Darconville's Cat (17 page)

  “O gross!” cried Anaphora Franck. “Listen to
this!”

  “ ‘. . . the diddling was hot, hot, hot. Rhoda,
utterly enslaved, was sobbing, moaning, gasping and rolling her
eyes. How hard, thought Rafe, can a dame press up to a guy, huh?
Bro-ther! And why, he wondered, do a dame’s tears taste so good? He
squeezed her ninnies and humped in heaves, like a crazed rabbit,
while the little sextress, groaning low in the throat, dug her
enamelled nails into his hairy back. “O baby, this is positively
maddening,” squealed Rhoda, even though she felt like 20, “you’re
driving me crazy, you hear me,
crazy
!” The sexcapade
continued. She had spunk. He liked that. And so Rafe took his huge
lubricated engine and

  “I’m going to get wet,” said Mimsy Borogroves,
revolving her torso.

  Sally Ann Sprouse made revving noises like an
engine.

  “Y’all
shush
, will you?” screamed Loretta
Boyco who, dropping her book, leaped up and, nearly garroting
herself on the cord, was yerked backwards like a yo-yo.
Panfuriously unplugging her hair-dryer, she stomped out of the room
bristling like a hedgehog. Mona Lisa Drake, cellotaping her
wet-locked hairdo, simply fluttered her eyelids and stuck out her
tongue at the door Loretta Boyco summarily slammed.

  “Who’s she, somethin’ on a stick?”

  “Straight arrow,” said Donna Wynkoop.

  “A wonk.”

  “I am the Queen of England,” proscribed Hester
Popkin, pointing a regal finger at the door, “and you are
dismissed!”

  “St. Loretta,” said Jessie Lee Deal who took the
book which, giggling, Aone Pitts grabbed only to have it snatched
from her by Géraldine Oikle who read:

  “ ‘. . . like a wild stud, suctioning her tongue,
gasped on a wave of ecstasy, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet, sister,”
and he lunged at horny Rhoda whose skin was foxing with lustful
chills. They kissed ravishingly. The kiss snapped. And then he made
quick little feelies all over her body with his expert tongue,
ranging over her diamond-hard nipples, and down, down, down to the
fringed secrets below. “Oh yes, yes, Rafe, yesss,” husked Rhoda,
“Touch me
there
!” Ho-ly bananas, thought Rafe. What a
brawd! What bliss! What a sextravaganza!’ “

  “She must be
killing
him,” skreeked Celeste
Skyler.

  Donna Wynkoop clapped. “Ain’t it the bees’
knees!”

  “Well, shoot,” interjected lovely, spoiled rich
Pengwynne Custis, lighting a cigarette and blowing smoke at the lot
of them. “I was fourteen when all that happened to
me
,
fancy. Which gives y’all a considerable something to think about,
doesn’t it?” The sentence had been arranged for distribution as
periodic. “You better believe it does.”

  “Not really, honeychile,” came a sudden reply, cool
as camphor. It was beautiful Hypsipyle Poore, stepping pink and
fresh and stark-naked out of the shower. She slowly walked to the
mirror and, unembarrassed, began to towel off, dabbing, patting,
and caressing each limb, her perfect curves, like a luscious and
legendary Narcissa. It was a body as smooth and soft as nainsook.
She stretched and stepped lithely into a tight pair of silk
pale-green panties which fit her too perfectly. “Why, Pengwynne
honey,” breathed Hypsipyle with an over-sweet smile, “at fourteen I
could have written me a damn ol’ book
I’d
have blushed to
read.”

  Splashing on friction lotion, Hypsipyle Poore paused
and looked around at the other girls to see if anybody doubted it:
even so much as the hint of a raised eyebrow, a smile not softened
by belief, would not only have cost the transgressor—and
immediately—her friendship but would have launched a campaign of
rumor, as if of itself, whereby particular faults suddenly
attributed to such a one would become, within an afternoon,
distinct
faits accomplis
. Hypsipyle was strong-willed, did
not like to be contradicted, and, if Xystine Chappelle, the class
brownie, had been singled out as most likely to succeed,
she
enjoyed the reputation of being the most beautiful
girl on campus.
Teachers
asked her out. She often made the
claim, publicly, that she could seduce any male in the state of
Virginia, six to sixty. You didn’t fool with her.

