The Secret History - Donna Tartt [232]
“Did you give him some aspirins?”
“A few minutes ago.”
“Well, then, why don’t you wait and see. I’m sure he’s fine.”
This is exactly what I wanted to hear.
“You’re right,” I said.
“He probably caught cold sleeping out of doors. I’m sure he’ll be better in the morning.”
I spent the night on Dr. Roland’s couch, and after breakfast, came back to my room with blueberry muffins and a half-gallon carton of orange juice which, with extraordinary difficulty, I had managed to steal from the buffet in the dining hall.
Charles was awake, but feverish and vague. From the state of the bedclothes, which were tumbled and tossed, blanket trailing on the floor and the stained ticking of the mattress showing where he’d pulled the sheets loose, I gathered he’d not had a very good night of it. He said he wasn’t hungry, but he managed a few limp little sips of the orange juice. The rest of the Kosher wine had disappeared, I noticed, in the night.
“How do you feel?” I asked him.
He lolled his head on the crumpled pillow. “Head hurts,” he said sleepily. “I had a dream about Dante.”
“Alighieri?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“We were at the Corcorans’ house,” he mumbled. “Dante was there. He had a fat friend in a plaid shirt who yelled at us.”
I took his temperature; it was an even hundred. A bit lower, but still kind of high for the first thing in the morning. I gave him some more aspirin and wrote down my number at Dr. Roland’s in case he wanted to call me, but when he realized I was leaving, he rolled his head back and gave me such a dazed and hopeless look that it stopped me cold in the middle of my explanation about how the switchboard re-routed calls to administrative offices on the weekends.
“Or, I could stay here,” I said. “If I wouldn’t be bothering you, that is.”
He pushed up on his elbows. His eyes were bloodshot and very bright. “Don’t go,” he said. “I’m scared. Stay a little while.”
He asked me to read to him, but I didn’t have anything around but Greek books, and he didn’t want me to go to the library. So we played Euchre on a dictionary balanced on his lap, and when that started to prove a bit much we switched to Casino. He won the first couple of games. Then he started losing. On the final hand—it was his deal—he shuffled the cards so poorly they were coming up in virtually exact sequence, which should not have made for very challenging play but he was so absent-minded he kept trailing when he could easily have built or taken in. When I was reaching to increase a build, my hand brushed against his and I was taken aback by how dry and hot it was. And though the room was warm, he was shivering. I took his temperature. It had shot back to a hundred and three.
I went downstairs to call Francis, but neither he nor Henry was in. So I went back upstairs. There was no doubt about it: Charles looked terrible. I stood in the door looking at him for a moment, and then I said, “Wait a minute” and went down the hall to Judy’s room.
I found her lying on her bed, watching a Mel Gibson movie on a VCR she’d borrowed from the video department. She was managing somehow to polish her fingernails, smoke a cigarette, and drink a diet Coke all at the same time.
“Look at Mel,” she said. “Don’t you just love him? If he called up and asked me to marry him I would do it in, like, one second.”
“Judy, what would you do if you had a hundred and three degrees of fever?”
“I would go to the fucking doctor,” she said without looking away from the TV.
I explained about Charles. “He’s really sick,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”
She fanned a red taloned hand in the air, drying it, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Take him to the emergency room.”
“You think?”
“You’re not going to find any doctors on Sunday afternoon. Want to use my car?”
“That would be great.”
“Keys are on the desk,” she said absently. “Bye.”
I drove Charles to the hospital in the red Corvette. He was bright-eyed and quiet, staring straight ahead, his right cheek pressed to the cool window-glass. In the waiting room, while I looked through