Darconville's Cat by Alexander Theroux Page A

his eyeballs quivering. A group of old
fishfags from the home economics department, dosed to sleep by
their own heavy perfume, immediately woke to clap their mouths in
horror.
      “I’m not certain I heard what he said,” whispered
Miss Swint to someone behind her. It was a faint voice, some
staring ghost suddenly exclaiming upon Rhadamanth. The world to
Miss Swint, piano teacher, her face two subtle shades of oatmeal,
backlit both by a monocle, consisted merely of music, her
collection of wheat-sheaf pennies, and the responsibility of
playing the organ every Sunday at the Presbyterian church, the very
place in which, years ago, she’d long since become convinced that
maidenhead and godhead were indivisible.
      There were soon other matters on the docket:
dining-hall duty, election to committees, chaperon assignments. And
some few raised questions about general reform, and yet while only
a mere fraction of the lot were actually concerned with change—it
was a subject met by children, with reform as the wicked uncle—they
all jumped up like minorités, jurisprudentes, and tub-thumping
Sorbonnists to debate it, all reinforcing the “yo-he-ho”
protoglottological theory that words initially began as shouts. No
aspect was overlooked, no fine point ignored, no issue diminished.
It was complete havoc once again as they stood in coalition or
squatted in caucus, breaking down every proposition like
reformational hairsplitters into partitions, sections, members,
subsections, submembral sections, submembral subsections and
denouncing each other with mouthfuls of rhetoric warped by
quiddling, diddling, and undistributed middling. One third believed
what another third invented what the other third laughed at. Quid
the Cynic argued with Suction the Epicurean, Suction the Epicurean
argued with Sipsop the Pythagorean, Sipsop the Pythagorean argued
with Quid the Cynic, and the whole afternoon dwindled away with one
saving at the spigot and another letting out at the bunghole.
      It occurred to Darconville that the expression,
“ignorance is bliss,” was a perception curiously unavailable to the
ignorant as he considered, with great misgivings, the sad and
inarticulate desperviews there whose identities had gone soft on
them and whose grasp of reality was so slight and so arbitrary and
so grotesque that each could have easily stepped from there into
the hot pornofornocacophagomaniacal set of Bosch’s unmusical hell
and fit, snugly.
      The meeting, finally, adjourned. A partition was
rolled back, revealing at another section of the long room several
tables with bottles of soft drinks (no liquor) and plates of
cookies, candy, and cake. Papers rattled, people coughed, and
chairs shifted as everyone withdrew.
      “Y’all ever see so dang much shuck for so little
nubbin?” complained President Greatracks who—a fake giant among
real pygmies —stomped toward the food in the company of several
pipe-smoking lackeys, all dodging about in his circumference. No,
no, they agreed, no, they hadn’t. His arms upon the boobies’
shoulders, you quickly saw the gudgeon bite. No, no, they repeated,
not at all. “Sombitches,” he said, picking up five thumbprinted
marshmallows and stuffing them into his mouth. “I can hear their
brains rolling about like B-B’s in a boxcar.”
      The Quinsy faculty, during the refreshments, took
the occasion to gossip, but faction didn’t really constitute
disunity. It was as if, somehow, they had all been destined by some
temporal and spatial anti-miracle of history to come together at
the same place and time and to know each other on the instant by
some mystic subtlety for mates, perhaps in the paradox of peculiar
faces which, while each was different, all looked as though God had
smeared them when still wet. They didn’t have to talk. They weren’t
speakers, really. But they were
experts
at
malversation.
      “I know about budgets,” said Miss Throwswitch, the
drama teacher, with a