A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  I remembered his seductive ease, how soothing he had been when he’d shown up with the Tennyson essay in a manila folder under his arm. I’d looked at it with uneasy caution once I’d figured out what it actually was, once he’d come in and explained and sat down on the floor in my dorm room the same way he always did, settling himself in one fluid movement, one long leg stretched out in front of him and one bent, a hand pulled loosely through his hair then rested, elbow to bent knee. The folder had looked so flimsy once I knew what was in it — so open, so prone to falling and spilling, I wanted to tell him to be more careful with it — then I realized at a certain point, with a rush of strangely mixed confidence and fear, that there was no need to worry about it falling and spilling. My name was on it, it was mine. In a matter of minutes I would be carrying it myself, over to the English department, my main concern that it not fall out onto the muddy pathways and get messed up.

  And Dylan had smiled so happily, and passed me a cigarette, lit it. He’d brought coffee as well, a large paper cup with extra cream and sugar.

  ‘You probably don’t need the caffeine, I know you’ve been so stressed out,’ he’d said, ‘but here you are.’

  He’d handed it to me carefully, resecuring the plastic lid with an air of indulgence, like giving a treat to a distressed child. It was hazelnut flavor, which Dylan liked and refused to believe that anyone couldn’t. For once I didn’t mind it.

  There had been two copies of the paper in the folder and a disc with an electronic version, along with the two essays of mine that I’d given Dylan to show the writer, to give him a sense of my style. I glanced at the essay long enough to see that it was on the right topic and fit the length, but couldn’t bring myself to actually read any of it.

  ‘I’ve had a look over it,’ Dylan said, drawing lazily on his cigarette. ‘It’s good, it’s fine.’ He met my eyes and spoke with his usual lightness of tone, but somehow more clearly and slowly than usual, making sure his words sunk in. ‘At some point soon you should read it — just in case, you know — but don’t worry about that right now.’

  I nodded. Outside the window was another sunset starting to happen.

  Dylan managed to rise with the same liquid grace he’d sat down with. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go and turn this in. We don’t want to miss Stanton’s office hours.’ That was something else he did when he went into full-on reassurance mode, assuming the collective plural in everything. ‘We’ll work it out.’ ‘We’ll get it done.’

  We walked over to the English department together, along the slushy pathways edged with muddy grass, as the day got darker and colder, the sky red by the time we arrived at the gray stone building. All around us were other students, shoulders hunched against the chill, alone and in talkative groups, their voices turned to brief clouds of mist in the air, sounds quietened by the damp cold. I had transferred the paper into an envelope by then, and it felt sharp and light in my hands.

  Dylan pushed the door open for me and held it, followed me inside the building with his hand on my shoulder. We walked straight into the professor coming out of the mailroom holding a thick stack of papers and envelopes, his head down. We managed not to actually bump into him, but it almost happened.

  ‘Elliot,’ he said in greeting once he had stabilized the stack of things in his hands. He looked closer at Dylan as I mumbled hello. ‘Dylan, how are you?’

  ‘Hi, Professor Stanton. Great to see you.’

  ‘You, too.’

  ‘Elliot here has been telling me so much about your class. It sounds great.’

  ‘Well, thanks. Dylan was in my Whitman seminar last spring,’ he explained to me.

  Dylan smiled graciously, as though accepting an extravagant compliment, which was in fact how Stanton had made his comment sound. Dylan knew how to stop short of obvious flattery. He didn’t go on to say ‘That class was so great’ or ‘I wish I could have taken this class this semester’, though that would have been the obvious next step. I watched him, able to admire him even through my haze of anxiety and exhaustion. There was a compression to his movements when he flirted with men — it wasn’t exactly flirting, but some more complex acknowledgment of his own attractive qualities, his sense of their admiration, an acceptance of it that was more subtle and challenging than the welcoming of it that flirting would have involved. He didn’t slouch; he held himself not stiffly but with a feline tautness, relaxed as always, but stiller somehow.

