Part Two, Chapter 8

Afternote

Time and Age
           
As a philosopher, Van focuses on time and its texture. As a novelist, Nabokov focuses on time, all the time: not only through Van’s images and ideas but also, for instance, in rendering the ages and stages of life. Even more than in The Defense and The Gift, and just as much as in Lolita, Nabokov in Ada tracks the changing scope of possibility as childhood expands toward and into adulthood.

Just four years on from Ardis the Second, in the novel’s only extended scene of Van, Ada, and Lucette’s post-Ardis interaction, they and their circumstances and relationships are remarkably altered. The action extends and echoes what happened at Ardis the Second but also transmutes that past into a present unexpected in every line. Countryside, family manor, summer, and childhood make way for adults out on the city in late fall. In the previous chapter Van and Ada revisited their singularly precocious adolescence in Ardis the First, as starkly recorded in Kim’s album, but now they sweep into elegant entitled-adult assurance, bringing belatedly precocious Lucette along with them: the young women at the glamorous height of fashion, all three awing restaurant guests and staff by their conspicuous and copious consumption of caviar and champagne. “Ursus” may echo “Ardis,” but Manhattan is no Ardis the Third.
           
The last Veen family dinner had been for Demon, at Ardis the Second, when Lucette was still too young to stay up for a lavish evening meal (and in any case was still away with mishap-prone Dan in Kaluga). Now “all three Veens, the children of Venus” (410) showcase style in a night on the ritzy town. Then father and mother and their two children, together for what would turn out to be the last time, had maintained the awkward pretence of being no closer than cousins, and were either isolated at table by unshared secrets or conjoined by covert complicity. Now the three Veen children, so intimately entangled and mutually aware at Ardis, seem a tight and almost isosceles triangle, with Lucette, once so unlike Ada, not least in her relationship to Van, now remarkably similar in dress, allure, and behavior (both are watchfully jealous of Flora), and in Van’s attention, touch, and possessive pride. That is another irony of time and growth: a four-year gap at one stage can seem enormous, and a few years later appear almost to have closed; Lucette, who had seemed a child at twelve in a way Ada no longer did at that age, has zoomed to catch up or almost pull ahead, at sixteen looking “considerably more dissolute than her sister had seemed at that fatal age” (367).


Time, the Age and the Ageless

In Ada Nabokov explores time in other ways too, not least through the comic anachronisms that distinguish Antiterra from Earth. But by placing Van and Ada’s erotically charged youth in the 1880s and 1890s he also investigates the differences and the commonalities of distinct eras.

In an interview in the summer of 1966, when Ada’s composition was flowing fast, Alberto Ongaro asked Nabokov: “Do you think a love like that of Humbert Humbert and Lolita is still possible? A total abandonment to feeling?” He answered:

Humbert Humbert is a villain and his case is no model. But if by this question you want to know if I believe people still fall in love and in the same
way as before, I will answer yes. You see, I have taught for a long time in universities. I know young people well, I have seen couples who loved
each other, couples who broke up painfully, others who broke up painlessly, as always, as always. The young people I’ve known were no different
in love from the way I was nor from how young people are today or will be like tomorrow. Love and sex, I repeat, are always the same.

Isn’t it risky to say this? If man does not change now, how could he evolve? And it’s not far from saying that man is always the same, regardless
of historical context.

I do not believe that man exists, but men; and men are different from each other and the same in the essential elements that persist through time.
And love is an essential element. Certainly there can be social, moral evolution, but not in love or in the feelings that can be always the same, the
joys or sorrows that love can give. (TWS 346-47)

Romance

At the end of the previous chapter, as if to rebuff Kim’s deflatingly prosaic photos, another recurrent eyewitness, Blanche, has elevated the romance of Van and Ada’s “first summer in the orchards and orchidariums of Ardis” into “a sacred secret and creed” (409). Part 2 Chapter 8 segues from there into a different distillation of romance. From the rustic and pastoral, from “seven-stringed Russian lyres under the racemosa in bloom,” “cyclic folk songs,” and herdsmen using “their huge ‘moaning horns’ as ear trumpets to catch the lilts of Ladore,” the scene shifts to “the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major” and its floor show of fashionable “Russian ‘romances,’ with a touch of heartwringing tsiganshchina” (410), romantic urban nostalgia for the countryside, and the “seven-stringed companion” of songs by former friends and Ardis guests of Uncle Ivan.
           
