A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  Brian stood up immediately afterward and surprised all of us with a calm, tender statement: eloquent, understated, touching. Now I found myself wondering about the powerful ambivalence he must have been struggling to control, remembering his reported words in Cynthia’s voice, I’m glad he’s dead, and the doubleness it gave to everything he’d said that day, a harsh cast of irony. For every expression of affection, the intimation of its opposite.

  He had concluded with a passage from In Memoriam. My attention had drifted by that point and was brought back with a snap by the two words of the title. They were unmistakable, but still I wondered helplessly for a second whether I might have misheard, and then I recognized the cadence of the poem as he began reading.

  It wasn’t so strange that he read from that poem; it was a logical one to choose. The poem had been in my own mind in the days leading up to the funeral, flitting in and out mainly in the form of inarticulate, half-remembered images that I tried to steer away as soon as they appeared. The spreading, menacing branches of the graveyard yew tree; the ghastly ship sailing home with its tragic burden. Most troubling, hardest to eradicate, was the picture of the bleak dawn city street, empty of people, a lonely, foreign landscape of slick cobblestones and gray pearlescent sky. I’d pushed it away when it snuck up on me; cast resentful thoughts at the morning fog and faint rain on campus that called it to mind.

  ‘Behold me, for I cannot sleep, / And like a guilty thing I creep / At earliest morning to the door …’ Brian’s hand passed unconsciously over his tired eyes as he spoke.

  I’d wondered anxiously whether he knew, whether there was a message for me in there somewhere, and, if so, what exactly it might be. By the time he finished and took his seat next to me, I had recovered. It wasn’t a choice with any special significance. I was overtired and stressed. And if I was showing any outward signs of stress they could all be put down to symptoms of grief.

  Snatches of birdsong and squabbling, chirping noises reached us through the funeral home windows from the trees outside. The day was absurdly full of sun and life, the opposite of Tennyson’s mournful, drizzly London street. And yet the very harshness of the California sunlight had its own blankness, its own incandescent emptiness, and every doorway I looked at for the rest of the day filled me with a little shiver of dread, reminding me of those silent doors the coffin had passed through, with such inhuman, pneumatic smoothness, on its way to the cremation machine.

  In my hotel room now, I thought of Colin in his seat toward the back of the chapel and wondered whether he had made the connection between the poem and me, whether he’d even known about the paper by then, whether his attention had been brought more sharply to me for those moments.

  I’d been driven to reread the Tennyson in the week before the visit to Vegas for the first time since college, and had pulled the book out from its place on a bottom shelf in my office but so far hadn’t gotten around to actually opening it. It was there in my suitcase now, a thick paperback collection of his poetry, the elegy in there among the other poems, the monologues and odes and sonnets. I reached for it through folded clothes and took it back with me to the bed, placed the screenplays on the floor, and opened to a page at random. It was an early poem, ‘Ode to Memory’, and I quickly turned the page and leafed through until I came across the distinctive four-line stanzas of the elegy.

  I’d been reading for a while when the phone began to ring, a muted bleeping sound. I considered it mistrustfully, letting it go on for five or six rings; I started to wonder how long it would go before it rang out and went to voice mail. For a brief second, my heart rose up dizzyingly at the thought that it might be Natasha, and sank just as quickly when I remembered that she didn’t know where I was staying, and had my cell number, and would have no reason to call me in any case. Nevertheless, it was her face I had in mind, her distinctively modulated voice I imagined meeting mine when I picked up the receiver.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Elliot? It’s Cynthia.’

  I still had the strange sense of unreality I’d felt when the phone started to ring, part of my mind still dwelling in the page, not transitioning out into the present.

  ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘Wake me? No.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m OK, I’m good. I wasn’t asleep.’ I felt slightly insulted by the idea, unsure why. ‘How are you?’

  ‘Excellent. What are you doing?’

  ‘Uh, reading.’

  ‘What are you reading?’

  I didn’t want to tell her. I stared at the page — the tight, vicious, symmetrical stanzas — felt again the odd softness of the paper, unable to think of something else to say.