  Professor Stanton sighed. ‘Well, Elliot. A paper for me, I hope?’ He leaned forward, almost onto the tips of his toes, and tilted back again.

  I handed it to him. ‘Sorry again … thanks …’

  ‘That’s all right. Get yourself some rest. Goodnight.’ He nodded to both of us.

  Dylan raised his hand to my shoulder again — he was directing me, steering me, I realized — and we turned back toward the doors. I felt much lighter, as though the envelope had weighed pounds and pounds and I hadn’t noticed until it was gone.

  Outside the building, the few minutes of real twilight were still bringing a shimmer to the air.

  ‘Come on,’ Dylan said. ‘Let’s get you a drink.’

  I loved him then unreservedly, with a rush of gratitude and affection, and thought about reaching out to embrace him, hesitated. He seemed to read my thoughts and leaned in to put his arms around me — swift, taut, completed with that elusive pat on the back. We released each other.

  ‘I think I’ll be buying you a drink,’ I said. ‘Several. And you’ll have to tell me what I owe you.’

  ‘It’s a favor.’

  ‘No way. I know these things don’t come free. And you said this guy was good.’

  ‘Oh, he’s good. He’s the best.’ Dylan picked up a fast stride, hands in his pockets against the cold. ‘But he’s an old friend. I called in a favor with him. It’s a favor for you.’

  ‘I don’t want —’

  ‘Elliot.’ He cut me off, smiling, warning. ‘Shut the fuck up about it.’ He laughed, a short, genuine laugh.

  I shut up about it. I had a moment of being unsettled by the feeling of being in his debt, but I didn’t think about it too much. It was a part of friendship, after all, and at that moment it was a part of friendship for which I was very grateful. I thought at the time only of how much he might have had to pay the writer — the ghostwriter, as I thought of him, the mysterious anonymous person who now knew my style and my name — or how big a favor he must have called in to get the paper. It didn’t occur to me to wonder how Dylan knew the writer, or how he might have incurred such a balance of favors and debts — or rather these questions drifted into my mind for brief seconds, floated there, stretched out only slightly into imaginings. High school? Another class? His sister? LA? For all I knew the writer wasn’t anywhere nearby at all but somewhere in another state, another country — I hoped he was. Then they evaporated. One of them stuck around, concretized itself enough to get me to ask Dylan, halfway through that long night of drinking, how he knew the writer.

  ‘Oh, he’s an old friend,’ he said again, dismissive, relaxed.

  ‘What’s his name?’ I asked, a gallery of faces passing through my mind.

  ‘Seth.’ Dylan met my eyes, smiled, looked back to his drink, signaled the bartender for another round. ‘Just stop thinking about it, Elliot. It’s all over now. So, tell me. How’s Tallis? Where is he?’

  Tallis arrived only seconds after Dylan had brought the conversation around to him, and I’d been drunk and tired enough to be superstitiously awed by it. Dylan seemed to have conjured him up, a vision of distraction to take my mind away from the question of the essay, the question of the writer.

  ‘Yes, he did it,’ Dylan had announced when Tallis asked how I’d gone with that final paper, and raised his glass in a general toast. ‘With a little help from your friends, right, Elliot?’

  I had raised my glass in turn.

  ‘Now, where’s that girl you said you were going to bring, Tallis?’

  Tallis
had started sleeping with some girl in one of his classes who also waitressed at the bagel shop in town. She seemed to be as interested in casual sex as he usually was, and her lack of clinging, the thing he hated in other girls, was driving him mad. He groaned. ‘She’s killing me, Dylan. She chucked me tonight — she’s going out with a fucking junior, a comp lit major. Fuck.’

  We commiserated. The congratulations were in, the subject was closed. I felt the remaining questions in the back of my mind fizzle and fade.

  Our drinks arrived; I’d ordered a martini in Cynthia’s two-olive style. It tasted salty and made me wish immediately for a glass of water. The dry air sucked moisture away from my skin busily. When Cynthia finally appeared I couldn’t tell whether she’d taken a long time or no time at all.

