The Secret History - Donna Tartt [265]
Around the time I graduated, there was a sporadic renewal of communications. “Who would’ve thought,” wrote Francis, “that you’d be the only one of us to make it out with a diploma.” Camilla sent her congratulations, and called a couple of times. There was some talk from both of them about coming up to Hampden, to watch me walk down the aisle, but this did not materialize and I was not very surprised when it didn’t.
I had started to date Sophie Dearbold, my senior year of school, and during my last term I moved into her apartment off-campus: on Water Street, just a few doors down from Henry’s house, where his Madame Isaac Pereire roses were running wild in the back yard (he never lived to see them bloom, it occurs to me, those roses that smelled like raspberries) and where the boxer dog, sole survivor of his chemistry experiments, ran out to bark at me when I walked by. Sophie had a job, after school, with a dance company in Los Angeles. We thought we were in love. There was some talk of getting married. Though everything in my subconscious was warning me not to (at night I dreamed of car crashes, freeway snipers, the glowing eyes of feral dogs in suburban parking lots) I restricted my applications for graduate fellowships to schools in Southern California.
We hadn’t been out there six months when Sophie and I broke up. I was uncommunicative, she said. She never knew what I was thinking. The way I looked at her sometimes, when I woke up in the morning, frightened her.
I spent all my time in the library, reading the Jacobean dramatists. Webster and Middleton, Tourneur and Ford. It was an obscure specialization, but the candlelit and treacherous universe in which they moved—of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed—was one I found appealing. Even the titles of their plays were strangely seductive, trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of mortality: The Malcontent. The White Devil. The Broken Heart. I pored over them, made notes in the margins. The Jacobeans had a sure grasp of catastrophe. They understood not only evil, it seemed, but the extravagance of tricks with which evil presents itself as good. I felt they cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world.
I had always loved Christopher Marlowe, and I found myself thinking a lot about him, too. “Kind Kit Marlowe,” a contemporary had called him. He was a scholar, the friend of Raleigh and of Nashe, the most brilliant and educated of the Cambridge wits. He moved in the most exalted literary and political circles; of all his fellow poets, the only one to whom Shakespeare ever directly alluded was he; and yet he was also a forger, a murderer, a man of the most dissolute companions and habits, who “dyed swearing” in a tavern at the age of twenty-nine. His companions on that day were a spy, a pickpocket, and a “bawdy serving-man.” One of them stabbed Marlowe, fatally, just above the eye: “of which wound the aforesaid Christ. Marlowe died instantly.”
I often thought of these lines of his, from Doctor Faustus:
I think my master shortly means to die
For he hath given me all his goods …
and of this one, spoken as an aside on the day that Faustus in his black robes went to the emperor’s court:
I’faith, he looks much like a conjurer.
When I was writing my dissertation, on Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy, I received the following letter from Francis.
Dear Richard:
I wish I could say that this is a difficult letter for me to write but in fact it is not. My life has been for many years in a process of dissolution and it seems to me that now, finally, it is time for me to do the honorable thing.
So this is the last chance I will have to speak to you, in this world at least. What I want to say to