Darconville's Cat (77 page)

  IT WAS with Darconville now as with wastrels, left
with thoughts such as sue and send, and send and sue again, but to
no purpose, the evil of policy and plot having rained down like a
plague upon everything of value he’d once owned. His was the
compunction of one fallen from grace, whose wounds were of a nature
to be cured no longer with balms but corrosives.

  The folly! The sacrilege! The loss! The inheritance
he’d squandered when, forsaking his father’s house, he came down
from Galilee and wandered south toward Moab, over to Edom, and then
into Goshen itself! The wasted dreams! The pens, inkcakes, and
writing palettes sold for a fistful of silver to buy rings and
baubles and toys on night-walks through the shadowy
sûks
of Rephidim! Cheated at Damascus! Burnt with fire at Shushan!
Robbed in the leaping-houses of Al-duqa as-sawda! The pagan idols
and teraphim on whom he threw away whole fortunes in rubies and
gold! The self-satisfaction in the face of fate! The feasts and
banquets given over to whole cities, the drinking out of full
bowls, the dancing in silver-soled sandals to obscene flutes and
timbrels! What truth hadn’t been forfeited, what trust not mislaid?
Beaten in Jezreel! Drugged in Bubastis! The excesses in the abiding
places of Babylon, attainted of outrages on morals and perfumed
with calamus and onycha, where to amuse herself one night a whore
swallowed his richest pearl and, to flatter her, he wallowed in her
flesh as if there to find it! The emptiness! The trivialities! The
turmoils of weeping before the ghosts of what he couldn’t have!
All, all had profited him nothing! The profane songs sung to
unkempt shepherds in the Wilderness of Zin, the dice-throwing with
the soldiers of Porcius Festus, the wasted years dabbling in
Gnosticism! Ridiculed in Gath! Corrupted in Philistia! The
dissipation in the brothels of Megiddo where fops smeared
themselves with malobathrum and ate pomegranates watered with
silphium and collop-bellied tarts danced naked before the graven
images of Baal! The fools and Marduk-faced losels and malefactors
on whom he gambled away entire fleets of Cilician horses! The
recklessness! The presumption that he deserved to be loved! The
love he foreswore while, ignoring his faith, he sucked up to
thralls and hirelings and read in counterfeit books and riddled wit
with the high-priests and intellectuals of Ecbatana and Zebulun!
The silences he took for adoration! The extravagance! Perverted in
Admah! Condemned in Zeboim! The chances he had thrown away! Who
hadn’t loved enough could now not love at all! All, all lay dead
upon his hands!

  Crying out, Darconville struggled to get up—then
fell back flat onto the floor, totally unconsciovts. It was late at
night, gone quiet now, and there was no one around to help him who
might have for who could have been found in the hallways at such an
hour? That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And
God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two
was God.

  LXXIX

  Keeper of the Bed

  A brave scholar, sirrah; they say ... he can make
women of devils, and he can juggle cats into costermongers.

        —ROBERT GREENE,
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay

  “UNE NUIT BLANCHE, VIEUX?”

  Darconville opened his eyes.

  “It’s cognac. 1884,” said Dr. Crucifer, solicitously
hovering over the bed and holding out a round goblet. “Please,
won’t you allow me to lead you beside distilled waters?”

  They were in a bedroom of a portentous size, with a
barreled ceiling crisscrossed with oak slats in a pattern something
like a cat’s cradle. A rich Burgundian tapestry hung on a far wall:
two medieval figures hurrying out of a garden at the behest of a
stern pointing angel. Below it stood a phonograph. There were
silver sconces by the door, ginger jars, mirrors. A beautifully
quilted counterpane heavily worked with a design of gold fishbones
and anthropolatric-faced pentagrams had been neatly folded on a
Jacobean cross-legged chair next to the four-poster bed in which,
inexplicably, Darconville now found himself. It was a cumbrous load
of oak—the sheets yellow silk sprigged in black—so tall to reach
from floor to ceiling and wide enough that it appeared to be
designed for three.

  “What is this? Where am I?” asked Darconville,
trying to sit up.

  “You were found—drunk enough to piss through your
shirt collar. Ill. Delirious. I don’t doubt you’ve had a bad
experience. I see you went down South, the Albania of America,
mmm?”

  “What—?”

  “Lie back, my dear. Don’t misunderstand me: the
airplane ticket in your room—I went to fetch your pajamas—spoke
volumes. It’s irrelevant, anyway. You’ve been raving out loud about
little else since last night, so I shan’t pretend not to know
what’s happened. Fawx’s Mt.,” pronounced Crucifer with a snort.
“Village life and peasants with water-buckets? Flown over by a bird
of paradise? Heading towards the sun? How goes it down there—are
men still men, women women, and the sheep glad of it?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this,” said Darconville,
attempting to rise but falling back, weakly.

