Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle Part 2, Chapter 5 (view annotations ) |
5 |
Van spent the fall term of 1892 at Kingston University, Mayne, | |
where there was a first-rate madhouse, as well as a famous | |
Department of Terrapy, and where he now went back to one | |
of his old projects, which turned on the Idea of Dimension & | |
365.05 | Dementia ("You will 'sturb,' Van, with an alliteration on your |
lips," jested old Rattner, resident pessimist of genius, for whom | |
life was only a "disturbance" in the rattnerterological order of | |
things—from "nertoros," not "terra"). | |
Van Veen [as also, in his small way, the editor of Ada] | |
365.10 | liked to change his abode at the end of a section or chapter or |
even paragraph, and he had almost finished a difficult bit deal- | |
ing with the divorce between time and the contents of time | |
(such as action on matter, in space, and the nature of space it- | |
self) and was contemplating moving to Manhattan (that kind | |
365.15 | of switch being a reflection of mental rubrication rather than a |
concession to some farcical "influence of environment" endorsed | |
by Marx père, the popular author of "historical" plays), when | |
he received an unexpected dorophone call which for a moment | |
affected violently his entire pulmonary and systemic circulation. | |
365.20 | Nobody, not even his father, knew that Van had recently |
[ 365 ]
bought Cordula's penthouse apartment between Manhattan's | |
Library and Park. Besides its being the perfect place to work | |
in, with that terrace of scholarly seclusion suspended in a | |
celestial void, and that noisy but convenient city lapping below | |
366.05 | at the base of his mind's invulnerable rock, it was, in fashionable |
parlance, a "bachelor's folly" where he could secretly entertain | |
any girl or girls he pleased. (One of them dubbed it "your wing | |
à terre"). But he was still in his rather dingy Chose-like rooms | |
at Kingston when he consented to Lucette's visiting him on that | |
366.10 | bright November afternoon. |
He had not seen her since 1888. In the fall of 1891 she had | |
sent him from California a rambling, indecent, crazy, almost | |
savage declaration of love in a ten-page letter, which shall not | |
be discussed in this memoir [See, however, a little farther. Ed.]. | |
366.15 | At present, she was studying the History of Art ("the second- |
rater's last refuge," she said) in nearby Queenston College for | |
Glamorous and Glupovatïh ("dumb") Girls. When she rang | |
him up and pleaded for an interview (in a new, darker voice, | |
agonizingly resembling Ada's), she intimated that she was | |
366.20 | bringing him an important message. He suspected it would be |
yet another installment of her unrequited passion, but he also | |
felt that her visit would touch off internal fires. | |
As he awaited her, walking the whole length of his brown- | |
carpeted suite and back again, now contemplating the emblazed | |
366.25 | trees, that defied the season, through the northeast casement at |
the end of the passage, then returning to the sitting room which | |
gave on sun-bordered Greencloth Court, he kept fighting Ardis | |
and its orchards and orchids, bracing himself for the ordeal, | |
wondering if he should not cancel her visit, or have his man | |
366.30 | convey his apologies for the suddenness of an unavoidable de- |
parture, but knowing all the time he would go through with it. | |
With Lucette herself, he was only obliquely concerned: she in- | |
habited this or that dapple of drifting sunlight, but could not be |
[ 366 ]
wholly dismissed with the rest of sun-flecked Ardis. He re- | |
called, in passing, the sweetness in his lap, her round little | |
bottom, her prasine eyes as she turned toward him and the re- | |
ceding road. Casually he wondered whether she had become fat | |
367.05 | and freckled, or had joined the graceful Zemski group of |
nymphs. He had left the parlor door that opened on the landing | |
slightly ajar, but somehow missed the sound of her high heels | |
on the stairs (or did not distinguish them from his heartbeats) | |
while he was in the middle of his twentieth trudge "back to the | |
367.10 | ardors and arbors! Eros qui prend son essor! Arts that our |
marblery harbors: Eros, the rose and the sore." I am ill at these | |
numbers, but e'en rhymery is easier "than confuting the past | |
in mute prose." Who wrote that? Voltimand or Voltemand? | |
Or the Burning Swine? A pest on his anapest! "All our old | |
367.15 | loves are corpses or wives." All our sorrows are virgins or |
whores. | |
A black bear with bright russet locks (the sun had reached | |
its first parlor window) stood awaiting him. Yes—the Z gene | |
had won, She was slim and strange. Her green eyes had grown. | |
367.20 | At sixteen she looked considerably more dissolute than her |
sister had seemed at that fatal age. She wore black furs and no | |
hat. | |
"My joy (moya radost')," said Lucette—just like that; he | |
had expected more formality: all in all he had hardly known | |
367.25 | her before—except as an embered embryo. |
Eyes swimming, coral nostrils distended, red mouth perilously | |
disclosing her tongue and teeth in a preparatory half-open skew | |
(tame animal signaling by that slant the semblance of a soft | |
bite), she advanced in the daze of a commencing trance, of an | |
367.30 | unfolding caress—the aurora, who knows (she knew), of a |
new life for both. | |
"Cheekbone," Van warned the young lady. | |
"You prefer skeletiki (little skeletons)," she murmured, as |
[ 367 ]
