Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“But why,” he asked, folding his hands over his layers of puppyfat and hunching into himself, “why did she wait for you to come up to Harvard to end it?”

“I don’t know.”

“You waited. You rejected immediate satisfactions with a view to obtaining subtler. Marriage.”

“She told me she needed more time.”

“Her presumption, yes. Your reply?”

“I told her to take that time. I loved her. I love her,” whispered Darconville.

“A proposition you’ll think she took the liberty of doubting — but you’d be gravely mistaken. Right there, that was the camel’s nose under the tent. There was a plan in the making, can’t you see? She knew what she wanted and only wanted to keep her promise abreast of reality until such time as she could with impunity do a quick hundred-and-eighty in the other direction! She always wanted to insinuate herself into that family, it would appear, and to that end always kept her alternatives dry, you see, so as to be able to follow in future what you might call the Golden Rule: she who has the gold, rules! The father’s footling! Give it two thralls!” He laughed. “Amazing, isn’t it, how but farting can engender little men? But this brother, that,” shrugged Crucifer, “strange all this difference should be ‘twixt Tweedledum and Tweedledee. As one was in the navy it’s evident he did everything on the double — o’erleaping his brother, yes? But whether Ferrex or Porrex, Hengist or Horsa, or any other unphiladel-phian two you wish to name or number she had best watch out: the wrath of lovers is much less the wrath of devils than is the wrath of brothers!” He winked. “Point taken? In any case, it was all as reasoned as geometry for them, with no sudden passionate expeditions on a stormy night to a waiting boat and then by muffled oarlocks to Calais, oh no, don’t fall for that.” He paused. “But the plot—”

“I don’t think she ever planned to come.”

“You focus on details only to miss the whole,” said Crucifer, blowing out his tongue to remove a flake of tobacco. “It’s simple. She hoped you’d find enough distraction in Cambridge to decide for both of you to end it — and, ironically, like you she was waiting for nothing but the very result your waiting explicitly forbade. It’s hardly a matter of Minoan complexity. She thought that you whose soul she stole to break would get over what she herself never got involved in in the first place — and never understood — a relationship that was an ideal she was vain enough to flirt with, cunning enough to acknowledge, but too small-souled to pursue, except, of course, in terms of this relatively brief and temporary romantic lavolta — a light bounding kind of waltz? In which the woman is assisted by her partner? To make frequent high springs? Oh yes! She was the deed’s creature, I tell you, and by her female parent you lost your first condition.

“I can see her, can’t you? No sooner a fornicator than a whore, giddy for the mere exchange of arms, with all expenses paid? It was a mind, Darconville, that could hold only one idea at a time, never proceeding to consequences felt in others and doing nothing in relation to anyone but itself. It made a promise to stay and in a winky-winky it was gone — once a pawn has moved, remember”—he leaned forward and snapped the words out-”it can never turn back. She hasn’t fallen in love: it was a realistic decision she made, after straightening her seems, to live without the vision she feared because of her shallowness would make her even more common than she is.” Crucifer sucked a knuckle. “Have you ever noticed that women who abuse men are always those whom men have found unattractive? They confess to their own lack of power to please.”

“She is beautiful,” said Darconville, almost inaudibly.

“O, the very queen of curds and cream,” replied Dr. Crucifer, mockingly clearing his throat with a rapid rumble. “I so happened”— he paused, making a comic glime sideways—”to see her photograph, several of them, in fact, when I stopped by your room.” His breasts wobbled as he leaned forward. “Frankly, she has a low frontotemporal hairline, close-set eyes — with a marked trace of lubricity, I might add — a slight case of oxycephaly, tits like griggles, and a scar on a face, I’m sorry, that over-goes my blunt invention to say more. Lascivious grace in whom all ill well shows! You claim to love her. I smell the fallacy of praemissis particularibus nihil probatur .”

Delighted, Crucifer cocked his little head forward questioningly. It twitched.

“You defend her because you love her—’tis a pity you can’t do so because she deserves it,” he breathed, drowning his suspirations in the long draw of another cigarette. “Love is too partial a piece of piety, you see, for just as a man carrying a heavy bucket of water compensates to walk by cantilevering a leg, so you must alter your posture in order to keep your own balance, no, my friend? And speaking of legs!” He held his hand in front of his mouth, hideously, to laugh. “Darconville, Darconville, Darconville. Honeysuckle is a weed. We are deceived in what is not discerned, and to err is but to be blind. I saw nothing but a pudgy self-preening angel of banality with ankles like bottles, scarce twenty-odd years above the girdle, some fifty beneath. Hodgepudding! Globuliferous pig’s-trotters! A pippin grown upon a crab! My God, it could diminish venery in a Turk! And I was going to tell you to keep a contemplative distance from beauty?” Smoke sifted through his teeth. “I looked at those lubberlegs and it made me wish birth-control were retroactive.”

“You don’t know what you sound like,” cried Darconville. “You don’t know the girl. You don’t know anything.”

“I know something,” said Crucifer forcefully. “And of that something, much.”

“You know much of little then.”

“Let’s just say, I don’t know enough.” He leaned forward. “Yet.”

Crucifer smiled in his face.

“I do know she was as deficient in good looks as she was in intelligence and, yes, all right, dexterous enough to realize her own inferiority, I’ll give her that, but ten ducats to a dime she went and left you precisely because she felt you’d one day leave her , having concluded in a final assessment of what she really was that she lived closer to her deficiencies than to her dreams. I know more. I know she is a woman and that all women walk in the sandals of Theramenes. And, finally, I know that if she had been brought up as — but whist, whist! You say she had no father?”

“Her father left her when she was a child.”

“Interesting.”

“She never knew him.”

“Fascinating,” said Crucifer, his voice squeaking. Then his face underwent one of its sudden alterations. “And I suppose I should now grow soft who with the same piece of luck years ago was packed off in the direction of my face to the Monastery of Monte Cretini? Do not hope it, Al Amin: my heart was broken, I broke none.” He paused. “But it’s curious, isn’t it? Elizabeth I, bynempt Isabel — a woman who had more pricks in her than a secondhand dartboard — killed a lover because of her father.” He spat in disgust. “I remember the riotous superlatives inscribed under her picture in the hall of the post-Reformation Jesus College, Oxford. The Virgin Queen, laughable soubriquet! The woman was the devil’s quilted anvil, fashioning sins on herself and yet the blows were never heard! King Harry the Fat’s murder of her polydactylic mother-cum-whore, however, was not forgot but flourished again in her daughter’s anti-paternal slaughter of Essex. It was not only a revenge but a repetition, the murdered mother finally emerging in her to overthrow manhood in that dark inevitability and ghastly satisfaction by no means unrelated to her father’s cruelty which, in a kind of bizarre chiasmus, was repeated in her own: it was no marvelous coincidence that Robert Devereux — or the cardinal who bore your glorious name — followed Anne Boleyn to the block. There was no husband. Belphoebe had her own balls! And there was no macBeth, although the entire realm cried out for one, but in any case she’d have strangled the boy in his crib, not so much that he might have grown up to kill a sovereign as that he’d have been pricked out in the sex she’d so proficiently come to hate. I’ve always thought it a pity,” sneered Dr. Crucifer, “that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew didn’t cross the channel to scour out a throne and turn that red-haired bitch back into the whibling she always was, ripping away that tallith of local religion she used to hide under and crushing underfoot that box of fortune-cookies called phylacteries she called her laws!”