The secret history

Donna Tartt (1992)

  • Prologue:
    • It was difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe that I could have walked through it - the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl - without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in air.
  • Book I:
    • I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.
    • Chapter 1:
      • Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
      • Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for mean expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
      • sound empirical argument for gloom
      • While to a certain extent Milton is right - the mind is its own place and in itself can make a Heaven of Hell and so forth - it is nonetheless clear that Plano was modeled less on Paradise than that other, more dolorous city.
      • mezzanines
      • garrulous
      • ablative
      • solicitude
      • I was charmed by his conversation, and despite its illusion of being rather modern and digressive (to me, the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject) I now see that he was leading me by circumlocution to the same points again and again. For if the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless. It is not a quality of intelligence that one encounters frequently these days. But though I can digress with the best of them, I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive.
      • It is my policy never to accept a pupil unless I him his conselor as well.
      • 'I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind, in the same way I believe that it is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially,' he said. 'I know the modern world tends not to agree with me, but after all, Plato had only one teacher, and Alexander.'
      • ('Work?' he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. 'Do you really think that what we do is work?' 'What else should I call it?' 'I should call it the most glorious kind of play.'
      • "All right," said Julian, looking around the table. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?"
      • Thus he died, and all the life struggled out of him; and as he died he spattered me with the dark red and violent-driven rain of bitter-savored blood to make me glad, as gardens stand among the showers of God in glory at the birthtime of the buds.
      • 'Death is the mother of beauty,' said Henry. 'And what is beauty?' 'Terror,' 'Well said,' said Julian. 'Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.' I looked at Camilla, her face bright in the sun, and thought of that line from the Iliad I love so much, about Pallas Athene and the terrible eyes shining. 'And if beauty is terror,' said Julian, 'then what is desire? We think we have many desires, but in fact we have only one. What is it?' 'To live,' said Camilla. 'To live forever,' said Bunny, chin cupped in palm. The teakettle began to whistle.
      • 'We don't like to admit it,' said Julian, 'but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people – the ancients no less than us – have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks or the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?' I looked around the table at the six faces. To modern tastes they were somewhat chilling. I imagine any other teacher would've been on the phone to Psychological Counseling in about five minutes had he heard what Henry said about arming the Greek class and marching into Hampden town. 'And it's a temptation for any intelligent person, and especially for perfectionists such as the ancients and ourselves, to try to murder the primitive, emotive, appetitive self. But that is a mistake.' 'Why?' said Francis, leaning slightly forward. Julian arched an eyebrow; his long, wise nose gave his profile a forward tilt, like an Etruscan in a bas-relief. 'Because it is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, then the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue. Otherwise those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. For a warning of what happens in the absence of such a pressure valve, we have the example of the Romans. The emperors. Think, for example, of Tiberius, the ugly stepson, trying to live up to the command of his stepfather Augustus. Think of the tremendous, impossible strain he must have undergone, following in the footsteps of a savior, a god. The people hated him. No matter how hard he tried he was never good enough, could never be rid of the hateful self, and finally the floodgates broke. He was swept away on his perversions and he died, old and mad, lost in the pleasure gardens of Capri: not even happy there, as one might hope, but miserable. Before he died he wrote a letter home to the Senate. "May all the Gods and Goddesses visit me with more utter destruction than I feel I am daily suffering." Think of those who came after him. Caligula. Nero.' He paused. 'The Roman genius, and perhaps the Roman flaw,' he said, 'was an obsession with order. One sees it in their architecture, their literature, their laws – this fierce denial of darkness, unreason, chaos.' He laughed. 'Easy to see why the Romans, usually so tolerant of foreign religions, persecuted the Christians mercilessly – how absurd to think a common criminal had risen from the dead, how appalling that his followers celebrated him by drinking his blood. The illogic of it frightened them and they did everything they could to crush it. In fact, I think the reason they took such drastic steps was because they were not only frightened but also terribly attracted to it. Pragma tists are often strangely superstitious. For all their logic, who lived in more abject terror of the supernatural than the Romans? 'The Greeks were different. They had a passion for order and symmetry, much like the Romans, but they knew how foolish it was to deny the unseen world, the old gods. Emotion, darkness, barbarism.' He looked at the ceiling for a moment, his face almost troubled. 'Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier, of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?' he said. 'It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.' We were all leaning forward, motionless. My mouth had fallen open; I was aware of every breath I took. 'And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.'
