The Secret History - Donna Tartt [72]
The dining halls were open, though at that hour of the morning there were no students, only cafeteria workers and maintenance men eating breakfast before their shifts began. I went upstairs and got myself a cup of coffee and a couple of soft-boiled eggs, which I ate alone at a table near a window in the empty main dining room.
Classes started today, Thursday, but my first class with Julian wasn’t until the next Monday. After breakfast I went back to my room and began to work on the irregular second aorists. Not until almost four in the afternoon did I finally close my books, and when I looked out my window over the meadow, the light fading in the west and the ashes and yews casting long shadows on the snow, it was as if I’d just woken up, sleepy and disoriented, to find it was getting dark and I had slept through the day.
It was the big back-to-school dinner that night—roast beef, green beans almondine, cheese soufflé and some elaborate lentil dish for the vegetarians. I ate dinner alone at the same table where I’d had my breakfast. The halls were packed, everyone smoking, laughing, extra chairs wedged in at full tables, people with plates of food roaming from group to group to say hello. Next to me was a table of art students, branded as such by their ink-grimed fingernails and the self-conscious paint spatters on their clothes; one of them was drawing on a cloth napkin with a black felt marker; another was eating a bowl of rice using inverted paintbrushes for chopsticks. I had never seen them before. As I drank my coffee and gazed around the dining room, it struck me that Georges Laforgue had been right, after all: I really was cut off from the rest of the college—not that I cared to be on intimate terms, by and large, with people who used paintbrushes for cutlery.
There was a life-or-death attempt being made near my table by a couple of Neanderthals looking to collect money for a beer blast in the sculpture studio. Actually, I did know these two; it was impossible to attend Hampden and not to. One was the son of a famous West Coast racket boss and the other was the son of a movie producer. They were, respectively, president and vice-president of the Student Council, offices they utilized principally in order to organize drinking contests, wet-T-shirt competitions, and female mud-wrestling tournaments. They were both well over six feet—slack-jawed, unshaven, dumb dumb dumb, the sort who I knew would never go indoors at all after daylight savings in the spring but instead would lounge bare-chested on the lawn with the Styrofoam cooler and the tape deck from dawn till dusk. They were widely held to be good guys, and maybe they were decent enough if you lent them your car for beer runs or sold them pot or something; but both of them—the movie producer’s kid in particular—had a piggish, schizophrenic glitter about the eye that I did not care for at all. Party Pig, people called him, and not entirely with affection, either; but he liked this name and took a kind of a stupid pride in living up to it. He was always getting drunk and doing things like setting fires, or stuffing freshmen down chimneys, or throwing beer kegs through plate glass windows.
Party Pig (a.k.a. Jud) and Frank were making their way to my table. Frank held out a paint can full of change and crumpled bills. “Hi, guy,” he said. “Keg party in the sculpture studio tonight. Want to give something?”
I put down my coffee and fished in my jacket pocket and found a quarter and some pennies.
“Oh, come on, man,” Jud said, rather menacingly I thought. “You can do better than that.”
Hoi polloi. Barbaroi. “Sorry,” I said, and pushed back from the table and got my coat and left.
I went back to my room and sat at my desk and opened my lexicon, but I didn’t look at it. “Argentina?” I said to the wall.
On Friday morning I went to my French class. Several students dozed in the back, overcome no doubt