The Secret History (8 page)

I went into the post office (blasé students, business as usual) and, still preposterously lightheaded, scribbled a picture postcard to my mother—fiery maples, a mountain stream. A sentence on the back advised:
Plan to see Vermont’s fall foliage between Sept. 25 and Oct. 15th when it is at its vivid best
.

As I was putting it in the out-of-town mail slot, I saw Bunny across the room, his back to me, scanning the row of numbered boxes. He stopped at what was apparently my own box and bent to stick something in it. Then he straightened surreptitiously and walked out quickly, his hands in his pockets and his hair flopping everywhere.

I waited until he was gone, then went to my mailbox. Inside, I found a cream-colored envelope—thick paper, crisp and very formal—but the handwriting was crabbed and childish as a fifth-grader’s, in pencil. The note within was in pencil, too, tiny and uneven and hard to read:

Richard old Man

What do you Say we have Lunch on Saturday, maybe about 1? I know this Great little place. Cocktails, the business. My treat. Please come.

Yours,
Bun   

p.s. wear a Tie. I am Sure you would have anyway but they will drag some godawful one out of the back and meke (s.p.) you Wear it if you Dont.

I examined the note, put it in my pocket, and was walking out when I almost bumped into Dr. Roland coming in the door. At first he didn’t seem to know who I was. But just when I thought I was going to get away, the creaky machinery of his face began to grind and a cardboard dawn of recognition was lowered, with jerks, from the dusty proscenium.

“Hello, Doctor Roland,” I said, abandoning hope.

“How’s she running, boy?”

He meant my imaginary car. Christine. Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. “Fine,” I said.

“Take it to Redeemed Repair?”

“Yes.”

“Manifold trouble.”

“Yes,” I said, and then realized I’d told him earlier it was the transmission. But Dr. Roland had now begun an informative lecture concerning the care and function of the manifold gasket.

“And that,” he concluded, “is one of your major problems with a foreign automobile. You can waste a lot of oil that way. Those cans of Penn State will add up. And Penn State doesn’t grow on trees.”

He gave me a significant look.

“Who was it sold you the gasket?” he asked.

“I can’t remember,” I said, swaying in a trance of boredom but edging imperceptibly towards the door.

“Was it Bud?”

“I think so.”

“Or Bill. Bill Hundy is good.”

“I believe it was Bud,” I said.

“What did you think about that old blue jay?”

I was uncertain if this referred to Bud or to a literal blue jay, or if, perhaps, we were heading into the territory of senile dementia. It was sometimes difficult to believe that Dr. Roland was a tenured professor in the Social Science Department of this, a distinguished college. He was more like some gabby old codger who would sit next to you on a bus and try to show you bits of paper he kept folded in his wallet.

He was reviewing some of the information he had previously given me on the manifold gaskets and I was waiting for a good moment to remember, suddenly, that I was late for an appointment, when Dr. Roland’s friend Dr. Blind struggled up, beaming, leaning on his walker. 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
HAD HOPED
the weather would be cool for my lunch with Bunny, because my best jacket was a scratchy dark tweed, but when I woke on Saturday it was hot and getting hotter.

“Gonna be a scorcher today,” said the janitor as I passed him in the hall. “Indian summer.”

The jacket was beautiful—Irish wool, gray with flecks of mossy green; I had bought it in San Francisco with nearly every cent I’d saved from my summer job—but it was much too heavy for a warm sunny day. I put it on and went to the bathroom to straighten my tie.

I was in no mood for talk and I was unpleasantly surprised to find Judy Poovey brushing her teeth at the sink. Judy Poovey lived a couple of doors down from me and seemed to think that because she was from Los Angeles we had a lot in common. She cornered me in hallways; tried to make me dance at parties; had told several girls that she was going to sleep with me, only in less delicate terms. She had wild clothes, frosted hair, a red Corvette with California plates bearing the legend
JUDY P
. Her voice was loud and rose frequently to a screech, which rang through the house like the cries of some terrifying tropical bird.

“Hi, Richard,” she said, and spit out a mouthful of toothpaste. She was wearing cut-off jeans that had bizarre, frantic designs drawn on them in Magic Marker and a spandex top which revealed her intensely aerobicized midriff.

“Hello,” I said, setting to work on my tie.

“You look cute today.”

“Thanks.”

“Got a date?”

I looked away from the mirror, at her. “What?”

“Where you going?”

By now, I was used to her interrogations. “Out to lunch.”

“Who with?”

“Bunny Corcoran.”

“You know Bunny?”

Again, I turned to look at her. “Sort of. Do you?”

“Sure. He was in my art history class. He’s hilarious. I hate that geeky friend of his, though, the other one with the glasses, what’s his name?”

“Henry?”

“Yeah, him.” She leaned towards the mirror and began to fluff out her hair, swiveling her head this way and that. Her nails were Chanel red but so long they had to be the kind you bought at the drugstore. “I think he’s an asshole.”

“I kind of like him,” I said, offended.

“I don’t.” She parted her hair in the center, using the curved talon of her forefinger as a comb. “He’s always been a bastard to me. I hate those twins, too.”

