Darconville's Cat (46 page)

  Then it’s time for dinner. At the table of candles
and wine, one experiences plenitude itself: the fruit-motif silver,
the napkins folded tricesimosecundo, the plates heaped full, and
the fat-rolls of the generous-waisted barguests bulging in
expectation through the small spaces in the heartbacked Hepplewhite
chairs. A black in a white jacket, answering the bell, dishes no
meat but in silver: pies of carp’s tongue, the carcasses of several
ample wethers bruised for gravy, pig in sauce sage, and then
flummery, jellies, and sweetmeats of twenty sorts, followed by
cigars and cock-ale. The ladies and gentlemen then rise and retire
to sit around the hearth and chat, your blissful if feigned
half-sleep—a long vacation, no doubt, to Finibus Mundi—safeguard
enough from having to have clarified for you, once again, the
rubrics of dressage, the facts about racial inferiority, the
virtues of Republicanism, and so forth and so on. It is only when
they start—
again
— trotting out their parentals that you
excuse yourself graciously and depart, not with any grudge or
grievance, neither on the other hand with envy, but merely with the
growing conviction, as you look back through the Charlottesville
night, that there are some people in this world who are going to be
gravely disappointed, indeed, on the Easter Sunday following their
death.

  But, oh, it went badly for Isabel and Darconville
that summer. It wasn’t so much the terrible meaninglessness of
Charlottesville. Isabel seemed to be finding a charm in the very
vanities Darconville had given up. She reacquainted herself, for
instance, with a former high-school chum, the daughter of a
crapulous woman novelist from Charlottesville. The girl’s name was
Lisa Gherardini, a dark-haired kakopyge with fat hands, an insipid
smile, and the morals of a musk-cat. (Darconville suspected she was
pregnant.) She had pretensions to art—of the craft-and-hobby
sort—something Isabel both shared and admired, and when they took
an apartment together Darconville tried as best he could to keep
from bothering them, although it taxed him a bit, when he visited,
to hear them giggling over secrets—of course there were
secrets—from which he was excluded, only because good manners
somehow forced him into the awkward position of having to inquire
what they were. The taste for guessing puzzles he’d had enough of,
God knows. But he was
involved
. St. Anthony, in the third
century, offered the idea, Darconville knew further, that a seeker
of God or any significant ideal, in spite of all his intentions, is
doomed to community and in the end must intervene in the disputes
of the world from which once he’d sought to flee. The commitment,
in any case, had long been made.

  The two girls were now working for the telephone
company; for Lisa, with her gumball brain and strawberry-bright
nails, a boon, indeed—but for Isabel? Why, her interests, as she’d
often confided to Darconville, were wider by much. The
possibilities—anything, she said, but a dull life in Fawx’s
Mt.!—were infinite; she’d shown a desire at different times to
become an actress, a flautist, a veterinarian, an oceanographer, a
harpsichordist, an artist, a biologist, a zookeeper, an
archaeologist, a stone-jewelry artisan, a model, and a thousand
other freaks that died in the thinking, notwithstanding—this,
always with a knowing smile—a wife. And added to this random list
might be that curious infantilism not forgot: a princess! But
aspirations at that time were not very high for either, and so were
high for neither. There was a good deal of aimlessness and
inactivity. They were either washing their hair or were about to.
They ate a lot: snacks.

  The summer misresolved itself in a hundred ways. In
spite of the countless efforts made to unify, splits took place.
Darconville felt changes come upon them, divisions which, because
they happened, seemed inevitable: he grave; she gamesome; he
studious; she careless; he without mirth; she without measure.
Despising himself for it, Darconville began to resent what seemed
to him to be the effusive attention (“I dislike people,” said
Isabel, “who stare”) the almost uniformly blond undergraduates (“I
dislike blond guys,” she added, “they seem to have no character in
their faces”) from the University of Virginia (“I dislike wealthy
little snobs”) paid to her in the street. The messages were welcome
enough, thought Darconville, but the tone, the tone—and the values,
if reversed, somehow would have been more agreeable. Isabel
confused him. When she wasn’t nervous, she seemed smug; when not
happy, subdued; and when not gentle, sarcastic, the pain provoked
in their various misunderstandings seeming to brace her up, as if
to assent to the beauty of pearls she had to assent to the
irritations that produced them. Each wanted to give, it was true,
tried to give, tried desperately to give, but it seemed that as
each gave the coordinate disposition to receive—how?—just vanished.
I can prove on my fingers’-ends, thought Darconville, that
a
dicto secundam quid ad dictum simpliciter
. They fit each other
like two torn halves of a sheet of paper ripped from the book he
couldn’t write—belonging to each other, but unable to join. The
same sensibility that brought her pleasure could always cause her
pain, for being unhappy with what she was she couldn’t then accept
him for what he loved, or was it something else? He wasn’t really
sure, for often beyond each other’s reach they sometimes perversely
seemed less acquainted with each other now than when first they
met. How exactly does that
happen
in love?

