Darconville's Cat (31 page)

  “The apple of your eye, is it, dear?”

  Darconville nodded, and then explained not only what
was bothering him but what might have been the occasion of it, a
matter she herself understood only too well.

  “So the pair of you are currently dating? Good,”
said Miss Carp, puffing her cigarette. “You have your reasons. I’m
plumb fed up with these old kumquats around here who want to throw
lime in your eyes for it. The policy on faculty/student
dating—rules that should have been pruned long ago—was a lemon even
when I taught here. You just give ‘em the old raspberry, y’hear?
Me?” She blew out a cannonade of smoke. “I couldn’t give a fig for
them.” She tapped his nose three times. “Not. One. Fig.”

  The dining-room table was in chaos. It looked as if
the Harpies had descended and flown, leaving a disorder of
nutshells, slubbered glasses, cherry stems, and half-bitten
macaroons. Gastronomes blouted. Hip-pophages belched. Fruitarians
burped. And all the low candles, flickering, seemed to wink a final
notice to all those guests who doggedly remained and in whose eyes,
now, sensitivity and sobriety were so comfortably abed.

  “They used to call me ‘Temptation Eyes’ in
high-school,” muttered bedraggled Mrs. Dodypol who, in the obvious
grip of Korsakoff’s Psychosis, rocked shakily past Darconville and
walked straightway into a linen closet. She might have spent the
rest of her life there had not two hundred pounds plus of lubberly
self-assurance—with a stink-pot cigar and a suit splurched with the
orts of a cream bun—tiptoed by. It was President Greatracks who,
wheezing with laughter, hammered on the door. There was no answer.
He squatted, giggling behind his hand, and began bouncing up and
down and crooning in the manner of a jump-rope song, “Your baby
wants his
ha
ppy! Your baby wants his
hap
py! Your
baby wants his
hap
py!”

  “This is hilarious,” said one of his lackeys.

  “What fun.”

  “I’m about to split my si-hi-hi-hides,” said
another.

  But the door tipped open—and Mrs. Dodypol pitched
out backwards, her hair sticking out like a wig created by Klimt,
and fell supple as a tobacco pouch into the outspread arms of
President Great-racks, who wabbled backwards on his ill-smelling
feet and angrily looked about him and wondered out loud just who
the hell in the dang a-rea, goddamit, aimed to grow themselves
enough backbone to get a poor child a drink of water? The
pipe-smoking lickgolds, each cautious as a medieval guard watching
over the king’s
nef
, all hopped to. “I will,” said one.
“Leave it to me,” said another. “No, me,” said still another.

  “I think I know what to do,” said Miss Skait’s date,
appearing from nowhere. “I saw this here movie on television last
night where someone got shot, see, and the victim’s brother, no,
his father from, I don’t know, someplace where they wear those fur
hats, what, Czechoslovania or something, the Orient anyway, said to
elevate his feet, I mean head, and—”

  Checking his watch, Darconville took advantage of
the distraction and ran upstairs again to the telephone. He dialed
several numbers. The ghost in Isabel’s dormitory wouldn’t answer.
The infirmary nurse, doing her bedpans, rudely told him to call
back. And the sheriff was out.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday 10:20
P.M.: Isabel
solus
is
sobbing on a bed too real, covered with a quilt too narrow. She
writhes, she twists, she toils, perspiring and spiked from within.
The sleeping pill she took sustains but a periodic unconsciousness,
easing neither the dying out of life nor the living out of pain. A
black dream enacts itself in her fever: a telephone, locked on its
rack, is screaming and screaming for help, as if being tortured
alive. Isabel’s shadow comes at her bellowing, “
She won’t pick
it up
!” Isabel cries in reply, “She can’t pick it up!”
“
She won’t pick it up
!” But Isabel cries, “She can’t pick
it up with a hand that wants to!” “
She won’t pick it up! She
won’t! She won’t
!” The screaming then stops, the telephone is
dead. Trembling, Isabel wakes and tries to call Annabel Lee Jenks,
who has gone. Her puffed face burns back at her from the night
window in a foolish swollen reflection. Everyone has left her.
Everyone hates her. Everyone has gone to sea. In a sudden
wingstroke of will, Isabel, standing on her shadow, brutally shakes
the telephone to life, dials another number, and—as the Incidental
leaps up to throttle the Essential—whispers low to the party at the
other end, “Govert?”