      • Dr Blind (pronounced 'Blend') was about ninety years old and had taught, for the past fifty years, a course called 'Invariant Subspaces' which was noted for its monotony and virtually absolute unintelligibility, as well as for the fact that the final exam, as long as anyone could remember, had consisted of the same single yes-or-no question. The question was three pages long but the answer was always 'Yes.' That was all you needed to know to pass Invariant Subspaces. 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. I murmured an excuse and slipped away, leaving them to their own formidable devices.
    • Chapter 2:
      • I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she'd firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop- psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie – all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of 'inadequacy' and 'poor self-image,' all those banal sorrows. She was one of the main reasons I was in such an agony to leave home; she was also one of the reasons I was so wary of the bright, apparently innocuous flock of new girls I had met my first weeks of school.
      • she's what you call a bramble rose, as opposed to your hybrid tea
      • I'd apologize for dragging you away from your book if you hadn't brought it with you.
      • augury
      • bilious
      • Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.
      • syncopation
      • memories of things I'd never known
      • petulant
      • She was a living reverie for me: the mere sight of her sparked an almost infinite range of fantast, from Greek to Gothic, from vulgar to divine.
      • "I mean, do you have any plans?" He laughed. "What are you doing for the next forty or fifty years of your life?"
    • Chapter 3:
      • Henry refused to read it. 'I'm sure it's over my head, Bunny, really,' he said, glancing over the first page. 'Say, what's wrong with this type?' 'Triple-spaced it,' said Bunny proudly. 'These lines are about an inch apart.' 'Looks kind of like free verse, doesn't it?' Henry made a funny little snorting noise through his nose. 'Looks kind of like a menu,' he said.
      • "No. I am rather curious to see what it is like. 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."
    • Chapter 4:
      • goodness, you magpies
      • Julian laughed and recited an aphorism from Xenophon, which was literally about tents and soldiers and the enemy nigh, but which carried the implication that in troubled times it was best to go to one's own people for help.
      • a nude Barbie doll hanging from the doorknob by a noose
      • 'Do you remember last fall, in Julian's class, when we studied what Plato calls telestic madness? Bakcheia? Dionysiac frenzy?' 'Yes,' I said, rather impatiently. It was just like Henry to bring up something like this right now. '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.' He shrugged. 'Why would you want to do something like that?' 'I was obsessed with the idea.' 'Why?' 'Well, as far as I knew, it hadn't been done for two thousand years.' He paused, when he saw he hadn't convinced me. 'After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,' he said. 'To escape the cognitive mode of experience, to transcend the accident of one's moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.' 'Like what?' 'Well, it's not called a mystery for nothing,' said Henry sourly. 'Take my word for it. But one mustn't underestimate the primal appeal – to lose one's self, lose it utterly. And in losing it be born to the principle of continuous life, outside the prison of mortality and time. That was attractive to me from the first, even when I knew nothing ahont the topic and approached it less as potential mystes than anthropologist. Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals – the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say. More difficult was the mystery itself: how did one propel oneself into such a state, what was the catalyst?' His voice was dreamy, amused. 'We tried everything. Drink, drugs, prayer, even small doses of poison. On the night of our first attempt, we simply overdrank and passed out in our chitons in the woods near Francis's house.' 'You wore chitons'?' 'Yes,' said Henry, irritated. 'It was all in the interests of science. We made them from bed sheets in Francis's attic. At any rate. The first night nothing happened at all, except we were hung over and stiff from having slept on the ground. So the next time we didn't drink as much, but there we all were, in the middle of the night on the hill behind Francis's house, drunk and in chitons and singing Greek hymns like something from a fraternity initiation, and all at once Bunny began to laugh so hard that he fell over like a ninepin and rolled down the hill. 