Chapter 5 4 страница

More crashing, as of furniture overturned, and Henry's voice, quick and angry. Bunny's rose above it. 'Go ahead! ' he shouted, so loudly I'm sure he woke the house. 'Try and stop me. I'm not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew-'

Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs – gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.

About three o'clock, when everything was quiet and I was just about to go back to sleep, I heard soft footsteps in the hall and, after a pause, a knock at my door. It was Henry.

'Goodness, ' he said distractedly, looking around my room, at the unmade four-poster hed and my clothes scattered on the rug beside it. Tm glad you're awake. I saw your light. '

'Jesus, what was all that about? '

He ran a hand through his rumpled hair. 'What do you suppose? ' he said, looking up at me blankly. 'I don't know, really.

I must have done something to set him off, though for the life of me I don't know what. I was reading in my room, and he came in and wanted a dictionary. In fact, he asked me to look something up, and – You wouldn't happen to have an aspirin, would you? '

I sat on the side of my bed and rustled through the drawer of the night table, through the tissues and reading glasses and Christian Science leaflets belonging to one of Francis's aged female relatives. 'I don't see any, ' I said. 'What happened? '

He sighed and sat down heavily in an armchair. There's aspirin in my room, ' he said. 'In a tin in my overcoat pocket.

Also a blue enamel pillbox. And my cigarettes. Will you go get them for me? '

He was so pale and shaken I wondered if he was ill. 'What's the matter? ' I said.

'I don't want to go in there. '

'Why not? '

'Because Bunny's asleep on my bed. '

I looked at him. 'Well, Jesus, ' I said. 'I'm not going to '

He waved away my words with a tired hand. 'It's all right.

Really. I'm just too upset to go myself. He's fast asleep. '

I went quietly out of my room and down the hall. Henry's door was at the end. Pausing outside with one hand on the knob, I heard distinctly from within the peculiar huffing noise of Bunny's snores.

In spite of what I'd heard earlier, I was unprepared for what I saw: books were scattered in a frenzy across the floor; the night table was knocked over; against the wall lay the splay-legged remains of a black Malacca chair. The shade of the pole lamp was askew and cast a crazy irregular light over the room. In the middle of it was Bunny, his face resting on the tweed elbow of his jacket and one foot, still in its wing-tipped shoe, dangling off It the edge of the bed. Mouth open, his eyes swollen and unfamiliar f without their spectacles, he puffed and grumbled in his sleep. I | grabbed up Henry's things and left as fast as I could. I Bunny came down late the next morning, puff-eyed and sullen, while Francis and the twins and I were eating our breakfasts. He ignored our awkward greetings and went straight to the cabinet ^ and made himself a bowl of Sugar Frosted Flakes and sat down I wordlessly at the table. In the abrupt silence which had fallen, I i heard Mr Hatch come in the front door. Francis excused himself i. 1 and hurried away, and I heard the two of them murmuring in the hall as Bunny crunched morosely at his cereal. A few minutes passed. I was looking, obliquely, at Bunny slumped over his bowl «when all of a sudden, in the window behind his head, I saw the distant figure of Mr Hatch, walking across the open field beyond the garden, carrying the dark, curlicued ruins of the Malacca chair to the rubbish heap.

As troubling as they were, these eruptions of hysteria were infrequent. But they made it plain how upset Bunny was, and how disagreeable he might make himself if provoked. It was Henry he was angriest at, Henry who had betrayed him, and Henry who was always the subject of these outbursts. Yet in a funny way, it was Henry he was best able to tolerate on a daily basis. He was more or less constantly irritated with everyone else. He might explode at Francis, say, for making some remark he found pretentious, or become inexplicably enraged if Charles offered to buy him an ice cream; but he did not pick these petty fights with Henry in quite the same trivial, arbitrary way. This was in spite of the fact that Henry did not take nearly the pains to placate him that everyone else did. When the subject of the barge tour came up – and it came up fairly often – Henry played along in only the most perfunctory way, and his replies were mechanical and forced. To me, Bunny's confident anticipation was more chilling than any outburst; how could he possibly delude himself into thinking that the trip would come about, that it would be anything but a nightmare if it did? But Bunny, happy as a mental patient, would rattle for hours about his delusions of the Riviera, oblivious to a certain tightness about Henry's jaw, or to the empty, ominous silences which fell when he was talked out and sat, chin in hand, staring dreamily into space.

