Donna Tartt - The Secret History

'God, please God, let her give him the old heave-ho,' said Francis, turning his eyes to heaven, when he heard this bit of intelligence. Nothing more was said of it, but we watched them carefully and prayed that it would be so. If he had his wits about him Bunny surely would keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

Cloke he saw rather less frequently. He and Bunny had little in common besides their prep school, and Cloke – who ran with a fast crowd, and took a lot of drugs besides – was fairly self-preoccupied, not likely to concern himself with Bunny's behavior or even to take much notice of it. Cloke lived in the house next door to mine, Durbinstall (nicknamed, by campus wags, 'Dalmane Hall,' it was the bustling center of what the administration chose to refer to as 'narcotics-related activity' and one's visits there were occasionally punctuated with explosions and small fires, incurred by lone free-basers or the student chemists who worked in the basement) and, fortunately for us, he lived in the front, on the ground floor. Since his shades were always up and there were no trees in the immediate area, it was possible to sit safely on the porch of the library, some fifty feet away, and enjoy a luxurious and unobscured view of Bunny, framed in a bright window as he gazed open-mouthed at comic books or talked, arms waving, with an invisible Cloke.

'I just like to have an idea,' Henry explained, 'where he goes.'

But actually it was quite simple to keep tabs on Bunny: I think because he, too, was unwilling to let the others, and Henry in particular, out of his sight for very long.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger.

Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church.

Bunny's family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of I them went to church much, Bunny's ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests ('So then, this Father What's-His-Name, he said to the altar boy – this kid is nine years old, mind you, he's in my Cub Scout troop – he says to Tim Mulrooney, "Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night?"'). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry's bald refutations and Francis's muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants.

What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer. He was also sensitive to remarks about his drinking. As a matter of fact, Charles did drinka lot. We all did: but still, though he didn't indulge in any very conspicuous excess, I'd frequently had the experience of smelling liquor on his breath at odd hours or dropping by unexpectedly in the early afternoon to find him with a glass in his hand – which was perhaps understandable, things being what they were. Bunny made a show of fraudulent, infuriating concern, peppered with snide comments about drunkards and sots. He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles's cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires ('Do you sometimes feel you need a drink to get through the day?') and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, 'Mommy, what's "drunk"?') anonymously in Charles's box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon Charles was deluged with tracts and phone calls and even a personal visit from a well-meaning Twelfth-Stepper.

With Francis, on the other hand, things were more pointed and unpleasant. Nobody said anything about it, ever, but we all knew he was gay. Though he was not promiscuous, every so often he would disappear quite mysteriously at a party and once, very early in our acquaintance, he'd made a subtle but unmistakable pass at me one afternoon when we were drunk and by ourselves in the rowboat. I'd dropped an oar, and in the confusion of retrieving it I felt his fingertips brush in a casual yet deliberate fashion along my cheek near the jawbone. I glanced up, startled, and our eyes met in that way that eyes will, and we looked at each other for a moment, the boat wobbling around us and the lost oar forgotten. I was dreadfully flustered; embarrassed, I looked away; when suddenly, and to my great surprise, he burst out laughing at my distress.

'No?' he said.

'No,' I said, relieved.

It might seem that this episode would have imposed a certain coolness upon our friendship. While I don't suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly. Though I liked Francis well enough, I had always been nervous around him; oddly, it was this pass of his that cleared the air between us. I suppose I knew it was inevitable, and dreaded it. Once it was out of the way I was perfectly comfortable being alone with him even in the most questionable situations – drunk, or in his apartment, or even wedged in the back seat of a car.

With Francis and Bunny it was a different story. They were happy enough to be together in company, but if one was around either of them for too long it became obvious that they seldom did things with each other and almost never spent time alone. I knew why this was; we all did. Still, it never occurred to me that they weren't genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny's gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. I'd never considered, though I should have, that these crackpot prejudices of Bunny's which I found so amusing were not remotely ironic but deadly serious.

Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn't perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could've put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.

I don't really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.

'Just once,' I remember Francis hissing, through clenched teeth.

'Just once I'd like to…'

But there was absolutely nothing that anyone could say or do.

One might expect that I, being at that time perfectly innocent of any crime against either Bunny or humanity, would not myself be a target of this ongoing sniper fire. Unfortunately I was, perhaps more unfortunately for him than for me. How could he have been so blind as not to see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally?