The Secret History - Donna Tartt [56]
Dr. Roland, accustomed as he was by this time to my truancy and my frequent excuses and my failure to complete tasks by the deadline, was startled and rather suspicious of this abrupt spurt of industry. He praised my work, questioned me closely; on several occasions I heard him in the hall discussing my metamorphosis with Dr. Cabrini, the head of the psychology department, the only other teacher in the building who hadn’t left for the winter. At the first, no doubt, he thought it was all some new trick of mine. But as the weeks rolled by and each new day of enthusiastic labor added another gold star to my shining record he began to believe: timidly at first but at last triumphantly. Around the first of February he even gave me a raise. Perhaps he was hoping in his Behavioralist way that this would spur me to even greater heights of motivation. He came to regret this mistake, however, when the winter term ended and I went back to my comfortable little room in Monmouth House and all my old incompetent ways.
I worked as late at Dr. Roland’s as I decently could and then went to the snack bar in Commons for dinner. On certain fortunate nights there were even places to go afterwards, and I scanned the bulletin boards eagerly for these meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, these performances of Brigadoon by the local high school. But usually there was nothing at all, and Commons closed at seven, and I was left my long walk home in the snow and dark.
The cold in the warehouse was like nothing I’ve known before or since. I suppose if I’d had any sense I’d have gone out and bought an electric heater, but only four months before I had come from one of the warmest climates in America and I had only the dimmest awareness that such appliances existed. It never occurred to me that half the population of Vermont wasn’t experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night—bone-cracking cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone in black Arctic seas. In the morning, when I woke, I was as stiff and sore as if I’d been beaten. I thought it was because I was sleeping on the floor. Only later did I realize that the true cause of this malady was hard, merciless shivering, my muscles contracting as mechanically as if by electric impulse, all night long, every night.
Amazingly, the hippie, whose name was Leo, was quite angry that I didn’t spend more time carving mandolin struts or warping boards or whatever it was I was supposed to be doing up there. “You’re taking advantage, man,” he would say threateningly whenever he happened to see me. “Nobody burns Leo like this. Nobody.” He had some idea that I had studied instrument building and was in fact able to do all sorts of complex, technical work, though I had never told him any such thing. “Yes, you did,” he said, when I pled my ignorance. “You did. You said you lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains one summer and made dulcimers. In Kentucky.”
I had nothing to say to this. I am not unused to being confronted with my own lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop. I could only deny it and say, quite honestly, that I didn’t even know what a dulcimer was. “Carve pegs,” he said insolently. “Sweep up.” To which I replied, in so many words, that I could hardly carve pegs in rooms too cold