Read Online Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux - Free Book Online Page B

and, excusing himself, he
worked his way out of the office, looking up only once: but then to
catch, above a blur of fluffy pink, a perfect face unblindfolding
slowly from a pair of sunglasses the fire-flash of two beautiful
but dangerous eyes in which, he thought, he detected a sly,
premeditated smile. He paused in the outer corridor and once again
looked at the names entered alphabetically on the list; it read
like a spice chart:
     
            Ailsa Cragg
            Childrey
Fawcett
            Galveston
Foster
            Scarlet
Foxwell
            Opal Garten
            Marsha
Goforth
            LeHigh
Hialeah
            Elsie Magoun
            Sheila
Mangelwurzel
     
      A single name there meant something more than it
was: a
symbolum
—both a “sign” and a “confession.” But
which one was it? Which one was hers? It was curious, his
preoccupation, for he’d seen her only once. Inexplicably, however,
it mattered, if only for the hardly momentous irony that by knowing
it he could then immediately dismiss it and put an end to it all.
Her look had injured a silence in his life. The known name might
somehow injure the look, and with the look gone the silence could
continue, allowing him in consequence and inducing, for diversion,
the equanimity to create out of the dormitive world the something
out of nothing we call art. There was actually scant attention
being paid to this unnamed girl in the upper part of his mind, but
in the lower reaches she several times appeared, a thing, rather
like the libration of the moon, alternately visible and
invisible.
      He flipped a sheet and read more names.
     
            Christie
McCarkle
            Trinley Moss
            Glycera
Pentlock
            Hallowe’ena
Rampling
            Isabel
Rawsthorne
            Cecilia
Sketchley
     
      Darconville couldn’t help but smile. The names
seemed absurd, but one didn’t really have to spend very much time
down South to realize the regional compulsion for this particular
extravagance, daily coming upon such weird examples as: Cylvia,
Olgalene, Marcelette, Scharlott, Coquetilla, Mavis, Latrina, Weeda
and Needa, Mariedythe, Romiette, Coita, Vannelda, Moonean, Rhey,
Flouzelle, Balpha, Erdix, Colice, Icel, and Juella, all desperate
parental attempts to try to work some kind of sympathetic magic
upon their daughters from the very start. And yet how was it that
upon hearing them one saw only majorettes, waitresses, and
roller-derby queens?
      Darconville passed by the refectory (and the odor of
mercilessly boiled brussels sprouts) and sat down in a circular
room where in the center stood a sculpture of Chapu’s Joan of Arc,
the college patron. This was known as the Rotunda. The main
building at Quinsy College, its egg-shaped interior was a
respectable cream-and-green color, open, as it took one’s attention
higher and higher past two circular balustrades, to a voluminous
inner dome covered with fake but sumptuous, over-elaborate,
neo-biblical murals in rose and gold. On several walls at ground
level, a series of past college presidents, bald and severe,
glowered out of their frames. He was still reviewing the list,
empty pier-glasses, and pronouncing names, all but hers hostile to
him because not hers, but yet none hostile because to him any might
be.
     
            Butone
Slocum
            Millette
Snipes
            April
Springlove
            Lately
Thompson
            DeDonda
Umpton
     
      The memory had persisted. On an otherwise
unexceptional day, for the first time, he’d met that class of
freshmen, silent little elves bunched-up and sitting terrible-eyed
as they contemplated the four years of college to come. No one had
spoken or said so much as a syllable, but all took down the
assignment and then the name he’d chalked on the board by way of
introduction as if they were borrowing it for some