Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Want to give something?'

I put down my coffee and fished in my jacket pocket and found a quarter and some pennies.

'Oh, come on, man,' Jud said, rather menacingly I thought.

'You can do better than that.'

Hoi polloi. Barbaroi. 'Sorry,' I said, and pushed back from the.» table and got my coat and left. "

I went back to my room and sat at my desk and opened my lexicon, but I didn't look at it. 'Argentina?' I said to the wall.

On Friday morning I went to my French class. Several students dozed in the back, overcome no doubt by the previous evening's festivities. The odor of disinfectant and chalkboard cleaner, combined with vibrating fluorescents and the monotonous chant of conditional verbs, put me into kind of a trance, too, and I sat at my desk swaying slightly with boredom and fatigue, hardly aware of the passage of time.

When I got out I went downstairs to a pay phone and called Francis's number in the country and let the phone ring maybe fifty times. No answer.

I walked back to Monmouth House through the snow and went to my room and thought, or, rather, didn't think, but sat on my bed and stared out the window at the ice-rimed yews below.

After a while I got up and went to my desk, but I couldn't work, either. One-way tickets, the operator had said. Nonrefundable.

It was eleven a. m. in California. Both my parents would be at work. I went downstairs to my old friend the pay phone and called the number of Francis's mother's apartment in Boston, reversing the charges to my father.

'Well, Richard,' she said when she finally figured out who I was. 'Darling. How nice of you to call us. I thought you were going to come spend Christmas with us in New York. Where are you, dear? Can I send somebody to pick you up?'

'No, thank you. I'm in Hampden,' I said. 'Is Francis there?'

'Dear, he's at school, isn't he?'

'Excuse me,' I said, suddenly flustered; it had been a mistake to call like this, without planning what to say. 'I'm sorry. I think I've made a mistake.'

'I beg your pardon?'

'I thought he'd said something about going to Boston today.'

'Well, if he's here, sweetheart, I haven't seen him. Where did you say you were? Are you sure you don't want me to send Chris around to get you?'

'No thank you. I'm not in Boston. I'm -'

'You're calling all the way from school? she said, alarmed. 'Is anything wrong, dear?'

'No, ma'am, of course not,' I said; for a moment I had my customary impulse to hang up but it was too late for that now.

'He came by last night while I was really sleepy, and I could've sworn he said he was going down to Boston – oh! Here he is now!' I said stupidly, hoping she wouldn't call my bluff.

'Where, dear? There?'

'I see him coming across the lawn. Thank you so much, Mrs er, Abernathy,' I said, badly flustered and unable to remember the name of her present husband.

'Call me Olivia, dear. You give that bad boy a kiss for me and tell him to call me on Sunday.'

I made my goodbyes quickly – by now I'd broken out in a sweat – and was just turning to go back up the stairs when Bunny, dressed in one of his smart new suits and chewing briskly on a large wad of gum, came striding down the rear hall towards me.

He was the last person I was ready to talk to, but I couldn't get away. 'Hello, old man,' he said. 'Where's Henry got off to?'

'I don't know,' I said, after an uncertain pause.

'I don't either,' he said belligerently. 'Haven't seen him since Monday. Nor Francois or the twins, either. Say, who was that on the phone?'

I didn't know what to say. 'Francis,' I said. 'I was talking to Francis.'

'Hmn,' he said, leaning back with his hands in his pockets.

'Where was he calling from?'

'Hampden, I guess.'

'Not long distance?'

My neck prickled. What did he know about this? 'No,' I said. ™ 'Not that I know of.' 1 'Henry didn't say anything to you about going out of town, did he?'

'No. Why?'

Bunny was silent. Then he said: There hasn't been a single light on at his house the last few nights. And his car is gone. It's not parked anywhere on Water Street.'

For some strange reason, I laughed. I walked over to the back door, which had a window at the top that faced the parking lot behind the tennis courts. Henry's car was there, right where I'd parked it, plain as day. I pointed it out to him. 'There it is, right there,' I said. 'See?'

Bunny's jaw slowed at its work, and his face clouded with the effort of thinking. 'Well, that's funny.'

'Why?'

A thoughtful pink bubble emerged from his lips, grew slowly, and burst with a pop. 'No reason,' he said briskly, resuming his chewing.

'Why would they have gone out of town?'

He reached up and flipped the hair out of his eyes. 'You'd be surprised,' he said cheerily. 'What are you up to now, old man?'

We went upstairs to my room. On the way he stopped at the house refrigerator and peered inside, stooping down myopically to inspect the contents. 'Any of this yours, old soak?' he said.

'No.'

He reached in and pulled out a frozen cheesecake. Taped to the box was a plaintive note: 'Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid. Jenny Drexler.'

This'd hit the spot about now,' he said, glancing quickly up and down the hall. 'Anybody coming?'

'No.'

He stuck the box underneath his coat and, whistling, walked ahead to my room. Once inside, he spat out his gum and stuck it on the inside rim of my garbage can with a quick, feinting motion, as if he hoped I wouldn't see him do it, then sat down and began to eat the cheesecake straight from the box with a spoon he'd found on my dresser. 'Phew,' he said. 'This is terrible.

Want some?'

'No thanks.'

He licked thoughtfully at the spoon. 'Too lemony, is what the problem is. And not enough cream cheese.' He paused – thinking, I believed, about this handicap – and then said abruptly: 'Tell me.

You and Henry spent a lot of time together last month, huh?'

I was suddenly watchful. 'I guess.'

'Do much talking?'

'Some.'

'He tell you much about when we were in Rome?' he said, looking at me keenly.

'Not a whole lot.'

'He say anything about leaving early?'

At last, I thought, relieved. At last we were going to get to the bottom of this business. 'No. No, he didn't tell me much at all,'

I said, which was the truth. 'I knew he'd left early when he showed up here. But I didn't know you were still there. Finally I asked him about it one night, and he said you were. That's all.'

Bunny took a jaded bite of the cheesecake. 'He say why he left?'

'No.' Then, when Bunny didn't respond, I added: 'It had something to do with money, didn't it?'

'Is that what he told you?'

'No.' And then, since he had gone mute again: 'But he did say you were short on cash, that he had to pay the rent and stuff. Is that right?'

Bunny, his mouth full, made a brushing, dismissive motion with one hand.

'That Henry,' he said. 'I love him, and you love him, but just between the two of us I think he's got a little bit of Jew blood.'

'What?' I said, startled.

He had just taken another big bite of cheesecake, and it took W! him a moment to answer me.

'I never heard anybody complain so much about helping out a pal,' he finally said. 'I tell you what it is. He's afraid of people taking advantage of him.'

'How do you mean?'

He swallowed. 'I mean, somebody probably told him when he was little, "Son, you have a load of money, and someday people are going to try to weasel it out of you."' His hair had fallen over one eye; like an old sea captain, he squinted at me shrewdly through the other. 'It's not a question of the money, y'see,' he said. 'He don't need it himself, it's the principle of the thing. He wants to know that people like him not for his money, you know, but for himself I was surprised by this exegesis, which was at odds with what I knew to be Henry's frequent and – by my standards of reckoning – extravagant generosity.