It seemed, for the most part, that he sublimated his anger towards Henry into his dealings with the rest of the world. He was insulting, rude, quick to start a quarrel with virtually everyone he came in contact with. Reports of his behavior drifted back to us through various channels. He threw a shoe at some hippies playing Hackysack outside his window; he threatened to beat up his neighbor for playing the radio too loudly; he called one of the ladies in the Bursar's office a troglodyte. It was fortunate for us, I suppose, that his wide circle of acquaintance included few people whom he saw on a regular basis. Julian saw as much of Bunny as anyone, but their relation did not extend much beyond the classroom. More troublesome was his friendship with his old schoolmate Cloke Rayburn; and most troublesome of all, Marion.

Marion, we knew, recognized the difference in Bunny's behavior as clearly as we did, and was puzzled and angered by it. If she'd seen the way he was around us, she doubtless would have realized that she was not the cause; but as it was she saw only the broken dates, the mood swings, the sullenness and the quick irrational angers which apparently were directed solely at her – Was he seeing another girl? Did he want to break up? An acquaintance at the Early Childhood Center told Camilla that one day at work Marion had called Bunny six times, and the last time he had hung up on her.

'God, please God, let her give him the old heave-ho, ' said Francis, turning his eyes to heaven, when he heard this bit of intelligence. Nothing more was said of it, but we watched them carefully and prayed that it would be so. If he had his wits about him Bunny surely would keep his mouth shut; but now, with his subconscious mind knocked loose from its perch and flapping in the hollow corridors of his skull as erratically as a bat, there was no way to be sure of anything he might do.

Cloke he saw rather less frequently. He and Bunny had little in common besides their prep school, and Cloke – who ran with a fast crowd, and took a lot of drugs besides – was fairly self-preoccupied, not likely to concern himself with Bunny's behavior or even to take much notice of it. Cloke lived in the house next door to mine, Durbinstall (nicknamed, by campus wags, 'Dalmane Hall, ' it was the bustling center of what the administration chose to refer to as 'narcotics-related activity' and one's visits there were occasionally punctuated with explosions and small fires, incurred by lone free-basers or the student chemists who worked in the basement) and, fortunately for us, he lived in the front, on the ground floor. Since his shades were always up and there were no trees in the immediate area, it was possible to sit safely on the porch of the library, some fifty feet away, and enjoy a luxurious and unobscured view of Bunny, framed in a bright window as he gazed open-mouthed at comic books or talked, arms waving, with an invisible Cloke.

'I just like to have an idea, ' Henry explained, 'where he goes. '

But actually it was quite simple to keep tabs on Bunny: I think because he, too, was unwilling to let the others, and Henry in particular, out of his sight for very long.

If he treated Henry with deference, it was the rest of us who were forced to bear the wearing, day-to-day brunt of his anger.

Most of the time he was simply irritating: for example, in his ill-informed and frequent tirades against the Catholic Church.

Bunny's family was Episcopalian, and my parents, as far as I knew, had no religious affiliation at all; but Henry and Francis and the twins had been reared as Catholics; and though none of I them went to church much, Bunny's ignorant, tireless stream of blasphemies enraged them. With leers and winks he told stories about lapsed nuns, sluttish Catholic girls, pederastic priests ('So then, this Father What's-His-Name, he said to the altar boy – this kid is nine years old, mind you, he's in my Cub Scout troop – he says to Tim Mulrooney, " Son, would you like to see where me and all the other fathers sleep at night? " '). He invented outrageous stories of the perversions of various Popes; informed them of little-known points of Catholic doctrine; raved about Vatican conspiracies, ignoring Henry's bald refutations and Francis's muttered asides about social-climbing Protestants.

