The Secret History - Donna Tartt [32]
He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. “Are you ill?” he said, not unkindly.
“No, just a headache,” I said.
“You don’t have them often, I hope?”
“What?” said Charles. “Is everybody sick?”
“Why is everybody in here?” Bunny’s pained voice came booming from the hallway. “When do we eat?”
“Hold on, Bun, it’ll only be a minute.”
He sauntered in, peering over Charles’s shoulder at the tray of chops he’d just removed from the broiler. “Looks done to me,” he said, and he reached over and picked up a tiny chop by the bone end and began to gnaw on it.
“Bunny, don’t, really,” said Charles. “There won’t be enough to go around.”
“I’m starving,” said Bunny with his mouth full. “Weak from hunger.”
“Maybe we can save the bones for you to chew on,” Henry said rudely.
“Oh, shut up.”
“Really, Bun, I wish you would wait just a minute,” said Charles.
“Okay,” Bunny said, but he reached over and stole another chop when Charles’s back was turned. A thin trickle of pinkish juice trickled down his hand and disappeared into the cuff of his sleeve.
To say that the dinner went badly would be an exaggeration, but it didn’t go all that well, either. Though I didn’t do anything stupid, exactly, or say anything that I shouldn’t, I felt dejected and bilious, and I talked little and ate even less. Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles’s kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it. Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument—hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring—about whether Hesiod’s primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word. Camilla put on a Josephine Baker record; Bunny ate my lamb chop.
I left early. Both Francis and Henry offered to drive me home, which for some reason made me feel even worse. I told them I’d rather walk, thanks, and backed out of the apartment, smiling, practically delirious, my face burning under the collective gaze of cool, curious solicitude.
It wasn’t far to school, only fifteen minutes, but it was getting cold and my head hurt and the whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might’ve missed, and my mind—quite willingly—supplied various distortions.
When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight, the window still open and the Parmenides open on the desk where I had left it; a half-drunk coffee from the snack bar stood beside it, cold in its styrofoam cup. The room was chilly but I didn’t shut the window. Instead, I lay down on my bed, without taking off my shoes, without turning on the light.
As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the pages of the Parmenides rippled back and forth.
I had meant to sleep only a few hours, but I woke with a start the next morning to find sunlight pouring in and the clock reading five of nine. Without stopping to shave or comb my hair or even change my clothes from the night before, I grabbed my Greek Prose composition book and my Liddell and Scott and ran to Julian’s office.
Except for Julian, who always made a point of arriving a few minutes late, everyone was there. From the hall I heard them talking, but when I opened the door they all fell quiet and looked at me.
No one said anything for a moment. Then Henry said: “Good morning.”
“Good morning,” I said. In the clear northern