A Common Loss Read online

  The feeling passed. Natasha kicked me under the table, accidentally it seemed, although I wondered. A desire overcame me to talk with my friends, with Brian or Cameron or Tallis, to prove to myself that I meant something to them, and they meant something to me, after all.

  I pushed my plate away. A sad quarter of a sandwich and a wilting slice of tomato and parsley garnish were left.

  Elizabeth said, ‘Elliot, you need to eat. You know that,’ appealing to Natasha to support her. But Natasha narrowed her eyes at me and didn’t respond.

  ‘I want a cigarette,’ I said. Since the funeral I’d taken up smoking again in a half-hearted way.

  Natasha surprised me. ‘I’ll join you,’ she said, and rose. ‘I need a refill first.’

  She topped up a battered thermos with coffee from the stale-smelling urns behind us. Elizabeth said goodbye and stopped to talk to one of her students who greeted her anxiously.

  Natasha and I sat on a stone bench outside in front of the café windows. It was a cold spring and the bench had been in shade all day. She pulled her black coat tight around her body. I was suspicious of her — that look she had given me a minute before made me think I couldn’t trust her at all — and didn’t offer anything to say. We smoked for a minute in silence.

  ‘I lost a friend, once,’ she said.

  I waited for her to continue. ‘A close friend?’ I asked, eventually.

  She nodded. She lifted a hand, the one holding the cigarette, to her face and rubbed a spot above her eye, just on her eyebrow. It didn’t do anything to dislodge the weight of dark hair that fell back into place.

  I wondered how it had happened. A variety of scenarios went through my mind — train wrecks full of people screaming, a surfer caught in a freak tide out at sea, a muted hospital ward with nurses soundlessly patrolling. A terrible car crash. Overblown, exaggerated scenes.

  ‘Stabbing,’ Natasha said, simply. ‘That was back in Ukraine.’ She smiled at me, a wry smile with half her mouth. She had an accent, but I had never noticed it so strongly before.

  I hadn’t smoked much of my cigarette and it had half burned down into ash. Natasha took a drink from her coffee thermos. My mouth felt dry and I wanted to drink some too.

  I felt sure that Natasha’s stabbed friend had been really close, a friend of hers, belonging to her, not like Dylan was to me — one of a group of friends that had been close in college and since then had been going through the motions, keeping an idea alive beyond its proper expiration date. That’s what I thought, with a sense of the group as being dead and purposeless as keen as I had ever felt. The feeling of loss that came over me a second later was a complete surprise.

  ‘Dylan died in a car accident,’ I said, and corrected myself: ‘Well, a bike accident — he was riding a bike, he was hit by a car …’ I had to stop, because my voice got stuck.

  Natasha sighed, a small breath that barely moved her body, and gave a faint nod. It was nothing like the earnest sympathy Elizabeth had offered me over the past weeks.

  We sat in silence for a moment, and I watched her cigarette burn down as she held it between her fingers with their glossy black nail polish. Words began to form in my mind, phrases ready in response to the questions I expected, the routine questions about where it happened, how long we’d been friends, how old Dylan was, but she didn’t ask for more details. The responses I’d been planning all dropped away. I wanted to tell her more, but wasn’t sure what, exactly, only that it wasn’t like whatever I’d just been thinking about.

  Two students approached the table close to our bench, dragging the metal chairs with a scrape across the ground as they sat down, and the moment was broken. One of them I recognized from a class I’d taught the previous semester, but she was too absorbed in conversation with her friend, or boyfriend probably, to notice me.

  Natasha ground her cigarette under her heel on the concrete slab under the bench, brusque and detached. I was left with the sense that she had extracted a kind of confession from me without even trying.

  But it wasn’t a confession that would have meant anything much to her. She stood and pulled the belt of her coat neatly closed, and gave me an affectionate smile — it was almost patronizing, and my awe turned slightly to indignant outrage. She raised her hand in farewell. ‘Bye, Elliot. Take care.’

  I nodded and returned her wave. She strode away in her high-heeled boots, shoulders tightly lifted.