What was worse was when he chose to zero in on one person in particular. With some preternatural craftiness he always knew the right nerve to touch, at exactly the right moment, to wound and outrage most. Charles was good-natured, and slow to anger, but he was sometimes so disturbed by these anti-Catholic diatribes that his very teacup would clatter upon its saucer. He was also sensitive to remarks about his drinking. As a matter of fact, Charles did drinka lot. We all did: but still, though he didn't indulge in any very conspicuous excess, I'd frequently had the experience of smelling liquor on his breath at odd hours or dropping by unexpectedly in the early afternoon to find him with a glass in his hand – which was perhaps understandable, things being what they were. Bunny made a show of fraudulent, infuriating concern, peppered with snide comments about drunkards and sots. He kept exaggerated tallies of Charles's cocktail consumption. He left questionnaires ('Do you sometimes feel you need a drink to get through the day? ') and pamphlets (freckle-faced child gazing plaintively at parent, asking, 'Mommy, what's " drunk"? ') anonymously in Charles's box, and once went so far as to give his name to the campus chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, whereupon Charles was deluged with tracts and phone calls and even a personal visit from a well-meaning Twelfth-Stepper.

With Francis, on the other hand, things were more pointed and unpleasant. Nobody said anything about it, ever, but we all knew he was gay. Though he was not promiscuous, every so often he would disappear quite mysteriously at a party and once, very early in our acquaintance, he'd made a subtle but unmistakable pass at me one afternoon when we were drunk and by ourselves in the rowboat. I'd dropped an oar, and in the confusion of retrieving it I felt his fingertips brush in a casual yet deliberate fashion along my cheek near the jawbone. I glanced up, startled, and our eyes met in that way that eyes will, and we looked at each other for a moment, the boat wobbling around us and the lost oar forgotten. I was dreadfully flustered; embarrassed, I looked away; when suddenly, and to my great surprise, he burst out laughing at my distress.

'No? ' he said.

'No, ' I said, relieved.

It might seem that this episode would have imposed a certain coolness upon our friendship. While I don't suppose that anyone who has devoted much energy to the study of Classics can be very much disturbed by homosexuality, neither am I particularly comfortable with it as it concerns me directly. Though I liked Francis well enough, I had always been nervous around him; oddly, it was this pass of his that cleared the air between us. I suppose I knew it was inevitable, and dreaded it. Once it was out of the way I was perfectly comfortable being alone with him even in the most questionable situations – drunk, or in his apartment, or even wedged in the back seat of a car.

With Francis and Bunny it was a different story. They were happy enough to be together in company, but if one was around either of them for too long it became obvious that they seldom did things with each other and almost never spent time alone. I knew why this was; we all did. Still, it never occurred to me that they weren't genuinely fond of each other on some level, nor that Bunny's gruff jokes concealed, however beguilingly, a keen and very pointed streak of malice toward Francis in particular.

I suppose the shock of recognition is one of the nastiest shocks of all. I'd never considered, though I should have, that these crackpot prejudices of Bunny's which I found so amusing were not remotely ironic but deadly serious.

Not that Francis, in normal circumstances, wasn't perfectly able to take care of himself. He had a quick temper, and a sharp tongue, and though he could've put Bunny in his place pretty much any time he chose, he was understandably apprehensive about doing so. We were all of us painfully aware of that metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine which Bunny carried around with him day and night, and which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always with him, and he had the power to dash it to the floor whenever he pleased.

I don't really have the heart to recount all the vile things he said and did to Francis, the practical jokes, the remarks about faggots and queers, the public, humiliating stream of questions about his preference and practices: clinical and incredibly detailed ones, having to do with such things as enemas, and gerbils, and incandescent light bulbs.

'Just once, ' I remember Francis hissing, through clenched teeth.

'Just once I'd like to…'

But there was absolutely nothing that anyone could say or do.

