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Eliot stared out theinto the black ohich looked too heavily embroidered to be coh shape e left Fillory?"
"Yes Though at least Martin Chatwin hadn’t chewed you practically in half"
"It’s not a contest, but yes, that is true But ere shaken up We loved Alice, too, you know, in our way Even Janet did And we thought we’d lost you as well as her We ell and truly done with Fillory and all its goods and chattels, I can tell you
"Josh went home to his parents in New Hampshire, and Richard and Anaïs went off so before they went to Fillory Not big ain, nor could I face on, so I went home with Janet to LA
"That turned out to be an excellent decision You know her parents are lawyers? Entertaine house in Brentwood, working all the time, no discernible emotional life whatsoever So we sucked around Brentwood for a week or two until Janet’s parents got tired of the sight of our post-trau up for a predawn squashfor a couple of weeks
"You wouldn’t have heard of it, it was that kind of place Iet into and ludicrously expensive, but ue Janet practically grew up there--the staff all knew her froine that--our Janet, a little girl! She and I had a bungalow to ourselves and positively legions of people to wait on us I think Janet had awith ic in it Nothing feels that good without ic
"Of course, the terrible secret of places like that is that they’re horrifically boring You have no idea the extreot very scoldy when it ca on the court, I can tell you I told them it’s just part of e
"Well, by the third day Janet and I were considering having sex with each other just to relieve the tediuuard my virtue, Julia appeared
"It was like one of those Poirot mysteries set at a posh country seat There was some accident down by the pool--I was never clear on the details, but an enors you pay for: first-class fuss At any rate the first tih the lobby strapped to a backboard, soaking wet and cursing a blue streak and insisting that she was fine, absolutely fine Take your paws off me, you damned dirty apes
"The next day I came down to the bar around three or four in the afternoon and there she was again, drinking alone, all in black Vodka gimlets I believe The mysterious lady It was painfully obvious that she didn’t belong at the spa Her hair was a rat’s nest, you literally can’t iine Worse than now even Her cuticles were bitten down to the quick Shoulders hunched Nervous stutter And then she had no grasp of how things worked She tried to tip the staff She pronounced the names of French wines with an actual French accent
"Of course I was drawn to her at once I figured she arch, that sort of thing No one but a Russian could afford to stay there and still have hair that bad Janet thought she was just out of rehab and froht back in Either e fell upon her like starving people
"The approach was subtle The trick was not setting off her alarer It was Janet, that mistress of seduction, who cracked her in the end--she planted herself in a public lounge and complained loudly about a rather involved computer issue You could watch our Julia wrestle with herself, but it was a fait accompli
"After that--well, you kno it is on those vacations As soon as you learn another person’s name they become inescapable We ran into each other everywhere You wouldn’t think a place like that was her style, would you? But there she was, up to her neck in mud, with cucu in and out of baths and things Once Janet tried to go in a steah everybody else had to flee Probably she had the to rid herself of some stubborn taint
"It came out that she had a weakness for cards, so we spent hours just drinking and playing three-handed bridge Not talking We didn’t know she was a ician, of course How could we? But you could tell she was bursting with sos that one likes about htly askew To tell you the truth I think one of the things we liked about her was that she reminded us of you
"Well, you kno in the Poirot books he always goes on vacation to get away from it all, the mysteries and whatever else, only to have a murder committed on the very island he’s fled to for peace and quiet and soastronoic One night I wandered over to her bungalow around ten or eleven at night Janet and I had had a fight, and I was looking for someone to complain about her to
"When I passed Julia’sI saw that she was building a fire That was odd to begin with The fireplaces were absolutely enoralows, but it was thethe it very s very carefully Shebefore she put it on--scraped away some of the bark with a little silver knife
"And then as I watchedI don’t kno to describe it so you’ll understand She kneeled down in front of the fire and began putting things in it Sos were obviously valuable--a rare shell, an old book, a handful of gold dust Some of them must just have been precious to her A piece of costuraph Each ti happened, except that whatever it was burned or ave off a nasty s for, but whatever it was it never caitated
"I felt utterly tawdry spying on her, but I couldn’t look away Finally she ran out of precious things, and then she started crying, and then she put herself into the fire She crawled over the hearth and collapsed, half in and half out of the fla out It ful to see Her clothes went up right away, of course, and her face got black with soot, but the fire never touched her skin She was absolutely sobbing Her shoulders shook and shook"
Eliot stood up and went to theHe struggled with one of the little panes for a second, then he must have found a catch Quentin had never noticed because he pulled the wholeopen Quentin couldn’t see how he did it He put his glass on the sill
"I don’t know if you’re falling in love with her or if you just think you are or what it is you’re doing," he said "I suppose I can’t blas as hard as possible on yourself But just listen to what I’ you
"That was how it all started, hoe knew she was one of us The spell was so I could hear the huone a funny color But so ht away she’d never been to Brakebills, because it sounded like gibberish to et within a thousandto do, and she never said, and I never asked
"But if I absolutely had to guess I’d say she was atte back so that she’d lost, or that was taken away fro that was very precious to her indeed And if I had another guess, I’d have to say that it wasn’t working"
CHAPTER 3