'It was rather obvious that drink alone wasn't going to do the trick. Goodness. I couldn't tell you all the things we tried. Vigils. Fasting. Libations. It depresses me even to think about it. We burned hemlock branches and breathed the fumes. I knew the Pythia had chewed laurel leaves, but that didn't work either. You found those laurel leaves, if you recall, on the stove in Francis's kitchen.' I stared at him. 'Why didn't I know about any of this?' I said. Henry reached into his pocket for a cigarette. 'Well, really,' he said, 'I think that's kind of obvious.' 'What do you mean?' 'Of course we weren't going to tell you. We hardly knew you. You would have thought we were crazy.' He was quiet for a I moment. 'You see, we had almost nothing to go on,' he said. 'I ^ suppose in a certain way I was misled by accounts of the Pythia, ™ the pneuma enthusiastikon, poisonous vapors and so forth. Those processes, though sketchy, are more well documented than Bacchic methods, and I thought for a while that the two must be related. Only after a long period of trial and error did it become evident that they were not, and that what we were missing was something, in all likelihood, quite simple. Which it was.' 'And what might that have been?' 'Only this. To receive the god, in this or any other mystery, one has to be in a state of euphemia, cultic purity. That is at the very center of Bacchic mystery. Even Plato speaks of it. Before the Divine can take over, the mortal self- the dust of us, the part that decays – must be made clean as possible.' 'How is that?' 'Through symbolic acts, most of them fairly universal in the Greek world. Water poured over the head, baths, fasting – Bunny wasn't so good about the fasting nor about the baths, either, if you ask me but the rest of us went through the motions. The more we did it, though, the more meaningless it all began to seem, until, one day, I was struck by something rather obvious – namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.' He paused. 'Do you know,' he said, 'what Julian says about the Divine Comedy'?' 'No, Henry, I don't.' 'That it's incomprehensible to someone who isn't a Christian? That if one is to read Dante, and understand him, one must become a Christian if only for a few hours? It was the same with this. It had to be approached on its own terms, not in a voyeuristic light or even a scholarly one. At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.' He took one last drag of his cigarette and put it out. 'Quite simply,' he said, 'we didii I believe. And belie! was the one condition which was absolutely necessary. Belief, and absolute surrender.' I waited for him to continue. 'At this point, you must understand, we were on the verge of giving up,' he said calmly. 'The enterprise had been interesting, but not that interesting; and besides, it was a good deal of trouble. You don't know how many times you almost stumbled on us.' 'No?' 'No.' He took a drink of his whiskey. 'I don't suppose you remember coming downstairs one night in the country, about three in the morning,' he said. 'Down to the library to get a book. We heard you on the stairs. I was hidden behind the draperies; I could have reached out and touched you if I'd wanted. Another time you woke up before we even got home. We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars – it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark. Besides, it was getting cold. They say that the oreibasia took place in midwinter, but I daresay the Peloponnesus is considerably milder that time of year than Vermont. 'We'd worked on it so long, though, and it seemed senseless, in light of our revelation, not to try once more before the weather turned. Everything got serious all of a sudden. We fasted for three days, longer than we ever had before. A messenger came to me in a dream. Everything was going beautifully, on the brink of taking wing, and I had a feeling that I'd never had, that reality itself was transforming around us in some beautiful and dangerous fashion, that we were being driven by a force we didn't understand, towards an end I did not know.' He reached for his drink again. 'The only problem was Bunny. He didn't grasp, in some fundamental way, that things had changed significantly. We were closer than we'd ever been, and every day counted; already it was terribly cold, and if it snowed, which it might have any day, we'd have had to wait till spring. I couldn't bear the thought that, after everything we'd done, he'd ruin it at the last minute. And I knew he would. At the crucial moment he'd start to tell some asinine joke and ruin everything. By the second day I was having my doubts, and then, on the afternoon of the night itself, Charles saw him in Commons having a grilled cheese sandwich and a milk shake. That did it. We decided to slip away without him. To go out on the weekends was too risky, since you'd almost caught us several times already, so we'd been driving out late on Thursday and getting back about three or four the next morning. Except this time we left early, before dinner, and didn't say a word to him about it.' He lit a cigarette. There was a long pause. 'So?' I said. 