  They tried nevertheless to see each other as often
as they could, and when, for whatever reason, they couldn’t meet at
the apartment the two of them found a convenient rendezvous not far
from the University of Virginia at the statue of George Rogers
Clark—a public commemoration, perhaps, for his having by connivance
obtained from the Georgia legislature an immense personal land
grant on the Mississippi near the mouth of the Yazoo?—but at such
times there were often disagreements and, just as often, they
seemed to have little to say. To her way of thinking he seemed
preoccupied; she to him preoccupied his thoughts. Resentment
succeeded bewilderment. Her withdrawals evoked his reproaches, and
his reproaches her anger. Sometimes each found cutting words for
the other. I love her, thought Darconville. And Isabel thought she
loved him. But it was as if these were the very worst emotions to
feel that summer.

  The periodic visits to Fawx’s Mt. were peculiar, as
well; Isabel—-Darconville had now come to notice it several
times—grew nervous there, balked at being seen, avoided the street
that crossed by the yard, looking only toward places where whatever
she sought or sought to avoid was absent and catching herself up in
the sudden half-turns by which, others notwithstanding, she even
seemed to frighten herself, as if Tubriel, the unholy sefiroth of
summer, shimmered towards her through the Virginia heat in waves of
flame—but boding what? What was she afraid of? Or who? There was
nothing to know, he found out, once meeting her on that head.
Generally, they returned to Charlottesville that same day. And
often in the bedroom of that low washed-out apartment—before Lisa
returned, all thumbprints and reek, from visiting the hairy
Idumean-from-UVa. she slept with—they made love, beautiful twins
complected in the anonymous darkness they at once both needed and
yet both feared.

  But that was all by the way.

  An event took place that put the entire affair on
the shelf. It began with a party that was not significant and ended
with a letter that was. But it was not really the party, not really
the letter. Destiny, it might be said, simply opened its mouth to
speak and, for reasons no one really knew, fambled to a halt.

  It so happened that Lisa Gherardini, having suddenly
decided to go to Hawaii, was given a farewell party (one made
conspicuous notably by the absence of her boyfriend ) on one of
those flat-gold late summer evenings in Charlottesville when,
shining down on things unlawfully begotten, the moon merely smiles
and winks. Lisa’s parents, of course, invited Isabel, and Isabel,
importuning him, asked Darconville to come up from Quinsyburg to
attend. File, which ever attends to Rank, obliged. It was of course
one of those gatherings in the mode heretofore described, a kind of
social vivisepulture with whole platoons of things-in-orchids
coming youward with bourbons in hand and vicious, premeditated
smiles. The guests on this occasion, people predominantly from the
horse-latitudes, still proved to be less homogeneous than
usual—Mrs. G (pitifully born that way) so wanted to be
open-minded—and one had the redoubtable pleasure, this time, of
meeting not only the ubiquitous gongster-voiced matron and
mahogany-faced whipper-in but also several jimkwims from the
University of Virginia, some fraternity boys and their brother
bungs, two terminal poets, a few telephone operators, and a lot of
other spunky nots-and-dots from the neighborhood who’d spoiled
around at one time or other with the Pineapple-Princess-to-Be. This
particular party was characterized by that mood of horrid democracy
one so loathes; disparate factions didn’t separate but actually
tried to relate to each other—and while old farts, trying to dance,
flapped about like wounded birds, self-assured teenagers—in whom
confidence is such a vile characteristic— pontificated above the
noise about politics, careers, and money-schemes. Here, a
fifteen-year-old was revealing his plan for a nationwide
megalopolization of paper-routes; there, Mr. Gherardini, bald as a
Dutch cheese, was twirling around like a buffoon and trying to
learn the intricate steps of a dance being taught him by a
high-school girl in short shorts. Mrs. Gherardini, weaseling
through a network of balloons, came up to Darconville and said,
“You’re a writer.” “No, I’m not,” he replied and disappeared. It
was a wonderful party.

