Darconville's Cat (27 page)

  A jet-colored scalene affair, with little orange
eyes and the contours of a bat, the kite staggered and upcut
brainlessly across the air, then swooped in several tendentious
circles, and suddenly shot straight up on tightening line. It
shimmied out further
and
jiggered up to a tiny size.
Isabel turned to Darconville, thirty yards or so behind her, and
clapped her hands like a child, then suddenly racing after the
floating string as he let go to pick up the camera. She leaped and
got it, as Darconville whispered to himself:

        ”Followe thy
faire sunne, unhappy shaddowe,

        Though thou be
blacke as night

        And she made all
of light.”

  Quickly, he began to film her: gamboling,
circulating, snudging the distant kite. Her shoulders jived with
every puff and gust. Isabel wore a red jersey, white trousers, no
shoes. The wanton air in twenty sweet forms danced after her
fingers and flashed its transparent song about her golden hair,
blowing as blond as once in the same light blew that of Helen,
Polyxena, Guithera. The natural light, thought Darconville, that
showed Socrates one God and disclosed to Democritus the atoms now
epiphanized this dancing, peddling child whose laughter almost
broke his heart. She skipped and ran and stretched up, actions
revealing her more-than-a-moiety of thigh. It didn’t matter what
wasn’t seen. Darconville had simply conceived light visible and
found the girl he loved. He would have gone barefoot to Jerusalem,
to the Great Khan’s Court, to the Far Indies to fetch her a bird to
wear on her finger. She never seemed more beautiful.

  “Look! It’s umpteen miles high!” cried Isabel, her
untied hair drifting aerially behind her as she ran.

  Darconville was now filming her shadow.

  “That cloud, up there. Isn’t it beautiful! It’s
shaped like a bird—a swan, look.” She turned and came over to him.
“Is that true, that the swan sings when it dies?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He brought the camera close and shot her nose.

  “No, really. What do you think?”

  “The swan,” said Darconville, smiling, “remains
silent all its life in order to sing well a single time.” A parable
of art, he thought—and a perfect excuse, it delighted him to think,
for having put aside my writing for
you
. Good: there was
more piety in being human than human in being pious.

  “What does it sing about, anyway, if it’s
dying?”

  Darconville happily replied, “It sings about, O,
what of heaven it was always reminded of—but couldn’t have—on
earth. Glaciers: clouds. The sea,” he said, “is the nightmare of
the sky, you’ve heard that, haven’t you?”

  “The sea?”

  It was unbelievable. She seemed to freeze in a
reverie, blankly studying a spot of nothing in the far distance, as
if all of a sudden, to solve a riddle imposed on her from without,
she were waiting for the answer she was incapable of giving to
come. It was undeniably like something of unhappiness moving in her
spirit, the look of a person who had discovered, not something she
hadn’t known before, but something she had known before and didn’t
want to hear again. He came over next to her and, as she turned
abruptly, almost kissed her on the lips: an
effleurage
suddenly reminding her of where she was. She lowered her head with
a slight blush.

  “I mean,” said Darconville, taking her arm, “there
is a sort of consolation in seeing that little thing squittering
around up there, you know? It jigs, you could say, to synthesize
worlds that have been separated, folding its wings and shooting
upon its errand out of the Valley of Funnel and connecting even for
a brief interval the five elements.”

  “Five elements?”

  “Earth, air, fire, water—”

  “And?”

  
You
, thought Darconville.

  “And ether,” he said. “The quintessential.”

  The kite caromed in the faraway air. As if
preoccupied with one of her thoughts, Isabel tweaked the line and
silently watched the tiny vessel plaintively tossing in the vast
and mighty ocean above her. Preoccupied himself now, Darconville
took the conversation a bit further.

  “Sometime, Isabel,” he said, “open the Bible to the
book of Genesis. There is a little fright there amid its exegetical
thickets: the phrase, ‘And God saw that it was good,’ is for some
reason omitted after the second day of Creation. You know what I
mean?” Isabel wasn’t sure. “I mean, no one has ever figured that
out. I’ve often thought, however, that—”

  A gust of wind sent the kite into a lunatic
figure-eight, whereupon, looking up, Isabel opened her mouth
expectantly.