'What happened?' He laughed. 'I don't know what to say.' 'What do you mean?' 'I mean that it worked.' 'It worked"!' 'Absolutely.' 'But how could-?' 'It worked.' 'I don't think I understand what you mean when you say "it worked."' 'I mean it in the most literal sense.' 'But how?' 'It was heart-shaking. Glorious. Torches, dizziness, singing. Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know… I mean we think of phenomenal change as being the very essence of time, when it's not at all. Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist; there is no ego, no "I," and yet it's not at all like those horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions, the self being a drop of water swallowed by the ocean of the universe. It's more as if the universe expands to fill the boundaries of the self. You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy. It was like being a baby. I couldn't remember my name. The soles of my feet were cut to pieces and I couldn't even feel it.' 'But these are fundamentally sex rituals, aren't they?' It came out not as a question but as a statement. He didn't blink, but sat waiting for me to continue. 'Well? Aren't they?' He leaned over to rest his cigarette in the ashtray. 'Of course,' he said agreeably, cool as a priest in his dark suit and ascetic spectacles. 'You know that as well as I do.' We sat looking at each other for a moment. 'What exactly did you do?' I said. 'Well, really, I think we needn't go into that now,' he said smoothly. 'There was a certain carnal element to the proceedings but the phenomenon was basically spiritual in nature.' 'You saw Dionysus, I suppose?' I had not meant this at all seriously, and I was startled when he nodded as casually as if I'd asked him if he'd done his homework. 'You saw him corporeally! Goatskin? Thyrsus?' 'How do you know what Dionysus is?' said Henry, a bit sharply. 'What do you think it was we saw? A cartoon? A drawing from the side of a vase?' 'I just can't believe you're telling me you actually saw ' 'What if you had never seen the sea before? What if the only thing you'd ever seen was a child's picture – blue crayon, choppy waves? Would you know the real sea if you only knew the picture? Would you be able to recognize the real thing even if you saw it? You don't know what Dionysus looks like. We're talking about God here. God is serious business.' He leaned back in his chair and scrutinized me. 'You don't have to take my word for any of this, you know,' he said. 'There were four of us. Charles had a bloody bite-mark on his arm that he had no idea how he'd got, but it wasn't a human bite. Too big. And strange puncture marks instead of teeth. Camilla said that during part of it, she'd believed she was a deer; and that was odd, too, because the rest of us remember chasing a deer through the woods, for miles it seemed. Actually, it was miles. I know that for a fact. Apparently we ran and ran and ran, because when we came to ourselves we had no idea where we were. Later we figured out that we had got over at least four barbed-wire fences, though how I don't know, and were well off Francis's property, seven or eight miles into the country. This is where I come to the rather unfortunate part of my story. 'I have only the vaguest memory of this. I heard something behind me, or someone, and I wheeled around, almost losing my balance, and swung at whatever it was – a large, indistinct, yellow thing – with my closed fist, my left, which is not my good one. I felt a terrible pain in my knuckles and then, almost instantly, something knocked the breath right out of me. It was dark, you understand; I couldn't really see. I swung out again with my right, hard as I could and with all my weight behind it, and this time I heard a loud crack and a scream. 'We're not too clear on what happened after that. Camilla was a good deal ahead, but Charles and Francis were fairly close behind and had soon caught up with me.,' have a distinct recollection of being on my feet and seeing the two of them crash through the bushes – God. I can see them now. Their hair was tangled with leaves and mud and their clothes virtually in shreds. They stood there, panting, glassy-eyed and hostile – I didn't recognize either of them, and I think we might have started to fight had not the moon come from behind a cloud. We stared at each other. Things started to come back. I looked down at my hand and saw it was covered with blood, and worse than blood. Then Charles stepped forward and knelt at something at my feet, and I bent down, too, and saw that it was a man. He was dead. He was about forty years old and he had on a yellow plaid shirt – you know those woolen shirts they wear up here – and his neck was broken, and, unpleasant to say, his brains were all over his face. Really, I do not know how that happened. There was a dreadful mess. I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses. 