The Secret History (13 page)

She was shouting at me over the music. “I guess I’ve had a pretty hard life, with my injury and all” (I had heard about this previously; loose tendons; dance world’s loss; performance-art’s gain) “but I guess I just have a very strong sense of myself, of my own needs. Other people are important to me, sure, but I always get what I want from them, you know.” Her voice was brusque with the staccato Californians sometimes affect when they’re trying too hard to be from New York, but there was a bright hard edge of that Golden State cheeriness, too. A Cheerleader of the Damned. She was the kind of pretty, burnt-out, vacuous girl who at home wouldn’t have given me the time of day. But now I realized she was trying to pick me up. I hadn’t slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend. Somebody told me later she was a paper-mill heiress from the Midwest. Now I cut my eyes away whenever we met. (The gentleman’s way out, as my classmates used to joke.)

“Do you want a cigarette?” I shouted at this one.

“I don’t smoke.”

“I don’t, either, except at parties.”

She laughed. “Well, sure, give me one,” she yelled in my ear. “You don’t know where we can find any pot, do you?”

While I was lighting the cigarette for her, someone elbowed me in the back and I lurched forward. The music was insanely loud and people were dancing and there was beer puddled on the floor and a rowdy mob at the bar. I couldn’t see much but a Dantesque mass of bodies on the dance floor and a cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling, but I could see, where light from the corridor spilled into the darkness, an upturned glass here, a wide lipsticked laughing mouth there. As parties go, this was a nasty one and getting worse—already certain of the freshmen had begun to throw up as they waited in dismal lines for the bathroom—but it was Friday and I’d spent all week reading and I didn’t care. I knew none of my fellow Greek students would be
there. Having been to every Friday night party since school began, I knew they avoided them like the Black Death.

“Thanks,” said the girl. She had edged into a stairwell, where things were a little quieter. Now it was possible to talk without shouting but I’d had about six vodka tonics and I couldn’t think of a thing to say to her, I couldn’t even remember her name.

“Uh, what’s your major,” I said drunkenly at last.

She smiled. “Performance art. You asked me that already.”

“Sorry. I forgot.”

She looked at me critically. “You ought to loosen up. Look at your hands. You’re very tense.”

“This is about as loose as I get,” I said, quite truthfully.

She looked at me, and a light of recognition began to dawn in her eye. “I know who you are,” she said, looking at my jacket and my tie that had the pictures of the men hunting deer on it. “Judy told me all about you. You’re the new guy who’s studying Greek with those creepos.”

“Judy? What do you mean, Judy told you about me?”

She ignored this. “You had better watch out,” she said. “I have heard some weird shit about those people.”

“Like what?”

“Like they worship the fucking Devil.”

“The Greeks have no Devil,” I said pedantically.

“Well, that’s not what I heard.”

“Well, so what. You’re wrong.”

“That’s not all. I’ve heard some other stuff, too.”

“What else?”

She wouldn’t say.

“Who told you this? Judy?”

“No.”

“Who, then?”

“Seth Gartrell,” she said, as if that settled the matter.

As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word “postmodernist.” “That swine,” I said. “You know him?”

She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. “Seth Gartrell is my good friend.”

I really had had a bit much to drink. “Is he?” I said. “Tell me, then. How does his girlfriend get all those black eyes? And does he really piss on his paintings like Jackson Pollock?”

“Seth,” she said coldly, “is a genius.”

“Is that so? Then he’s certainly a master of deception, isn’t he?”

“He is a wonderful painter. Conceptually, that is. Everybody in the art department says so.”

“Well then. If
everybody
says it, it must be true.”

“A lot of people don’t like Seth.” She was angry now. “I think a lot of people are just jealous of him.”

A hand tugged at the back of my sleeve, near the elbow. I shrugged it off. With my luck it could only be Judy Poovey, trying to hit up on me as she inevitably did about this time every Friday night. But the tug came again, this time sharper and more impatient; irritably I turned, and almost stumbled backward into the blonde.

It was Camilla. Her iron-colored eyes were all I saw at first—luminous, bemused, bright in the dim light from the bar. “Hi,” she said.

I stared at her. “Hel
lo
,” I said, trying to be nonchalant but delighted and beaming down at her all the same. “How are you? What are you doing here? Can I get you a drink?”

“Are you busy?” she said.

It was hard to think. The little gold hairs were curled in a very engaging way at her temples. “No, no, I’m not busy at all,” I said, looking not at her eyes but at this fascinating area around her forehead.

“If you are, just say so,” she said in an undertone, looking over my shoulder. “I don’t want to drag you away from anything.”

Of course: Miss Gaultier. I turned around, half-expecting some snide comment, but she’d lost interest and was talking pointedly to someone else. “No,” I said. “I’m not doing a thing.”

“Do you want to go to the country this weekend?”

“What?”

“We’re leaving now. Francis and me. He has a house about an hour from here.”

I was really drunk; otherwise I wouldn’t have just nodded and followed her without a single question. To get to the door, we had to make our way through the dance floor: sweat and heat, blinking Christmas lights, a dreadful crush of bodies. When finally we stepped outside, it was like falling into a pool of cool, still water. Shrieks and depraved music throbbed, muffled, through the closed windows.

“My God,” said Camilla. “Those things are hellish. People being sick all over the place.”

The pebbled drive was silver in the moonlight. Francis was standing in the shadows under some trees. When he saw us coming he stepped suddenly onto the lighted path. “Boo,” he said.

We both jumped back. Francis smiled thinly, light glinting off his fraudulent pince-nez. Cigarette smoke curled from his nostrils. “Hello,” he said to me, then glanced at Camilla. “I thought you’d run off,” he said.

“You should have come in with me.”

