The Secret History Read Online Free PDF

All the kids seem to crave them.”
    I had no idea how to respond to this.
    He pulled out his desk drawer and began to pick things up and bring them close to his eyes and put them back in again. “Once a transmission goes,” he said, “in my experience the car is gone. Especially on a V-6. You might as well take that vehicle to the junk heap. Now, myself, I’ve got a 98 Regency Brougham, ten years old. With me, it’s regular checkups, new filter every fifteen hundred miles, and new oil every three thousand. Runs like a dream. Watch out for these garages in town,” he said sharply.
    “Pardon?”
    He’d found his checkbook at last. “Well, you ought to go to the Bursar but I guess this’ll be all right,” he said, opening it and beginning to write laboriously. “Some of these places in Hampden, they find out you’re from the college, they’ll charge you double. Redeemed Repair is generally the best—they’re a bunch of born-agains down there but they’ll still shake you down pretty good if you don’t keep an eye on them.”
    He tore out the check and handed it to me. I glanced at it and my heart skipped a beat. Two hundred dollars. He’d signed it and everything.
    “Don’t you let them charge you a penny more,” he said.
    “No sir,” I said, barely able to conceal my joy. What would I do with all this money? Maybe he would even forget he had given it to me.
    He pulled down his glasses and looked at me over the tops of them. “That’s Redeemed Repair,” he said. “They’re out on Highway 6. The sign is shaped like a cross.”
    “Thank you,” I said.
    I walked down the hall with spirits soaring, and two hundreddollars in my pocket, and the first thing I did was to go downstairs to the pay phone and call a cab to take me into Hampden town. If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s lying on my feet. It’s sort of a gift I have.

    And what did I do in Hampden town? Frankly, I was too staggered by my good fortune to do much of anything. It was a glorious day; I was sick of being poor, so, before I thought better of it, I went into an expensive men’s shop on the square and bought a couple of shirts. Then I went down to the Salvation Army and poked around in bins for a while and found a Harris tweed overcoat and a pair of brown wingtips that fit me, also some cufflinks and a funny old tie that had pictures of men hunting deer on it. When I came out of the store I was happy to find that I still had nearly a hundred dollars. Should I go to the bookstore? To the movies? Buy a bottle of Scotch? In the end, I was so swarmed by the flock of possibilities that drifted up murmuring and smiling to crowd about me on the bright autumn sidewalk that—like a farm boy flustered by a bevy of prostitutes—I brushed right through them, to the pay phone on the corner, to call a cab to take me to school.
    Once in my room, I spread the clothes on my bed. The cufflinks were beaten up and had someone else’s initials on them, but they looked like real gold, glinting in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the oak floor—voluptuous, rich, intoxicating.

    I had a feeling of déjà vu when, the next afternoon, Julian answered the door exactly as he had the first time, by opening it only a crack and looking through it warily, as if there were something wonderful in his office that needed guarding, something that he was careful not everyone should see. It was a feeling I would come to know well in the next months. Even now, years later and far away, sometimes in dreams I find myself standing before that white door, waiting for him to appear like the gatekeeper in a fairy story: ageless, watchful, sly as a child.
    When he saw it was me, he opened the door slightly wider than he had the first time. “Mr. Pepin again, isn’t it?” he said. I didn’t bother to correct him. “I’m afraid so.”
    He looked at me for a moment. “You have a wonderful name, you know,” he said.