Alexander Theroux - Darconville’s Cat

Whatness translated into wlatness. It wasn’t working, for both of them came to feel, painfully, that the avoidance of pressure recapitulated with considerable skill, analytic and mimetic, precisely the pressure they both sought to avoid. Graver by far than the problem became the solution. How answers, like effects, become the consequence of questions, like causes! It was baleful. Would they go? Where would they go? And would they go together? One decision, of course, hinged on another, then that to another, and so on, serving, eventually, to hasp the door so tight that, if once neither of them quite dared open it, they couldn’t work it now at all.

It all came to an end — or a beginning — rather suddenly one morning very much like any other when the risk of Darconville’s having given up everything for the sake of his love, for that love, seemed as inconsequential as ever. From class Darconville was called down to the English office to take a long-distance telephone call. The office secretary couldn’t quite distinguish, at least at that moment, the difference between a groan of pleasure and a groan of pain — isn’t more than inflection involved? — as she searched his face for a clue. Though having forsaken much — a humiliating charge he privately leveled against himself for abrogating, during the Quinsyburg years, so many former ideals — Darconville nevertheless held fast to what he still felt the best attribute of character: the power to refrain. The telephone call was brief. He said only one word: yes .

Darconville checked his watch, left the office, and quickly headed toward the dining-hall. The door of the classics department suddenly opened as he passed, and Miss Gibletts, interposing herself, tried to stop him. “A curious schoolprint,” she said, “how would you translate the Greek phrase soukissa melaiva ?” She sniffed. “I’m working up an article.” Darconville, in mid-stride, said he was sorry, he was rushed, he really was. Miss Gibletts, stamping her foot, honked tearfully at him as he hastened down the corridor, “Don’t mind me, nobody does, I’m just a snirt!” Darconville turned to explain but heard only, “Go back from wherever you came from and your ugly cat!”—and a door slammed. We just may, thought Darconville, smiling, we just may.

Now he was running, down the buckling linoleum, past the framed row of Quinsy presidents, and into the Rotunda where the odor of brussels sprouts still hung in the air. A student was standing in front of the statue of Joan of Arc. Darconville, almost out of breath, asked her if perchance she knew Isabel Rawsthorne and, as she did, requested that she go into the dining-hall and get her. When Isabel appeared, somewhat surprised, he took her by the hand to a far corner.

“We’re going to dinner at the Timberlake Hotel tonight — to celebrate!”

“We are?” Isabel bunked. “Why are we?”

Darconville seemed to remember everything he’d ever forgotten at that moment, and, with his eyes positively gleaming, he quickly explored her face to see exactly where her joy, matching his, would express itself. The sun, clamping wide, streamed into the Rotunda.

“We can say goodbye to Quinsyburg,” he said. “If I’m not going to leave you, you see, I’m afraid you’ll have to come with me.”

“To the Timberlake?”

“Guess again.”

The Timberlake Hotel, through some error or other of inadvertence, had never been torn down. It perched over a walk-up, behind high trees, off the main street and wanted paint badly. The shades in the upper rooms, most of which hadn’t been used for years, were always pulled. The old-fangled shutters slanted. There was an old, ghostly character to the place, its suffering points at immediate evidence to the eye and as close as the gloom in the main foyer — one stood in the middle of the worn carpet and heard only the sound of waits — which was dark, weird, and smelled like long-used prayer-books. Behind the massive front desk hung a keyrack, always full, and along the back-wall were replicated rows of mail-hutches, always empty. Sometimes someone was behind the desk, sometimes someone wasn’t. It didn’t matter. You hung up your wraps, waited in vain by the dining-room to be seated, and then eventually walked in.

“It’s a miracle — a wonderful secret just between you and I,” said Isabel, giggling and sipping more champagne. She looked up. “Or should it be me?”

“Should what be me?”

“Should I be me?” Isabel twirled a finger in her drink and laughed. “ You know.”

Darconville smiled. “Could you possibly be anyone else?”

The secret had been divulged, and they were both in high spirits, an exuberance fully as bright and as antic as the candleflames that lighted up the table and sparkled out of the silver and twinkled in the wine. Darconville refilled the glasses, and again they toasted the future that had just been offered them. But there was Doubt in the Mind of Royalty. “Harvard! Harvard University ! But it’s you,” she added, playfully pushing his arm, her diamond ring spurtling with tiny lights, “it’s you they want. Me, whatever would I do there? You know me, I don’t seem to be able to communicate with anybody.” She paused, reflectively. “I seem to ruin everything”—always, that quaint pronunciation—”but to ruin your career? To disappoint you? To not measure up?”

It was absurd, such talk. Loyalty? The virtue, going to such lengths, only turned upon itself, making faith as fickle as a lee tide trying to run against the wind. Oh, could she only have seen herself, for she sat as for a portrait, her honeycolored hair falling around a face as exquisite as noonshine and her long black dress leaving her shoulders bare and whiter than purity. Praise praises. Thanksgiving gives thanks. Couldn’t she see that?

“What,” asked Darconville, “could you possibly ruin?”

The smile died. For a minute Isabel seemed not to know, struck as if she’d somehow forgotten on opening night the dialogue that had gone too long assumed or unquestioned in her monologous lines of rehearsal. She grew silent, thinking she didn’t want to remember what she, in fact, had forgotten. Darconville, watching her for a response, remembered all of a sudden a queer dream he’d once had: a couple, standing on each side of a dead beast, were bid to live together ‘til death did them part and so, shaking hands, the wedding was ended. Who was that couple? What was that beast? Isabel, meanwhile, seemed for no apparent reason utterly shent and powerless, staring at, then into, and now through Darconville to the reaches of blackest orphny. It frightened him, that mood-change, and he touched a shiver in her arm. She looked up and around as if looking for something to do.

“How much they must have loved your book! Look!” She nervously pulled from her handbag a copy of Rumpopulorum , the formal cause of his being asked to teach at Harvard and so brought along as a guest, flipped it open, and read: “‘ With the sun a reminding touch upon their frozen hair the winged , um, phagones of evil flashed out of heaven —’“ She looked up. “‘Flashed,’“ she said, “that’s a great verb.” The voice was happy but it wasn’t her voice. It seemed a terrible echo of something even worse than false cheer: terror.

Darconville wasn’t fooled.

“Please,” he asked softly, “what’s the matter?”

Isabel’s face collapsed as if she’d just been stabbed — then, clutching his two hands, she pulled herself to his face and sobbed desperately, “ My God, do you really love me ?”

The dining-room itself seemed to fall away, the shadows thrown across it becoming now more ominous, its huge radiators like headstones and the faded perse drapes like shrouds over the windows effectively providing a last funereal touch. It seemed to transform back to the sepulchre it always was, not that the owner, were he ever brought that complaint, would have given a damn — and he’d damned well tell you so, too; but he spoke to no one, least of all strangers: he only stood around, tut-mouthed in his baseball cap, listening to his swine-toned radio, reading the paper, or maybe slouching out to that dad-docky veranda, knotted with grey wisteria, to play checkers with a few other old smouchers and layabouts who seemed to have spent a lifetime devoted to smoking bags of filthy shag and patching grief with proverbs out front. That was the way it was. You didn’t like it, you could goddamn well go down the road, OK?