The Secret History - Donna Tartt [55]
But it wasn’t so hard to find where the hippie lived, after all. One of the warehouses, right on the river, was painted bright purple.
The hippie looked angry, as though I’d woken him up, when he finally came to the door. “Just let yourself in next time, man,” he said sullenly. He was a short fat man with a sweat-stained T-shirt and a red beard, who looked as if he’d spent many fine evenings with his friends around the pool table at the Boulder Tap. He pointed out the room where I was to live, at the top of a flight of iron stairs (no railing, naturally), and disappeared without a word.
I found myself in a cavernous, dusty room with a plank floor and high, exposed rafters. Besides a broken dresser, and a high chair standing in the corner, it was completely unfurnished except for a lawn mower, a rusted oil drum, and a trestle table which was scattered with sandpaper and carpentry tools and a few curved pieces of wood which were perhaps the exoskeletons of mandolins. Sawdust, nails, food wrappers and cigarette butts, Playboy magazines from the 1970s littered the floor; the many-paned windows were furry with frost and grime.
I let one suitcase and then the other fall from my numb hands; for a moment my mind was numb, too, agreeably registering these impressions without comment. Then, all at once, I became aware of an overwhelming roaring, rushing noise. I went over and looked out the back windows behind the trestle table and was startled to see an expanse of water, hardly three feet below. Farther down, I could see it pounding over a dam, and the spray flying. As I tried to clear a circle on the window with my hand so I could see better, I noticed that my breath was still white, even then, indoors.
Suddenly, something that I can only describe as an icy blast swept over me, and I looked up. There was a large hole in the roof; I saw blue sky, a swift cloud moving from left to right, through the jagged black edge. Below it was a thin powdery dusting of snow, stenciled perfectly on the wooden floor in the shape of the hole above it, and undisturbed except for the sharp line of a solitary footprint, my own.
A good many people asked me later if I had realized what a dangerous thing this was, attempting to live in an unheated building in upstate Vermont during the coldest months of the year; and to be frank, I hadn’t. In the back of my mind were the stories I’d heard, of drunks, of old people, of careless skiers freezing to death, but for some reason none of this seemed to apply to me. My quarters were uncomfortable, certainly, they were foully dirty and bitterly cold; but it never occurred to me that they were actually unsafe. Other students had lived there; the hippie lived there himself; a receptionist at the Student Referral Office had told me about it. What I didn’t know was that the hippie’s own quarters were properly heated, and that the students who had lived there in the past had come there well armed with space heaters and electric blankets. The hole in the roof, moreover, was a recent development, unknown to the Student Referral Office. I suppose anyone who knew the whole story would have warned me off, but the fact was, nobody did know. I was so embarrassed at having such living quarters that I had told no one where I was staying, not even Dr. Roland; the only person who knew all was the hippie, and he was supremely unconcerned with anyone’s welfare but his own.
Early in the morning, while it was still dark, I would wake up in my blankets on the floor (I slept in two or three sweaters, long underwear, wool trousers and overcoat) and walk just as I was to Dr. Roland’s office. It was a long walk and, if it was snowing or the wind was up, sometimes a harrowing one. I would arrive at Commons, chilled and exhausted, just as the janitor was unlocking the building for the day. I would