Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Isabel loved to eat. It was an expression of joy, a mode less of glut than of celebration. The weight she put on, however, unfortunately sank — to drop hopelessly, perversely, relentlessly into the crural sheath where eventually began to slumber, with little to be done that could reverse it, a fatty deposit of incipient cellulite, touched in places with arborescent naeves daintily penciled blue. Volumes, alas, grow faster than surfaces. The birth-control pills she took only worsened the condition. She was extraordinarily beautiful but low slung: not the Marquesse of Pantagruel, not Assumpta Corpuscularia, neither did her legs reach to the fabled size of a Samoan’s, but she was frankly supracoxal and whatever counterefforts she employed to diminish the problem failed. An inceptive gammer was ever pushing from within to get out and create havoc. Each of her legs rather recalled the condition of Dr. Johnson’s goose — too much for one, not enough for two! Cute, below, became cunning.

The long dresses and bell-bottoms she habitually wore — obsessively, as if her thighs were an approximate occasion of sin to a cannibal— she saw as a defense not so much advantageous perhaps as appropriate. Mind bifurcates: and often, with jaw muscles tensing, she suffered the torments of the damned from the observations she self-defeatingly ascribed to any onlooker in sight, coming to resent not only the observer but, sadly, the observed. Sometimes, her response was self-mocking laughter, the ironic kind, which, having to do with nothing, only makes the face lose its attractiveness in a paralytic ache, ossifying natural feelings in a ritualistic grimace, feigning fun, and so flatly refusing anyone who cares the reason he must have graciously to show compassion. Darconville was such a one. He loved her precisely for everything she was and wasn’t, and, if sometimes he worried her worries, he simply assumed the compositional view, like that of the Japanese print, by favoring the pictorial elements gathered in the upper part of the picture and leaving the rest either empty or out of view. But nothing could diminish his love. There was too much else for which to be grateful. One crow didn’t make a winter.

So the Miss Quinsy subject had been raised and, raised, dealt with, and Isabel’s self-disappointment, running headlong from the challenge — misinterpreted mock — led to the humiliation she swore, she adjured, she insisted lay bound up with the mere mention of that public event she so came to abhor. She became convinced, utterly, that she had to meet “standards” for Darconville, in spite of his repeatedly denying it. “I’m not Hypsipyle Poore!” she cried, a terrible chaudfroid in her heart. She wept. “It’s impossible! I just can’t be what you want!” And several times she turned pridefully on her heel, her eyes flashing, with: “You watch! I know what I’m going to do, I’m going to lose thirty pounds and become a model!”

It was bewildering. Her tempestuous emotions merely burst into occasional flame that consumed but could not illumine. And it was ridiculous. Darconville wished he’d never mentioned the foolish pageant but having done so mistakenly tried to outface her fears and suspicions by further pleading — maximum efforts to minimize — and so only compounded the problem, stretching consequent hours of debate and clarification to limits beyond the powers of even Arabic notation to express. Finally, like so much else during those years, it sputtered, wound down to a whimper, and was heard again no more.

Darconville, the lover, put the matter behind him. But Darconville, the writer, lingered on awhile, remaining behind to retrace for some reason what otherwise he should have missed. And what he found he filed, for the better to know her impressions, her preferences, her remarks, her joys, even her outrages, the better to understand, he felt, and so better love. With lovers: with enemies — how strange! — there, in each, can one always find both a stimulus and a lesson.

And what exactly were they? The stimulus? Oh, the stimulus he knew. But of all the many lessons over the many years, Darconville came to learn, above all, that love mightn’t be easy and yet still be love, that love might fade or fall or stumble or stoop yet still be love, that love might have to dodge and pivot through every scarp, counterscarp, demi-bastion, pinfold or covered way, glacis, ravelin, half-moon, ditch, sap, mine, and palisado yet still be love ! And he learned even more, and was glad for that, for too easily we come to love love first and not initially love that from which it comes.

And so aware of that Darconville came to learn about his lover.

Her Likes : ballet-slippers; salt; purple ink; abstract prints; mushrooms; jiujitsu; fairy tales; the novel, Wuthering Heights ; herring roe for breakfast; combing her hair; movies; scented candles; découpage; spinach; unattractive girls; jeeps; tiny candies; the pronunciation of the word “lascivious”; gin-and-tonics; all animals, especially lions and ti-gers; straw hats; illusion; getting mail; rings; the consolation following failure; halter-type dresses; rock music; flattery; seed catalogues; the endearment “Doo Doo”; Rima, the Bird Girl; wick-erwork; clam chowder; the South; cookies; stories of waifs; the flute; nudity; solitude; plucking her eyebrows manually; money; the color blue; mobiles; hope; thick shoes; pomander balls; snakes; long dresses; antiques; stone jewelry; exotic shampoos; princesses; heat; security; herb gardens; fine-point pens; her first name; ice-cream; batiks; illustrated books; fields; venison; hoop earrings; feigning; horses; fossils; root beer; safety; movies; to be looked at; the known; photos of herself; things cute; balloons and kites; fiddler crabs; ginger ale; Charlottesville summers (?); Darconville.

Her Dislikes : mathematics; sand on the bottom of her feet; country music; peach fuzz; children; long tunnels; her relatives; coffee; poodles; the appellation “Honey”; reading; frankness; Quinsyburg; films; blond guys; poverty; beer; intellectual discussion; cities; writing letters; religious devotions; nakedness; feigners; the thought of deer being killed; her legs; tomatoes; exercise; literature; hard peas; loneliness; having her nostrils pinched; shorts; men with long fingernails; cigarette smoke; rednecks; study; things cunning; Mrs. van der Slang’s lack of ethics; cold; farmers; the unknown; the responsibility following success; chemistry; to be stared at; scholars; her real father; expectation; geraniums; her thumbnails; card-playing; Fawx’s Mt.; eccentrics; the South; diners; Hypsipyle Poore; declarations of love in anyone’s presence; college; attractive girls; analytical talks; Dr. Glibbery; standing up; references to storge; maternal inanilo-quence; the past; the future; sailors; insecurity; words; square dances; running; beauty pageants; the name Shiftlett; Charlottesville summers (?); Govert van der Slang.

THERE WAS A LOT TO KNOW, more to remember, but remembering to forget became the significant self-protective feature for each of them that last year. It became policy, for Isabel’s graduation — and its afterwending consequences — loomed up for them as an abrupt question as to what, then and thereafter, they would do. Characteristically, both lived with the piepondering but unexpressed hope that nothing for them would change, and yet while they postponed whatever decision it was the continued silence on that subject insured against their raising, hoping, perversely, became an obstacle to hope, for each and every fulfillment of theirs, no matter how small, seemed to contain in itself an impulse to further commitment, which somehow instantly ruined the purity of fact by theory. It was as if, while Dar-conville was waiting for something to happen, Isabel was waiting for something not to. Queerly, it came to the same thing.