The Secret History - Donna Tartt [177]
This one looked at him—pleased, incredulous—and barked with laughter. “Well, ain’t that a kick,” she said hoarsely, reaching with a heavily ringed hand for the Silva-Thin burning in the ashtray beside her. “And here I thought you Mormon kids that went around wasn’t even suppose to drink Coca-Cola.”
As soon as she sauntered back to the kitchen to turn in our order (“Bill!” we heard her saying, behind the swinging doors. “Hey, Bill! Listen to this!”), the smile faded from Charles’s face. He reached for his drink and offered a humorless shrug when I tried to catch his eye.
“Sorry,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind coming here. It’s cheaper than the Brasserie and we won’t see anybody.”
He was not in a mood to talk—ebullient sometimes, he could also be as mute and sulky as a child—and he drank steadily, with both his elbows on the bar and his hair falling down in his face. When his sandwich came he picked it apart, ate the bacon and left the rest, while I drank my drink and watched the Lakers. It was weird to be there, in that clammy dark bar in Vermont, and watching them play. Back in California, at my old college, they’d had a pub called Falstaff’s with a wide-screen television; I’d had a dopey friend named Carl who used to drag me there to drink dollar beer and watch basketball. He was probably there now, on a redwood bar stool, watching this exact game.
I was thinking these depressing thoughts and others like them, and Charles was on his fourth or fifth whiskey when somebody started switching the television with a remote control: “Jeopardy,” “Wheel of Fortune,” “MacNeil/Lehrer,” at last a local talk show. It was called “Tonight in Vermont.” The set was styled after a New England farmhouse, with mock Shaker furniture and antique farm equipment, pitchforks and so forth, hanging from the clapboard backdrop. Liz Ocavello was the host. In imitation of Oprah and Phil, she had a question-and-answer period at the end of each show, generally not too lively since her guests tended to be pretty tame—the State Commissioner for Veterans’ Affairs, Shriners announcing a blood drive (“What’s that address again, Joe?”).
Her guest that evening, though it was several moments before I realized it, was William Hundy. He had on a suit—not the blue leisure suit but an old one the likes of which a rural preacher might wear—and he was talking authoritatively, for some reason I did not immediately understand, about Arabs and OPEC. “That OPEC,” he said, “is the reason we don’t have Texaco filling stations anymore. I remember when I was a boy it was Texaco stations all over the place but these Arabs, it was some kind of, what you call, leverage buyout—”
“Look,” I said to Charles, but by the time I’d got him to glance up from his stupor they’d switched back to “Jeopardy.”
“What?” he said.
“Nothing.”
“Jeopardy,” “Wheel of Fortune,” back to “MacNeil-Lehrer” for kind of a long time until someone yelled, “Turn that shit off, Dotty.”
“Well, what you want to watch, then?”
“ ‘Wheel of Fortune,’ ” shouted a hoarse chorus.
But “Wheel of Fortune” was going off the air (Vanna blowing a glittery kiss) and the next thing I knew we were back in the simulated farmhouse with William Hundy. He was talking now about his appearance the previous morning on the “Today” show.
“Look,” said someone, “there’s that guy runs Redeemed Repair.”
“He don’t run it.”
“Who does, then?”
“Him and Bud Alcorn both do.”
“Aw, shut up, Bobby.”
“Naw,” said Mr. Hundy, “didn’t see Willard Scott. Reckon I wouldn’t have known what to said if I had. It’s a big operation they got there, course it don’t look so big on the TV.”
I kicked Charles’s foot.
“Yeah,” he said, without interest, and brought his glass up with an unsteady hand.
I was surprised to see how outspoken Mr. Hundy had become in just four days.