The Secret History (42 page)

In the third week of April, when the lawns were green as Heaven and the apple blossoms had recklessly blown, I was reading in my room on a Friday night, with the windows open and a cool, damp wind stirring the papers on my desk. There was a party across the lawn, and laughter and music floated through the night air. It was long after midnight. I was nodding, half-asleep over my book, when someone bellowed my name outside my window.

I shook myself and sat up, just in time to see one of Bunny’s shoes flying through my open window. It hit the floor with a thud. I jumped up and leaned over the sill. Far below, I saw his staggering, shaggy-headed figure, attempting to steady itself by clutching at the trunk of a small tree.

“What the hell’s wrong with you?”

He didn’t reply, only raised his free hand in a gesture half wave, half salute, and reeled out of the light. The back door
slammed, and a few moments later he was banging on the door of my room.

When I opened it he came limping in, one shoe off and one shoe on, leaving a muddy trail of macabre, unmatched footprints behind him. His spectacles were askew and he stank of whiskey. “Dickie boy,” he mumbled.

The outburst beneath my window seemed to have exhausted him and left him strangely uncommunicative. He tugged off his muddy sock and tossed it clumsily away from him. It landed on my bed.

By degrees, I managed to extricate from him the evening’s events. The twins had taken him to dinner, afterwards to a bar in town for more drinks; he’d then gone alone to the party across the lawn, where a Dutchman had tried to make him smoke pot and a freshman girl had given him tequila from a thermos. (“Pretty little gal. Sort of a Deadhead, though. She was wearing clogs, you know those things? And a tie-dyed T-shirt. I can’t stand them. ‘Honey,’ I said, ‘you’re such a cutie, how come you want to get yourself up in that nasty stuff?’ ”) Then, abruptly, he broke off this narrative and lurched away—leaving the door of my room open behind him—and I heard the sound of noisy, athletic vomiting.

He was gone a long time. When he returned he smelled sour, and his face was damp and very pale; but he seemed composed. “Whew,” he said, collapsing in my chair and mopping his forehead with a red bandanna. “Musta been something I ate.”

“Did you make it to the bathroom?” I asked uncertainly. The vomiting had sounded ominously near my own door.

“Naw,” he said, breathing heavily. “Ran in the broom closet. Get me a glass of water, wouldja.”

In the hall, the door to the service closet hung partly open, providing a coy glimpse of the reeking horror within. I hurried past it to the kitchen.

Bunny looked at me glassily when I came back in. His expression had changed entirely, and something about it made me uneasy. I gave him the water and he took a large, greedy gulp.

“Not too quick,” I said, alarmed.

He paid no attention and drank the rest in a swallow, then set the glass on the desk with a trembling hand. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead.

“Oh, my God,” he said. “Sweet Jesus.”

Uneasily, I crossed to my bed and sat down, trying to think of some neutral subject, but before I could say anything he spoke again.

“Can’t stomach it any longer,” he mumbled. “Just can’t. Sweet Italian Jesus.”

I didn’t say anything.

Shakily, he passed a hand over his forehead. “You don’t even know what the devil I’m talking about, do you?” he said, with an oddly nasty tone in his voice.

Agitated, I recrossed my legs. I’d seen this coming, seen it coming for months and dreaded it. I had an impulse to rush from the room, just leave him sitting there, but then he buried his face in his hands.

“All true,” he mumbled. “All true. Swear to God. Nobody knows but me.”

Absurdly, I found myself hoping it was a false alarm. Maybe he and Marion had broken up. Maybe his father had died of a heart attack. I sat there, paralyzed.

He dragged his palms down over his face, as if he were wiping water from it, and looked up at me. “You don’t have a clue,” he said. His eyes were bloodshot, uncomfortably bright. “Boy. You don’t have a fucking clue.”

I stood up, unable to bear it any longer, and looked around my room distractedly. “Uh,” I said, “do you want an aspirin? I meant to ask you earlier. If you take a couple now you won’t feel so bad in the—”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” Bunny said abruptly.

Somehow I’d always known it was going to happen this way, the two of us alone, Bunny drunk, late at night.… “Why no,” I said. “All you need is a little—”

“You think I’m a lunatic. Bats in the belfry.
Nobody listens to me
,” he said, his voice rising.

I was alarmed. “Calm down,” I said. “I’m listening to you.”

“Well, listen to this,” he said.

It was three in the morning when he stopped talking. The story he told was drunken and garbled, out of sequence and full of vituperative, self-righteous digressions; but I had no problem understanding it. It was a story I’d already heard. For a while we sat there, mute. My desk light was shining in my eyes. The party across the way was still going strong and a faint but boisterous rap song throbbed obtrusively in the distance.

Bunny’s breathing had become loud and asthmatic. His head fell on his chest, and he woke with a start. “What?” he said, confused, as if someone had come up behind him and shouted in his ear. “Oh. Yes.”

I didn’t say anything.

“What do you think about that, eh?”

I was unable to answer. I’d hoped, faintly, that he might have blacked it all out.

“Damndest thing. Fact truer than fiction, boy. Wait, that’s not right. How’s it go?”