One might expect that I, being at that time perfectly innocent of any crime against either Bunny or humanity, would not myself be a target of this ongoing sniper fire. Unfortunately I was, perhaps more unfortunately for him than for me. How could he have been so blind as not to see how dangerous it might be for him to alienate the one impartial party, his one potential ally?

Because, as fond as I was of the others, I was fond of Bunny, too, and I would not have been nearly so quick to cast in my lot with the rest of them had he not turned on me so ferociously. Perhaps, in his mind, there was the justification of jealousy; his position in the group had started to slip at roughly the same time I'd arrived; his resentment was of the most petty and childish sort, and doubtless would never have surfaced had he not been in such a paranoid state, unable to distinguish his enemies from his friends.

By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: 'Gorgeous necktie, ' he'd say, 'that's a Hermes, isn't it? ' – and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie's humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: 'Richard, old man, why don't you keep any pictures of your folks around? '

It was just the sort of detail he would seize upon. His own room was filled with an array of flawless family memorabilia, all of them perfect as a series of advertisements: Bunny and his brothers, waving lacrosse sticks on a luminous black-and-white playing field; family Christmases, a pair of cool, tasteful parents in expensive bathrobes, five little yellow-haired boys in identical pajamas rolling on the floor with a laughing spaniel, and a ridiculously lavish train set, and the tree rising sumptuous in the background; Bunny's mother at her debutante ball, young and disdainful in white mink.

'What? ' he'd ask with mock innocence. 'No cameras in California?

Or can't you have your friends seeing Mom in polyester pants suits? Where'd your parents go to school anyway? ' he'd say, interrupting before I could interject. 'Are they Ivy League material? Or did they go to some kind of a State U? '

It was the most gratuitous sort of cruelty. My lies about my family were adequate, I suppose, but they could not stand up under these glaring attacks. Neither of my parents had finished high school; my mother did wear pants suits, which she purchased at a factory outlet. In the only photograph I had of her, a snapshot, she squinted blurrily at the camera, one hand on the Cyclone fence and the other on my father's new riding lawn mower. This, ostensibly, was the reason that the photo had been sent me, my mother having some notion that I would be interested in the new acquisition; I'd kept it because it was the only picture I had of her, kept it tucked inside a Webster's dictionary (under M for Mother) on my desk. But one night I rose from my bed, suddenly consumed with fear that Bunny would find it while snooping around my room. No hiding place seemed safe enough. Finally I burned it in an ashtray.

They were unpleasant enough, these private inquisitions, but I cannot find words to adequately express the torments I suffered when he chose to ply this art of his in public. Bunny's dead now, requiescat in pace, but so long as I live I will never forget a particular interlude of sadism to which he subjected me at the twins' apartment.

A few days earlier, Bunny had been grilling me about where I'd gone to prep school. I don't know why I couldn't just have admitted the truth, that I'd gone to the public school in Piano.

Francis had gone to any number of wildly exclusive schools in England and Switzerland, and Henry had been at correspondingly exclusive American ones before he dropped out entirely in the eleventh grade; but the twins had only gone to a little country day school in Roanoke, and even Bunny's own hallowed Saint Jerome's was really only an expensive remedial school, the sort of place you see advertised in the back of Town and Country as offering specialized attention for the academic underachiever.

My own school was not particularly shameful in this context, yet I evaded the question long as I could till finally, cornered and desperate, I had told him I'd gone to Renfrew Hall, which is a tennis-y, indifferent sort of boys' school near San Francisco. That had seemed to satisfy him, but then, to my immense discomfort, and in front of everybody, he brought it up again.

'So you were at Renfrew, ' he said chummily, turning to me and popping a handful of pistachios in his mouth.

'Yes. '

'When'd ya graduate? '

I offered the date of my real high school graduation.

'Ah, ' he said, chomping busily on his nuts. 'So you were there with Von Raumer. '

'What? '

'Alec. Alec Von Raumer. From San Fran. Friend of Cloke's.

