The Secret History - Donna Tartt [69]
“Where is everybody?”
“Asleep, probably,” he said irritably.
“Do you know if the twins are around?”
“I guess.”
“Have you seen them?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with everybody? Are you mad at Henry or something?”
He didn’t answer. Looking at the side of his face, I saw that it was absolutely blank. For a moment I was unnerved and I glanced back at the television. “Did you have a fight in Rome, or what?”
All of a sudden, he cleared his throat noisily, and I thought he was going to tell me to mind my own business, but instead he pointed at something and cleared his throat again. “Are you going to drink that Coke?” he said.
I had forgotten all about it. It lay sweating and unopened on the sofa. I handed it to him and he cracked it open and took a large greedy drink and burped.
“Pause that refreshes,” he said, and then: “Let me give you a little tip about Henry, old man.”
“What?”
He took another swig and turned back to the TV. “He’s not what you think he is.”
“What does that mean?” I said after a long pause.
“I mean, he’s not what you think,” he said, louder this time. “Or what Julian thinks or anybody else.” He took another slug of the Coke. “For a while there he had me fooled but good.”
“Yeah,” I said uncertainly, after another long moment. The uncomfortable assumption had begun to dawn on me that maybe this was all some sex-related thing I was better off not knowing. I looked at the side of his face: petulant, irritable, glasses low on the tip of his sharp little nose and the beginnings of jowls at his jawline. Might Henry have made a pass at him in Rome? Incredible, but a possible hypothesis. If he had, certainly, all hell would have broken loose. I could not think of much else that would involve this much whispering and secrecy, or that would have so strong an effect on Bunny. He was the only one of us who had a girlfriend and I was pretty sure he slept with her, but at the same time he was incredibly prudish—touchy, easily offended, at root hypocritical. Besides, there was something unquestionably odd about the way Henry was constantly shelling out money to him: paying his tabs, footing his bills, doling out cash like a husband to a spendthrift wife. Perhaps Bunny had allowed his greed to get the better of him, and was angry to discover that Henry’s largesse had strings attached.
But did it? There were certainly strings somewhere, though—easy as it seemed on the face of it—I wasn’t sure that this was where those particular strings led. There was of course that thing with Julian in the hallway; still, that had been very different. I had lived with Henry for a month, and there hadn’t been the faintest hint of that sort of tension, which I, being rather more disinclined that way than not, am quick to pick up on. I had caught a strong breath of it from Francis, a whiff of it at times from Julian; and even Charles, who I knew was interested in women, had a sort of naive, prepubescent shyness of them that a man like my father would have interpreted alarmingly—but with Henry, zero. Geiger counters dead. If anything, it was Camilla he seemed fondest of, Camilla he bent over attentively when she spoke, Camilla who was most often the recipient of his infrequent smiles.
And even if there was a side of him of which I was unaware (which was possible) was it possible that he was attracted to Bunny? The answer to this seemed, almost unquestionably, No. Not only did he behave as if he wasn’t attracted to Bunny, he acted as if he were hardly able to stand him. And it seemed that he, disgusted by Bunny in what appeared to be virtually all respects, would be far more disgusted in that particular one than even I would be. It was possible for me to recognize, in a general sort of way, that Bunny was handsome, but if I brought the lens any closer and tried to focus on him in a sexual light, all I got was a repugnant miasma of sour-smelling shirts and muscles gone to fat and dirty socks. While girls didn’t seem to mind that sort of thing, to me he was about as erotic as an old football coach.
All at once I felt very tired. I stood