Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'So it's not about money?' I said at last.

'Nope.'

'Then what is it about, if you don't mind my asking?'

Bunny leaned forward, his face thoughtful, and for a moment almost transparently frank; and when he opened his mouth again I thought he was going to come right out and say what he meant; but instead, he cleared his throat and said, if I didn't mind, would I go make him a pot of coffee?

That night, as I was lying on my bed reading Greek, I was startled by a flash of remembrance, almost as if a hidden spotlight had been trained without warning on my face. Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister chamber of Gen, with the bright interrogative Tina at the end – all nonsense, of course, but then it seemed in some muddled way that the name itself, one of the few concrete facts available to me, might itself be a cryptogram or clue. But that wasn't what made me bolt upright, but the sudden realization of what time it must be – nine-twenty, I saw, when I looked at my watch. So they were all on the plane now (or were they?) hurtling towards the bizarre Argentina of my imagination through the dark skies.

I put down my book and went over and sat in a chair by the window, and didn't work for the rest of the night.

The weekend passed, as they will do, and for me it went by in Greek, solitary meals in the dining hall, and more of the same old puzzlement back in my room. My feelings were hurt, and I missed them more than I would have admitted. Bunny was behaving oddly besides. I saw him around a couple of times that weekend, with Marion and her friends, talking importantly as they stared in goony admiration (they were Elementary Education majors, for the most part, who I suppose thought him terribly erudite because he studied Greek and wore some little wire-rimmed glasses). Once I saw him with his old friend Cloke Rayburn. But I didn't know Cloke well, and I was hesitant to stop and say hello.

I awaited Greek class, on Monday, with acute curiosity. I woke that morning at six. Not wanting to arrive insanely early, I sat around my room fully dressed for quite some time, and it was with something of a thrill that I looked at my watch and realized that if I didn't hurry, I'd be late. I grabbed my books and dashed out; halfway to the Lyceum, I realized I was running, and forced myself to slow to a walk.

I had caught my breath by the time I opened the back door.

Slowly, I climbed the stairs, feet moving, mind oddly blank – the way I'd felt as a kid on Christmas morning when, after a night of almost insane excitement, I would walk down the hall to the closed door behind which my presents lay as if the day were nothing special, suddenly drained of all desire.

They were all there, all of them: the twins, poised and alert in the windowsill; Francis, with his back to me; Henry beside him; and Bunny across the table, reared back in his chair. Telling a story of some sort. 'So get this,' he said to Henry and Francis, turning his face sideways to glimpse the twins. Everyone's eyes were riveted on him; no one had seen me come in. 'The warden says, "Son, your pardon hasn't come through from the governor and it's already five after. Any last words?" So the guy thinks for a minute, and as they're leading him into the chamber' – he brought his pencil up close to his eyes and studied it for a moment – 'he looks over his shoulder and says, "Well, Governor So-and-So has certainly lost my vote in the next election!"' Laughing, he tipped back even further in his chair; then he looked up and saw me standing like an idiot in the doorway. 'Oh, come in, come in,' he said, bringing the front legs of the wooden chair down with a thump.

The twins glanced up, startled as a pair of deer. Except for a certain tightness around the jaw, Henry was as serene as the Buddha, but Francis was so white he was almost green.

'We're just chucking around a couple jokes before class,' said Bunny genially, leaning back in his chair. He tossed the hair out of his eyes. 'Okay. Smith and Jones commit an armed robbery and they both get death row. Of course, they go through all the usual channels of appeal but Smith's runs out first and he's slotted for the chair.' He made a resigned, philosophical gesture and then, unexpectedly, winked at me. 'So,' he continued, 'they let Jones out to see the execution and he's watching them strap his buddy in' – I saw Charles, his eyes blank, biting down hard into his lower lip – 'when the warden comes up. "Heard anything on your appeal, Jones?" he says. "Not much, Warden," says Jones.

"Well, then," says the warden, looking at his watch, "hardly worth going back to your cell then, is it?"' I Ic threw back his head and laughed, pleased as all get-out, but no one else even smiled.

When Bunny started in again ('And then there's the one about the Old West – this is when they still hung folks…') Camilla edged over on the windowsill and smiled nervously at me.

I went over and sat between her and Charles. She gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. 'How are you?' she said. 'Did you wonder where we were?'

'I can't believe we haven't seen you,' said Charles quietly, turning towards me and crossing his ankle over his knee. His foot was trembling violently, as if it had a life of its own, and he put a hand on it to still it. 'We had a terrible mishap with the apartment.'

I didn't know what I'd expected to hear from them, but this was not it. 'What?' I said.

'We left the key back in Virginia.'

'Aunt Mary-Gray had to drive all the way to Roanoke to Federal Express it.'

'I thought you had someone subletting,' I said suspiciously.

'He left a week ago. Like idiots we told him to mail us the key. The landlady is in Florida. We've been in the country at Francis's the whole time.'

'Trapped like rats.'

'Francis drove us out there and about two miles from the house something terrible happened to the car,' said Charles.

'Black smoke and grinding noises.'

'The steering went out. We ran into a ditch.'

They were both talking very rapidly. For a moment, Bunny's voice rose stridently above them. '… Now this judge had a particular system he liked to follow. He'd hang a cattle thief on a Monday, a card cheat on a Tuesday, murderers on Wednesday '

'… so after that,' Charles was saying, 'we had to walk to Francis's and for days we called Henry to come get us. But he wasn't answering the phone – you know what it's like to try to get in touch with him '

There was no food at Francis's house except some cans of black olives and a box of Bisquick.'

'Yes. We ate olives and Bisquick.'

Could this be true? I wondered suddenly. Briefly I was cheered – my God, how silly I had been – but then I remembered the way Henry's apartment had looked, the suitcases by the door.

Bunny was working up to a big finish. 'So the judge says, "Son, it's a Friday, and I'd like to go on and hang you today, but I'm going to have to wait until next Tuesday because 'There wasn't any milk, even,' said Camilla. 'We had to mix the Bisquick with water.'

There was the slight sound of a throat being cleared and I looked up and saw Julian closing the door behind him.

'Goodness, you magpies,' he said into the abrupt silence that fell. 'Where have you all been?'

Charles coughed, his eyes fixed on a point across the room, and began rather mechanically to tell the story of the apartment key and the car in the ditch and the olives and the Bisquick. The wintry sun, coming in at a slant through the window, gave everything a frozen, precisely detailed look; nothing seemed real, and I felt as though this were some complicated film I'd started watching in the middle and couldn't quite get the drift of. Bunny's jailhouse jokes had for some reason unsettled me, though I remembered him telling an awful lot of jokes like that, back in the fall. They had been met, then as now, with a strained silence, but then they were silly, bad jokes. I had always assumed the reason he told them was because he had some corny old Lawyer's Joke Book up in his room or something, right up there on the shelf with Bob Hope's autobiography, the Fu Manchu novels, and Men of Thought and Deed. (Which, as it eventually turned out, he did.)