The Secret History - Donna Tartt [35]
“Uh, what’s your major,” I said drunkenly at last.
She smiled. “Performance art. You asked me that already.”
“Sorry. I forgot.”
She looked at me critically. “You ought to loosen up. Look at your hands. You’re very tense.”
“This is about as loose as I get,” I said, quite truthfully.
She looked at me, and a light of recognition began to dawn in her eye. “I know who you are,” she said, looking at my jacket and my tie that had the pictures of the men hunting deer on it. “Judy told me all about you. You’re the new guy who’s studying Greek with those creepos.”
“Judy? What do you mean, Judy told you about me?”
She ignored this. “You had better watch out,” she said. “I have heard some weird shit about those people.”
“Like what?”
“Like they worship the fucking Devil.”
“The Greeks have no Devil,” I said pedantically.
“Well, that’s not what I heard.”
“Well, so what. You’re wrong.”
“That’s not all. I’ve heard some other stuff, too.”
“What else?”
She wouldn’t say.
“Who told you this? Judy?”
“No.”
“Who, then?”
“Seth Gartrell,” she said, as if that settled the matter.
As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.” “That swine,” I said. “You know him?”
She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. “Seth Gartrell is my good friend.”
I really had had a bit much to drink. “Is he?” I said. “Tell me, then. How does his girlfriend get all those black eyes? And does he really piss on his paintings like Jackson Pollock?”
“Seth,” she said coldly, “is a genius.”
“Is that so? Then he’s certainly a master of deception, isn’t he?”
“He is a wonderful painter. Conceptually, that is. Everybody in the art department says so.”
“Well then. If everybody says it, it must be true.”
“A lot of people don’t like Seth.” She was angry now. “I think a lot of people are just jealous of him.”
A hand tugged at the back of my sleeve, near the elbow. I shrugged it off. With my luck it could only be Judy Poovey, trying to hit up on me as she inevitably did about this time every Friday night. But the tug came again, this time sharper and more impatient; irritably I turned, and almost stumbled backward into the blonde.
It was Camilla. Her iron-colored eyes were all I saw at first—luminous, bemused, bright in the dim light from the bar. “Hi,” she said.
I stared at her. “Hello,” I said, trying to be nonchalant but delighted and beaming down at her all the same. “How are you? What are you doing here? Can I get you a drink?”
“Are you busy?” she said.
It was hard to think. The little gold hairs were curled in a very engaging way at her temples. “No, no, I’m not busy at all,” I said, looking not at her eyes but at this fascinating area around her forehead.
“If you are, just say so,” she said in an undertone, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t want to drag you away from anything.”
Of course: Miss Gaultier. I turned around, half-expecting some snide comment, but she’d lost interest and was talking pointedly to someone else. “No,” I said. “I’m not doing a thing.”
“Do you want to go to the country this weekend?”
“What?”
“We’re leaving now. Francis and me. He has a house about an hour from here.”
I was really drunk; otherwise I wouldn’t have just nodded and followed her without a single question. To get to the door, we had to make our way through the dance floor: sweat and heat, blinking Christmas lights, a dreadful crush of bodies. When finally we stepped outside, it was like falling into a pool of cool, still water. Shrieks and depraved music throbbed, muffled, through the closed windows.
“My God,” said Camilla. “Those things are hellish. People being sick all over the place.”
The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight. Francis was standing in the shadows under some trees. When he saw us coming he stepped suddenly onto the lighted path. “Boo,” he said.
We both jumped back. Francis smiled thinly, light glinting off his fraudulent pince-nez. Cigarette smoke curled from his nostrils. “Hello,” he said to me,