The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

Pragmatists are often strangely superstitious.

He was, if possible, even a bigger windbag than Dr. Roland. Together, they were like one of those superhero alliances in the comic books, invincible, an unconquerable confederation of boredom and confusion.

wild roast

I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath.

Henry paid the check while Bunny hung behind him like a bad child.

They were playing Go Fish: it was the only card game that Bunny knew.

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. “Live forever,” he says. And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. “Live forever,” we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison. And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.

Across the lawn, Bunny had finally made his shot; the ball went wide of the sixth and seventh arches but, incredibly, hit the turning stake. “Watch,” I said. “I bet he’ll try for another shot.” “He won’t get it, though,” said Charles, sitting down again, his eyes still on the lawn. “Look at Henry. He’s putting his foot down.” Henry was pointing at the neglected arches and, even at that distance, I could tell he was quoting from the rule book; faintly, we could hear Bunny’s startled cries of protest.

Richard old Man are you Frozen? it is quite warm here. We live in a Penscione (sp.) I ordered Conche by mistake yesterday in a restaurant it was awful but Henry ate it. Everybody here is a damn Catholic. Arrivaderci see you soon.

I think he did save me, though. And someplace, if there is a place where lists are kept, and credit given, I am sure there is a gold star by his name. But I am getting sentimental. Sometimes, when I think about these things, I do.

Besides, I think it’s good to change the place where one sleeps from time to time. I believe it gives one more interesting dreams.”

“Well, we decided to try to have one.” For a moment I thought I hadn’t understood him. “What?” I said. “I said we decided to try to have a bacchanal.” “Come on.” “We did.” I looked at him. “You must be joking.” “No.” “That’s the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.”

Music from a neighbor’s stereo was filtering through the walls. The Grateful Dead. Good Lord.

“Jesus, Henry, you know everything,” said Francis, “you make me sick.”

“I don’t see what’s wrong with the first plan.” “The first plan is too stylized. Design is inherent in it through and through.” “But design is preferable to chance.”

“If we attempt to order events too meticulously, to arrive at point X via a logical trail, it follows that the logical trail can be picked up at point X and followed back to us. Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic.

“I never realized, you know, how much we rely on appearances,” he said. “It’s not that we’re so smart, it’s just that we don’t look like we did it.

People get upset, all of a sudden they want to listen to old hippie garbage they would never listen to if they were in their right mind,

“You amaze me,” he said. “You think nothing exists if you can’t see it.”

Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn’t know the words to “Sugar Magnolia.”

Actually, I was often glad of their company. Despite her faults, Judy was a kindly soul, and she was so bossy and talkative that I felt oddly safe with her.

Dear Richard—How very unhappy I am this morning, as I know I will be for many mornings to come. The news of our friend’s death has saddened me greatly. I do not know if you have tried to reach me, I have been away, I have not been well, I doubt if I shall return to Hampden until after the funeral— How sad it is to think that Wednesday will be the last time that we shall all be together. I hope this letter finds you well. It brings love.

Though I’d feared that the ride down might be awkward, in fact it was a wonderful relief to be around a stranger. We almost had fun, with the radio going and Sophie (brown-eyed, gravel-voiced) leaning on folded arms over the front seat talking to us, and Francis in a better mood than I’d seen him in in ages. “You look like Audrey Hepburn,” he told her, “you know that?” She gave us Kools and cinnamon gumballs, told funny stories. I laughed and looked out the window and prayed we’d miss our turn.

He was still crying. His face was purple. When I reached down to loosen his collar he grabbed me by the wrist. “Gone,” he wailed, looking me straight in the eye. “My baby.” His gaze—helpless, wild—hit me like a blackjack. Suddenly, and for the first time, really, I was struck by the bitter, irrevocable truth of it; the evil of what we had done. It was like running full speed into a brick wall.

You kids,” said Mr. Corcoran, a hand clamped on Henry’s shoulder, “better hope you’ve got friends like this one. They don’t come along like this every day. No, sir. Why, I’ll never forget, it was Bunny’s first night at Hampden, he called me up on the telephone. ‘Dad,’ he said to me, ‘Dad, you ought to see this nut they gave me for a roommate.’ ‘Stick it out, son,’ I told him, ‘give it a chance’ and before you could spit it was Henry this, Henry that, he’s changing his major from whatever the hell it was to ancient Greek. Tearing off to Italy. Happy as a clam.” The tears were welling in his eyes. “Just goes to show,” he said, shaking Henry’s shoulder with a kind of rough affection. “Never judge a book by its cover.

“That is the ugliest garden I have ever seen,” I said. “Yes,” said Henry.

