Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

They went on trips to Richmond, Charlottesville, and, in contrast to a strangely uneasy visit several years before to the same spot — they’d hardly known each other! — to Appomattox Court House where in the green meadows that were fenced along with old white palings they laughed and talked and had memorable picnics of quiche and wine. Once they went to Williamsburg, driving back after a weekend into a beautiful sunset that matched in richness the gold of their young, uncomplicated hearts, beating, as if to speak: “You are my donee, I give you my will. You are too my devisee, I give you all the estate of my soul.”

It might be mentioned that Darconville and Isabel never lived together, formally, that is — which, of course, prevented nothing save her summary expulsion from school — yet it was with undisguised pride and even wider statement that they still shopped together at the Piggly Wiggly, rarely, however, without the feeling (for such were the super-visional stares) of both the legal and local vulnerability of their consortium. They were, nevertheless, inseparable. Not an odd day, it was an odd minute when they weren’t together, both the objects and observers of love. They packed the Bentley and often traveled to Washington, roaming around the museums and monuments, and several summers even drove up to Cape Cod where they hiked, took photographs, and often made love in the ocean, but whenever school was in session, confining them somewhat, they ranged the nearby countryside and enfiladed the small neighboring towns around Quinsyburg for whatever turned their eyes to chance marvels or any new adventure. What fimble on what gate didn’t they unlatch? What side road not pass down?

Few ever saw Darconville and Isabel together without wanting to be in love with somebody. They were thick as thistles: two distincts, division none. They joyed one joy, one grief they grieved, one love they loved. They rose with the wonderful ductile inflections of the seasons, school schedules, but most of all the irrepressible superlatio of their twin spirits, for either was the other’s, single nature’s double name, neither two nor one was called — yet either neither, the simple was so well compounded. Original, they escaped repetition and yet, free and imprescriptible, learned to find the best of old emotions the most beautiful. They went anywhen and manywhere, called the world nicknames, and sang glorias at the very top of their voices. No, not at the beginning of imagination because at the end of fact, they simply renewed just by a glance what they looked upon and wishing for nothing they didn’t have lived intently only for what they did, for a while it truly might be said that never passed a minute when that sublime and prevenient grace arresting their young hearts to love didn’t assure them that to watch the morning star one’s eyes must always be a little brighter, neither did it fail to whisper low that once upon a time never comes again.

And, as time passed, they soon came to know how very serious they had become.

It became a matter of course, then, for them to spend their weekends in Fawx’s Mt. Darconville didn’t really mind. The farming community remained as misenunciated as ever, and one rarely drove through those depressing doles and secluded ravines without a sudden feeling of subjugation, an inexplicable sadness, but as the years passed he’d found, surprisingly, he’d adapted not only to the folks in those parts who looked like itinerant blackthorn sellers, what with their low-vaulted brows and cluttoned joints, but also to the land they worked and its parquetry of odd, misallotted fields where stupid large-bodied cattle with shiny red hides and massive horns ambled about. How often he’d heard the sounds of reapers skitching near a hedge or fence by the road! Slash, rustle, slash! Slash, rustle, slash. And, in fact, he actually came to measure the frequency of his trips up there — along with the parallel lapses of time — by alterations in the fields he passed: the tedding after the swathe of the scythes, then rowing, then the foot-cocks, then breaking, then the hubrows gathered into hubs, sometimes another break, then turning again, to the rickles, the biggest of all the cocks, which were eventually run together into placks, shapeless heaps from which the harvesters carted their hay away. Autumns it rained, the stubble soon took the snow, and before long spring had come again. But what distributions — irrotational, solenoidal, lunar — really mattered? Where was that in a world of mutability that must apply to him? The plug-uglies of Fawx’s Mt., the eupatrids of Charlottesville, the quidnuncs of Quinsyburg? They were of no consequence anymore, for behind what people on this earth, thought Darconville, were shadows cast not black?

