The Secret History (33 page)

“What do you suppose he wanted? Money?”

Henry shrugged. “Who knows. Unfortunately at that point I had very little money to give him. Bunny’s jaunts to the tailors and so forth had just about cleaned me out, and then having to move to this hotel—I didn’t care about the money, really I didn’t, but he was nearly driving me crazy. Never once was I alone. It was impossible to write a letter or even to make a telephone call without Bunny lurking somewhere in the background,
arrectis auribus
, trying to listen in. While I was having a bath, he’d go in my room and root through my things; I’d come out to find my clothes all wadded up in the bureau and crumbs in the pages of my notebooks. Everything I did made him suspicious.

“I stood it as long as I could but I was beginning to feel desperate and, frankly, rather unwell too. I knew that leaving him in Rome might be dangerous but it seemed every day that things got worse and eventually it became obvious that staying on was no solution. Already I knew that the four of us could under no circumstances go back to school as usual in the spring-though look at us now—and that we’d have to devise a plan, probably a rather Pyrrhic and unsatisfactory one. But I needed time, and quiet, and a few weeks’ grace period in the States if I was to do anything of the sort. So one night at the Excelsior when Bunny was drunk and sleeping soundly I packed my clothes—leaving him his ticket home and two thousand American
dollars and no note—and took a taxi to the airport and got on the first plane home.”

“You left him two thousand dollars?” I said, aghast.

Henry shrugged. Francis shook his head and snorted. “That’s nothing,” he said.

I stared at them.

“Really, it is nothing,” said Henry mildly. “I can’t tell you how much that trip to Italy cost me. And my parents are generous, but they’re not
that
generous. I’ve never had to ask for money in my life until the last few months. As it is, my savings are virtually gone and I don’t know how much longer I can keep feeding them these stories about elaborate car repairs and so forth. I mean, I was prepared to be reasonable with Bunny, but he doesn’t seem to understand that after all I’m just a student on an allowance and not some bottomless well of money.… And the horrible thing is, I don’t see an end to it. I don’t know what would happen if my parents got disgusted and cut me off, which is extremely likely to happen at some point in the near future if things go on as they are.”

“He’s blackmailing you?”

Henry and Francis looked at each other.

“Well, not exactly,” said Francis.

Henry shook his head. “Bunny doesn’t think of it in those terms,” he said wearily. “You’d have to know his parents to understand. What the Corcorans did with their sons was to send them all to the most expensive schools they could possibly get into, and let them fend for themselves once they were there. His parents don’t give him a cent. Apparently they never have. He told me when they sent him off to Saint Jerome’s they didn’t even give him money for his schoolbooks. Rather an odd child-rearing method, in my opinion—like certain reptiles who hatch their young and abandon them to the elements. Not surprisingly, this has inculcated in Bunny the notion that it is more honorable to live by sponging off other people than it is to work.”

“But I thought his folks were supposed to be such blue-bloods,” I said.

“The Corcorans have delusions of grandeur. The problem is, they lack the money to back them up. No doubt they think it very aristocratic and grand, farming their sons off on other people.”

“He’s shameless about it,” said Francis. “Even with the twins, and they’re nearly as poor as he is.”

“The bigger the sums, the better, and never a thought of paying it back. Of course, he’d rather die than get a job.”

“The Corcorans would rather see him dead,” said Francis sourly, lighting his cigarette and coughing as he exhaled. “But this squeamishness about work wears a bit thin when one is forced to assume his upkeep oneself.”

“It’s unthinkable,” said Henry. “I’d rather have any job, six jobs, than beg from people. Look at you,” he said to me. “Your parents aren’t particularly generous with you, are they? But you’re so scrupulous about not borrowing money that it’s rather silly.”

I said nothing, embarrassed.

“Heavens. I think you might have died in that warehouse rather than wire one of us for a couple of hundred dollars.” He lit a cigarette and blew out an emphatic plume of smoke. “That’s an infinitesimal sum. I’m sure we shall have spent two or three times that on Bunny by the end of next week.”

I stared. “You’re kidding,” I said.

“I wish I were.”

“I don’t mind lending money either,” Francis said, “if I’ve got it. But Bunny borrows beyond all reason. Even in the old days he thought nothing of asking for a hundred dollars at the drop of a hat, for no reason at all.”

“And never a word of thanks,” said Henry irritably. “What can he spend it on? If he had even a shred of self-respect he’d go down to the employment office and get himself a job.”

“You and I may be down there in a couple of weeks if he doesn’t let up,” said Francis glumly, pouring himself another glass of Scotch and sloshing a good deal of it on the table. “I’ve spent thousands on him.
Thousands,
” he said to me, taking a careful sip from the trembling brim of his glass. “And most of it on restaurant bills, the pig. It’s all very friendly, why don’t
we
go out to dinner and that sort of thing, but the way things are, how can I say no? My mother thinks I’m on drugs. I don’t suppose there’s much else she can think. She’s told my grandparents not to give me any money and since January I haven’t gotten a damn thing except my dividend check. Which is fine as far as it goes, but I can’t be taking people out for hundred-dollar dinners every night.”

Henry shrugged. “He’s always been like this,” he said. “Always. He’s amusing; I liked him; I felt a little sorry for him. What was it to me, to lend him money for his schoolbooks and know he wouldn’t pay it back?”

“Except now,” Francis said, “it’s not just money for schoolbooks. And now we can’t say no.”

“How long can you keep this up?”

“Not forever.”

“And when the money’s gone?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry, reaching up behind his spectacles to rub his eyes again.