“I’m glad I didn’t,” said Francis, “because I saw some interesting things out here.”

“Like what?”

“Like some security guards handing out a girl on a stretcher and a black dog attacking some hippies.” He laughed, then tossed his car keys in the air and caught them with a jingle. “Are you ready?”

He had a convertible, an old Mustang, and we drove all the way to the country with the top down and the three of us in the front seat. Amazingly, I had never been in a convertible before, and it is even more amazing that I managed to fall asleep when both momentum and nerves should’ve kept me awake but I did, fell asleep with my cheek resting on the padded leather of the door, my sleepless week and the six vodka tonics hitting me hard as an injection.

I remember little of the ride. Francis drove at a reasonable clip—he was a careful driver, unlike Henry, who drove fast and often recklessly and whose eyes were none too good besides. The night wind in my hair, their indistinct talk, the songs on the radio all mingled and blurred in my dreams. It seemed we’d been driving for only a few minutes when suddenly I was conscious of silence, and of Camilla’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up,” she said. “We’re here.”

Dazed, half dreaming, not quite sure where I was, I shook my head and inched up in my seat. There was drool on my cheek and I wiped it off with the flat of my hand.

“Are you awake?”

“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t. It was dark and I couldn’t see a thing. My fingers finally closed on the door handle and only then, as I was climbing out of the car, the moon came out from
behind a cloud and I saw the house. It was tremendous. I saw, in sharp, ink-black silhouette against the sky, turrets and pikes, a widow’s walk.

“Geez,” I said.

Francis was standing beside me, but I was scarcely aware of it till he spoke, and I was startled by the closeness of his voice. “You can’t get a very good idea of it at night,” he said.

“This belongs to you?” I said.

He laughed. “No. It’s my aunt’s. Way too big for her, but she won’t sell it. She and my cousins come in the summer, and only a caretaker the rest of the year.”

The entrance hall had a sweet, musty smell and was so dim it seemed almost gaslit; the walls were spidery with the shadows of potted palms and on the ceilings, so high they made my head reel, loomed distorted traces of our own shadows. Someone in the back of the house was playing the piano. Photographs and gloomy, gilt-framed portraits lined the hall in long perspectives.

“It smells terrible in here,” said Francis. “Tomorrow, if it’s warm, we’ll air it out, Bunny gets asthma from all this dust.… That’s my great-grandmother,” he said, pointing at a photograph which he saw had caught my attention. “And that’s her brother next to her—he went down on the
Titanic
, poor thing. They found his tennis racket floating around in the North Atlantic about three weeks afterward.”

“Come see the library,” said Camilla.

Francis close behind us, we went down the hall and through several rooms—a lemon-yellow sitting room with gilt mirrors and chandeliers, a dining room dark with mahogany, rooms I wanted to linger in but got only a glimpse of. The piano music got closer; it was Chopin, one of the preludes, maybe.

Walking into the library, I took in my breath sharply and stopped: glass-fronted bookcases and Gothic panels, stretching fifteen feet to a frescoed and plaster-medallioned ceiling. In the back of the room was a marble fireplace, big as a sepulchre, and a globed gasolier—dripping with prisms and strings of crystal beading—sparkled in the dim.

There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.

“Golly,” I said.

The playing stopped abruptly and Charles looked up. “Well there you are,” he said. “You’re awfully late. Bunny’s gone to sleep.”

“Where’s Henry?” said Francis.

“Working. He might come down before bed.”

Camilla went to the piano and took a sip from Charles’s glass. “You should have a look at these books,” she said to me. “There’s a first edition of
Ivanhoe
here.”

“Actually, I think they sold that one,” said Francis, sitting in a leather armchair and lighting a cigarette. “There are one or two interesting things but mostly it’s Marie Corelli and old
Rover Boys.
”

I walked over to the shelves. Something called
London
by somebody called Pennant, six volumes bound in red leather—massive books, two feet tall. Next to it
The Club History of London
, an equally massive set, bound in pale calfhide. The libretto of
The Pirates of Penzance
. Numberless
Bobbsey Twins
. Byron’s
Marino Faliero
, bound in black leather, with the date 1821 stamped in gold on the spine.

“Here, go make your own drink if you want one,” Charles was saying to Camilla.

“I don’t want my own. I want some of yours.”

He gave her the glass with one hand and with the other, wobbled up a difficult backwards-and-forwards scale.

“Play something,” I said.

He rolled his eyes.

“Oh, come on,” said Camilla.

“No.”

“Of course, he can’t
really
play anything,” Francis said in a sympathetic undertone.

Charles took a swallow of his drink and ran up another octave, trilling nonsensically on the keys with his right hand. Then he handed the glass to Camilla and, left hand free, reached down and turned the fibrillation into the opening notes of a Scott Joplin rag.

He played with relish, sleeves rolled up, smiling at his work, tinkling from the low ranges to the high with the tricky syncopation of a tap dancer going up a Ziegfeld staircase. Camilla, on the seat beside him, smiled at me. I smiled back, a little dazed. The ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I’d never known.

Charlestons on the wings of airborne biplanes. Parties on sinking ships, the icy water bubbling around the waists of the orchestra as they sawed out a last brave chorus of “Auld Lang Syne.” Actually, it wasn’t “Auld Lang Syne” they’d sung, the night the
Titanic
went down, but hymns. Lots of hymns, and the Catholic priest saying Hail Marys, and the first-class salon which had really looked a lot like this: dark wood, potted palms, rose silk lampshades with their swaying fringe. I really had had a bit much to drink. I was sitting sideways in my chair, holding tight to the arms
(Holy Mary, Mother of God)
, and even the floors were listing, like the decks of a foundering ship; like we might all slide to the other end with a hysterical
wheeee!
piano and all.