Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“And she didn’t call you at all?”

“Not really,” came the distant voice.

The palliative expressed her charity. Darconville, perspiring, shifted the receiver to his other ear.

“Wait. I think I know,” said Miss Trappe, trying. The voice faded, returned, faded. “Perhaps she concentrated on trying to remember instead of concentrating on remembering — and forgot.”

Apologizing, Darconville thanked her and said goodnight. Quickly, he dialed the infirmary again: the bark of discord on the other end identified Nurse Bedpan and both — the bark, the discord — disclaimed with the punctuation of a double-negative that it knew anything about anybody named Isabel Rawsthorne. She hung up. He sat by the telephone in the dark, thinking that the lover possessing a luxury with which merit had so little to do must perhaps stand a constant penitent to such arbitrarily dispensed grace. And anxious in the vitals, he felt an even more profound love for Isabel coming upon him, swift as a wish: the knowledge of good bought dear by fearing ill, the value of gain bought dear by feeling loss. But what ill? he wondered. How lost? He reviewed fifty inevitabilities and, selecting none, was now the owner of all.

The door moved.

Darconville looked up at the shadow.

“Hello, Dr. Dodypol.”

“Hell-o, Darconville. Fair grow the lilies on the riverbank?” He paused, then came noiselessly into the room. “I’m just pecking on a cracker.” He peered closer. “Are you — all right?”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“I like a cracker now and again.”

Darconville nodded.

“My wife isn’t big for them, crackers. But she bakes them.”

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Dodypol? O yes. She actually bakes them. Few wives, taking it all together, do nowadays. No, I can’t complain.”

A silence fell. Only the tight little crunches could be heard in the darkness. Then Dr. Dodypol, alone like Darconville, sat by him on the bed. He sighed and folded his hands, prayer-like, as if in supplication to Coquage, god of cuckolds.

“Drudgery? O boy, you wouldn’t believe it. Harder by much than me making my verse. She first sets out her tins, whisks, cutters, the lot. You know how women are. Then she does her sifting, salts to taste, proofs the batter, does Mrs. Dodypol. Well, you want them natural, see. To get the benefit. It’s all in the books, about nature, I mean. Isn’t it? Wholesome, they say. They do say that, don’t they? Oh yes, scrupulous about doughs, my wife, but the kneading gets her here, in the back, right”—he motioned—”here. Well, you can imagine. Anyway, she cooks them to paper-thin on preheated tiles, and, mmm, when offered up warm—” He looked at Darconville, who noticed tears rolling down his cheeks. “I’m sorry. I’m lying. I hate crackers. I hate nature. And I hate my wife. I’d like to take a pair of shears and snip off her cruel merciless tits. Well, goodnight.” And he left.

* * * * *

Friday 11:43 P.M.: The light of the full moon, burglarious, steals through an eagre of dart-shaped clouds, shifting west. A blue car, dented, winds onto the ring-road that curves around to the front of Fitts dormitory. The mausoleum is not empty. There is a face at a third-floor window, watching out in the autarchy of an isolation no worse than dreams. A wistfulness awaits — Isabel, throatcramped, apprehensively twicking her thumbs over a thought: what does my sorrow matter if I can’t be happy? Suddenly, she stirs up, pale, on her feet as the car pulls up out front, its headlights flashing on-and-off. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair! Out of the building, into the car she runs, her odd cheerless expression transforming to resignation; gunned, the car backfires and races toward the Quinsyburg line, not to it, for turning off the main road, it bumps over a dirt drive into a glade, and stops. A fatidic stir of wind is blowing across several obsolete fields. A dog howls, somewhere. Matter-of-fact Govert van der Slang, chauffeur and zielverkooper , turns to Isabel. There is, he says, no alternative: he, Fawx’s Mt., and the time is each, respectively, tired, far, and late. They sit there, coevals in the night. ‘Tis not so much the gallant who woos as the gallant’s way of wooing. He is walking now, flanked by a silent girl on one side and her robin’s-egg-blue valise on the other, both safe in his omnivicarious hands. The glow above her is, she thinks, at least a personal glimmer in the impersonal darkness and, reaching to palpate a stray cat glowing eerily now red, now blue, she manages successfully to avoid a second look above her at the blinking neon-lights — mistakeproof in the night — of the Bide-A-Wee Motel. An agreement is made: “witness our hands.” The goddesses of Greece became the goddesses of Rome.

* * * * *

Posthumia, mistress of revels, eventually brought most of the guests outdoors, and under the magic of the paper lanterns everyone’s inhibitions gave way to a variety of feats and games and pranks: chairing the member, guessing-which-hand, and pulling faces in skits and foolish charades that looked as if they were trying to act out scenes taken from a series of Thraco-Pelasgian wall-paintings. Behavior became ridiculous. They cut capers, yelped at the moon, and chased each other around the hedges, shrimp-whistling and bum-goosing anything that moved.

Dr. Speetles, one over the eight, gave a vigorous if implicit endorsement for the necessity of laxatives by delivering — upsidedown on a picnic table — his own rendition of “The Lass That Loved a Sailor.” Blissful Mr. Thimm danced blissom Miss Swint squealing over a ha-ha. Miss Porchmouth, her eyes red, white, and pinwheeling, screamed from a tree that a beaver she couldn’t see was chasing her. Miss Pouce who’d got into the pokeberry wine was meanwhile wandering round the house in a circle, reciting the rules of the Dewey Decimal System — and every three or four minutes, as she passed, her exultant monologue would swell out and decrease again. An empty shandy glass had rolled just out of reach of Dr. Excipuliform who lay unconscious under the porch in a strange facioscapulohumeral cramp. Someone walked by with a wastebasket over his head. And then came a shriek to wake the very dead — Miss Gibletts, looking like the devil before daylight, tearing down the backstairs in her underpinnings and screeching at the top of her lungs, “ Flammeum video venire! Ite, concinite in modum ‘Io Hymen Hymenaee, io Hymen Hymen-aeeeeeeeee!’“

“A u.f.o.!”

“It’s only batwoman.”

“She looks like Pharaoh’s mother’s mummy,” said Felice.

Darconville only watched. At a window, he impassively sipped a drink, the velvet bite of vodka a small anodyne to lessen the pain of a truth foremost in his mind, that fortune alone is victorious. To know something was wrong was to argue, perhaps, that he didn’t know something more important — just what, of course, he couldn’t say; but speculate he could, and he began to understand that his love for Isabel, so new in the declaration, was bound to walk upon the tiniest hurts: the cards of a new deck, so judges the cartomant, have been insufficiently shuffled if two people immediately hold the Royal Flush. Cynical, he thought. Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più forte ? Difficult, he thought, difficult.

Perversely, he felt rather glad he’d thrown up his writing. Not so much vanquished, he began to feel — this night more than ever — a gathering despair over the very nature of communication itself, a desolation growing out of hearing so much so remarkably unwritedown-able: the gossip, the laborious stories, the twice-told tales, and the scrappet-like micromonologues, forbidding conversation, which assumed that to be frank was to be rude. Here sighed a jar, there a goose-pye talked. At every word a reputation died. And writing? The true writer, thought Darconville, must not only be a man whose Christ shows no discontinuity between Creator and Redeemer — a perfection, he knew, he failed — but a man with faith in that perfection. One couldn’t write in a chimney with charcoal. But for Isabel, he thought, this would be my personal farewell party. Suddenly, the dragoman, Abactha, one of the genii of confusion, shook him and cat-whispered into his ear, “ But she isn’t here! She isn’t here !”