Across from us a young father and mother were sitting with a toddler who squealed with delight at the machinery in the back lots as we passed. One whole long block seemed to be a parking lot for all kinds of equipment: bulldozers, excavators, dump trucks, steamrollers, all in rows, in shades of orange and yellow, showing signs of wear and tear and rust.
‘Diggers!’ the little boy shouted ecstatically. ‘Diggers! I want to ride on them!’
His father smiled indulgently; his mother stared out the window, her gaze wandering past the rows of digging machines and further out, past more empty blocks to the strip malls and parking lots and townhouses in the streets beyond.
We arrived at the stop for Paris, which was also the stop for Bally’s, the casino I hated most. It was hard to say exactly why: it wasn’t the most garish or spectacular, or even the most tasteless. We had never stayed there, but I’d spent hours in it with Tallis one night at the blackjack table, a few years previously when he had decided to make that his game. I had only recently accepted the fact that I don’t much enjoy card games in general — I had never really embraced gambling, but at least I’d always thought that card games had some style. My experience that night only confirmed my sense that they were boring. I didn’t lose or win much, and, to my surprise, ended up slightly ahead at two or three in the morning, when Tallis was down by hundreds of dollars, or maybe more. I stopped keeping track and drank too much rum.
I wandered with Cynthia through stretches of underground corridors lined with shops almost identical to those at the MGM, although slightly more low-rent. There were one or two sad signs for lawyers’ offices that assisted with borrowing more money on your mortgage and getting instant cash for assets. My sense of time had skewed all over again, and as soon as we were out of the reach of sunlight I felt unhinged, jet-lagged, with no bodily sense of whether it was morning or afternoon.
Cynthia grinned at me cheerfully. The gum had disappeared somewhere between the monorail platform and where we were now. ‘How’s your hangover?’ she asked brightly.
‘I think it’s jet lag right now,’ I said. ‘How’s yours?’
She gave a little grimace. ‘Not too bad. Not too great either. I need another one of those greasy breakfasts. Or a huge plate of crepes. Will they have those at the buffet? Or are the crepes just at the crepe place?’
‘I have no idea. Sorry. There’ll be a lot of things to eat.’
We stepped onto an escalator that took us up through a mirrored, sparkling cavern. Strands of heavy crystal beads hung in pendulous, thickly clustered loops from the metal rings of chandeliers above, illuminated by hundreds of bright little bulbs, reproduced in infinitely receding reflections and fragments by squares of beveled glass on all sides. The light broke into rainbow shards and patterns, like artificial constellations or the showers of explosive sparks from a fireworks display. We both stared upward as the mirrors fractured us into oddly reversed versions of ourselves — a pair of hands here, an endlessly reflected set of eyes there, two backs, two faces, against the metallic shine and depthless black of the background. In some panels the images rippled and curved as though glancing off water, the not entirely smooth surface of a river or a bath. Off to one side, in a corner, or a reflection of a corner, our opposing profiles merged and kissed before disappearing.
I stumbled off the escalator, almost losing my footing, dazed as an animal caught in headlights. That’s how they do it, I thought, that’s how they prepare you to spend all day in here and lose all your money: dazzle.
‘Are you OK?’ Cynthia asked. Her sunglasses were back on. I felt an urge to replace mine as well.
I shook my head. ‘I fucking hate Bally’s,’ I said.
‘The chandeliers …’ she said admiringly, sounding as dazzled as I was.
Variations on the same elaborate light fixtures that hung over the escalator were suspended from the low ceilings inside the building: smaller-scale ones, and a few enormous versions that made me think inescapably of the tinkling, murderous crash they would make if they fell to the ground.
The journey to our destination was a long one, again, and I found myself thinking that it would have been as fast to walk the whole way from the MGM. But then we were in the underground caverns of Paris, and I could think only of sitting down and eating something sweet and drinking several cups of coffee.
‘It really is Disneyland,’ Cynthia murmured as we passed through corridors of shops designed to look Parisian: quaint little shutters on all the windows, some real, some just painted on the surrounding walls; bronzed lampposts; a bluish-violet sky brushed onto the ceiling. Any illusion of depth in the painted sky was tempered by crisscrossed shadows of roofs and columns and hanging signs, cast upward by recessed lights. Accumulated tobacco smoke had yellowed the scattered, pale clouds. The contours of everything were all blunted in the same way, as though they had been cast from a mold that had been used too many times and had lost all its proper detail; there were blobs and fat swirls on the architraves and lamppost bases that looked like a distant echo of the sharp curlicues you might see on a Parisian street.
‘I’ve never been to Disneyland,’ I said.
‘But you know what I mean, right?’
‘Sure.’
It made sense that Disneyland would be the authentic location corresponding to this copied one, rather than the actual city of Paris, the supposed reference point.
The buffet had a humorless atmosphere, crowded with visitors examining the various offerings — supposedly authentic dishes from each region of France, plus the usual salad bar and a kiosk in the middle just for cake and other forms of dessert. People queued patiently at the salad bar in front of the enormous dishes of peeled shrimp, loading up plates with pink mountains of the things, faces set with the same joyless dedication you saw at the slot machines. Even the children at the ice-cream machines looked serious as they pulled the lever and built the highest possible tower on their cones.