He was in the room the other day and we got talking. Lots of old Renfrew boys at Hampden, he says, ' I said nothing, hoping he'd leave it at that.

'So you know Alec and all. '

'Uh, slightly, ' I said.

'Funny, he said he didn't remember you, ' said Bunny, reaching over for another handful of pistachios without taking his eyes off me. 'Not at all. '

'It's a big school. '

He cleared his throat. Think so? '

'Yes. '

'Von Raumer said it was tiny. Only about two hundred people. '

He paused and threw another handful of pistachios into his mouth, and chewed as he talked. 'What dormitory did you say you were in? '

'You wouldn't know it. '

'Von Raumer told me to make a point of asking you. '

'What difference does it make? '

'Oh, it's nothing, nothing at all, old horse, ' said Bunny pleasantly.

'Just that it's pretty damn peculiar, n'est-ce pas'? You and Alec being there together for four years, in a tiny place like Renfrew, and he never laid eyes on you even once? '

'I was only there for two years. '

'How come you're not in the yearbook? '

'I am in the yearbook. '

'No you're not. '

The twins looked stricken. Henry had his back turned, pre248 tending not to listen. Now he said, quite suddenly and without turning around: 'I low do you know if lie was in the yearbook or not? '

'I don't think I've ever been in a yearbook in my life, ' said Francis nervously. 'I can't stand to have my picture taken. Whenever I try to '

Bunny paid no attention. He leaned back in his chair.

'Come on, ' he said to me. Till give you five dollars if you can tell me the name of the dorm you lived in. '

His eyes were riveted on mine; they were bright with a horrible relish. I said something incoherent and then in consternation got up and went into the kitchen to get a glass of water. Leaning on the sink, I held the glass to my temple; from the living room, Francis whispered something indistinct but angry, and then Bunny laughed harshly. I poured the water down the sink and turned on the tap so I wouldn't have to listen.

How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny's eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter? I still think about this sometimes. If what Bunny really wanted was revenge, he could have had it easily enough and without putting himself at risk.

What did he imagine was to be gained from this slow and potentially explosive kind of torture, had it, in his mind, some purpose, some goal? Or were his own actions as inexplicable to him as they were to us?

Or perhaps they weren't so inexplicable as that. Because the worst thing about all of this, as Camilla once remarked, was not that Bunny had suffered some total change of personality, some schizophrenic break, but rather that various unpleasant elements of his personality which heretofore we had only glimpsed had orchestrated and magnified themselves to a startling level of potency. Distasteful as his behavior was, we had seen it all before, only in less concentrated and vitriolic form. Even in the happiest times he'd made ran of my California accent, my secondhand overcoat and my room barren of tasteful bibelots, but in such an ingenuous way I couldn't possibly do anything but laugh. ('Good Lord, Richard, ' he would say, picking up one of my old wingtips and poking his finger through the hole in the bottom. 'What is it with you California kids? Richer you are, the more shoddy you look. Won't even go to the barber. Before I know it, you'll have hair down to your shoulders and be skulking around in rags like Howard Hughes. ') It never occurred to me to be offended; this was Bunny, my friend, who had even less pocket money than I did and a big rip in the seat of his trousers besides. A good deal of my horror at his new behavior sprang from the fact that it was so similar to the old and frankly endearing way he used to tease me, and I was as baffled and enraged at his sudden departure from the rules as though – if we had been in the habit of doing a little friendly sparring – he had boxed me into the corner and beaten me half to death.

