The Secret History - Donna Tartt [42]
“Is Bunny there?” she would say, stretching up on tiptoe and craning to look past me into the room.
“He’s not here.”
“Are you sure?”
“He’s not here, Marion.”
“Bunny!” she would call out ominously.
No answer.
“Bunny!”
And then, to my acute embarrassment, Bunny would emerge sheepishly in the doorway. “Hello, sweetie.”
“Where have you been?”
Bunny would hem and haw.
“Well, I think we need to talk.”
“I’m busy now, honey.”
“Well—” she would look at her tasteful little Carrier watch—“I’m going home now. I’ll be up for about thirty minutes and then I’m going to sleep.”
“Fine.”
“I’ll see you in about twenty minutes, then.”
“Hey, wait just a second there. I never said I was going to—”
“See you in a little while,” she would say, and leave.
“I’m not going,” Bunny would say.
“No, I wouldn’t.”
“I mean, who does she think she is.”
“Don’t go.”
“I mean, gotta teach her a lesson sometime. I’m a busy man. On the move. My time’s my own.”
“Exactly.”
An uneasy silence would fall. Finally Bunny would get up. “Guess I better go.”
“All right, Bun.”
“I mean, I’m not gonna go over to Marion’s, if that’s what you think,” he’d say defensively.
“Of course not.”
“Yes, yes,” Bunny would say distractedly, and bluster away.
The next day, he and Marion would be having lunch together or walking down by the playground. “So you and Marion got everything straightened out, huh?” one of us would ask when next we saw him alone.
“Oh, yeah,” Bunny would say, embarrassed.
The weekends at Francis’s house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside. Apart from the occasional, half-hearted game of tennis (overhead volley going out of court; poking dispiritedly in the tall grass with the ends of our rackets for the lost ball) we never did anything very athletic; something about the place inspired a magnificent laziness I hadn’t known since childhood.
Now that I think about it, it seems while we were out there we drank almost constantly—never very much at once, but the thin trickle of spirits which began with the Bloody Marys at breakfast would last until bedtime, and that, more than anything else, was probably responsible for our torpor. Bringing a book outside to read, I would fall asleep almost immediately in my chair; when I took the boat out I soon tired of rowing and allowed myself to drift all afternoon. (That boat! Sometimes, even now, when I have trouble sleeping, I try to imagine that I am lying in that rowboat, my head pillowed on the cross-slats of the stern, water lapping hollow through the wood and yellow birch leaves floating down to brush my face.) Occasionally, we would attempt something a little more ambitious. Once, when Francis found a Beretta and ammunition in his aunt’s night table, we went through a brief spate of target practice (the greyhound, jumpy from years of the starting gun, had to be secluded in the cellar), shooting at mason jars that were lined on a wicker tea-table we’d dragged into the yard. But that came to a quick end when Henry, who was very nearsighted, shot and killed a duck by mistake. He was quite shaken by it and we put the pistol away.
The others liked croquet, but Bunny and I didn’t; neither of us ever quite got the hang of it, and we always hacked and sliced at the ball as if we were playing golf. Every now and then, we roused ourselves sufficiently to go on a picnic. We were always too ambitious at the outset—the menu elaborate, the chosen spot distant and obscure—they invariably ended with all of us hot and sleepy and slightly drunk, reluctant to start the long trudge home with the picnic things. Usually we lay around on the grass all afternoon, drinking martinis from a thermos bottle and watching the ants crawl in a glittering black thread on the messy cake plate, until finally the martinis