Darconville's Cat (32 page)

  *  *  *  *  *

  Posthumia, mistress of revels, eventually brought
most of the guests outdoors, and under the magic of the paper
lanterns everyone’s inhibitions gave way to a variety of feats and
games and pranks: chairing the member, guessing-which-hand, and
pulling faces in skits and foolish charades that looked as if they
were trying to act out scenes taken from a series of
Thraco-Pelasgian wall-paintings. Behavior became ridiculous. They
cut capers, yelped at the moon, and chased each other around the
hedges, shrimp-whistling and bum-goosing anything that moved.

  Dr. Speetles, one over the eight, gave a vigorous if
implicit endorsement for the necessity of laxatives by
delivering—upsidedown on a picnic table—his own rendition of “The
Lass That Loved a Sailor.” Blissful Mr. Thimm danced blissom Miss
Swint squealing over a ha-ha. Miss Porchmouth, her eyes red, white,
and pinwheeling, screamed from a tree that a beaver she couldn’t
see was chasing her. Miss Pouce who’d got into the pokeberry wine
was meanwhile wandering round the house in a circle, reciting the
rules of the Dewey Decimal System —and every three or four minutes,
as she passed, her exultant monologue would swell out and decrease
again. An empty shandy glass had rolled just out of reach of Dr.
Excipuliform who lay unconscious under the porch in a strange
facioscapulohumeral cramp. Someone walked by with a wastebasket
over his head. And then came a shriek to wake the very dead—Miss
Gibletts, looking like the devil before daylight, tearing down the
backstairs in her underpinnings and screeching at the top of her
lungs, “
Flammeum video venire! Ite, concinite in modum ‘Io
Hymen Hymenaee, io Hymen Hymen-aeeeeeeeee!’“

  “A u.f.o.!”

  “It’s only batwoman.”

  “She looks like Pharaoh’s mother’s mummy,” said
Felice.

  Darconville only watched. At a window, he
impassively sipped a drink, the velvet bite of vodka a small
anodyne to lessen the pain of a truth foremost in his mind, that
fortune alone is victorious. To know something was wrong was to
argue, perhaps, that he didn’t know something more important—just
what, of course, he couldn’t say; but speculate he could, and he
began to understand that his love for Isabel, so new in the
declaration, was bound to walk upon the tiniest hurts: the cards of
a new deck, so judges the cartomant, have been insufficiently
shuffled if two people immediately hold the Royal Flush. Cynical,
he thought.
Un altro, un altro, gran’ Dio, ma più forte
?
Difficult, he thought, difficult.

  Perversely, he felt rather glad he’d thrown up his
writing. Not so much vanquished, he began to feel—this night more
than ever—a gathering despair over the very nature of communication
itself, a desolation growing out of hearing so much so remarkably
unwritedown-able: the gossip, the laborious stories, the twice-told
tales, and the scrappet-like micromonologues, forbidding
conversation, which assumed that to be frank was to be rude. Here
sighed a jar, there a goose-pye talked. At every word a reputation
died. And writing? The true writer, thought Darconville, must not
only be a man whose Christ shows no discontinuity between Creator
and Redeemer—a perfection, he knew, he failed—but a man with faith
in that perfection. One couldn’t write in a chimney with charcoal.
But for Isabel, he thought, this would be my personal farewell
party. Suddenly, the dragoman, Abactha, one of the genii of
confusion, shook him and cat-whispered into his ear, “
But she
isn’t here! She isn’t here
!”

