Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

It was Fawx’s Mt.

A few hambacked townies in swamper hats, looking like Chalco-lithic forerunners, were sitting on nailkegs in front of the general store, eating moon-pies and drinking cups of parched-corn coffee. But Darconville kept to his directions: left at the fork, first right — stop. He got out. The moon was auriform, in its first quarter. A spreading pool of nightwind wet the air. The blue dusk chilled Darconville’s sweatdamp ears as he wondered, for the first time now, whether Isabel would take this appearance to be an expression of his passion, a compromise with it, or a violation against it: whatever, it was too late. He saw lights in the house and checked his watch — seven o’clock, exactly. There was a woodsmoke aroma down by the hollows, and the croak of frogs, a variable plunk, clung, or jug-a-rum, could be heard across the street in the glades where old hickory pines and dark stands of junipers sent a terebrinthic musk out of the shadows. He picked up his suitcase and started to walk toward the house.

Suddenly, Darconville stopped short. He peered forward. Isabel’s blue car was parked in the driveway, slightly dented as before, but with an uncharacteristic addition on the back fender: it was a bumper-sticker. His mouth went dry as a limebasket as he read the words on it—” Sailors Have More Fun .”

Then night fell like a guillotine blade.

THE RURAL CLOAK of blackness slowly dwindled down to a single figure stepping out of the shadows. Swallowing, Isabel Rawsthorne staggered back from the door and clapped both hands over her mouth, her face pale as if paralyzed by the flash of a lightbulb: a ghost wearing a body. All her life seemed to have taken refuge in her eyes. She couldn’t speak but with a gesture suggestive of caution, the alarmed maneuver he’d so often seen before, quickly saw him inside to shut the door as fast as possible. Who are you with, thought Darconville, from whom you turn away, at whom you dare not look? She shut her mouth tightly, her face flushing with heat, the enhanced beauty which this warmth might have brought being killed by the rectilinear sternness of countenance that came therewith.

It was a bewilderment that became awkwardness: somehow every move and motion of hers made her legs, even more over-essex’d in the thigh now than he’d remembered, a perverse caricature of what once she feared, waterbulge, keech, a symmelian effect as if the lower limbs had literally fused from rumprowl to root. Her hair had lost its gloss. There are no faults, however, in something we want badly, and Darconville hugged her desperately, closing his eyes only to avoid seeing again what had immediately come to his attention.

Isabel was not wearing her ring.

Instinctively, Darconville wanted to tell her he loved her, but her face had changed — there was now a force of irony in it, the almost malignant joy of some sudden but unshared surprise, yet there was still that dreadful pallor, like some kind of psychic face in a photograph. He followed her into the kitchen where, greeting him with a note of hollow but booming effusiveness, her mother clapped her ironing board shut and discreetly withdrew to another room, the complicated significance of the look that passed between the two people, however, not being lost on him. They were alone now. Isabel did not speak. Darconville tried to smile. They both seemed to be judiciously waiting out the hesitation of some mutually pre-accepted worry or doubt or embarrassment that perhaps it might somehow vanish to ease the historical import the moment seemed to hold.

It wasn’t the fatigue of the long trip down, it wasn’t that he hadn’t eaten all day, it wasn’t the studied formality he felt all about him, no, it was nothing he could actually name — but Darconville began to experience a melancholy that drained his bones to vacuums. He smiled lovingly at her nevertheless and gently tried to lift her chin; it wouldn’t lift. The note of the note of a thing is a note of the thing itself: he mentioned the bumper-sticker on the car. It seemed ludicrous. The air in the kitchen, however, loaded with the phlogiston of unspoken words, seemed about to explode. Had someone, he asked, given it to her?

Isabel’s profoundly lowered head suddenly came up fast with an almost diabolical half-smile in its eyes — a look of hers he’d never seen before. She’s a complete stranger to me, he thought. She seemed to be trying to control a happiness within her, despite the fact that he was suffering, despite the fact that she saw that, and, more, it seemed to confess with a kind of premeditated felicity to her own lack of power to please him with whatever reply he became increasingly more desperate to know, confirming the face to be its own fault’s book. Dar-conville began to hear devils crisscrossing over his head. He experienced a sensation of starting to fall.

The dizziness began to overtake him. And all of a sudden the angel, Rikbiel, in the company of his Holy Wheels descended to try to minister to him, saying: You will struggle up from green valleys into the mountains. You will recognize another valley on the other side, when suddenly the mountain whereupon you stand shall melt away under you. Then the two valleys will become just one wider lowland with you standing there in the middle of it. You shall travel thence to mountains far away to discover them likewise into disappearing, suddenly find that there is no end to the mountains, and realize that all the leveling of mountains outside yourself has caused a leveling within. You don’t know where you are any longer, but you mustn’t fall, my child. No, you musn’t fall, can you hear us ? But Darconville knew he was falling. He could feel himself falling into a monstrous vortex, reverberant with noise, loud with light. He couldn’t stop.

He remembered falling a million miles away. He remembered as he fell slowly through the air how the known strangely became the unknown. He remembered trying to fix his falling attention on Isabel’s lips to catch her words quicker than his ears might as he asked her a direct question. He was smiling, reaching out for her — but suddenly something was wrong with her face, a hardness in the eyes, a coarseness of expression flickering over her lips. Her scar whitened. And then a bubble burst, and then a world. Isabel said, “I love someone else.”

Darconville went pale as a dishclout. His head detonated, like Goliath who took the stone— thud ! — flat in the sinciput, and perspiration, like lace, broke upon his face. His hands began to tremble uncontrollably as blindly he reached for the table to steady himself. But he was falling slowly, slowly falling, and, as he fell, he felt his soul fly out of his mouth making a sound like, “W-who?”

Isabel turned to him the three-quarter profile the Dutch invented. Her lips curved into a sharp, foxlike smile as if under the pressure of some inner merriment or delight remorselessly beyond her power to suppress, for its triumph, for the force in the authenticity of its abusive truth, for the opportunity at last of its unexpected release, and then calmly spoke the words of his execution.

“Gilbert van der Slang,” she said.

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“IT ALL BEGAN a long time ago,” said Isabel, smiling wistfully at Darconville, “before I met you. I guess it was just fate.” She seemed to turn his body into the frame of a doorway through which, though speaking of the past, she gazed out into the future. “I was first attracted to his brother, Govert, you know all that, in my classes in high school, but with him inviting me over to Zutphen Farm and all, well, it wasn’t long before I eventually met”—she looked at Darconville who was obmuted into a shocked and fearful silence, his eyes frozen onto her—”Gil.”