  “—well, that on that particular day came the first
disuniting of what God had created. The elements, if now separate,
were once all one, an unindividuated world become multiple only in
that it might be comprehended, and, say, in one thunderclap that
hitherto indivisible ur-world suddenly banged into a vast network
of
intermundia
: gases, air, flame, and huge chunks of
smoking telluric mole flew out into a gravity-locked exosphere!” He
waved his arms up. “The One became the Many.”

  “What a pessimist you are,” said Isabel.

  Darconville said: “But can’t you see that that is
optimism? There,” he said, pointing up past the kite, “is our exit,
inspected from an ingressive angle, camouflaged only by our fear of
taking it. Vision overwhelms us! I don’t think vision is anything
more than daring to seek unity, no matter the—”

  Isabel put her hand on his mouth and said
shhhh
. . .

  “You remind me of poetry,” she said.

  The black kite suddenly spiked out sideways,
shivered, and then hooking started on a plummet to hell. Isabel
cried out, her nates tightening. Reaching over, Darconville swiftly
yanked the string. The kite swooped up, listed deferentially, and
then nosedived almost on an aim down, downward, across the field
into a tangled web of treelimbs, hanging upsidedown there as if
brained. Isabel, disconsolate, her hands dropping, pulled her
thumb. Tears sprang to her eyes.

  Darconville, lifting her chin, hugged her close, a
photogenic gold-blue mirage of that beautiful day. They walked
slowly over toward the surrounding woods and silently inspected the
ruined kite, dangling in pieces. A why sat in her eyes which he
kissed, finding them grum, now gleaming with high-wrought
inexpressibles. They stood silent, watching each other, Listening
to the real words of the imaginary dialogue being whispered from
heart to heart, and a very special closeness was theirs that
afternoon, an eternal bond shaping itself in the late sun, the
flower-scents of Eden, the windsong. Still, no name was put to
their happiness, although a new happiness was understood as
Darconville and Isabel, associate sole, left the field together
hand in hand. A low-flying bird, trailing its legs across the sky,
pulled in its wake the sunset and all the heat of its fire. Dusk
crept in.

  They returned to Darconville’s rooms, without a
word.

  It was so still: Darconville’s thumping heart, as he
opened the door, was interrupted by a whisper not to turn on the
light. He kissed her quickly, turned, and then turned back again
desperately as if at last all the words lost on the desk behind her
might now be spoken; but Isabel would have no words and, giving up
in his arms, leaned into him with a long kiss, the obscure
surrounding them as the flesh enclosed the soul, as if simply to
explain how, in the course of love, the body took part in its
affections. They couldn’t get close enough to each other, sucking
out both breath and being as if to gain time for the merciful
recognition between them both knew now they could never give up;
and, needing suretyship no more, they together passed over
questions like riddles not ignored but solved rather in the quiet
but beseeching assurance of each other’s promised faith: did love
yield or was it conquered? Was to rule by love to dominate by
emotion? Did love fulfilled cease then to be love? Was to remove
the mystery to take away the wonder? May one love only what one
knows, or was love that which made knowledge possible? Did love
have to have a meaning?

  No, no, not if it meant what it was.

  “I love you,” said Darconville.

  “Oh, I love you, too.”

  And they made love in the naked darkness, two lost
children looking for rebirth in the glory of each other, struggling
upward, like their wayward kite, toward the cold particulates of
one world where, joining sky and sea by song, they found another,
and then reaching up higher still to behold in the frost and
starlight the very beauty of very beauty, neither begotten nor made
but being of the substance and essence which is beautiful unto all
eternity, they made a wish, stretched forth and—poof!—blew out the
birthday sun, and were blind at the climax of vision,

                    
Coda

  Those were the carefree, intimate days they shared
together before the weird and fateful turn that wound its intricate
way back to a certain letter—not even a letter, in fact. It was a
questionnaire.

  XXXV

  A Questionnaire

  Time’s fatal wings doe ever forward flye,

  Soe ev’ry day we live, a day wee dye.

        —THOMAS
CAMPION

  THE QUESTIONNAIRE caused a lot of trouble. It was
quite common, now, that Darconville often found little gifts left
for him in his office, presents—it was typical at a girls’
school—offered up during the course of the year by gentle giglots,
maidens blushworthily abud, and softhearted flouts whose dear heads
Love had turned, whose dear hearts Love had wrung, whose dear hands
Love had moistened and who, most of the time, tripped in and out of
his shadow as quietly as mice, walking by his house, watching him
from windows, and generally bearing the agues, itches, stones,
cramps, and colics of cruel and anonymous passion as best they
could.

