The Secret History - Donna Tartt [225]
“Smoking can have totally weird effects on your body.”
Francis frequently made fun of me when I used some phrase he perceived as Californian. “Totally weird?” he said maliciously, mimicking my accent: suburban, hollow, flat. “Rilly?”
I looked at him slouching in his chair: polka-dot tie, narrow Bally shoes, foxy narrow face. His grin was foxy too, and showed too many teeth. I was sick of him. I stood up. The room was so smoky that my eyes watered. “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve got to go now.”
Francis’s snide expression faded. “You’re mad, aren’t you?” he said anxiously.
“No.”
“Yes you are.”
“No, I’m not,” I said. These sudden, panicky attempts at conciliation annoyed me more than his insults.
“I’m sorry. Don’t listen to me. I’m drunk, I’m sick, I didn’t mean it.”
Without warning I had a vision of Francis—twenty years later, fifty years, in a wheelchair. And of myself—older, too, sitting around with him in some smoky room, the two of us repeating this exchange for the thousandth time. At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.
On the walk home from Francis’s—head down, sunk in a black, inarticulate tangle of anxiety and gloom—I heard Julian’s voice saying my name.
I turned. He was just coming out of the Lyceum. At the sight of his quizzical, kindly face—so sweet, so agreeable, so glad to see me—something wrenched deep in my chest.
“Richard,” he said again, as if there were no one on earth he could possibly be so delighted to see. “How are you?”
“Fine.”
“I’m just going over to North Hampden. Will you walk with me?”
I looked at the innocent, happy face and thought: If he only knew. It would kill him.
“Julian, I’d love to, thanks,” I said. “But I have to be getting home.”
He looked at me closely. The concern in his eyes made me nearly sick with self-loathing.
“I see so little of you these days, Richard,” he said. “I feel that you’re becoming just a shadow in my life.”
The benevolence, the spiritual calm, that radiated from him seemed so clear and true that, for a dizzying moment, I felt the darkness lift almost palpably from my heart. The relief was such that I almost broke down sobbing; but then, looking at him again, I felt the whole poisonous weight come crashing back down, full force.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
He can never know. We can never tell him.
“Oh. Sure I am,” I said. “I’m fine.”
Though the fuss about Bunny had mostly blown over, the college had still not returned quite to normal—and not at all in the new “Dragnet” spirit of drug enforcement which had spread across campus. Gone were the nights when, on one’s way home from the Rathskeller, it was not unheard-of to see an occasional teacher standing under the bare light bulb of Durbinstall basement—Arnie Weinstein, say, the Marxist economist (Berkeley, ’69), or the haggard, scraggle-haired Englishman who taught classes in Sterne and Defoe.
Long gone. I had watched grim security men dismantling the underground laboratory, hauling out cartons of beakers and copper piping, while Durbinstall’s head chemist—a small, pimple-faced boy from Akron named Cal Clarken—stood by and wept, still in his trademark high-top sneakers and lab coat. The anthropology teacher who for twenty years had taught “Voices and Visions: The Thought of Carlos Castaneda” (a course which featured, at its conclusion, a mandatory campfire ritual at which pot was smoked) announced quite suddenly that he was leaving for Mexico on sabbatical. Arnie Weinstein took to frequenting the townie bars, where he attempted to discuss Marxist theory with hostile countermen. The scraggle-haired Englishman had returned to his primary interest, which was chasing girls twenty years younger than himself.
As part of the new “Drug Awareness” policy, Hampden was hosting an intercollege tournament, in