Van applied light lips (which had suddenly become even drier | |
than usual) to his half-sister's hot hard pommette. He could not | |
help inhaling briefly her Degrasse, smart, though decidedly | |
"paphish," perfume and, through it, the flame of her Little | |
368.05 | Larousse as he and the other said when they chose to emprison |
her in bath water. Yes, very nervous and fragrant. Indian sum- | |
mer too sultry for furs. The cross (krest) of the best-groomed | |
redhead (rousse). Its four burning ends. Because one can't stroke | |
(as he did now) the upper copper without imagining at once | |
368.10 | the lower fox cub and the paired embers. |
"This is where he lives," she said, looking around, turning | |
around, as he helped her with wonder and sorrow out of her | |
soft, deep, dark coat, side-thinking (he liked furs): sea bear | |
(kotik)?No, desman (vïhuhol'). Assistant Van admired her | |
368.15 | elegant slenderness, the gray tailor-made suit, the smoky fichu |
and as it wafted away, her long white neck. Take your jacket | |
off, he said or thought he said (standing with extended hands, | |
in his charcoal suit, spontaneous combustion, in his bleak parlor, | |
in the bleak house anglophilically named Voltemand Hall at | |
368.20 | Kingston University, fall term 1892, around four p.m.). |
"I think I'll take off my jacket," she said with the usual | |
flitting frown of feminine fuss that fits the "thought." "You've | |
got central heating; we girls have tiny fireplaces." | |
She threw it off, revealing a sleeveless frilly white blouse. | |
368.25 | She raised her arms to pass her fingers through her bright curls, |
and he saw the expected bright hollows. | |
Van said, "All three casements pourtant are open and can | |
open wider; but they can do it only westward and that green | |
yard down below is the evening sun's praying rug, which makes | |
368.30 | this room even warmer. Terrible for a window not to be able |
to turn its paralyzed embrasure and see what's on the other side | |
of the house." | |
Once a Veen, always a Veen. |
[ 368 ]
She unclicked her black-silk handbag, fished out a handker- | |
chief and, leaving the gaping bag on the edge of the sideboard, | |
went to the farthest window and stood there, her fragile | |
shoulders shaking unbearably. | |
369.05 | Van noticed a long, blue, violet-sealed envelope protruding |
from the bag. | |
"Lucette, don't cry. That's too easy." | |
She walked back, dabbing her nose, curbing her childishly | |
humid sniffs, still hoping for the decisive embrace. | |
369.10 | "Here's some brandy," he said. "Sit down. Where's the rest |
of the family?" | |
She returned the balled handkerchief of many an old romance | |
to her bag, which, however, remained unclosed. Chows, too, | |
have blue tongues. | |
369.15 | "Mamma dwells in her private Samsara. Dad has had another |
stroke. Sis is revisiting Ardis." | |
"Sis! Cesse, Lucette! We don't want any baby serpents | |
around." | |
"This baby serpent does not quite know what tone to take | |
369.20 | with Dr V.V. Sector. You have not changed one bit, my pale |
darling, except that you look like a ghost in need of a shave | |
without your summer Glanz." | |
And summer Mädel. He noticed that the letter, in its long | |
blue envelope, lay now on the mahogany sideboard. He stood | |
369.25 | in the middle of the parlor, rubbing his forehead, not daring, |
not daring, because it was Ada's notepaper. | |
"Like some tea?" | |
She shook her head. "I can't stay long. Besides, you said | |
something about a busy day over the phone. One can't help | |
369.30 | being dreadfully busy after four absolutely blank years" (he |
would start sobbing too if she did not stop). | |
"Yes. I don't know. I have an appointment around six." | |
Two ideas were locked up in a slow dance, a mechanical |
[ 369 ]
menuet, with bows and curtseys: one was "We-have-so-much-to | |
say"; the other was "We have absolutely nothing to say." But | |
that sort of thing can change in one instant. | |
"Yes, I have to see Rattner at six-thirty," murmured Van, | |
370.05 | consulting a calendar he did not see. |
"Rattner on Terra!" ejaculated Lucette. "Van is reading | |
Rattner on Terra. Pet must never, never disturb him and me | |
when we are reading Rattner!" | |
"I implore, my dear, no impersonations. Let us not transform | |
370.10 | a pleasant reunion into mutual torture." |
What was she doing at Queenston? She had told him before. | |
Of course. Tough course? No. Oh. From time to time both | |
kept glancing askance at the letter to see if it was behaving it- | |
self—not dangling its legs, not picking its nose. | |
370.15 | Return it sealed? |
"Tell Rattner," she said, gulping down her third brandy | |
as simply as if it were technicolored water. "Tell him" (the | |
liquor was loosening her pretty viper tongue)— | |
(Viper? Lucette? My dead dear darling?) | |
370.20 | —"Tell him that when in the old days you and Ada—" |
The name yawned like a black doorway, then the door | |
banged. | |
"—left me for him, and then came back, I knew every time | |
that you vsyo sdelali (had appeased your lust, had allayed your | |
370.25 | fire)." |
"One remembers those little things much too clearly, Lucette. | |
Please, stop." | |
"One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly | |
than the big fatal ones. As for example the clothes you wore | |
370.30 | at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the |
sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of | |
course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy's | |
shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, | |
soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as |
[ 370 ]
they always did after you'd been on Terra with Ada, with | |
Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest—oh, | |
they positively stank, you know, your little shorts of lavendered | |
Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!" | |
371.05 | Should that letter, now next to the brandy, listen to all this? |
Was it from Ada after all (there was no address)? Because it | |
was Lucette's mad, shocking letter of love that was doing the | |
talking. | |
"Van, it will make you smile" [thus in the MS. Ed.]. | |
371.10 | "Van," said Lucette, "it will make you smile" (it did not: |
that prediction is seldom fulfilled), "but if you posed the famous | |
Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative." | |
What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind | |
the revolving paperbacks' stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, | |
371.15 | Clichy Clichés, Six Pricks, The Bible Unabridged, Mertvago |
Forever, The Gitanilla ... He was known in the beau monde | |
for asking that question the very first time he met a young lady. | |
"Oh, to be sure, it was not easy! In parked automobiles and | |
at rowdy parties, thrusts had to be parried, advances fought off! | |
371.20 | And only last winter, on the Italian Riviera, there was a young- |
ster of fourteen or fifteen, an awfully precocious but terribly | |
shy and neurotic young violinist, who reminded Marina of her | |
brother ... Well, for almost three months, every blessed after- | |
noon, I had him touch me, and I reciprocated, and after that I | |
371.25 | could sleep at last without pills, but otherwise I haven't once |
kissed male epithelia in all my love—I mean, life. Look, I can | |
swear I never have, by—by William Shakespeare" (extending | |
dramatically one hand toward a shelf with a set of thick red | |
books). | |
371.30 | "Hold it!" cried Van. "That's the Collected Works of |
Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor." | |
"Pah!" uttered Lucette. | |
"And, please, don't use that expletive." | |
"Forgive me—oh, I know, oh, I shan't." |
[ 371 ]
"Of course, you know. All the same, you are very sweet. | |
I'm glad you came." | |
"I'm glad, too," she said. "But Van! Don't you dare think I | |
'relanced' you to reiterate that I'm madly and miserably in love | |
372.05 | with you and that you can do anything you want with me. If |
I didn't simply press the button and slip that note into the | |
burning slit and cataract away, it was because I had to see you, | |
because there is something else you must know, even if it makes | |
you detest and despise Ada and me. Otvratitel'no trudno (it is | |
372.10 | disgustingly hard) to explain, especially for a virgin—well, |
technically, a virgin, a kokotische virgin, half poule, half puella. | |
I realize the privacy of the subject, mysterious matters that one | |
should not discuss even with a vaginal brother—mysterious, not | |
merely in their moral and mystical aspect—" | |
372.15 | Uterine—but close enough. It certainly came from Lucette's |
sister. He knew that shade and that shape. "That shade of blue, | |
that shape of you" (corny song on the Sonorola). Blue in the | |
face from pleading RSVP. | |
"—but also in a direct physical sense. Because, darling Van, | |
372.20 | in that direct physical sense I know as much about our Ada as |
you." | |
"Fire away," said Van, wearily. | |
"She never wrote you about it?" | |
Negative Throat Sound. | |
372.25 | "Something we used to call Pressing the Spring?" |
"We?" | |
"She and I." | |
N.T.S. | |
"Do you remember Grandmother's scrutoir between the globe | |
372.30 | and the gueridon? In the library?" |
"I don"t even know what a scrutoir is; and I do not visualize | |
the gueridon." | |
"But you remember the globe?" |
[ 372 ]
Dusty Tartary with Cinderella's finger rubbing the place | |
where the invader would fall. | |
"Yes, I do; and a kind of stand with golden dragons painted | |
all over it." | |
373.05 | "That's what I meant by 'gueridon.' It was really a Chinese |
stand japanned in red lacquer, and the scrutoir stood in bet- | |
ween." | |
"China or Japan? Make up your mind. And I still don't know | |
how your inscrutable looks. I mean, looked in 1884 or 1888." | |
373.10 | Scrutoir. Almost as bad as the other with her Blemolopias and |
Molospermas. | |
"Van, Vanichka, we are straying from the main point. The | |
point is that the writing desk or if you like, secretaire—" | |
"I hate both, but it stood at the opposite end of the black | |
373.15 | divan." |
Now mentioned for the first time—though both had been | |
tacitly using it as an orientator or as a right hand painted on a | |
transparent signboard that a philosopher's orbitless eye, a peeled | |
hard-boiled egg cruising free, but sensing which of its ends is | |
373.20 | proximal to an imaginary nose, sees hanging in infinite space; |
whereupon, with Germanic grace, the free eye sails around the | |
glass sign and sees a left hand shining through—that's the solu- | |
tion! (Bernard said six-thirty but I may be a little late.) The | |
mental in Van always rimmed the sensuous: unforgettable, | |
373.25 | roughish, villous, Villaviciosa velour. |
"Van, you are deliberately sidetracking the issue—" | |
"One can't do that with an issue." | |
"—because at the other end, at the heel end of the Vaniada | |
divan—remember?—there was only the closet in which you two | |
373.30 | locked me up at least ten times." |
"Nu uzh i desyat' (exaggeration). Once—and never more. | |
