A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  Brian released Cynthia in order to give me a hug, a quick embrace that finished with a short, hard pat on the back. I’d never quite gotten the hang of it myself.

  ‘This is Cynthia,’ he said.

  She shook my hand with a light grip. ‘It’s great to meet you,’ she said, smiling and showing her perfect teeth. ‘It’s great to be here.’

  She looked too clean for someone who had just come off an airplane. Everyone else in the lobby was wrinkled and tired and dazed, apart from the impeccably dressed Japanese guy directly in front of us whose jeans had knife-sharp creases down the front.

  Brian put his hands into his pockets, nervous.

  ‘It’s great that you could make it,’ I said, and saw his shoulders relax. ‘I hope you won’t be too bored.’

  Cynthia looped her arm through Brian’s and smiled again. Her eyes were deep-set under straight brows, a washed-out denim blue. ‘Oh, no. I’ve been looking forward to this. You know, it’s all research for me.’

  ‘That’s right. Brian mentioned that.’

  ‘I won’t be in your way. I’ll be wandering around, looking at all the casinos. All the sights.’

  ‘You’re in cultural studies, is that right?’

  ‘Yes. I’m working on my dissertation proposal now.’ I could hear the crisp, graduate-student professionalism in her voice, the voice she used for talking about herself to her superiors. ‘And Brian tells me you’re at Riverford, that’s wonderful.’

  We had made it to the front of the line. ‘Here we are,’ Brian said, and hauled his duffel bag over to the counter. Cynthia had a suitcase on wheels with a hard, shiny black shell like an insect carapace, all new-looking apart from two long scratches on one side as though it had been dragged over something sharp. Brian took over the job of dealing with the clerk, a young woman with heavy pink lipstick and hair lacquered close to her head. ‘I’m checking in … two bookings …’ I heard him say, and let him go ahead.

  ‘Well, it’s a job.’ I smiled at Cynthia. ‘It’s my second year there.’

  ‘Oh, it’s wonderful,’ she repeated.

  I wanted to agree with her — I was new enough in the profession, close enough to the agonizing experience of being on the job market and the sense that any job would indeed be wonderful if only it would bring the process of the search to an end. And it was a good job — that was how everyone had described it. It was the sort of job that just about anyone would be happy with. The school was respectable, it was on the East Coast, the classes weren’t too big, there were sabbaticals and fellowships, they even occasionally tenured people. But I didn’t want to let on that I would have been happy with just about any job; or that by the time I’d got the call for my job interview I’d already started sending out my résumé to publishers and testing companies and private schools and other places that seemed as though they might be interested in hiring someone with a PhD on an obscure aspect of Renaissance drama.

  ‘You’re in English, right?’ she asked.

  I nodded, and before I had a chance to say more Brian was passing her a room key, a slim, white plastic card, and it was my turn to hand over to the clerk my ID and a credit card.

  Brian tried to take Cynthia’s suitcase in some show of chivalrous behavior. They wrestled over it for a moment while I was issued with my own key, and she offered to let him carry her purse, which was large and heavy-looking in brown leather. Brian wasn’t interested in that. He pretended it was something to do with already carrying his own bag over his shoulder.

  ‘OK, take it,’ Cynthia said, finally. ‘My feet are killing me. Let’s go.’

  I looked down and realized she was wearing high heels, almost stilettos. Even with them on she barely came up to my shoulder.

  Figuring out how to get to our rooms was a complicated process. The clerk had handed Brian a couple of maps of the hotel grounds and we studied them; there were several towers, some of them at the other end of the huge hotel complex. We turned out to be staying in the most central one, which the clerk had marked with a red circle, and only had to walk through one room of slot machines and a mazelike set of corridors, a convenience store and a gift shop to reach the elevators. Every corner we turned was emblazoned with several signs and arrows giving directions to attractions such as the pool and restaurants.

  ‘Where are the lions?’ Cynthia wanted to know. ‘Where’s the spa?’

