The Secret History - Donna Tartt [25]
“Hit by a car?”
“I think that’s what it was. Can’t think what else it could’ve been. He doesn’t like to talk about it.” He lowered his voice. “Know the way he parts his hair, so it falls over the right eye? That’s because there’s a scar there. Almost lost the eye, can’t see out of it too good. And the stiff way he walks, sort of a limp. Not that it matters, he’s strong as an ox. I don’t know what he did, lift weights or what, but he certainly built himself back up again. A regular Teddy Roosevelt, overcoming obstacles and all. You got to admire him for it.” He brushed his hair back again and motioned to the waiter for another drink. “I mean, you take somebody like Francis. You ask me, he’s as smart as Henry. Society boy, tons of money. He’s had it too easy, though. He’s lazy. Likes to play. Won’t do a thing after school but drink like a fish and go to parties. Now Henry.” He raised an eyebrow. “Couldn’t beat him away from Greek with a stick—Ah, thank you, there, sir,” he said to the waiter, who was holding out another of the coral-colored drinks at arm’s length. “You want another?”
“I’m fine.”
“Go ahead, old man. On me.”
“Another martini, I guess,” I said to the waiter, who had already turned away. He turned to glare at me.
“Thanks,” I said weakly, looking away from his lingering, hateful smile until I was sure he had gone.
“You know, there’s nothing I hate like I hate an officious fag,” said Bunny pleasantly. “You ask me, I think they ought to round them all up and burn them at the stake.”
I’ve known men who run down homosexuality because they are uncomfortable with it, perhaps harbor inclinations in that area; and I’ve known men who run down homosexuality and mean it. At first I had placed Bunny in the first category. His glad-handing, varsity chumminess was totally alien and therefore suspect; then, too, he studied the classics, which are certainly harmless enough but which still provoke the raised eyebrow in some circles. (“You want to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Classics are. Wars and homos.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.)
The more I listened to Bunny, however, the more apparent it became that there was no affected laughter, no anxiety to please. Instead, there was the blithe unselfconciousness of some crotchety old Veteran of Foreign Wars—married for years, father of multitudes—who finds the topic infinitely repugnant and amusing.
“But your friend Francis?” I said.
I was being snide, I suppose, or maybe I just wanted to see how he would wriggle out of that one. Though Francis might or might not have been homosexual—and could just as easily have been a really dangerous type of ladies’ man—he was certainly of that vulpine, well-dressed, unflappable sort who, to someone with Bunny’s alleged nose for such things, would rouse a certain suspicion.
Bunny raised an eyebrow. “That’s nonsense,” he said curtly. “Who told you that?”
“Nobody. Just Judy Poovey,” I said, when I saw he wasn’t going to take nobody for an answer.
“Well, I can see why she’d say it but nowadays everybody’s gay this and gay that. There’s still such a thing as an old-fashioned mama’s boy. All Francis needs is a girlfriend.” He squinted at me through the tiny, crazed glasses. “And what about you?” he said, a trifle belligerently.
“What?”
“You a single man? Got some little cheerleader waiting back home for you at Hollywood High?”
“Well, no,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining my own girlfriend problems, not to him. It was only quite recently that I had managed to extricate myself from a long, claustrophobic relationship with a girl in California whom