The weekends rarely varied. They talked. They took occasional drives. They often walked through the woods across the way and once or twice to their initially slight embarrassment but secret understanding found the tree where, the day before Darconville left for London several years ago, they’d in a far less assured mood carved the word “Remember.” Generally, however, Darconville sat in the backyard reading — he didn’t write, he never wrote when he was with her — while Isabel, either washing her hair or listening to records, waited to fix dinner. Mr. Shiftlett, who never said a word, seemed to have no end of work — Darconville never figured this out — down in the cellar. And his imperseverant and preposterous sister, her hah- pinched into rollers, was always puttering about in the pseudo-carbuncular excrescence out front she called a flowerbed — it was less expensive than a psychiatrist — leaving off at successive intervals either for a stiff drink or the by now familiar roundelay-like exchange with her prospective son-in-law on the subject of noble intentions: for her daughter, now at her accidence, the fond illiterate mother wished only, if querimoniously, that she be thinking “aboot the footure.” Darconville, of course, agreed. But as he felt that Isabel, for her own benefit, should finish her education and avoid, at the same time, any inordinate pressure attendant on future speculation, he preferred not to harry her in any way whatsoever. The flying arrow, at a given moment in a given place, is also at rest. They were content.

There was, nevertheless, the habitual Saturday night party when the Shiftletts and their neighbors ( minus : the van der Slangs) put their workaday worries into a blender and shook out the concoctions of Lethe — a group of country skimpleplexes on dress parade whose ardor from low squeals rose eventually to the din of an Abyssinian thunderstorm. Darconville, by retiring early, avoided it. But in the next room, Isabel, with all that thumping, hooting, and laughter, lay face-up in the darkness most of the night, burning with shame. Morning, then, never broke in Fawx’s Mt. without Darconville being suddenly awakened by the explosion of the 6 A.M. farm report coming over the clock-radio next to his bed; it was all agri-business: a rustic gaffoon with the diction of a guinea-hen, full of voiceless consonants and twangs, grackling his information out with such spitting, blowing, and hawking it sounded like a five-minute repetition of something like mustaherttuatarmustaherttuatar —in fact, it was the price-per-bushel rundown on red winter wheat, soybeans, and yellow shell corn which was then always followed by a familiar essay on the problems of pinkeye, parasite control, bull cross comparison, and hog-spraying.

There were other country matters, as well. Sundays, for instance, usually found Darconville and Isabel alone. No one there went to church. The Shiftletts, a somber two in low-crowned black hats, always set that day aside as a ticket-of-leave for a spin in the family truck to replenish themselves with the aimless but prolonged mouse-hunt that is the Sunday drive. Little varied thereafter in the wave goodbye, the locked door, the silence. Transcendental prolepses, or anticipations of thought: under the color of sudden opportunity then, interwished, they would turn like aimcriers to behold their chance, not with spoken words, but simply eyes that meet to seek what seeking always find. Mumbudget is the slogan. Isabel steps quietly to her room; a shirt’s unbuttoned, off comes an umbeclip, and down flows her hair; and then a girl with tresses shining like that of a faxed star and a figure bioluminescent beneath a black diaphanous gown sprinkled with flowers turns with a gentle smile to the doorway and leads her lover, under a slowly twirling mobile, toward the familiar red-and-cream bed. There are kisses short as one, one long as twenty, and they make love, recapitulating with considerable skill what they’d done a thousand times in a passion now as restless and urgent as that need which into words no vertue could ever digest. Fire makes gold shine. In the swelter, Isabel is proof of it, always in the same way — she pushes herself forward in blind suspension, her arms lowered behind her, her hands locked tightly under the bed panel, her breath catching in soft aromatic yoops as if astonished, inexpressibly, at the wonder now of other impossibilities ever being found as true as that. And Darconville? Now in the floods, now panting in the meads, Darconville could not be found to ask, so lost for joy was he in those always indelible, compellable, but untellable hours of drury which nevertheless the stupid quack of a clock, set against invasion, always served to end.