  I went back inside and upstairs to my office. It was my second year at the college, but it still felt at times as though I was on probation and the place didn’t really belong to me yet. I closed the door, against the unspoken department policy that everyone’s door was always left ajar, and glanced at the stack of library committee reports and minutes in a folder on my desk.

  I’d been sitting on the committee since the beginning of semester, and had walked into a deeply factionalized argument over funding for various collections that had begun long before my arrival at the university. Lately those discussions had been pushed down the agenda, to my relief, by emergency talks over the fire-safety issues revealed by a recent report, which had recommended closing the research stacks to students altogether until major building work had taken place. No one wanted to close the stacks, or at least no one wanted to be responsible for closing them. Everyone wanted to keep the report as quiet as possible.

  The report had given me a whole new, disturbing perspective on the shelves of books that lined the room. Since reading about the vivid scenarios proposed in the report (fire on the top floor that spread rapidly down, trapping students toward the back of the building with no exits; flames jumping from shelf to shelf as all that stacked and bound paper ignited), every time I sat at my desk I confronted a vision of the whole wall bursting into flame. Sometimes it was frightening or simply depressing; today was one of those days where the prospect was strangely exhilarating.

  I picked up the phone intending to make the call I’d thought of making earlier, to one of my college friends. But my mind went blank and I couldn’t think which one of them I wanted to talk to. The receiver was in my hand as I turned the question around in my mind — which one, what time was it where they were, where were their numbers? I placed the receiver back against the telephone.

  There was a picture of the five of us in a frame on one of the bookshelves. It was maybe three or four years old, shot somewhere in Vegas, by the pool at the Mirage, I seemed to remember, but wasn’t sure who had taken it — had Brian set the camera to shoot automatically? We were sitting all in a row on a bench. The sky was pale and bright behind us, a white blink of sunlight in the corner of the picture. Dylan was in the center, wearing a sweet, knowing smile, brown hair grown long and pushed back from his face. High cheekbones, dark eyes, his features almost feminine from one perspective. You would have called him beautiful as well as handsome. The camera caught some aspect of his looks perfectly, crystalized it so that there never seemed to be a bad picture of him. For a while he had worked as a model, in his last year of high school. He’d found it demoralizing, he told me, and boring, and had recounted the strangeness of once sitting on the bus opposite a schoolgirl carrying a bulky homework folder that was covered in pictures of himself, cut out from magazines.

  Dylan had always been attractive to men as well as to women. I’d never known him to be interested in that direction, but here in this picture I could see it more clearly than ever, the somehow universal aspect of his attraction, the absolutely seductive quality of his gaze, as though the camera were a secret lover.

  Brian was on his left, one arm around Dylan’s shoulder, looking as if he was about to speak to someone outside the frame, mouth halfway open, face in profile. He looked relaxed, earnest as usual, but happy, too, his face lit up with energy; there was an easy swing to his legs, one crossed over the other, ankle on knee, and with his arm thrown casually over Dylan’s shoulder he looked almost athletic. On Dylan’s other side was Cameron, tired around the eyes, his smile close-lipped and ironic.
It must have been the year the twins were born. He sat a little forward, elbows resting on his knees, hands loosely clasped. Tallis was at the end of the row next to Cameron, the tallest one, fair hair turned to gold in the sun, his face open in a wide, exuberant grin, almost blurred with motion. One hand was raised holding a can of something, beer or soda. I was at the other end next to Brian, arms folded, the only one with glasses. They were my old pair, round lenses with thin tortoiseshell rims that appeared childish to me now. I’d bought a new pair when I got the new job: squarish, dark frames.

  The ring of the phone startled me. I answered it. ‘Elliot West.’

  ‘Hey, Elliot. It’s Brian.’

  My heart lifted. We had a connection, after all, it wasn’t a dead effort at friendship — somehow it seemed as though my desire to talk with him (with one of them) had reached him and been answered. This feeling sank just as quickly as our conversation progressed. Brian’s tense voice held virtually nothing in common with the relaxed person in the photograph on the shelf. He was complaining about the choice of dates for the trip, trying to enlist my support in talking Tallis into changing them, yet again. Dylan had been a good mediator. I was crap at it, and yet somehow the task had fallen to me in these particular negotiations.