'Charles tells a different story. He remembers seeing me by the body. But he says he also has a memory of struggling with something, pulling as hard as he could, and all of a sudden becoming aware that what he was pulling at was a man's arm, with his foot braced in the armpit. Francis – well, I can't say. Every time you talk to him, he remembers something different.' 'And Camilla?' Henry sighed. 'I suppose we'll never know what really happened,' he said. 'We didn't find her until a good bit later. She was sitting quietly on the bank of a stream with her feet in the water, her robe perfectly white, and no blood anywhere except for her hair. It was dark and clotted, completely soaked. As if she'd tried to dye it red.' 'How could that have happened?' 'We don't know.' He lit another cigarette. 'Anyway, the man was dead. And there we were in the middle of the woods, half- naked and covered with mud with this body on the ground in front of us. We were all in a daze. I was fading in and out, nearly went to sleep; but then Francis went over for a closer look and had a pretty violent attack of the dry heaves. Something about that brought me to my senses. I told Charles to find Camilla and then I knelt down and went through the man's pockets. There wasn't much – I found something or other that had his name on it – but of course that wasn't any help. 'I had no idea what to do. You must remember that it was getting cold, and I hadn't slept or eaten for a long time, and my mind wasn't at its clearest. For a few minutes – goodness, how confusing this was – I thought of digging a grave but then I realized that would be madness. We couldn't linger around all night. We didn't know where we were, or who might happen along, or even what time it was. Besides, we had nothing to dig a grave with. For a moment I nearly panicked – we couldn't just leave the body in the open, could we? – but then I realized it was the only thing we could do. My God. We didn't even know where the car was. I couldn't picture dragging this corpse over hill and dale for goodness knows how long; and even if we got it to the car, where would we take it? 'So when Charles came back with Camilla, we just left. Which, in retrospect, was the smartest thing we could have done. It's not as if teams of expert coroners are crawling all over upstate Vermont. It's a primitive place. People die violent natural deaths all the time. We didn't even know who the man was; there was nothing to tie us to him. All we had to worry about was finding the car and then making our way home without anyone seeing us.' He leaned over and poured himself some more Scotch. 'Which is exactly what we did.' I poured myself another glass, too, and we sat without speaking for a minute or more. 'Henry,' I said at last. 'Good God.' He raised an eyebrow. 'Really, it was more upsetting than you can imagine,' he said. 'Once I hit a deer with my car. It was a beautiful creature and to see it struggling, blood everywhere, legs broken… And this was even more distressing but at least I thought it was over. I never dreamed we'd hear anything else about it.' He took a drink of his Scotch. 'Unfortunately, that is not the case,' he said. 'Bunny has seen to that.' 'What do you mean?' 'You saw him this morning. He's driven us half mad over this. I am very nearly at the end of my rope.' There was the sound of a key being turned in the lock. I lenry brought up his glass and drank the rest of his whiskey in a long swallow. That'll be Francis,' he said, and turned on the overhead light.
    • Chapter 5:
      • With ships they had nothing to do...
      • demurral
      • ecause
      • Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency.
      • easy delights of English literature to the coolie labor of Greek
      • aloof
      • "Not for all the tea in China."
      • Bats in the belfry.
      • verdant
      • Her hair was tousled, and her lovely mouth was stained dark by the Popsicle drink, and just by looking at her I could tell she didn't have the faintest idea what was going on at Henry's. She would go with them tomorrow. Somebody would probably tell her that she didn't have to go, but she would end up going with them anyway. I coughed. 'Look,' I said. 'What?' 'Come home with me.' She lowered her eyebrows. 'Now?' 'Yes.' 'Why?' The wind chimes tinkled again; silvery, insidious. 'Because I want you to.' She gazed at me with vacant, drunken composure, standing coltlike on the outer edge of her black-stockinged foot so the ankle was twisted inward in a startling, effortless L. Her hand was in mine. I squeezed it hard. Clouds were racing across the moon. 'Come on,' I said. She raised up on tiptoe and gave me a cool, soft kiss that tasted of Popsicles. Oh, you, I thought, my heart beating fast and shallow. Suddenly, she broke away. 'I've got to go,' she said. 'No. Please don't.' 'I've got to. They'll wonder where I am.' She gave me a quick kiss, then turned and started down the street. I watched her until she reached the corner, then dug my hands in my pockets and started back home.
