A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  ‘What time is it?’ I asked, trying to see where I’d put my watch.

  ‘We’re not meeting Colin for another hour or so,’ Tallis said, reading the menu as he spoke and lifting the phone to dial. ‘Yes,’ he said into it. ‘That’s correct. Can I please have …’

  ‘I’m not hungry,’ I said, though no one was paying attention. Brian was showing Cameron the box, trying to lift the lid, which stuck for a moment before it came off.

  I spent a long time in the shower, running over the events of the previous day, the previous night, which now had the surreal cast of a dream, the vivid, haunting dreams you get sometimes in the last hour of a short sleep. It was all strange, but I knew it was true, although it seemed less real than the dream I’d actually had, or I thought it was a dream, at least. Dylan, calmly sitting in the chair across from my bed, leafing through the hotel literature about the lion enclosure, raising his eyes to stare out through the window, focused on the far horizon, somehow evidently aware of everything we were going through and detached from it all.

  I emerged to find a tray of coffee and muffins on the desk. Tallis was eating a fruit salad, leaving all the pieces of melon aside. Brian poured me a coffee. Cameron leafed through my Tennyson, not pausing on any page. I had nothing to say to any of them, I realized, and knew with an unfurling certainty that the feeling would stick with me through the whole morning and would essentially never leave.

  I found some clothes without stains — where had they been the night before, I wondered, confused — and changed in the bathroom. My face in the mirror when I brushed my teeth looked deflated and tired, deep circles under the eyes, and my freshly washed hair managed to dry in a way that looked as though it had been slept on. I was faintly surprised to see the sadness in my expression, a new seriousness.

  I dreaded the meeting with Colin, unsure how it was going to work out. But the thought of the day just simply proceeding filled me with a kind of contentment: the morning would become afternoon, the situation would be resolved somehow, and then I would be able to leave, finally, and go back to upstate New York, alone.

  When I looked back at the mirror the seriousness was still there but the downcast aspect was less pronounced; I wouldn’t call it optimistic but it wasn’t despair.

  We rode together in a taxi, and the others continued to confer while I sat in the front, holding the box on my lap on top of Colin’s scripts with their slippery plastic covers. He had arranged to meet us at one of the newer hotels at the far end of the Strip, a smooth, glassy chocolate-colored edifice surrounded by green lawns and monumentally large fountains. On our way in we passed between a pair of oversized Chinese-style statues of lions, each with one paw raised over a small, stylized cub lying on its back, mouth half-open in an imitation of the big lions’ roar. Inside was a strangely beautiful artificial garden, with floor mosaics of colorful flowers, strings of lights woven through the branches of realistic trees and filtered sunlight shining through skylights in the roof. The effect of natural light inside a Vegas building was so odd that it took a moment to get used to it and the soft-edged shadows it cast on the floor.

  Colin was waiting for us in one of the restaurants, at a table in a quiet corner near windows overlooking the swimming pool, as eager and well groomed as he had been the day before. He rose and greeted us, and shook everyone’s hand except Brian’s, who gestured silently, indicating the bandage. Colin nodded, staring for a few extra seconds at Brian’s black eye. He stared again when he saw Cameron’s face, and glanced from one to the other, checking me and Tallis as well.

  ‘Did you have a good night in the end?’ he asked.

  Brian nodded, not meeting his eye.

  Cameron smiled back. ‘It was an eventful evening. Those stairs at the Flamingo can be a little hard to negotiate at the end of the night.’

  Colin nodded. ‘So they can.’

  We sat down. Coffee materialized instantly, and a tray of pastries, laid out by silent, white-uniformed waiters. Colin thanked them.

  Cameron wanted to keep it simple. He had instructed Brian to say nothing at all, not even to apologize for his actions in the casino the night before, in case he got ‘carried away’ and hostile all over again. He and Tallis were dressed for business in their suits. Brian kept his sunglasses on, gazing at the pool outside, where no one was swimming. I sat next to him. A girl who looked like Sally — long straight hair, long tanned limbs, and boyish hips in her bikini — walked along the edge and I waited for her to dive in, but she kept going and lay down on a lounge next to an older man who appeared to be sleeping. Father? Husband? Uncle? She took a newspaper from where it rested beside him and opened it out.

