The Secret History (12 page)

He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. “Are you ill?” he said, not unkindly.

“No, just a headache,” I said.

“You don’t have them often, I hope?”

“What?” said Charles. “Is everybody sick?”

“Why is everybody in here?” Bunny’s pained voice came booming from the hallway. “When do we eat?”

“Hold on, Bun, it’ll only be a minute.”

He sauntered in, peering over Charles’s shoulder at the tray of chops he’d just removed from the broiler. “Looks done to me,” he said, and he reached over and picked up a tiny chop by the bone end and began to gnaw on it.

“Bunny, don’t, really,” said Charles. “There won’t be enough to go around.”

“I’m starving,” said Bunny with his mouth full. “Weak from hunger.”

“Maybe we can save the bones for you to chew on,” Henry said rudely.

“Oh, shut up.”

“Really, Bun, I wish you would wait just a minute,” said Charles.

“Okay,” Bunny said, but he reached over and stole another chop when Charles’s back was turned. A thin trickle of pinkish juice trickled down his hand and disappeared into the cuff of his sleeve.

To say that the dinner went badly would be an exaggeration, but it didn’t go all that well, either. Though I didn’t do anything stupid, exactly, or say anything that I shouldn’t, I felt dejected and bilious, and I talked little and ate even less. Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles’s kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it. Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument—hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring—about whether Hesiod’s primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word. Camilla put on a Josephine Baker record; Bunny ate my lamb chop.

I left early. Both Francis and Henry offered to drive me home, which for some reason made me feel even worse. I told them I’d rather walk, thanks, and backed out of the apartment, smiling,
practically delirious, my face burning under the collective gaze of cool, curious solicitude.

It wasn’t far to school, only fifteen minutes, but it was getting cold and my head hurt and the whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind—quite willingly—supplied various distortions.

When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight, the window still open and the
Parmenides
open on the desk where I had left it; a half-drunk coffee from the snack bar stood beside it, cold in its styrofoam cup. The room was chilly but I didn’t shut the window. Instead, I lay down on my bed, without taking off my shoes, without turning on the light.

As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the pages of the
Parmenides
rippled back and forth.

I had meant to sleep only a few hours, but I woke with a start the next morning to find sunlight pouring in and the clock reading five of nine. Without stopping to shave or comb my hair or even change my clothes from the night before, I grabbed my Greek Prose composition book and my Liddell and Scott and ran to Julian’s office.

Except for Julian, who always made a point of arriving a few minutes late, everyone was there. From the hall I heard them talking, but when I opened the door they all fell quiet and looked at me.

No one said anything for a moment. Then Henry said: “Good morning.”

“Good morning,” I said. In the clear northern light they all looked fresh, well rested, startled at my appearance; they stared at me as I ran a self-conscious hand though my disheveled hair.

“Looks like you didn’t meet up with a razor this morning, chap,” said Bunny to me. “Looks like—”

Then the door opened and Julian walked in.

There was a great deal to do in class that day, especially for me, being so far behind; on Tuesdays and Thursdays it might be pleasant to sit around and talk about literature, or philosophy, but the rest of the week was taken up in Greek grammar and
prose composition and that, for the most part, was brutal, bludgeoning labor, labor that I—being older now, and a little less hardy—would scarcely be able to force myself to do today. I had certainly plenty to worry about besides the coldness which apparently had infected my classmates once again, their crisp air of solidarity, the cool way their eyes seemed to look right through me. There had been an opening in their ranks, but now it was closed; I was back, it seemed, exactly where I’d begun.

That afternoon, I went to see Julian on the pretext of talking about credit transfers, but with something very different on my mind. For it seemed, quite suddenly, that my decision to drop everything for Greek had been a rash and foolish one, and made for all the wrong reasons. What had I been thinking of? I liked Greek, and I liked Julian, but I wasn’t sure if I liked his pupils and anyway, did I really want to spend my college career and subsequently my life looking at pictures of broken
kouroi
and poring over the Greek particles? Two years before, I had made a similar heedless decision which had plummeted me into a nightmarish, year-long round of chloroformed rabbits and day trips to the morgue, from which I had barely escaped at all. This was by no means as bad (with a shudder I remembered my old zoology lab, eight in the morning, the bobbing vats of fetal pigs), by no means—I told myself—as bad as that. But still it seemed like a big mistake, and it was too late in the term to pick up my old classes or change counselors again.

I suppose I’d gone to see Julian in order to revive my flagging assurance, in hopes he would make me feel as certain as I had that first day. And I am fairly sure he would have done just that if only I had made it in to see him. But as it happened, I didn’t get to talk to him at all. Stepping onto the landing outside his office, I heard voices in the hall and stopped.

It was Julian and Henry. Neither of them had heard me come up the stairs. Henry was leaving; Julian was standing in the open door. His brow was furrowed and he looked very somber, as if he were saying something of the gravest importance. Making the vain, or rather paranoid, assumption that they might be talking about me, I took a step closer and peered as far as I could risk around the corner.

Julian finished speaking. He looked away for a moment, then bit his lower lip and looked up at Henry.

Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. “Should I do what is necessary?”

To my surprise, Julian took both Henry’s hands in his own. “You should only, ever, do what is necessary,” he said.

What
, I thought,
the hell is going on?
I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to move.

To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek. Then he turned to leave, but fortunately for me he looked over his shoulder to say one last thing; I crept down the stairs as quietly as I could, breaking into a run when I was at the second landing and out of earshot.

The week that followed was a solitary and surreal one. The leaves were changing; it rained a good deal and got dark early; in Monmouth House people gathered around the downstairs fireplace, burning logs stolen by stealth of night from the faculty house, and drank warm cider in their stocking feet. But I went straight to my classes and straight back to Monmouth and up the stairs to my room, bypassing all these homey firelit scenes and hardly speaking to a soul, even to the chummier sorts who invited me down to join in all this communal dorm fun.

I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don’t believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read
The Great Gatsby
. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

“I’m a survivor,” the girl at the party was saying to me. She was blond and tan and too tall—almost my height—and without even
asking I knew she was from California. I suppose it was something in her voice, something about the expanse of reddened, freckled skin, stretched taut over a bony clavicle and a bonier sternum and ribcage and entirely unrelieved by breasts of any sort—which presented itself to me through the lacuna of a Gaultier corselet. It was Gaultier, I knew, because she’d sort of casually let that slip. To my eyes it looked only like a wet suit, laced crudely up the front.