The Secret History - Donna Tartt [90]
“Nor have I. Like a dead man. No dreams.”
“I can’t tell you how disorienting this was,” Francis said. “The sun was coming up when I went to sleep, and it seemed like I’d just closed my eyes when I opened them again, and it was dark, and a phone was ringing, and I had no idea where I was. It kept ringing and ringing, and finally I got up and found my way into the hall. Somebody said don’t answer it but—”
“I’ve never seen anybody like you for answering a phone,” said Henry. “Even in somebody else’s house.”
“Well, what am I supposed to do? Just let it ring? Anyway, I picked it up, and it was Bunny, cheery as a lark. Boy, the four of us had really been messed up, and were we turning into a bunch of nudists or what, and how about if we all went to the Brasserie and had some dinner?”
I sat up in my chair. “Wait,” I said. “Was that the night—?”
Henry nodded. “You came too,” he said. “Remember?”
“Of course,” I said, unaccountably excited that the story was at last beginning to dovetail with my own experience. “Of course. I met Bunny on his way to your place.”
“If you don’t mind my saying so, we were all a little surprised when he showed up with you,” said Francis.
“Well, I suppose eventually he wanted to get us alone and find out what happened, but it was nothing that couldn’t wait,” said Henry. “You’ll recall that our appearance wouldn’t have seemed so odd to him as it might. He’d been with us before, you know, on nights very nearly as—what is the word I’m looking for?”
“—when we’d been sick all over the place,” said Francis, “and fallen in mud, and didn’t get home till dawn. There was the blood—he might have wondered exactly how we’d killed that deer—but still.”
Uncomfortably, I thought of the Bacchae: hooves and bloody ribs, scraps dangling from the fir trees. There was a word for it in Greek: omophagia. Suddenly it came back to me: walking into Henry’s apartment, all those tired faces, Bunny’s snide greeting of “Khairei, deerslayers!”
They’d been quiet that evening, quiet and pale, though not more than seemed remarkable for people suffering particularly bad hangovers. Only Camilla’s laryngitis seemed unusual. They’d been drunk the night before, they told me, drunk as bandicoots; Camilla had left her sweater at home and caught cold on the walk back to North Hampden. Outside, it was dark and raining hard. Henry gave me the car keys and asked me to drive.
It was a Friday night, but the weather was so bad the Brasserie was nearly deserted. We ate Welsh rarebits and listened to the rain beating down in gusts on the roof. Bunny and I drank whiskey and hot water; the others had tea.
“Feeling queasy, bakchoi?” said Bunny slyly after the waiter took our drink orders.
Camilla made a face at him.
When we went out to the car after dinner Bunny walked around it, inspected the headlights, kicked at the tires. “This the one you were in last night?” he said, blinking in the rain.
“Yes.”
He brushed the damp hair from his eyes and bent to examine the fender. “German cars,” he said. “Hate to say it but I think the Krauts have got Detroit metal beat. I don’t see a scratch.”
I asked him what he meant.
“Aw, they were driving around drunk. Making a nuisance of themselves on the public road. Hit a deer. Did you kill it?” he asked Henry.
Walking around to the passenger’s side, Henry looked up. “What’s that?”
“The deer. Didja kill it?”
Henry opened the door. “It looked pretty dead to me,” he had said.
There was a long silence. My eyes were smarting from all the smoke. A thick gray haze of it hung near the ceiling.
“So what’s the problem?” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“What happened? Did you tell him about it or not?”
Henry took a deep breath. “No,” he said. “We might have, but obviously the fewer people who knew the better. When I first saw him alone, I broached it carefully, but he seemed satisfied with the deer story and I let it go at that. If he hadn’t figured it out on his own there was certainly no reason to tell him. The fellow’s body was found, an article ran in the Hampden Examiner, no problem at