The Secret History (47 page)

In a certain way, though, I know how my colleague feels. Not that everything “went black,” nothing of the sort; only that the event itself is cloudy because of some primitive, numbing effect that obscured it at the time; the same effect, I suppose, that enables panicked mothers to swim icy rivers, or rush into burning houses, for a child; the effect that occasionally allows a deeply bereaved person to make it through a funeral without a single tear. 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.

When we got back to the car it had not begun to snow, but already the woods shrank beneath the sky, hushed and waiting, as if they could sense the weight of the ice that would be on them by nightfall.

“Christ, look at this mud,” said Francis as we bounced through yet another pothole, brown spray striking the window with a thick
rataplan
.

Henry shifted down into first.

Another pothole, one that rattled the teeth in my head. As we tried to come out of it the tires whined, kicking up fresh splatters of mud, and we fell back into it with a jolt. Henry swore, and put the car in reverse.

Francis rolled down his window and craned his head outside to see. “Oh, Jesus,” I heard him say. “Stop the car. There’s no way we’re going to—”

“We’re not stuck.”

“Yes we are. You’re making it worse.
Christ
, Henry. Stop the—”

“Shut up,” Henry said.

The tires whined in the back. The twins, sitting on either side of me, turned to look out the rear window at the muddy spray. Abruptly, Henry shifted into first, and with a sudden leap that made my heart glad we were clear of the hole.

Francis slumped back in his seat. He was a cautious driver, and riding in the car with Henry, even in the most propitious of circumstances, made him nervous.

Once in town, we drove to Francis’s apartment. The twins and I were to split up and walk home—me to campus, the twins to their apartment—while Henry and Francis took care of the car. Henry turned off the engine. The silence was eerie, jolting.

He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. “We need to talk a minute,” he said.

“What is it?”

“When did you leave your room?”

“About a quarter of three.”

“Did anyone see you?”

“Not really. Not that I know of.”

Cooling down after its long drive, the car ticked and hissed and settled contentedly on its frame. Henry was silent for a moment, and he was about to speak when Francis suddenly pointed out the window. “Look,” he said. “Is that
snow?
”

The twins leaned low to see. Henry, biting his lower lip, paid no attention. “The four of us,” he said, at last, “were at a matinee at the Orpheum in town—a double feature that ran from one o’clock to four-fifty-five. Afterwards we went on a short drive, returning—” he checked his watch—“at five-fifteen. That accounts for us, all right. I’m not sure what to do about you.”

“Why can’t I say I was with you?”

“Because you weren’t.”

“Who’ll know the difference?”

“The ticket girl at the Orpheum, that’s who. We went down and bought tickets for the afternoon show, paid for them with a hundred-dollar bill. She remembers us, I can assure you of that. We sat in the balcony and slipped out the emergency exit about fifteen minutes into the first movie.”

“Why couldn’t I have met you there?”

“You could have, except you don’t have a car. And you can’t say you took a cab because that can be easily checked. Besides, you were out walking around. You say you were in Commons before you met us?”

“Yes.”

“Then I suppose there’s nothing you can say except that you went straight home. It’s not an ideal story, but at this point you don’t have any alternative to speak of. We’ll have to imagine you met up with us at some point
after
the movie, in the quite likely event that someone has seen you. Say we called you at five o’clock and met you in the parking lot. You rode with us to Francis’s—really, this doesn’t follow very smoothly, but it’ll have to do—and walked home again.”

“All right.”

“When you get home, check downstairs in case any phone messages were left for you between three-thirty and five. If there were, we’ll have to think of some reason why you didn’t take the calls.”

“Look, you guys,” Charles said. “It’s
really snowing.
”

Tiny flakes, just visible at the tops of the pines.

“One more thing,” said Henry. “We don’t want to behave as if we’re waiting around to hear some momentous piece of news. Go home. Read a book. I don’t think we ought to try to
contact one another tonight—unless, of course, it’s absolutely necessary.”

“I’ve never seen it snow this late in the year.” Francis was looking out the window. “Yesterday it was nearly seventy degrees.”

“Were they predicting that?” Charles said.

“Not that I heard.”

“Christ. Look at this. It’s almost Easter.”

“I don’t see why you’re so excited,” Henry said crossly. He had a pragmatic, farmer-like knowledge of how weather conditions affected growth, germination, blooming times, et cetera. “It’s just going to kill all the flowers.”