As early as 1884 an emotional contagion had swept the handmaids and swains of Ladore. That same summer, Lucette, only eight, had begun to catch a much more intimate emotional contagion from Van and Ada’s romance, no matter how much they tried to keep her at bay that year, or both included and excluded her in 1888. Now in 1892 a general and generational emotional contagion fills the air and envelops the Veens in the modish ambience of Russian pseudo-gypsy romance.

Nabokov acknowledges both the common elements in love, romance, and sex—the imitative arousal René Girard calls “mimetic desire” (Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1961)—and unique individual experience. He evokes the romantic mood of a particular place and time: the Russia of his youth, and its vogue “of Russian ‘romances’” (410), the gypsy songs, “the so-called tsïganskie romansï beloved of my generation” (SM 224). (For a discussion of the genre of Russian romances, see https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A0%D1%83%D1%81%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%BD%D1%81.)
           
Yet even as he emphasizes the musical and emotional atmosphere enjoyed by all three Veens, he also highlights individual differences. Lucette cannot understand her half-siblings’ passionate response to the trite “Uzh gasli v komnatah ogni”—which we know echoes their moment of communion and consummation after the dinner for Demon. And in her own passionate declaration to Van, while Ada is away, Lucette shows her utter difference from the happy love of the two older “children of Venus,” in the desperation and determination of her yearning for Van.
           
Ada explores the different flavors and flows of romance. But this upwelling of romance at Ursus will be almost its last flourish, before separation (Lucette from Van and Ada, and soon Van and Ada from each other) and suicide.

Anticipation

A first-time reader of II.8 does not know how Van’s relationship with Lucette will unfold. Her looks, still her own (that “lustrous cantharid green”) now also strikingly match Ada’s, in dress, makeup, poise, and chic. Her feelings too in some ways match Ada’s. Van registers attentively “the furtive, jealous, intuitive suspicion with which Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing blyadushka (cute whorelet), as our young misses referred to (very expensive and altogether delightful) Flora with ill-feigned indifference” (411: italics in original). When Ada has “to go and ‘powder her nose,’” Lucette, her tongue loosened by champagne, declares to Van her passion and, unlike Ada, also her devotion and desperation: “you are Van, all Van, and nothing but Van, skin and scar, the only truth of our only life, of my accursed life, Van, Van, Van” (411).

Van responds, as he had at Kingston, to Lucette’s physical allure. He feels a “state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred” (411). As they leave the restaurant, he steers both girls from the table, his left hand on Ada’s long bare back, his right on Lucette’s: “His girl’s ensellure was hot ivory; Lucette’s was downy and damp. He too had had just about his ‘last straw’ of champagne, namely four out of half a dozen bottles . . . and now, as he followed their bluish furs, he inhaled like a fool his right hand before gloving it.” Flora’s alert professional eye sees the equal treatment of both: “I say, Veen, . . . you don’t rally need two, d’you?” (414).

Back at the apartment, while Ada runs her bath, Van begins to undress, and pauses “in virile hesitation” before heading to Lucette’s room, having decided “to kill two finches with one fircone” (414). There, she is “in the process of slipping on her pale green nightdress over her head. Her narrow haunches were bare, and our wretched rake could not help being moved by the ideal symmetry of the exquisite twin dimples that only very perfect young bodies have above the buttocks in the sacral belt of beauty. Oh, they were even more perfect than Ada’s!” (414-15).

But the arrow of Van’s desire follows a different trajectory than readers may have predicted. He wants only to know from Lucette the name of the man who has proposed to Ada, and although he will reward her for the information with “a very special kiss,” that turns out to be only fitting “his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow” of her armpit (415). And although he does come sexually closer to her the next morning, caressing the russet mound that has so fired his imagination, he does so at Ada’s instigation and with her fingers too caressing “their helpless bed pet” (420).

Distraught Lucette flees after this unexpected unfulfillment of her hopes, and Van writes a note of apology: “We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene.” But Ada protests “this pompous, puritanical rot. . . . Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka?. . . It’s curious—you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for ‘life.’ Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!” (421) Given the mounting emotional and sexual tension between Van and Lucette since her arrival at Kingston, Ada’s prophesy, for all a first-time reader knows, could be borne out.

