The Secret History

It was Julian and Henry. Neither of them had heard me come up the stairs. Henry was leaving; Julian was standing in the open door. His brow was furrowed and he looked very somber, as if he were saying something of the gravest importance. Making the vain, or rather paranoid, assumption that they might be talking about me, I took a step closer and peered as far as I could risk around the corner.

Julian finished speaking. He looked away for a moment, then bit his lower lip and looked up at Henry.

Then Henry spoke. His words were low but deliberate and distinct. 'Should I do what is necessary?'

To my surprise, Julian took both Henry's hands in his own.

'You should only, ever, do what is necessary,' he said.

What, I thought, the hell is going on? I stood at the top of the stairs, trying not to make a sound, wanting to leave before they saw me but afraid to move.

To my utter, utter surprise Henry leaned over and gave Julian a quick little businesslike kiss on the cheek. Then he turned to leave, but fortunately for me he looked over his shoulder to say one last thing; I crept down the stairs as quietly as I could, breaking into a run when I was at the second landing and out of earshot.

The week that followed was a solitary and surreal one. The leaves were changing; it rained a good deal and got dark early; in Monmouth House people gathered around the downstairs fireplace, burning logs stolen by stealth of night from the faculty house, and drank warm cider in their stocking feet. But I went straight to my classes and straight back to Monmouth and up the stairs to my room, bypassing all these homey firelit scenes and hardly speaking to a soul, even to the chummier sorts who invited me down to join in all this communal dorm fun.

I suppose I was only a little depressed, now the novelty of it had worn off, at the wildly alien character of the place in which I found myself: a strange land with strange customs and peoples and unpredictable weathers. I thought I was sick, though I don't believe I really was; I was just cold all the time and unable to sleep, sometimes no more than an hour or two a night.

Nothing is lonelier or more disorienting than insomnia. I spent the nights reading Greek until four in the morning, until my eyes burned and my head swam, until the only light burning in Monmouth House was my own. When I could no longer concentrate on Greek and the alphabet began to transmute itself into incoherent triangles and pitchforks, I read The Great Gatsby. It is one of my favorite books and I had taken it out of the library in hopes that it would cheer me up; of course, it only made me feel worse, since in my own humorless state I failed to see anything except what I construed as certain tragic similarities between Gatsby and myself.

Tm a survivor,' the girl at the party was saying to me. She was blond and tan and too tall – almost my height – and without even asking I knew she was from California. I suppose it was something in her voice, something about the expanse of reddened, freckled skin, stretched taut over a bony clavicle and a bonier sternum and ribcage and entirely unrelieved by breasts of any sort – which presented itself to me through the lacuna of a Gaultier corselet. It was Gaultier, I knew, because she'd sort of casually let that slip. To my eyes it looked only like a wet suit, laced crudely up the front.

She was shouting at me over the music. 'I guess I've had a pretty hard life, with my injury and all' (I had heard about this previously: loose tendons; dance world's loss; performance-art's gain) 'but I guess I just have a very strong sense of myself, of my own needs. Other people are important to me, sure, but I always get what I want from them, you know.' Her voice was brusque with the staccato Californians sometimes affect when they're trying too hard to be from New York, but there was a bright hard edge of that Golden State cheeriness, too. A Cheerleader of the Damned. She was the kind of pretty, burnt-out, vacuous girl who at home wouldn't have given me the time of day. But now I realized she was trying to pick me up. I hadn't slept with anybody in Vermont except a little red-haired girl I met at a party on the first weekend. Somebody told me later she was a paper-mill heiress from the Midwest. Now I cut my eyes away whenever we met. (The gentleman's way out, as my classmates used to joke.)

'Do you want a cigarette?' I shouted at this one.

'I don't smoke.'

'I don't, either, except at parties.'

She laughed. 'Well, sure, give me one,' she yelled in my ear.

'You don't know where we can find any pot, do you?'

While I was lighting the cigarette for her, someone elbowed me in the back and I lurched forward. The music was insanely loud and people were dancing and there was beer puddled on the floor and a rowdy mob at the bar. I couldn't see much but a Dantesque mass of bodies on the dance floor and a cloud of smoke hovering near the ceiling, but I could see, where light from the corridor spilled into the darkness, an upturned glass here, a wide lipsticked laughing mouth there. As parties go, this was a nasty one and getting worse – already certain of the freshmen had begun to throw up as they waited in dismal lines for the bathroom – but it was Friday and I'd spent all week reading and I didn't care. I knew none of my fellow Greek students would be there. Having been to every Friday night party since school began, I knew they avoided them like the Black Death.

'Thanks,' said the girl. She had edged into a stairwell, where things were a little quieter. Now it was possible to talk without shouting but I'd had about six vodka tonics and I couldn't think of a thing to say to her, I couldn't even remember her name.

'Uh, what's your major,' I said drunkenly at last.

She smiled. 'Performance art. You asked me that already.'

'Sorry. I forgot.'

She looked at me critically. 'You ought to loosen up. Look at your hands. You're very tense.'

'This is about as loose as I get,' I said, quite truthfully.

She looked at me, and a light of recognition began to dawn in her eyes. 'I know who you are,' she said, looking at my jacket and my tie that had the pictures of the men hunting deer on it.

'Judy told me all about you. You're the new guy who's studying Greek with those creepos.'

'Judy? Whar do you mean, Judy told you about me?'

She ignored this. 'You had better watch out,' she said. 'I have heard some weird shit about those people.'

'Like what?'

'Like they worship the flicking Devil.'

'The Greeks have no Devil,' I said pedantically.

'Well, that's not what I heard.'

'Well, so what. You're wrong.'

'That's not all. I've heard some other stuff, too.'

'What else?'

She wouldn't say.

'Who told you this? Judy?'

'No.'

'Who, then?'

'Seth Gartrell,' she said, as if that settled the matter.

As it happened, I knew Gartrell. He was a bad painter and a vicious gossip, with a vocabulary composed almost entirely of obscenities, guttural verbs, and the word 'postmodernist.'

'That swine,' I said. 'You know him?'

She looked at me with a glitter of antagonism. 'Seth Gartrell is my good friend.'

I really had had a bit much to drink. 'Is he?' I said. 'Tell me, then. How does his girlfriend get all those black eyes? And does he really piss on his paintings like Jackson Pollock?'

'Seth,' she said coldly, 'is a genius.'

'Is that so? Then he's certainly a master of deception, isn't he?'

'He is a wonderful painter. Conceptually, that is. Everybody in the art department says so.'

'Well then. If everybody says it, it must be true,' 'A lot of people don't like Seth.' She was angry now. 'I think a lot of people are just jealous of him.'

A hand tugged at the back of my sleeve, near the elbow. I shrugged it off. With my luck it could only be Judy Poovey, trying to hit up on me as she inevitably did about this time every Friday night. But the tug came again, this time sharper and more impatient; irritably I turned, and almost stumbled backwards into the blonde.