Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'What happened?'

She shrugged and turned back to the mirror. 'Like I said, I just told them to fuck off. And the boy twin, he starts screaming at me. Like he really wants to kill me, you know? And that Henry just standing there, right, but to me he was scarier than the other one. So anyway. A friend of mine who used to go here and who's really tough, he was in this motorcycle gang, into chains and shit – ever heard of Spike Romney?'

I had; in fact I'd seen him at my first Friday-night party. He was tremendous, well over two hundred pounds, with scars on his hands and steel toe-clips on his motorcycle boots.

'Well, anyway, so Spike comes up and sees these people abusing me, and he shoves the twin on the shoulder and tells him to beat it, and before I knew it, the two of them had jumped on him. People were trying to pull that Henry off, too – lots of them, and they couldn't do it. Six guys couldn't pull him off.

Broke Spike's collarbone and two of his ribs, and fucked up his face pretty bad. I told Spike he should've called the cops, but he was in some kind of trouble himself and wasn't supposed to be on campus. It was a bad scene, though.' She let her hair fall back around her face. 'I mean, Spike is tough. And mean. You'd think he'd be able to beat the shit out of both those sissy guys in suits and ties and stuff.'

'Hmm,' I said, trying not to laugh. It was funny to think of Henry, with his little round glasses and his books in Pali, breaking Spike Romney's collarbone.

'It's weird,' said Judy. 'I guess when uptight people like that get mad, they get really mad. Like my father.'

'Yeah, I guess so,' I said, looking back into the mirror and adjusting the knot on my tie.

'Have a good time,' she said listlessly, and started out the door. Then she stopped. 'Say, aren't you going to get hot in that jacket?'

'Only good one I have.'

'You want to try on this one I've got?'

I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume, Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room. ›j 'Is it yours?' I said.

'I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like, a bustier out of it.' *j Great, I thought, but I went along with her anyway. H The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful – old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green – a little loose, but it fit all right. 'Judy,' I said, looking at my cuffs.

'This is wonderful. You sure you don't mind?'

'You can have it,' said Judy. 'I don't have time to do anything with it. I'm too busy sewing those damned costumes for fucking As You Like It. It goes up in three weeks and I don't know what I'm going to do. I've got all these freshmen working for me this term that don't know a sewing machine from a hole in the ground.'

'By the way, love that jacket, old man,' Bunny said to me as we were getting out of the taxi. 'Silk, isn't it?'

'Yes. It was my grandfather's.'

Bunny pinched a piece of the rich, yellowy cloth near the cuff and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers. 'Lovely piece,' he said importantly. 'Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.'

'No?' I said.

'Naw. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they're pretty laissez-faire about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here 52. they don't let you run around in your bathing suit all year long.

Blacks and blues, that's the ticket, blacks and blues… Here, let me get that door for you. You know, I think you'll like this place.

Not exactly the Polo Lounge, but for Vermont it's not too bad, do you think?'

It was a tiny, beautiful restaurant with white tablecloths and bay windows opening onto a cottage garden – hedges and trellised roses, nasturtiums bordering the flagstone path. The customers were mostly middle-aged and prosperous: ruddy country-lawyer types who, according to the Vermont fashion, wore gumshoes with their Hickey-Freeman suits; ladies with frosted lipstick and challis skirts, nice looking in a kind of well-tanned, low-key way.

A couple glanced up at us as we came in, and I was well aware of the impression we were making- two handsome college boys, rich fathers and not a worry in the world. Though the ladies were mostly old enough to be my mother, one or two were actually quite attractive. Nice work if you could get it, I thought, imagining some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town on business all the time. Good dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car…

A waiter sidled up. 'You have a reservation?'

'Corcoran party,' said Bunny, hands in his pockets, rocking back and forth on his heels. 'Where's Caspar keeping himself today?'

'On vacation. He'll be back in two weeks.'

'Well, good for him,' said Bunny heartily.

Till tell him you asked for him.'

'Do that, wouldja?'

'Caspar's a super guy,' Bunny said as we followed the waiter to the table. 'Maitre d'. Big old fellow with moustaches, Austrian or something. And not' – he lowered his voice to a loud whisper 'not a fag, either, if you can believe that. Queers love to work in restaurants, have you ever noticed that? I mean, every single fag '

I saw the back of our waiter's neck stiffen slightly.

'- I have ever known has been obsessed with food. I wonder, why is that? Something psychological? It seems to me that '

I put a finger to my lips and nodded at the waiter's back, just as he turned and gave us an unspeakably evil look.

'Is this table all right, gentlemen?' he said.

'Sure,' said Bunny, beaming.

The waiter presented our menus with affected, sarcastic delicacy and stalked off. I sat down and opened the wine list, my face burning. Bunny, settling in his chair, took a sip of water and looked around happily. 'This is a great place,' he said.

'It's nice.'

'But not the Polo,' He rested an elbow on the table and raked the hair back from his eyes. 'Do you go there often? The Polo, I mean.'

'Not much.' I'd never even heard of it, which was perhaps understandable as it was about four hundred miles from where I lived.

'Seems like the kinda place you'd go with your father,' said Bunny pensively. 'For man-to-man talks and stuff. My dad's like that about the Oak Bar at the Plaza. He took me and my brothers there to buy us our first drink when we turned eighteen.'

I am an only child; people's siblings interest me. 'Brothers?' I said. 'How many?'

'Four. Teddy, Hugh, Patrick and Brady.' He laughed. 'It was terrible when Dad took me because I'm the baby, and it was such a big thing, and he was all "Here, son, have your first drink" and "Won't be long before you're sitting in my place" and "Probably I'll be dead soon" and all that kind of junk. And the whole time there I was scared stiff. About a month before, my buddy Cloke and I had come up from Saint Jerome's for the day to work on a history project at the library, and we'd run up a huge bill at the Oak Bar and slipped off without paying. You know, boyish spirits, but there I was again, with my dad.'

'Did they recognize you?'

'Yep,' he said grimly. 'Knew they would. But they were pretty decent about it. Didn't say anything, just tacked the old bill onto my dad's.'

I tried to picture the scene: the drunken old father, in a three-piece suit, swishing his Scotch or whatever it was he drank around in the glass. And Bunny. He looked a little soft but it was the softness of muscle gone to flesh. A big boy, the sort who played football in high school. And the sort of son every father secretly wants: big and good-natured and not awfully bright, fond of sports, gifted at backslapping and corny jokes. 'Did he notice?'

I said. 'Your dad?'

'Naw. He was three sheets to the wind. If I'd of been the bartender at the Oak Room he wouldn't have noticed.'