  It was common enough, and harmless: at the oblique
of a given hour, up to the second floor of the English building and
into the silent corridor the little
pixiarda
would steal,
arrange her gift—boxed, bottled, or bowed—and then according to the
law of self-denying ordinance secretly hurry away to an outlying
willow tree under which she sat, a bundle of regrets, listening to
a bobolink in the branches above mocking the pity of human passion.
It was indeed harmless and easily explained, the consequence, in
most cases, of an infirm social calendar, the overabuse of spices
in the college diet, or simply the love-philtre that is the
muskrose season we know as spring.

  And sometimes there were notes. And so it was on one
particular Friday. Taking a brief respite before his four o’clock
class, Darconville walked into his office and stepped on what he
picked up. It was a lilac envelope. He slit it open, took out a
sheet of matching stationery—out of which slipped, along with a
heady lavender fragrance, a small red-green gem: a bloodstone—and
read the following:

              1.
hate me?

    Do you    2. like me?

              3.
love me?

              4.
feel indifferent to me (the worst) D?

                          Yours
forever,

                                H.P.

  There would have been no doubt as to the identity of
the pollster here, initialed or not. No, even if Darconville had
not recognized the lush hue of paper, or breathed in its deep
perfume, or identified the feminine slant of those semi-uncials, he
knew the correspondent well. Of course, Hypsipyle Poore was not
alone. There were other girls
de la faute fatale
during
the year—quoits homesick for spikes—who also left behind little
gifts and select remember-me-bys. These were not all shy. Neither
were they all anonymous.

  Sprightly, unforgettable Mercy Tattycoram once left
him a robin’s egg with her name signed on it in lemon juice. Tadzia
di Lido sent to his house biweekly letters, of the saga genre, with
envelopes coming three at a batch (marked %1, %2, %3) and the
stamps on each always arranged amorously
tête-bêche
. A
senior English major, Iva Ironmonger Dane, was wont to leave tucked
in the carriage of his typewriter intense little poems, each,
usually, a one-sentence tranche written in pedantic sentimeter,
arbitrarily spaced, and given a title something like “Mouse,”
“Rain,” “Loneliness,” or “Untitled,” that special one too ineffable
in content to be named. For the monthly jar of gooseberry
preserves, all thanks to the annual-editor, popular Pepper
Milltown, who once snapped a photograph of Darconville in his
Bentley which, later, Isabel pointedly requested her to remove from
her dormitory mirror, but she wouldn’t, she said, until she had
good reason to, which that afternoon, sitting in the infirmary with
a swollen foot, she had. Cygnet Throwt brought him a reproduction
of an eighteenth-century clay pipe from Williamsburg. Michelle
Arcangiolo gave him a glass pistol filled with candy. Then Hazel
Anne Glover, whose paintings he once complimented, presented him
her favorite osmiroid pen with its ancillaries, a box of titquills
spilt on his desk and so arranged to spell 1-o-v-e. And Fanny
Appleton’s, one couldn’t forget, was the tie-clasp and the
foot-high card at Easter. Finally, Yancy Dragonwagon, offering
herself
, simply spent every day of the week sitting
loyally on the dimly lit stairwell outside his office.

  The obliviscible on this day was, of course, like
all the others in intention. It differed only in its effect,
becoming swiftly the
protarchos ate
—the crime that sets
other crime in motion. No, there was no question as to its author;
no doubt as to the type of epistle, indited, as an attorney might
bonds, by leaving blanks; and no hesitation as to what must be
done. Smiling, Darconville put the bloodstone in his pocket. He
ripped up the letter, dropped the pieces into the waste-basket, and
went off to class thinking no more about it. About such
matters—over protestation, over evasion, over
repetition—Darconville had long expressed a dear wish to have less
ceremonial and more understanding. Or, at least more attempts at
understanding. Or, better still, more insistence at making
understanding explicit and verbal. But little had come of it. And
so he began to take it all in stride. You see, it was about the
twentieth time that year he’d received such a note.