  The room was her domain. It was, in fact, not
remarkably unlike the others—save that, concomitant with a recent
financial gift to the college from her daddy, Hypsipyle had no
roommate. The décor, best described as eclectic, was a combination
of toyshop, brothel parlor, and theatrical green room. A mobile of
crotal bells, wired together, hung from the ceiling. A Mexican jar
held several peacock feathers. Three silver fraternity mugs sat on
the bookcase, half filled with texts and half with rat-romances,
tepid glucose-and-water things like:
The Killer Wore
Nylon
;
Color Me Shameless
;
Miss Juliette’s
Academy, or Variety Was Their Byword
, etc.—and, of course, a
foot-high stack of
Bride’s
magazines, the college
favorite.

  Collegiate banners hung everywhere. An
orange-and-purple University of Virginia pennant (with two football
ticket-stubs stapled to it) was pinned over her bed, next to which
stood a table: a stiff gold postiche sat on a dummy head. Stuffed
animals, beribboned, were scattered about the room. There was a box
of billet-doux.

  Coolly, Hypsipyle Poore sat down before her bureau,
straightening out the photographs of several boyfriends at the
edges of the mirror which was bright with cute, goofy decals. It
was her favorite place in the whole wide world, an arsenal of
cosmetic powers: toning sprays, hair lacquers, bath oils, body
unguents and creams, gums, pomatums, flacons of rosewater, barbaric
ceroborants, vaginal gels, creme rinses, perspiration arresters,
rouge sticks, eyeliner pencils, lipsticks, cuticle oil and nipple
blush, eyelash curlers, bone combs, tissue boxes, and pin-trays. A
jewel box, découpaged red, was filled with rings, neck-chains, and
bracelets, all gold. Hypsipyle walked her fingers over the phalanx
of bottles, lifted out a vial of perfume, and touched a drop to her
neck and inner thigh. She then took up a comb and, with the
tracelet of a lewd smile in her eyes, tapped the lurid novel Sally
Ann Sprouse was holding and now—to oblige her—reading:

  “ ‘Rhoda was no little chickerino. She knew the
game, the little she-cat —and how! And when they—’ “

  Hypsipyle, interrupting, shook her head and told her
precisely
the page she wanted to hear. Sally Ann Sprouse
flashed back the pages.

  “ ‘Tantalizingly she pranced—’?”

  Smiling, Hypsipyle nodded.

  “ Tantalizingly she pranced around on her mules in a
filmy peignoir, her pendulous breasts swinging like bell-tongues.
Rafe, part Turk, was sure going to get all he damned well
wanted—and then some! He’s a real heel, thought Rhoda, but he
really grows on you: I’ve
got
something for this guy.
Meanwhile, Rafe’s plans had worked to perfection, no soft soap
required, thank you: he knew he’d be throwing hot gooms into her
all night. Swiftly he cornered her and, overcome by passion, Rafe
tore her flouncies off in one rip and coaxed her into unspeakable
acts, but she drank them in greedily, howling, “
Whip me! Nip
me! Use me! Slap me! Bite me! Goose me
!” Rafe dove
headlong—’“

  “Gooms,” said Cookie Crumpacker. She snapped the
elastic of her panties. “I
love
that word.”

  But Sally Ann Sprouse held up her hand, a semaphore
to command undivided attention for the fantastic bit about to
follow. She rattled the book and, screaming kinkily, raced on.

  “‘—dove headlong into her, wallowing in her creamy
flesh. He bounced up and down waggling his inflamed root. What
Rhoda felt for the hot bulging muscles, the hairiness of this
brainless, insatiable, gin-befunked seaman couldn’t be described.
What the merchant marine hadn’t taught him hadn’t been
taught
! He’d been in and out of every port from Libya to
Hong Kong, running girls, white-slaving, putting the boots to every
dame who hit the deck! The sweat poured down him in rills as he
pounced, re-pounced, and re-pounced again with that throbbing,
pulsating, jiving, expanding spark-plug of his—’ “

  “
Neat
!” screeched Aone Pitts, looking up
lively from the letter she’d begun to write—on illustrated
stationery, the kind graphed with doodads (dancing mice, kittens
peering over floral baskets, etc.) and contrasting envelope
liner.

  Geraldine Oikle smiled secretively, a little amative
fang sticking out. “He must have—” She held her hands two feet
apart.

  “I’m soaked!” giggled Mimsy Borogroves.

  “
Readin’ trash
,” came a sudden outraged
voice from somewhere, “
ain’t no better than bein’ trash
!”
It was Loretta Boyco, standing on a desk in the next room with her
mouth to the heating vent.

