The Secret History - Donna Tartt [214]
“What was that?” said Francis.
“I don’t know. A deer maybe.”
“That wasn’t a deer.”
“Then a dog.”
“It looked like some kind of cat to me.”
Actually, that was what it had looked like to me too. “But it was too big,” I said.
“Maybe it was a cougar or something.”
“They don’t have those around here.”
“They used to. They called them catamounts. Cat-o-the-Mountain. Like Catamount Street in town.”
The night breeze was chilly. A dog barked somewhere. There wasn’t much traffic on that road at night.
I put the car in gear.
Francis had asked me not to tell anyone about our excursion to the emergency room but at the twins’ apartment on Sunday night I had a little too much to drink and found myself telling the story to Charles in the kitchen after dinner.
Charles was sympathetic. He’d had some drinks himself but not as many as me. He was wearing an old seersucker suit which hung very loosely on him—he, too, had lost some weight—and a frayed old Sulka tie.
“Poor François,” he said. “He’s such a fruitcake. Is he going to see that shrink?”
“I don’t know.”
He shook a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes that Henry had left on the counter. “If I were you,” he said, tapping the cigarette on the inside of his wrist and craning to make sure that no one was in the hall, “if I were you, I would advise him not to mention this to Henry.”
I waited for him to continue. He lit the cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke.
“I mean, I’ve been drinking a bit more than I should,” he said quietly. “I’m the first to admit that. But my God, I was the one who had to deal with the cops, not him. I’m the one who has to deal with Marion, for Christ sake. She calls me almost every night. Let him try talking to her for a while and see how he feels.… If I wanted to drink a bottle of whiskey a day I don’t see what he could say about it. I told him it was none of his business, and none of his business what you did, either.”
“Me?”
He looked at me with a blank, childish expression. Then he laughed.
“Oh, you hadn’t heard?” he said. “Now it’s you, too. Drinking too much. Wandering around drunk in the middle of the day. Rolling down the road to ruin.”
I was startled. He laughed again at the look on my face but then we heard footsteps and the tinkle of ice in an advancing cocktail—Francis. He poked his head into the doorway and began to gabble good-naturedly about something or other, and after a few minutes we picked up our drinks and followed him back to the living room.
That was a cozy night, a happy night; lamps lit, sparkle of glasses, rain falling heavy on the roof. Outside, the treetops tumbled and tossed, with a foamy whoosh like club soda bubbling up in the glass. The windows were open and a damp cool breeze swirled through the curtains, bewitchingly wild and sweet.
Henry was in excellent spirits. Relaxed, sitting in an armchair with his legs stretched out in front of him, he was alert, well rested, quick with a laugh or a clever reply. Camilla looked enchanting. She wore a narrow sleeveless dress, salmon-colored, which exposed a pair of pretty collarbones and the sweet frail vertebrae at the base of her neck—lovely kneecaps, lovely ankles, lovely bare, strong-muscled legs. The dress exaggerated her spareness of body, her unconscious and slightly masculine grace of posture; I loved her, loved the luscious, stuttering way she would blink while telling a story, or the way (faint echo of Charles) that she held a cigarette, caught in the knuckles of her bitten-nailed fingers.
She and Charles seemed to have made up. They didn’t talk much, but the old silent thread of twinship seemed in place again. They perched on the arms of each other’s chairs, and fetched drinks back and forth (a peculiar twin-ritual, complex and charged with meaning). Though I did not fully understand these observances, they were generally a sign that all was well. She, if anything, seemed the more conciliatory party, which seemed to disprove the hypothesis that he was at fault.
The mirror over the fireplace was the center of attention, a cloudy