For rereaders the chapter anticipates what is to come in a very different light, by foreshadowing so directly the suicide that Lucette feels driven to.

Lucette’s drunken declaration of adoration and desire for Van ends with a comic twist when Van misconstrues what she means in referring to “the physical red thing—your heart was almost ripped out, my poor dushen’ka (‘darling,’ more than ‘darling’), it looked to me at least eight inches long” (411). That reminder of her stumbling into the penthouse bathroom and catching Van and Ada in flagrante a week ago sums up and consummates, as it were, her role as eyewitness of their ardors at Ardis: her ever closer involvement, from that first moment at the brookside in 1884, when she was playing with the doll that gets swept away, to the azure brook of Pinedale, on Ada’s sixteenth birthday in 1888, to this close-up climax in 1892.

But what Lucette has said just before mentioning Van’s scar will prove ominously near in method and motive to her actual suicide nine years hence: “I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you” (411).

Patterns of the Ardis past recur in Manhattan: Lucette as overnight guest and morning plaything still wears a willow-green nightie (414, 417), evocative of the first anticipation of her suicide, in the souci d’eau discussion in I.10 and “Lucette’s nightdress . . . the nuance of willows” (see I.10 Afternote and Boyd 1985/2001: 51-59, 291-96); Lucette as pet, in a way that emphasizes her youth and her subordination to and manipulation by her big sister (“Pop in, pet (it all started with the little one letting wee winds go free at table, circa 1882),” 418); and the “Orchid in an amethystine vaselet” (419) on the table beside the débauche à trois bed, which recalls Ada drawing an orchid as Lucette merely traces one, and setting “aside the crystal vaselet holding the Lady’s Slipper she had picked. Casually, lightly, she went on to explain how the organs of orchids work—but all Lucette wanted to know, after her whimsical fashion, was: could a boy bee impregnate a girl flower through something, through his gaiters or woolies or whatever he wore? . . . ‘you know, that child has the dirtiest mind imaginable and now she is going to be mad at me for saying this and sob on the Larivière bosom, and complain she has been pollinated by sitting on your knee’” (289). Lucette’s concern and confusion then, at Ardis the Second, anticipate her distress now at Van’s touch, interlaced with Ada’s, in Manhattan.

Part 2 Chapter 8 also anticipates Lucette’s death in much more than the stark prediction of jumping into the Goodson River. Van, Ada, and Lucette dine all three together for the last time here, at the Ursus restaurant; Van and Lucette dine together for the last time, just hours before her suicide, and eat “roast bearlet à la Tobakoff” (484). Just as “Goodson” is a retransliteration from the Russian version of the name of an explorer of the American north-east, Henry Hudson, the “Tobak” in “Tobakoff” plays in part on the palindromic reversal of the Russian transliteration of “Cabot” (see 383.01n.), after John Cabot and his son Sebastian (Giovanni and Sebastiano Caboto), who explored the American north-east and, before Hudson, searched for a north-west passage.

At the Manhattan dinner, Lucette in a “very short and open evening gown” whose “lustrous cantharid green” evokes a bird of paradise (410); Lucette at the dinner aboard the Tobakoff wears a dress Van “could describe . . . only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches), accentuating as it did the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon stockings. Objectively speaking, her chic was keener than that of her ‘vaginal’ sister” (486). Not only does “struthious” echo “lustrous,” but both words contain all the letters of “Ursus.”

At Ursus, Van glares like a bretteur at those admiring Ada and Lucette’s looks (422) and turns round “ready to cuff the gross speaker” who has whinnied “I say, Veen, . . . you don’t rally need two, d’you?” until he sees it is only Flora, teasing (414); at the Tobakoff’s restaurant, Van “saw with gentlemanly displeasure that [Lucette’s] tilted chin and black wings, and free stride, attracted not only blue innocent eyes but the bold stare of lewd fellow passengers. He loudly exclaimed that he would slap the next jackanapes” (486).

Van is aroused by and admiring of Lucette at Ursus and after, in 1892, and in 1901, in the Tobakoff’s cinema, after the restaurant, “She brushed his cheek with her lips in the dark, she took his hand, she kissed his knuckles, and he suddenly thought: after all, why not? Tonight? Tonight. He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new, apricot fire of anticipation” (488).