  “I should tell you,” explained Crucifer, his
babylike mouth puckering and making little glub-glubs, “there is a
doctor’s order involved. Your lungs, I’m told, aren’t as they
should be. And it’s left for me to see that you eat and rest. Trust
me, now, won’t you?” Darconville waved aside the drink. “There is a
bottle of tablets next to your bed: benperidol. It will relax you,”
he smiled, “—to say nothing of completely eliminating sexual
desire. Take two.” He waited. “No? Then keep them handy. You’ve
been hurt, Al Amin. You went down there to the outreaches, like
Alexander the Great, to find yourself surrounded by enemies on all
sides: the licentious members of the Confederacy of Corinth; the
tributary splacknucks of the province of Thrace; the inveterately
hostile Illyrians with their steeple-hats and peaked shoes and
dental preterites—and what happened to you?
Futuata
!” Dr.
Crucifer removed the counterpane from the chair and in one
belswaggering move sat down, awkwardly. It looked as though he
could have taken up the slag of his belly and wiped his eyes with
it. “Like a wood tick,” he smirked, covering his mouth, “I grow big
when I sit down. Now, tell me everything. The true riddle,
remember, always asks a question that can be answered. I’m yours to
the rattle, my child. Give me your hand.”

  “That,” answered Darconville in an exhausted voice,
“is a favor, I’m afraid, you must grieve to be denied.”

  “What are you
think
ing?” giggled Crucifer
coyly, lilting the phrase musically and wagging a finger. “I wish
but to console you. I am chaste, you forget. I have no feelings
below the waist, although to that,” he added, crudely grabbing his
empty crotch, “I cannot testify. Gone are my ding-dongs,” he said,
laughing until his ears grew quite red, “my pair of dear
indentures, king of clubs, dainty duckers, rose-nobles, myrmidons.
I experience the
Hang zum Tiefen
in mind alone. I am as
hollow as a chicken’s vent. My temptations exist only in
dreams.”

  “The reality is otherwise for me. Leave me
alone.”

  Then Crucifer’s face dropped as if the smile had
been struck from his mouth by some invisible hand. His diminutive
fingers twisted, whitening the dimpled knuckles. “Reality is
never
otherwise!” he screamed. “And the attempt to realize
one’s ideal in a woman—the expression is as unfortunate as the
undertaking—instead of the woman herself, is a necessary
destruction of the empirical personality of the thing. Love is
murder,” he said, blinking furiously. “As for the higher platonic
love of man, women do not want it; it flatters them and pleases
them, but it has no significance for them, and if your sweet little
homage on bended knee to some doxy o’er the dale lasts too long, as
it apparently has, Beatrice will transmogrify into a Medusa, as she
apparently did.” He smiled cruelly, his ordinary discourse as grave
and sententious as ever abounding with those aphorisms and
apologues so popular among the Arabs. “One signature, as they say
in the book trade, is sprung. Call yourself a departee. You have
been deserted.”

  Darconville peered sorrowfully over the
coverlet.

  “She is gone.”

  Crucifer passed him the glass again, and this time
Darconville drank, greedily. He held it out for a refill, drank
that, and then in a monotone characterized more by lassitude than
sorrow or distress—his lips dry, his head back on the pillow—he
took the whole confused story, almost as if he were trying to
clarify it for himself, from the previous summer down to the
present. But when he had finished, he wondered why he’d even
bothered to tell it, for the abdominous creature beside him only
fleered and nodded, dumbly and arrogantly, and it seemed more a
blasphemy of the sacrament of confession than a shared confidence.
Crucifer sat meditatively, blind as his fish, being urged on, or so
Darconville now feared, to the lunacy of one of his enantiopathic
remedies and the consideration, as a response, of perhaps trying to
obtain an effect opposite to the symptoms of the disease. And yet a
disease it was. Darconville was dying for love.

  “I see it all now,” muttered Dr. Crucifer. “The
frame gives the picture perspective. She had a divided uterus, like
a seal, ready to carry a pup in one horn one year and in the other
the following year.” He leaned back. “It was too late, of course,
to grab her by the hypogaster and clap on a chastity belt. The
Unfaithful Foul! She may not be the best girl in the world, but at
least she’s the worst, mmm?”

  Crucifer went to the étagère by the window and took
a cigarette from a box.

