The Secret History (6 page)

This was all a long way from Plano, and my father’s gas station. “And if I do take classes with you, will they all be in Greek?” I asked him.

He laughed. “Of course not. We’ll be studying Dante, Virgil, all sorts of things. But I wouldn’t advise you to go out and buy a copy of
Goodbye, Columbus
” (required, notoriously, in one of the freshman English classes) “if you will forgive me for being vulgar.”

Georges Laforgue was disturbed when I told him what I planned to do. “This is a serious business,” he said. “You understand, don’t you, how limited will be your contact with the rest of the faculty and with the school?”

“He’s a good teacher,” I said.

“No teacher is that good. And if you should by chance have a disagreement with him, or be treated unjustly in any way, there will be nothing anyone on the faculty can do for you. Pardon me, but I do not see the point of paying a thirty-thousand-dollar tuition simply to study with one instructor.”

I thought of referring that question to the Hampden College Endowment Fund, but I said nothing.

He leaned back in his chair. “Forgive me, but I should think the elitist values of such a man would be repugnant to you,” he said. “Frankly, this is the first time I have ever heard of his
accepting a pupil who is on such considerable financial aid. Being a democratic institution, Hampden College is not founded on such principles.”

“Well, he can’t be all that elitist if he accepted me,” I said.

He didn’t catch my sarcasm. “I am willing to speculate that he isn’t aware you are on assistance,” he said seriously.

“Well, if he doesn’t know,” I said, “I’m not going to tell him.”

Julian’s classes met in his office. They were very small classes, and besides, no classroom could have approached it in terms of comfort, or privacy. He had a theory that pupils learned better in a pleasant, non-scholastic atmosphere; and that luxurious hothouse of a room, flowers everywhere in the dead of winter, was some sort of Platonic microcosm of what he thought a schoolroom should be. (“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.”)

As I was on my way there for my first class, I saw Francis Abernathy stalking across the meadow like a black bird, his coat flapping dark and crowlike in the wind. He was preoccupied, smoking a cigarette, but the thought that he might see me filled me with an inexplicable anxiety. I ducked into a doorway and waited until he had passed.

When I turned on the landing of the Lyceum stairs, I was shocked to see him sitting in the windowsill. I glanced at him quickly, and then quickly away, and was about to walk into the hall when he said, “Wait.” His voice was cool and Bostonian, almost British.

I turned around.

“Are you the new
neanias?
” he said mockingly.

The new young man. I said that I was.

“
Cubitum eamus?
”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

He transferred the cigarette to his left hand and offered the right one to me. It was bony and soft-skinned as a teenage girl’s.

He did not bother to introduce himself. After a brief, awkward silence, I told him my name.

He took a last drag of the cigarette and tossed it out the open window. “I know who you are,” he said.

Henry and Bunny were already in the office; Henry was reading a book and Bunny, leaning across the table, was talking to him loudly and earnestly.

“… tasteless, that’s what it is, old man. Disappointed in you. I gave you credit for a little more
savoir faire
than that, if you don’t mind my saying so.…”

“Good morning,” said Francis, coming in behind me and closing the door.

Henry glanced up and nodded, then went back to his book.

“Hi,” said Bunny, and then “Oh, hello there” to me. “Guess what,” he continued to Francis. “Henry bought himself a Montblanc pen.”

“Really?” said Francis.

Bunny nodded at the cup of sleek black pens that sat on Julian’s desk. “I told him he better be careful or Julian will think he stole it.”

“He was with me when I bought it,” said Henry without looking up from his book.

“How much are those things worth, anyway?” said Bunny.

No answer.

“Come on. How much? Three hundred bucks a pop?” He leaned all of his considerable weight against the table. “I remember when you used to say how ugly they were. You used to say you’d never write with a thing in your life but a straight pen. Right?”

Silence.

“Let me see that again, will you?” Bunny said.

Putting his book down, Henry reached in his breast pocket and pulled out the pen and put it on the table. “There,” he said.

Bunny picked it up and turned it back and forth in his fingers. “It’s like the fat pencils I used to use in first grade,” he said. “Did Julian talk you into getting this?”

“I wanted a fountain pen.”

“That’s not why you got this one.”

“I am sick of talking about this.”

“
I
think it’s tasteless.”

“You,” said Henry sharply, “are not one to speak of taste.”

There was a long silence, during which Bunny leaned back in his chair. “Now, what kind of pens do we all use here?” he said
conversationally. “François, you’re a nib-and-bottle man like myself, no?”

