The Secret History: Chapters 3–4

These activities picked up considerably around holidays and my presence, brief and irregular as it was, was regarded as a hindrance and something of a reproach.

Already I could hear my father complaining beerily about me to Mr. MacNatt, Mr. MacNatt slyly goading him on with remarks insinuating that I was spoiled and that he wouldn’t allow any son of his to walk all over him, if he had one.

I was fairly sure that it wasn’t the money per se, but the principle of it; I was also fairly sure that whatever tension existed, Bunny was oblivious of it.

Henry had little to say about the trip. As Bunny rattled on he would sit smoking with deep, resolute drags, pretending not to understand Bun’s fallacious Italian.

I needed money if I wanted to come back in the spring, and I couldn’t very well work if I was gallivanting around with Francis.

Unwanted during the holidays by my glamorous, good-for-nothing parents, I had decided to stay alone in Hampden (at an unspecified location) and work on my Greek, spurning, in my pride, their craven offers of financial help.

This stoicism, this Henrylike dedication to my studies and general contempt for the things of this world, won me admiration from all sides, particularly from Henry himself.

“Got to do with art or pastoralism or something. That’s how I gotta tie together John Donne and Izaak Walton, see.” He would resume pacing. “Donne. Walton. Metahemeralism. That’s the problem as I see it.”
“Bunny, I don’t think ‘metahemeralism’ is even a word.”
“Sure it is. Comes from the Latin. Has to do with irony and the pastoral. Yeah. That’s it. Painting or sculpture or something, maybe.”

“Dunno. Don’t know how to spell it. I mean”—he made a picture frame with his hands—“the poet and the fisherman. Parfait. Boon companions. Out in the open spaces. Living the good life. Metahemeralism’s gotta be the glue here, see?”

I stood in the deserted street until I could no longer hear the sound of the motor, only the hiss of the powdery snow that the wind kicked up in little eddies on the ground.

There were no cars at all, except for the occasional derelict vehicle propped on cinderblocks in someone’s front yard.

All of it looked as though it had stood abandoned since the Depression, except for a seedy little bar at the end of the street, which, judging from the scrum of trucks out front, was doing a good brisk business, even this early in the afternoon.

Besides a broken dresser, and a high chair standing in the corner, it was completely unfurnished except for a lawn mower, a rusted oil drum, and a trestle table which was scattered with sandpaper and carpentry tools and a few curved pieces of wood which were perhaps the exoskeletons of mandolins.

It never occurred to me that half the population of Vermont wasn’t experiencing pretty much what I put myself through every night—bone-cracking cold that made my joints ache, cold so relentless I felt it in my dreams: ice floes, lost expeditions, the lights of search planes swinging over whitecaps as I floundered alone in black Arctic seas.

“You did. You said you lived in the Blue Ridge Mountains one summer and made dulcimers. In Kentucky.”
I had nothing to say to this. I am not unused to being confronted with my own lies, but those of others never fail to throw me for a loop. I could only deny it and say, quite honestly, that I didn’t even know what a dulcimer was.

...and once, when the nurse on duty was three hours late with my medicine, he followed her expressionless into the hall and there delivered, in his subdued monotone, such a tense and eloquent reprimand that the nurse (a contemptuous, hard-bitten woman, with dyed hair like an aging waitress, and a sour word for everyone) was somewhat mollified...

...and afterwards she—who ripped off the bandages around my IV with such callousness, and poked me black and blue in her desultory search for veins—was much gentler in her handling of me, and once, while taking my temperature, even called me “hon.”

I played along with the stomach-flu ruse.

I looked at the side of his face: petulant, irritable, glasses low on the tip of his sharp little nose and the beginnings of jowls at his jawline.

Besides, there was something unquestionably odd about the way Henry was constantly shelling out money to him: paying his tabs, footing his bills, doling out cash like a husband to a spendthrift wife. Perhaps Bunny had allowed his greed to get the better of him, and was angry to discover that Henry’s largesse had strings attached.

Once out of North Hampden I walked slowly, extremely puzzled, an undertow of anxiety tugging at my thoughts.

One was the son of a famous West Coast racket boss and the other was the son of a movie producer. They were, respectively, president and vice-president of the Student Council, offices they utilized principally in order to organize drinking contests, wet-T-shirt competitions, and female mud-wrestling tournaments.

Taped to the box was a plaintive note: “Please do not steal this. I am on financial aid. Jenny Drexler.”

Bunny took a jaded bite of the cheesecake.

I was surprised by this exegesis, which was at odds with what I knew to be Henry’s frequent and—by my standards of reckoning—extravagant generosity.

I saw him around a couple of times that weekend, with Marion and her friends, talking importantly as they stared in goony admiration (they were Elementary Education majors, for the most part, who I suppose thought him terribly erudite because he studied Greek and wore some little wire-rimmed glasses).

Julian laughed and recited an aphorism from Xenophon, which was literally about tents and soldiers and the enemy nigh, but which carried the implication that in troubled times it was best to go to one’s own people for help.

I walked back to my pristine white door at the end of the hall, the only one in the suite unobscured by taped-up religious propaganda and posters of the Fleshtones and suicidal epithets from Artaud, and wondered how all these people were able to put up all this crap on their doors so fast and why they did it in the first place.

I felt as though I were in the dining car of a train and had been seated by the steward with another solitary male traveler, some kindly stranger, someone who didn’t even speak my language, perhaps, but who was still content to eat his dinner with me, exuding an air of calm acceptance as if he’d known me all his life.

On the way into North Hampden, it was all I could do to keep from deluging Henry with questions, but I kept my mouth shut until we got there.

“None of us have work visas. Whatever we took would’ve had to last the four of us for a long time. Incidentally,” he said, raising his voice as if I’d tried to interrupt him—actually, I hadn’t, I was only making a sort of inarticulate noise of stupefaction—“incidentally, Buenos Aires wasn’t our destination at all. It was only a stop along the way.”

With a rush of what was almost motion sickness, I experienced for a moment both the claustrophobic feeling that the walls had rushed in towards us and the vertiginous one that they receded infinitely, leaving both of us suspended in some boundless expanse of dark.

Ancient commentators are very circumspect about the whole thing. It was possible, with a great deal of work, to figure out some of the sacred rituals—the hymns, the sacred objects, what to wear and do and say.

It was rather obvious that drink alone wasn’t going to do the trick. Goodness. I couldn’t tell you all the things we tried. Vigils. Fasting. Libations.

The more we did it, though, the more meaningless it all began to seem, until, one day, I was struck by something rather obvious—namely, that any religious ritual is arbitrary unless one is able to see past it to a deeper meaning.

At the first, I suppose, it was impossible to see it any other way, looking at it as we did in fragments, through centuries. The vitality of the act was entirely obfuscated, the beauty, the terror, the sacrifice.

Time is something which defies spring and winter, birth and decay, the good and the bad, indifferently. Something changeless and joyous and absolutely indestructible. Duality ceases to exist...

You have no idea how pallid the workday boundaries of ordinary existence seem, after such an ecstasy.

“Of course,” he said agreeably, cool as a priest in his dark suit and ascetic spectacles.

“You saw him corporeally? Goatskin? Thyrsus?”
“How do you know what Dionysus is?” said Henry, a bit sharply. “What do you think it was we saw? A cartoon? A drawing from the side of a vase?”