Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

“O, you’re going to leave me one day, I know it,” Isabel, raised on an elbow, habitually teased.

For they talked, often — yes, and hoped, and dreamed, and planned. Indeed, it had been one such chance remark on one such occasion, sometime during that first year after he’d returned from London, that one particular quodvultdiabolus was fully, and finally, put to rest; the topic of infidelity having been raised in the whimsical way that had become typical of her, Darconville would thereafter never forget how Isabel, cajoled, suddenly laughed out that Govert van der Slang, not only someone now to whom she never gave a passing thought, had also been all along none other than Darconville’s unprepossessing and inoffensive conversant at the nefarious Gherardini party the previous year! It was, if a belated confession, a disclosure at once explaining why, fearful at the prospect of suddenly finding two rivals side by side, she had kept to the other side of the room and how, in fact, she’d suffered so, a matter thereby encouraging her shocked, then relieved listener to try to effect greater efforts at a truce with him whenever they met, which they did, and a mutual understanding developed as the years passed to the degree that they might even have broached old subjects, which they didn’t. Govert van der Slang was harmless. The name, Ignaro, did his nature right ahead even if once he’d loved her. “I never loved him, I don’t love him now,” said Isabel Rawsthorne, “and I will never love him.”

Fawx’s Mt. however, unlike that problem, never quite lost its inscrutability, nor had Isabel her mystic fancies. (What was it about that place, for instance, that made her so nervous and always looking about from port to stern?) Smitten, nevertheless, Darconville found her a child of the sun, to be faulted less in what she lacked than for all he could never know of her or ever have enough of: the incautious afternoons of love, her secret kisses pressed upon his hand, the closeness she felt sleeping in his shirts, and of course her many childlike exaggerations—”I know you’re going to leave me.” “Are we being ‘lascivious’?” “I must go back to my kingdom one day, you know, because I’m really a princess.” “If we ever parted I’d come back one day and you’d recognize me by—”

O, could one write her paralipomena!

It would be incorrectly given out, however, to call Isabel perfect. Loyal? That she was, and that for Darconville mitigated matters otherwise not always positive. She often took a great deal of humoring. She never sent thank-you notes, never read enough, and never visited Miss Trappe. She lagged a lot. She had a monstrous vanity about her hair, the combing of which became a particular hobble of hers exercised to death. Young, she was disinclined to keep promises, take chances, or, except in the woes of antipaternal lament, ever really be frank — and, even when driven to it, her responses were often too understated to match Darconville’s enthusiasms which tended less to stifle them, often to her consternation, than to fan. She often said things out loud that most people generally preferred to think (“I know what I’m going to do—” or “I’m decided now—”) but was just as often a talker to no purpose. The talker, by definition, is not a listener, but wasn’t listening, deliberating, the key to the thought understanding requires? Then, she always said her worst fault was that she was always trying to please people, and yet she somehow failed to understand that, in doing so, she inevitably came to resent them, a fault that had its worst ramifications in the matter of jealousy.

Isabel loved Darconville, he was certain of it, but through her behavior often proved to need him even more — and suspicion is often an ugly, if habitual, facet of need. There were at times hysterical telephone calls. Several times, she read his mail—”I just looked, I didn’t see anything!”—which upset him terribly only because it threatened him with implications of a disloyalty he never felt, quite the reverse, in fact, and so he would end up paradoxically insisting on his loyalty with wrath and on his love with anger. At such times, she wept in the most unconvincing way — she never hid herself to weep — but when Darconville, appalled at the vulgarity of such groundless suspicion yet terrified at the same moment that his presence far exceeded her need of him or underrepresented what need of hers he could meet, then made the suggestion he always swore within himself he’d honor (“Would you like to date anyone else?”), she always refused, always firmly and always finally. Stubbornness, one of the worst manifestations of weakness, here made him grateful. Yes, she was loyal.

But our virtues, indeed, are our vices. She never entertained a single thought about the mysteries of God, man, or the universe yet for that seemed innocent. If she had few convictions, kept her opinions at half-mast, and simply repeated what Darconville said, easy acceptance replenished serenity. Threatened by mediocrities much closer to her than to others — or at least she so feared — she effortfully aspired to graces others of her age ignored, and yet when she acquired them she too often failed, in terms of sympathy, those who hadn’t acquired them — and far too often, in the light of those requirements where the social demands of Quinsy College, such as they were, refracted off the relatively advanced status her association with Darconville gave her, Isabel more and more began to feel her participation in them less a favor received than one conferred. That people with atrocious manners should now have to be polite and considerate in their dealings with her, that people whose habit was to stand aloof should now have to be at her service, that the priggish and self-assured should have to defer to her, all of this pleased her just a little too much — and yet, while sometimes it cankered him, Darconville could no more by unconscionable criticism be disloyal to her than St. Paul who, ready to anathematize even an angel if it preached another gospel, proved a model of steadfastness.

There was not a lot to forgive, really, for while what she was exacerbated what she wasn’t — the fairer the paper, the fouler the blot— her faults were few. Isabel could be amusing, as well. Hers was a sweet wiseacreishness. She made claims: that she never had a headache, never drank a cup of coffee, and never — a howler of Southern etiquette — went to the bathroom. She boasted she could tell by smell if it were going to snow and that she knew jiujitsu. She suffered an acute haptodysphoria in relation to peaches. She carried French sweets loose in her pocket, stuck together with lint more often than not. She wore a cheap perfume called “Figment” which was much less attractive than her particular way of lowering her eyes in a smile when he flatteringly acknowledged it. The girl was difficult in the extreme to know, a fact brought home to Darconville many times in the process, lately begun, of recording for fun what she said, and did, and felt, memos, then notes and random observations, and finally long reflective essays that eventually grew into a box of papers on a subject whose wonderful inconsistencies he hoped never to resolve only if they led her to the larger, deeper self he knew she had it in her power to become.

In Isabel’s senior year, it so happened that Darconville encouraged her, as a confidence boost, to enter the Miss Quinsy contest. Now, despite petty annoyances, there was no question but that over the few short years they’d grown closer and closer. Difficulties attend upon adjustment. Perennials, unlike annuals, seem less attractive perhaps only because open to longer scrutiny, but they endure, they do endure, and if the splendor of their lives was occasionally overcast by shadow, neither of them was so confused as either to accede to the mundane or assume happiness was habit. And so every day they spent together, and every day, no matter the cast, was too short — morning leaped high-noon, bounded on a step to mid-overnoon, and always night came far too fast. She stopped by his house every day, confided in him when she needed that, and even if poorly read — she found allusions to Darconville’s book, not having read it, disconcerting — nevertheless remained for him a refreshing alternative to the dire extremes of academic dullness. He still invented and told her little fables. She still slept in his shirts, still left notes at his office, and always of course exclaimed in her childlike way of princesses, fairy forests, and supernatural intercepts. They still played with Spellvexit, went on picnics, and flew kites out in the meadow, where, still, her tresses broke free in the wind which absorbed into its length her trailing ribbons and in a special wayward way, as always, seemed to claim her for its own by means of an adoption no more complex than simply taking her away. What was Darconville’s surprise, then, when in the face of all that joy and seasoned understanding the Miss Quinsy affair exploded — a crisis, reaching to proportions he hadn’t thought possible, that touched upon that one point of delicacy long unspoken of and which now ran arrow-straight to a single, unavoidable confrontation. It had to do with the size of Isabel’s legs.