  “She did not believe her own belief, from what you
tell me, had doubts even as to her own doubts. She was never
absorbed by her own joy or engrossed by her own silly sorrow.
Casual, she pretended to be intimate, like all the smouch-faced
Hebrews and Ibrim and Terachites from o’er the Euphrates with whom
in
guile she bears more than a passing resemblance.” He
lighted his cigarette, spat out a ball of smoke, and shook his fist
at the ceiling. “
Le-Al-tahrir filistin
! With that
selective memory, I think she was half-Jew! You know, forget the
Palestinian diaspora, but remember the Holocaust, right? O Christ
yes, Darconville, women in mischief are wiser than men. She never
took herself in earnest and so never took anyone else in
earnest—was neither enthusiastic nor indifferent, neither ecstatic
nor cold, reached neither the heights nor the depths. Her restraint
became meagerness, her copiousness bombast, don’t tell me, I know,
and I trust when trying to reach into the boundless realms of
inspired thought—for her enjoyed no sooner, like sex, than despised
straight—she seldom reached beyond pathos, right? No, she couldn’t
embrace the whole world but was forever covetous of it, correct?
Believing in nothing, however, she took refuge in materialism, an
avarice put on to convince herself, leaving you to die, that
something had permanent value, and what value, what wonderful
wonderful value! The Southpaw! And yet how many tales
the
while
to please you had she coined, dreading your love, the
loss whereof still fearing? But when she chose another—assured, of
course, that whom she chose chose her—chose as well to rob you of
your choice!” He drew on his cigarette. “‘I, Helen, holding Paris
by the lips,’ “ he purled smoke at Darconville, “ ‘smote Hector
through the head!’ And you won’t call it hateful? Why, not all the
subur-bicarian churches of Latium, Campania, Apulia, and Bruttium
could send enough prayer through the sky to forgive the most
harmless act of this smiling psychocorrupter whom you call a woman
but I call cat whore! Do you hear me? Cat whore!”

  Darconville closed his eyes in anguish.

  “I can see her now. Can’t you see her?” he asked as
if trying to show the speakable by clearly displaying the
unspeakable. “Walking with stretched-forth neck, and wanton eyes,
and mincing as she goes to Maître Gilbert Grippeminaud, making a
tinkling with her feet, anticipating his every move, and then
coming out with a little moue— the hypocrite! the glozer!—’O, I am
mithunderthtood!’ And while you are spending a month up here
suffering the tortures of the damned for her, what is
she
doing?” Dr. Crucifer, grinding out his cigarette, smiled angrily at
his friend—then bounced at him and in a lewd
geste à
l’appui
drove Ms thumb into the well of his fist. “Hardly the
work of a lady, my friend, but I suppose one should always applaud
initiative.” He turned to the tapestry. “No, Darconville, I take it
to be axiomatic, a matter of breviary, that Eve, being a mere
woman, was less like Adam than a serpent with a woman’s face was
like Eve.”

  Crucifer sat down again.

  “But why,” he asked, folding his hands over his
layers of puppyfat and hunching into himself, “why did she wait for
you to come up to Harvard to end it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You waited. You rejected immediate satisfactions
with a view to obtaining subtler. Marriage.”

  “She told me she needed more time.”

  “Her presumption, yes. Your reply?”

  “I told her to take that time. I loved her. I love
her,” whispered Darconville.

  “A proposition you’ll think she took the liberty of
doubting—but you’d be gravely mistaken. Right there, that was the
camel’s nose under the tent. There was a plan in the making, can’t
you see? She knew what she wanted and only wanted to keep her
promise abreast of reality until such time as she could with
impunity do a quick hundred-and-eighty in the other direction! She
always wanted to insinuate herself into that family, it would
appear, and to that end always kept her alternatives dry, you see,
so as to be able to follow in future what you might call the Golden
Rule: she who has the gold, rules! The father’s footling! Give it
two thralls!” He laughed. “Amazing, isn’t it, how but farting can
engender little men? But this brother, that,” shrugged Crucifer,
“strange all this difference should be ‘twixt Tweedledum and
Tweedledee. As one was in the navy it’s evident he did everything
on the double—o’erleaping his brother, yes? But whether Ferrex or
Porrex, Hengist or Horsa, or any other unphiladel-phian two you
wish to name or number she had best watch out: the wrath of lovers
is much less the wrath of devils than is the wrath of brothers!” He
winked. “Point taken? In any case, it was all as reasoned as
geometry for them, with no sudden passionate expeditions on a
stormy night to a waiting boat and then by muffled oarlocks to
Calais, oh no, don’t fall for that.” He paused. “But the plot—”