To compound this – all these unpleasant recollections to the contrary – so much remained of the old Bunny, the one I knew and loved. Sometimes when I saw him at a distance – fists in pockets, whistling, bobbing along with his springy old walk – I would have a strong pang of affection mixed with regret. I forgave him, a hundred times over, and never on the basis of anything more than this: a look, a gesture, a certain tilt of his head. It seemed impossible then that one could ever be angry at him, no matter what he did. Unfortunately, these were often the moments when he chose to attack. He would be amiable, charming, chatting in his old distracted manner when, in the same manner and without missing a beat, he would lean back in his chair and come out with something so horrendous, so backhanded, so unanswerable, that I would vow not to forget it, and never to forgive him again. I broke that promise many times. I was about to say that it was a promise I finally had to keep, but that's not I really true. Even today I cannot muster anything resembling anger for Bunny. In fact, I can't think of much I'd like better than for him to step into the room right now, glasses fogged and smelling of damp wool, shaking the rain from his hair like an old dog and saying: 'Dickie, my boy, what you got for a thirsty old man to drink tonight? '

One likes to think there's something in it, that old platitude amor vincit omnia. But if I've learned one thing in my short sad life, it is that that particular platitude is a lie. Love doesn't conquer everything. And whoever thinks it does is a fool.

Camilla he tormented simply because she was a girl. In some ways she was his most vulnerable target – through no fault of her own, but simply because in Greekdom, generally speaking, women are lesser creatures, better seen than heard. This prevailing sentiment among the Argives is so pervasive that it lingers in the bones of the language itself; I can think of no better illustration of this than the fact that in Greek grammar, one of the very first axioms I learned is that men have friends, women have relatives, and animals have their own kind.

Bunny, through no impulse toward Hellenic purity but simply out of mean-spiritedness, championed this view. He didn't like women, didn't enjoy their company, and even Marion, his self proclaimed raison d'etre, was tolerated as grudgingly as a concubine.

With Camilla he was forced to assume a slightly more paternalistic stance, beaming down at her with the condescension of an old papa toward a dimwit child. To the rest of us he complained that Camilla was out of her league, and a hindrance to serious scholarship. We all found this pretty funny. To be honest, none of us, not even the brightest of us, were destined for academic achievement in subsequent years, Francis being too lazy, Charles too diffuse, and Henry too erratic and generally strange, a sort of Mycroft Holmes of classical philology. Camilla was no different, secretly preferring, as I did, the easy delights of I English literature to the coolie labor of Greek. What was laugh «able was that poor Bunny should display concern about anyone else's intellectual capacities.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys' club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn't compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem. In many ways she was as cool and competent as Henry; tough-minded and solitary in her habits, and in many ways as aloof. Out in the country it was not uncommon to discover that she had slipped away, alone, out to the lake, maybe, or down to the cellar, where once I found her sitting in the big marooned sleigh, reading, her fur coat thrown over her knees.

Things would have been terribly strange and unbalanced without her. She was the Queen who finished out the suit of dark Jacks, dark King, and Joker.

If I found the twins so fascinating, I think it was because there was something a tiny bit inexplicable about them, something I was often on the verge of grasping but never quite did. Charles, kind and slightly ethereal soul that he was, was something of an enigma but Camilla was the real mystery, the safe I could never crack. I was never sure what she thought about anything, and I knew that Bunny found her even harder to read than I did. In good times he'd often offended her clumsily, without meaning to; as soon as things turned bad, he tried to insult and belittle her in a variety of ways, most of which struck wide of the mark. She was impervious to slights about her appearance; met his eye, unblinking, as he told the most vulgar and humiliating jokes; laughed if he attempted to insult her taste or her intelligence; ignored his frequent discourses, peppered with erudite quotations he must have gone to great trouble to dig up, all to the effect that all women were categorically inferior to himself: not designed as he was – for Philosophy, and Art, and Higher Reasoning, but to attract a husband and to Tend the Home.

Only once did I ever see him get to her. It was over at the twins' apartment, very late. Charles, fortunately, was out with Henry getting ice; he'd had a lot to drink and if he'd been around things would almost certainly have gotten out of hand.

Bunny was so drunk he could hardly sit up. For most of the evening, he'd been in a passable mood, but then, without warning, he turned to Camilla and said: 'How come you kids live together? '

She shrugged, in that odd, one-shouldered way the twins had.

'Huh? '

'It's convenient, ' said Camilla. 'Cheap. '

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