  The Culpas’ backyard now looked like the Shevardino
Redoubt. Here and there, bodies lay sprawled around the grounds
like dead cuddies. Dr. Glibbery, his periodic guffaws echoing out
of the darkness, was creeping around the backwoods trying to
siphon-bottle sleeping birds. Prof. Wratschewe, who’d earlier in
the evening frankly told Miss Sweetshrub to go marry her beagle,
was now engaged in a game of belly-blind with Mrs. McAwaddle, who
dearly hoped it wouldn’t offend her husband, despite the fact that
he’d been eight long years
in pectore Abraam
. And Miss
Gibletts was now handspringing naked and discalced through the
shrubbery, which Miss Ghote said—though Miss Shepe disagreed—was
the Unpardonable Sin and for that disagreement hit her with a pie,
splat! the force of which knocked Miss Shepe dumfounded and
fenderless right over the picnic bench where she sat in a pile and
began to cry. To the loud music of the phonograph several
couples—bartered brides, groping grooms—shifted back and forth in
the upright position of neo-copulative thrall. Back in the
dining-room, Mrs. DeCrow, ravenously cro-magnoning a last platter
of beef, saw no one about, shoved a ham into her handbag, and
disappeared. The Weerds, ready to go home, together decided they’d
collaborate on a poem about the party and call it “Party.” And
President Greatracks, puffing his mugwumpist cheeks, fought
exertion and tried as best he could to get Mrs. Dodypol from under
the table where she was so often found to the top of it where she
was so often left. He bent over, his buttocks sticking out like two
curious faces—or a single hideous one—and grabbed her by her
skulled toes and pulled. It was impossible. She was stiff as a
knout.

  “A pity,” said Darconville. He couldn’t get Dr.
Dodypol’s words out of his mind. Hell hath no fury like a husband
horned. Standing beside him at the window, Felice quietly stirred
her drink with a finger. “Does she always get carried away with
herself?”

  “Only,” said Felice, “when there’s no one else to do
it for her.”

  Darconville wondered. He looked out across the
garden past the lanterns and saw Dr. Dodypol, to hide, presumably,
his bereaved wits, pacing up and down a path ignoring the flowers
and struggling no doubt to get out of his head a horned syllogism:
the
syllogismus cornutus
. He was waiting for his wife, of
course. He would wait until the crack of doom. Blind endurance,
thought Darconville, was a kind of faith, and in the bewildered
souls of those cuckolds who, like watermen, row one way and yet
look another, was a strange bravery. Dodypol had it—and yet against
what odds? Darconville knew Dodypol’s black view of nature both
directly and in a little poem he’d once read of his:

        Your eyes please
keep

        Above the puppet
man—and weep,

        For when he
nods

        The operator’s
wrist is God’s.

  How many such caitiff-ridden husbands and traduced
wives were there, walking around aimlessly, each carrying his or
her metaphorical sandwich-board reading “wittol”—creatures who
wrapped their cracked and heavy hearts in the disguise of jests and
tiny poems? It was all odd, as if he, Darconville, were reflecting
on himself who was so much luckier than they. Was it perhaps
because Love itself cuckolds the man who, left alone, can’t express
it?

  As often happened, Felice Culpa knew more or less
what he was thinking. “Isabel is tired,” she said, attempting to
console him. The beautiful name, uttered, filled his heart. Why
haven’t you come, my chrysopoetic girl? Why haven’t you called?

  “What hurts, teaches.” She paused. “Do you believe
that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You will, my darling, you will.”

  Darconville couldn’t smile. She kissed his cheek and
repeated, “Isabel is tired.”

  Hearing that, Darconville wondered: and does that
bode well? And does that bode ill? The present tense, he thought,
overflows categories of past, present, and future and drifts into
the unreal, timeless realm of ideation. The present tense argues,
lexically, the habitual mode, reflects that which is essentially
unlimited and a-substantial. Isabel is tired, Isabel is forever
tired, Isabel is tired four hundred years ago,
per omnia
saecula saeculorum, amen
. There was no time, for there was no
creation, no movement, only the sepulchral mode. It did not
designate a temporal coordinate as the “past” or “future” did and
remained as vague and unassailable as a killer virus, a stasis, a
settled vision unto itself. Vision? There was no vision, for in the
present tense there could be no development. It thwarted change,
revision, growth, alteration, rehabilitation, and hope. What,
marching into its depths, could be made in the way of progress? And
what, he wondered, might there be to change in her that he might be
unable to change, ever? But time and change, he reasoned, were
existential
proofs
of each other, weren’t they? It was
precisely, thought Darconville, what Dr. Dodypol banked on over
there, walking with eyes askance through the midden of that dark
garden of his life, asprout with caveats: poison poppies, dwarfed
tulips, deathful lilies. Dr. Dodypol’s faith was as rare as the
horns on a rabbit—but faith it was. And Darconville knew he must
learn from that.

