Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

One afternoon, however, Darconville chose to drive up to Char-lottesville to apologize for everything. It was to be a momentous day. He picked Isabel up after work at the telephone company, and they went to her apartment and talked; perversely but inevitably raising thoughts they deeply wished to keep away, they scolded, contradicted, pished and pshawed, and tempered in a sentence of sweet mercy justice stern. But Isabel could always free his anger with a smile, and this time was no different. The pulled shades made that awful flat much less objectionable than it was when daylit, Lisa had since departed, and the place was now all their own. Darconville had come to see that privacy beyond privacy was necessary for Isabel to find any composure or, as she often put it, to “feel safe,” and as her will was there, her will was met. She had remembered to lock the door. She had remembered to put her job out of her mind. And she had remembered, in spite of recent recollections, to make love with all the feeling she seemed to have before.

But she had forgotten the letter on her bureau.

Darconville mistakenly came by it while Isabel was asleep. Stepping out to buy some cigarettes, not to disturb her, he was himself about to leave her a note when the scrap-paper he picked up turned out to be an unposted letter covered with that familiar spidery penmanship. He should not have read it. He should not have thought of reading it. But he did read it and read what upon the glance — are things seen things as seen? — made talking a pitiful invention. His heart club-fisted. He froze and, following all esteem, sympathy, love, faith, and friendship out of the world — there was no more of love, no more of friendship here — took up Echo’s ghostly part and gave back the discord of those still remembered sounds repeating on the page. Darconville read:

Dear Govert,

I’m so sorry I ignored you that night (!), but I’m like that I guess. What you must think of me! I don’t seem ever to be able to communicate with anybody, especially, as I guess you know, when they’re away (self-explanatory). I seem to ruin everything. It’s just that I’ve been so confused these months which is what’s behind it, I suppose, and which is why — as discussed — we were stopping. On Love’s sweetest arrow is tipped a dart, I guess. (Forgive my poetry.) Everything will turn out alright, don’t worry. I’ll never forget — how could I? — that day in the middle of our fairy forest and that beautiful moment in the field.

Love, ISABEL

That moment? In the field ? Darconville’s spirit utterly sank. He read the letter again: the thing unseen became the thing seen. Why, thought he, all things that breed in the mud are not efts! There was in the we were stopping the syntax of terror; it wasn’t the single photograph of the aorist of discontinued time ( epausames : we stopped) but rather the successive motion picture of the imperfect of continued action ( epavomes ; we were stopping) — continued, repeated, and customary. And how imperfect! How tense! Ah, sluiced in my absence, thought Darconville, and my pond fished by her neighbor, by Sir Smile, her neighbor! So this was love, opaque to probability, frac-tureproof, impermeable to death and disloyalty, immune to lies, an answer to the spoof of duration, content and holy peace, the twins of Eden, drawn round by the curtain between you and the world?

The observer infects the observed. Darconville read the letter again, holding it down with his cold shaking fingers, and it told him again that we are only deceived in what is not discerned and that to err is but to be blind; think not, it read, that always good which you think you can make good nor that concealed which the sun does not behold. He began to tremble, turning through the front room with his hands over his mouth, then, swept over with nausea, he found himself in the bathroom, and, whether whispering or shouting he couldn’t say— whatever, it awoke Isabel — but an echo, interrupting him as echoes will, replied in a wail, “I am unjustified, serving to deduce conclusions from premises insufficient to imply me!” Thus the Devil played at chess with him, and yielding a pawn while thinking to gain a queen, did.

Quickly, Darconville began bathing his face from a sink filled with dead water, losing his breath only to look up to see his face in the mirror, a mask of disbelief shallow, bewildered, and unlovable. All is as St. John said on the path of Mt. Carmel, he thought, nothing, nothing, nothing — even on the mount was nothing! That which cannot be altered, he realized, must then be borne, not blamed — and if borne, then altered perhaps — and follies past should sooner be remembered, certainly, than be redressed. There was a grace that he could still feel that way, squeezing the last tear from poisonous sorrow. But what otherwise? Force someone to decide to love you and thereby, proscribing choice, make of a lover a slave? Then N’mosnikttiel, the angel of rage, suddenly appeared and mouthed mockingly in Darconville’s ear: so close to glory! But at the center of both sits a zero, see? Now, where is your damoyselle au joue tortue? And where are you? Oh yes, pray where are you ?

I am here now and then will be gone, thought Darconville, dispelling the grey dominion, and if I am robbed of a deep love I am spared at least a moderate one. A sign had been given. There was nothing more to say, he was determined on it.

Darconville was already telephoning the dean’s office at Quinsy College when Isabel appeared in the doorway with contorted hands and begging-bowl eyes which seemed somehow to have surmised everything. She took a step forward in her shift, alarmed, no longer conscious of her heavy legs. She hadn’t been listening a minute when, aware suddenly of the letter, the extremity of the moment, her metallic screams tore holes in his chest. But of course it was too late — Darconville immediately resigned from his teaching post. The following day he was packed. And before the week was out he departed for England, resolved now to believe he had been spared the duty but denied the pleasure of hearing her lie and yet wondering as the thousands of miles were being fast put behind him if in some century long past he and Spellvexit hadn’t stopped one final time in a place called Fawx’s Mt. and whether he and the girl he loved so much had actually gone into the woods across the street where, upon a tree, they carved the word “Remember” and how the loveliest pair that ever stood between heaven and earth begetting wonder — a figure all gold, a figure all black — could possibly have said goodbye in what had been a last Zoroastrian kiss.

“I TELL YOU,” exclaimed Mrs. van der Slang, rowing a spoon through her tea, “this could happen only in a book ! I knew of course you were thick as thieves for a while in high-school, and of course that was then. But now, tell me, are you certain? Him?”

“Yes.”

“And not—”

“No,” said Isabel, “not really. Not anymore, I’m afraid.” She looked away. “But I don’t know if he will be.”

“Will be?”

“Certain.”

Mrs. van der Slang arched a brow and blew on her tea. “You mean interested .”

Isabel nodded.

“Well, I’m sorry to say, I don’t know myself. We don’t see him much, there’s that. Then, he’s young and frankly hasn’t fulfilled our ambitions for him nor his own for us. Sugar?” It was one of Isabel’s privileges to take sugar. Mrs. van der Slang moved closer and continued; it was a voice like dishwater gurgling through a sink. “Now I’m a practical woman. I’m a businesswoman. So I’ll be frank. I must say, you seemed to drop the whole business last year, didn’t you, when you went off to college — and, gracious me,” added Mrs. van der Slang, crossing her bowed legs and making a slight bleat of nasal peevishness for the benefit of the responsible party, “we didn’t do entirely well there, did we?”