We found crepes for Cynthia, and I left her to choose from a list of possibilities — chocolate, cheese, banana, berries, a bewildering array of combinations — and went about filling my tray with a dozen kinds of pastries and cakes and little cups of chocolate mousse, adding a bowl of salad as a gesture toward the idea of lunch.
‘Are you working on Disneyland?’ I asked Cynthia when she joined me. She had two plates of crepes that seemed identical, smothered in chocolate sauce, each with half a strawberry perched on top.
A silent waitress in white placed cups on the table and filled them with coffee from a silver jug.
‘I have a chapter on the castle,’ Cynthia said. ‘You know. The one in the Disney logo.’
I could picture it clearly, fireworks exploding over the elaborate pointed turrets against a velvety night sky.
‘It’s a replica,’ she explained. ‘Or, you know, “inspired by …”’
I was aware of this, somehow; the original castle was Swiss, or German, or somewhere in Europe.
‘Have you been there?’ I asked. ‘To the original one?’
‘Do you mean in LA?’
‘No — never mind.’
She seemed lost in thought. ‘Is there a Disneyland Las Vegas?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Damn. I should know that.’ She brought a guidebook out of her bag and started leafing through it.
‘How’s your crepe?’
‘Oh, it’s so good.’
I’d eaten a miniature apple tart, and stared for a while at the rest of the things I’d chosen: a chocolate eclair; a tiny lemon meringue pie; a fruit tart piled with a glistening pyramid of strawberries, lush and red under a golden glaze.
When I looked up, Cynthia’s face was preoccupied and almost sad. I thought about how it had looked in the mirrors around the escalator — thinner somehow, waiflike, the spots of pink on her cheeks heightened. I assumed that she was thinking about Brian, and I wondered how he was handling all of this around her. Perhaps she was putting everything down to the
unexpected, swamping effects of grief. Maybe the less-than-loving things he had said about Dylan to her made that less plausible; maybe they didn’t make any difference at all. That was the thing about grief: it had no precisely predictable processes from moment to moment, day to day, week to week, however much people liked to take refuge in the idea of universally shared stages or steps.
My mother had ordered some books about those stages for me from Amazon and had them shipped to my office. Stupidly, I’d opened the package in the mailroom and had to fend off the curious stare of a student, a girl I’d taught the previous semester who was there to drop a paper into someone else’s box. Both books featured images of water on the covers — one, a silvery lake bordered by forests and mountains; the other, a reflective, rippling ocean. I hadn’t wanted to take them home; hadn’t wanted to leave them in my office, where they would have attracted more curious stares; hadn’t imagined for a moment that they would have anything to offer.
My mother had called the next day to check they had arrived, and sounded injured when I’d said that they had. She’d been expecting my phone call to thank her.
‘I thought the one about friends would, you know, really help you with this process.’
I couldn’t remember whether that was the one with the lake or the ocean. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it will.’
‘OK, then.’ A pause, expectant.
‘Mom, I don’t know if I’m at the right stage of the process … for reading …’
‘Oh,’ she’d said, sympathetically. ‘Of course. When you’re ready.’
‘Thanks,’ I’d said again, and found a reason to end the call.
After hanging up I’d found myself captured somehow by the language I had reached for only as an excuse: was it true that I wasn’t at the right stage? And would some stage arrive at which I would actually find help and solace in books like those? I didn’t like to think so.
In any case, I could imagine Brian explaining away his distance, his state of emotional freak-out, to Cynthia by pleading something to do with grief, a change of heart brought on by being here in this place, with these friends. He’d just discovered how much Dylan had meant to him after all, what an impossible gap he would leave in Brian’s life, something like that. It was hard to take someone to task for any kind of offensive behavior when they were grieving.
‘If he didn’t want me to come he should have just said so,’ Cynthia pronounced, as though the statement were part of a conversation we had been having, or an argument, even though we had been sitting in silence for a while.
I thought about saying something about him grieving, but couldn’t do it.
She straightened. ‘I’m really fine doing this on my own. I’d always planned to do it that way. So don’t feel as though you have to keep me company or anything.’
‘No — no, I don’t feel like that.’
‘I thought you’d all be hanging out together and drinking all day and, you know, talking about old times.’
I wanted to come up with something in response that put a positive spin on what was happening among us all, a frame that could plausibly explain why I couldn’t stand the thought of Brian’s company right now and was equally reluctant to be on my own with my battered copy of Tennyson.
‘It’s harder than you thought, isn’t it, being here all together without Dylan,’ she offered.
I nodded gratefully and allowed her to think she was having some kind of insight into the four of us. Maybe she was. It kept happening, this sense that even the things that were wrong, or were faked, were actually in some sense also true — my grief excuse, our incapacity for relating to one another in a group without him.
‘If you don’t mind me hanging around I’m happy to tag along,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t mind the company.’