  The MGM was famous for its lion habitat, with animals they claimed were descended from ‘the original’ MGM lion, the one that roared on the studio logo above their motto, Ars Gratia Artis. Art for Art’s Sake.

  Brian glanced over at the list of signs near the elevators. ‘Lion Habitat’ was there at the bottom. ‘We’ll see the lions later,’ he said. ‘They’re over there somewhere. You’ll have to call the desk to find out where the spa is. I think there might be more than one.’

  I asked whether the spa was part of her research, only half joking.

  ‘Very funny.’ She smiled. ‘Well, I have to look my best for all this clubbing we’re doing tonight, right, Brian? I guess it is all in the name of research. Pedicures for research.’

  ‘You’re researching nightclubs?’

  ‘No. I’m working on —’

  Whatever she said was drowned out by screams of ‘Yahoo!’ from a group of people behind us. There weren’t any machines in that direction — not that I’d seen, unless there were machines in the convenience store, which seemed possible but unlikely.

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I asked.

  ‘Replicas,’ she said. ‘Authenticity.’

  The ‘Yahoo!’ scream started up again, more people joining in this time.

  ‘Are there machines over there?’ Brian asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘But it sounds as though someone just won something.’

  There were ten elevators, a crowd of people waiting for each one. I got out at the sixth floor. Brian and Cynthia were up on twelve.

  ‘See you at seven,’ Brian said.

  My room was at the far end of the corridor, away from the elevators. I pulled my suitcase over the soundless carpeted floor. The walls were lined with black-and-white portraits of stars from Hollywood’s golden age, larger than life, in heavy gilt frames, in keeping with the theme of the hotel: Old Hollywood glamour. Cary Grant grinned at me. I’d always hated his self-satisfied smile.

  The room was all tones of dark beige and brown, like a sepia photograph. An ugly armoire faced the bed, and opened to reveal a television inside. The windows gave me a view of a dirty hotel rooftop and Hooters across the road, and the false skyscrapers of the New York, New York casino. The windows didn’t open. They barely even had frames, were basically large, thick plates of glass stuck into the walls. It was hard to tell whether they were tinted or dirty, coated with a fine layer of brown desert dust that darkened and condensed around the edges. The air-conditioning hummed and whirred.

  It was 5 p.m., the clock beside the bed told me. The sun was still high in the sky. I showered and dressed, paced the floor for a while, and looked inside the fridge at the obscenely expensive little bottles of wine, tiny bottles of vodka. It was tempting. My shirt itched. Television, I thought, and looked for the remote control. It took a while; by the time I found it, in a corner of the armoire, the effort it would have taken to turn on the set and figure out how to watch anything didn’t seem worth it. I looked through the stack of brochures and papers on the desk.

  When I looked back at the clock it still said 5:00, the red digital numbers unblinking. I tried to find the switch to change the time, but all I could succeed in doing was getting the numbers to flash 00:00 a couple of times before they went straight back to 5:00. The colon between the numbers started blinking on and off, although it seemed too fast to be counting down actual seconds.

  I could have called one of the others. Instead I decided to go down to the hotel bar alone and get a drink. I started to look forward to it, imagining the soft sound of a piano in a high-ceilinged space, the si
ght of women’s legs in skirts and high-heeled shoes, the taste of alcohol. By the time I reached the elevator my mood had lifted already in anticipation. Vegas was like that for me. I never failed to expect that atmosphere, even though I never discovered it.

  The piano sounded just as I had expected, although the ceiling was low and dark. The tone was muted and soothing, the player hidden from my view by large potted palms. I ordered a Manhattan and thought of the imitation skyline across the road, the fake Empire State Building, and the real one, my most common view of it, seen from one of those blocks at the intersection of Greenwich Village and the East Village around the NYU campus. Low cloud sat across it in my memory. I couldn’t imagine clouds coming near this Vegas version. The weather was one big thing they couldn’t imitate or manipulate. What was the Empire State Building without the clouds obscuring its top, the tower reaching into the sky? Or the Eiffel Tower without the miles of green park around it, and mist; Venice without the humidity and ever-present stink of wet decay?