  ‘Well done,’ she said. She sat down on the white couch and crossed her legs, lifted her glass and clinked it against mine. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Cheers.’

  There it was again, her clean smile. There was an electric tension in her body, a restlessness that hadn’t been so obvious before. The lip gloss was still there, shiny like wet candy. Her eyes moved across the terrace, out to the balcony, the skyline. The mountains were out there somewhere beyond the glare of lights, dark and brutal and ancient.

  ‘It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘In a monstrous kind of way.’

  I nodded.

  ‘So, Cynthia,’ I began, ready with a set of questions about her research.

  ‘Call me Cyn,’ she said. She laughed. ‘Everyone does. Now, Elliot — there’s no nickname for that, is there? Just Elliot. One l or two?’

  ‘Two,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘Oh, like in E.T. Now. I just bought some amazing coke from someone in the bathroom. Do you want some?’

  ‘Cyn,’ I repeated. ‘Of course.’ Her eyes glittered, and suddenly everything seemed to become clear.

  ‘Of course — like, OK?’

  ‘Sure. OK. I mean, thanks.’

  She laughed again. ‘Relax.’

  I tensed at the word, hearing her say it in a way that made me think of Dylan. He would have been the one to acquire the good coke in the bathroom, if he’d been here. I considered whether this was a Dylan memory that would make sense to share with Cynthia.

  ‘You would have liked Dylan.’ Her eyes brightened. ‘I mean, everyone liked him. But you would have related to him.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘He always had the good drugs.’

  ‘Huh. Interesting.’ She pressed her hand to mine, and in it was a small plastic bag. ‘Don’t take too long,’ she breathed into my ear, and brought her mouth to her glass.

  I tapped a small pinch of powder onto my hand in the bathroom stall, noticing the paleness of my skin in the sparkling overhead light. It was sharp and then numb in my nose, a bitter, glorious trace down the throat. I washed my hands and marveled at the chill of the cold water, the brightness of it.

  Time telescoped and collapsed after that as though strobe-lit, patches of illumination followed by blur. More dancing; more drinking. On the dance floor, arms raised above her head for a moment, Cynthia was caught by the white flash of a strobe and appeared to me like a goddess, all silver and powerful and divine. Her arms dropped, the lights changed pattern, and she was human again, a thin film of sweat visible on the skin of her face, eyeliner beginning to smudge.

  More cocaine, both of us squeezed together in a stall in the men’s bathroom, where I forgot about Brian and everything else. The world outside the small, white box stopped existing, and all I was aware of was Cynthia and her silvery dress with the straps that never fell down. I raised one finger, trying to be slow and deliberate about it, and pushed the strap down her shoulder so that it lay against her arm. She kept smiling, lips compressed. I put both my hands to her shoulders and turned her around. She pressed her hands to the wall, turned her face so that I could see her profile, her nostrils flaring slightly with each breath. I brought my thumb to the back of her dress and pulled it down to show the tattoo. There it was, like she had said: a dandelion, delicately drawn, tiny starlike pieces floating away across her hip. Her skin was smooth. She twisted back to face me.

  The bubble around us burst as two people entered the bathroom; the scratch of high heels on the tiles and a woman’s low-pitched laugh, accompanied by a man’s heavy tread and voice, though I couldn’t make out what he was saying to her; a suggestion that ended with ‘… don’t you?’

  I was painfully aware of how our two pairs of feet must be showing in the gap between the door and the floor. The same feeling arrived that had come upon me in the elevator, the walls breathing, and closing in.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Cynthia whispered in my ear. ‘They’ll just think we’re fucking, or doing drugs.’

  ‘I want to get out of here,’ I hissed back.

  It was impossible to escape unnoticed. I’d given up worrying about that and had my hand on the latch when we heard the unmistakable sounds of the two people out there starting to have sex. She moaned; he said ‘yeah’ over and over again; there was a rhythmic sound of something metallic crashing against the tiles, though I couldn’t work out what it might be.

