The Secret History (50 page)

Bare cheek on cold tile. The roar and rush of the toilet was so loud I thought it would swallow me. It was like all the times I’d ever been sick, all the drunken throw-ups I’d ever had in the bathrooms of gas stations and bars. Same old bird’s-eye view: those odd little knobs at the base of the toilet that you never notice at any other time; sweating porcelain, the hum of pipes, that long burble of water as it spirals down.

While I was washing my face, I began to cry. The tears mingled easily with the cold water, in the luminous, dripping crimson of my cupped fingers, and at first I wasn’t aware that I was crying at all. The sobs were regular and emotionless, as mechanical as the dry heaves which had stopped only a moment earlier; there was no reason for them, they had nothing to do with me. I brought my head up and looked at my weeping reflection in the mirror with a kind of detached interest.
What does this mean?
I thought. I looked terrible. Nobody else was falling apart; yet here I was, shaking all over and seeing bats like Ray Milland in
The Lost Weekend
.

A cold draft was blowing in the window. I felt shaky but oddly refreshed. I ran myself a hot bath, throwing in a good handful of Judy’s bath salts, and when I got out and put on my clothes I felt quite myself again.

Nihil sub sole novum
, I thought as I walked back down the hall to my room. Any action, in the fullness of time, sinks to nothingness.

They were all there when I arrived at the twins’ for dinner that night, gathered around the radio and listening to the weather
forecast as if to some wartime bulletin from the front. “For the long-range outlook,” said an announcer’s spry voice, “expect cool weather on Thursday, with cloudy skies and a possibility of showers, leading into warmer weather for the—”

Henry snapped off the radio. “If we’re lucky,” he said, “the snow will be gone tomorrow night. Where were you this afternoon, Richard?”

“At home.”

“I’m glad you’re here. I want you to do a little favor for me, if you don’t mind.”

“What is it?”

“I want to drive you downtown after dinner so you can see those movies at the Orpheum and tell us what they’re about. Do you mind?”

“No.”

“I know this is an imposition on a school night, but I really don’t think it’s wise for any of the rest of us to go back again. Charles has offered to copy out your Greek for you if you like.”

“If I do it on that yellow paper you use,” said Charles, “with your fountain pen, he’ll never know the difference.”

“Thanks,” I said. Charles had a rather startling talent for forgery which, according to Camilla, dated from early childhood—expert report-card signatures by the fourth grade, entire excuse notes by the sixth. I was always getting him to sign Dr. Roland’s name to my time sheets.

“Really,” said Henry, “I hate to ask you to do this. I think they’re dreadful movies.”

They were pretty bad. The first was a road movie from the early seventies, about a man who leaves his wife to drive cross-country. On the way he gets sidetracked into Canada and becomes involved with a bunch of draft dodgers; at the end he goes back to his wife and they renew their vows in a hippie ceremony. The worst thing was the soundtrack. All these acoustic guitar songs with the word “freedom” in them.

The second film was more recent. It was about the Vietnam War and was called
Fields of Shame—a
big-budget movie with a lot of stars. The special effects were a bit realistic for my taste, though. People getting their legs blown off and so forth.

When I got out, Henry’s car was parked down the street with the lights off. Upstairs at Charles and Camilla’s, everyone was sitting around the kitchen table with their sleeves rolled up, deep in Greek. When we came in they began to stir, and Charles got
up and made a pot of coffee while I read my notes. Both movies were rather plotless and I had a hard time communicating the gist of them.

“But these are
terrible,
” said Francis. “I’m embarrassed that people will think we went to see such bad movies.”

“But wait,” said Camilla.

“I don’t get it, either,” Charles said. “Why did the sergeant bomb the village where the good people lived?”

“Yes,” Camilla said. “Why? And who was that kid with the puppy who just wandered up in the middle of it? How did he know Charlie Sheen?”

Charles had done a beautiful job on my Greek, and I was looking it over before class the next day when Julian came in. He paused in the doorway, looked at the empty chair and laughed. “Goodness,” he said. “Not
again.
”

“Looks like it,” said Francis.

“I must say, I hope our classes haven’t become as tedious as all that. Please tell Edmund that, should he choose to attend tomorrow, I shall make an effort to be especially engaging.”

By noon it was apparent that the weather forecast was in error. The temperature had dropped ten degrees, and more snow fell in the afternoon.

The five of us were to go out to dinner that night, and when the twins and I showed up at Henry’s apartment, we found him looking especially glum. “Guess who just phoned me,” he said.

“Who?”

“Marion.”

Charles sat down. “What did she want?”

“She wanted to know if I’d seen Bunny.”

“What’d you say?”

“Well, of course I said I hadn’t,” Henry said irritably. “They were supposed to meet on Sunday night and she hasn’t seen him since Saturday.”

“Is she worried?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

“Nothing.” He sighed. “I just hope the weather breaks tomorrow.”

But it didn’t. Wednesday dawned bright and cold and two more inches of snow had accumulated in the night.

“Of course,” said Julian, “I don’t mind if Edmund misses a class now and then. But three in a row. And you know what a hard time he has catching up.”

“We can’t go on like this much longer,” said Henry at the twins’ apartment that night, as we were smoking cigarettes over uneaten plates of bacon and eggs.

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know. Except he’s been missing now for seventy-two hours, and it’ll start to look funny if we don’t act worried pretty soon.”

“No one else is worried,” said Charles.

“No one else sees as much of him as we do. I wonder if Marion’s home,” he said, glancing at the clock.

“Why?”

“Because maybe I should give her a call.”

“For God’s sake,” said Francis. “Don’t drag
her
into it.”

“I have no intention of dragging her into anything. I just want to make it plain to her that none of us have seen Bunny for three days.”

“And what do you expect her to do about it?”

“I hope she’ll call the police.”

“Have you lost your mind?”

“Well, if she doesn’t, we’re going to have to,” said Henry impatiently. “The longer he’s gone, the worse it will look. I don’t want a big ruckus, people asking questions.”

“Then why call the police?”

“Because if we go to them soon enough, I doubt there’ll be any ruckus at all. Perhaps they’ll send one or two people out here to poke around, thinking it’s probably a false alarm—”

“If no one’s found him yet,” I said, “I don’t see what makes you think that a couple of traffic cops from Hampden will do any better.”

“No one’s found him because no one’s looking. He’s not half a mile away.”

It took whoever answered a long time to bring Marion to the telephone. Henry stood patiently, gazing down at the floor; gradually his eyes began to wander, and after about five minutes he made an exasperated noise and looked up. “My goodness,” he
said. “What’s taking them so long? Let me have a cigarette, would you, Francis?”

He had it in his mouth and Francis was lighting it for him when Marion came on the line. “Oh, hello, Marion,” he said, exhaling a cloud of smoke and turning his back to us. “I’m glad I caught you. Is Bunny there?”

A slight pause. “Well,” said Henry, reaching for the ashtray, “do you know where he is, then?”

“Well, frankly,” he said at last, “I was going to ask you the same thing. He hasn’t been in class for two or three days.”

Another long silence. Henry listened, his face pleasantly blank. Then, all of a sudden, his eyes widened. “What?” he said, a little too sharply.