Darconville's Cat (78 page)

  “I don’t think she ever planned to come.”

  “You focus on details only to miss the whole,” said
Crucifer, blowing out his tongue to remove a flake of tobacco.
“It’s simple. She hoped you’d find enough distraction in Cambridge
to decide for both of you to end it—and, ironically, like you she
was waiting for nothing but the very result
your
waiting
explicitly forbade. It’s hardly a matter of Minoan complexity. She
thought that you whose soul she stole to break would get over what
she herself never got involved in in the first place—and never
understood—a relationship that was an ideal she was vain enough to
flirt with, cunning enough to acknowledge, but too small-souled to
pursue, except, of course, in terms of this relatively brief and
temporary romantic lavolta—a light bounding kind of waltz? In which
the woman is assisted by her partner? To make frequent high
springs? Oh yes! She was the deed’s creature, I tell you, and by
her female parent you lost your first condition.

  “I can see her, can’t you? No sooner a fornicator
than a whore, giddy for the mere exchange of arms, with all
expenses paid? It was a mind, Darconville, that could hold only one
idea at a time, never proceeding to consequences felt in others and
doing nothing in relation to anyone but itself. It made a promise
to stay and in a winky-winky it was gone—once a pawn has moved,
remember”—he leaned forward and snapped the words out-—”it can
never turn back. She hasn’t fallen in love: it was a realistic
decision she made, after straightening her seems, to live without
the vision she feared because of her shallowness would make her
even more common than she is.” Crucifer sucked a knuckle. “Have you
ever noticed that women who abuse men are always those whom men
have found unattractive? They confess to their own lack of power to
please.”

  “She is beautiful,” said Darconville, almost
inaudibly.

  “O, the very queen of curds and cream,” replied Dr.
Crucifer, mockingly clearing his throat with a rapid rumble. “I so
happened”— he paused, making a comic glime sideways—”to see her
photograph, several of them, in fact, when I stopped by your room.”
His breasts wobbled as he leaned forward. “Frankly, she has a low
frontotemporal hairline, close-set eyes—with a marked trace of
lubricity, I might add —a slight case of oxycephaly, tits like
griggles, and a scar on a face, I’m sorry, that over-goes my blunt
invention to say more. Lascivious grace in whom all ill well shows!
You claim to love her. I smell the fallacy of
praemissis
particularibus nihil probatur
.”

  Delighted, Crucifer cocked his little head forward
questioningly. It twitched.

  “You defend her because you love her—’tis a pity you
can’t do so because she deserves it,” he breathed, drowning his
suspirations in the long draw of another cigarette. “Love is too
partial a piece of piety, you see, for just as a man carrying a
heavy bucket of water compensates to walk by cantilevering a leg,
so you must alter your posture in order to keep your own balance,
no, my friend? And speaking of legs!” He held his hand in front of
his mouth, hideously, to laugh. “Darconville, Darconville,
Darconville. Honeysuckle is a weed. We are deceived in what is not
discerned, and to err is but to be blind. I saw nothing but a pudgy
self-preening angel of banality with ankles like bottles, scarce
twenty-odd years above the girdle, some fifty beneath.
Hodgepudding! Globuliferous pig’s-trotters! A pippin grown upon a
crab! My God, it could diminish venery in a Turk! And I was going
to tell you to keep a contemplative distance from beauty?” Smoke
sifted through his teeth. “I looked at those lubberlegs and it made
me wish birth-control were retroactive.”

  “You don’t know what you sound like,” cried
Darconville. “You don’t know the girl. You don’t know
anything.”

  “I know something,” said Crucifer forcefully. “And
of that something, much.”

  “You know much of little then.”

  “Let’s just say, I don’t know enough.” He leaned
forward. “Yet.”

  Crucifer smiled in his face.

  “I do know she was as deficient in good looks as she
was in intelligence and, yes, all right, dexterous enough to
realize her own inferiority, I’ll give her that, but ten ducats to
a dime she went and left you precisely because she felt you’d one
day leave
her
, having concluded in a final assessment of
what she really was that she lived closer to her deficiencies than
to her dreams. I know more. I know she is a woman and that all
women walk in the sandals of Theramenes. And, finally, I know that
if she had been brought up as—but whist, whist! You say she had no
father?”

