The Secret History - Donna Tartt [119]
“What do you think?”
“I think he’s going to have a hell of a hard time finding enough mushrooms to even make him sick. It’s just too early. Last week he made Francis and me go out and help him, but we hardly found a thing. Francis came back really excited, saying, ‘Oh, my God, look, I found all these mushrooms,’ but then we looked in his bag and it was just a bunch of puffballs.”
“So you think he’ll be able to find enough?”
“Sure, if he waits a while. I know you don’t have a cigarette, do you?”
“No.”
“I wish you smoked. I don’t know why you don’t. You weren’t an athlete in high school or anything, were you?”
“No.”
“That’s why Bun doesn’t smoke. Some clean-living type of football coach got to him at an impressionable age.”
“Have you seen Bun lately?”
“Not too much. He was at the apartment last night, though, and stayed forever.”
“This isn’t just hot air?” I said, looking at him closely. “You’re really going to go through with it?”
“I’d rather go to jail than know that Bunny was going to be hanging around my neck for the rest of my life. And I’m not too keen on going to jail, either, now that I think about it. You know,” he said, sitting up on my bed and bending over double, as if from a pain in his stomach, “I really wish you had some cigarettes. Who’s that awful girl who lives down the hall from you—Judy?”
“Poovey,” I said.
“Go knock on her door, why don’t you, and ask her if she’ll give you a pack. She looks like the sort who keeps cartons in her room.”
It was getting warmer. The dirty snow was pockmarked from the warm rain, and melting in patches to expose the slimy, yellowed grass beneath it; icicles cracked and plunged like daggers from the sharp peaks of the roofs.
“We might be in South America now,” Camilla said one night while we were drinking bourbon from teacups in my room and listening to rain dripping from the eaves. “That’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said, though I hadn’t been invited.
“I didn’t like the idea then. Now I think we might’ve got by all right down there.”
“I don’t see how.”
She leaned her cheek on her closed fist. “Oh, it wouldn’t have been so bad. We could have slept in hammocks. Learned Spanish. Lived in a little house with chickens in the yard.”
“Got sick,” I said. “Been shot.”
“I can think of worse things,” she said, with a brief sideways glance that pierced me to the heart.
The windowpanes rattled in a sudden gust.
“Well,” I said, “I’m glad you didn’t go.”
She ignored this remark and, looking out the dark window, took another sip from the teacup.
It was by now the first week of April, not a pleasant time for me or anyone. Bunny, who had been relatively calm, was now on a rampage because Henry refused to drive him down to Washington, D.C., to see an exhibit of World War I biplanes at the Smithsonian. The twins were getting calls twice daily from an ominous B. Perry at their bank, and Henry from a D. Wade at his; Francis’s mother had discovered his attempt to withdraw money from the trust fund, and each day brought a fresh volley of communication from her. “Good God,” he muttered, having torn open the latest arrival and scanned it with disgust.
“What does she say?”
“ ‘Baby. Chris and I are so concerned about you,’ ” Francis read in a deadpan voice. “ ‘Now I do not pretend to be an authority on Young People and maybe you are going through something I am too old to understand but I have always hoped you would be able to go to Chris with your problems.’ ”
“Chris has a lot more problems than you do, it seems to me,” I said. The character that Chris played on “The Young Doctors” was sleeping with his brother’s wife and involved in a baby-smuggling ring.
“I’ll say Chris has problems. He’s twenty-six years old and married to my mother, isn’t he? ‘Now I even hate to bring this up,’ ” he read, “ ‘and I wouldn’t have suggested it had not Chris insisted but you know, dear, how he loves you and he says he has seen this type of thing so often before in show business you know.