Darconville's Cat (53 page)
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.
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.
LIV
Odi et Amo
A quirked vessel never falls from the hand.
—ANONYMOUS
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.
LV
The Timberlake Hotel
Sweet boadments, good!
—WILLIAM
SHAKESPEARE,
Macbeth
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.
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.
