

  ‘Just now? Nothing. We weren’t fighting. Something happened to her shoe, she said. That’s bad luck.’ He shook his head. ‘It was such a bad idea for her to come along.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘We had no idea it would be like this. Anyway. How was the show?’

  ‘The show? Oh, the Paris show. I thought it would be longer. It was kind of boring — every number was the same as the one before. She said she was going to call you, to go visit that casino downtown …’

  ‘She did,’ I said. ‘We went down there.’

  ‘What was it, some kind of exhibition about the Berlin Wall? I couldn’t quite get it straight.’

  ‘Yeah, something to do with the Wall.’

  ‘I hate downtown. Oh, man,’ he said. ‘You know, I think she’s seeing someone else.’ I reached for a cigarette for something to do with my hands. ‘Some academic in her department, some big-shot asshole.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I think they talk on the phone. There’s an unlisted number that comes up on her phone all the time.’

  ‘You’re looking at her phone?’ I remembered the constant subtle checks of her phone that afternoon and felt an irrational stab of jealousy when I imagined that she’d been checking for messages from some other lover, not from Brian. ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘I don’t want to be possessive, you know?’ he continued, ignoring me. ‘But at the same time …’

  ‘You sound paranoid,’ I said. ‘You always start to think your girlfriends are sleeping with someone else.’ This was true. Brian commonly fell into suspicion and jealousy in his relationships. I often thought it was because he was routinely unfaithful himself. ‘That always happens after a few months, remember?’

  Brian frowned. ‘Does it? Well, it was true in that one case, with Bianca.’

  ‘In that one case. Aren’t you and Cynthia moving in together?’

  ‘That’s the plan. I just … Fuck. I really don’t want her to find out about this shit.’ He rubbed his forehead with his good hand. ‘Do you mind if we take a walk? I could really use some fresh air.’

  ‘Sure.’

  As we made our way out through the gaming floor Brian stopped and looked down.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked, and then I noticed it: a few feet away from us on the floor, a small dark-colored bird with a sharp-pointed beak. It cocked its head and looked at us. I don’t know anything about birds; it was ordinary-looking, no bright plumage or extravagant tail feathers, faintly speckled on the wings. I had some idea that it might be a starling, but couldn’t say with confidence what a starling looked like. It hopped toward us by a few inches and its plumage flashed dark watery green, iridescent for a moment and then flat bluish-black again. I stepped back automatically but Brian stayed where he was, transfixed.

  It occurred to me that I’d never seen any birdlife in Vegas, or any animals not on display. The bird hopped and then flew past us into the heart of the casino floor. We turned to see where it went but it quickly disappeared from view around a corner.

  ‘What is a bird doing inside this place?’ Brian asked, staring after it, dazzled.

  ‘It’s bizarre,’ I agreed. ‘It must be lost.’

  He looked at me. ‘Let’s play.’

  ‘I thought you wanted to walk.’

  ‘No. I hate the Strip at night in any case. So do you. Let’s just stay here.’

  ‘It’s late. I need to get some sleep. So do you.’

  ‘Fuck it. I want to play.’

  I wanted to sleep. But part of me felt as though I had to say yes to Brian. I was still disturbed by the Jodie White story, and angry that he’d fought with Cameron, but I suppose I was also feeling guilty about Cynthia. Mostly I was thinking pretty much what Tallis and Cameron had probably been thinking when they’d followed him to New York, New York: that he was in a volatile mood and shouldn’t be left alone. It felt like babysitting a fretful, domineering child.

  ‘What do you want to play?’ I asked.

  ‘Roulette.’

  Dylan’s game. He’d spent an hour or so at a roulette table on the first night of every visit, one of his own private rituals. There was something about the glamor of the game that he’d liked, the dance of the ball, the color
ful spin of the wheel, the European flavor of it. I’d played with him sometimes, and had usually lost fairly quickly whatever I was prepared to risk. He was a conservative bettor and had some system of his own, a series of bets that he made one after the other, always starting with money on black. I preferred the riskiest and most basic — money on a single number. It paid off for me just once, the first year we spent there, and I won a couple of hundred dollars.

  It started out unremarkably. Brian took a few hundred dollars out of the nearest cash machine on the floor, bought some chips, and we made our way to one of the tables.

  ‘Let’s go to a classy one,’ Brian said, and looked me over. ‘You’re wearing your good suit.’

  He had on his old, beautifully cut Armani jacket, which he’d always claimed he’d found secondhand but which I strongly suspected had been bought for him at immense cost by his mother. At college he was always receiving packages — clothes and shoes from expensive mail-order services and designers that his mother ordered on his behalf. Most of the time he refused to wear them. We wore the same size and he sometimes gave the clothes to me, including a cashmere overcoat he’d just unpacked from an enormous cardboard box from Barneys when I arrived back at our dorm one afternoon. It was soft and deeply, wonderfully black and warm and probably cost about as much as my tuition for that semester.

  We found a table. The three women already there didn’t pay us much attention. Brian sat next to one of them, her fur coat slung over the back of the seat, and put his money on red. The woman operating the wheel gave his black eye a long stare and then didn’t look at us again.

  After a boring half-hour he was down to only fifty dollars worth of chips, and went back to the cash machine while I waited at the table, hypnotized by the spinning wheel, the woman’s expressionless voice calling out the numbers. I was conscious of him taking quite a long time to get back, when he appeared by my side and sat down again. The pile of chips he had with him now was considerably larger and of higher value.