The Secret History - Donna Tartt [228]
“I was worried. I thought I’d better come check on you.” She laughed. “Nobody’s seen you all day. Somebody told me they saw the flag at the guard booth at half-mast and I was afraid you might be dead.”
I sat on the bed, breathing hard, and stared at her. Her face was like a half-remembered fragment of dream—bar? I thought. There had been the bar—Irish whiskeys and a pinball game with Bram, Sophie’s face blue in the sleazy neon light. More cocaine, cut into lines with a school ID, off the side of a compact-disc case. Then a ride in the back of someone’s truck, a Gulf sign on the highway, someone’s apartment? The rest of the evening was black. Vaguely I remembered a long, earnest conversation with Sophie, standing by an ice-filled sink in someone’s kitchen (MeisterBrau and Genesee, MOMA calendar on the wall). Certainly—a coil of fear wrenched in my stomach—certainly I hadn’t said anything about Bunny. Certainly not. Rather frantically, I searched my memory. Certainly, if I had, she would not be in my room now, looking at me the way she was, would not have brought me this toasted bagel on a paper plate, the smell of which (it was an onion bagel) made me want to retch.
“How did I get home?” I said, looking up at her.
“Don’t you remember?”
“No.” Blood hammered nightmarishly in my temples.
“Then you were drunk. We called a cab from Jack Teitelbaum’s.”
“And where did we go?”
“Here.”
Had we slept together? Her expression was neutral, offering no clue. If we had, I wasn’t sorry—I liked Sophie, I knew she liked me, she was one of the prettiest girls at Hampden besides—but this was the kind of thing you like to know for sure. I was trying to think how I could ask her, tactfully, when someone knocked at the door. The raps were like gun shots. Sharp pains ricocheted through my head.
“Come in,” said Sophie.
Francis stuck his head around the door. “Well, look at this, would you,” he said. He liked Sophie. “It’s the car trip reunion and nobody asked me.”
Sophie stood up. “Francis! Hello! How’ve you been?”
“Good, thanks. I haven’t talked to you since the funeral.”
“I know. I was thinking about you just the other day. How have you been?”
I lay back on the bed, my stomach boiling. The two of them were conversing animatedly. I wished they would both leave.
“Well well,” said Francis after a long interlude, peering over Sophie’s shoulder at me. “What’s wrong with tiny patient?”
“Too much to drink.”
He came over to the bed. He seemed, up close, slightly agitated. “Well, I hope you’ve learned your lesson,” he said brightly and then, in Greek, added: “Important news, my friend.”
My heart sank. I had screwed up. I had been careless, talked too much, said something weird. “What have I done?” I said.
I had said it in English. If Francis was flustered, he didn’t look it. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said. “Do you want some tea or something?”
I tried to figure out what he was trying to say. The pounding agony in my head was such that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. Nausea swelled in a great green wave, trembled at the crest, sank and rolled again. I felt saturated with despair. Everything, I thought tremulously, everything would be okay if only I could have a few moments of quiet and if I lay very, very still.
“No,” I said finally. “Please.”
“Please what?”
The wave swelled again. I rolled over on my stomach and gave a long, miserable moan.
Sophie caught on first. “Come on,” she said to Francis, “let’s go. I think we ought to let him go back to sleep.”
I fell into a tormented half-dreaming state from which I woke, several hours later, to a soft knock. The room was now dark. The door creaked open and a flag of light fell in from the corridor. Francis slipped in and closed the door behind him.
He switched on the weak reading lamp on my desk and pulled the chair over to my bed. “I’m sorry but I’ve got to talk to you,” he said. “Something very odd has happened.”
I had forgotten my earlier fright; it came back in a sick, bilious wash. “What is it?”
“Camilla