It had a keyless hole as big as Kant's eye. Kant was famous for | |
his cucumicolor iris." |
[ 373 ]
"Well, that secretaire," continued Lucette, considering her | |
left shoe, her very chic patent-leather Glass shoe, as she crossed | |
her lovely legs, "that secretaire enclosed a folded card table and | |
a top-secret drawer. And you thought, I think, it was crammed | |
374.05 | with our grandmother's love letters, written when she was |
twelve or thirteen. And our Ada knew, oh, she knew, the | |
drawer was there but she had forgotten how to release the | |
orgasm or whatever it is called in card tables and bureaus." | |
Whatever it is called. | |
374.10 | "She and I challenged you to find the secret chuvstvilishche |
(sensorium) and make it work. It was the summer Belle sprained | |
her backside, and we were left to our own devices, which had | |
long lost the particule in your case and Ada's, but were touch- | |
ingly pure in mine. You groped around, and felt, and felt for | |
374.15 | the little organ, which turned out to be a yielding roundlet in |
the rosewood under the felt you felt—I mean, under the felt | |
you were feeling: it was a felted thumb spring, and Ada laughed | |
as the drawer shot out." | |
"And it was empty," said Van. | |
374.20 | "Not quite. It contained a minuscule red pawn that high" |
(showing its barleycorn-size with her finger—above what? | |
Above Van's wrist). "I kept it for luck; I must still have it | |
somewhere. Anyway, the entire incident pre-emblematized, to | |
quote my Professor of Ornament, the depravation of your poor | |
374.25 | Lucette at fourteen in Arizona. Belle had returned to Canady, |
because Vronsky had defigured The Doomed Children; her | |
successor had eloped with Demon; papa was in the East, maman | |
hardly ever came home before dawn, the maids joined their | |
lovers at star-rise, and I hated to sleep alone in the corner room | |
374.30 | assigned to me, even if I did not put out the pink night-light of |
porcelain with the transparency picture of a lost lamb, because | |
I was afraid of the cougars and snakes" [quite possibly, this is | |
not remembered speech but an extract from her letter or letters. | |
Ed.], "whose cries and rattlings Ada imitated admirably, and, |
[ 374 ]
I think, designedly, in the desert's darkness under my first floor | |
window. Well [here, it would seem, taped speech is re-turned- | |
on], to make a short story sort of longish—" | |
Old Countess de Prey's phrase in praise of a lame mare in | |
375.05 | her stables in 1884, thence passed on to her son, who passed it |
on to his girl who passed it on to her half-sister. Thus instantly | |
reconstructed by Van sitting with tented hands in a red-plush | |
chair. | |
"—I took my pillow to Ada's bedroom where a similar night- | |
375.10 | light transparency thing showed a blond-bearded faddist in a |
toweling robe embracing the found lamb. The night was oven- | |
hot and we were stark naked except for a bit of sticking plaster | |
where a doctor had stroked and pricked my arm, and she was a | |
dream of white and black beauty, pour cogner une fraise, | |
375.15 | touched with fraise in four places, a symmetrical queen of |
hearts." | |
Next moment they grappled and had such delicious fun that | |
they knew they would be doing it always together, for hy- | |
gienic purposes, when boyless and boiling. | |
375.20 | "She taught me practices I had never imagined," confessed |
Lucette in rerun wonder. "We interweaved like serpents and | |
sobbed like pumas. We were Mongolian tumblers, monograms, | |
anagrams, adalucindas. She kissed my krestik while I kissed hers, | |
our heads clamped in such odd combinations that Brigitte, a | |
375.25 | little chambermaid who blundered in with her candle, thought |
for a moment, though naughty herself, that we were giving birth | |
simultaneously to baby girls, your Ada bringing out une rousse | |
and no one's Lucette, une brune. Fancy that." | |
"Side-splitting," said Van. | |
375.30 | "Oh, it went on practically every night at Marina Ranch, and |
often during siestas; otherwise, in between those vanouissements | |
(her expression), or when she and I had the flow, which, be- | |
lieve it or not—" | |
"I can believe anything," said Van. |
[ 375 ]
"—took place at coincident dates, we were just ordinary sis- | |
ters, exchanging routine nothings, having little in common, she | |
collecting cactuses or running through her lines for the next | |
audition in Sterva, and I reading a lot, or copying beautiful | |
376.05 | erotic pictures from an album of Forbidden Masterpieces that |
we found, apropos, in a box of korsetov i khrestomatiy(corsets | |
and chrestomathies) which Belle had left behind, and I can | |
assure you, they were far more realistic than the scroll-painting | |
by Mong Mong, very active in 888, a millennium before Ada | |
376.10 | said it illustrated Oriental calisthenics when I found it by |
chance in the corner of one of my ambuscades. So the day | |
passed, and then the star rose, and tremendous moths walked on | |
all sixes up the window panes, and we tangled until we fell | |
asleep. And that's when I learnt—" concluded Lucette, clos- | |
376.15 | ing her eyes and making Van squirm by reproducing with dia- |
bolical accuracy Ada's demure little whimper of ultimate bliss. | |
At this point, as in a well-constructed play larded with comic | |
relief, the brass campophone buzzed and not only did the | |
radiators start to cluck but the uncapped soda water fizzed in | |
375.20 | sympathy. |
