The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(72)
That winter Quentin didn’t go home for the holidays. Around Christmastime—real-world Christmas—he’d had the usual conversation with his parents about Brakebills’ unusual schedule, which he had to remind them about every year, lounging inside the old phone booth under the back stairs with one foot braced up against the folding wooden door. Then by the time Brakebills-calendar Christmas rolled around, it was already March in the real world, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal not to go back. If they had asked him—if they’d put it out there for an instant that they were eager to see him, or that they would be disappointed if he didn’t come—he might have caved. He would have, in a second. But they were their usual blithe, oblivious, glassine selves. And besides, he got an independent feeling from coolly informing them that he had other plans, thanks very much.
Instead Quentin went home with Alice. It was her idea, though as it got closer to the holidays Quentin wasn’t exactly sure why she’d invited him, since the prospect obviously made her suicidally uncomfortable.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” she said, when he asked her. “It just seemed like the kind of things boyfriends and girlfriends do!”
“Well, whatever, I don’t have to come. I’ll just stay here. Just say I had a paper to finish or something. I’ll see you in January.”
“But don’t you want to come?” she wailed.
“Of course I do. I want to see where you come from. I want your parents to know who I am. And God knows I’m not taking you back to my parents’ house.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound any less anxious. “Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.”
The opening of the portals home for vacation was always a complicated and tedious procedure that inevitably led to huge numbers of Brakebillians backed up with all their luggage in a ragged line that wound down the dark, narrow corridor leading to the main living room, where Professor Van der Weghe was in charge of getting people where they needed to go. Everybody was relieved that exams were over, and there was always a lot of giddy pushing and shoving and shrieking and casting of minor pyrotechnic spells. Quentin and Alice waited together in silence with their packed bags, solemnly, side by side, Quentin looking as respectable as he could manage. He hardly had any clothes anymore that weren’t part of his Brakebills uniform.
He knew Alice was from Illinois, and he knew Illinois was in the Midwest, but he couldn’t have pointed to the prec that thing?”Rallowedv with ise location of that state within a thousand miles. Apart from a European vacation in junior high he’d barely ever been off the East Coast, and his Brakebills education hadn’t done much to improve his grasp of American geography. And as it turned out he hardly saw Illinois anyway, or at least not its exterior.
Professor Van der Weghe set up the portal to open directly into an anteroom inside Alice’s parents’ house. Stone walls, flat mosaic floors, post-and-lintel doorways on all sides. It was a precise re-creation of a traditional bourgeois Roman residence. Sound echoed in it like a church. It was like stepping past the red velvet rope at a museum. Magic tended to run in families—Quentin was an exception in that respect—and Alice’s parents were both magicians. She had never had to sneak around behind their backs the way he had to with his parents.
“Welcome to the house that time forgot to forget,” Alice said sulkily, kicking her bags into a corner. She led him by the hand along an alarmingly long, dark corridor to a sunken living room with cushions and hard Roman-style couches strewn around at careless angles and a modest plashing fountain in the middle.
“Daddy changes it all around every few years,” she explained. “He mostly does architectural magic. When I was little it was all Baroque, gold knobs on everything. That was almost nice. But then it was Japanese paper screens—you could hear everything. Then it was Fallingwater—Frank Lloyd Wright—until Mom got sick of living in a mildew farm for some reason. And then for a while it was just a big old Iroquois longhouse with a dirt floor. No walls. That was hilarious. We had to beg him to put in a real bathroom. I think he seriously thought we were going to watch him defecate into a pit.”
With that she sat down heavily on a hard leather Roman couch, opened a book, and became absorbed in her vacation reading.
Quentin understood that it was sometimes better to wait out Alice’s black periods than to try to coax her out of them. Everybody has their own idiopathic reaction to their childhood home. So he spent the next hour wandering around what looked remarkably like an upper-middle-class Pompeian household, complete with pornographic frescoes. It was obsessively authentic except for the bathrooms—a concession had obviously been granted on that score. Even dinner, when it arrived, served by a squad of three-foot-tall animated wooden marionettes who made little click-clacking noises as they walked, was revoltingly historical: calf brains, parrot tongues, a roasted moray eel, all peppered beyond the point of edibility, just in case they weren’t inedible to begin with. Fortunately, there was plenty of wine.
They had progressed to the third course, the stuffed and roasted uterus of a sow, when a short, portly, round-faced man suddenly appeared in the doorway. He was dressed in a well-worn toga the gray of unlaundered bedsheets. He hadn’t shaved for several days, and his dark stubble extended well down his neck, and what hair he had left on his head could have used cutting.