      • "Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o'clock, you hardly think what you're going to feed the corpse for dinner."
      • inane laughter of a woodpecker
  • Book II:
    • Chapter 6:
      • incarnadine
      • If, lying in my bed at night, I find myself unwilling audience to this objectionable little documentary (it goes away when I open my eyes but always, when I close them, it resumes tirelessly at the very beginning), I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power. In that way it mirrors the remembered experience more closely than one might imagine. Time, and repeated screenings, have endowed the memory with a menace the original did not possess. I watched it all happen quite calmly – without fear, without pity, without anything but a kind of stunned curiosity – so that the impression of the event is burned indelibly upon my optic nerves, but oddly absent from my heart.
      • Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things – naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror – are too terrible to really ever grasp at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory, that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself- quite to one's surprise – in an entirely different world.
      • tranquil as an orchid
      • "How," he said, "can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?"
      • It seemed the best thing was just to come right out and say it. 'You know,' I said, 'I'm really not attracted to you. I mean, not that-' 'Isn't that interesting,' he said coolly. 'I'm really not attracted to you, either.' 'But-' 'You were there.'
      • vellum
      • He was looking over the hills, at all that grand cinematic expanse of men and wilderness and snow that lay beneath us; and though his voice was anxious there was a strange dreamy look on his face. The business had upset him, that I knew, but I also knew that there was something about the operatic sweep of the search which could not fail to appeal to him and that he was pleased, however obscurely, with the aesthetics of the thing. r ™ Henry saw it, too. 'Like something from Tolstoy, isn't it?' he remarked. Julian looked over his shoulder, and I was startled to see that there was real delight on his face. 'Yes,' he said. 'Isn't it, though?'
      • Bunny had had a mild tendency towards kleptomania, and was apt to pocket any small, valueless articles that caught his eye – nail clippers, buttons, spools of tape. These he hid around his room in jumbled little nests. It was a vice he practiced in secret, but at the same time he had felt no compunction about quite openly carrying away objects of greater value which he found unattended. He did this with such assurance and authority – tucking bottles of liquor or unguarded boxes I from the florist under his arm and walking away without a backwards glance – that I wondered if he knew it was stealing. I once heard him explaining vigorously and quite unselfconsciously to Marion what he thought ought to be done to people who stole food from house refrigerators.
      • We drank our tea. The lamplight was warm and the apartment still and snug. At home in bed, in my private abyss of longing, the scenes I dreamed of always began like this: drowsy drunken hour, the two of us alone, scenarios in which invariably she would brush against me as if by chance, or lean conveniently close, cheek touching mine, to point out a passage in a book; opportunities which I would seize, gently but manfully, as exordium to more violent pleasures. The teacup was too hot; it burned my fingertips. I set it down and looked at her – oblivious, smoking a cigarette, scarcely two feet away. I could lose myself forever in that singular little face, in the pessimism of her beautiful mouth. Come here, you. Let's shut the light out, shall we? When I imagined these phrases cast in her voice, they were almost intolerably sweet; now, sitting right beside her, it was unthinkable that I should voice them myself. And yet: why should it be? She had been party to the killing of two men; had stood calm as a Madonna and watched Bunny die. I remembered Henry's cool voice, scarcely six weeks earlier. There was a certain carnal dement to the proceedings, yes.
      • ebullient
    • Chapter 7:
      • hermetic
      • reliquary
      • A character like his disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.
      • I, the absentminded bereaved, was free to stare peacefully out the window.
      • 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. I let go his collar, feeling completely helpless. I wanted to die. 'Oh, God,' I mumbled, 'God help me, I'm sorry '
      • My heart - which, thrilled at my daring..
