The Secret History - Donna Tartt [241]
There was no trace of emotion upon his face, or of any effort to conceal it. “No,” he said, turning back to his work. “She was sleeping when I left. I didn’t want to wake her.”
It was shocking to hear him speak of her with such intimacy. Pluto and Persephone. I looked at his back, prim as a parson’s, tried to imagine the two of them together. His big white hands with the square nails.
Henry said, unexpectedly: “How is Charles?”
“All right,” I said, after an awkward pause.
“He’ll be coming home soon, I suppose.”
A dirty tarpaulin flapped loudly on the roof. He kept working. His dark trousers, with the suspenders crossed over his white-shirted back, gave him a vaguely Amish appearance.
“Henry,” I said.
He didn’t look up.
“Henry, it’s none of my business, but I hope for God’s sake you know what you’re doing,” I said. I paused, expecting some response, but there was none. “You haven’t seen Charles, but I have, and I don’t think you realize the shape he’s in. Ask Francis, if you don’t believe me. Even Julian’s noticed. I mean, I’ve tried to tell you, but I just don’t think you understand. He’s out of his mind, and Camilla has no idea, and I don’t know what we’ll do when he gets home. I’m not even sure he’ll be able to stay by himself. I mean—”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted Henry, “but would you mind handing me those shears?”
There was a long silence. Finally, he reached over and got them himself. “All right,” he said pleasantly. “Never mind.” Very conscientiously, he parted the canes and clipped one in the middle, holding the shears at a careful slant, taking care not to injure a larger cane adjacent to it.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” I had a hard time keeping my voice down. There were windows open in the upstairs apartment that faced the back; I heard people talking, listening to the radio, moving around. “Why do you have to make things so hard for everybody?” He didn’t turn around. I grabbed the shears from his hand and threw them, with a clatter, on the bricks. “Answer me,” I said.
We looked at each other for a long moment. Behind his glasses, his eyes were steady and very blue.
Finally, he said, quietly: “Tell me.”
The intensity of his gaze frightened me. “What?”
“You don’t feel a great deal of emotion for other people, do you?”
I was taken aback. “What are you talking about?” I said. “Of course I do.”
“Do you?” He raised an eyebrow. “I don’t think so. It doesn’t matter,” he said, after a long, tense pause. “I don’t, either.”
“What are you trying to get at?”
He shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.” He brushed the dirt from his hands. “But then it changed,” he said. “The night I killed that man.”
I was jarred—a little spooked, as well—at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms.
“It was the most important night of my life,” he said calmly. “It enabled me to do what I’ve always wanted most.”
“Which is?”
“To live without thinking.”
Bees buzzed loudly in the honeysuckle. He went back to his rosebush, thinning the smaller branches at the top.
“Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn’t really know it,” he said. “It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.”
“And now?”
“Now,” he said, “now, I know that I can do anything that I want.” He glanced up. “And, unless I’m very wrong, you’ve experienced something similar yourself.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, but I think you do. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.”
He was talking about the ravine. And, to my horror, I realized that in a way he was right. As ghastly as it had been, there was no denying that Bunny’s murder had thrown all subsequent events