  Cynthia looked disbelieving, embarrassed on their behalf. She caught my eye and we both suppressed laughter.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘They could be here all night.’

  I nodded and pulled my shirt straight. She smoothed down her dress. I touched her hair where it had been slightly squashed when she had pressed her face to the wall, and felt a real stir of desire as I passed my fingers through it. Short, soft. Her eyes widened.

  The woman’s moans from beyond the door grew louder. It was the opposite of arousing. Cynthia smiled and raised her chin a little, waiting for me. I opened the door and walked out, not glancing at the couple over against the washbasins in the corner except to register in my peripheral vision that the woman had a handbag slung over her shoulder festooned with metal buckles and chains that were responsible for the clanking noises.

  Once we were out of the bathroom Cynthia took my arm and groaned.

  ‘On the washbasin! Get a stall, at least.’ She shook her head.

  Why not get a room? I wondered to myself. The city was full of hotels; we were in one. It seemed easy enough.

  The moment of tension between us had passed, the electric seconds when my fingers had touched her back, when the idea of sex in a bathroom hadn’t seemed so crazy. It dissolved, and we kept drinking like old friends.

  9.

  I wasn’t sure what to call the part of Vegas where the diner was, where we were meant to meet Colin. Tallis had looked it up; he was good at maps and directions and had it all planned out. All he would say to me was that it was west. He’d arranged a hire car that could be collected from somewhere out the back of the hotel complex.

  We all met for breakfast at the Hollywood Diner buffet at the hotel. I was surprised to see Cynthia there, sitting next to Brian and across from Cameron at a big white table. She looked clean and put-together as usual, her face freshly scrubbed and tan, and she seemed to be in the middle of a conversation with Cameron. Small, empty plastic containers of grape jelly and butter were strewn across the table. I sat down with my cup of coffee and drank it, burning my tongue.

  ‘Hi, Elliot,’ she said, and kept eating her toast.

  ‘Good morning,’ I said. My tongue smarted from the burn.

  ‘Cynthia’s doing some sightseeing today,’ Brian told me.

  I wasn’t sure what to say about what we were doing, in case she asked. She kept eating cheerfully, opening more tiny tubs of jelly and spreading it on pieces of toast. There was a pile of it on her plate.

  ‘Go ahead. Have some,’ she said. ‘You look hungry.’

  The thin gold necklace was still there around her neck. I tried not to think about her shoulders underneath her clothes, the way they had looked in the silver dress the night before, the dandelion on her back and the sensation of her skin under my
fingers. I ate some toast and it did something to take away the sour taste in my throat, cocaine and alcohol hangover.

  ‘What sights are you seeing?’ I asked.

  ‘The lions. Some of the other animal exhibits. I want to go over to the Paris later, the Venetian maybe.’

  The Paris. It sounded wrong and right at the same time.

  Brian and Cameron weren’t talking, but it didn’t have the same edge as it had before, when it took the form of explicit ignoring. This was more normal, early morning, too-early-for-conversation kind of behavior. Brian pushed the cream toward Cameron without really looking at him. Cameron poured and pushed it back in the same way. Watching them sitting there on opposite sides of the table, drinking coffee, I couldn’t see any of the flames of secret longing between them that I’d imagined were possible the day before.

  Cameron straightened. ‘You’re just in time, Elliot,’ he said, as though I’d only just sat down, or he’d only just noticed I was there. ‘Tallis is meeting us outside with the car in …’ He checked his watch, a heavy silver thing with several dials. ‘Fifteen minutes.’

  He seemed surprised to find that there was so much time to spare. Brian lifted his eyes to the ceiling in quiet disapproval.

  ‘But I don’t know if you have time to eat,’ Cameron continued.

  ‘That’s OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll just eat Cynthia’s toast.’

  She winked at me. I looked away.