Van (crossly): "I don't understand the first word ... What's | |
that? L'adorée? Wait a second" (to Lucette). "Please, stay | |
where you are." (Lucette whispers a French child-word with | |
two "p"s.). "Okay" (pointing toward the corridor). "Sorry, | |
376.25 | Polly. Well, is it l'adorée? No? Give me the context. Ah—la |
durée. La durée is not ... sin on what? Synonymous with dura- | |
tion. Aha. Sorry again, I must stopper that orgiastic soda. Hold | |
the line." (Yells down the 'cory door,' as they called the long | |
second-floor passage at Ardis.) "Lucette, let it run over, who | |
376.30 | cares!" |
He poured himself another glass of brandy and for a ridicu- | |
lous moment could not remember what the hell he had been— | |
yes, the polliphone. |
[ 376 ]
It had died, but buzzed as soon as he recradled the receiver, | |
and Lucette knocked discreetly at the same time. | |
"La durée ... For goodness sake, come in without knocking | |
... No, Polly, knocking does not concern you—it's my little | |
377.05 | cousin. All right. La durée is not synonymous with duration, |
being saturated—yes, as in Saturday—with that particular phi- | |
losopher's thought. What's wrong now? You don't know if it's | |
dorée or durée? D, U, R. I thought you knew French. Oh, I see. | |
So long. | |
377.10 | "My typist, a trivial but always available blonde, could not |
make out durée in my quite legible hand because, she says, she | |
knows French, but not scientific French." | |
"Actually," observed Lucette, wiping the long envelope | |
which a drop of soda had stained, "Bergson is only for very | |
377.15 | young people or very unhappy people, such as this available |
rousse." | |
"Spotting Bergson," said the assistant lecher, "rates a B minus | |
dans ton petit cas, hardly more. Or shall I reward you with a | |
kiss on your krestik—whatever that is?" | |
377.20 | Wincing and rearranging his legs, our young Vandemonian |
cursed under his breath the condition in which the image of the | |
four embers of a vixen's cross had now solidly put him. One of | |
the synonyms of "condition" is "state," and the adjective "hu- | |
man" may be construed as "manly" (since L'Humanité means | |
377.25 | "Mankind"!), and that's how, my dears, Lowden recently trans- |
lated the title of the malheureux Pompier's cheap novel La Con- | |
dition Humaine, wherein, incidentally, the term "Vandemonian" | |
is hilariously glossed as "Koulak tasmanien d'origine hollandaise." | |
Kick her out before it is too late. | |
377.30 | "If you are serious," said Lucette, passing her tongue over her |
lips and slitting her darkening eyes, "then, my darling, you can | |
do it now. But if you are making fun of me, then you're an | |
abominably cruel Vandemonian." |
[ 377 ]
"Come, come, Lucette, it means "little cross" in Russian, that's | |
all, what else? Is it some amulet? You mentioned just now a | |
little red stud or pawn. Is it something you wear, or used to | |
wear, on a chainlet round your neck? a small acorn of coral, | |
378.05 | the glandulella of vestals in ancient Rome? What's the matter, |
my dear?" | |
Still watching him narrowly, "I'll take a chance," she said. | |
"I'll explain it, though it's just one of our sister's 'tender-turret' | |
words and I thought you were familiar with her vocabulary." | |
378.10 | "Oh, I know," cried Van (quivering with evil sarcasm, boil- |
ing with mysterious rage, taking it out on the redhaired scape- | |
goatling, naive Lucette, whose only crime was to be suffused | |
with the phantasmata of the other's innumerable lips). "Of | |
course, I remember now. A foul taint in the singular can be a | |
378.15 | sacred mark in the plural. You are referring of course to the |
stigmata between the eyebrows of pure sickly young nuns | |
whom priests had over-anointed there and elsewhere with cross- | |
like strokes of the myrrherabol brush." | |
"No, it's much simpler," said patient Lucette. "Let's go back | |
378.20 | to the library where you found that little thing still erect in |
its drawer—" | |
"Z for Zemski. As I had hoped, you do resemble Dolly, still | |
in her pretty pantelets, holding a Flemish pink in the library | |
portrait above her inscrutable." | |
378.25 | "No, no," said Lucette, "that indifferent oil presided over |
your studies and romps at the other end, next to the closet, | |
above a glazed bookcase." | |
When will this torture end? I can't very well open the letter | |
in front of her and read it aloud for the benefit of the audience. | |
378.30 | I have not art to reckon my groans. |
"One day, in the library, kneeling on a yellow cushion placed | |
on a Chippendale chair before an oval table on lion claws—" | |
[The epithetic tone strongly suggests that this speech has an | |
epistolary source. Ed.] |
[ 378 ]
"—I got stuck with six Buchstaben in the last round of a | |
Flavita game. Mind you, I was eight and had not studied anat- | |
omy, but was doing my poor little best to keep up with two | |
Wunderkinder. You examined and fingered my groove and | |
379.05 | quickly redistributed the haphazard sequence which made, say, |
LIKROT or ROTIKL and Ada flooded us both with her raven | |
silks as she looked over our heads, and when you had completed | |
the rearrangement, you and she came simultaneously, si je puis | |
le mettre comme ça (Canady French), came falling on the black | |
379.10 | carpet in a paroxysm of incomprehensible merriment; so finally |
I quietly composed ROTIK ("little mouth") and was left with | |
my own cheap initial. I hope I've thoroughly got you mixed up, | |
Van, because la plus laide fille au monde peut donner beaucoup | |