  ‘Tennyson,’ I said eventually. I was an English professor, I reminded myself. It wasn’t that weird to be reading Tennyson.

  ‘Tennyson? What Tennyson?’

  ‘In Memoriam.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, a drawn-out sound of pity. ‘Of course, I’m sorry.’

  ‘That’s OK,’ I replied, not sure what exactly she was apologizing for.

  ‘I love that poem so much. I remember reading it in college.’

  ‘It’s great, isn’t it?’

  A brief silence passed, during which I felt sure she was conjuring an image of me very far from reality: grieving man finding consolation in the words of the great poet, in the town where he had shared so much with his lost friend. There was a poignancy in this idea that appealed to me, and yet also shaded into a kind of sentimentality. I wasn’t sure whether to leave Cynthia with the idea intact, or to correct it — but then, how to correct it without exposing my guilty, complicated relationship to the poem?

  ‘So, I’m heading over to the Paris soon for lunch,’ she said.

  ‘OK.’

  She sounded as though there was a good reason for telling me about her plans, but I couldn’t think why. With some irritation I remembered Brian’s promises about how independent she was and how willing to stay out of our way.

  ‘Is Brian going with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh no. I just saw him at the pool. It seems like it’s really important for him to get some guy time, or some alone time, I don’t know. Maybe they’re going to a strip joint. He’s with Tallis. They claim to be staying at the pool.’

  She laughed, a brief, relaxed sound that made me think about how little she knew him, really, and how little she knew about what was happening.

  ‘Elliot,’ she said firmly, ‘we talked about getting lunch today — last night — you said to give you a call when I was heading out. That’s all.’

  It came back to me. We’d been standing at a bar toward the end of the evening, talking about her plans for the day ahead. I had indeed expressed interest in accompanying her to lunch at Paris, and — this was fuzzier — had managed to pull out some statistics about the hotel: how tall the fake Eiffel Tower stood compared with the actual one in Paris, how good the buffet was supposed to be, the beauty of the ceiling with its painted sky … We had stayed there once several years before — on our third or fourth visit, perhaps — and I had spent most of the time with a terrible hangover from drinking too many kinds of liquor. The combination of whiskey with anything else was disastrous for me, and there had been several different cocktails, all experimental, fashionable recipes with too many ingredients. Many hours had been spent staring at the beige walls of my room and the ornately carved, faux-walnut wardrobe that took up about one-quarter of the available space.

  ‘The food there is supposed to be really good,’ I said, aware that I was repeating myself from the previous evening.

  ‘I know. I’m starving. Are you hungry?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll meet you in the shop. The one near the elevators. I’ll be down there in, oh, ten minutes.’

  ‘OK.’

  Her technique impressed me. Somehow I had agreed to meet her for lunch without ever actually agreeing, as such. It wasn’t an unpleasant s
ensation, and I found it oddly relaxing to have decision-making power lifted from me for a moment.

  I returned to the idea I imagined Cynthia had about me reading In Memoriam, and decided that while this image was totally wrong, it was also somehow true. The poem had always bound me to Dylan, although in ways that had nothing to do with the content or meaning of the verse. Since he died I had been aware of a nasty sort of irony or poetic justice in that being the poem in question — it would have to be an elegy for a dead friend, wouldn’t it, and worse, one I’d never mastered, just as I imagined in my more maudlin moments that I’d probably never mastered the art of friendship, of emotional connection, to Dylan or anyone else.

  Would it be possible, I wondered, now that he was gone, now that the image of our friendship I’d carried for years was wrecked and was being reconstructed moment by moment, in more and more unlikely, distressing, implausible ways — would it be possible now to read the poem with fresh eyes, to understand it?

