The Secret History (82 page)

After Francis left I fell asleep again. When I woke up it was four in the morning. I had slept for nearly twenty-four hours.

The nights that spring were unusually cold; this one was colder than most and the heat was on in the dormitories—steam heat, full blast, which made it unbearably stuffy even with the windows open. My sheets were damp with sweat. I got up and stuck my head out the window and took a few breaths. The chill air was so refreshing that I decided to put on some clothes and go for a walk.

The moon was full and very bright. Everything was silent except for the chirp of the crickets and the full foamy toss of the wind in the trees. Down at the Early Childhood Center, where Marion worked, the swings creaked gently to and fro, and the corkscrewed slide gleamed silver in the moonlight.

The most striking object in the playground was without question the giant snail. Some art students had built it, modeling it after the giant snail in the movie of
Doctor Dolittle
. It was pink, made of fiberglass, nearly eight feet tall, with a hollow shell so kids could play inside. Silent in the moonlight, it was like some patient prehistoric creature that had crawled down from the mountains: dumb, lonely, biding its time, untroubled by the articles of playground equipment which surrounded it.

Access to the snail’s interior was gained by a child-sized tunnel, maybe two feet high, at the base of the tail. From this tunnel, I was extremely startled to see protruding a pair of adult male feet, shod in some oddly familiar brown-and-white spectator shoes.

On hands and knees, I leaned forward and stuck my head in the tunnel and was overwhelmed by the raw, powerful stink of whiskey. Light snores echoed in the close, boozy darkness. The shell, apparently, had acted as a brandy snifter, gathering and concentrating the vapors until they were so pungent I felt nauseated just to breathe them.

I caught and shook a bony kneecap. “Charles.” My voice boomed and reverberated in the dark interior. “
Charles.
”

He began to flounder wildly, as if he had waked to find himself in ten feet of water. At length, and after repeated assurances that I was who I said I was, he fell on his back again, breathing hard.

“Richard,” he said thickly. “Thank God. I thought you were some kind of creature from space.”

At first it had been completely dark inside but now my eyes had adjusted I was aware of a faint, pinkish light, moonlight, just enough to see by, glowing through the translucent walls. “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

He sneezed. “I was depressed,” he said. “I thought if I slept here it might make me feel better.”

“Did it?”

“No.” He sneezed again, five or six times in a row. Then he slumped back on the floor.

I thought of the nursery-school kids, huddled round Charles the next morning like Lilliputians round the sleeping Gulliver. The lady who ran the Childhood Center—a psychiatrist, whose office was down the hall from Dr. Roland’s—seemed to me a pleasant, grandmotherly sort, though who could predict how she’d react to finding a drunk passed out on her playground. “Wake up, Charles,” I said.

“Leave me alone.”

“You can’t sleep here.”

“I can do whatever I want,” he said haughtily.

“Why don’t you come home with me? Have a drink.”

“I’m fine.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Well—just one.”

He bumped his head, hard, while crawling out. The little kids were certainly going to love that smell of Johnnie Walker when they came to school in a few hours.

He had to lean on me on the way up the hill to Monmouth House.

“Just one,” he reminded me.

I was not in terrific shape myself and had a hard time hauling him up the stairs. Finally I reached my room and deposited him on my bed. He offered little resistance and lay there, mumbling, while I went down to the kitchen.

My offer of a drink had been a ruse. Quickly I searched the refrigerator but all I could find was a screw-top bottle of some syrupy Kosher stuff, strawberry-flavored, which had been there since Hanukkah. I’d tasted it once, with the idea of stealing it, and hurriedly spit it out and put the bottle back on the shelf. That had been months ago. I slipped it under my shirt; but when I got upstairs, Charles’s head had rolled back against the wall where the headboard should have been and he was snoring.

Quietly, I put the botttle on my desk, got a book, and left. Then I went to Dr. Roland’s office, where I lay reading on the couch with my jacket thrown over me until the sun came up, and I turned off the lamp and went to sleep.

I woke around ten. It was Saturday, which surprised me a little; I’d lost track of the days. I went to the dining hall and had a late breakfast of tea and soft-boiled eggs, the first thing I’d eaten
since Thursday. When I went to my room to change, around noon, Charles was still asleep in my bed. I shaved, put on a clean shirt, got my Greek books and went back to Dr. Roland’s.

I was ridiculously behind in my studies but not (as is often the case) so far behind as I’d thought. The hours went by without my noticing them. When I got hungry, around six, I went to the refrigerator in the Social Sciences office and found some leftover hors d’oeuvres and a piece of birthday cake, which I ate from my fingers off a paper plate at Dr. Roland’s desk.