  Darconville chastised himself, for, cross-examining
his fears about Isabel, he had willfully assumed the worst. The
opposite of faith, he realized, was not believing in nothing but
rather believing in
anything
. And so home through the
night he walked, resolved any error whatsoever to contain lest by
more truth he find in himself more pain.

  XXXVII

  Expostulation and Reply

  None but himself can be his parallel.

        —LEWIS THEOBALD,
The Double Falsehood

  THE NOISE was unmistakable:
thissst
—something had been slipped under his door, and,
not asleep, Darconville quickly rolled up and forward, bouncing
Spellvexit in a high bumbershot from the top of his chest into a
hollow of the blanket where he lay low and pouched for safety. A
little vimbat of a face slowly appeared, with whiskers twitching. “
‘Swowns!” squeaked the cat, who’d been brought up better than that.
Ignoring him, Darconville grabbed his bathrobe, stumbled to the
door—the noise from the party still in his head—and called Isabel’s
name several times. There was an envelope on the floor. Perhaps
this explained—?

  But it was a poem, written by Dr. Dodypol.

              HAVES
AND HOLES

  Like a novel, like its sequel,

  Marriage is
that
equal:

  Halves, but one half previous;

  The other, somewhat devious,

  A counterpart, say, in the following way—

  As a workweek equals a Friday’s pay.

  Two stones grind in an ancient quern,

  One stays static, one will turn.

  Nothing in nature is equal quite;

  Jaws don’t match in a single bite.

  Your ear on the right, your ear on the left—

  Some will say “reft,” some will say “cleft”:

  The words to that queer inner-porch both apply.

  The cave from the darkness who can descry?

  The terms are the same, but not so the ears,

  With shapes as different as smiles from tears.

  A push, you say, is only a pull?

  A glass half empty is a glass half full?

  The riddle’s the riddle of number two;

  The one call me, the other you.

  But a couple, alas, is not a pair.

  Love’s disappointment’s precisely there!

  If a simple kiss is what one wants

  Turning the cheek is the other’s response.

  The vision you’d share can never be,

  Not to another who cannot see.

  For the singular act of one’s creation

  Absolves the other of obligation.

  Love-letters sent, countless and grand,

  Parch the pen in the other’s hand.

  The fair, they say, requires foul;

  An owl is cognate to its howl.

  And if with love you see your fate,

  Why, be prepared to suffer hate!

  In the duchess you woo at the midnight hour

  Claws a black-faced bitch mad to devour.

  You seek to select and select what you see,

  But is what appears what then must be?

  The nature of choice
itself
is sin.

  Where one must lose and one must win!

  One eye’s inaccurate. Two we need

  To watch, to learn, to know, to read.

  One image is gotten of those two:

  But is it real? And is it true?

  Distinctions! Differences! All life long!

  You can’t do right if you can’t do wrong.

  The bride, the groom on a nuptial bed?

  Spills one white, spills one red.

  Yet each fulfills defect in each,

  The epistemology of stone and peach.

  (But when it comes to the hungry lip,

  Are equally praised, the flesh, the pip?)

  A paradox, say, that can never be:

  The strange conundrum of lock and key.

  Man’s “too much” he boasts to show;

  Woman’s “too little” down below

  Incorporates as best it can

  The larger half of her messmate, Man.

  A larger half? Yes, there’s the catch!

  It’s the deathless quintessential,

  The flint, the strike, the spark sequential

  That fires every human match.

                    —D.
I. DODYPOL

  Darconville put it on the desk—a mouse-colored paper
with the thirty or so jumping jingles pecked out so hard that the
typed letters, snap-riveted and bitten full into the page, made the
verso side read like a lunatic cantrip in braille. He read it
several times. What could he reply? Wasn’t keeping faith a cause,
not an effect? And the irony of love, who knew, perhaps it gave us
the relative dimension we needed to experience it without being
fully consumed by either the absolute or the agony of it, no?

  Axioms, axioms. Darconville picked up his pen and
spent most of the day writing to his friend an essay that had been
growing within him for some time. It had a simple title.