At Ursus, Lucette admits “I’m drunk, and all that, but I adore (obozhayu), I adore, I adore, I adore more than life you, . . . and, please, don’t let me swill (hlestat’) champagne any more, not only because I will jump into Goodson River if I can’t hope to have you” (411). Aboard the Tobakoff, just before her fatal jump,she drinks rapidly until her head swims: “She drank a ‘Cossack pony’ of Klass vodka—hateful, vulgar, but potent stuff; had another; and was hardly able to down a third because her head had started to swim like hell. Swim like hell from sharks, Tobakovich!” (493).

Fate is not predetermined in Ada, or in Nabokov in general, but the patterns of the past, patterns of character, context, and consequence, can all too easily recur, no matter how unpredictable details and moments of the future may remain.
           

Ambivalence
           
Despite Van and Ada’s initiating the pattern that enmeshes Lucette in her doom, Nabokov also stresses the moral complexity of their actions and emotions toward her.

Van feels ambivalent toward Lucette: a strong sexual attraction, evident already at Kingston, and admiration, and an indulgent if also always conflicted pleasure in the devotion he can receive but feels he must not return. He can thoughtlessly play on her affection, as when at Ursus, with Ada briefly absent, he “cruelly stroked Lucette’s apricot-bloomed forearm” (411: notice his later judgment, as narrator), or when he offers “a very special kiss” (415) in return for the name of Ada’s would-be fiancé. But he also exercises what for him at least seems like restraint: kissing her only on the armpit, despite his arousal; next morning in bed with Ada and Lucette, he is “reasonably recalcitrant” before, in his own judgment, “pardonably yielding” (419) when Ada brings his hand over to stroke Lucette.
          
Elsewhere in life he shows no sexual restraint whenever he and Ada are apart, as II.8 emphasizes: Flora, that “cute whorelet . . . very expensive and altogether delightful” (411), whom he has previously enjoyed and who evokes the many whores he has sampled at the floramors of Villa Venus; Rose, whom in his drunken state he almost imagines he is making love to as he roughly handles Ada, after their return from Ursus; or as he boasts at the very moment he needles Ada for having earned a marriage proposal: “Hundreds of whores and scores of cuties more experienced than the future Mrs. Vinelander have told me that” (420).
           
But with Lucette, despite having manipulated her, tactically and tactilely, in both Ardis the First and especially Ardis the Second, Van has also shown restraint, mixed with the thoughtless stoking of her desires. Just a week ago, as she was about to leave his Kingston suite, he invited her to test that his admiration for her was not only “painfully strong” but far from “intangible”: “You may gauge it, you may brush it 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” (387). The same wildly mixed messaging comes in his caressing Lucette’s firebird at Manhattan then apologizing after her distressed parting note—an ambivalence that only annoys Ada. Ada has even less sexual restraint and seems to have enjoyed Lucette’s sexual favors again, immediately after making love with Van, the night before. Troubled by the seriousness of his feelings toward their half-sister, Ada predicts: “Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!” (421).
           
Ada’s prediction here, like Lucette’s that she will jump into the Goodson if she can’t hope to have him, involve a triple invocation of Van’s name (two triple repetitions, in desperate Lucette’s case, 411) and are eerily close to what will happen aboard the Tobakoff: after a sunbath and a dinner (although he and Lucette dine in the grill, rather than the restaurant “with a masturbating jazzband,” 484), Van decides, despite “the torture of self-denial” (485), despite having felt “the stout snake of desire weightily unwind” (478), despite trying to suppress “the ruttish ache” (485) that Lucette’s implorations and invitations arouse, that after all he will sleep with her—until Ada’s coming on screen in the shipboard cinema dispels all his ambivalence.

Débauche à trois
           
In a novel crammed with erotic scenes, the débauche à trois is the most elaborate, prurient, and detailed, but also the most stylized, riddling, and disturbing.

In the chapter's bravura centerpiece Van and Ada enfold their little sister more dangerously than ever within their desire. Lucette’s subsequent flight in distress should offer a warning, but Ada takes it too lightly and Van, though chastened at the time, proves too self-indulgent to take a consistent position when he encounters an even more unnerved Lucette nine years hence.