    • Chapter 8:
      • the pleasure of watching the starts of empathy bloom in her kind eyes
      • "He'll like this," I said. "Yes, I think he will," said Francis. "It was the most boring book I could find."
      • I had never been to Brooklyn and didn't know a thing about it but I liked the idea of living in a city - any city, especially a strange one - liked the thought of traffic and crowds, of working in a bookstore, waiting tables in a coffee shop, who knew what kind of odd, solitary life I might slip into? Meals alone, walking the dogs in the evenings; and nobody knowing who I was.
      • FIGHT BIRTH DEFECTS, HIRE VETERANS, REPORT MAIL FRAUD
      • "Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do. I see a pretty mouth or a moody pair of eyes and imagine all sorts of deep affinities, private kinships."
      • I found her lying on her bed, watching a Mel Gibson movie on a VCR she'd borrowed from the video department. She was managing somehow to polish her fingernails, smoke a cigarette, and drink a Diet Coke all at the same time.
      • Finally, he said, quietly: 'Tell me.' The intensity of his gaze frightened me. 'What?' 'You don't feel a great deal of emotion for other people, do you?' I was taken aback. 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'Of course I do.' 'Do you?' He raised an eyebrow. 'I don't think so. It doesn't matter,' he said, after a long, tense pause. 'I don't, either.' 'What are you trying to get at?' He shrugged. 'Nothing,' he said. 'Except that my life, for the most part, has been very stale and colorless. Dead, I mean. The world has always been an empty place to me. I was incapable of enjoying even the simplest things. I felt dead in everything I did.' He brushed the dirt from his hands. 'But then it changed,' he said. 'The night I killed that man.' I was jarred – a little spooked, as well – at so blatant a reference to something referred to, by mutual agreement, almost exclusively with codes, catchwords, a hundred different euphemisms. 'It was the most important night of my life,' he said calmly. 'It enabled me to do what I've always wanted most.' 'Which is?' 'To live without thinking.' Bees buzzed loudly in the honeysuckle. He went back to his rosebush, thinning the smaller branches at the top. 'Before, I was paralyzed, though I didn't really know it,' he said. 'It was because I thought too much, lived too much in the mind. It was hard to make decisions. I felt immobilized.' 'And now?' 'Now,' he said, 'now, I know that I can do anything that I want.' He glanced up. 'And, unless I'm very wrong, you've experienced something similar yourself 'I don't know what you're talking about.' 'Oh, but I think you do. That surge of power and delight, of confidence, of control. That sudden sense of the richness of the world. Its infinite possibility.' He was talking about the ravine. And, to my horror, 1 realized that in a way he was right. As ghastly as it had been, there was no denying that Bunny's murder had thrown all subsequent events into a kind of glaring Technicolor. And, though this new lucidity of vision was frequently nerve- wracking, there was no denying that it was not an altogether unpleasant sensation.
      • Things which were odd, by Julian's definition, often turned out to be amusingly mundane. By his own choice, he had so little contact with the outside world that he frequently considered the commonplace to be bizarre: an automatic-teller machine, for instance, or some new peculiarity in the supermarket – cereal shaped like vampires, or unrefrigerated yogurt sold in pop-top cans. All of us enjoyed hearing about these little forays of his into the twentieth century, so Francis and I pressed him to tell us what now had happened.
      • As my own parents had distanced themselves from me more and more – a retreat they had be n in the process of effecting for many years – it was Julian who had grown to be the sole figure of paternal benevolence in my life, or, indeed, of benevolence of any sort. To me, he seemed my only protector in the world.
      • "Julian is like one of those people that'll pick all his favorite chocolates out of the box and leave the rest."
      • my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good
  • Epilogue:
    • indolence
    • beautiful now in a way that less excited my senses than tore at my very heart
    • I had said goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her once before, but it took everything I had to say goodbye to her then, again, for the last time, like poor Orpheus turning for a last backwards glance at the ghost of his only love and in the same heartbeat losing her forever: hinc illae lacrimae, hence those tears.

Page last revised on: 2024-02-23