  “Hey, Boyco,” shouted Hester Popkin, hoisting up to
her side of the vent, “how would you like it if I grabbed your legs
and made a wish?” She listened a moment. “Or broke you damn
ah-glasses?”

  Cookie Crumpacker said: “That child, I swear, don’t
menstruate. She defrosts.”

  “But I wonder,” asked Robin Winglet, soberly, “if
men like them Turks really do make the best lovers, you know?”

  “Y’all know which men make the best lovers, honey?”
asked Hypsipyle Poore, rabbeting her beautiful black hair in long
strokes. She turned from the mirror, closed her eyes, and sucked a
tooth. “The ones you have in bed with you.”

  The girls all exploded into smutty giggles.

  The bells from the clock-bearing cupola of Smethwick
struck three, but having long since settled back, inert,
open-thighed, sleepy, no one showed any interest in going to bed.
What could they do now? Misty-eyed, Holly Sunday continued to strum
her guitar. Gladys Applegate, coiling an arm over her head, asked
if anybody wanted to sniff glue. Thomasina Quod said she was dying
for a ham-’n’-cheese on a bulkie. “O, butter a bun, will you!” said
Glenda Barrow, quickly cupping her mouth for the blunder.
“
Thanks
!” snapped little Thomasina Quod, wapperjawed, her
voice snarping like a grig’s. “
Really. Thanks a lot
!”
Straddling a cuckoo-flowered white chair, Mona Lisa Drake asked the
other girls what they would do if they were alone at night and a
weirdo came into the room.

  A mood of spookiness suddenly settled in. Voices
went low and glances were exchanged in a ghostly hush. Someone lit
a stick of incense. The girls grouped closer together on pillows,
sag bags, and throw rugs, somewhat uneasy—poised at any moment to
give in to the screaming meemies—and covertly began to speak about
peeping toms, whispering idiolects of the midnight phonecall, and
Breughel-like howbeits with things on their minds who crept about
the late-night shrubbery. It wasn’t funny. Hadn’t they, any one of
them, ever heard
noises
outside? They admitted they had
and turned morbid and immediately began to rehearse for one another
those self-ramifying and shuddersome myths, habitually passed down
from class to class, from generation to generation, that recounted
how in the distant past at Quinsy College maimed half-wits,
gub-shites with pointed ears, and deranged creatures who left no
shadow had actually been seen at night on the ramparts of the
buildings and sometimes dragging a gimp leg down the corridors of
the dorms, wheezing, cross-eyed, and
dripping
! And that
wasn’t all! They returned every single year, different ones, things
with names—Grippo! Hoghead! The Four-Eyed Man of Cricklade!—and icy
grips, bulbed heads, and pee-stains all over them!

  It was then given out that many, many years ago a
certain girl at Quinsy actually woke up in the middle of the night
and saw standing right next to her bed a refulgent something with
flippers for feet named “Thimbleballs” who clawed his way up the
bricks, crept across the roof, depended in a crazy hang, and then
dashed himself howling through a window—to try to bite off her
head! The authorities then found her the next morning, a blithering
idiot, with her hair gone completely white, and, according to
common report, she was said to be still alive to this day but not
moving a finger, just sitting with folded hands in a rooming-house
somewhere down in the Tidewater and repeatedly muttering only a
single word, “
Wurble! Wurble! Wurble
!”

  “I’m having the creeps,” said Géraldine Oikle.

  Jessie Lee Deal held up her arm. “Look. Goose
skin.”

  “O poo,” said Hypsipyle Poore calmly, carefully
tracing on some brown eyeliner—lurking with strange synthetic
perfumes, she always went to bed as if the Chevalier Bayard were
there awaiting her—and so her weary, decosmeticized visitors,
partially because they were sapping with terminal fatigue, put away
their fears. Hypsipyle clapped her eyeliner into her make-up box
and with the emory board she picked up, for one last swynk at her
nails, pointed toward the door. It was time for them to go. Yawping
and yawning, the girls wobbled up on their feet. Some stretched and
groaned.

  Cookie Crumpacker, tweaking a slice of underwear
from the moist rictus of her buttocks, picked up the paperback.

  “I believe I’ll take this and read me some more
about big ol’ Rafe here—just,” Cookie added, looking about like a
little sly-boots putting out feelers, “just for a bit of a
titty-pull. You mind?”

  Most of the Clitheroe kids, on their way out, were
too tired to comment.

  “Well, I’ll tell you who
I’d
like to have a
titty-pull with,” said Donna Wynkoop, working her eyes over a wide
smile.