A Common Loss Read online

  I guessed Tallis had told Daphne everything she needed to know on the phone. She repeated variations on how lucky we all were, her voice hoarse with lack of sleep, and shared around a large cup of black coffee she’d picked up on the way. She wound her window down a couple of inches but still the car filled with smoke from her cigarettes, which Tallis expertly rolled from a pouch of tobacco and handed to her. I envied Tallis, imagining him going back to her place and falling into bed with her.

  She dropped Brian and me off at our dorm, a three-story white-painted old house called Derwent, and we headed upstairs. The whole place was still and quiet in that early Saturday morning way. A girl’s sleepy voice carried through from a room on the first floor as we climbed the stairs, a stream of curses that broke into a smothered laugh. Neither of us spoke as we each unlocked our door. I turned to say goodbye before I closed mine, but Brian had slipped inside his own room already.

  I woke in the mid-afternoon with a pain between my shoulders as though someone had struck me hard in the back with a club. I took another codeine pill and went back to sleep, and Tallis woke me up not long afterward, banging on my door.

  ‘Brian’s not there,’ he said. ‘Cameron’s still not out.’

  We went back to the hospital in his 1970s Volkswagen. I didn’t own a car. There had been a long wait for the CAT scan machine, and then some kind of problem with it, we discovered when we got there, and they were fixing it and had no idea how long it would take. In the meantime Cameron had to lie on his back. They had moved him into a room upstairs, which he shared with one other patient, invisible through the closed curtains around their bed. Cameron was furious and inarticulate after hours of frustrated attempts to find a doctor to talk to. Dylan was still there, eyes dark with exhaustion.

  Something about the way Tallis carried himself, how he looked at Cameron, or didn’t look at him, told me that he was angry with him, and that was the first time I allowed myself to consider that feeling. I thought about his hands on the wheel, my clear view of them, the way my heart sank and sped up when he turned, the hopeless attempt to correct once the car had swerved … It hadn’t seemed to me that we had been traveling all that fast. Now I wondered. But the anger wouldn’t stick; the effect of the shock was still too strong for any feeling to persist or develop. It faded away. I think it did for Tallis as well.

  ‘Can you give me a cigarette, Elliot?’ Dylan asked, yawning and stretching. I didn’t have any on me, offered to buy a pack. ‘OK, whatever,’ he said. ‘I just want to get out of here for a minute.’

  I agreed, eager to be away from the harsh fluorescent lights, and the three of us made our way outside, stopping to buy cigarettes on the way.

  ‘Have you slept at all?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged and gave a half-hearted smile. ‘I lay down for a while. There was a spare bed next to where Cameron was. Everyone’s being nice to us in there.’ He stared at the cigarette in his hand and then raised his eyes to look at us both. ‘I was driving,’ he said. ‘I just want to make sure you both remember that.’

  Tallis reached over for Dylan’s cigarette and took a long drag from it. He nodded, and tried to give back the cigarette. Dylan shook his head.

  ‘I can’t remember anything much,’ I said. ‘But sure, I remember that.’

  Dylan smiled, his face glowing. ‘Amnesia,’ he said warmly. ‘It’s a wonderful thing.’

  ‘You should go home,’ I said. ‘You should get some rest. One of us can stay. Or both of us. I don’t mind.’

  ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I don’t think it’ll be long now.’ He stretched again, raising his arms above his head, graceful as a dancer. ‘Cameron feels badly about the whole thing, you know. But I told him, it could have happened to any one of us, right?’

  I agreed.

  ‘I’m glad you’re all OK,’ he said. ‘You’re all like family to me.’

  It wasn’t like him to be so openly sentimental, but I understood the impulse. It occurred to me that I ought to call Brian and see how he was doing.

  ‘You know, you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends,’ Dylan said. ‘I heard someone say that once. Or I read it. It’s true.’

  ‘Should we call Cameron’s parents?’ I asked.

