A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  Tallis sighed, as though I’d failed. I suppose I had. ‘Did he say anything?’ he asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I said.

  Cameron leaned his arms on the back of his chair and stared out at the pool for a while. He didn’t seem to notice I was back. He looked over at Brian, resting his eyes for long moments on Brian’s features, his bruised eye, his serious mouth, as though committing them to memory, his face pained and tired. Brian adjusted the strap of his messenger bag and tucked his thumbs into his pockets, a gesture that accommodated his injured hand, and looked away.

  I took a step toward Brian and handed him the scripts. ‘Just take them,’ I said. He scowled and stowed them in his bag.

  ‘All set?’ Cameron asked, glancing around.

  Tallis left the last corner of the croissant on his plate and brushed some crumbs from his sleeve. ‘Ready,’ he said, and we left together.

  Cameron’s flight was the earliest. He’d checked out before we left, and we said our goodbyes in the hotel lobby while he waited for his bag to be brought around. Brian and I stood together, making small talk about the immediate responsibilities and tasks we had waiting for us when we arrived home, while Cameron and Tallis talked quietly, ending with a fierce, quick embrace.

  I decided I’d had enough of trying to negotiate the difficulties of whether to hug or shake hands or try the awkward half-hug backslap; I stood back.

  ‘I’m sorry it all worked out like this,’ Cameron said to me.

  ‘What do you mean? It’s a good outcome. It could have been so much worse.’

  But I knew what he meant. I was still angry with him, with all of them. Cameron and I had probably been the weakest link in the group, the least likely to seek out each other’s company, but saying goodbye to him now brought home a sense of sadness and disappointment in how it had all worked out, as he put it.

  ‘Say hi to Marie and the girls,’ I said.

  He nodded and turned to Brian. ‘Thanks again,’ he said.

  ‘Yep,’ Brian replied, and ‘Bye,’ and that was it. Cameron lifted his small case off the trolley the bellhop had wheeled over, and walked to the doors.

  The three of us made our way to the elevators. Tallis and I made plans to get a cab together to the airport a little later on that I didn’t entirely trust. We reached a place where the passageways forked, and Brian headed off to meet Cynthia at a buffet, or the lion habitat – he indicated the general direction with a halfhearted wave. He rubbed his forehead above the black eye with his bandaged hand and squinted at me. ‘Be in touch,’ he said, putting his good hand on my arm, and I realized that it was goodbye. My misgivings about the difficult politics of bodily interaction disappeared; I gave in to the desire to put my arms around him and laid my palm on his back, feeling affection and regret in a rush. We parted; he said a flat goodbye to Tallis, and we watched him go.

  As I wheeled my bag from the elevators to the lobby I ran into Cynthia on her way back from the pool, wrapped in a print sarong, hair still wet and spiky. I wondered whether Brian had caught up with her after all, or whether that had been a story. We greeted each other warily in front of an oversized portrait of some MGM star of the forties: sultry eyes, hair in lacquered waves, gloved fingers holding a cigarette like a weapon. Cynthia’s face was sunstruck and flushed, her shoulders bare and elegant.

  ‘You’re in love with someone else, I guess, aren’t you?’ she asked. She raised one hand to cover her eyes, as though shielding them from a bright light.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said truthfully. ‘Maybe.’

  Perhaps I sounded definite and concise, but I felt only lost for words. We had left adolescence behind so long ago, and yet here we were, stranded at the beginning of our thirties with no better or more sophisticated vocabulary for the chaotic mess of our desires than we’d had at fifteen. At fifteen I might have actually been more articulate about these things even though I now made a living by crafting and interpreting words, by being an expert at language.

  I thought about Natasha. Was I in love with her? Was I in love with Cynthia? Did that happen — was it possible? — falling in love with someone in a matter of days, hours, when the amount of time you had spent together could be calculated in minutes?

  I recalled with sudden certainty the moment it had hit me: when I’d wanted to push Natasha’s hair away from her eyes and held back. Her very physical mass from that moment on seemed altogether different from that of all the other bodies around us, made of some denser, magnetic stuff, while I was newly emptied out. Some mysterious process had taken place in which particles of myself seemed to have become unmoored so that I was drawn to her with all the force of gravity on a falling body.