“Why? The twins are nice.”

“Oh yeah?” she said, rolling a mascaraed eye at me in the mirror. “Listen to this. I was at this party last term, really drunk, and sort of slam-dancing, right? Everybody was crashing into everybody else, and for some reason this girl twin was walking through the dance floor and pow, I slammed right into her, really hard. So then she says something rude, like totally uncalled for, and first thing I knew I’d thrown my beer in her face. It was that kind of a night. I’d already had about six beers thrown on
me
, and it just seemed like the thing to do, you know?

“So anyway, she starts yelling at me and in about half a second there’s the other twin and that Henry guy standing over me like they’re about to beat me up.” She pulled her hair back from her face in a ponytail and inspected her profile in the mirror. “So anyway. I’m drunk, and these two guys are leaning over me in this menacing way, and you know that Henry, he’s really
big
. It was kind of scary but I was too drunk to care so I just told them to fuck off.” She turned from the mirror and smiled brilliantly. “I was drinking Kamikazes that night. Something terrible always happens to me when I drink Kamikazes. I wreck my car, I get into fights …”

“What happened?”

She shrugged and turned back to the mirror. “Like I said, I just told them to fuck off. And the boy twin, he starts
scream
ing at me. Like he really wants to kill me, you know? And that Henry just standing there, right, but to me he was scarier than the other
one. So anyway. A friend of mine who used to go here and who’s really tough, he was in this motorcycle gang, into chains and shit—ever heard of Spike Romney?”

I had; in fact I’d seen him at my first Friday-night party. He was tremendous, well over two hundred pounds, with scars on his hands and steel toe-clips on his motorcycle boots.

“Well, anyway, so Spike comes up and sees these people abusing me, and he shoves the twin on the shoulder and tells him to beat it, and before I knew it, the two of them had jumped on him. People were trying to pull that Henry off, too—lots of them, and they couldn’t do it.
Six guys
couldn’t pull him off. Broke Spike’s collarbone and two of his ribs, and fucked up his face pretty bad. I told Spike he should’ve called the cops, but he was in some kind of trouble himself and wasn’t supposed to
be
on campus. It was a bad scene, though.” She let her hair fall back around her face. “I mean, Spike is tough. And
mean
. You’d think he’d be able to beat the shit out of both those sissy guys in suits and ties and stuff.”

“Hmm,” I said, trying not to laugh. It was funny to think of Henry, with his little round glasses and his books in Pali, breaking Spike Romney’s collarbone.

“It’s weird,” said Judy. “I guess when uptight people like that get mad, they get
really
mad. Like my father.”

“Yeah, I guess so,” I said, looking back into the mirror and adjusting the knot on my tie.

“Have a good time,” she said listlessly, and started out the door. Then she stopped. “Say, aren’t you going to get hot in that jacket?”

“Only good one I have.”

“You want to try on this one I’ve got?”

I turned and looked at her. She was a major in Costume Design and as such had all kinds of peculiar clothing in her room. “Is it yours?” I said.

“I stole it from the wardrobe at the Costume shop. I was going to cut it up and make, like, a
bustier
out of it.”

Great, I thought, but I went along with her anyway.

The jacket, unexpectedly, was wonderful—old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green—a little loose, but it fit all right. “Judy,” I said, looking at my cuffs. “This is wonderful. You sure you don’t mind?”

“You can have it,” said Judy. “I don’t have time to do anything with it. I’m too busy sewing those dammed costumes for
fucking
As You Like It
. It goes up in three weeks and I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’ve got all these freshmen working for me this term that don’t know a sewing machine from a hole in the ground.”

“By the way, love that jacket, old man,” Bunny said to me as we were getting out of the taxi. “Silk, isn’t it?”

“Yes. It was my grandfather’s.”

Bunny pinched a piece of the rich, yellowy cloth near the cuff and rubbed it back and forth between his fingers. “Lovely piece,” he said importantly. “Not quite the thing for this time of year, though.”

“No?” I said.

“Naw. This is the East Coast, boy. I know they’re pretty
laissez-faire
about dress in your neck of the woods, but back here they don’t let you run around in your bathing suit all year long. Blacks and blues, that’s the ticket, blacks and blues.… Here, let me get that door for you. You know, I think you’ll like this place. Not exactly the Polo Lounge, but for Vermont it’s not too bad, do you think?”

It was a tiny, beautiful restaurant with white tablecloths and bay windows opening onto a cottage garden—hedges and trellised roses, nasturtiums bordering the flagstone path. The customers were mostly middle-aged and prosperous: ruddy country-lawyer types, who, according to the Vermont fashion, wore gumshoes with their Hickey-Freeman suits; ladies with frosted lipstick and challis skirts, nice looking in a kind of well-tanned, low-key way. A couple glanced up at us as we came in, and I was well aware of the impression we were making—two handsome college boys, rich fathers and not a worry in the world. Though the ladies were mostly old enough to be my mother, one or two were actually quite attractive. Nice work if you could get it, I thought, imagining some youngish matron with a big house and nothing to do and a husband out of town on business all the time. Good dinners, some pocket money, maybe even something really big, like a car …