plus qu'elle n'a, and now let us say adieu, yours ever." | |
379.15 | "Whilst the machine is to him," murmured Van. |
"Hamlet," said the assistant lecturer's brightest student. | |
"Okay, okay," replied her and his tormentor, "but, you | |
know, a medically minded English Scrabbler, having two more | |
letters to cope with, could make, for example, STIRCOIL, a | |
379.20 | well-known, sweat-gland stimulant, or CITROILS, which |
grooms use for rubbing fillies." | |
"Please stop, Vandemonian," she moaned. "Read her letter | |
and bring me my coat." | |
But he continued, his features working: | |
379.25 | "I'm amazed! I never imagined that a hand-reared scion of |
Scandinavian kings, Russian grand princes and Irish barons could | |
use the language of the proverbial gutter. Yes, you're right, you | |
behave as a cocotte, Lucette." | |
In sad meditation Lucette said: "As a rejected cocotte, Van." | |
379.30 | "O moya dushen'ka (my dear darling)," cried Van, struck by |
his own coarseness and cruelty. "Please, forgive me! I'm a sick | |
man. I've been suffering for these last four years from con- | |
sanguineocanceroformia—a mysterious disease described by | |
Coniglietto. Don't put your little cold hand on my paw—that |
[ 379 ]
could only hasten your end and mine. On with your story." | |
"Well, after teaching me simple exercises for one hand that | |
I could practice alone, cruel Ada abandoned me. True, we never | |
really stopped doing it together every now and then—in the | |
380.05 | ranchito of some acquaintances after a party, in a white saloon |
she was teaching me to drive, in the sleeping car tearing across | |
the prairie, at sad, sad Ardis where I spent one night with her | |
before coming to Queenston. Oh, I love her hands, Van, be- | |
cause they have the same rodinka (small birthmark), because | |
380.10 | the fingers are so long, because, in fact, they are Van's in a |
reducing mirror, in tender diminutive, v laskatel'noy forme" | |
(the talk—as so often happened at emotional moments in the | |
Veen-Zemski branch of that strange family, the noblest in | |
Estotiland, the grandest on Antiterra—was speckled with Rus- | |
380.15 | sian, an effect not too consistently reproduced in this chapter— |
the readers are restless tonight). | |
"She abandoned me," continued Lucette, tchucking on one | |
side of the mouth and smoothing up and down with an abstract | |
palm her flesh-pale stocking."Yes, she started a rather sad little | |
380.20 | affair with Johnny, a young star from Fuerteventura, c'est dans |
la famille, her exact odnoletok (coeval), practically her twin in | |
appearance, born the same year, the same day, the same in- | |
stant —" | |
That was a mistake on silly Lucette's part. | |
380.25 | "Ah, that cannot be," interrupted morose Van and after rock- |
ing this side and that with clenched hands and furrowed brow | |
(how one would like to apply a boiling-water-soaked Watte- | |
bausch, as poor Rack used to call her limp arpeggiation, to that | |
ripe pimple on his right temple), "that simply cannot be. No | |
380.30 | damned twin can do that. Not even those seen by Brigitte, a |
cute little number I imagine, with that candle flame flirting with | |
her exposed nipples. The usual difference in age between twins" | |
—he went on in a madman's voice so well controlled that it | |
sounded overpedantic—"is seldom less than a quarter of an |
[ 380 ]
hour, the time a working womb needs to rest and relax with a | |
woman's magazine, before resuming its rather unappetizing con- | |
tractions. In very rare cases, when the matrix just goes on | |
pegging away automatically, the doctor can take advantage of | |
381.05 | that and ease out the second brat who then can be considered |
to be, say, three minutes younger, which in dynastic happy | |
events—doubly happy events—with all Egypt agog—may be, | |
and has been, even more important than in a marathon finish. | |
But the creatures, no matter how numerous, never come out à | |
381.10 | la queue-leu-leu. 'Simultaneous twins' is a contradiction in |
terms." | |
"Nu uzh ne znayu (well, I don't know)," muttered Lucette | |
(echoing faithfully her mother's dreary intonation in that | |
phrase, which seemingly implied an admission of error and | |
381.15 | ignorance, but tended somehow—owing to a hardly perceptible |
nod of condescension rather than consent—to dull and dilute | |
the truth of her interlocutor's corrective retort). | |
"I only meant," she continued, "that he was a handsome | |
Hispano-Irish boy, dark and pale, and people mistook them for | |
381.20 | twins. I did not say they were really twins. Or 'driblets.'" |
Driblets? Driblets? Now who pronounced it that way? Who? | |
Who? A dripping ewes-dropper in a dream? Did the orphans | |
live? But we must listen to Lucette. | |
"After a year or so she found out that an old pederast kept | |
381.25 | him and she dismissed him, and he shot himself on a beach at |
high tide but surfers and surgeons saved him, and now his brain | |
is damaged; he will never be able to speak." | |
"One can always fall back on mutes," said Van gloomily. "He | |
could act the speechless eunuch in 'Stambul, my bulbul' or the | |
381.30 | stable boy disguised as a kennel girl who brings a letter." |
"Van, I'm boring you?" | |
"Oh, nonsense, it's a gripping and palpitating little case his- | |
tory." | |
Because that was really not bad: bringing down three in as |
[ 381 ]
many years—besides winging a fourth. Jolly good shot—Adi- | |
ana! Wonder whom she'll bag next. | |
"You must not press me for the details of our sweet torrid | |