  I could picture so clearly how that story would go: I would sit on my bed and read the poem from start to finish, glancing up every now and again to take consolation from the ancient, indifferent mountains, and at last understand something about Tennyson’s grief. If I was going to really fulfill that particular fantasy, that version of the narrative, I would stay up all night, tumbler of whiskey by my side, and type out in one single, brilliant, heartfelt, typographical-error-ridden draft the essay I should have written eleven years ago. I briefly pictured myself walking into an aged Professor Stanton’s office and handing it to him with a humble, understated flourish, to his bewilderment and surprise — and then walking out of the building for the last time, newly unburdened … The Hollywood treatment.

  The book sat on the bed, stubbornly staying open to the page I had been reading earlier. I would reread the poem, I knew then with a clearheaded sense of purpose, and the words would lose some of their opacity, but it would not deliver the epiphany that took place in the little story I had just imagined for myself. If I came to an understanding of whatever Tennyson had to say it would not be through any fellowship of feeling with him, but through a knowledge of how bluntly my own confused, stupid grief was estranged from his. The lack of coincidence between my experience and the feelings encoded in the poem was the frame through which each began slowly to come into focus. My sense of this difference was like a dark blot of inky substance that both obscured and revealed the words on the page, each dissolving into all its separate characters and coalescing back into syntax, something that made no sense at all, and then some. I looked at the page again blindly and didn’t need to reread the words to experience a sense of understanding that felt at once fresh and familiar, as though it had been under the surface for a while, steeping and percolating mysteriously, and was now ready to appear, though not by any means complete.

  I envied Tennyson the way he was able to preserve the ideal image of his friend. A particular form of mourning attended this second, other loss that I was experiencing now — the loss of an idea of Dylan as I thought I had known him, our friendship as I thought I had understood it. I remembered the awful coffee he had brought me with that paper, the way he had presented it so sweetly, and his easy, comforting embrace. I wished for the return of all that innocence I’d lost, and despised myself for it. The sad finality of it all settled upon me and I felt a deep longing for him to arrive at my door at that moment, for him to walk in with that familiarity with my space he always took for granted, and half-sit on the desk with his arms folded, and reassure me of something. Even now, it was too hard to allow myself to be angry with him, although I knew it would have made sense to feel that way. The logical place for it seemed to open inside me and stay empty, numbly waiting, another kind of hole alongside the others that were part of my grief.

  I stared at the book for a while longer, waiting for it to close itself — it was staying open at a precarious angle, the front cover lifted up as though about to fall shut. Eventually I picked it up and closed it, left it next to the broken clock on the stand beside the bed.

  11.

  Cynthia was in the shop when I arrived, browsing a shelf of tourist paraphernalia, mostly in the form of dice: candy-colored plastic dice, key rings with plastic dice attached, packs of cards with dated photographs of casinos on the back, all the colors too yellow and red. Large sunglasses hid her eyes. She stood there with her head bowed, examining a set of yellow dice as though waiting for them to reveal a secret code. She turned, as though responding to something I’d said, and the big dark frames gave a vulnerable, childlike look to her face. Her mouth was lipsticked in a pinkish-orange shade that reminded me of tropical fruit. She smiled and the pensive look was gone, and I stopped wondering whether she had been crying and was hiding it with the sunglasses.

  ‘Hey,’ she said and set the dice back on their stand.

  I bought a packet of cigarettes. ‘Marlboros,’ I requested, unthinkingly choosing Dylan’s usual brand, and changed it to Marlboro Lights a second later. The pack sat hard and squarish in the pocket of my denim jacket. The cashier handed me a book of matches.

  Cynthia bought a packet of gum, and chewed rhythmically as we began our walk through the building to the monorail station. It was a long journey through brightly lit, windowless caverns. Every once in a while she consulted a folding map of the hotel and gave the general impression of knowing where she was going. We passed by a sign that pointed to the pool, and I caught a whiff of chlorine, a glint of sunlight reflected off blue water, and wondered whether Brian was there, hanging out with Tallis in the shelter of the coveted cabana, drinking too much and going over what to do about Colin. We made it through the gaming rooms, past the expensive, showy restaurants and the cafeterias, the Starbucks and the Dunkin’ Donuts, through halls of shops filled with ever-cheaper merchandise and pawnshops.

