Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“Are you sure nothing’s wrong?”

Hypsipyle sighed again, looked searchingly into her escort’s eyes, and leaned over to whisper softly — with a breath oversweet from pastilles — into the shell of his ear, “ My silk panties are too tight .”

The night grew more perilous as the night grew late, with passions being fueled by liquor and liquor being passed around now, openly, like love-philtres at a sabbat. Alicia Lutesinger, nimptopsical, was skipping in a circle and swinging by a loop half a six-pack of beer still attached to its polypropylene zeros. Rebecca Lemp, at her wit’s end, was losing the grip she had on the shins of her boyfriend, a big-bellied snewf from Hampden-Sydney who, goaded on by the rebel yells of his fraternity brothers, was hanging upsidedown from a balcony in the Trendelenburg position and trying unsuccessfully to chug-a-lug the full bottle of grain alcohol that was splashing below like a fifty-foot waterfall in a loud clapotage. And of course there were casualties. Olivia Oona Osborne, going stone cold, suddenly dropped her jaw and her tenth cup of cheap bourbon and reeled over backwards at the top of the staircase, the egglike alliteration of her name matching the echoing wail as she bounced, bum over beezer, all the way downstairs with a loud dopplerian “ Ooooooooooooo !” And then in perfect sequence came another crash. Nora Buncle’s date, mousing her thigh, never knew what hit him — for, unprepared for it, she squealed and kicked up with a whoop of surprise catching him a desperate shot full in the corpus spongiosum and, instantly, he snapped shut into a fierce genupectoral vise, unflexioned, and then wheeled about and hit the floor where he lay stiff as a stoolball in the rising fumes of whiskey and friable bits of glass from the shattered hip-bottle underneath him.

“O my weak heart!” cried Mrs. McAwaddle, shrieking in owl-blasted anguish. “Is there a doctor in the house?”

“House,” said Prof. Wratschewe, reflectively. “You hear yourself, Mrs. McAwaddle? The most curious pronunciation in the idiolect of the Virginian. I believe its phonemic transcription”—he drew signs in a dribble of spilled whiskey—”is best rendered /h3ous/. Hoose: the voice hoots.” He looked up. “Mrs. McAwaddle?”

But she was in the powder room, gulping a handful of strain-abaters.

Meanwhile, Darconville had decided he could wait no longer. And although he could not shake off the feeling that his soul had become a drifting multiplicity without any nucleus — indeed, he began furtively trying to annihilate with his imagination his very life there — he walked down the hill from Truesleeve and around to the front of the student union. Three pale roreres from the University of Virginia, all wearing varsity shirts and nothing else, stood on the landing outside chanting “Wahoo-Wa! Wahoo-Wa! Wahoo-Wa!” and then wended their spiflicated way, arm in arm, down the front steps beside which some poor child, pinching her nose clothespin-fashion and urging her sick self forward, doubled up like a foot-rule and passed out. The campus police were called in, and after searching the grounds, strewn everywhere with gartering, inkles, nonesopretties, and gloves, they marched the drunks they collared and the vandals they nabbed right over to the chaperons.

Mrs. McAwaddle, all in a dither, hadn’t appeared on the steps ten seconds before Darconville stopped her short. Please, had she seen Isabel Rawsthorne? Anywhere? No, he knew she hadn’t attended the — But Mrs. McAwaddle, her dead turquoises clicking, squeezed his hand, told him to be calm, and reassured him: Isabel wasn’t ill, no, and in fact that very afternoon had been over to the registrar’s office. Although Darconville had more questions, she stopped his lips with a finger and turned momentarily elsewhere.

The police, inquisitively shining flashlights at thirty or so college identity cards all at once, were trying to prevail on Mrs. McAwaddle to help them match owners to face. It must have been a frightful day for her, thought Darconville, as she seemed to have nothing left. It was only partially true, however, for in spite of the furor there, Mrs. McAwaddle, having excused herself to Darconville more to deliberate her response to him than anything else, had bad news — how could she tell him that the girl he loved had cashed in her three Fs, one D, and an Incomplete for a job in support of which she, Mrs. McAwaddle, had only that afternoon, begged for it, written a letter of recommendation? Isabel, going home, was to take a job as a telephone operator. She had flunked out. The ball was over.

And, somehow, Darconville knew it.

“The grades, why I couldn’t half understand them. But they weren’t good, I’m afraid. They weren’t”—Mrs. McAwaddle, closing her eyes, shock-absorbed his unbelief—”sufficient?”

The moonlight whitened the grounds. He crossed the dark street, the dead sound of his footsteps making his heart feel desolate and empty. Crickets stopped chirping as he passed. There was no one in sight as he left the area of the student union, where the dance had broken up. The long year, soon finished, was on his mind. At once he pitied Isabel, and then never had he felt less inquisitive, less concerned, for the hopelessness of it all and the questions asked that never seemed to have answers, adequate or enough. He was tempted to walk forward, past his house and past the town, and let the whole thing go, disposed to let the night fall about him in that place of memory and seal the dwelling shut.

The beech trees and maples whispered overhead. An owl hooted. And he began to feel that he himself shared those nocturnal movements and sounds, that he was no stranger among them but rather a secretive and lonely earth-life removed from self-respect, an incompetent at fostering hope in another, and a would-be lover open to the whimseys of what he’d never understand. He passed by the low brick wall in front of Fitts — how many times that day had he done so? — where over the doorway, set some thirty feet back, the front lamp was lit. Darconville stopped, and his leg jumped as he looked. He looked again. He dropped low and cocked his head to spy into a serendipity he wouldn’t yet believe. A figure was standing in the morning-glory vines.

The night itself seemed to hold its breath. Darconville moved closer, not daring to turn salutation into irruption, drawn only toward the luminous darkness that revealed her golden hair and flesh as white as elder pith, and extending his hand he heard only a slight exhalation. Was it a sigh for a yes, a sigh for a no, or a sigh for an I-can’t-bear-it? The figure stepped forward once, the moisture in her throat moving to her eyes, clear as the tears of a penitent. They did not demand, or plead, but simply said understand me, please understand me ?

And they turned into the parlor, Darconville and the girl who, as she turned, left behind in the shadows her suitcase the color of the dented blue car (a guitar in the back seat) that suddenly roared up there and waited in front, waited for five minutes in front, then waited in front no longer but, blowing a sneer on its horn, disappeared on a furious curvet into the night.

“Forgive me?” asked Darconville to Isabel. “I know not what I did.”

Adversity always made him epigrammatic.

LORETTA BOYCO pressed in another piece. Clapping her hands, Harriet Bowdler squealed in excitement and reached for another bottle of grape soda. The puzzle was hah0 done. Left on the shelf, so to speak, while the others did the sprint, the two seniors, wearing quilted housecoats and scuffie-wuffies, had spent the evening of the graduation dance in a sitting room off the front parlor of Fitts. What fun!