The Secret History - Donna Tartt [74]
We went upstairs to my room. On the way he stopped at the house refrigerator and peered inside, stooping down myopically to inventory the contents. “Any of this yours, old soak?” he said.
“No.”
He reached in and pulled out a frozen cheesecake. Taped to the box was a plaintive note: “Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid. Jenny Drexler.”
“This’d hit the spot about now,” he said, glancing quickly up and down the hall. “Anybody coming?”
“No.”
He stuck the box underneath his coat and, whistling, walked ahead to my room. Once inside, he spat out his gum and stuck it on the inside rim of my garbage can with a quick, feinting motion, as if he hoped I wouldn’t see him do it, then sat down and began to eat the cheesecake straight from the box with a spoon he’d found on my dresser. “Phew,” he said. “This is terrible. Want some?”
“No thanks.”
He licked thoughtfully at the spoon. “Too lemony, is what the problem is. And not enough cream cheese.” He paused—thinking, I believed, about this handicap—and then said abruptly: “Tell me. You and Henry spent a lot of time together last month, huh?”
I was suddenly watchful. “I guess.”
“Do much talking?”
“Some.”
“He tell you much about when we were in Rome?” he said, looking at me keenly.
“Not a whole lot.”
“He say anything about leaving early?”
At last, I thought, relieved. At last we were going to get to the bottom of this business. “No. No, he didn’t tell me much at all,” I said, which was the truth. “I knew he’d left early when he showed up here. But I didn’t know you were still there. Finally I asked him about it one night, and he said you were. That’s all.”
Bunny took a jaded bite of the cheesecake. “He say why he left?”
“No.” Then, when Bunny didn’t respond, I added: “It had something to do with money, didn’t it?”
“Is that what he told you?”
“No.” And then, since he had gone mute again: “But he did say you were short on cash, that he had to pay the rent and stuff. Is that right?”
Bunny, his mouth full, made a brushing, dismissive motion with one hand.
“That Henry,” he said. “I love him, and you love him, but just between the two of us I think he’s got a little bit of Jew blood.”
“What?” I said, startled.
He had just taken another big bite of cheesecake, and it took him a moment to answer me.
“I never heard anybody complain so much about helping out a pal,” he finally said. “I tell you what it is. He’s afraid of people taking advantage of him.”
“How do you mean?”
He swallowed. “I mean, somebody probably told him when he was little, ‘Son, you have a load of money, and someday people are going to try to weasel it out of you.’ ” His hair had fallen over one eye; like an old sea captain, he squinted at me shrewdly through the other. “It’s not a question of the money, y’see,” he said. “He don’t need it himself, it’s the principle of the thing. He wants to know that people like him not for his money, you know, but for himself.”
I was surprised by this exegesis, which was at odds with what I knew to be Henry’s frequent and—by my standards of reckoning—extravagant generosity.
“So it’s not about money?” I said at last.
“Nope.”
“Then what is it about, if you don’t mind my asking?”
Bunny leaned forward, his face thoughtful, and for a moment almost transparently frank; and when he opened his mouth again I thought he was going to come right out and say what he meant; but instead, he cleared his throat and said, if I didn’t mind, would I go make him a pot of coffee?
That night, as I was lying on my bed reading Greek, I was startled by a flash of remembrance, almost as if a hidden spotlight had been trained without warning on my face. Argentina. The word itself had lost little of its power to startle and had, due to my ignorance of the physical place it occupied on the globe, assumed a peculiar life of its own. There was the harsh Ar at the beginning, which called up gold, idols, lost cities in the jungle, which in turn led to the hushed and sinister