Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Thnairsz,” came a voice like a toy air-horn, with a hole in it.

It meant yes.

DARCONVILLE would hear that man’s tiny, thumbtongued voice— saying “thnaowr”—only one more time.

And then it would mean no.

Fortunati ambo : they fooled around most of the spring, wandering, in joyous twinship, with Isabel laughing always and Darconville feeling there wasn’t a happier person than he, anywhere. They went on picnics, roamed through the woods, and drove in and around the countryside with Spellvexit perched regally in the back seat, whenever they could get away from the college. They went to movies, walloped tennis balls, swapped useless gifts, and in high spirits always chased down whatever curious fatamorganas could be found in the Quinsyburg Darconville now, for Isabel’s presence there, almost grew to love. How primal, thought Darconville, the secondary can become!

After classes, habitually, Darconville would wait on his porch for her: and how often, sitting there, had he worn out his eyes trying to grasp in the distance a certain, undeceitful form coming toward him, which by failing to come only became an uncertain figure going away! More often than not, they left each other notes before lunch, hailed each other on the run in midafternoon, and, leaving behind the little Pittenweem witches of the dorm, hand in hand escaped that deinspir-ing world to follow the endless caravan of fascinations their own delight, their love, daily afforded. The mind defining reality creates it. The sun was hot all spring. The world sang.

“O, you’re going to leave me, I know,” Isabel would cry, laughing, whenever he might be late, her arm flung, Camille-like, melodramatically across her brow — then she would burst into even wilder laughter, light silver peals flying up like a flash of swallows. It was a favorite joke, a riddle posed as a catharsis, documenting perhaps the early fears of their delicately exigible love but becoming a humorous catchphrase from then on, one never used without a lilt and a laugh.

“Never!” Darconville would reply with comic feverishness. “You’re going to leave me .”

It has been said by some and several that Desire wishes, Love enjoys, and that the end of one is the beginning of the other. That which we love is present; that which we desire is absent. But it was not so with smitten Darconville. He felt he would never know enough of her, present or absent, so little, in fact, he knew. His love only compounded his desire. And, as he wished to enjoy, he enjoyed this wish: his love to desire. And yet his wishes, even in her presence, were not misapplied, for there was so little of Isabel known in so much of Isabel seen: Queen Enigmatica of Quinsyburg. The Little Thing, indeed! She herself was a riddle.

There were matters, for instance, on which she was close as an oyster: her poor grades, her occasional disappearances on weekends, Govert (neither mentioned him: not him, not her), and the inexplicable secrecy she seemed to assume whenever they went to Fawx’s Mt. — but part of her beauty was her mystery, thought Darconville, who went about his business in the face of such conditions, immortalizing her, like Surrey’s Géraldine, in dew-besprent complaints she never heard. She was that ineffable factor whose precise definition — if one should avoid in definition the word of words one’s trying to define— could maddeningly be put in no other terms. She was equal only to herself. It was her first glory. But there was no disclosure. She could not be found in the line of a palm or explained in conclusion to a series of formal donations. She was not in the tarot, untraceable through pounce paper, incommensurable — a flash like a flame in an opal. Nothing was really applicable. But if no name was put to their happiness, still it was abundance. They were both frankly in love.

Subrationally, they needed each other, with each making the other proud and worthwhile in the way lovers do when attention is freely given, when one is loved less because he or she deserves to be than because he or she creates, is created by, the other’s grace and both become transfigured not as opposites but as reverse images of the same character. It was a pact, to save each other from trouble, to protect every consideration come to them in the inaudible glory of each other’s trust, to find, miraculously, in the sudden emptiness of one heart the beautiful contents of another’s filling the void.

They packed lunches and took trips, the sunroof of the Bentley thrown back, its radio playing, driving to Richmond, to Appomattox, to Charlottesville, telling stories, taking pictures, and always laughing, laughing from horizon to horizon, as if space were endless and they’d triumphed over time. They locked themselves in the music rooms of the college and danced, acted out scenes with the skeletons in the labs, and delivered funny speeches to each other in empty lecture halls. One night they were returning from the movies. Walking by a hydrant, Isabel found sitting on top of it a filthy old discarded seaman’s cap, but feeling silly she picked it up (typically, with exaggerated thumb and forefinger), stuck it on her head and, with her face rubberized into a foolish grin, said, “I think I’ll join the navy!” “O my God,” exclaimed Darconville, “take it off — you may get cancer!” And Isabel was overcome with uncontrollable laughter, a rat-a-tat-tat of lovable, bubbable squeaks. It was Spellvexit’s noise exactly . My wonderful cats, thought Darconville, my—

At that very moment, he happened to glance up: about ten feet ahead of him — near his house and in the exact pose of the cat from the curious drawing he’d done as a child — stood Spellvexit, looking sorrowfully at him. It was strange. It looked so much like a look of pity.

And then, together, they often crept at night into the Episcopal church in Quinsyburg where Darconville, under a pinlight — with Isabel, lusorious in a pew, giggling and clicking her tongue (always a colophon of her joy) — worked melodies on the organ out of its dusty wheezes. Still, Isabel was always apprehensive there. The pastor of that church had once invited both of them to a dinner party, their first social affair in Quinsyburg together, but Isabel, sitting on a central divan and wearing a dress insufficiently volumetric to cover her poundage of leg, self-consciously went the entire evening without saying a word and still thereafter sought to avoid him: she never wore a short skirt again.

They even made several films with Isabel’s old 1940 plug of a camera, often spending days together walking around town and per-iscoping everywhere for subjects: smews in flight, misspelled signs, rosydactylate sunrises-and-sets. One of their films, a plotted four-or-five-minute comic drama shot on location among the bent stones in the wisteria-strewn Quinsyburg cemetery, was a masterpiece of creative irreverence. It was Isabel’s capolavoro , shot in perfect sequence: Darconville, funebrist, motors slowly in his Bentley through the main gates; cuts to Darconville, memorialist, stepping from the car holding a myrtle wreath; cuts to Darconville, sobrietist, who halts before an odd gravestone hewn to the shape of a ship; cuts to Darconville, dadaist, suddenly clutching his heart and dropping down dead; cuts to Darconville, karcist, rising up creepily, slowly, from behind the stone with a gleam in his impish eyes. Blackout. They almost died from laughter every time it was shown.