The Secret History - Donna Tartt [174]
Mrs. Corcoran (said Henry) was burned up that anyone had dared suggest Bunny was on drugs. At lunch at the Brasserie, a reporter had edged up to the Corcoran table to ask if they had any comment to make about the “drug paraphernalia” found in Bunny’s room.
Mr. Corcoran, startled, had lowered his eyebrows impressively and said, “Well, of course, haw, ahem,” but Mrs. Corcoran, sawing at her steak au poivre with subdued violence, launched without even looking up into a tart diatribe. Drug paraphernalia, as they chose to call it, was not drugs, and it was a pity the press chose to level accusations at persons not present to defend themselves, and she was having a hard enough time as it was without having strangers imply that her son was a drug kingpin. All of which was more or less reasonable and true, and which the Post reported dutifully the next day word for word, alongside an unflattering picture of Mrs. Corcoran with her mouth open and a headline which read: MOM SEZ: NOT MY KID.
On Monday night, about two in the morning, Camilla asked me to walk her home from Francis’s. Henry had left around midnight; and Francis and Charles, who’d been drinking hard since four o’clock, showed no signs of slowing down. They were entrenched in Francis’s kitchen with the lights turned out, preparing, with what I felt was alarming hilarity, a series of hazardous cocktails called “Blue Blazers” which involved ignited whiskey poured back and forth in a flaming arc between two pewter mugs.
At her apartment Camilla—shivering, preoccupied, her cheeks fever-red from the cold—asked me upstairs for a cup of tea. “I wonder if we should have left them there,” she said, switching on the lamp. “I’m afraid they’re going to set themselves on fire.”
“They’ll be all right,” I said, though the same thought had occurred to me.
We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures.
The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her—oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. Come here, you. Let’s shut the light out, shall we? When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself.
And yet: why should it be? She had been party to the killing of two men; had stood calm as a Madonna and watched Bunny die. I remembered Henry’s cool voice, scarcely six weeks earlier. There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings, yes.
“Camilla?” I said.
She glanced up, distracted.
“What really happened, that night in the woods?”
I think I had been expecting, if not surprise, at least a show of it. But she didn’t blink. “Well, I don’t remember an awful lot,” she said slowly. “And what I do remember is almost impossible to describe. It’s all much less clear than it was even a few months ago. I suppose I should have tried to write it down or something.”
“But what do you remember?”
It was a moment before she answered. “Well, I’m sure you’ve heard it all from Henry,” she said. “It seems a bit silly to even say it aloud. I remember a pack of dogs. Snakes twining around my arms. Trees on fire, pines bursting into flames like enormous torches. There was a fifth person with us for part of the time.”
“A fifth person?”
“It wasn’t always a person.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know what the Greeks called Dionysus. . The Many-Formed