Maybe something came across in my voice about how I was really feeling. For whatever reason, she met my eyes with a hint of suspicion before nodding in agreement.
‘I can be your research assistant,’ I joked, trying to shift the mood.
‘Oh, I like that,’ she said, smiling. ‘Do you get to have research assistants? To do your copying and fetch your books from the library?’
‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘Maybe I’ll have one next year.’
‘I did that job last year for someone in the English department,’ she continued. ‘Hours in the library, copying articles from obscure journals, a whole lot of Victorian periodicals …’
She started on the second crepe. The chocolate sauce on it looked as though it had gone cold. I looked down at my plate and found that the eclair had vanished; a faint taste of custard in my mouth told me that I’d managed to eat it without noticing.
‘Actually,’ she said, chewing, ‘he was a Victorianist, this professor. The ancient one I worked for. Maybe you know him. He works on Tennyson.’
‘It’s not really my field,’ I said. ‘Do you want more coffee?’ I collected both our cups without waiting for an answer and went to find us a refill.
The next couple of hours passed in a pleasant, dazed sort of blur, the kind of calming sensation that comes with giving yourself up to someone else’s plans when those plans are benign and easily executed. We wandered around the casino floors just like tourists and I watched Cynthia take photographs and write notes in a small spiral-bound notebook. We rode the elevator up to the top of the Eiffel Tower and surveyed the whole sprawling, dusty town with a hundred other spectators, then caught the Deuce bus up to the Venetian and watched people riding in gondolas around the canals.
Cynthia had seemed morose at the buffet, but she snapped out of her mood once we left and assumed a busy, professional manner, checking things off in her guidebook and on various lists in her notes. We didn’t talk much; half the time when Cynthia exclaimed ‘Look!’ or ‘Interesting!’ I wasn’t sure exactly what she was pointing at, and wasn’t interested much in figuring it out. I’d smile and shake my head or nod gently — both those gestures seemed to express exactly the same kind of amused, baffled, slightly fascinated reaction that was called for. It was a companionable sort of quiet, and I was interested in her fascination with the place even if the place itself bored me. It wasn’t exactly like seeing it through new eyes — it still looked tacky and grotesque to me, and felt hot and uncomfortable — but I attached myself to her pleasure in it, trying to get outside my own thoughts.
Looking back at that afternoon it strikes me how deeply I’d gone into denial about the strange situation we had all found ourselves in. I probably should have been stressing out like Tallis and Cameron no doubt were at that moment, or drinking myself into oblivion like Brian, but I discovered in myself a capacity for aimless passivity that acted like a wonderful anesthetic. Every once in a while I would observe myself as though from a distance, and watch myself following Cynthia around, and get as far as thinking that there was something else I maybe should be thinking about, this other pressing issue. But if I started putting a name to it — Dylan; Colin; Brian; Tennyson — my attention would flow back to Cynthia again, like a river being mindlessly diverted from its course. It was a bit like being drunk and watching myself keep drinking even when I knew that having another vodka on top of the wine I’d already drunk would make me immediately sick and even sicker the next day, only it felt less self-destructive. It was something like being enchanted, I imagined, feeling as though I’d let the dazzle of all the blinking, reflected lights pass right through my eyes and into some receptive part of my overstressed brain. If I’d been into gambling I probably would have sat myself down in front of a slot machine and lost a lot of money over the course of a few brain-dead hours.
We made our way to the Bellagio and stood there looking at the big pool of water where the fountains went on at night. The grid of lights and machinery was visible under the surface from certain angles, a massive, sinister array of dark metal.
Cynthia checked her watch. ‘It’s getting close to six,’ she said. ‘Shouldn’t you be getting ready for your se
ven o’clock date?’
It took me a moment. ‘Oh,’ I responded, eventually. ‘The Flamingo. Yeah.’
Neither of us moved.
‘I’m worried about Brian,’ she said.
My heart tightened; I was becoming more and more aware of its status as a muscle, a moving, unpredictable thing that wasn’t performing its job as quietly as I would have liked. I felt myself reaching for that enchanted, dazed state of mind that had occupied me until the past second, but knew with unhappy certainty that it wouldn’t return, no matter how long I spent staring at the chandeliers and mirrors of Bally’s or wherever.
‘I really enjoyed this afternoon,’ I said.
She looked at me, puzzled. ‘Really? I couldn’t tell. I thought it was all a little boring for you.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘not at all.’
She smiled, but it didn’t last long. ‘You’re trying to change the subject.’
‘I don’t know what to say about Brian …’ I said, hoping that it came across as some kind of guy thing, the man who isn’t good at talking about feelings, or doesn’t want to talk about his friends behind their back, especially with their girlfriends. Again, it crossed my mind that the thing I thought I was performing might actually be real, although not exactly in the way I was presenting it to her. It was all evasion of one kind or another.
‘I know. It’s OK.’
She took out her phone, and I realized that she had been checking it regularly all afternoon, brief glances and taps at the keys. Now I saw the sense of expectancy in the gesture, and the disappointment when she put the phone away.
A Common Loss Page 24
