A Common Loss Read online

  I ended up reading in that coffee shop a lot that first semester and so did Brian, and we often shared a table. I remember being embarrassed that four weeks later I was still reading Clarissa, until we worked out that it had more pages than his entire course reader for Intro to Film Studies, and wound up in a conversation about whether it was harder to read Richardson or the article on Eisenstein that he was supposed to be reading.

  ‘But it’s just a novel,’ he kept saying. ‘Really, it’s just fiction. Even if it’s old-fashioned language, it’s still just a story.’

  He wanted to know if there was a movie of it. He was unmoved when I made him read a few paragraphs, although he was both intrigued and suspicious when I explained that the whole thing was in the form of letters. This seemed to make it even easier to his way of thinking but decidedly less like an actual novel.

  ‘I know it doesn’t seem that bad,’ I said. ‘But it goes on. It goes on forever.’

  That’s when he noticed it was abridged, and I didn’t feel as though I could keep complaining after that.

  Brian met Tallis and Dylan at a Roman Polanski marathon one night; Tallis knew Cameron from high school; Dylan met Tallis and Cameron somehow, and seemed to know just about everyone anyway. Dylan was in my Introduction to the Novel class; I’d seen him once or twice in the lectures and then he showed up in my section meeting for the first time three or four weeks into the semester with his copy of Clarissa (unabridged), complete with notes in the margins. He was the only other guy in the section. I watched as all the girls realigned themselves subtly the moment he sat down with his long legs stretched out in front of him, crossed at the ankles, jeans torn at the knees and in a spot just below his front pocket, showing a dime-size glimpse of his thigh.

  The first time I remember feeling as though I belonged to a recognizable group, a distinct unit, was when all five of us got drunk together on a bottle of good brandy that Dylan managed to find in the back cupboard in the kitchen at a debauched Halloween party. Dylan was the only one of us with a costume, if you could call it that: a threadbare, beautifully tailored tuxedo and a red-and-black plastic pitchfork that never left his side. I think at some point during the night he borrowed a set of vampire teeth; I have a memory of him grinning wickedly, brandishing the pitchfork and raising a glass, or a can, in a toast. There was a perfectly shaped kiss in red lipstick on his neck that seemed to be part of the whole effect; it smudged and migrated to his collar over the course of the night.

  By sophomore year Brian and I were living in the same dorm, across the hall from each other, and the group began to have real cohesion. We coordinated our weekend activities, wound up at the same parties, ate hungover greasy breakfasts with one another. At exam time or when papers were due we sometimes wound up studying in the library together at one of the big tables in the common rooms downstairs, Cameron and Tallis with their impenetrable economics texts and laptops, Dylan with his novels in French and history journals. That was the year I tried to learn Old Norse, and Dylan would laugh at my struggles with the syntax, and then help me figure it out, with a maddening ability to quickly master grammatical forms.

  It’s hard to remember what we had in common, exactly, before the accident; it’s not something you think about at the time. The rest of them watched games together, but that was something I couldn’t get enthusiastic about, having gone from being always bad at athletics (glasses, uncoordinated, bookish) to being stubbornly uncaring about any game except tennis, which I watch with my father when I visit my parents around the time of any major match. Tallis used to say that my apathy about sport was impressively ‘un-American’. He had grown up in England, and the games he cared about were all alien to us — cricket, soccer (or football as he called it) — except for basketball and any game that involved women players. Our college had an exceptionally good women’s basketball team and Tallis loved to attend their games, and even convinced me to go with him once when no one else could make it. I agreed because he was so aggressively persuasive, and spent a strange couple of hours watching him alternately shout and sulk, seemingly oblivious to my presence except when our college team scored the winning point and he slapped me on the back with a broad, relieved grin.

  Dylan didn’t follow any sport with a passion but seemed able to talk about any kind of game with a conventional level of knowledge and enthusiasm, although I convinced myself that it was just a show, and that in reality he had more in common with my intellectual and academic interests. After college he wound up working in publishing, securing a job with a company in New York after years of internships at various presses and small magazines. I was envious of his career and grew more so the longer I stayed in graduate school, amassing debt in student loans and spending all my time in the library while he moved ever upward in the literary world of the city, inviting me to parties every now and again where he would introduce me to intimidating authors and editors.

  ‘It’s not too late, you know, Elliot,’ he would say whenever I complained about the endless labor of coursework, dissertation research, and working as an underpaid teaching assistant. ‘There are plenty of people in publishing with PhDs. You could always get a job like that when you’re done.’ But after years in graduate school there was no way I could afford to spend several more interning simply for the value of the experience, as he had.

  If I kept grumbling he knew how to placate me, evincing interest in whatever research project or class I was taking or teaching, surprising me with little pieces of specialized knowledge: the reception of Thomas Middleton on the continent, the significance of hotly contested aspects of Lutheran doctrine in late-Elizabethan court literature, the role of Philip Sidney’s sister in his literary career. He always talked with a sense of admiration for the rigor of academic thinking and a touch of regret that he hadn’t taken that path himself, and I would wind up encouraging him to apply to graduate school for a program in Renaissance studies or French literature, and he would shake his head modestly and tell me that I was the clever one, that he didn’t have the dedication to stick it out.