“What is it?” he said in Greek. “Drugs?” “Yes.” “Well, give me something, for God’s sake,” he said, swaying forward, pop-eyed. He was far too drunk for sleeping pills. I gave him an Excedrin. “Thanks,” he said, and swallowed it with a big sloppy drink of his whiskey. “I hope I die in the night.

“I don’t suppose,” he said, “you would go upstairs and get me a drink.” “You shouldn’t be drinking on top of those pills.” “I’ve been drinking already.” “I know that.” There was a brief silence. “Look,” he said, pushing his glasses up on the bridge of his nose. “I want a Scotch and soda. In a tall glass. Heavy on the Scotch, light on the soda, lots of ice, a glass of plain water, no ice, on the side. That’s what I want.”

With rue my heart is laden For golden friends I had, For many a rose-lipt maiden And many a lightfoot lad. By brooks too broad for leaping The lightfoot boys are laid; The rose-lipt girls are sleeping In fields where roses fade.

A green striped canopy, of the sort used for lawn parties, was set up over the grave. There was something vacuous and stupid about it, flapping out there in the middle of nowhere, something empty, banal, brutish.

He had also bought a gift for Henry: a corpus of Mycenaean inscriptions from Knossos. I looked through it. It was an enormous book. There was no text, only photograph after photograph of broken tablets with the inscriptions—in Linear B—reproduced in facsimile in the bottom. Some of the fragments had only a single character. “He’ll like this,” I said. “Yes, I think he will,” said Francis. “It was the most boring book I could find. I thought I might drop it off after dinner.”

I went on a lot of long walks by myself, through North Hampden, down to the Battenkill River. I liked especially going to the little country grocery in North Hampden (whose ancient proprietors, mother and son, were said to have been the inspiration for a famous and frequently anthologized horror story from the 1950s) to buy a bottle of wine, and wandering down to the riverbank to drink it, then roaming around drunk all the rest of those glorious, golden, blazing afternoons—a waste of time, I was behind in school, there were papers to write and exams coming up but still I was young; the grass was green and the air was heavy with the sound of bees and I had just come back from the brink of Death itself, back to the sun and air. Now I was free; and my life, which I had thought was lost, stretched out indescribably precious and sweet before me.

“Do you think I should go into the hospital?” “You tell me.” He lay there a moment. “I don’t know. I really think I should,” he said. “All right, then. If it’ll make you feel better. Come on. Sit up.” — He was not too ill to smoke in the car all the way to the hospital.

you can’t imagine how sick they thought I was for repressing this. Though I would’ve told them anything if I thought they’d send me home.” He laughed, without much humor. “God. I remember the head of the Institute asking me once what character from fiction I most identified with, and I said Davy Balfour from Kidnapped.”

He laughed again at the look on my face but then we heard footsteps and the tinkle of ice in an advancing cocktail—Francis.

I walked a long way, till the stores got sparse and the road was dark, walked on the deep singing shoulder of the highway till I got to the Greyhound bus station, sad in the moonlight, the first glimpse I’d ever had of Hampden.

“Want some coffee?” “There’s some in the kitchen,” Charles said, yawning and running a hand through his hair. “Mind if I have a bath?” “Go ahead.” “I’ll be out in a minute. That cell was filthy. I think I might have fleas.” He was more than a minute.

“You know,” I said, “you ought to throw away that jar of malted milk you have in there.” It was a moment before she answered. “I know,” she said. “In the closet there’s a scarf he left the last time he was here. I keep running across it. It still smells like him.” “Why don’t you get rid of it?” “I keep hoping I won’t have to. I hope one day I’ll open the closet door and it’ll be gone.”

One thing I’ll say for Camilla, she’s more reasonable about that sort of thing. Perhaps she has to be.” “What sort of thing?” “About Charles going to bed with people.” “Who’s he been to bed with?” He brought up his glass and took a big drink. “Me for one,” he said. “That shouldn’t surprise you. If you drank as much as he does, I daresay I would have been to bed with you, too.”

At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.

“Even these fucking bindles. She got fixated on the idea that I had to make these fancy ones, Jesus, open them up and there’s a fucking Tintoretto on the inside. And gets pissed if I cut them out so that the cupid’s butt or whatever isn’t, like, right in the center.

Francis stuck his head around the door. “Well, look at this, would you,” he said. He liked Sophie. “It’s the car trip reunion and nobody asked me.”

Francis put his head in his hands. “Richard,” he said, “you’re dense. You must have brain damage.”

Charles is in a state.

I’m shot, I thought, I’m shot. I reached down and touched my stomach. Blood. There was a small hole, slightly charred, in my white shirt: my Paul Smith shirt, I thought, with a pang of anguish. I’d paid a week’s salary for it in San Francisco.