Darconville's Cat (16 page)

  HAIR: A beneplacit of God. Shode at the center, it
falls in fine burnished gold either straight down or is worn,
alternately, in a single bell-pull braid.

  HEIGHT: Ca. 5’7”

  BREASTS: Doe’s noses

  HANDS: Big-boned. The fingers, with flattened tips,
are long and strong.

  WAIST: Clipsome, sized to Love’s wishes

  ANKLES: Scaurous

  LEGS: The one devenustation. What intrusive image
will you have, swollen fetlock? Curb at the bank of the hock?
Puffed gaskin? Thoroughpin? Stringhalt? They are “filled” legs, in
the tradition of the round goblet which wanteth not liquor, an heap
of wheat set about with lilies. There is nothing to forgive. The
Venus de Milo wears a size 14 shoe.

  XX

  A Wandering in Brocéliande

  Wrapt in my careless cloke, as I walke to and fro, I
see love can

  shew what force there reigneth in his bow.

        —HENRY HOWARD,
Earl of Surrey

  THERE WAS A MUSIC in the world that night never
before heard, strains reaching Darconville alone across moor and
highland, field and common, cliff and vale and watercourse and
piercing his heart in a sweet, impossible ache. Unable to sleep,
he’d dressed hastily, run down the stairs, and driven to an
out-of-way spot miles outside Quinsyburg. At the edge of an open
field, rising to a wooded height, he for no particular reason came
to a stop and got out.

  It was well past midnight. The vault of black sky,
its clear stars so sublime and infinite above him, seemed in its
immensity to speak of what it was in his power to become.
Darconville walked and walked, directionless, across the night-dark
grass of the meadow, perfumed by the musk of the earth, and his
heart beat in his chest as if it would burst. He soon found himself
across the field. It was wooded now, wonderfully gloomy, somehow
steeped in legend, and he imagined that every clump of trees, every
hollow, every vine was a part of Brocéliande where the enchanter
Merlin dwelt and that every boulder was a menhir behind which,
secretly, a druid hid, spying on his joy.

  A cold mist haunted the fallows, with the odor of
trees, stubble, and seeds; dampness and earthmusk; and the spotted
plage of decaying leaves. An owl pitchpiped. The trees were loaded
with mast, their boughs pendulous and brown, and piles of leaves
gave way to his tread. What was there in forests, representing more
of mystery than light, that now promised to illuminate just where
he must go?

  And now he was climbing up over the rocks, the
branches and leaves in the moonlight throwing strange pelicasaurian
figures everywhere about him. A wild wind gusted at his coat at
several points, only blowing up his fever to climb up even higher
as if resolved to discover in the spectral, astropoetic light of
some clearing above—a height, perhaps, fashioned from what he
felt—the tall presences of aeons and archons, peris and paracletes,
mystic thrones and twelve-winged kalkydri beckoning him forward
less from where he stood than closer toward where she was. It was
fated: their souls must have been in love before they had been born
and were dreaming this dream they were living, a promise of love,
though blind and slow like all prophecies, that participated in and
so would last an eternity.

  The moon, bright, blackened shadows, gave every
green thing a fivefold addition to its greenness, and whitened out
a way. The wind swirled and looped his coat as he reached the very
height of the hill, and the uprushing of enchantment he felt
flooding his arms, making him almost delirious, seemed to send him
soaring past the regions of the earth where, giving to the wind the
kisses it returned—high in the cataracts of air, beyond the running
clouds—he pointed to the world that formed her face and cried out
in ecstasy, “
I love you
!”

  XXI

  “The Little Thing”

  What a tyranny, what a penetration of bodies is
this!

  Thou drawest with violence, and swallowest me up,
as

  Charydis doth Sailors with thy rocky eyes.

        —PHILOSTRATUS
LEMNIUS

  FOR WEEKS THEREAFTER, Darconville found the small
notes left everywhere for him always infested with little
one-dimensional sets of peepers, like the two eyes of Horus;
thus:

              (..)

  They were signed, “The Little Thing.”

  XXII

  The Clitheroe Kids

  Like moody beasts they lie along the sands.

