Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

No, no, not if it meant what it was.

“I love you,” said Darconville.

“Oh, I love you, too.”

And they made love in the naked darkness, two lost children looking for rebirth in the glory of each other, struggling upward, like their wayward kite, toward the cold particulates of one world where, joining sky and sea by song, they found another, and then reaching up higher still to behold in the frost and starlight the very beauty of very beauty, neither begotten nor made but being of the substance and essence which is beautiful unto all eternity, they made a wish, stretched forth and — poof! — blew out the birthday sun, and were blind at the climax of vision,

Coda

Those were the carefree, intimate days they shared together before the weird and fateful turn that wound its intricate way back to a certain letter — not even a letter, in fact. It was a questionnaire.

THE QUESTIONNAIRE caused a lot of trouble. It was quite common, now, that Darconville often found little gifts left for him in his office, presents — it was typical at a girls’ school — offered up during the course of the year by gentle giglots, maidens blushworthily abud, and softhearted flouts whose dear heads Love had turned, whose dear hearts Love had wrung, whose dear hands Love had moistened and who, most of the time, tripped in and out of his shadow as quietly as mice, walking by his house, watching him from windows, and generally bearing the agues, itches, stones, cramps, and colics of cruel and anonymous passion as best they could.

It was common enough, and harmless: at the oblique of a given hour, up to the second floor of the English building and into the silent corridor the little pixiarda would steal, arrange her gift — boxed, bottled, or bowed — and then according to the law of self-denying ordinance secretly hurry away to an outlying willow tree under which she sat, a bundle of regrets, listening to a bobolink in the branches above mocking the pity of human passion. It was indeed harmless and easily explained, the consequence, in most cases, of an infirm social calendar, the overabuse of spices in the college diet, or simply the love-philtre that is the muskrose season we know as spring.

And sometimes there were notes. And so it was on one particular Friday. Taking a brief respite before his four o’clock class, Darconville walked into his office and stepped on what he picked up. It was a lilac envelope. He slit it open, took out a sheet of matching stationery — out of which slipped, along with a heady lavender fragrance, a small red-green gem: a bloodstone — and read the following:

1. hate me?

Do you 2. like me?

3. love me?

4. feel indifferent to me (the worst) D?

Yours forever,

H.P.

There would have been no doubt as to the identity of the pollster here, initialed or not. No, even if Darconville had not recognized the lush hue of paper, or breathed in its deep perfume, or identified the feminine slant of those semi-uncials, he knew the correspondent well. Of course, Hypsipyle Poore was not alone. There were other girls de la faute fatale during the year — quoits homesick for spikes — who also left behind little gifts and select remember-me-bys. These were not all shy. Neither were they all anonymous.

Sprightly, unforgettable Mercy Tattycoram once left him a robin’s egg with her name signed on it in lemon juice. Tadzia di Lido sent to his house biweekly letters, of the saga genre, with envelopes coming three at a batch (marked %1, %2, %3) and the stamps on each always arranged amorously tête-bêche . A senior English major, Iva Ironmonger Dane, was wont to leave tucked in the carriage of his typewriter intense little poems, each, usually, a one-sentence tranche written in pedantic sentimeter, arbitrarily spaced, and given a title something like “Mouse,” “Rain,” “Loneliness,” or “Untitled,” that special one too ineffable in content to be named. For the monthly jar of gooseberry preserves, all thanks to the annual-editor, popular Pepper Milltown, who once snapped a photograph of Darconville in his Bentley which, later, Isabel pointedly requested her to remove from her dormitory mirror, but she wouldn’t, she said, until she had good reason to, which that afternoon, sitting in the infirmary with a swollen foot, she had. Cygnet Throwt brought him a reproduction of an eighteenth-century clay pipe from Williamsburg. Michelle Arcangiolo gave him a glass pistol filled with candy. Then Hazel Anne Glover, whose paintings he once complimented, presented him her favorite osmiroid pen with its ancillaries, a box of titquills spilt on his desk and so arranged to spell 1-o-v-e. And Fanny Appleton’s, one couldn’t forget, was the tie-clasp and the foot-high card at Easter. Finally, Yancy Dragonwagon, offering herself , simply spent every day of the week sitting loyally on the dimly lit stairwell outside his office.

The obliviscible on this day was, of course, like all the others in intention. It differed only in its effect, becoming swiftly the protarchos ate —the crime that sets other crime in motion. No, there was no question as to its author; no doubt as to the type of epistle, indited, as an attorney might bonds, by leaving blanks; and no hesitation as to what must be done. Smiling, Darconville put the bloodstone in his pocket. He ripped up the letter, dropped the pieces into the waste-basket, and went off to class thinking no more about it. About such matters — over protestation, over evasion, over repetition — Darconville had long expressed a dear wish to have less ceremonial and more understanding. Or, at least more attempts at understanding. Or, better still, more insistence at making understanding explicit and verbal. But little had come of it. And so he began to take it all in stride. You see, it was about the twentieth time that year he’d received such a note.

On the other hand, it was Isabel’s first.

THE INCIDENT was memorable. It fell out this way. A party, thrown annually, was always held in late May — a retrospective at end of term — and the faculty, every year, generally took it to be the party “to end all parties,” a mode of expression, of course, that had to be taken — along with so much else at Quinsy College, especially in matters of education — figuratively. Traditionally, it was held at the home of one of the faculty members, some professor or other chosen for it, one customarily hot for advancement in the royal court of deipotent Greatracks le roi who, let it be said, never disallowed his subjects any chance to screw themselves into whatever new little dignities they coveted and his grace-and-favor might allow. All vied for his wink, the mere wave of his sceptre, and a subsequent ho-ho-ho raised, it was common knowledge, many a low academic from vassal to knight to baronet to lord to viscount to earl and, with luck, even put him right next to the Higher Who.

College presidents love meacocks. So everyone tried to please President Greatracks in every way he could. He was wined and dined at every turn by little jellybones and psychobiological suckeggs who, never missing a chance, scraped, climbed, snatched, glozed, cozened, and collogued. Inside every faculty member beats the heart of a merry andrew. The word of kings is the queen of words. The ambitious there were captives.

The hosts were chosen. The many-called who were overlooked, disgruntled, nevertheless appeared on Friday night and found that no expense had been spared. There was music, dancing, and no end of delicious food. As darkness fell, long white candles were set out in every room, while in the capacious gardens out back a string of paper-lanterns rattled in the warm wind, to which later in the evening, if things went as usual, a good deal of caution would be thrown — at least so the bets went, for this particular year the host-couple, from the psychology department, was a stylish and exciting coprolaliac-écouterist two who’d come in September with Darconville named Felix and Felice Culpa.