Free The Secret History by Donna Tartt Page A

eyebrow. “Couldn’t beat him away from Greek with a stick—Ah, thank you, there, sir,” he said to the waiter, who was holding out another of the coral-colored drinks at arm’s length. “You want another?”
    “I’m fine.”
    “Go ahead, old man. On me.”
    “Another martini, I guess,” I said to the waiter, who had already turned away. He turned to glare at me.
    “Thanks,” I said weakly, looking away from his lingering, hateful smile until I was sure he had gone.
    “You know, there’s nothing I hate like I hate an officious fag,” said Bunny pleasantly. “You ask me, I think they ought to round them all up and burn them at the stake.”
    I’ve known men who run down homosexuality because they are uncomfortable with it, perhaps harbor inclinations in that area; and I’ve known men who run down homosexuality and mean it. At first I had placed Bunny in the first category. His glad-handing, varsity chumminess was totally alien and therefore suspect; then, too, he studied the classics, which are certainly harmless enough but which still provoke the raised eyebrow in some circles. (“You want to know what Classics are?” said a drunk Dean of Admissions to me at a faculty party a couple of years ago. “I’ll tell you what Classics are.
Wars and homos
.” A sententious and vulgar statement, certainly, but like many such gnomic vulgarities, it also contains a tiny splinter of truth.)
    The more I listened to Bunny, however, the more apparent it became that there was no affected laughter, no anxiety to please. Instead, there was the blithe unselfconciousness of some crotchety old Veteran of Foreign Wars—married for years, father of multitudes—who finds the topic infinitely repugnant and amusing.
    “But your friend Francis?” I said.
    I was being snide, I suppose, or maybe I just wanted to see how he would wriggle out of that one. Though Francis might or might not have been homosexual—and could just as easily have been a really dangerous type of ladies’ man—he was certainly of that vulpine, well-dressed, unflappable sort who, to someone withBunny’s alleged nose for such things, would rouse a certain suspicion.
    Bunny raised an eyebrow. “That’s nonsense,” he said curtly. “Who told you that?”
    “Nobody. Just Judy Poovey,” I said, when I saw he wasn’t going to take nobody for an answer.
    “Well, I can see why she’d say it but nowadays everybody’s gay this and gay that. There’s still such a thing as an old-fashioned mama’s boy. All Francis needs is a girlfriend.” He squinted at me through the tiny, crazed glasses. “And what about you?” he said, a trifle belligerently.
    “What?”
    “You a single man? Got some little cheerleader waiting back home for you at Hollywood High?”
    “Well, no,” I said. I didn’t feel like explaining my own girlfriend problems, not to him. It was only quite recently that I had managed to extricate myself from a long, claustrophobic relationship with a girl in California whom we will call Kathy. I met her my first year of college, and was initially attracted to her because she seemed an intelligent, brooding malcontent like myself; but after about a month, during which time she’d firmly glued herself to me, I began to realize, with some little horror, that she was nothing more than a lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath. It lasted forever, like some weepy and endless made-for-TV movie—all the clinging, all the complaints, all the parking-lot confessions of “inadequacy” and “poor self-image,” all those banal sorrows. She was one of the main reasons I was in such an agony to leave home; she was also one of the reasons I was so wary of the bright, apparently innocuous flock of new girls I had met my first weeks of school.
    The thought of her had turned me somber. Bunny leaned across the table.
    “Is it true,” he said, “that the gals are prettier in California?”
    I started laughing, so hard I thought my drink was