        —JOHN GRAY,
Femmes Damnées

  “ ‘Rafe, throbbing, thought: I’ll fix you,
sweetheart—and, hitting that dame a good smack, he flung her onto
the bed and prepared to throw his hot gooms into her,’ “

  read Jessie Lee Deal, licking her upper lip.

  “ ‘O brother, he thought, as she jiggled
lasciviously in her scanties, this is some brawd! And not exactly
overdressed! And then, hornmad, he drilled his lust-hungry tongue
deep into Rhoda’s ear and hissed, “O.K., boobsie, show me some of
your tricks!” She arched her back and writhed about. O beautiful!
thought Rafe, this kiddo is wide-open, no buts about it.’ “

  It was a cold winter night, and in one of the rooms
on the fourth floor of Clitheroe, a senior dorm, the girls from
several adjoining suites had gathered together, as was their habit,
for a general bull-session of gab and gossip: sitting around in
pajamas, swapping stories, and, on this occasion, listening to
random installments being read from a currently popular and
exhilarating fuel-burner called
I Knew Rhoda Rumpswab
by
16 People (Troilism Press, N.Y.)—a paperback, slightly damp and
fungoid from overuse, that sprouted open if left on a table to
several well-reviewed passages. The room was filled with an
eye-watering canopy of cigarette smoke. A couple of girls were
yawning. But it was better than studying.

  “I declare,” said Cookie Crumpacker, with a wimbling
tongue, “I’m about to just plain boil over listening to that thing,
honey, and you can
believe
it if you think you can’t!” She
rubbed her hand over her gluteus médius and whistled out in two
beats the commonly understood flirtatious iamb:u —!

  Anaphora Franck, sitting on the edge of the bed,
grabbed the book. “I have fifty reasons I’d like to be Rhoda
Rumpswab. Want to know one?”

  “Hey, but isn’t that a pseudonysm or something?”
asked slew-eyed Celeste Skyler, the bulb of her head voodooed with
bobby pins, pink rollers, and metal clips, and she pointed to the
book cover (Woman, Leg up on Chair, Unhooking Fishnet Hose). The
herb wisdom at Quinsy, let it be said, did not grow in everyone’s
garden.

  It was a question, however, given small attention.
No one was listening. No one ever listened. Added to that, it was
just the very
worst
time of year. Christmas had come and
gone, and even the picturesque dusting of light snow on campus gave
short relief to the students, now facing exams. The
night-to-morning processus during Finals Week rarely varied,
obligations were unrelieved, and the faculties of concentration
lagged. And then of course the girls all knew each other— usually
by chummy diminutives like Muffie, Mopsy, Sissy, Missy, etc. —and
any new habits, opinions, or quirks at this late date could only
come as a surprise. So they just lazed about doing what girls
together have been doing from time immemorial, primping, talking
about boys, and raising, as only groups in dorms can, those
neo-ethical, quasi-theological questions usually reserved for the
wee hours, you know, famous old topoi like: Would You Confess Under
Torture? Which of the Five Senses Would You Rather Lose? How Would
You Commit Suicide? Would You Ever Eat a Human Being? (And, of
course, its ancillary: Which Part?) What Would Be Your One Wish If
You Had Only One? What If You Were Alone at Night and a Weirdo Came
into Your Room?

  Mimsy Borogroves was ironing her hair. Sally Ann
Sprouse, smoothing gouts of depilatory cream over her saber-shinned
legs, wondered out loud if erections hurt boys. Glenda Barrow,
visibly keratoconjunctivine, said she was going to sue the college
linen service and asked if anybody wanted to take bets on it. One
fat little puella, Thomasina Quod—a girl, reputed to be an ovarian
dwarf, who was often disparagingly called “Buns”—lay back eating a
poptart and reading a pamphlet of intimate advice with her feet up
on the wall in tiny slippers trimmed with moth-eaten squirrel fur.
Holly Sunday, a folksinger with a macrobiotic complexion and
straight blond hair, was strumming a guitar and singing with
exquisite purity to a darkened window. Aone Pitts, wimpled in a
towel, sat in a corner tossing a beanbag frog up and down and
claimed she once heard of an unmarried girl transvestite who fell
in love with a married homosexual man! Well, interposed Donna
Wynkoop, there was a guy on
her
street back home who was
famous for stopping the interior opening of his nostrils with his
tongue! And what, Robin Winglet wanted to know, did they think she
found that morning on a wheat biscuit in the Quinsy dining-hall? No
one asked. And so she tried, unsuccessfully, to tell lovely,
spoiled, rich Pengwynne Custis who was not listening but who had
been for some time confiding to everyone, while blowing her nails
dry, that she had lost her virginity in the Zakopane Forest to a
Polish officer with sideburns when she was fourteen—and she loved
it, she said, she didn’t regret it one bit, she’d do it again, and
they could all eat their hearts out for all she cared, OK? But to
care was, logically, to have listened. “
I
lost it the
night of the sophomore prom, in a car,” said Mona Lisa Drake, with
a broad smile. “I just kicked my yellow satin pumps out the window,
yanked up my organdy, and got tagged. It was called ‘The Spring
Bounce.’ “ She winked. “The prom, that is.”

