Donna Tartt - The Secret History

Because, as fond as I was of the others, I was fond of Bunny, too, and I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously. Perhaps, in his mind, there was the justification of jealousy; his position in the group had started to slip at roughly the same time I'd arrived; his resentment was of the most petty and childish sort, and doubtless would never have surfaced had he not been in such a paranoid state, unable to distinguish his enemies from his friends.

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: 'Gorgeous necktie,' he'd say, 'that's a Hermes, isn't it?' – and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie's humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: 'Richard, old man, why don't you keep any pictures of your folks around?'

It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bunny and his brothers, waving lacrosse sticks on a luminous black-and-white playing field; family Christmases, a pair of cool, tasteful parents in expensive bathrobes, five little yellow-haired boys in identical pajamas rolling on the floor with a laughing spaniel, and a ridiculously lavish train set, and the tree rising sumptuous in the background; Bunny's mother at her debutante ball, young and disdainful in white mink.

'What?' he'd ask with mock innocence. 'No cameras in California?

Or can't you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pants suits? Where'd your parents go to school anyway?' he'd say, interrupting before I could interject. 'Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U?'

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father's new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I'd kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster's dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.

They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I cannot find words to adequately express the torments I suffered when he chose to ply this art of his in public. Bunny's dead now, requiescat in pace, but so long as I live I will never forget a particular interlude of sadism to which he subjected me at the twins' apartment.

A few days earlier, Bunny had been grilling me about where I'd gone to prep school. I don't know why I couldn't just have admitted the truth, that I'd gone to the public school in Piano.

Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bunny's own hallowed Saint Jerome's was really only an expensive remedial school, the sort of place you see advertised in the back of Town and Country as offering specialized attention for the academic underachiever.

My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I'd gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a tennis-y, indifferent sort of boys' school near San Francisco. That had seemed to satisfy him, but then, to my immense discomfort, and in front of everybody, he brought it up again.

'So you were at Renfrew,' he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.

'Yes.'

'When'd ya graduate?'

I offered the date of my real high school graduation.

'Ah,' he said, chomping busily on his nuts. 'So you were there with Von Raumer.'

'What?'

'Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke's.

He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says,' I said nothing, hoping he'd leave it at that.

'So you know Alec and all.'

'Uh, slightly,' I said.

'Funny, he said he didn't remember you,' said Bunny, reaching over for another handful of pistachios without taking his eyes off me. 'Not at all.'

'It's a big school.'

He cleared his throat. Think so?'

'Yes.'

'Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people.'

He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. 'What dormitory did you say you were in?'

'You wouldn't know it.'

'Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you.'

'What difference does it make?'

'Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all, old horse,' said Bunny pleasantly.

'Just that it's pretty damn peculiar, n'est-ce pas'? You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once?'

'I was only there for two years.'

'How come you're not in the yearbook?'

'I am in the yearbook.'

'No you're not.'

The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pre248 tending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: 'I low do you know if lie was in the yearbook or not?'

'I don't think I've ever been in a yearbook in my life,' said Francis nervously. 'I can't stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to '

Bunny paid no attention. He leaned back in his chair.

'Come on,' he said to me. Till give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in.'

His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bunny laughed harshly. I poured the water down the sink and turned on the tap so I wouldn't have to listen.

How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? I still think about this sometimes. If what Bunny really wanted was revenge, he could have had it easily enough and without putting himself at risk.

What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?

Or perhaps they weren't so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency. Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form. Even in the happiest times he'd made ran of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn't possibly do anything but laugh. ('Good Lord, Richard,' he would say, picking up one of my old wingtips and poking his finger through the hole in the bottom. 'What is it with you California kids? Richer you are, the more shoddy you look. Won't even go to the barber. Before I know it, you'll have hair down to your shoulders and be skulking around in rags like Howard Hughes.') It never occurred to me to be offended; this was Bunny, my friend, who had even less pocket money than I did and a big rip in the seat of his trousers besides. A good deal of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though – if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring – he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.