Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Lampblack, breathless, hopped into the room.

“The tray, whetstone.” Crucifer smiled at Darconville. “My amah, my sizar, my valet de chambre .”

The table was cleared quickly. Crucifer lighted another cigarette and, behind the smoke, watched Darconville carefully.

“Now, talk to me. Learn to confide. I shan’t say a dicky-bird, I promise. Did she ever tell you she ever wanted to go out with other men? Once even?”

“Never. No.”

“Exactly, you see?” Dr. Crucifer spat out a ball of smoke and offhandedly held out another glass of cognac to Darconville, which he took and drank. “The kleptophobe is cousin to the kleptomaniac! When any message is preached by a lover that makes its major claim to virtue the assertion that she wants to go out with no one else, it bears the poison of its essential destruction within its own breath. She only knew that, when she acted, she would act for good. There is always some brutish nether fault in starved vanity, deep and gleaming like the eyes of a shrew, almost hidden in its fur, yet when that shrew decides to move, no matter in which direction it goes, its hair will never muss. You would perfume, it appears, what stinks like a hoatzin. The thing is now Greek and now Roman. But during this four-year contrectation, tell me, was she ever given the freedom to choose other than you?”

“Often. Many times.”

“Specifically.”

“I went to London,” said Darconville. “Then.”

“You came back.”

“Encouraged to it. We were engaged to be married.”

“When precisely?”

“Three years ago.”

“Why didn’t you marry her then?”

“She wanted to finish school. We agreed on it. She was—” Crucifer nodded, saying, “Inexperienced. Say it. But gentle and kind, right? She was kind in the beginning, of course she was. The tare in its early stages looks exactly like wheat. Inexperienced, gentle, kind — yes, and young. But of canonical age,” Crucifer winked, “right? But, tell me,” he whispered salaciously, “was she of imperforate sex?” He leaned forward. “I mean, when you first—”

Darconville’s eyes lowered sorrowfully.

“Dot dot dot,” said Crucifer, smiling. He folded his arms. “This engagement, whose idea was it?”

Darconville looked piteously across the room, confused in the salvo of questions that made reflection impossible. “I can tell you this: I very much desired it, but when I was in London she wrote not only that she loved me but mailed me her grandmother’s ring — unasked for, freely sent, yet happily received — to size another ring, another finger of the same dimension.”

“A nimble finger.”

Dr. Crucifer stood up, a belly-dance contortion that took three or four distinct moves, and poured some more wine. “A nimble finger, a thimble brain, and a fimble for a mouth. But did she talk much?” He arranged a few pieces of toast left there. “Conversation?”

Darconville shook his head.

“Precisely,” said Crucifer. “And when she did?”

“It was — not always—”

“Remarkable? Of course not. On the contrary. Distinguo . Like all silent people when she opened her mouth she was a nag, thinking nothing of course but all the while speaking like Bumbastis. A woman’s conversation is always an anaphrodisiac, and no one knows it better than they.” He swirled toast around in his wine to remove the bubbles which gave him a headache and set his neutral groin on fire. “I know that silence from years in the classroom. Pigritia : plain slackness. But was it silence? I wonder. Dumbness, perhaps-a situation as regards women when they are at their most dangerous: men are only too apt to take their silence as quiescence or inactivity. But what an error in the estimate! The bitch had moves and countermoves. No one ever leaves somebody for nobody. She was the very Vicar of Bray.”

He glubbed more wine. “She told you she loved you. To the last?”

Darconville nodded.

“Stories to delight your ears, favors to allure your eyes? She touched you here and there? Oh yes. The adverse party, with a suitable amount of proleptic irony, was your advocate. But the time that went by! Is it any wonder that Vulcan fashioned creaking shoes for Venus that he might hear her when she stirred?” Crucifer swept his arm from him. “She loved you — pish! She was loyal — bubble! Fair proportioned — mew! Gentle of heart — wind!”

Dr. Crucifer, meditatively, then began to walk, watching the unsteady outthrow of his feet in front of him as he paced the room with that awkward gait of his, left, right, left.

“Yet digged the mole,” he murmured, “and lest its ways be found worked underground. Fickle, false, and full of fraud, this breeding jennet, in which with its pluming and fakery the South is apparently rich, ill-annexed opportunity and yet was still the owner of her face! It’s astounding! My God, I am almost with child to get to the bottom of this. She was a speaking cat. The girl was a veritable Guicciardini.” He moved back and forth on those premeditated feet. “To question is the answer. Quaere : why did her relationship with you coincide exactly with the years she spent as a student? Quaere : how could she chance to confirm your replacement almost on the very day you departed and not before? Quaere : what was her original resolve in having decided to tell you absolutely nothing of him while at the same time hazarding his disaffection in the cultivation of your love? Quaere : when exactly did she decide she needed you for leverage? Quaere : where had she spent all those days, weeks, months in your absence? Lies! Abominable lies! The adulteress’s tenth muse!” hooted Crucifer. “Fornication, spying, trespassing, lying, duplicity, bribery, procuring, and conspiracy! She munched vacuity and excreted fibs. Why, it’s a whore deep as a ditch! And then take the dike-louper,” he asked, “—this nautical neighbor — had she ever once mentioned him, even at the outset, years ago, or referred to him in your presence? During a row, say? After some balls-up or other?”

Darconville’s closed eyelids trembled, his nostrils quivered, and he shook his head.

“And why?” asked Crucifer. “ Why, but to keep you ignorant !” He was standing in front of the tapestry with his misshapen back towards Darconville, and then he turned, that ghostly unnatural face working hopelessly to try to animate itself with conviction, desperate, it seemed, to try to reach, to shape, to appoint the life in another he’d come to lose in his own but one, it was clear, he’d retrieve not for the purpose of remorse but for the purpose of rage.

“A fact, it appears,” said Crucifer, “never went in partnership with the miracle you saw as her.”

He took the remark across the room to Darconville and lowered over the bed, arranging the sheet to his feverish shoulders. He looked at the tender concave temple and would have kissed it but instead whispered, “Did it?”

Dr. Crucifer stared into his eyes.

“The number of vibrations,” he breathed, “varies inversely as to the length of a string; thus half the length gives twice the vibrations, don’t you see? The less she gave, Darconville, the more you imagined — and she couldn’t leap an inch from a slut.” He sat down and moved closer. “To live without facts, you felt, was to be at the beginning of imagination. The artist, I don’t doubt, may learn a wealth of lessons in this connection but,” he glubbed, “the lover? — O dear me!”

Crucifer minimized nothing. A chronic oppositionist, he had to depart every majority and to attack every authority. When in argument he often refused to allow his antagonist the chance to state his own case but would do it for him, suddenly, and perhaps even fairly— and then demolish it, gravely and frequently with an expression of sympathetic regret. Curiously, he tried carefully to conceal the way he secretly demanded things be understood, so that swiftly, inexplicably, he could become upset upon instantly being offended, and yet somehow, with a tongue laced with proverb and sermon, strap and ferrule, he never gave up one element of a problem for the sake of coming to a comfortable solution. He railed by precept and detracted by rule, seeking not to contemplate truth but rather to subjugate it. He made precedence out of example, underaccommodated, and wheedled. He entered every hole.