The Secret History (89 page)

Henry started to talk. It was so painful to hear him—Henry!—stumble over his words that I am afraid I blocked out much of what he said. He began, in typical fashion, by attempting to justify himself but that soon faltered in the white glare of Julian’s silence. Then—I still shudder to remember it—a desperate, pleading note crept into his voice. “I disliked having to lie, of course”—disliked! as if he were talking about an ugly necktie, a dull dinner party!—“we never
wanted
to lie to you, but it was necessary. That is, I felt it was necessary. The first matter was an accident; there
was no use in worrying you about it, was there? And then, with Bunny … He wasn’t a happy person in those last months. I’m sure you know that. He was having a lot of personal problems, problems with his family.…”

He went on and on. Julian’s silence was vast, arctic. A black buzzing noise echoed in my head.
I can’t stand this
, I thought,
I’ve got to leave
, but still Henry talked, and still I stood there, and the sicker and blacker I felt to hear Henry’s voice and to see the look on Julian’s face.

Unable to stand it, I finally turned to go. Julian saw me do it.

Abruptly, he cut Henry off. “That’s enough,” he said.

There was an awful pause. I stared at him.
This is it
, I thought, with a kind of fascinated horror.
He won’t listen anymore. He doesn’t want to be left alone with him
.

Julian reached into his pocket. The expression on his face was impossible to read. He took the letter out and handed it to Henry. “I think you’d better keep this,” he said.

He didn’t get up from the table. The two of us left his office without a word. Funny, when I think about it now. That was the last time I ever saw him.

Henry and I didn’t speak in the hallway. Slowly, we drifted out, eyes averted, like strangers. As I went down the stairs he was standing by the windowsill on the landing, looking out, blind and unseeing.

Francis was panic-stricken when he saw the look on my face. “Oh, no,” he said. “Oh, my God. What’s happened?”

It was a long time before I could say anything. “Julian saw it,” I said.

“
What?
”

“He saw the letterhead. Henry’s got it now.”

“How’d he get it?”

“Julian gave it to him.”

Francis was jubilant. “He gave it to him? He gave Henry the letter?”

“Yes.”

“And he’s not going to tell anyone?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

He was startled by the gloom in my voice.

“But what’s the matter?” he said shrilly. “You got it, didn’t you? It’s okay. Everything’s all right now. Isn’t it?”

I was staring out the car window, at the window of Julian’s office.

“No,” I said, “no, I don’t really think that it is.”

Years ago, in an old notebook, I wrote: “One of Julian’s most attractive qualities is his inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light.” And under it, in a different ink, “maybe one of my most attractive qualities, as well (?)”

It has always been hard for me to talk about Julian without romanticizing him. In many ways, I loved him the most of all; and it is with him that I am most tempted to embroider, to flatter, to basically reinvent. I think that is because Julian himself was constantly in the process of reinventing the people and events around him, conferring kindness, or wisdom, or bravery, or charm, on actions which contained nothing of the sort. It was one of the reasons I loved him: for that flattering light in which he saw me, for the person I was when I was with him, for what it was he allowed me to be.

Now, of course, it would be easy for me to veer to the opposite extreme. I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched onto young people who wanted to feel better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistic impulse of his own. And I could elaborate on this at some length and with, I believe, a fair degree of accuracy. But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality or why—even in the light of subsequent events—I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.

But even in fairy tales, these kindly old gentlemen with their fascinating offers are not always what they seem to be. That should not be a particularly difficult truth for me to accept at this point but for some reason it is. More than anything I wish I could say that Julian’s face crumbled when he heard what we had done. I wish I could say that he put his head on the table and wept, wept for Bunny, wept for us, wept for the wrong turns and the life wasted: wept for himself, for being so blind, for having over and over again refused to see.

And the thing is, I had a strong temptation to say he
had done these things anyway, though it wasn’t at all the truth.

George Orwell—a keen observer of what lay behind the glitter of constructed facades, social and otherwise—had met Julian on several occasions, and had not liked him. To a friend he wrote: “Upon meeting Julian Morrow, one has the impression that he is a man of extraordinary sympathy and warmth. But what you call his ‘Asiatic serenity’ is, I think, a mask for great coldness. The face one shows him he invariably reflects back at one, creating the illusion of warmth and depth when in fact he is brittle and shallow as a mirror. Acton”—this, apparently, Harold Acton, who was also in Paris then and a friend to both Orwell and Julian—“disagrees. But I think he is not a man to be trusted.”

I have thought a great deal about this passage, also about a particularly shrewd remark once made by, of all people, Bunny. “Y’know,” he said, “Julian is like one of those people that’ll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest.” This seems rather enigmatic on the face of it, but actually I cannot think of a better metaphor for Julian’s personality. It is similar to another remark made to me once by Georges Laforgue, on an occasion when I had been extolling Julian to the skies. “Julian,” he said curtly, “will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.”

When I disagreed—strenuously—and asked what was wrong with focusing one’s entire attention on only two things, if those two things were Art and Beauty, Laforgue replied: “There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.”

It’s funny. In retelling these events, I have fought against a tendency to sentimentalize Julian, to make him seem very saintly—basically to falsify him—in order to make our veneration of him seem more explicable; to make it seem something more, in short, than my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good. And I know I said earlier that he was perfect but he wasn’t perfect, far from it; he could be silly and vain and remote and often cruel and still we loved him, in spite of, because.

Charles was released from the hospital the following day. Despite Francis’s insistence that he come to his house for a while, he
insisted on going home to his own apartment. His cheeks were sunken; he’d lost a lot of weight and he needed a haircut. He was sullen and depressed. We didn’t tell him what had happened.

I felt sorry for Francis. I could tell he was worried about Charles, and upset that he was so hostile and uncommunicative. “Would you like some lunch?” he asked him.

“No.”

“Come on. Let’s go to the Brasserie.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“It’ll be good. I’ll buy you one of those roulage things you like for dessert.”

We went to the Brasserie. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. By an unfortunate coincidence, the waiter sat us at the table by the window where Francis and I had sat with Julian less than twenty-four hours before. Charles wouldn’t look at a menu. He ordered two Bloody Marys and drank them in quick succession. Then he ordered a third.

Francis and I put down our forks and exchanged an uneasy glance.

“Charles,” Francis said, “why don’t you get an omelet or something?”

“I told you I’m not hungry.”

Francis picked up a menu and gave it a quick once-over. Then he motioned to the waiter.

“I said I’m
not fucking hungry
,” said Charles without looking up. He was having a hard time keeping his cigarette balanced between his first and middle fingers.

Nobody had much to say after that. We finished eating and got the check, not before Charles had time to finish his third Bloody Mary and order a fourth. We had to help him to the car.

I was not much looking forward to going to Greek class, but when Monday rolled around I got up and went anyway. Henry and Camilla arrived separately—in case Charles decided to show up, I think—which, thank God, he didn’t. Henry, I noticed, was puffy and very pale. He stared out the window and ignored Francis and me.