The Secret History - Donna Tartt [209]
I looked through it. It was an enormous book. There was no text, only photograph after photograph of broken tablets with the inscriptions—in Linear B—reproduced in facsimile in the bottom. Some of the fragments had only a single character.
“He’ll like this,” I said.
“Yes, I think he will,” said Francis. “It was the most boring book I could find. I thought I might drop it off after dinner.”
“Maybe I’ll come along,” I said.
Francis lit a cigarette. “You can if you like. I’m not going in. I’m just going to leave it on the porch.”
“Oh, well, then,” I said, oddly relieved.
I spent all day Sunday in Dr. Roland’s office, from ten in the morning on. Around eleven that night I realized I’d had nothing to eat all day, nothing but coffee and some crackers from the Student Services office, so I got my things, locked up, and walked down to see if the Rathskeller was still open.
It was. The Rat was an extension of the snack bar, with lousy food mostly but there were a couple of pinball machines, and a jukebox, and though you couldn’t buy any kind of a real drink there they would give you a plastic cup of watered-down beer for only sixty cents.
That night it was loud and very crowded. The Rat made me nervous. To people like Jud and Frank, who were there every time the doors opened, it was the nexus of the universe. They were there now, at the center of an enthusiastic table of toadies and hangers-on, playing, with froth-mouthed relish, some game which apparently involved their trying to stab each other in the hand with a piece of broken glass.
I pushed my way to the front and ordered a slice of pizza and a beer. While I was waiting for the pizza to come out of the oven, I saw Charles, alone, at the end of the bar.
I said hello and he turned halfway. He was drunk; I could see it in the way he was sitting, not in an inebriated manner per se but as if a different person—a sluggish, sullen one—had occupied his body. “Oh,” he said. “Good. It’s you.”
I wondered what he was doing in this obnoxious place, by himself, drinking bad beer when at home he had a cabinet full of the best liquor he could possibly want.
He was saying something I couldn’t make out over the music and shouting. “What?” I said, leaning closer.
“I said, could I borrow some money.”
“How much?”
He did some counting on his fingers. “Five dollars.”
I gave it to him. He was not so drunk that he was able to accept it without repeated apologies and promises to repay it.
“I meant to go to the bank on Friday,” he said.
“It’s okay.”
“No, really.” Carefully, he took a crumpled check from his pocket. “My Nana sent me this. I can cash it on Monday no problem.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“Felt like going out.”
“Where’s Camilla?”
“Don’t know.”
He was not so drunk, now, that he couldn’t make it home on his own; but the Rat didn’t close for another two hours, and I didn’t much like the idea of his staying on by himself. Since Bunny’s funeral several strangers—including the secretary in the Social Sciences office—had approached me and tried to pick me for information. I had frozen them out, a trick I’d learned from Henry (no expression, pitiless gaze, forcing intruder to retreat in embarrassment); it was a nearly infallible tactic but dealing with these people when you were sober was one thing, and quite another if you were drunk. I wasn’t drunk, but I didn’t feel like hanging around the Rat until Charles got ready to leave, either. Any effort to draw him away would, I knew, serve only to entrench him further; when he was drunk he had a perverse way of always wanting to do exactly the opposite of what anyone suggested.
“Does Camilla know you’re here?” I asked him.
He leaned over, palm on the bar to brace himself. “What?”
I asked him again, louder this time. His face darkened. “None of her business,” he said, and turned back to his beer.
My food came. I paid for it and told Charles, “Excuse me, I’ll be right back.”
The men’s room was in a dank, smelly hallway that ran perpendicular to the bar. I turned