  I thought of Natasha and imagined sharing my clouds-across-the-Empire-State observation with her. I was quickly overwhelmed by a desire to be there in the city with her, to be with her in a place that mattered to me. I couldn’t imagine her being very impressed with my remarks about the Empire State Building, although I did want to share the actual view with her.

  I had first started drinking Manhattans in Manhattan, and the taste of the drink reminded me even more strongly of the place. I missed the sight of the Empire State Building — not pretty, like its glamorous friend the Chrysler, but just massive, just tall, not making you think anything except how big this building is. At night, when those clouds went across it, the colored lights on its spire would shine and gleam through, making it beautiful. I’d caught sight of it once on a winter’s night from outside Penn Station, the first snow of the season driving across the sky in a hard, cold wind, and it was lovely then, but in a harsh way, like a diamond. Pure icon.

  The campus where I taught was high up on a hill, and in the colder months was often covered in mist, sometimes for the whole day, everything shrouded in white, wet cloud. Just the week before there had been a cold, foggy morning, mist across the entire campus transforming the place into a silent wonderland. On the walk across the mall from my building to the library, other people on the pathways were grayish blurs until they were just a couple of feet away. I wanted to be there now, in my office, looking out at the bicycle rack and the trash cans and the enmeshed Musicology building across the way, and not here, where it was permanent, dry summer outside and unchanging no-time-of-day inside. The bike rack would have been virtually empty, the campus blissfully devoid of students.

  The drink worked fast on my empty stomach, producing a melancholy haze. The night ahead seemed long and it wasn’t even six yet. The music coming from the piano was impossible to place, no recognizable theme or structure, bits and pieces of vaguely familiar sounding tunes strung together. I turned on my stool and looked around, and that’s when I saw Brian at a table on the far side of the room in a quiet corner.

  He was hunched over, sitting with his elbows on his knees, leaning in so that the table pressed against his arms. An empty glass stood in front of him, and another one half-filled with what looked like vodka and ice. Tallis was there beside him, leaning back in his chair as though wanting to put distance between himself and Brian. He reached over and put a hand on Brian’s shoulder, a tentative gesture of comfort, then dropped it to the table and grasped his tall glass of beer.

  I took my drink and headed over. Tallis met my eyes, his face grave. Brian continued to stare at his glass. There was a letter-size manila envelope on the table in front of him.

  ‘Hey,’ I said. ‘What’s up?’

  I looked at Brian, and he raised his eyes to meet mine. Dark-lashed eyes, hazel that looked green when he wore brown. He had on a wrinkled, sandy-colored T-shirt, the same thing he had been wearing when we’d run into each other in the lobby. He smelled of sweat and the sweet chemical fragrance of hair product or some kind of deodorant. There was fear in his eyes, and guilt. I thought of that ridiculous moment years before when I had stumbled on his pornography collection. This was a distant, older relative of that expression. I took a chair.

  Tallis cleared his throat. ‘We’ve got trouble,’ he said, regretfully.

  ‘Did you get one of these?’ Brian asked me, words fast and urgent.

  ‘One of what?’

  They both looked from me to each other, to the envelope. Brian’s name was written on it in a plain, upright hand. A waitress walked by and collected Brian’s empty glass. She smiled brightly at us all.

  ‘Can I get you anything more to drink, gentlemen?’

  Tallis looked up at her and shook his head mutely, letting his gaze rest on her waist for an extra few seconds. She was young, with dark hair pulled up into a complicated construction of curls.

  Brian raised his hand. ‘I’ll have another. Put it on the tab.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ She smiled again and walked away.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked again when she was gone. ‘Did you get some bad news?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Brian said. ‘It’s not exactly news. Well, it’s old news.’

  ‘So? Did you get one?’ Tallis asked, repeating Brian’s question.

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what that is.’

  Brian glanced at Tallis. ‘Should have known.’ He put his hands to his glass and turned it around and around. ‘I told you he might come down. You called him, didn’t you? You texted him. Why did you bring him into it, anyway?’

