The Secret History - Donna Tartt [221]
“I’m going to Boston,” Charles said. “Francis’s great-aunt has an apartment on Marlborough Street. Just a few doors from the Public Garden. She goes to the country in the summer and Francis said if I wanted to stay there, I could.”
“Sounds nice.”
“It’s a big place. If you wanted, you could come too.”
“Maybe.”
“You’d like it. Francis will be in New York but he’ll come up sometimes. Have you ever been to Boston?”
“No.”
“We’ll go to the Gardner Museum. And the piano bar at the Ritz.”
He was telling me about a museum they had at Harvard, some place where they had a million different flowers all made of colored glass when all of a sudden, with alarming swiftness, a yellow Volkswagen swooped from the opposite lane and ground to a stop beside us.
It was Judy Poovey’s friend Tracy. She rolled down her window and gave us a brilliant smile. “Hi, guys,” she said. “Want a ride?”
She dropped us off at Charles’s place. It was ten o’clock. Camilla wasn’t home.
“God,” said Charles, shouldering off his jacket. It fell, in a heap, on the floor.
“How do you feel?”
“Drunk.”
“Want some coffee?”
“There’s some in the kitchen,” Charles said, yawning and running a hand through his hair. “Mind if I have a bath?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ll be out in a minute. That cell was filthy. I think I might have fleas.”
He was more than a minute. I could hear him sneezing, running the hot and cold taps, humming to himself. I went into the kitchen and poured myself a glass of orange juice and put some raisin bread in the toaster.
While looking through the cabinet for coffee, I found a half-full jar of Horlick’s malted milk. The label stared at me like a reproach. Bunny was the only one of us who ever drank malted milk. I pushed it to the rear of the cabinet, behind a jug of maple syrup.
The coffee was ready and I was on my second batch of toast when I heard a key in the lock, the front door opening. Camilla stuck her head into the kitchen.
“Hi, you,” she said. Her hair was untidy and her face pale and watchful; she looked like a little boy.
“Hi yourself. Want some breakfast?”
She sat down at the table beside me. “How did it go?” she said.
I told her. She listened attentively, reached out and took a triangle of buttered toast from my plate and ate it as she listened.
“Is he all right?” she said.
I didn’t know exactly how she meant it, “all right.” “Sure,” I said.
There was a long silence. Very faintly, on a downstairs radio, a sprightly female voice sang a song about yogurt, backed by a chorus of mooing cows.
She finished her toast and got up to pour herself some coffee. The refrigerator hummed. I watched her rummage in the cabinet for a cup.
“You know,” I said, “you ought to throw away that jar of malted milk you have in there.”
It was a moment before she answered. “I know,” she said. “In the closet there’s a scarf he left the last time he was here. I keep running across it. It still smells like him.”
“Why don’t you get rid of it?”
“I keep hoping I won’t have to. I hope one day I’ll open the closet door and it’ll be gone.”
“I thought I heard you,” said Charles, who had been standing in the kitchen door for I didn’t know how long. His hair was wet and all he had on was a bathrobe and in his voice was still a trace of that liquory thickness I knew so well. “I thought you were in class.”
“Small class. Julian let us out early. How do you feel?”
“Fabulous,” said Charles, padding into the kitchen, his moist feet tracking prints that evaporated instantly on the shiny, tomato-red linoleum. He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?” he said.
She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth—not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just