The Secret History - Donna Tartt [123]
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”
Uneasily, I crossed to my bed and sat down, trying to think of some neutral subject, but before I could say anything he spoke again.
“Can’t stomach it any longer,” he mumbled. “Just can’t. Sweet Italian Jesus.”
I didn’t say anything.
Shakily, he passed a hand over his forehead. “You don’t even know what the devil I’m talking about, do you?” he said, with an oddly nasty tone in his voice.
Agitated, I recrossed my legs. I’d seen this coming, seen it coming for months and dreaded it. I had an impulse to rush from the room, just leave him sitting there, but then he buried his face in his hands.
“All true,” he mumbled. “All true. Swear to God. Nobody knows but me.”
Absurdly, I found myself hoping it was a false alarm. Maybe he and Marion had broken up. Maybe his father had died of a heart attack. I sat there, paralyzed.
He dragged his palms down over his face, as if he were wiping water from it, and looked up at me. “You don’t have a clue,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, uncomfortably bright. “Boy. You don’t have a fucking clue.”
I stood up, unable to bear it any longer, and looked around my room distractedly. “Uh,” I said, “do you want an aspirin? I meant to ask you earlier. If you take a couple now you won’t feel so bad in the—”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Bunny said abruptly.
Somehow I’d always known it was going to happen this way, the two of us alone, Bunny drunk, late at night.… “Why no,” I said. “All you need is a little—”
“You think I’m a lunatic. Bats in the belfry. Nobody listens to me,” he said, his voice rising.
I was alarmed. “Calm down,” I said. “I’m listening to you.”
“Well, listen to this,” he said.
It was three in the morning when he stopped talking. The story he told was drunken and garbled, out of sequence and full of vituperative, self-righteous digressions; but I had no problem understanding it. It was a story I’d already heard. For a while we sat there, mute. My desk light was shining in my eyes. The party across the way was still going strong and a faint but boisterous rap song throbbed obtrusively in the distance.
Bunny’s breathing had become loud and asthmatic. His head fell on his chest, and he woke with a start. “What?” he said, confused, as if someone had come up behind him and shouted in his ear. “Oh. Yes.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What do you think about that, eh?”
I was unable to answer. I’d hoped, faintly, that he might have blacked it all out.
“Damndest thing. Fact truer than fiction, boy. Wait, that’s not right. How’s it go?”
“Fact stranger than fiction,” I said mechanically. It was fortunate, I suppose, that I didn’t have to make an effort to look shaken up or stunned. I was so upset I was nearly sick.
“Just goes to show,” said Bunny drunkenly. “Could be the guy next door. Could be anybody. Never can tell.”
I put my face in my hands.
“Tell anybody you want,” Bunny said. “Tell the goddamn mayor. I don’t care. Lock ’em right up in that combination post office and jail they got down by the courthouse. Thinks he’s so smart,” he muttered. “Well, if this wasn’t Vermont he wouldn’t be sleeping so well at night, let me tell you. Why, my dad’s best friends with the police commissioner in Hartford. He ever finds out about this—geez. He and Dad were at school together. Used to date his daughter in the tenth grade.…” His head was drooping and he shook himself again. “Jesus,” he said, nearly falling out of his chair.
I stared at him.
“Give me that shoe, would you?”
I handed it to him, and his sock too. He looked at them for a moment, then stuffed them in the outside pocket of his blazer. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he said, and then he was gone, leaving the door of my room open behind him. I could hear his peculiar limping progress all the way down the stairs.
The objects in the room seemed to swell and recede with each thump of my heart. In a horrible daze, I sat on my bed, one elbow on the windowsill, and tried to pull myself together. Diabolical rap music floated from the opposite