“Maybe I could talk to him.”

“
No
,” said Henry and Francis, one on top of the other, with an alacrity that surprised me.

“Why—?”

There was an awkward pause, finally broken by Francis.

“Well, you may or may not know this,” he said, “but Bunny is a little jealous of you. Already he thinks we’ve all ganged up on him. If he gets the impression you’re siding with the rest of us …”

“You mustn’t let on you know,” said Henry. “Ever. Unless you want to make things worse.”

For a moment no one spoke. The apartment was blue with smoke, through which the broad expanse of white linoleum was arctic, surreal. Music from a neighbor’s stereo was filtering through the walls. The Grateful Dead. Good Lord.

“It’s a terrible thing, what we did,” said Francis abruptly. “I mean, this man was not
Voltaire
we killed. But still. It’s a shame. I feel bad about it.”

“Well, of course, I do too,” said Henry matter-of-factly. “But not bad enough to want to go to jail for it.”

Francis snorted and poured himself another shot of whiskey and drank it straight off. “No,” he said. “Not that bad.”

No one said anything for a moment. I felt sleepy, ill, as if this were some lingering and dyspeptic dream. I had said it before, but I said it again, mildly surprised at the sound of my own voice in the quiet room. “What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know what we’re going to do,” said Henry, as calmly as if I’d asked him his plans for the afternoon.

“Well, I know what
I’m
going to do,” said Francis. He stood up unsteadily and pulled with his forefinger at his collar. Startled, I looked at him, and he laughed at my surprise.

“I want to sleep,” he said, with a melodramatic roll of his eye, “
 ‘dormir plutôt que vivre’!
”

“
 ‘Dans un sommeil aussi doux que la mort
…’ ” said Henry with a smile.

“Jesus, Henry, you know everything,” said Francis, “you make me sick.” He turned unsteadily, loosening his tie as he did it, and swayed out of the room.

“I believe he is rather drunk,” said Henry, as a door slammed somewhere and we heard taps running furiously in the bathroom. “It’s early still. Do you want to play a hand or two of cards?”

I blinked at him.

He reached over and got a deck of cards from a box on the end table—Tiffany cards, with sky-blue backs and Francis’s monogram on them in gold—and began to shuffle through them expertly. “We could play bezique, or euchre if you’d rather,” he said, the blue and gold dissolving from his hands in a blur. “I like poker myself—of course, it’s rather a vulgar game, and no fun at all with two—but still, there’s a certain random element in it which appeals to me.”

I looked at him, at his steady hands, the whirring cards, and suddenly an odd memory leapt to mind: Tojo, at the height of the war, forcing his top aides to sit up and play cards with him all night long.

He pushed the deck over to me. “Do you want to cut?” he said, and lit a cigarette.

I looked at the cards, and then at the flame of the match burning with an unwavering clarity between his fingers.

“You’re not too worried about this, are you?” I said.

Henry drew deeply on the cigarette, exhaled, shook out the match. “No,” he said, looking thoughtfully at the thread of smoke that curled from the burnt end. “I can get us out of it, I think. But that depends on the exact opportunity presenting itself and for that we’ll have to wait. I suppose it also depends to a certain extent on how much, in the end, we are willing to do. Shall I deal?” he said, and he reached for the cards again.

I awoke from a heavy, dreamless sleep to find myself lying on Francis’s couch in an uncomfortable position, and the morning sun streaming through the bank of windows at the rear. For a while I lay motionless, trying to remember where I was and how I had come to be there; it was a pleasant sensation which was abruptly soured when I recalled what had happened the previous night. I sat up and rubbed the waffled pattern the sofa cushion had left on my cheek. The movement made my head ache. I stared at the overflowing ashtray, the three-quarters-empty bottle
of Famous Grouse, the game of poker solitaire laid out upon the table. So it had all been real; it wasn’t a dream.

I was thirsty. I went to the kitchen, my footsteps echoing in the silence, and drank a glass of water standing at the sink. It was seven a.m. by the kitchen clock.

I filled my glass again and took it to the living room with me and sat on the couch. As I drank, more slowly this time—bolting the first glass had made me slightly nauseous—I looked at Henry’s solitaire poker game. He must have laid it out while I was asleep. Instead of going all out for flushes in the columns, and full houses and fours on the rows, which was the prudent thing to do in this game, he’d tried for a couple of straight flushes on the rows and missed. Why had he done that? To see if he could beat the odds? Or had he only been tired?

I picked up the cards and shuffled them and laid them out again one by one, in accordance with the strategic rules that he himself had taught me, and beat his score by fifty points. The cold, jaunty faces stared back at me: jacks in black and red, the Queen of Spades with her fishy eye. Suddenly a wave of fatigue and nausea shuddered over me, and I went to the closet, got my coat, and left, closing the door quietly behind me.

The hall, in the morning light, had the feel of a hospital corridor. Pausing unsteadily on the stairs, I looked back at Francis’s door, indistinguishable from the others in the long faceless row.

I suppose if I had a moment of doubt at all it was then, as I stood in that cold, eerie stairwell looking back at the apartment from which I had come. Who were these people? How well did I know them? Could I trust any of them, really, when it came right down to it? Why, of all people, had they chosen to tell me?

It’s funny, but thinking back on it now, I realize that this particular point in time, as I stood there blinking in the deserted hall, was the one point at which I might have chosen to do something very different from what I actually did. But of course I didn’t see this crucial moment then for what it was; I suppose we never do. Instead, I only yawned, and shook myself from the momentary daze that had come upon me, and went on my way down the stairs.