  Brian had fallen out with Cameron two years previously, and now neither of them spoke to the other much beyond the simple necessities. It seemed as though neither wanted to be responsible for breaking the whole thing up, and neither wanted to be the one who withdrew. Pride, denial, attachment to the rest of us. They kept it civil most of the time, but it caused problems when we were organizing the details of the Vegas trips, which happened mostly by email. Brian would reply to the group but leave Cameron out every now and again, and the rest of us wouldn’t notice until it was too late and a whole round of negotiating about dates and details had already happened — then we would have to bring Cameron back into the loop, and he’d be irritated and argue over the dates just for the sake of it, and so on. Something like that had happened now.

  ‘I don’t know, Brian,’ I said. ‘Why are you asking me? I can’t do the Wednesday, I told you. The Thursday and Friday is better. Or the next week.’

  ‘Why not? Remind me,’ he said, impatiently.

  ‘It’s the dates of the break. I have a faculty meeting. I can’t miss it. I can’t get away until Thursday. Even that’s pushing it.’

  ‘Right, right. OK. It’s just such a hassle, you know? Cameron’s being so rigid about it as usual —’

  ‘Just talk to Tallis. I’ve given him my dates.’

  ‘And let’s hope he doesn’t put us in some place like that fucking medieval theme park he got for us last time.’

  I tried to be patient. I looked out the window as we talked, at the bicycle racks and trash cans down below at the entrance to the building, and across the narrow road at the scaffolded Musicology building, which was undergoing a seemingly endless renovation.

  Brian complained about Cameron and Tallis for a while more and then seemed to lose steam. We exchanged comments about how good it would be to see each other. I waited for him to let me go. There was a long pause, and then he spoke. ‘There’s something else, something I need to tell you, and Tallis. For the booking and everything.’ He paused again.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m bringing someone,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I’m bringing Cynthia.’

  ‘Whoa.’ My attention snapped back from the window, where I’d been counting the railings on the bicycle rack, noticing the bent ones. ‘Cynthia?’

  ‘You know, this girl I’ve been seeing for a while. We’re moving in together at the end of the summer, it’s serious. She’s coming. She wants to meet all you guys, she’s interested in Vegas … I said it was OK.’

  ‘But we have the rule.’

  It was more like an understanding than a rule — there weren’t rules, exactly, but after all this time there were customs that felt like ancient law. We didn’t bring girlfriends. It was something to do with wanting the freedom to flirt with other women, but there was something else, too, the more intangible sense that the time we spent together there was about us, about the friendships, focused on one another rather than on the other significant relationships in our lives. It was a sure sign of aging when relationships got serious enough that the partner would have to be included in every social activity. We had all felt the pressure of these distant-seeming things since Cameron had got married and had children and made it all seem scarily closer and more possible, but for him there had been no question of bringing Marie and the girls. If anything, he’d become more enthusiastic about the trip, despite his conflict with Brian, for the element of escape it offered from his overburdened life.

  ‘I know,’ Brian said. ‘But it’s all changed now, isn’t it? Now that Dylan won’t be there. Nothing about the whole trip will be the same. It’ll be a totally different thing.’

  ‘But it’s the first time without Dylan,’ I said, hating the feeling of saying it, acknowledging it. ‘I thought that would make it even more important for it to be just the four of us.’

  ‘Come on, Elliot.’

  I reflected on it, on my knee-jerk resistance to the idea, and wondered hazily where it was coming from, dismissed it. Wasn’t I the one who had been chafing against the annoying conventionality of the whole thing for so long now, complaining about the unchanging choice of venue, feeling myself detached and disinvested from the group, the experience, the relationships?

  ‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘It will be different, but that’s OK. Part of the whole moving-on experience.’

  ‘Thanks, man.’ Brian sighed with relief. ‘I knew you’d be the toughest to convince.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked. How would Tallis feel, I wondered, about a female witness to his endless chase of the cocktail waitresses of Vegas? And I realized that he probably wouldn’t care at all.