Since I wanted a bath, I came home around eleven, but when I unlocked the door and turned on the light, I was startled to find Charles still in my bed. He was sleeping, but the bottle of Kosher wine on the desk was half-empty. His face was flushed and pink. When I shook him, he felt as though he had a good deal of fever.

“Bunny,” he said, waking with a start. “Where did he go?”

“You’re dreaming.”

“But he was here,” he said, looking wildly round. “For a long time. I saw him.”

“You’re dreaming, Charles.”

“But I
saw him
. He was here. He was sitting on the foot of the bed.”

I went next door to borrow a thermometer. His temperature was nearly a hundred and three. I gave him two Tylenol and a glass of water and left him, rubbing his eyes and talking nonsense, to go downstairs and call Francis.

Francis wasn’t home. I decided to try Henry. To my surprise it was Francis, not Henry, who answered the phone.

“Francis? What are you doing over there?” I said.

“Oh, hello, Richard,” said Francis. He said it in a stagy way, as if for Henry’s benefit.

“I guess you can’t really talk now.”

“No.”

“Look here. I need to ask you something.” I explained to him about Charles, playground and all. “He seems pretty sick. What do you think I should do?”

“The snail?” said Francis. “You found him inside that giant snail?”

“Yes. Listen, that doesn’t matter. What should I do? I’m kind of worried.”

Francis put his hand over the receiver. I could hear a muffled discussion. In a moment Henry came on the line. “Hello, Richard,” he said. “What’s the matter?”

I had to explain all over again.

“How high, did you say? A hundred and three?”

“Yes.”

“That’s rather a lot, isn’t it?”

I said that I thought it was.

“Did you give him some aspirins?”

“A few minutes ago.”

“Well, then, why don’t you wait and see. I’m sure he’s fine.”

This is exactly what I wanted to hear.

“You’re right,” I said.

“He probably caught cold sleeping out of doors. I’m sure he’ll be better in the morning.”

I spent the night on Dr. Roland’s couch, and after breakfast, came back to my room with blueberry muffins and a half-gallon carton of orange juice which, with extraordinary difficulty, I had managed to steal from the buffet in the dining hall.

Charles was awake, but feverish and vague. From the state of the bedclothes, which were tumbled and tossed, blanket trailing on the floor and the stained ticking of the mattress showing where he’d pulled the sheets loose, I gathered he’d not had a very good night of it. He said he wasn’t hungry, but he managed a few limp little sips of the orange juice. The rest of the Kosher wine had disappeared, I noticed, in the night.

“How do you feel?” I asked him.

He lolled his head on the crumpled pillow. “Head hurts,” he said sleepily. “I had a dream about Dante.”

“Alighieri?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“We were at the Corcorans’ house,” he mumbled. “Dante was there. He had a fat friend in a plaid shirt who yelled at us.”

I took his temperature; it was an even hundred. A bit lower, but still kind of high for the first thing in the morning. I gave him some more aspirin and wrote down my number at Dr. Roland’s in case he wanted to call me, but when he realized I was leaving, he rolled his head back and gave me such a dazed and hopeless look that it stopped me cold in the middle of my explanation about how the switchboard re-routed calls to administrative offices on the weekends.

“Or, I could stay here,” I said. “If I wouldn’t be bothering you, that is.”

He pushed up on his elbows. His eyes were bloodshot and very bright. “Don’t go,” he said. “I’m scared. Stay a little while.”

He asked me to read to him, but I didn’t have anything around but Greek books, and he didn’t want me to go to the library. So we played Euchre on a dictionary balanced on his lap, and when that started to prove a bit much we switched to Casino. He won the first couple of games. Then he started losing. On the final hand—it was his deal—he shuffled the cards so poorly they were coming up in virtually exact sequence, which should not have made for very challenging play but he was so absent-minded he kept trailing when he could easily have built or taken in. When I was reaching to increase a build, my hand brushed against his and I was taken aback by how dry and hot it was. And though the room was warm, he was shivering. I took his temperature. It had shot back to a hundred and three.

I went downstairs to call Francis, but neither he nor Henry was in. So I went back upstairs. There was no doubt about it: Charles looked terrible. I stood in the door looking at him for a moment, and then I said, “Wait a minute” and went down the hall to Judy’s room.

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.

“Look at Mel,” she said. “Don’t you just love him? If he called up and asked me to marry him I would do it in, like, one second.”

“Judy, what would you do if you had a hundred and three degrees of fever?”

“I would go to the fucking doctor,” she said without looking away from the TV.

I explained about Charles. “He’s really sick,” I said. “What do you think I should do?”

She fanned a red taloned hand in the air, drying it, her eyes still fixed on the screen. “Take him to the emergency room.”

“You think?”

“You’re not going to find any doctors on Sunday afternoon. Want to use my car?”

“That would be great.”

“Keys are on the desk,” she said absently. “Bye.”