and horrid nights together, before and between that poor guy | |
382.05 | and the next intruder. If my skin were a canvas and her lips a |
brush, not an inch of me would have remained unpainted and | |
vice versa. Are you horrified, Van? Do you loathe us?" | |
"On the contrary," replied Van, bringing off a passable imita- | |
tion of bawdy mirth. "Had I not been a heterosexual male, I | |
382.10 | would have been a Lesbian." |
His trite reaction to her set piece, to her desperate cunning, | |
caused Lucette to give up, to dry up, as it were, before a black | |
pit with people dismally coughing here and there in the in- | |
visible and eternal audience. He glanced for the hundredth time | |
382.15 | at the blue envelope, its near long edge not quite parallel to that |
of the glossy mahogany, its left upper corner half hidden behind | |
the tray with the brandy and soda, its right lower corner point- | |
ing at Van's favorite novel The Slat Sign that lay on the side- | |
board. | |
382.20 | "I want to see you again soon," said Van, biting his thumb, |
brooding, cursing the pause, yearning for the contents of the | |
blue envelope. "You must come and stay with me at a flat I now | |
have on Alex Avenue. I have furnished the guest room with | |
bergères and torchères and rocking chairs; it looks like your | |
382.25 | mother's boudoir." |
Lucette curtseyed with the wicks of her sad mouth, à l'Améri- | |
caine. | |
"Will you come for a few days? I promise to behave properly. | |
All right?" | |
382.30 | "My notion of propriety may not be the same as yours. And |
what about Cordula de Prey? She won't mind?" | |
"The apartment is mine," said Van, "and besides, Cordula is | |
now Mrs. Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. | |
Here's her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Den- |
[ 382 ]
mark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. | |
Have a look." | |
"Who cares for Sustermans," observed Lucette, with some- | |
thing of her uterine sister's knight move of specious response, | |
383.05 | or a Latin footballer's rovesciata. |
No, it's an elm. Half a millennium ago. | |
"His ancestor," Van pattered on, "was the famous or fameux | |
Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after | |
whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, | |
383.10 | I forget which, it was so long ago, half a millennium." |
"I mentioned her only because an old sweetheart is easily | |
annoyed by the wrong conclusions she jumps at like a cat not | |
quite making a fence and then running off without trying again, | |
and stopping to look back." | |
383.15 | "Who told you about that lewd cordelude—I mean, inter- |
lude?" | |
"Your father, mon cher—we saw a lot of him in the West. | |
Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name—that | |
you fought your duel with another person—but that was be- | |
383.20 | fore anybody heard of the other person's death in Kalugano. |
Demon said you should have simply cudgeled him." | |
"I could not," said Van, "the rat was rotting away in a hos- | |
pital bed." | |
"I meant the real Tapper," cried Lucette (who was making | |
383.25 | a complete mess of her visit), "not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, |
innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, | |
could cure of his impotence." | |
"Driblets," said Van. | |
"Not necessarily his," said Lucette. "His wife's lover played | |
383.30 | the triple viol. Look, I'll borrow a book" (scanning on the near- |
est bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, | |
The Ugly New Englander) "and curl up, komondi, in the next | |
room for a few minutes, while you—Oh, I adore The Slat | |
Sign." |
[ 383 ]
"There's no hurry," said Van. | |
Pause (about fifteen minutes to go to the end of the act). | |
"At the age of ten," said Lucette to say something, "I was at | |
the Vieux-Rose Stopchin stage, but our (using, that day, that | |
384.05 | year, the unexpected, thronal, authorial, jocular, technically |
loose, forbidden, possessive plural in speaking of her to him) | |
sister had read at that age, in three languages, many more books | |
than I did at twelve. However! After an appalling illness in | |
California, I recouped myself: the Pioneers vanquished the | |
384.10 | Pyogenes. I'm not showing off but do you happen to know a |
great favorite of mine: Herodas?" | |
"Oh yes," answered Van negligently. "A ribald contempo- | |
rary of Justinus, the Roman scholar. Yes, great stuff. Blinding | |
blend of subtility and brilliant coarseness. You read it, dear, in | |
384.15 | the literal French translation with the Greek en regard—didn't |
you?—but a friend of mine here showed me a scrap of new- | |
found text, which you could not have seen, about two children, | |
a brother and sister, who did it so often that they finally died | |
in each other's limbs, and could not be separated—it just | |
384.20 | stretched and stretched, and snapped back in place every time |
the perplexed parents let go. It is all very obscene, and very | |
tragic, and terribly funny." | |
"No, I don't know that passage," said Lucette. "But Van, | |
why are you—" | |
384.25 | "Hay fever, hay fever!" cried Van, searching five pockets at |
once for a handkerchief. Her stare of compassion and the fruit- | |
less search caused such a swell of grief that he preferred to | |
stomp out of the room, snatching the letter, dropping it, pick- | |
ing it up, and retreating to the farthest room (redolent of her | |
384.30 | Degrasse) to read it in one gulp. |