  ‘We’ve discussed the situation,’ Cameron said. ‘And this is how we’d like to proceed.’ He pushed the box toward Colin.

  Colin opened the lid enough to get a glimpse of what was inside. He worked at the tables; he knew how to calculate the value of what was there, at a glance, in around two seconds. He looked up at Cameron and shut the lid — freshly serious, questioning.

  ‘Think of this as a friendly gesture of support for your future plans,’ Cameron said. ‘I think you’ll find enough there to sustain the projects you’re interested in.’

  Brian reached for a glistening yellow Danish — peaches, or apples, and custard sunk into pastry — and bit into it, still staring at the water, refusing to engage in the conversation. The rest of us sipped our coffee and avoided looking at the food.

  ‘That’s very generous of you,’ Colin said, carefully.

  Tallis leaned forward. ‘Brian’s simply not in a position to get you the kind of attention you probably want for your screenwriting plans,’ he said. ‘He’s squandered his talents in the service of political documentaries.’ Colin smiled, and then saw that he wasn’t really joking. ‘Seriously,’ Tallis continued, ‘he can give you some contacts but I don’t think he’ll be able to help you out much in that direction, the whole Hollywood direction. Colin, Leo is the person to get in touch with if you’re interested in that. I think you know that. That’s up to you.’

  Colin looked to me, and so did Cameron and Tallis.

  ‘I know someone who can help you with your admissions essays,’ I said. Colin’s face brightened. ‘You have his name already. He was very helpful with a paper I needed to finish. He was a good friend of Dylan’s.’ Colin held my gaze. ‘He’s excellent,’ I said. ‘And I’m sure he’ll be well disposed toward you. But that’s the only advice I have for you, really. I’m not all that well connected myself. I’m like Brian. I’ve wasted my talents. I don’t know anyone on any admissions committees.’

  Colin started to protest.

  Cameron spoke up. ‘Elliot’s advice is very good, I think, Colin. Why don’t you think it over?’

  I went back to staring at the pool along with Brian, not wanting to look at Colin’s face, which today showed me only unbearably familiar contours.

  ‘I think we might have had a communication problem,’ Colin said, and his smile was tense. It slackened as he sat there. He turned to me. ‘Elliot,’ he said. ‘Are you behind this, too? Dylan always talked about you, as though, I don’t know … as though he really trusted you.’

  I flinched and caught myself. Dylan would have been a lot smoother than that. ‘It’s nice of you to say that, Colin. I appreciate it. But I think we’ve come up with a good solution.’

  ‘A solution?’ Colin said. ‘Right.’

  I looked away again, trying to emulate Brian’s air of disengagement, trying to ignore Colin’s injured expression.

  ‘We’d like to think we can trust you to be discreet about the information you’ve shared with us,’ Cameron said.

  ‘You think that money can buy anything.’ He was stating a fact, not asking a question. There was outrage in his voice at the idea, and a combination of fascination and repulsion at the privileged position of people with enough wealth to actually test it out.

  Tallis folded his arms. ‘I don’t know about that.’r />
  For a moment Colin seemed poised for some theatrical gesture of refusal, a showdown. He could have upturned the box, tossed it to the floor, let the plastic pieces clink and tumble together in a colorful mess — whatever the equivalent would be of tearing up the check, or tossing it into the fire. The chips made a bad prop, with their crazy disparity between substance and value: too light, too small, so little dramatic potential. Cameron and the others had been wrong in thinking that money was what Colin was after. It wasn’t what he wanted, or not exactly. But Brian had calculated well: this was more money than he could afford to turn down.

  Colin leaned back in his seat with a heavy slump and nodded, and I knew he’d accepted the idea and would agree to whatever terms Cameron laid out. The suit he’d seemed to wear so easily a moment ago now appeared ill-fitting, too big around the shoulders, as if he might have borrowed it for the occasion. His face looked raw around the cheeks, as though he’d shaved too closely. He pulled the box a little closer toward him and rested his hands on the sides of it, lightly. The smile was gone. When he next glanced up, looking in Brian’s direction, there was bitterness and resentment in his face. He squared his shoulders, pulling together a more neutral expression.

