Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Smiling, Hypsipyle nodded.

“ Tantalizingly she pranced around on her mules in a filmy peignoir, her pendulous breasts swinging like bell-tongues. Rafe, part Turk, was sure going to get all he damned well wanted — and then some! He’s a real heel, thought Rhoda, but he really grows on you: I’ve got something for this guy. Meanwhile, Rafe’s plans had worked to perfection, no soft soap required, thank you: he knew he’d be throwing hot gooms into her all night. Swiftly he cornered her and, overcome by passion, Rafe tore her flouncies off in one rip and coaxed her into unspeakable acts, but she drank them in greedily, howling, “ Whip me! Nip me! Use me! Slap me! Bite me! Goose me !” Rafe dove headlong—’“

“Gooms,” said Cookie Crumpacker. She snapped the elastic of her panties. “I love that word.”

But Sally Ann Sprouse held up her hand, a semaphore to command undivided attention for the fantastic bit about to follow. She rattled the book and, screaming kinkily, raced on.

“‘—dove headlong into her, wallowing in her creamy flesh. He bounced up and down waggling his inflamed root. What Rhoda felt for the hot bulging muscles, the hairiness of this brainless, insatiable, gin-befunked seaman couldn’t be described. What the merchant marine hadn’t taught him hadn’t been taught ! He’d been in and out of every port from Libya to Hong Kong, running girls, white-slaving, putting the boots to every dame who hit the deck! The sweat poured down him in rills as he pounced, re-pounced, and re-pounced again with that throbbing, pulsating, jiving, expanding spark-plug of his—’ “

“ Neat !” screeched Aone Pitts, looking up lively from the letter she’d begun to write — on illustrated stationery, the kind graphed with doodads (dancing mice, kittens peering over floral baskets, etc.) and contrasting envelope liner.

Geraldine Oikle smiled secretively, a little amative fang sticking out. “He must have—” She held her hands two feet apart.

“I’m soaked!” giggled Mimsy Borogroves.

“ Readin’ trash ,” came a sudden outraged voice from somewhere, “ ain’t no better than bein’ trash !” It was Loretta Boyco, standing on a desk in the next room with her mouth to the heating vent.

“Hey, Boyco,” shouted Hester Popkin, hoisting up to her side of the vent, “how would you like it if I grabbed your legs and made a wish?” She listened a moment. “Or broke you damn ah-glasses?”

Cookie Crumpacker said: “That child, I swear, don’t menstruate. She defrosts.”

“But I wonder,” asked Robin Winglet, soberly, “if men like them Turks really do make the best lovers, you know?”

“Y’all know which men make the best lovers, honey?” asked Hypsipyle Poore, rabbeting her beautiful black hair in long strokes. She turned from the mirror, closed her eyes, and sucked a tooth. “The ones you have in bed with you.”

The girls all exploded into smutty giggles.

The bells from the clock-bearing cupola of Smethwick struck three, but having long since settled back, inert, open-thighed, sleepy, no one showed any interest in going to bed. What could they do now? Misty-eyed, Holly Sunday continued to strum her guitar. Gladys Applegate, coiling an arm over her head, asked if anybody wanted to sniff glue. Thomasina Quod said she was dying for a ham-’n’-cheese on a bulkie. “O, butter a bun, will you!” said Glenda Barrow, quickly cupping her mouth for the blunder. “ Thanks !” snapped little Thomasina Quod, wapperjawed, her voice snarping like a grig’s. “ Really. Thanks a lot !” Straddling a cuckoo-flowered white chair, Mona Lisa Drake asked the other girls what they would do if they were alone at night and a weirdo came into the room.

A mood of spookiness suddenly settled in. Voices went low and glances were exchanged in a ghostly hush. Someone lit a stick of incense. The girls grouped closer together on pillows, sag bags, and throw rugs, somewhat uneasy — poised at any moment to give in to the screaming meemies — and covertly began to speak about peeping toms, whispering idiolects of the midnight phonecall, and Breughel-like howbeits with things on their minds who crept about the late-night shrubbery. It wasn’t funny. Hadn’t they, any one of them, ever heard noises outside? They admitted they had and turned morbid and immediately began to rehearse for one another those self-ramifying and shuddersome myths, habitually passed down from class to class, from generation to generation, that recounted how in the distant past at Quinsy College maimed half-wits, gub-shites with pointed ears, and deranged creatures who left no shadow had actually been seen at night on the ramparts of the buildings and sometimes dragging a gimp leg down the corridors of the dorms, wheezing, cross-eyed, and dripping ! And that wasn’t all! They returned every single year, different ones, things with names — Grippo! Hoghead! The Four-Eyed Man of Cricklade! — and icy grips, bulbed heads, and pee-stains all over them!

It was then given out that many, many years ago a certain girl at Quinsy actually woke up in the middle of the night and saw standing right next to her bed a refulgent something with flippers for feet named “Thimbleballs” who clawed his way up the bricks, crept across the roof, depended in a crazy hang, and then dashed himself howling through a window — to try to bite off her head! The authorities then found her the next morning, a blithering idiot, with her hair gone completely white, and, according to common report, she was said to be still alive to this day but not moving a finger, just sitting with folded hands in a rooming-house somewhere down in the Tidewater and repeatedly muttering only a single word, “ Wurble! Wurble! Wurble !”

“I’m having the creeps,” said Géraldine Oikle.

Jessie Lee Deal held up her arm. “Look. Goose skin.”

“O poo,” said Hypsipyle Poore calmly, carefully tracing on some brown eyeliner — lurking with strange synthetic perfumes, she always went to bed as if the Chevalier Bayard were there awaiting her — and so her weary, decosmeticized visitors, partially because they were sapping with terminal fatigue, put away their fears. Hypsipyle clapped her eyeliner into her make-up box and with the emory board she picked up, for one last swynk at her nails, pointed toward the door. It was time for them to go. Yawping and yawning, the girls wobbled up on their feet. Some stretched and groaned.

Cookie Crumpacker, tweaking a slice of underwear from the moist rictus of her buttocks, picked up the paperback.

“I believe I’ll take this and read me some more about big ol’ Rafe here — just,” Cookie added, looking about like a little sly-boots putting out feelers, “just for a bit of a titty-pull. You mind?”

Most of the Clitheroe kids, on their way out, were too tired to comment.

“Well, I’ll tell you who I’d like to have a titty-pull with,” said Donna Wynkoop, working her eyes over a wide smile.

The girls stopped in their tracks. And just before they went to their respective rooms, sent down like insubordinate nuns to their low crypts to meditate punitively on their sins among the bones of their predecessors, they turned.

“Who?”

“ Come on!” prodded Celeste Skyler, she of the porpentine head.

“Yeah, who?”

Tenders, in a pause, for all? Tenders, in a pause, accepted.

“ Darconville .”

There was, for the first time that evening perhaps, universal agreement, and, although laughing, they fluked Donna Wynkoop mercilessly and told her not to hold her breath. She wasn’t alone. Charlotte Bodwell, a junior psych major, for instance, sat outside of his office all day every day! Sabrina Halliburton over in Truesleeve, they all knew, claimed that he had asked her out twice. And Brenda Workitt supposedly told her whole sorority right out that she’d like to cover his whole body with honey and lick it off!