  Tallis leaned farther back. ‘Calm down,’ he said. ‘I didn’t call Elliot.’

  He sounded worried. I was starting to worry too. Brian was handling the envelope, holding it as though it had something really heavy inside.

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he said. Then he looked up at me, challenging. ‘It’s not your problem though, Elliot.’ He started to rise. ‘I’ll take off now, take a shower, see you later at the Flamingo.’

  Tallis stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Sit down. It won’t hurt to tell Elliot.’

  Brian paused and then sat. He took the envelope onto his knees, hiding it under the table as he pulled his chair in.

  I looked to Brian for a sign: a desire for help, a desire for me to leave. But whatever was in his eyes was unintelligible. They hadn’t meant to include me. As I found myself on the verge of being excluded, I looked for a reason to make them trust me. It was a strange sensation; these were the people I trusted probably most in the world, in an unthinking, ingrained kind of way. A deep emotional structure inside me began to creak complainingly as it was forced to shift into unfamiliar shapes.

  ‘Why did you ask me if I’d got one? Did you?’ I asked Tallis.

  ‘No. I was just curious. And just out of curiosity, what did Dylan have on you?’ he asked.

  ‘Dylan?’

  He nodded.

  ‘What did he have on me? Do you mean, did he know something about me?’

  I hadn’t thought about it like that before. There had been no need. I had thought of the secret we’d shared about the essay as one of those things that bind people a little closer. What did he have on you?

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t say he “had” something,’ I said. ‘Although there is something. From the past. Something only Dylan knew about. Just something embarrassing.’

  ‘Embarrassing,’ Tallis repeated, raising his eyebrows a notch.

  ‘It was a long time ago,’ I said.

  ‘From a galaxy far, far away?’

  It felt as though all the whiskey and sugar in my drink had already started to sweat out through my skin.

  ‘Something embarrassing that I did, something Dylan was involved with as well.’ That’s all it was, I reminded myself; an embarrassing secret.

  ‘How embarrassing?’ Tallis asked carefully.

  I shrugged. ‘Embarrassing enough.’

  My
drink was finished. I lifted it to my mouth in any case and got a trickle of water from the melted ice, stale and terrible-tasting.

  ‘But you don’t look embarrassed,’ I said to Brian. His hands were clenched into nervous fists. ‘You look scared.’

  He laughed then, and almost relaxed for a second.

  Tallis studied him, pity and impatience in his eyes. ‘Don’t joke,’ he said. ‘He fucking well should be.’

  The waitress came back and placed Brian’s drink in front of him. She had another Manhattan for me as well. She smiled at me.

  Tallis gave me an encouraging wink. ‘Thought you might be ready for another.’

  I frowned at him and put some dollars on the waitress’s little tray. Brian rested his head in his hands.

  ‘Are you going to tell me what this is all about?’ I asked.

  Tallis and Brian looked at each other, that conspiratorial glance again. Had they ever acted like this before? I didn’t remember noticing any kind of special intimacy between them. This in itself, the indication of a shared knowledge, a closer relationship than had previously been revealed, was as unsettling as the worry about what secrets — clearly more than embarrassing — were contained in Brian’s envelope.

  The envelope had gone from being a mundane object, the kind of thing I saw all the time in my mailbox at the department, ten a day, to being something else. Brian’s reaction made it into a sinister thing, and I began to suspect that it was what it looked like in his hands: the icon of blackmail.

  ‘What did you do, kill someone?’ I asked, impatient now.

  For a horrible moment as the words left my mouth I wondered if they might have hit on the truth.

  Tallis gave me a withering look. ‘Don’t be a moron. No.’

  ‘OK, OK. But I’m in the dark here. Are you going to let me in or not?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brian said. ‘Of course, Elliot.’

  He seemed to gather resolve, and it looked as though he was trying to find the right words to start with. But his composure unraveled as he handled the envelope. Seconds passed.