  I’d been struck by something that night with Cynthia, when we rode together in the taxi and I responded to her tense silence and became obsessed with the markings on her back, but it had passed. Whatever gravitational push or pull I had felt at that moment wasn’t toward her exactly, but simply away from Las Vegas. And I couldn’t quite believe that she’d been struck by love for me, thinking of the way she’d seemed to push me back gently the night before.

  ‘But you love Brian,’ I said. A short cut, a way around the questions about how I felt or didn’t feel.

  ‘I do,’ she replied. ‘It’s complicated.’

  It felt excruciating, being drawn so inexorably toward cliché and redundancy in how we talked to each other; we both seemed to recognize it, and shared a look: exasperated, resigned.

  ‘It’s always complicated,’ I told her. ‘Brian is a complicated guy.’ That was the most I would ever say to her about Brian’s flaws and mistakes and crimes, I decided.

  She looked remotely disbelieving, but at the same time as though it didn’t really matter much to her whether I thought Brian was complicated or not.

  ‘Did you get enough research done?’ I asked.

  She rolled her eyes and smiled, showing her white teeth. ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m coming again in the summer for a longer visit. If my grant comes through.’

  ‘Let me know if you need an assistant.’

  She shook her head a little reproachfully, still smiling, and glanced around at the portraits, the burbling slot machines a few feet away from where we stood, all the incandescent brightness of the signs for restaurants and games. There was less fascination in the way she looked at the place than there had been the previous day, less affection. ‘I still can’t believe you guys come back here every year.’

  ‘I know.’

  There were pieces of me, traces of all of us, scattered all over the city: places we’d visited, blocks we had walked, rooms we had slept in that had been slept in by countless other people before and since. I felt those lines of connection to the place become fainter by the second, evaporated somehow by the events of the past couple of days.

  ‘See you,’ she said, after a pause, and reached up to kiss my cheek.

  At that moment, when her face was close to mine, her ear inches from my mouth, I wanted to find something more to say, something reassuring. The kiss was awkward, as those kisses usually are, short and soft, but her arms reached easily around me in a close embrace. I breathed out in a long sigh and felt the tiredness gather and descend before she let me go.

  The lines of people waiting to check in or out were all long. I sat down in an armchair in a sunken lounge area close by, shades of brown in velour and caramel-colored carpet, and thought about finding coffee while I waited for the lines to get shorter. The spot where Cynthia had kissed my cheek still tingled. I tried to remember what it had felt like to kiss her mouth, but it didn’t come easily to mind, blurred by the static stress of the hours since then. I pulled my phone out of my pocket and stared at it for a while, taking a long time to decide that the walk to get coffee wasn’t worth it, and scrolled through the numbers on the screen, my fingers slow and clumsy, until Natasha’s came up. It rang only once before going to voice mail. There was her voice, lazy and curt and faraway sounding, as though she’d been
speaking into the phone from a distance, telling me to leave a message. The beep sounded.

  ‘It’s Elliot,’ I said, cursing myself for not having prepared something to say. ‘I’m in Vegas … we’re leaving soon.’ I struggled, even more tongue-tied than I would have been in her actual presence. ‘I’ll try you again when I’m back.’

  I ended the call and looked up at the surroundings that had all but disappeared in the moments I’d been listening to her words and fumbling over my own. I had forgotten about Brian in those seconds, about Tallis, about Cameron and Dylan. I had stopped noticing the horrible, flawless glitter of the wallpaper. Now I saw it again and noticed a peeling patch down near the floor. The little flaws and worn patches in the lobby’s decor caught my eye, shining through the gleaming surface. There was a stain on the cushion next to me, an ameba-shaped ring in a slightly darker color than the surrounding wine red. A thin thread was escaping from the fabric farther down the leg of the sofa. I could see the join of the carpet underneath the chair across from me, the place where the four pieces met up and didn’t quite sit flat, one pushed up just fractionally higher than the others, showing a frayed edge.