  As the evening wore on, Darconville noticed a man
was flirting with Isabel across the room. Flirting perhaps was
wrong: say
pluming
. The species was unmistakable, one of
those over-pronounced middle-aged microlipets having some
connection or other with the university— Charlottesville was full
of them—who had never married, waved his hair in a fussy marcel,
and had a handshake so ornate as to persuade you on the spot that
you must hate him always: only another one in that grand group of
prissy, theatrically erudite Episcopal hyperemians down South with
his thousand-and-one stories about mother, Mozart, and
miscegenation. He fit to type in his suit of rather ministerial
cut, white shirt and black tie and kid slippers with soles as thin
as dancing pumps, bold in the nose and given to whispering catty
asides in little sibilants about everybody he met for the amusement
of the maidenly young men from UVa. whom he loved to keep within a
foot’s-length of himself wherever he went. He isn’t precisely
homosexual—he is too passionless for that—but consistently worried
about the size of his gibbals, he always drinks too much and,
becoming sweetly nasty, affects to offer his rudeness as a general
defense of style and good taste of which he invariably sees himself
high-priest. He wears jewelry, keeps a British blue cat, and simply
adores
the novels of Jane Austen. Strangely, the type
attracts women.

  Fear is an eye. Darconville, nevertheless, stayed
where he was, striking up a casual conversation with a pale,
somewhat avitaminotic young man there whose ample ears jutted out
of his long blond hair. He was rather plain and not very
intelligent but likable enough, and, since both were alone, they
quietly sipped their drinks and made small talk, quickly coming to
agree that neither of them belonged there. Meanwhile, Isabel kept
to her end, assiduously avoiding in her byerespects and
bavarderie
that part of the room where Darconville and
friend waited; it was impossible to get her attention. The fop,
vaunting, would occasionally take her waist and, leaning over,
whisper whatever pretty-wilted thing it was that caused her, just
as occasionally, to lower her head and, biting her lip, stifle
laughter. But she seemed embarrassed. When a girl once began to be
ashamed of what she ought not to be, thought Darconville, was it
not perhaps then possible that she might not one day be ashamed of
what she ought? A woman constantly blushing, thought Darconville,
must be terribly well informed. Growing disgusted, he looked away.
Then everything took a distinct turn for the worse.

  Tapping on his glass for silence—clink! clink!—the
fop stepped forward, calling for attention. “Here’s glasses then to
our Lisa,” he sang, smiling over at the party girl, “the namesake,
I trust, of that best-remembered of Elizabeths, the first so-named
of English sovereignty and patroness of the Old Dominion, mmmm?” He
spoke in the key of G-flat, like a mouse in cheese, and kissed her
hand. “Bon voyage!”

  Darconville gave out with a schwa of disgust.

  Suddenly, the exquisite held up his hand, the
poniards of his eyes fast on Darconville; he had been waiting for
the opportunity all evening.

  “Aren’t
you
drinking, handsome?” he called
out, sarcastically. He repeated the question again, louder.

  Everyone slowly turned toward Darconville.

  “I’m sorry, were you addressing me?”

  “I believe I was. I do believe I was.” He turned to
Isabel, knowingly. “Wasn’t I?”

  “I can only disappoint you then,” said Darconville.
“It is not a practice of mine to toast the memory of dead,
ambisinistrous queens, and should I ever choose to make an
exception, whatever your name is, I hardly think I’d do so in
deference to that illegitimately-crowned Welsh sprunt with a face
like witch’s butter named Bette Tudor.” Murmurs could be heard.
“Now go back to what you were doing and don’t bother me again.”