“More or less.”

He pointed to me as if he were the host of a panel discussion on a talk show. “And you, what’s-your-name, Robert? What sort of pens did they teach you to use in California?”

“Ball points,” I said.

Bunny nodded deeply. “An honest man, gentlemen. Simple tastes. Lays his cards on the table. I like that.”

The door opened and the twins came in.

“What are you yelling about, Bun?” said Charles, laughing, kicking the door shut behind him. “We heard you all the way down the hall.”

Bunny launched into the story about the Montblanc pen. Uneasily, I edged into the corner and began to examine the books in the bookcase.

“How long have you studied the classics?” said a voice at my elbow. It was Henry, who had turned in his chair to look at me.

“Two years,” I said.

“What have you read in Greek?”

“The New Testament.”

“Well, of course you’ve read
Koine
,” he said crossly. “What else? Homer, surely. And the lyric poets.”

This, I knew, was Henry’s special bailiwick. I was afraid to lie. “A little.”

“And Plato?”

“Yes.”

“All of Plato?”

“Some of Plato.”

“But all of it in translation.”

I hesitated, a moment too long. He looked at me, incredulous. “
No?
”

I dug my hands into the pockets of my new overcoat. “Most of it,” I said, which was far from true.

“Most of what? The dialogues, you mean? What about later things? Plotinus?”

“Yes,” I lied. I have never, to this day, read a word by Plotinus.

“What?”

Unfortunately my mind went blank, and I could not think of a single thing I knew for sure Plotinus had written. The
Eclogues?
No, dammit, that was Virgil. “Actually, I don’t much care for Plotinus,” I said.

“No? Why is that?”

He was like a policeman with the questions. Wistfully, I thought of my old class, the one I’d dropped for this one: Intro to Drama, with jolly Mr. Lanin, who made us lie on the floor and do relaxation exercises while he walked around and said things like: “Now imagine that your body is filling with a cool orange fluid.”

I had not answered the Plotinus question soon enough for Henry’s taste. He said something rapidly in Latin.

“I beg your pardon?”

He looked at me coldly. “Never mind,” he said, and bent back over his book.

To hide my consternation, I turned to the bookshelf.

“Happy now?” I heard Bunny say. “I guess you raked him over the coals pretty good, eh?”

To my intense relief, Charles came over to say hello. He was friendly and quite calm, but we had scarcely more than exchanged greetings when the door opened and a hush fell as Julian slipped in and closed the door quietly behind him.

“Good morning,” he said. “You’ve met our new student?”

“Yes,” said Francis in what I thought a bored tone, as he held out Camilla’s chair and then slid into his own.

“Wonderful. Charles, would you put on water for tea?”

Charles went into a little anteroom, no bigger than a closet, and I heard the sound of running water. (I never did know exactly what was in that anteroom or how Julian, upon occasion, was miraculously able to convey four-course meals out of it.) Then he came out, closing the door behind him, and sat down.

“All right,” said Julian, looking around the table. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?”

He was a marvelous talker, a magical talker, and I wish I were able to give a better idea what he said, but it is impossible for a mediocre intellect to render the speech of a superior one—especially after so many years—without losing a good deal in the translation. The discussion that day was about loss of self, about Plato’s four divine madnesses, about madness of all sorts; he began by talking about what he called the burden of the self, and why people want to lose the self in the first place.

“Why does that obstinate little voice in our heads torment us so?” he said, looking round the table. “Could it be because it reminds us that we are alive, of our mortality, of our individual souls—which, after all, we are too afraid to surrender but yet make feel more miserable than any other thing? But isn’t it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no
thing
hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think? Remember the Erinyes?”

“The Furies,” said Bunny, his eyes dazzled and lost beneath the bang of hair.

“Exactly. And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much
themselves
that they couldn’t stand it.

“And how can we lose this maddening self, lose it entirely? Love? Yes, but as old Cephalus once heard Sophocles say, the least of us know that love is a cruel and terrible master. One loses oneself for the sake of the other, but in doing so becomes enslaved and miserable to the most capricious of all the gods.
War?
One can lose oneself in the joy of battle, in fighting for a glorious cause, but there are not a great many glorious causes for which to fight these days.” He laughed. “Though after all your Xenophon and Thucydides I dare say there are not many young people better versed in military tactics. I’m sure, if you wanted to, you’d be quite capable of marching on Hampden town and taking it over by yourselves.”