  ‘Cynthia’s great, you’ll love her,’ Brian said, ignoring my question.

  ‘She’s interested in Vegas?’ I asked, remembering his earlier remark.

  ‘Oh, yeah. She’s a grad student. You’ll relate to that.’

  I wanted to remind him, forcefully, that I was in fact no longer a student, despite having been one for more years than I liked to admit.

  ‘Cultural studies, something like that. She’s doing some kind of research on imitation versus authenticity. I think that’s it. Anyway, she’s been wanting to visit Vegas — she wants to write a paper about it, or a chapter.’ He chuckled. ‘She wants me to make a documentary about the place. I told her, it’s been done. But seriously, you know, I can’t stop her coming if she wants to. She won’t hang around all that much. She wants to see those fake Eiffel Tower buildings and the Venice canals and all that stuff.’

  ‘OK. I said it’s OK.’

  ‘Well, good, that’s great.’

  ‘Where’s she studying?’ I asked.

  ‘Boston U.’

  ‘Can’t wait to meet her.’

  ‘Great. Awesome. She’s gonna love you. The two of you can sit down and compare notes. Looking forward to seeing you, man.’

  As I hung up the phone I looked back out the window and noticed a familiar figure walking along one of the paths that crossed the lawn outside. It was Natasha, returning from the direction she’d taken when we parted earlier. There was a man in a dark overcoat coming toward her on one of the other paths; he caught up with her and they stood for a moment, talking, animated, before walking off together.

  It was hard at first to identify the feeling of resentment I had, watching them make their way up the low hill toward the other side of campus, where she worked in the Physics department on a research grant. He swept his graying hair back from his forehead, and gestured with one hand in an unmistakably European way as he walked. She turned her face toward him and slowed for a moment and looked as though she was about to kiss him. I knew the feeling then. It was jealousy, of course.

  2.


  This isn’t going to be one of those stories about a suburban boy seduced into a picturesque world of wealth and charm by a group of high-class eccentrics. I loved those stories, and in many ways that experience was what I wished for at college. But by the time of Dylan’s death, the group was out of tune with everything else that seemed important to my life, everything I aspired to. I told myself I didn’t like any of them much any more. Their shortcomings and irritating habits were much more present in my mind than any positive feeling. I suppose I liked the idea of having friends from college more than I really liked the friends themselves. Having them, the whole group of them, seemed to confirm something to me about myself. That I was a likable person, I suppose; that I was part of something enviable, something that looked from the outside like a deep bond, even though I felt that it was shallow and contrived, or had grown to be that way.

  Much of the tension between us stemmed from the fact that it was our eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-old selves that had connected so strongly with one another, and the people we had become held less in common. Some groups of friends manage this passage of time with more success. I’ve seen it happen, over and over again, people staying friends with the people they met and befriended in high school, college, sometimes even elementary school, though the farther back you go the smaller and more divided the group usually becomes. It’s not that uncommon to find people who have friends they have known for ten, fifteen years; it’s rarer to find a whole group — five, in our case — that’s maintained a lasting unity.

  The group came into being as a kind of aggregate of friendships. I met Brian in my first week at college at a coffee shop just around the corner from campus. I’d sat down to begin reading Clarissa, a set text that I’d just bought for a class in English, horrified at how long it was, unable to believe that it was, as it claimed, the abridged version. There weren’t any other tables, and when Brian glanced around, looking for somewhere to sit down, he caught my eye and asked if I minded, and I said no, go ahead. He hauled out a massive stack of photocopied pages bound together into a reader and set it on his lap, unable to fit it onto the little table along with the coffee cups and my overlarge novel, and we started talking. He was short by thirty-five cents for his second cup of coffee and I gave it to him from the change I had in my pocket, in dimes and pennies; he made a fuss about needing to go to the ATM but eventually just shrugged and accepted it. I’d known him for months before I figured out how wealthy his family was and that he hadn’t wanted to refuse my money out of shame at being broke, as I’d assumed, but from being uncomfortable about how much money he actually had. He counted up the coins in little towers on the table and gave a grin when they added up to a dollar.