  Dylan carried with him from LA a subdued West Coast aura (probably just an effect of his year-round discreet tan) and looked like someone famous: no one in particular, just the suggestion of possible low-grade celebrity. People often gave him a second glance as though they were trying to place him. I did it myself the first time I saw him, heading into class on a rainy morning, leaning his bicycle casually against a space on the wall, shaking the water out of his soaked hair, wearing a yellow raincoat that should have looked absurd but on him appeared deliberately stylish in an offbeat way. I found myself thinking he looked like a marginal character from a sophisticated teen TV show but I couldn’t quite decide which one.

  The first time I heard him describe his background I felt sure it was a lie, at least to some degree — it seemed so improbably glamorous, despite his modesty in the way he talked about it. His father, Leo, worked in the movie business as a film editor; this didn’t have the flashiness of a producer or executive, but somehow had more dignity, more sense of artistic precision and seriousness. He had won an Oscar at some point in the early eighties, and it sat on a shelf in his cluttered office, surrounded by other statuettes and trophies I was less familiar with. Dylan’s mother, Greta, was a psychotherapist and a writer who had made a bit of money with a series of self-help books about using color to change your life — paint your room purple for prosperity, wear yellow for wisdom, that kind of thing. They lived near Laurel Canyon — one of the only LA neighborhoods whose name I was familiar with — only not quite in it, but in the hills above it, which sounded even more discreetly fashionable.

  Dylan came from relative wealth: his clothes and belongings and easy attitude to money, his lack of interest in it, showed that. But I couldn’t help thinking that his background must be a cover story for some much less interesting reality: a banker and a housewife, or an accountant and a librarian or university administrator, something like that. I’m not sure
why I doubted him. It’s easy to think that I picked up on the secret he was hiding about his real origins, but that would be overestimating my powers of intuition or observation. I probably wanted to believe that he was more like me than he really was. It wasn’t surprising that such charisma and style could be produced by money and Hollywood, but it was more comforting to think that it could equally have come from a background as mediocre as my own.

  Dylan didn’t act as though his background was impressive. Instead he almost deprecated it all. ‘It’s not Laurel Canyon,’ he’d explain apologetically; ‘He’s an editor, not a “producer” or whatever, though he’s pretty senior, gets to work on some good things’; ‘The books are, you know, lowbrow. It’s not Freudian theory or anything like that. Although she does write more serious stuff — like, in journals. She keeps writing the color books because they do well.’ Once when he got really drunk he admitted that the books had spawned a line of merchandise: colored desk accessories, candles, scarves.

  I asked Dylan once if he was named after the singer and he nodded patiently, not embarrassed as I would have been in his place. Like my own parents, his were old hippies. Unlike my parents, or my mother at least, his had grown out of it.

  ‘What about you?’ he’d asked a moment later.

  ‘What about me?’

  ‘Your name. Your parents poetry fans?’

  ‘Oh, that. No. I mean, they are poetry fans. But that’s nothing to do with my name. And it’s spelled differently.’

  ‘Of course. My mistake.’

  It was a long while after that evening, a year or two later, that I watched him tell a different story about his name. It was the last class we took together, Autobiography and Memoir, in our junior year. I passed by him as everyone was leaving at the end of class and overheard a conversation with a girl he’d been flirting with all semester.

  ‘No, the poet,’ he said, readjusting the books under his arm. ‘Dylan Thomas.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ The girl nodded. ‘That’s so cool.’

  Her name was Tyler, or Riley, I could never remember. Maybe they were discussing what it was like to have a gender-neutral name.

  ‘I guess my parents were big poetry fans,’ he said, and shrugged.

  It didn’t even occur to me to think that Dylan had been lying to me and telling the truth to Tyler, or Riley. I just assumed that he’d said whatever he thought would impress her the most, that he’d made it up, a line. Those words — lie, truth — seem too heavy somehow to even apply to something as minor as whether you were named after a singer or a poet. It was a small, meaningless thing. It was only later, that last time in Vegas, that I remembered that afternoon and his conversation with the girl and wondered with growing discomfort whether he’d been spinning me a line, not her; or whether neither of those things was true, and there was no romantic origin for his name at all.

  There was no reason I could think of that he’d choose one famous Dylan over the other when it came to fitting a line to me and my prejudices; I didn’t care either way. Or maybe I did, in a way that I wasn’t even aware of and that Dylan intuited with his instinct for understanding what it was that people wanted to hear, conforming to tacit expectations, crafting subtle and elegant fictions and half-truths. Even at the very end I couldn’t bring myself to resent him for that, exactly, even when I began to understand something of the extent to which I’d been taken in. I admired it; I envied it, probably.

  After the crash, in the late fall of our sophomore year, that was the most obvious thing we had in common, but if we hadn’t already been knitted together somehow I don’t know whether it would have had the bonding effect that it did. At times afterward I wondered why it didn’t have the opposite effect, especially at moments when I found myself thinking about it when I didn’t want to, and I found it harder to forget when any of them were around.

  Cameron turned out to be fine in the end, as did the rest of us, although we all had whiplash from the impact and his seemed to be the worst, along with a fracture to his wrist. We were all complaining of sore necks by the time we arrived at the emergency room, and one by one we were wheeled into the X-ray room and zapped and then given instant coffee and Advil. After an hour or so my neck stopped hurting, or rather the pain became less distinguishable from the generalized ache that had started humming in my whole body.

  The doctor looking after me and Tallis, a young intern with a row of colored pens in her coat pocket, said we could both go home, and wandered off with her clipboard. Dylan was over the other side of the room with Brian, having his face cleaned up by a serious young nurse. She seemed to be taking an unreasonable length of time about it.

  I looked down and noticed that there was still a needle sticking out of my forearm attached to a short, hard plastic tube that had been used for an IV, although I wasn’t sure what the IV had been for (generic ‘fluids’?) or when it had been detached from the needle. On my wrist, below the needle, was the stamp from the bar we’d been at that night, showing I’d paid my entry fee and had ID. Brian knew the guys in one of the bands playing there, a punkish rock-and-roll group with four guitarists, none of whom could really sing. He’d played with them in high school. The stamp was a graphic that looked like a sharp-angled maze. The greenish ink had bled into my skin, collecting in the tracery of fine wrinkles at my wrist.

  Tallis stood by my bed, where I was still sitting, staring at my arm. ‘What is it?’ he asked, his voice slow and tired. ‘Let’s find Cameron and get out of here.’

  ‘Did you have one of these?’ I asked him, indicating the needle.

  ‘God, I don’t know. I think they took mine out.’

  We looked around for someone to remove the needle, but the place was busy. There was a child vomiting a couple of beds over, doctors and nurses walking busily by with hands full of papers and bottles of medication and kidney-shaped bowls. The attendants behind the central desk were all on the phone or talking to doctors. I’d caught sight once or twice of the guy who had stopped his car for us on the road, the long-haired nurse, but he ignored me and the rest of us, as though he’d never seen us before.

  Tallis shrugged. ‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Shut your eyes.’

  I did as he said, and there was a swift, tearing pain, and then a small clatter as the needle and its plastic attachment landed on the metal stand by the bed. He took a square of cotton wool from a pile on the stand and handed it to me, and I pressed it against the wound. It didn’t bleed much.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘Anytime,’ he said in a voice that I would normally have put together with a smile, but it seemed that, like me, he was too exhausted.

  We couldn’t find Cameron, and we eventually got hold of a doctor who explained to us that he was still complaining of pain in his neck. He led us over to a curtained bed where Cameron was lying down. We stood there and exchanged hellos.

  ‘The X-ray hasn’t shown as much as we’d like to see about his vertebrae,’ the doctor said, blinking at us from behind round spectacles. They wanted to do a CAT scan and were waiting for the machine to become available.

  When we asked how long the wait would be, he shrugged and said, ‘Oh, around forty-five minutes,’ and I could tell from the way he glanced over my shoulder and his vision glazed that it was just what he said in response to any question related to waiting times.

  Dylan appeared next to us with Brian at his side. Brian folded his arms tight, as though he were cold. Dylan managed to look rakish with his row of stitches half hidden by his hair. ‘You guys go home,’ he said to me and Tallis. ‘I’ll stay with Cameron.’

  Cameron couldn’t take his eyes off him, staring guiltily at Dylan’s injury.

  Tallis seemed ready to argue, but changed his mind. Brian stayed quiet, as though he’d already agreed with Dylan to leave with us.

  ‘It’s really late,’ Dylan said. He sat down in the one chair next to the bed, a green vinyl seat too low to the ground.

  ‘OK,’ Tallis said, and I said it
, too, and we left.

  My arm still hurt where the needle had been, and Tallis handed me some of the prescription codeine the nurse had given him. When we left the building I was shocked to find that it was already morning, dawn breaking fast on one side of the sky, cloudless and pale blue.

  Tallis called someone to collect us, a girl he had gone out with a couple of nights before, Daphne. Her face was sleepy and smudged with eyeliner when she showed up in her blue Datsun, still dressed in pajamas with a duffel coat over them. She looked us over critically, gave Tallis a tentative hug and a long kiss on the mouth. We all stared at the car.

  ‘I’ll ride in the back,’ I said at last.

  Tallis and Brian shared a look, and Tallis opened the other back door and climbed in, giving me a nod before he clipped his seatbelt. Brian sat next to Daphne and folded his arms again. Daphne didn’t try to engage us in a conversation about what had happened, and I was grateful. For some reason, I discovered later, people tended to want to do that, to know the details of speed and time and impact. The size of the deer. Eventually I came up with a one-sentence description of the whole accident that conveyed that necessary information, and once I’d delivered it twice or three times I stopped even hearing the words as I said them.