The Secret History - Donna Tartt [110]
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 Hermès, 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 pantsuits? 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 Plano. 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