Without a word, Charles drained his drink and ducked back into the kitchen while Camilla went to answer it.
Before it was even open all the way I could see the glint of little round glasses. There was a chorus of hellos, and there they 72. all were: Henry; Bunny, with a brown paper bag from the supermarket; Francis, majestic in his long black coat, clutching, with a black-gloved hand, the neck of a bottle of champagne.
The last inside, he leaned to kiss Camilla – not on the cheek, but on the mouth, with a loud and satisfied smack. 'Hello, dear,' he said. 'What a happy mistake we have made. I've got champagne, and Bunny brought stout, so we can make black and tans. What have we got to eat tonight?'
I stood up.
For a fraction of a second they were struck silent. Then Bunny shoved his paper bag at Henry and stepped forward to shake my hand. 'Well, well. If it isn't my partner in crime,' he said. 'Haven't had enough of going out to dinner, eh?'
He slapped me on the back and started to babble. I felt hot, and rather sick. My eyes wandered around the room. Francis was talking to Camilla. Henry, by the door, gave me a small nod and a smile, nearly imperceptible.
'Excuse me,' I said to Bunny. Till be back in just a minute.'
I found my way to the kitchen. It was like a kitchen in an old person's house, with shabby red linoleum and – in keeping with this odd apartment – a door that led onto the roof. I filled a glass from the tap and bolted it, a case of too much, too quickly.
Charles had the oven open and was poking at some lamb chops with a fork.
I – due largely to a rather harrowing tour my sixth-grade class took through a meat-packing plant – have never been much of a meat eater; the smell of lamb I would not have found appealing in the best of circumstances, but it was particularly repulsive in my current state. The door to the roof was propped open with a kitchen chair, a draft blowing through the rusty screen. I filled my glass again and went to stand by the door: deep breaths, I thought, fresh air, that's the ticket… Charles burned his finger, cursed, and slammed the oven shut. When he turned around he seemed surprised to find me.
'Oh, hi,' he said. 'What is it? Can I get you another drink?'
'No, thanks.'
He peered at my glass. 'What've you got? Is that gin? Where did you dig that up?'
Henry appeared in the door. 'Do you have an aspirin?' he said to Charles.
'Over there. Have a drink, why don't you.'
Henry shook a few aspirins into his hand, along with a couple of mystery pills from his pocket, and washed them down with the glass of whiskey Charles gave him.
He had left the aspirin bottle on the counter and surreptitiously I went over and got a couple for myself, but Henry saw me do it. 'Are you ill?' he said, not unkindly.
'No, just a headache,' 1 said.
'You don't have them often, I hope?'
'What?' said Charles. 'Is everybody sick?'
'Why is everybody in here?' Bunny's pained voice came booming from the hallway. 'When do we eat?'
'Hold on, Bun, it'll only be a minute.'
He sauntered in, peering over Charles's shoulder at the tray of chops he'd just removed from the broiler. 'Looks done to me,' he said, and he reached over and picked up a tiny chop by the bone end and began to gnaw on it.
'Bunny, don't, really,' said Charles. 'There won't be enough to go around.'
'I'm starving,' said Bunny with his mouth full. 'Weak from hunger.'
'Maybe we can save the bones for you to chew on,' Henry said rudely.
'Oh, shut up.'
'Really, Bun, I wish you would wait just a minute,' said Charles.
'Okay,' Bunny said, but he reached over and stole another chop when Charles's back was turned. A thin trickle of pinkish juice trickled down his hand and disappeared into the cuff of his sleeve.
To say that the dinner went badly would be an exaggeration, but it didn't go all that well, either. Though I didn't do anything stupid, exactly, or say anything that I shouldn't, I felt dejected and bilious, and I talked little and ate even less. Much of the talk centered around events to which I was not privy, and even Charles's kind parenthetical remarks of explanation did not help much to clarify it. Henry and Francis argued interminably about how far apart the soldiers in a Roman legion had stood: shoulder to shoulder (as Francis said) or (as Henry maintained) three or four feet apart. This led into an even longer argument – hard to follow and, to me, intensely boring – about whether Hesiod's primordial Chaos was simply empty space or chaos in the modern sense of the word.
Camilla put on ajosephine Baker record; Bunny ate my lamb chop.
I left early. Both Francis and Henry offered to drive me home, which for some reason made me feel even worse. I told them I'd rather walk, thanks, and backed out of the apartment, smiling, practically delirious, my face burning under the collective gaze of cool, curious solicitude.
It wasn't far to school, only fifteen minutes, but it was getting cold and my head hurt and the whole evening had left me with a keen sense of inadequacy and failure which grew keener with every step. I moved relentlessly over the evening, back and forth, straining to remember exact words, telling inflections, any subtle insults or kindnesses I might've missed, and my mind – quite willingly – supplied various distortions.
When I got to my room it was silver and alien with moonlight, the window still open and the Parmenides open on the desk where I had left it; a half-drunk coffee from the snack bar stood beside it, cold in its styrofoam cup. The room was chilly but I didn't shut the window. Instead, I lay down on my bed, without taking off my shoes, without turning on the light.
As I lay on my side, staring at a pool of white moonlight on the wooden floor, a gust of wind blew the curtains out, long and pale as ghosts. As though an invisible hand were leafing through them, the pages of the Pannenides rippled back and forth.
I had meant to sleep only a few hours, but I woke with a start the next morning to find sunlight pouring in and the clock reading five of nine. Without stopping to shave or comb my hair or even change my clothes from the night before, I grabbed my Greek Prose composition book and my Liddell and Scott and ran to Julian's office.
Except for Julian, who always made a point of arriving a few minutes late, everyone was there. From the hall I heard them talking, but when I opened the door they all fell quiet and looked at me.
No one said anything for a moment. Then Henry said: 'Good morning.'
'Good morning,' I said. In the clear northern light they all looked fresh, well rested, startled at my appearance; they stared at me as I ran a self-conscious hand through my disheveled hair.
'Looks like you didn't meet up with a razor this morning, chap,' said Bunny to me. 'Looks like '
Then the door opened and Julian walked in.
There was a great deal to do in class that day, especially for me, being so far behind; on Tuesdays and Thursdays it might be pleasant to sit around and talk about literature, or philosophy, but the rest of the week was taken up in Greek grammar and prose composition and that, for the most part, was brutal, bludgeoning labor, labor that I – being older now, and a little less hardy would scarcely be able to force myself to do today. I had certainly plenty to worry about besides the coldness which apparently had infected my classmates once again, their crisp air of solidarity, the cool way their eyes seemed to look right through me. There had been an opening in their ranks, but now it was closed; I was bark, it seemed, exactly where I'd begun.
That afternoon, I went to see Julian on the pretext of talking about credit transfers, but with something very different on my mind.
For it seemed, quite suddenly, that my decision to drop everything for Greek had been a rash and foolish one, and made for all the wrong reasons. What had I been thinking of? I liked Greek, and I liked Julian, but I wasn't sure if I liked his pupils or not and anyway, did I really want to spend my college career and subsequently my life looking at pictures of broken kouroi and poring over the Greek particles? Two years before, I had made a similar heedless decision which had plummeted me into a nightmarish, year-long round of chloroformed rabbits and day trips to the morgue, from which I had barely escaped at all. This was by no means as bad (with a shudder I remembered my old zoology lab, eight in the morning, the bobbing vats of fetal pigs), by no means -1 told myself-