  I’d been so wrapped up in being glad that we were all OK that it hadn’t occurred to me to contact them; it hadn’t fully occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t all OK, and that they might want to know. And the whole thing had a guilty aura, like the kind of unlucky accident or mistake you would want to keep from your parents. The kind of thing that could get you in trouble.

  ‘I talked to them already,’ Dylan said.

  We started walking toward the doors, back inside. I was still in the fuzzy state of aftershock and codeine so I didn’t think too hard about what Dylan had said about us being like family, but I kept going back to his words later on. What he said was strange to me mainly because his family seemed so desirable to me. If you could choose a family, wouldn’t you have chosen his? All that wealth and good taste; his easygoing, award-winning, well-connected father; his intelligent, poised mother; even his sister, Sally, was smart and beautiful. They were the family I would have chosen.

  And us, his friends: why had he chosen us? Why had any of us chosen any of the others? I knew the answers were there, but they remained as diffuse feelings of warmth and attachment, resolutely not amenable to analysis. I decided that I liked it that way. It was a mystery. All I knew was that I was glad Dylan had chosen me.

  When he sat back down in the chair next to Cameron’s bed, identical to the green vinyl one downstairs, I saw him in a slightly different way, just aslant. I knew how he must appear to the nurses and doctors — the devoted friend struggling with his feelings of responsibility for Cameron’s injuries. I wondered whether he thought of Cameron as a brother, whether it was as specific as that. He looked the part, sitting there patiently, if I imagined a version of sibling feeling that included only the positive strains of affection and shared experience and excluded all the petty resentments and irritations that colored my relationship with my own sister. Maybe it was different for brothers.

  The machine was eventually fixed, just before five on that second day, and Cameron and Dylan said later that the whole thing was so absurdly fast, it showed that nothing was broken or fractured, and he could go home.

  About a month after the crash I made the mistake of going on a date with a girl, Thalia, to see an action film and had to leave the cinema about five minutes into the first scene, which was basically an extended, epic car crash sequence. I sat down on a sagging lounge in the hall just outside the exit, not exactly having a panic attack but breathing too hard and stuck for words, and ashamed. She patted my shoulder and drank from her bucket-size diet soda. We could hear the sounds of screeching metal from inside the cinema, and someone shouting orders, someone screaming.

  Thalia was patient about it, but I didn’t want to see the other movie that was showing, something about the trials of a teenage nanny. When I explained what had happened to Tallis and Cameron a couple of days later, they understood immediately.

  ‘It’s fucked,’ Tallis said. ‘I couldn’t even sit through Charade on TV the other night. The most pathetic car chase ever.’

  There was an opening. I felt some need to take advantage of it, and asked Cameron how he’d felt about driving since the crash. He’d bought another car, a secondhand Oldsmobile, a week later with a determined kind of insistence on driving again as soon as possible, and had taken to using the car even to do the smallest errands, as though proving to himself that he was capable. Four or five blocks to the general store, short distances to the library, to the coffee shop and the bar. None of us had been in the car with him.

  He cleared his throat and frowned. ‘I’m OK with driving,’ he said. ‘Surprising. But I can’t handle anyone else in the driver’s seat. That’s when I start, you know, replaying it.’

  ‘That makes sense,’ I said, wondering whe
ther it really did.

  ‘Except Dylan,’ he said. ‘I’m OK with that.’

  Tallis nodded. ‘Dylan’s a good driver,’ he said.

  I agreed. The two of them were heading over to his place to watch a game; it must have been basketball. I decided to go home and call Thalia, but by the time I got there the impulse had passed.

  I’d agreed with the others about Dylan being a good driver more out of habit than anything else, and I tried to remember whether it was true. He didn’t own a car, and only drove when he was home in LA. Recalling the hot, smoggy streets there, the one time I’d visited, and Dylan’s relaxed air of possession and belonging as he negotiated the endless freeways, did something to chase away the beginnings of depression that had followed me home. But then the memory got mixed up with that other one, the swerving car, and as I closed my eyes against the image, it was Dylan’s hands I saw on the wheel.

