Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

(4.) Isabel as a blur : an operator’s giggle shook the camera. Was that blob in the lower right-hand corner a figure standing in a boat? This is the only photograph with writing on the reverse side, the connotative hieroglyphic: “G v d S.”

(5.) Isabel as a prom queen : spruce Miss Darklips, an eyebrow slightly raised, her hair styled and sprayed, her face overpowdered white like a femme entretenue , is wearing a white short-sleeved evening gown of Holland silk with a single green stripe at the Plimsoll line of her breasts, long gloves, and lyre-like shoes. She poses before a stone fireplace (hers?) on the mantel of which stands a model of a red-sailed, black-hulled ship and the demotic pénates of the owner, not a Medici: a duck-spout pitcher, gimcrack bottles, a pewter cup. The hearth is surrounded in blue and white mock-Delft tiles and the tacky, mass-produced print of a rainy marinescape-with-ship-in-distress hung in glass behind her is, thanks to the witless photographer, ludicrously given a sun by the reflection of his lightbulb. ( His light-bulb?)

(6.) Isabel as stout Cortez : a white farmhouse with a hip-and-valley roof and hippie-related fence lies within view of the beautiful subject standing hind-side-foremost. The photo has a Sinnbald character, with the back, awful and mysterious thing, impossible to speak about — that part of us we know nothing about, like an outlying waste forgotten by God. The photographer’s elongated and fractured shadow — he would be just abaft her port beam — covers her in part. The ear of the sphinx is 4½ feet long.

(7.) Isabel as a party guest : a candid shot of the subject sitting on the floor, a Nike amidst a group of yegg-faced teenagers, playfully mussing a blond boy’s hair, which action effectively disprizes one from a consideration of his face — but not, by any means, his ears! Her eyes are animated. It is strange to see her beauty so incongruously annexed, even if momentarily, to some kind of affection for this dolt-headed pube, a cobbler, clearly, who got beyond his last.

N.B . Wrong. The photograph compendiates a rapprochement of note. She leans toward him with such contentment fond, as well the sweetheart sits, would well a wife. The only photograph of hers thumbed.

(8.) Isabel as a non-acquaintance : a wallet-size rendering, from the shoulders up, of vacant preoccupation. A study of Van Der Weyden’s lady. The lips are too full. The turtleneck sweater misuses her delicacy of clavicle. The mouth is winterset. That is not benevolence in the eyes. They look beyond you, more toward vanity than vision. The photographer missed. He will be taken out at dawn, blindfolded, and shot.

A long, long insearch — then Darconville shuffled up all the photographs together, and, inevitably, the jack-of-knaves came up on top. It was, supervening all, the thumbed and creased one: number seven (this, no doubt, in some kind of social apposition to the intentions implied in number five). Darconville wished, as did Momus of Vulcan’s created man, that every person had a window placed in his or her breast. Murmur, fallen angel and father of ill report, whispered, “ Govert is covert! Govert is covert !”

Quickly, Darconville slapped his hand over it. It was as if it had become another photograph, creating a fear in him, by way of diseased imagination, as inconstant as the shadows he surveyed. Who was this fellow? A name too little mentioned to suspect yet mentioned just enough to heed or learn to disregard. He looked at the photograph again. Weren’t these simply the facts of certain events? And weren’t events always the same as their significance?

It was incredible for Darconville to see how swiftly he could fall to torturing, tormenting thoughts, to scribble a biting and incoherent tragedy out of the restive suppositions he poorly fought. It was only to conceive one of those sticky, ring-swapping high-school junkets for the clang of mistrust: he threw a faithless cipher of moon into the sky, put beneath it a fatherless girl craving affection, and then helpless before the doom of his own contrivances watched in his mind, possibly on that very prom night or in a car parked on an overlook up in the Blue Ridge mountains, the hideous pyroballogy of some vile teenager with a hanging lip, his suspenders disengaged, prying off her gown with his grice-fingered hands and then bucking away like a country stink-cat, whereupon she—

But cruel! Cruel! Darconville, clapping the photographs back into the envelope, instantly grew disgusted with himself. He was scandalized by thoughts transported into the very deeds he disbelieved. If I create loveliness, he determined, there is loveliness. If I create monstrosity, there is monstrosity. Away with it! To play the part of accuser, one had to be word-perfect in that of hypocrite as well!

THERE WERE MANY DISAPPOINTMENTS during these months for Darconville but many, indeed, for Isabel herself, and not one, somehow, that didn’t compound another. She was only eighteen —”the age of the duck,” in his grandmother’s phrase — a period of diffidence and confusion, generally, but in her case somewhat exacerbated by her keeping to herself and refusing to share her problems with anyone at Quinsy she wasn’t scrupulously sure of, a situational irony that only sent effects back to causes.

It was not much help, beyond that, to be suffering the vicissitudes of freshman year. One of the deans, for instance, had several tunes summoned Isabel to her office, inquiring after the propriety of her seeing too much of a certain professor, especially in view of the fact that she had flunked almost all her courses for the first semester, with one glaring exception: a grade of A in English. And then certain enterprising girls in the dorms, unspeakable in malice, had been making her life miserable, a self-appointed group of spitesowers manufacturing stories, shaping hexes and false rumors, and blowing their green cornets across her every hope. It was whispered that she was above her station as Darconville was below his, and, as time passed the apocryphal, simply by repetition, became the apodictic.

Isabel, initially undecided, eventually chose to major in art. A singular disappointment with this as its source took place one particular night when tapping on Darconville’s door — her eyes swollen from weeping and want of sleep — she appeared holding up between thumb and forefinger two prints she had worked weeks on and on which, for both, she’d been graded F. One showed a square of ribbed wheels interlocking on foil. The other, also abstract, was a thinly proven and just-about-detectable sunburst squashed into a background the color of the jellied broth of a canned ham. No, they were not good — and were, in fact, quite bad. But what did it matter? He looked from the morbid prints to Isabel’s own soulful beauty and to indicate without ado the condition of true art asked her only to accept herself, a good at once appropriated, a glory-in-itself by virtue of but a moment’s reflection. It is to judgment, he told her, that perception belongs: true eloquence makes light of eloquence, to make light of philosophy was to be a true philosopher! Why, to fail to accept her own originality, not by force or exactness but by comprehension, she could never accept his own, could she? Ordinary persons, he said, smiling, found no differences between men. The artist found them all.

Not to undercut his own argument, he continued.

But he thought: what was art next to her ? It was a lie, he explained (aware of this implication, however, that the book he was writing would become, increasingly, a more difficult task), a contrivance to find the mind’s construction only where it looks and how it will. Darconville looked into her eyes, and beyond. In the selfish state of the human heart, he thought, to consign to the exercise of the wayward imagination those facts, correspondent at hand but held as contrary, was possibly to lose everything. The imagination was, after all, only that poor faculty that strived to make the ideal real, wasn’t it? There was once a medieval tournament, Darconville told her, where favors to the victors were bestowed by the Queen of Beauty: the third prize was a silver rose, the second gold, but the highest award — given to the best knight of all — was a genuine rose.