The Secret History - Donna Tartt [111]
“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, pretending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: “How do you know if he 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. “I’ll 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 fun 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.