  3.

  When I think back to the last time we all went to Vegas together, the five of us, it seems like the best trip of them all. Before Dylan died, it had seemed just the same as the previous trips: the occasional win, the occasional big loss; watching Tallis hit on every second woman that crossed our path and become fixated on whichever one turned him down the most harshly; all of us drinking more and more to chase that pitch of happiness and good company that came with the third drink and faded rapidly; awkward silences, when the background noise of the casinos would rise as though a volume switch were being slowly turned. The percussive slap of the cards. The hiss behind the music. The talk, talk of groups of women; the thick quiet of the serious tables.

  Why did we choose Vegas? Dylan and Cameron went there in senior year for spring break, and then the year after we graduated we all met up there together. By then we had all moved to our different places around the country and around the world; it became the one time of the year when we were all reliably in one place. It was relatively inexpensive and easy to get flights there at any time of year; the weather was always good.

  The choice of our destination was the most obvious demonstration of my always-existing distance from the group, my outsider status, the way it represented something at odds with who I wanted to be. I remember being against Vegas from the start, but that’s probably just back projection. For the last few years I had put up more of a fight against the place — it was trashy, kitsch, the worst example of cultural emptiness and decay in the nation — and tried to get us to choose someplace else. The North Carolina beaches — Cameron had recently acquired in-laws with a house there. The Berkshires. New York or Chicago — somewhere with something to offer beyond drinking and gambling.

  Tallis complained the most at any mention of change. ‘Beaches? Fuck that. You know I can’t tan, I burn to a crisp as soon as I go out in the sun. I want somewhere I can stay inside, be comfortable, be easily supplied with drink and amusement.’ Or, ‘I don’t need to make this a fucking cultural event.’ He lived in London by then, working for the UK office of a German bank. ‘I’m coming to see you guys, not a museum or a lake. If you’re that concerned about making it an enriching experience then let’s stay at that hotel that has all the million-dollar paintings. Van Gogh or whatever.’

  Sometimes Brian joined me in complaining, but never very seriously. It was too difficult to find an alternative option that was an acceptable compromise for everyone. I gave in, always, in the end, and Dylan always called me afterward to offer reassurances.

  Of course, that last trip seems special now because it was the last time we were together with Dylan. But there was one night that stood out, surely for all of us. And right after Dylan died it was good to have this one positive moment to hang on to. It became too hard to think back on the awkward silences and the haze of dislike that would start to show itself at odd times — early in the morning before breakfast was finished, in an argument over who would buy the first round of drinks, or late at night when we became bored with one another’s company.

  The exception on that last trip was the soccer game on TV. When we first arrived at the hotel there was a problem with Dylan’s room: the previous guests had left late, or one of the faucets was broken, or something like that. The guy behind the desk upgraded him with an apology and put him in a luxury suite on one of the high floors of the building, way up from our standard rooms on the sixth floor. It had a huge TV that took up half the wall, and a kitchenette with a big fridge that we filled with beer and vodka. We ended up spending more time in Dylan’s room than we did out of it. Two of us, at least, stayed on the enormous couches on each of the three nights we were there.

  The TV had a list of cable stations so long that we couldn’t scan through them all in a sitting, but Tallis cared only for the one that showed the World Cup. We all thought of soccer as a sort of girlish game that our sisters were getting really good at. At English football finals time in college Tallis had always hung out with another group of friends, the soccer fans, and we never saw much of him for a couple of weeks. During this trip, he watched every game and replay, talking about it without pause whenever he came down to join us at the tables or to eat.

  He was skilled at getting his way, employing a range of persuasive strategies from cajoling to whining and sheer argumentative bullying, aided by his height and plain intimidating bulk. And so it was that when it came close to the time for the deciding game, on the afternoon of our last day, we all gathered in Dylan’s room. We sat through replays of the semifinal games, and into the early morning for the final, finishing just before dawn.