“Fact stranger than fiction,” I said mechanically. It was fortunate, I suppose, that I didn’t have to make an effort to look shaken up or stunned. I was so upset I was nearly sick.

“Just goes to show,” said Bunny drunkenly. “Could be the guy next door. Could be anybody. Never can tell.”

I put my face in my hands.

“Tell anybody you want,” Bunny said. “Tell the goddamn mayor. I don’t care. Lock ’em right up in that combination post office and jail they got down by the courthouse. Thinks he’s so smart,” he muttered. “Well, if this wasn’t Vermont he wouldn’t be sleeping so well at night, let me tell you. Why, my dad’s best friends with the police commissioner in Hartford.
He
ever finds out about this—
geez
. He and Dad were at school together. Used to date his daughter in the tenth grade.…” His head was drooping and he shook himself again. “Jesus,” he said, nearly falling out of his chair.

I stared at him.

“Give me that shoe, would you?”

I handed it to him, and his sock too. He looked at them for a moment, then stuffed them in the outside pocket of his blazer. “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” he said, and then he was gone, leaving the door of my room open behind him. I could hear his peculiar limping progress all the way down the stairs.

The objects in the room seemed to swell and recede with each thump of my heart. In a horrible daze, I sat on my bed, one elbow on the windowsill, and tried to pull myself together. Diabolical rap music floated from the opposite building, where a couple of shadowy figures were crouched on the roof, throwing empty beer cans at a disconsolate band of hippies huddled around a bonfire in a trash can, trying to smoke a joint. A beer can sailed from the roof, then another, which hit one of them on the head with a tinny sound. Laughter, aggrieved cries.

I was gazing at the sparks flying from the garbage can when suddenly I was struck by a harrowing thought. Why had Bunny decided to come to my room instead of Cloke’s, or Marion’s? As I looked out the windows the answer was so obvious it gave me a chill. It was because my room was by far the closest. Marion lived in Roxburgh, on the other end of campus, and Cloke’s was on the far side of Durbinstall. Neither place was readily apparent to a drunk stumbling out into the night. But Monmouth was scarcely thirty feet away, and my own room, with its conspicuously lighted window, must have loomed in his path like a beacon.

I suppose it would be interesting to say that at this point I felt torn in some way, grappled with the moral implications of each of the courses available to me. But I don’t recall experiencing anything of the sort. I put on a pair of loafers and went downstairs to call Henry.

The pay phone in Monmouth was on a wall by the back door, too exposed for my taste, so I walked over to the Science Building, my shoes squelching on the dewy grass, and found a particularly isolated booth on the third floor near the chemistry labs.

The phone must’ve rung a hundred times. No answer. Finally, in exasperation, I pressed down the receiver and dialed the twins. Eight rings, nine; then, to my relief, Charles’s sleepy hello.

“Hi, it’s me,” I said quickly. “Something happened.”

“What?” he said, suddenly alert. I could hear him sitting up in bed.

“He told me. Just now.”

There was a long silence.

“Hello?” I said.

“Call Henry,” said Charles abruptly. “Hang up the phone and call him right now.”

“I already did. He’s not answering the phone.”

Charles swore under his breath. “Let me think,” he said. “Oh, hell. Can you come over?”

“Sure. Now?”

“I’ll run down to Henry’s and see if I can get him to the door. We should be back by the time you get here. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

When I got there, about twenty minutes later, I met Charles coming from the direction of Henry’s, alone.

“No luck?”

“No,” he said, breathing hard. His hair was rumpled and he had a raincoat on over his pajamas.

“What’ll we do?”

“I don’t know. Come upstairs. We’ll think of something.”

We had just got our coats off when the light in Camilla’s room came on and she appeared in the doorway, blinking, cheeks aflame. “Charles? What are
you
doing here?” she said when she saw me.

Rather incoherently, Charles explained what had happened. With a drowsy forearm she shielded her eyes from the light and listened. She was wearing a man’s nightshirt, much too big for her, and I found myself staring at her bare legs—tawny calves, slender ankles, lovely, dusty-soled boy-feet.

“Is he there?” she said.

“I know he is.”

“You sure?”

“Where else would he be at three in the morning?”

“Wait a second,” she said, and went to the telephone. “I just want to try something.” She dialed, listened for a moment, hung up, dialed again.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a code,” she said, the receiver cradled between shoulder and ear. “Ring twice, hang up, ring again.”

“
Code?
”

“Yes. He told me once—Oh, hello, Henry,” she said suddenly, and sat down.

Charles looked at me.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” he said quietly. “He must have been awake the whole time.”

“Yes,” Camilla was saying; she stared at the floor, bobbing the foot of her crossed leg idly up and down. “That’s fine. I’ll tell him.”

She hung up. “He says to come over, Richard,” she said. “You should leave now. He’s waiting for you. Why are you looking at me like that?” she said crossly to Charles.

“Code, eh?”

“What about it?”

“You never told me about it.”

“It’s stupid. I never thought to.”

“What do you and Henry need a secret code for?”

“It’s not a secret.”

“Then why didn’t you tell me?”

“Charles, don’t be such a baby.”