  I let myself imagine for a moment an alternative universe, right here where we sat, in which Dylan wasn’t dead. It was what I’d expected, when I’d prepared for the trip, to be doing the whole time, before I understood what Dylan was really like in his relationships with the others. I’d thought that many moments of this visit to Vegas would be colored with a sense of imagining Dylan there with us, conjuring his presence into every interaction, every activity.

  The scene I imagined made me sadder than ever about the lost, undivided sense of Dylan as my generous friend. What would it have been like, I wondered, if Dylan had confessed to me, or to Cameron, or any one of us, instead of Lily? He must have known on some level that she would find it impossible to keep the secret. Had it been a roundabout way of passing the information along?

  I tried to picture Dylan at the table with us, including Colin, admitting him as part of his life. But it was a version of Dylan that was becoming increasingly difficult to resurrect; a version of him as I remembered him, growing fainter by the second: generous, inclusive, charming, productive of harmony. I worked hard. I came up with a brief vision of him sitting next to Colin, arm on the back of his chair, smiling at something he said in a way that signaled approval and affection. (Was this how I’d longed, always, for him to act toward me, I wondered.) It flickered and disappeared.

  Cameron spoke to Colin in a measured tone; Colin nodded. Was he picturing some similar scene, I wondered, a moment that Dylan had always promised him would be arranged when the time was right, when Dylan was ready to let us into his other life? I’d schooled myself into a neutral attitude toward Colin, unable to deal with the conflicting feelings of anger and resentment and disdain and pity I’d otherwise been caught in, but this thought made me sorry for him all over again, and hopelessly disappointed in Dylan. It can’t have been as simple as just feeling ashamed of his family here, I told myself, a matter of not wanting to admit connections with a place like Vegas. I knew it had to be more complicated, more vexed, than that.

  I pushed back my chair. ‘I’m going outside for a cigarette,’ I said.

  Brian shifted in his seat, moving stiffly as though every action brought discomfort. ‘I’ll join you,’ he said.

  We left together through the wide French doors leading onto a tiled terrace and stepped past oversized potted plants down to the pool area. A uniformed girl tried to offer us towels. We sat on some squarish wicker seats and declined more offers of towels from more passing uniformed girls. I hadn’t really intended to smoke. Brian asked me for a cigarette and I lit one for him. Over on the other side of the pool little jets on the ends of white umbrellas sprayed a fine mist of cool water into the air around the tables they shaded. The girl who looked like Sally was still reading her paper and drinking an espresso. The man beside her had turned on his side and was snoring softly, deeply asleep.

  I remembered what Brian had said about his friendship with Dylan being filled with love and hate in equal measure, and thought about asking again what it had really been like for him all those years. It seemed like a conversation we were designed to have some other time, much later, when we had moved farther past our grief, if that’s what it was, or our loss, if that’s what it was. At any other time I would have reached a point of equanimity, knowing that the time would come — next time in Vegas, for instance, after drinks at the Flamingo. But now it was harder to feel confident that it would happen that way.

  People often mistook Brian and me for brothers when we were friends at college. It had always surprised both of us, but the others, Dylan and Cameron and Tallis, just nodded and shrugged, unfazed, if we mentioned it. Sitting with him now, I could understand it. Not just the physical resemblance of height and build, the unremarkable shade of brown hair, the family-like gradation of brown to hazel-green eyes. Here we both sat, apart from the responsible adults inside, avoiding all the important questions.

  More than anything, I just wished he hadn’t done it. Not only because it was wrong and I hated to think about Jodie being hurt, and the injury she might still carry around. But because it had wrecked something between us, and the exposure of it had been the first crack in my sense of what Dylan was like, and on one irrational, stubborn level within me it still seemed to be the fundamental source of all that had gone wrong.

