The Magicians - Lev Grossman [105]
“Daddy changes it all around every few years,” she explained. “He mostly does architectural magic. When I was little it was all Baroque, gold knobs on everything. That was almost nice. But then it was Japanese paper screens—you could hear everything. Then it was Fallingwater—Frank Lloyd Wright—until Mom got sick of living in a mildew farm for some reason. And then for a while it was just a big old Iroquois longhouse with a dirt floor. No walls. That was hilarious. We had to beg him to put in a real bathroom. I think he seriously thought we were going to watch him defecate into a pit. I doubt even the Indians did that.”
With that she sat down heavily on a hard leather Roman couch, opened a book, and became absorbed in her vacation reading.
Quentin understood that it was sometimes better to wait out Alice’s black periods than to try to coax her out of them. Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home. So he spent the next hour wandering around what looked remarkably like an upper-middle-class Pompeian household, complete with pornographic frescoes. It was obsessively authentic except for the bathrooms—a concession had obviously been granted on that score. Even dinner, when it arrived, served by a squad of three-foot-tall animated wooden marionettes who made little click-clacking noises as they walked, was revoltingly historical: calf brains, parrot tongues, a roasted moray eel, all peppered beyond the point of edibility, just in case they weren’t inedible to begin with. Fortunately, there was plenty of wine.
They had progressed to the third course, the stuffed and roasted uterus of a sow, when a short, portly, round-faced man suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a well-worn toga the gray of unlaundered bedsheets. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his dark stubble extended well down his neck, and what hair he had left on his head could have used cutting.
“Ave atque vales!” he proclaimed. He gave an elaborate, made-up-looking Roman salute, which was essentially the same as a Nazi salute. “Welcome to the domus of Danielus!”
He made a face that implied that it was other people’s fault that the joke wasn’t funny.
“Hi Dad,” Alice said. “Dad, this is my friend Quentin.”
“Hi.” Quentin stood up. He’d been trying to eat reclining, Roman-style, but it was harder than it looked, and he had a stitch in his side. Alice’s father shook his outstretched hand. He seemed to forget he was doing it halfway through, then looked surprised to find a fleshy alien extremity still in his grip.
“Are you really eating that stuff? I had Domino’s an hour ago.”
“We didn’t know there was anything else. Where’s Mom?”
“Who knows?” Alice’s father said. He bugged his eyes out like it was a wacky mystery. “She was working on one of her compositions downstairs, last I saw.”
He jogged the few steps down into the room, sandals slapping the stone tiles, and served himself some wine from a decanter.
“And that was when? November?”
“Don’t ask me. I lose track of time in this damn place.”
“Why don’t you put in some windows, Daddy? It’s so dark in here.”
“Windows?” He bugged out his eyes again; it appeared to be his signature facial expression. “You speak of some barbarian magic of which we noble Romans know nothing!”
“You’ve done an amazing job here,” Quentin piped up, the soul of obsequiousness. “It looks really authentic.”
“Thank you!” Alice’s father drained the goblet and poured himself another, then sat down heavily on a couch, spilling a purple track of wine down the front of his toga in the process. His bare calves were plump and bone white; black bristles stood straight out from them in static astonishment. Quentin wondered how his beautiful Alice could possibly share a single base pair of genetic information with this person.
“It took me three years to put it together,” he said. “Three years. And