  Dylan was at his best that day. He had played the game in middle school for a couple of years, and while we watched he explained the rules, telling us about the yellow card/red card, the offside rule, the penalty kick.

  ‘Tallis, why didn’t you tell us that?’ Brian asked over and over again.

  Dylan scrunched up a couple of sheets of newspaper — the Las Vegas Tribune, delivered pointlessly to the room every morning — and demonstrated the proper way to head a ball; and played goalkeeper as each of us kicked and tossed the ball at him, making improbable, balletic saves almost every time, throwing his body lengthwise across the room, reaching out impossibly fast.

  Tallis was more pleased than he would admit that we were all joining him for once in watching the sport he loved, but I noticed, too, that he was now and again suffused with a kind of envy as Dylan used his infectious enthusiasm to convince us to pay attention to a game that none of us had cared about for all the years we’d been friends with Tallis. It was a whim on Dylan’s part: he could just as easily have persuaded us to watch the marathon of hit singles from the 1980s that was playing on MTV if he’d felt like it.

  It was the second year that Brian and Cameron were quietly ignoring each other, but there were moments in our World Cup marathon when they seemed almost back to normal. Cameron passed Brian a beer and he took it. Brian sat down in the chair next to where Cameron was sitting on the end of the couch, and Cameron didn’t get up within five seconds and change seats like he normally would have.

  I remember seeing Cameron’s hand rest on Brian’s shoulder for a moment. It hangs there in my memory as a golden thing, lit with the warm light from the lamps and the cold light of the television, the green of the playing field on the screen in the background. I can’t remember the context for the gesture. It might have been that time of the early hours of the a.m. when we were all embracing and slapping at every save, every rare goal, but this doesn’t feel exactly right.

  I don’t quite trust the memory; it seems like the kind of thing I would make up in looking back and constructing something good from the aura of that whole, longer moment of the night and day we spent in front of the TV. If it had really happened I imagine that the others would have noticed; I would have caught Tallis’s eye and acknowledged — quick and quiet, careful not to show we had seen it — that a tiny rapprochement had happened, but I don’t remember that.

  I don’t think any of us could pin down exactly when it was that it sto
pped being fun. I suppose it would be different for each of us. Maybe it never stopped being fun for Tallis. For me, I sometimes thought it was as early as the third trip. I was growing apart from Brian and Cameron, but I was still in touch with Tallis by email, and I saw Dylan every couple of months for a drink or coffee in New York.

  The frostiness between Brian and Cameron followed an argument they had at a bar in New York one night. I was there, and Tallis was as well, in the city for a meeting with the New York branch of the bank he worked for. I was in the final stages of my dissertation at grad school at NYU, a bit scattered from just having handed in a chapter to my advisor, who was sure to hand it back to me in a month or two, as he had done with two previous chapters, with three or four brief and devastating comments in his almost indecipherable scrawl, in red ink. Three or four doesn’t sound like many, but he made them count.

  Cameron was in the city to see his family in Queens; Brian was there to talk to a rich couple, patrons of the arts, who might want to give money to the film he was trying to get off the ground. He had just started work for a small documentary production company based in Boston, and while he claimed to be happy with the job I had the feeling that he’d been holding out for something better.

  The argument between him and Cameron was one they’d had before, but it was worse this time because of the new job Cameron had just taken on, a position at a big law firm in Chicago that represented other big businesses. He would be mainly representing companies defending themselves against insurance claims. Cameron was undoubtedly the smartest of us all, and had done well at Chicago Law School. Even I thought it was a pity that he was putting his talent to use in the service of a company like Bridgewater Black.

  In college the differences between the two of them were all there in the making: Brian always leaning toward the left, Cameron becoming more conservative as the years passed. Cameron, lower-middle-class, first-generation college student; Brian, trust-fund child, rebelling against the conservative certainties of his family. Watching them argue in those early years was often enjoyable, like watching a dance that had been performed so many times it was a struggle and an art to find new steps; and they were dancing over a connection so solid that the argument was just part of it, not a danger to it.