  I had felt almost drunk when I dialed Natasha, still feeling the effects of drinking all night long, but now I was aware of being quite sober. This fresh light through which I was seeing the world, all the joins and flaws evident, was oddly exhilarating. I felt pleased with myself, as though I were enjoying a new, more truthful vision of reality. My old, blinkered way of seeing my friends had gone, had been torn away, and I could see the underlying, brutal matrix of connection and disconnection.

  It didn’t last long. It was true that I had shed a skin of some kind, but it would be wrong to be too happy with myself about this new-found stage of maturity, if that was what it was. A fresh wave of exhaustion passed across my body, a flash of vertigo. The stain next to me seemed more ominous — it wasn’t blood, I told myself, that was just the color of the fabric; it was a glass of wine or water that had spilled there. Hopefully no kind of bodily fluid. I fought an urge to look more closely.

  ‘Elliot.’ Tallis threw himself into the chair opposite, blocking my view of the poorly matched fragments of carpet. He had changed into a different jacket and shirt and his clothes were incredibly wrinkled, as though they had been wet and scrunched up and left to dry in a lump. I said hello.

  ‘Lovely day for it,’ he said with a weak smile.

  He was clear and sharp around the edges in my vision, like everything else, although he appeared wobbly and tired. Still, he relaxed into his chair with an unmistakable aura of relief, and I realized how tense he’d been all the way through the meeting with Colin, all the past couple of days.

  ‘Said your farewells to Cynthia?’ His eyes on me were cold blue, and a small flicker of a smile crossed his face.

  I flinched, wondering whether he’d seen us a few moments earlier.

  He shrugged at my silence and turned away. ‘Brian won’t ever tell her, will he,’ he said, with a touch of contempt. His eyes wandered, fixing on a pair of girls in miniskirts and high heels, each dragging a huge wheeled suitcase across the lobby.

  I’m not sure what prompted it, the sudden suspicion that enveloped me. Something about that cool, appraising glance of his, maybe, and his disapproval of Cynthia. ‘How did they come to choose your room?’ I asked, barely thinking the words through before I spoke them.

  ‘What?’ He frowned, then showed comprehension after a moment. ‘Oh, the party. You know those places. There were dozens of rooms.’

  ‘So, how did they choose yours?’

  He shrugged, and started tapping the fingers of one hand on his knee in a nervous gesture, then calmed it within seconds.

  ‘Glen,’ I said.

  He glanced up with surprise. ‘What about him?’

  ‘You watched soccer with him. Football. He’s one of those guys you watched it with, when we wouldn’t watch it with you.’

  The memory surfaced from some distant recess: Glen’s muscled shoulders, the arrogant slouch that belonged to all the lacrosse players, his lopsided smile as he laughed with Tallis at some sporting joke I couldn’t understand, plastic cup of beer in hand.

  Tallis shrugged again, a twitch of his shoulder, and shook his head.

  The things we’d been hiding, the secrets Dylan held over us, I reflected, had all been things we’d done, crimes of our own, apart from Tallis. He was the selfless one, protecting his father, hiding his failings. There was no mistake of his own that Dylan had helped him conceal, apart from asking Dylan to help with hiring a lawyer for his father after the fight, and it was difficult to classify that alongside the things the rest of us had done.

  It’s not as if this idea hadn’t crossed my mind before over the past few days; it hadn’t really surprised me that Tallis was the one who hadn’t screwed up or done something wrong. He was so careful, always, with his neatly ordered apartment and well-planned career. But a chill started to come over me, thinking back on that carefully arranged place of his, the spotless surfaces and perfectly made bed — except for that one day, when I’d seen it in disarray through the open door. He cleaned up after himself so well.

  I looked back at him. He was watching the girls again, his face blank. They had stopped near the end of a check-in line and seemed to be arguing with each other, both talking at once.

  ‘Tallis?’

  ‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about,’ he said. ‘It’s absurd.’

  ‘What is?’

  He didn’t reply.

  ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘There’s nothing to tell.’

  ‘Why were you the only one with nothing to hide?’

  ‘What the fuck? What about my father?’

  ‘But it’s different,’ I said. ‘Where was your mistake? The rest of us made them. I can’t believe you never made one yourself.’

  ‘My mistake was getting Dylan to help me with that situation. With my father. That was my mistake.’ He showed the same shocked hostility he had the day before when I’d complained about offering money to Colin, an angry, almost wounded disbelief that I would ever seriously challenge him.

  ‘Brian doesn’t know, does he?’

  ‘Know what?’ he asked, but the aggressive edge was gone from his voice.

  ‘Right.’

  One of the girls opened her phone and started talking, fast and serious. The other waited with her arms folded, sighing.

  Tallis blinked and pulled himself together, squaring his shoulders and straightening his wrinkled jacket. ‘Elliot, come on,’ he said, and fixed a smile on me, his eyes creasing. ‘It’s all over. Colin’s out of our lives. Relax.’

  A pulse of mutinous anger rose; I held on to it, carefully watched it settle somewhere inside, and committed its contours to memory. I wondered what else had been in his almost-weightless envelope, or was hidden in a file somewhere, and whether he’d been holding his breath for days, waiting to find out how much, exactly, Colin knew. It mattered to me, I was almost surprised to discover, in a way that the details of Cameron’s and even Brian’s transgressions hadn’t. I shook my head, seeing his wall of brashness settling back into place, knowing there was no way through just now, and wondering cautiously how far I should trust my own paranoid imagination at this point.

  He accepted my response and sank into his seat, the tension in his body dissipating. Something like our usual dynamic settled back into place, or it looked like that from the outside. The vertigo rose again, just enough to make the room tilt a little. I pulled at a thread coming loose from my armchair’s upholstery.

  Tallis scanned the lobby as if seeing it for the first time. ‘Flash place, this. Nice enough. What do you think about staying here next year?’

  I looked at him in disbelief. I’d just been playing out in my imagination several versions of the future, possible conversations, confrontations with him in Kensington or New York, but it hadn’t occurred to me that we would find ourselves here a
gain. I followed his glance around the space, the matte and shiny surfaces, the worn spots on all the glossy fittings. ‘This cushion is stained.’ It was all I could think of to say.

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  I wanted to show him the patch of peeling wallpaper, the loose threads, the bad carpet job under his seat. I let it go, not sure what it was I wanted to reveal to him.

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’ll come next year?’

  A few moments ago it had seemed an impossibility, but a strange sense of inevitability began to overtake me. Those other possible contexts for our future conversations blurred and diminished. It felt as though our friendship would be forever constituted within this setting, the artificial city, and was newly impossible to imagine outside of it.

  As he considered my question Tallis seemed strangely vulnerable, the veneer of brashness thinner than a moment ago. There was a small cut on the side of his face, a thin line of dried blood, but it didn’t look as though he had shaved. He rubbed his hand absently against the bristle. The peculiar mix of resentment and concern I felt was as deeply familiar as ever: that desire to condemn him warring, exhaustedly, with an instinct to protect him.

  He hesitated for only a second. ‘Oh, yeah. Why not, you know. Why not.’

  ‘I can think of some reasons,’ I said. ‘But sure, why not.’

  Acknowledgments

  I’m incredibly lucky to have parents who have always supported my writing in so many ways, and a mother who is both a great reader and a great agent. Both Lyn and John Tranter provided time for me to write by spending time with my son, Henry, and for that I am especially grateful. John saved my hard drive and lent me a computer when mine fell victim to a stray glass of milk, and I couldn’t have finished this book without it.

  Many thanks to Karen Colston for accompanying me to Las Vegas in 2009 and assisting with my research activities there: I owe you many drinks. Thanks to my editors: Jon Riley at Quercus, Sarah Branham at Atria, Jo Butler and Nicola O’Shea at HarperCollins; and to all the people at those presses involved with bringing this book to fruition. Thanks to my agent in New York, Claudia Ballard, for her insightful reading and hard work.