  *  *  *  *  *

  A painting of Mt. Vernon took pride of place in the
living room. Floyce had done it for the Guipas earlier in the year,
and now as the various members of the faculty sat around there,
drinking, it came under discussion, meeting with drunken abuse from
the men and, from the women, unfeminine swipes that in the
eighteenth century, the Virginian’s favorite, would at least have
been whispered behind fans, an uncharitable belowting that
ridiculed the beginnings of skill and the ends of art. Miss
Throwswitch called it untheatrical. Dr. Glibbery asked if a nigger
done it. And Mrs. DeCrow, snickering, pretended to look at it
sideways and yet still had to admit it honored a great American,
no,
not
Floyce, she added, putting an objurgatory
sibilance to his name—but George Washington. “First in war, first
in peace,” she quoted pompously, “and first in the hearts of his
countrymen.”

  “Still,” said Felice, her eyes smiling, “he married
a widow.”

  Mrs. DeCrow, her eyes going ablaze with
prosecutional bitchery, turned cat-a-pan and marched out of the
room. “Terribly earnest,” murmured Felix Culpa, unwrapping another
bottle of bourbon. “Well, you know,” said Felice to Darconville,
“the poor old pelican hasn’t been the same since the operation. The
cosmetic work, not the tubes she had twisted. Her plastic surgeon
grafted skin in the damnedest way. I won’t tell you where, but
every time she gets tired,” Felice winked, “her face wants to sit
down.” Felice wet her forefinger, nicked the air, and, screaming
with laughter, took Felix by his belt and pulled him out into the
garden.

  “You want to know what I think? I think these people
are revolting and disgusting, that’s what I think,” said Miss
Malducoit to Miss Porchmouth, who was with her enormous hands
trying unsuccessfully to worm a cherry out of a bud-vase she’d
filled with gin. She looked down censoriously at only half of
stone-blind Qwert Yui Op who, rendered
hors de combat
from
milk—a digestive indisposition characteristic of that race—was
lying under the sofa, with only his little twig-like legs sticking
out. But Miss Malducoit couldn’t believe what was going on at the
other side of the room.

  For Miss Ballhatchet, her eyes wide as a lovesick
potto, had wangled a place on the couch with Miss Thisbite and,
chatting her up with a few choice misandrous asides, asked the
girl—who politely overlooked the deltoid massage—if she didn’t
agree with her that one man made a market, two a mob? Meanwhile,
Floyce R. Fulwider, equally zealous, excused himself to a group of
old ladies wearing necklaces strung as if with the teeth of
peccaries and gynandromorphosed past them in short, mincing steps,
holding high a couple of overly befruited drinks and singing,
“Coming through! Coming through!” He set one, gently, into the
hands of the slim blond boy who was Miss Thisbite’s brother and
told him he looked like the young Louis XVII. The old ladies were
not
quite
sure how they felt about it, and, closing into a
circle, proceeded to commit several sins against the Eighth
Commandment. Dr. and Mrs. Speetles, philoprogenetists, then began
passing around to everybody there—saving, of course, the Weerds,
who were down in the cellar talking to each other—several
photographs of their hydrocéphalie baby playing with a fire engine,
a little meldrop of snot shining under its nose in every one. Dr.
Glibbery said he looked like a dufus and handed them to Darconville
who passed them to Miss Tavistock who thanked him, stared at him
steadfastly a full minute, then asked, “Are you in love with me?”
There was an awkward silence, broken by a whistle—Felice calling
Darconville into the kitchen.

  Darconville excused himself just as Dr.
Knipperdoling, loaded to the scuppers, was remarking how good old
Mr. Bischthumb of recent memory would have enjoyed the party,
bringing to mind, with significant pauses, both the doily of his
undoing and the irony of death-by-laughter. Touching on the odds
and ends of life, he pointed out that life
was
odd and yet
that, funnily enough, it would have only one end, you know? The
profundity struck him, and he blew a long unmusical note of grief
into his handkerchief. Dr. Pindle turned to his partner with an
I-suppose-we-in-a-way-expected-it-but-how-horrible-just-the-same
face, drawing an arrow out of his sententious quiver. “In one way,”
he philosophized, “life is pointless, but a needle isn’t.” He
paused. “You know?” His friend knew. Oh, his friend knew very well.
And Dr. Knipperdoling burst into tears.

  “Forgive me,” Felice said to Darconville. “I saw you
over there being pried by ‘The Clawhammer’ and couldn’t bear to see
you trapped.” He smiled. “I wasn’t really trapped, but—”
Darconville stopped short. He snapped his fingers at the sudden
idea. Miss Trappe!

  Swiftly, Darconville got to the bedroom, shut the
door, and made his call. Of course! Isabel, making that
long-delayed visit, had
forgotten
all about the party. But
Miss Trappe had been asleep. He could see her at the other end—it
almost broke his heart—just wakened, confused in the dark, wearing
an elfin nightcap and groping for an identifiable chair. Her voice
sounded far away, as if it were underwater, old and tired as
hope.