I walked home fast, because I was cold. A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron on the April landscape. Snow was falling in earnest now—big silent petals drifting through the springtime woods, white bouquets segueing into snowy dark: a nightmarish topsy-turvy land, something from a story book. My path took me beneath a row of apple trees, full-blown and luminous, shivering in the twilight like an avenue of pale umbrellas. The big white flakes wafted through them, dreamy and soft. I did not stop to look, however, only hurried beneath them even faster. My winter in Hampden had given me a horror of snow.

There were no messages for me downstairs. I went up to my room, changed my clothes, couldn’t decide what to do with the ones I’d taken off, thought of washing them, wondered if it might look suspicious, finally stuffed them all at the very bottom of my laundry bag. Then I sat down on my bed and looked at the clock.

It was time for dinner and I hadn’t eaten all day but I wasn’t hungry. I went to the window and watched the snowflakes whirl in the high arcs of light above the tennis courts, then crossed over and sat upon my bed again.

Minutes ticked by. Whatever anesthesia had carried me through the event was starting to wear off and with each passing second the thought of sitting around all night, alone, was seeming more and more unbearable. I turned on the radio, switched it off, tried to read. When I found I couldn’t hold my attention on one book I tried another. Scarcely ten minutes had passed. I picked up the first book and put it down again. Then, against my better judgment, I went downstairs to the pay phone and dialed Francis’s number.

He answered on the first ring. “Hi,” he said, when I told him it was me. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

I heard Henry murmuring in the background. Francis, his mouth away from the receiver, said something that I couldn’t catch.

“What are you guys doing?” I said.

“Not much. Having a drink. Hold on a second, would you?” he said, in response to another murmur.

There was a pause, an indistinct exchange, and then Henry’s brisk voice came on the line. “What’s the matter? Where are you?” he said.

“At home.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I just wondered if maybe I could come over for a drink or something.”

“That’s not a good idea. I was just leaving when you called.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, if you want to know the truth, I’m going to take a bath and go to bed.”

The line was silent for a moment.

“Are you still there?” Henry said.

“Henry, I’m going crazy. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Well, do anything you like,” Henry said amiably. “As long as you stick pretty close to home.”

“I don’t see what difference it would make if I—”

“When you’re worried about something,” said Henry abruptly, “have you ever tried thinking in a different language?”

“What?”

“It slows you down. Keeps your thoughts from running wild. A good discipline in any circumstance. Or you might try doing what the Buddhists do.”

“
What?
”

“In the practice of Zen there is an exercise called
zazen
—similar, I think, to the Theravadic practice of
vipassana
. One sits facing a blank wall. No matter the emotion one feels, no matter how strong or violent, one remains motionless. Facing the wall. The discipline, of course, is in continuing to sit.”

There was a silence, during which I struggled for language to adequately express what I thought of this goofball advice.

“Now, listen,” he continued, before I could say anything. “I’m exhausted. I’ll see you in class tomorrow, all right?”

“
Henry,
” I said, but he’d hung up.

In a sort of trance, I walked upstairs. I wanted a drink badly but I had nothing to drink. I sat down on my bed and looked out the window.

My sleeping pills were all gone. I knew they were gone but I went to my bureau and checked the bottle just in case. It was empty except for some vitamin C tablets I’d got from the infirmary. Little white pills. I poured them on my desk, arranged them in patterns and then I took one, hoping that the reflex of swallowing would make me feel better, but it didn’t.

I sat very still, trying not to think. It seemed as if I was waiting for something, I wasn’t sure what, something that would lift the tension and make me feel better, though I could imagine no possible event, in past, present, or future, that would have either effect. It seemed as if an eternity had passed. Suddenly, I was struck by a horrible thought:
is this what it’s like? Is this the way it’s going to be from now on?

I looked at the clock. Scarcely a minute had gone by. I got up, not bothering to lock the door behind me, and went down the hall to Judy’s room.

By some miracle, she was in—drunk, putting on lipstick. “Hi,” she said, without glancing away from the mirror. “Want to go to a party?”

I don’t know what I said to her, something about not feeling well.

“Have a bagel,” she said, turning her head from side to side and examining her profile.

“I’d rather a sleeping pill, if you’ve got one.”

She screwed the lipstick down, snapped on the top, then opened the drawer of her dressing table. It was not actually a dressing table but a desk, college-issue, just like the one in my room; but like some savage unable to understand its true purpose—transforming it into a weapon rack, say, or a flower-decked fetish—she had painstakingly turned it into a cosmetics area, with a glass top and a ruffled satin skirt and a three-way mirror on the top that lit up. Scrabbling through a nightmare of compacts and pencils, she pulled out a prescription bottle, held it to the light, tossed it into the trash can and selected a new one. “This’ll do,” she said, handing it to me.