  “Her father left her when she was a child.”

  “Interesting.”

  “She never knew him.”

  “Fascinating,” said Crucifer, his voice squeaking.
Then his face underwent one of its sudden alterations. “And I
suppose I should now grow soft who with the same piece of luck
years ago was packed off in the direction of my face to the
Monastery of Monte Cretini? Do not hope it, Al Amin: my heart was
broken, I broke none.” He paused. “But it’s curious, isn’t it?
Elizabeth I, bynempt Isabel—a woman who had more pricks in her than
a secondhand dartboard—killed a lover because of her father.” He
spat in disgust. “I remember the riotous superlatives inscribed
under her picture in the hall of the post-Reformation Jesus
College, Oxford. The Virgin Queen, laughable soubriquet! The woman
was the devil’s quilted anvil, fashioning sins on herself and yet
the blows were never heard! King Harry the Fat’s murder of her
polydactylic mother-cum-whore, however, was not forgot but
flourished again in her daughter’s anti-paternal slaughter of
Essex. It was not only a revenge but a repetition, the murdered
mother finally emerging in her to overthrow manhood in that dark
inevitability and ghastly satisfaction by no means unrelated to her
father’s cruelty which, in a kind of bizarre chiasmus, was repeated
in her own: it was no marvelous coincidence that Robert Devereux—or
the cardinal who bore your glorious name—followed Anne Boleyn to
the block. There was no husband. Belphoebe had her
own
balls! And there was no macBeth, although the entire realm cried
out for one, but in any case she’d have strangled the boy in his
crib, not so much that he might have grown up to kill a sovereign
as that he’d have been pricked out in the sex she’d so proficiently
come to hate. I’ve always thought it a pity,” sneered Dr. Crucifer,
“that the Massacre of St. Bartholomew didn’t cross the channel to
scour out a throne and turn that red-haired bitch back into the
whibling she always was, ripping away that tallith of local
religion she used to hide under and crushing underfoot that box of
fortune-cookies called phylacteries she called her laws!”

  Suddenly, he rang a bell by the side of the bed.
“And yet how like sits upon like. Isabel: Elizabeth—one’s a wonder,
the other’s a Tudor! Virginians two and two less than a deuce. When
they meet in hell they can shout ‘Snap!’ How things come round at
last.”

  Lampblack, tugging his forelock, appeared in the
doorway. “Lunch, Master Numps,” ordered Dr. Crucifer, who before
the boy went out explained with sharp directives that he was first
to pour him an apéritif and to bring Darconville anything he wanted
over the next few days. “My bum-boy,” said Crucifer, smiling at
Darconville, “my clerk of the hanaper, my
exécuteur des hautes
oeuvres
.” The boy quickly obliged. Crucifer took his glass
and, standing, held it aloft to intone:

        ”A lexical man
came to marry

        And erred for
the trull’s mood did vary;

        The rosy cheeked
bride, feared a

        Uxoricide.

        Prevail, worthy
man, but be wary.”

  “Get my clothes.”

  “You aren’t well.”

  “I have no intention of staying here.”

  “Tut-tut,” warned Crucifer.

  Darconville struggled to move up in the bed. “I do
not like you,” he said. “I do not acquiesce. I will never like you.
I will never acquiesce. Now I’ll say it once more: my clothes, get
them.” But he felt tired, disoriented, and, troubled by an elusive
interdiction there, couldn’t help but sense that everything for
which he’d ever hoped or striven had somehow been relinquished in
the confines of that room. His chest ached, and even in the dimmest
light his eyes consistently hurt.

  “You’re not going to be ungrateful, now, are you?”
asked Crucifer. He screamed for Lampblack. “You mustn’t stir, in
any case, not certainly until you’ve eaten and—”

  Crucifer’s eyes smiled, sheepishly.

  “And?”

  “—well, until the chlorpromazine wears off.”

  Smiling, Dr. Crucifer held up the empty cognac
inhaler from which Darconville had drunk, twirled it between his
clubbed fingers, and set it down.