  “And she didn’t call you at all?”

  “Not really,” came the distant voice.

  The palliative expressed her charity. Darconville,
perspiring, shifted the receiver to his other ear.

  “Wait. I think I know,” said Miss Trappe, trying.
The voice faded, returned, faded. “Perhaps she concentrated on
trying
to remember instead of concentrating on
remembering—and forgot.”

  Apologizing, Darconville thanked her and said
goodnight. Quickly, he dialed the infirmary again: the bark of
discord on the other end identified Nurse Bedpan and both—the bark,
the discord—disclaimed with the punctuation of a double-negative
that it knew anything about anybody named Isabel Rawsthorne. She
hung up. He sat by the telephone in the dark, thinking that the
lover possessing a luxury with which merit had so little to do must
perhaps stand a constant penitent to such arbitrarily dispensed
grace. And anxious in the vitals, he felt an even more profound
love for Isabel coming upon him, swift as a wish: the knowledge of
good bought dear by fearing ill, the value of gain bought dear by
feeling loss. But what ill? he wondered. How lost? He reviewed
fifty inevitabilities and, selecting none, was now the owner of
all.

  The door moved.

  Darconville looked up at the shadow.

  “Hello, Dr. Dodypol.”

  “Hell-o, Darconville. Fair grow the lilies on the
riverbank?” He paused, then came noiselessly into the room. “I’m
just pecking on a cracker.” He peered closer. “Are you—all
right?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course.”

  “I like a cracker now and again.”

  Darconville nodded.

  “My wife isn’t big for them, crackers. But she bakes
them.”

  “Yes?”

  “Mrs. Dodypol? O yes. She actually bakes them. Few
wives, taking it all together, do nowadays. No, I can’t
complain.”

  A silence fell. Only the tight little crunches could
be heard in the darkness. Then Dr. Dodypol, alone like Darconville,
sat by him on the bed. He sighed and folded his hands, prayer-like,
as if in supplication to Coquage, god of cuckolds.

  “Drudgery? O boy, you wouldn’t believe it. Harder by
much than me making my verse. She first sets out her tins, whisks,
cutters, the lot. You know how women are. Then she does her
sifting, salts to taste, proofs the batter, does Mrs. Dodypol.
Well, you want them natural, see. To get the benefit. It’s all in
the books, about nature, I mean. Isn’t it? Wholesome, they say.
They do say that, don’t they? Oh yes, scrupulous about doughs, my
wife, but the kneading gets her here, in the back, right”—he
motioned—”here. Well, you can imagine. Anyway, she cooks them to
paper-thin on preheated tiles, and, mmm, when offered up warm—” He
looked at Darconville, who noticed tears rolling down his cheeks.
“I’m sorry. I’m lying. I hate crackers. I hate nature. And I hate
my wife. I’d like to take a pair of shears and snip off her cruel
merciless tits. Well, goodnight.” And he left.

  *  *  *  *  *

  
Friday 11:43
P.M.: The light of the full
moon, burglarious, steals through an eagre of dart-shaped clouds,
shifting west. A blue car, dented, winds onto the ring-road that
curves around to the front of Fitts dormitory. The mausoleum is not
empty. There is a face at a third-floor window, watching out in the
autarchy of an isolation no worse than dreams. A wistfulness
awaits—Isabel, throatcramped, apprehensively twicking her thumbs
over a thought: what does my sorrow matter if I can’t be happy?
Suddenly, she stirs up, pale, on her feet as the car pulls up out
front, its headlights flashing on-and-off. Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let
down your hair! Out of the building, into the car she runs, her odd
cheerless expression transforming to resignation; gunned, the car
backfires and races toward the Quinsyburg line, not
to
it,
for turning off the main road, it bumps over a dirt drive into a
glade, and stops. A fatidic stir of wind is blowing across several
obsolete fields. A dog howls, somewhere. Matter-of-fact Govert van
der Slang, chauffeur and
zielverkooper
, turns to Isabel.
There is, he says, no alternative: he, Fawx’s Mt., and the time is
each, respectively, tired, far, and late. They sit there, coevals
in the night. ‘Tis not so much the gallant who woos as the
gallant’s way of wooing. He is walking now, flanked by a silent
girl on one side and her robin’s-egg-blue valise on the other, both
safe in his omnivicarious hands. The glow above her is, she thinks,
at least a personal glimmer in the impersonal darkness and,
reaching to palpate a stray cat glowing eerily now red, now blue,
she manages successfully to avoid a second look above her at the
blinking neon-lights—mistakeproof in the night—of the Bide-A-Wee
Motel. An agreement is made: “witness our hands.” The goddesses of
Greece became the goddesses of Rome.