  A spate of rape stories followed. Sex, of course,
was by far the most popular subject in Clitheroe 403, but it was
equally understood, in that particular room at least, that bragging
about one’s sexual adventures with any kind of conceit or
competition was simply not done, and most of the girls there
generally talked about sex as if to avoid it or exorcise it, as
Eskimos, say, use refrigerators to keep food from freezing. The
reason wasn’t difficult to figure out. It was Hypsipyle Poore’s
room.

  “A cockroach,” said Robin Winglet, to no one.

  A knock, an entry.

  The room went silent. Loretta Boyco—tall,
ill-complexioned, homely as a winter pear—stood in the doorway with
her hair-dryer and, explaining that the hum was bothering her
roommate, asked if she could plug it in in their outlet.

  “Plug it in—right over there.”

  “You can plug it in
any
where,” pitched in
Cookie Crumpacker, smirking and stroking her tummy underneath the
football jersey she wore which showed, to her advantage, a rather
extreme case of bouncy overendowment. She crossed her legs and
winked at Loretta, who glowered back. They weren’t friends.
Loretta, not one of the “regulars” there, was of a somewhat
different stripe: secretary of the Tidy Lawn Club at Quinsy,
proctor at Fitts, and ex-president of the Baptist Student Union at
Consolidated High School in Chattanooga, she toed the mark. She
used pink sponge-rubber breasts and kept a picture of God in her
room. Her hobby was twirling. As she clicked on her dryer, sniffed
serenely, and began to read the book she had brought with
her—Caroline Lee Hentz’s
Linda, or The Young Pilot of the Belle
Creole
—several girls behind her raised their hands in
claws.

  Charity was scant. It was of course a critical time
of the year and nerves were on edge. Day in, day out, there had
been nothing but one long round of work for two weeks: getting up
in the morning, walking through the grey dawn to a classroom,
waiting with faces like piggy banks for some fanatic to hand them
an impossible exam, and then, what? Returning to the dorms for
another night of study and sweat? Horrible! It was like prison!
They murmured. They made faces. They moped about like the defiled
Moabite women of Shittim and all the while suffered from things
like bad bowel rotation, eyesquint, omphalocele, swelled hummocks,
and pinworm! For a stupid degree? They didn’t need? When they were
all going to get married anyway?

  Certain girls, however—the “scroops!”—loved it and
the better to study hid themselves in out-of-the-way places like
airshafts and broom closets making lists, writing out mnemonics,
and underlining their textbooks in red with massive felt pens. But
this was a rare group. Most of the girls at Quinsy, braless and
indifferent, either sat around drinking coffee or just went
simpling from room to room with a thousand stinks and curses about
the impossibility of cramming an infinity of knowledge into the
finity of mind in one single night!

  Ah, but for the copesmates in Clitheroe 403? It was
considered by most of
them
vulgar to worry. Tomorrow? A
pother, a pox! A feather, a fig! For if for them the night grew
short, the morning was a world away, that was that, and no amount
of pressure could ever hope to lessen the conviction beating in
their little hearts that had been established there for all time in
the immortal words of Miss Scarlett O’Hara, the Belle of Tara, who,
when bravely standing against the world, deathlessly pronounced,
“I’ll think of it all tomorrow . . . after all, tomorrow is another
day.” It was the true
materia poetica
of Dixiedom, a
regional quintessential, the primal scream of the South.