  “And so, you see, we can continue without fear of
having to choose between other courses.” Darconville slowly rolled
over onto his face and breathed out in deep agony as the keeper of
the bed took the occasion, swiftly, to refill the empty goblet from
a special decanter he was keeping under the table. “Now, we were
discussing motives, not ours, rather Mistress Commodity’s. It would
seem—”

  But Lampblack suddenly appeared in the doorway
balancing a tray at eye-level; it held two steaming bowls, some
glasses, and a litre of wine. The boy carried it to the table by
the bed. Darconville, however, refused to eat even as Dr. Crucifer,
humped forward in hunger, told the fare: bush of crayfish in Viking
herbs and frog cream, fingers of toast, and a sturdy Côtes de
Montravel. Lampblack—it was his habit —waited, biting his nails,
until Crucifer, waggling a bit of delicacy out of the bowl with his
fingers, held out the trifle to the boy which he snapped up, and
then he disappeared. Crucifer poured the wine and raised his glass:
“Confusion to ladies!”—and he began to eat.

  “I was saying,” he continued, abrodietically licking
his fingers, “it would seem to be impossible to consider this new
mésalliance except in reference to you—the simple logistics of a
ladder: touching points. It was a relationship, yes, but one of
those relationships of contradiction whereby the error of illogical
distribution—and of course,” he paused, “in love,” he sneered,
“there is never enough equality to go around—-prevented any logical
conclusion. Why, even the proposition that hides in her
name—I-A-E—serves no logical mood.

  “We’re agreed,” said Crucifer, sucking in two fish
from the spoon and waving some toast, “there was a plot. But why.
See? How. She either came to look at herself through your eyes, in
my opinion, and, flattering herself by what she saw in them, while
at the same time not uncoincidentally making you indispensable, was
driven to have that adoration confirmed elsewhere—a woman is
repeatedly compelled to call herself a reward—or, as I say, your
vision of the world frightened her to this point, that she came to
take a realistic view of things and, reverting to type, capitulated
for
security
! Money! Jews’ butter! Fric! A fellaheen
habit, I’ve seen it before. Semele, remember, prayed for a visit
from Jupiter in all his splendor, but when he came his lightning
killed her.” He smiled gruesomely and grugeoned at the food. “I
love that story.” He wiped away the smile. “You of course asked
very little of her, but hers, you mustn’t forget, was a
quest-in-reverse, an attempt to shed the meaning of her life rather
than find it, see? Emptiness is the female form of perdition.” He
squelched, chewing his food, and breathed laboriously through his
nose as he did so; the cult of the belly as an ethic appeared to
him as perfectly natural, and it was obvious as he ate that he
retained a predilection for such celibates who displayed the good
sense of preferring gluttony to love. “Put a light load on a
donkey, you see, and it thinks it can lie down, literally, in this
instance —for women, like Egyptians, well know the principle of the
inclined plane—and so she gilt up her eyebrows with arsedine, put
on a tight sweater, and trotted off down the road.”

  “No.”

  “And notice when she acted: precisely when it would
pay off
. Good and evil in a woman’s mind, I tell you, mean
simply money and no money. Forgive me, but I suspect unless one
promised her marriage it’d have been harder to plug her than to
sneak daybreak past a rooster! What, you don’t think he fucked
her?” Crucifer grolched noisily. “This is embarrassing.” He pressed
his cheeks. “I’m not being wrong enough. I’m too
correct
.”

  “No!” insisted Darconville into the pillow.

  “Very likely,” replied Crucifer, “exceedingly
likely. Very exceedingly likely.”

  He calmly lapped some cream off the spoon.

  “And for a Dutchman! The Pilgrims, remember, left
Leyden for America
not
for religious reasons—simply, their
children were becoming Flemings! I’ve been to Holland. What, a sail
down the Amstel, a box of sugar cookies, and an afternoon listening
to the horrible rhythms of the Froth-Blowers’ anthem?” Crucifer
poured more wine and drained the glass. “Have you ever met this
rival?”

  Darconville said nothing.

  “No answer.”

  He leaned forward.

  “Did you ever try?” He waited. “No answer.

  “The Dutch dog, tell me, is he—wealthy? His
family?”

  “Yes.”

  “A color card! I tell you,” said Crucifer, fussing
through some green sprigs to pull out another crayfish which he
devoured like a bor-borygmite, “a woman’s virtue is always in
greater danger from opportunity than desire. Ambition has an
intellect that runs like a rat through all the scrutinous
possibilities here—and, I think, has snouted a hole! She wouldn’t
have been—”