"O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may |
|
call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I |
|
wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and |
[ 384 ]
ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my | |
immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been | |
made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is | |
an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright and not | |
385.05 | fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest |
in many military-looking desert plants, especially various species | |
of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in Amer- | |
ica, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). | |
He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and 'oil wells' (whatever | |
385.10 | they are—our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, |
getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told | |
my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer | |
after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall ever love. | |
Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the | |
385.15 | Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled |
with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya | |
(thine). A." | |
Van took a clean handkerchief from a tidy pile in a drawer, | |
an action he analogized at once by plucking a leaf from a writ- | |
385.20 | ing pad. It is wonderful how helpful such repetitive rhythms on |
the part of coincidental (white, rectangular) objects can be at | |
such chaotic moments. He wrote a short aerogram and returned | |
to the parlor. There he found Lucette putting on her fur coat, | |
and five uncouth scholars, whom his idiot valet had ushered in, | |
385.25 | standing in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of |
the coming winter's fashions. Bernard Rattner, a heavily bespec- | |
tacled black-haired, red-cheeked thick-set young man greeted | |
Van with affable relief. | |
"Good Log!" exclaimed Van, "I had understood we were to | |
385.30 | meet at your uncle's place." |
With a quick gesture he centrifuged them to waiting-room | |
chairs, and despite his pretty cousin's protests ("It's a twenty | |
minute's walk; don't accompany me") campophoned for his |
[ 385 ]
car. Then he clattered, in Lucette's wake, down the cataract of | |
the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please, chil- | |
dren not katrakatra (Marina). | |
"I also know," said Lucette as if continuing their recent ex- | |
386.05 | change, "who he is." |
She pointed to the inscription "Voltemand Hall" on the brow | |
of the building from which they now emerged. | |
Van gave her a quick glance—but she simply meant the | |
courtier in Hamlet. | |
386.10 | They passed through a dark archway, and as they came out |
into the colored air of a delicate sunset, he stopped her and | |
gave her the note he had written. It told Ada to charter a plane | |
and be at his Manhattan flat any time tomorrow morning. He | |
would leave Kingston around midnight by car. He still hoped | |
386.15 | the Ladore dorophone would be in working order before his |
departure. Le château que baignait le Dorophone. Anyway, he | |
assumed the aerogram would reach her in a couple of hours. | |
Lucette said "uhn-uhn," it would first fly to Mont-Dore—sorry, | |
Ladore—and if marked "urgent" would arrive at sunrise by | |
386.20 | dazzled messenger, galloping east on the postmaster's fleabitten |
nag, because on Sundays you could not use motorcycles, old | |
local law, l'ivresse de la vitesse, conceptions dominicales; but | |
even so, she would have ample time to pack, find the box of | |
Dutch crayons Lucette wanted her to bring if she came, and | |
386.25 | be in time for breakfast in Cordula's recent bedroom. Neither |
half-sibling was at her or his best that day. | |
"By the way," he said, "let's fix the date of your visit. Her | |
letter changes my schedule. Let's have dinner at Ursus next | |
weekend. I'll get in touch with you." | |
386.30 | "I knew it was hopeless," she said, looking away. "I did my |
best. I imitated all her shtuchki (little stunts). I'm a better actress | |
than she but that's not enough, I know. Go back now, they are | |
getting dreadfully drunk on your cognac." | |
He thrust his hands into the warm vulvas of her mole-soft |
[ 386 ]
sleeves and held her for a moment on the inside by her thin | |
bare elbows, looking down with meditative desire at her painted | |
lips. | |
"Un baiser, un seul!" she pleaded. | |
387.05 | "You promise not to open your mouth? not to melt? not to |
flutter and flick?" | |
"I won't, I swear!" | |
He hesitated. "No," said Van, "it is a mad temptation but I | |
must not succumb. I could not live through another disaster, | |
387.10 | another sister, even one-half of a sister." |
"Takoe otchayanie (such despair)!" moaned Lucette, wrap- | |
ping herself closely in the coat she had opened instinctively to | |
receive him. | |
"Might it console you to know that I expect only torture | |
387.15 | from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?" |
She shook her head. | |
"That my admiration for you is painfully strong?" | |
"I want Van," she cried, "and not intangible admiration—" | |
"Intangible? You goose. You may gauge it, you may brush it | |
387.20 | once very lightly, with the knuckles of your gloved hand. I |
said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can't kiss you. Not | |
even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take | |
a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning." |
[ 387 ]