  ‘Thinking about your paper?’ he asked, with a wry smile.

  ‘Oh, that? Yeah. I was thinking about that.’

  ‘Regrets, right?’

  ‘Absolutely. Regrets.’

  I wondered whether I looked as worn out and broken down as he did, except for the black eye.

  ‘Elliot? Brian?’ Cameron called out to us from the restaurant doors.

  I followed Brian slowly inside. Colin was saying his farewells, black box tucked under one arm. He waved to Brian, and leaned over to shake my hand.

  ‘Elliot,’ he said, ‘I’d still like to touch base with you, you know, when I’m in the process of applying. If you don’t mind.’

  I shook his hand — he held on too long. I wondered if he sensed the layer of sympathy I had for him alongside all the other feelings of wanting to get him out of my life, and whether on some level he related to what he knew to be true about me, my fraudulent self.

  I let myself look him in the eye, Dylan’s eyes cast in blue and a slightly different shaped brow. He had settled back into his pose of confidence and once again wore the suit as though it had been tailored to fit him. I could see Dylan again in the way he carried himself, although Dylan would have more effectively hidden the effort it took to produce the effect.

  ‘You know, Colin,’ I said, ‘you should think about getting in touch with Greta. I think she might like you. Let Sally introduce you.’

  I could picture it somehow, now that I thought about it. It was possible that Greta would appreciate the effort, the attempt to perfect himself on her behalf. It seemed possible even that after a few months of sitting by the pool admiring her and Sally and Leo, he would start to fit right in.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll think about doing that.’

  ‘Bye, Colin,’ I said, and brought my hand to his shoulder briefly in a gesture I never seemed able to get right but this time worked OK, or was at least absorbed into the awkwardness of the whole situation.

  He left, walking with purpose, shifting the box from one arm to the other. I started to think about what it would be like to get an email from him, and stopped. I couldn’t believe it would actually happen.

  He was disappearing into the mass of people wandering through the halls when I remembered the scripts, and retrieved them from the table. ‘I’ll just be a second,’ I said to Tallis, who seemed about to stop me, then relented and turned back toward Cameron.

  I caught up with Colin at the far end of the lobby, cl
ose to the doors, in the sparse miniature forest of artificial trees. ‘Colin,’ I called out, and he turned, surprised, and didn’t smile. ‘I forgot to give you these,’ I said, offering the documents.

  He glanced down at them, and back at me. ‘Keep them, Elliot,’ he said, and seemed ready to keep walking.

  ‘No, really,’ I said, eager to hand them over. ‘Won’t you need them?’

  He smiled then. ‘I have other copies. Hey, did you read them?’ He turned to face me more directly. A few feet away from us the sliding doors opened and shut over and over again as people entered and left. ‘What did you think?’

  I started shaking my head. ‘I had a look, yeah, but you know, it’s not my thing …’

  ‘Everyone likes the movies.’

  ‘Right, of course.’

  ‘You must read a lot of scripts.’

  ‘Scripts?’

  ‘Plays. That’s what you do, right? Do you think movies are like what plays were in those days?’

  ‘In the Renaissance, you mean?’ I asked, realizing that he was talking about my research. ‘I don’t know. Similar, I suppose.’

  I wondered whether he’d talked about my work with Dylan, and how Dylan would have described it, or whether most of what he knew was gleaned from Google and my faculty web profile.

  ‘Which one did you like the best?’ he asked.

  ‘Really, I didn’t read all the way through them … The Chandler one is interesting,’ I said compulsively, never wanting to admit I hadn’t read something I was supposed to. ‘I didn’t finish the car accident story. How does it end?’

  ‘Keep it,’ he said, ready to go, all his disappointment starting to show again. ‘See for yourself.’

  I extended the scripts to him again. ‘I’ll see the movie.’

  He shook his head with a wry smile. ‘See you,’ he said, and walked away, through the sliding doors, past the giant lions on guard.

  The other three were still hovering around the table when I returned, Tallis with a half-eaten croissant in hand. ‘No luck,’ I said to them. ‘He doesn’t want them back.’