  It was the first time I had ever caught the monorail. At other times in Vegas if we ventured beyond our hotel it had always been in a taxi, or occasionally a rental car or the Deuce bus. I liked the Deuce; it drove reliably straight up and down the Strip, was air-conditioned and cheap. Tallis had some kind of aversion to any train-style public transport. It seemed to stem from a traumatic experience of getting stuck on the London Underground, something to do with an escalator breaking down at one of those deep stations. I’d tried to explain to him once that the monorail was above ground, but he wasn’t interested and I let it go. Now, walking through the bowels of the hotel with Cynthia, I wasn’t so sure that the monorail experience would be a good one for him.

  Eventually some doors took us into a parking lot, and then via an escalator to the station. We waited for a few minutes on the platform. The place had a strange hush, as though something terrible and violent had happened just before our arrival and the others waiting there had been stunned into silence. There was a family of six, all overweight and identically dressed in shorts and polo shirts of various colors; an overly affectionate young couple (just married, I thought, noticing a sparkling ring on the girl’s finger); a young woman, out of place in a business suit complete with pearls and briefcase, sweating visibly. The young couple whispered and giggled, a hand in each other’s back pocket. The smallest of the polo-shirt family, a young boy, broke ranks and stepped to the edge of the platform, where he spat hugely and aggressively onto the track. There was a second or two delay before his big sister strode over and whacked him on the side of the head, then pulled him back over to the group. His mother and father looked on impassively.

  I shrugged further into my jacket despite the heat, hating the place. The dry air around us smelled of old plastic and traces of concrete dust from the construction site across the way. The train arrived with its sleek, robotic whir seconds after I’d lit a cigarette.

  The monorail shuttled along a path parallel to the Strip, around the back of the big hotels, from the MGM all the way up to the Sahara at the very end, miles away. From windows on one side of the carriage we watched the backs of the hotels go past,
the neglected side of the buildings: crumbling brickwork; fading paintwork; multistory parking lots made of rotting concrete.

  The windows on the other side of the carriage looked toward the distant desert, showing us endless blocks of construction sites populated with enormous earthmoving machinery. Everywhere, something was being knocked down, something was being built. We looked down onto flat rooftops of one-and two-story buildings below — bars, restaurants, souvenir shops — pale lunar landscapes of concrete and air-conditioning units, crisscrossed with pipes and bristling with aerials.

  WE HAVE 21 YEARS LEFT ON OUR LEASE announced one place, in those movable plastic letters you see on old cinema signs, although these letters looked as though they hadn’t been moved for a while. It was a surreal protest of permanence in a zone of chaos and what seemed to be cyclical, ongoing destruction and renewal. WE ARE HERE TO SERVE YOU the sign finished, in smaller, insistent capitals.

  There was something arresting, almost shocking, about the sudden falling away of glitz and substance in that small distance between the front of the massive hotels, the face they showed to the Strip, and the back. We weren’t miles or even blocks away, we were simply behind the buildings, and yet the drop from prosperity to desperation and emptiness was dizzying. It wasn’t the same as going backstage and seeing the actors without their make-up, or discovering how the magical trapdoor works, although it felt something like that. It wasn’t exactly disenchantment, although it did make the illusions of the Strip seem more garish and daring than ever. Stage Door Casino read the rotating sign on top of the 21-year-lease building, reinforcing the theater metaphor that was flickering in my mind.

  I think what unsettled me most was what felt like a lack of decorum about these things — the lack of a proper division of front and back, decorated and undecorated, glitz and trash, all the cool, glossy interiors and the brutal exterior machinery that made them and kept them cool. Backstage should be hidden with a curtain or a door from the audience, surely; it shouldn’t be so — well, just so easy to see all the crap and falling-apart stuff out the back. It was there to be seen as the view from the tourist monorail, and there was no expectation that seeing it all from the back would diminish the front-of-house glamor, or qualify it in any way.