The Secret History - Donna Tartt [195]
“Look,” I said, “you’ve got it wrong.”
“I don’t care. I’m just telling you.”
“Well, I’m telling you. Believe it or not, I don’t care.”
Cloke fished lazily in his pocket, came out with a pack of Marlboros so crumpled and flat that it did not seem possible that a cigarette could be inside it. He said: “I thought she was seeing somebody.”
“For God’s sake.”
He shrugged. “It’s no business of mine,” he said, extracting one crooked cigarette and crushing the empty pack in his hand. “People were bothering me at school, so I was staying on their couch before we came down here. I’ve heard her talking on the phone.”
“And saying what?”
“Oh, nothing, but like two or three in the morning, whispering, you’ve got to wonder.” He smiled bleakly. “I guess she thinks I’m passed out but to tell you the truth I haven’t been sleeping all that well.… Right,” he said, when I didn’t answer. “You don’t know a thing about it.”
“I don’t.”
“Sure.”
“I really don’t.”
“So what were you doing in there?”
I looked at him for a moment, and then I took out a handful of pills and held them out on my open palm.
He leaned forward, brows knit, and then, quite suddenly, his foggy eyes became intelligent and alert. He selected a capsule and held it up to the light in businesslike fashion. “What is it?” he said. “Do you know?”
“Sudafed,” I said. “Don’t bother. There’s nothing in there.”
He chuckled. “Know why?” he said, looking at me for the first time with real friendliness. “That’s because you were looking in the wrong place.”
“What?”
He glanced over his shoulder. “Down the hall. Off the master bedroom. I would have told you if you’d asked.”
I was startled. “How do you know?”
He pocketed the capsule and raised an eyebrow at me. “I practically grew up in this house,” he said. “Old Kathy is on about sixteen different types of dope.”
I looked back at the closed door of the master bedroom.
“No,” he said. “Not now.”
“Why not?”
“Bunny’s grandma. She has to lie down after she eats. We’ll come up later.”
Things downstairs had cleared out some, but not much. Camilla was nowhere in sight. Charles, bored and drunk, his back in a corner, was holding a glass to his temple as a tearful Marion babbled away—her hair pulled back in one of those tremendous preppy bows from the Talbots catalogue. I hadn’t had a chance to speak to him because she had shadowed him almost constantly since we arrived; why she had latched so firmly on to him I don’t know, except that she wasn’t talking to Cloke, and Bunny’s brothers were either married or engaged, and of the remaining males in her age group—Bunny’s cousins, Henry and me, Bram Guernsey and Rooney Wynne—Charles was by far the best looking.
He glanced at me over her shoulder. I didn’t have the stomach to go over and rescue him, and I looked away; but just then a toddler—fleeing his grinning, jug-eared brother—slid into my legs and almost knocked me down.
They dodged round me in circles. The smaller one, terrified and shrieking, dove to the floor and grabbed my knees. “Butthole,” he sobbed.
The other one stopped and took a step backwards, and there was something nasty and almost lascivious about the look on his face. “Oh, Dad,” he sang, his voice like spilled syrup.
“Oh, Daa-yid.”
Across the room, Hugh Corcoran turned, glass in hand. “Don’t make me come over there, Brandon,” he said.
“But Corey called you a butthole, Daa-yid.”
“You’re a butthole,” sobbed the little one. “You you you.”
I pried him off my leg and went looking for Henry. He and Mr. Corcoran were in the kitchen, surrounded by a semicircle of people: Mr. Corcoran, who had his arm around Henry, looked as if he’d had a few too many.
“Now Kathy and I,” he said, in a loud, didactic voice, “have always opened our home to young people. Always an extra place at the table. First thing you know, they’d be coming to Kathy and me with their problems, too. Like this guy,” he said, jostling Henry. “I’ll never forget the time he came up to me one night after supper.