The Secret History - Donna Tartt [176]
“Certainly you don’t believe in that stuff.”
He gave me a look of indescribable contempt.
“You amaze me,” he said. “You think nothing exists if you can’t see it.”
The psychic was a young mother from upstate New York. An electrical shock from some jumper cables had put her into a coma from which she emerged, three weeks later, able to “know” things by handling an object or touching a stranger’s hand. The police had used her successfully in a number of missing-person cases. Once she had found the body of a strangled child by merely pointing to an area on a surveyor’s map. Henry, who was so superstitious that he sometimes left a saucer of milk outside his door to appease any malevolent spirits who might happen to wander by, watched her, fascinated, as she walked alone on the edge of campus—thick glasses, suburban car coat, red hair tied up in a polka-dot scarf.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “I don’t dare risk meeting her. But I should like to talk to her very much.”
The majority of our classmates, however, were thrown into an uproar by the information—accurate or not, I still don’t know—that the Drug Enforcement Agency had brought in agents and was conducting an undercover investigation. Théophile Gautier, writing about the effect of Vigny’s Chatterton on the youth of Paris, said that in the nineteenth-century night one could practically hear the crack of the solitary pistols: here, now, in Hampden, the night was alive with the flushing of toilets. Pillheads, cokeheads staggered around glassy-eyed, dazed at their sudden losses. Someone flushed so much pot down one of the toilets in the sculpture studio they had to get somebody in from the Water Department to dig up the septic tank.
About four-thirty on Monday afternoon, Charles showed up at my room. “Hello,” he said. “Want to get something to eat?”
“Where’s Camilla?”
“Somewhere, I don’t know,” he said, his pale glance skittering across my room. “Do you want to come?”
“Well … sure,” I said.
He brightened. “Good. I’ve got a taxi downstairs.”
The taxi driver—a florid man named Junior who’d driven Bunny and me into town that first fall afternoon, and who in three days would be driving Bunny back to Connecticut for the last time, this time in a hearse—looked back at us in the rear-view mirror as we pulled out onto College Drive. “You boys going to the Brassiere?” he said.
He meant the Brasserie. It was the little joke he always had with us. “Yes,” I said.
“No,” said Charles quite suddenly. He was slouched down childishly low against the door, staring straight ahead and drumming on the armrest with his fingers. “We want to go to 1910 Catamount Street.”
“Where’s that?” I said to him.
“Oh, I hope you don’t mind,” he said, almost looking at me but not quite. “Just feel like a change. It’s not far and besides, I’m sick of the food at the Brasserie, aren’t you?”
The place where we wound up—a bar called the Farmer’s Inn—was not remarkable for its food, or its decor—folding chairs and Formica tables—or for its sparse clientele, which was mostly rural, drunken, and over sixty-five. It was, in fact, inferior to the Brasserie in every respect but one, which was that really very sizable shots of off-brand whiskey could be got at the bar for fifty cents each.
We sat at the end of the bar by the television set. A basketball game was on. The barmaid—in her fifties, with turquoise eye shadow and lots of turquoise rings to match—looked us over, our suits and ties. She seemed startled by Charles’s order of two double whiskeys and a club sandwich. “What the hey,” she said, in a voice like a macaw. “They’re letting you boys have a snort now and then, huh?”
I didn’t know what she meant—was this some dig at our clothes, at Hampden College, did she want