Nabokov felt that such key components of life as love and sex should have full expression in adult art. In Lolita he explored the dark links of love and desire even when such a subject might well have remained unpublishably taboo. He welcomed and made the most of the sexual frankness increasingly allowed in serious literature in the late 1950s and after. But he also thought little of pornography, both for its lack of original artistry and its invitation to rudimentary arousal. He famously writes in his afterword to Lolita, when it was still uncertain whether the novel could appear in the United States:

While it is true that in ancient Europe, and well into the eighteenth century (obvious examples come from France),
deliberate lewdness was not inconsistent with flashes of comedy, or vigorous satire, or even the verve of a fine poet
in a wanton mood, it is also true that in modern times the term “pornography” connotes mediocrity, commercialism,
and certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment
has to be entirely replaced by simple sexual stimulation which demands the traditional word for direct action upon the
patient. Old rigid rules must be followed by the pornographer in order to have his patient feel the same security of
satisfaction as, for example, fans of detective stories feel—stories where, if you do not watch out, the real murderer may
turn out to be, to the fan’s disgust, artistic originality (who for instance would want a detective story without a single
dialogue in it?). Thus, in pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the copulation of clichés. Style, structure,
imagery should never distract the reader from his tepid lust. (Lolita 313)

Ada’s erotic showpiece, its climax of incestuous entanglement, inverts every aspect of commercial pornography that Nabokov outlines, offering not the copulation of clichés but an orgy of originality, with style, structure and imagery constantly distracting readers even as it also directs them to the lurid details.

Where the tsiganshchina music at Ursus characterized romance in a particular time and place, the central frame for the débauche à trois scene, “a much earlier canvas, of the Venetian (sensu largo) school, reproduced (in ‘Forbidden Masterpieces’)” (418), evokes immemorial traditions of erotic art, even as it depicts a hitherto unseen sex scene. As Nabokov had stressed to Ongaro: “The visual depiction of the erotic has always been there. There was no dearth of paintings evoking love in the past. The examples are endless. All the painted Venuses, Leda and the Swan, Susanna and the Elders, to say nothing of the Pompeian frescoes, some of which, in this so-called libertine and shameless age, cannot be seen because they are considered too scandalous” (TWS 346).

Nabokov further multiplies frames to point to the long traditions of both erotic literature (Casanova, for all his notoriety, is dismissed for his insipidity) and erotic commerce (the reflection “in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams” (418-19) standing, like the Villa Venus scheme in general, for the whole historical and geographical range of prostitution and prurience). He adds the tourist frame, placing readers as if in the position of channeled crowds of superficial novelty-seekers, and compounds this with the nouveau roman to suggest the tension between attention and distraction as the lone reader focuses on detail.

The scene’s ornateness and occasional opaqueness may also reflect in part Nabokov’s wish to ensure that any children who somehow stumble on these pages can be kept from understanding what is going on. In 1959, when Lolita was at last being published in Britain, Nabokov told an interviewer: “I believe that what is called pornography, when it is apt to corrupt the innocent, should be banned, but then pornography has nothing to do with the questions we are discussing” (interview with David Holmes for BBC, 5 November 1959, transcript sent to VN by Raymond Baker of Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 9 November 1959, VNA). Years earlier, when Edmund Wilson’s Hecate County was being prosecuted for indecency, Nabokov had told his then friend “Hecate Co[unty] is as pure as a block of ice in a surgical laboratory” (DBDV 199) and urged him to have his lawyers contrast it with the lecherous male gaze in a would-be humorous story in The Reader’s Digest (“Island Interlude,” August-September 1946, 123-28; condensed from Thomas Heggen, “Mister Roberts”), and another story mentioning the sexual activities of Eskimo adults, as seen and copied by their children, in International Digest (Bruce D. Campbell, “Where the High Winds Blow,” September 1946, 95-114), both of which, he notes, “are eagerly read at all schools” (DBDV 197).

Certainly the débauche à trois scene’s obscure descriptive details would thwart readers of any age seeking titillation. (Invited shortly after Ada’s publication by Kenneth Tynan—at that time the world’s foremost advocate for sexual and linguistic frankness on stage and in print—to contribute to an anthology of pornography, Nabokov sniffily replied: “I have no interest whatever in pornography and cannot imagine myself being titillated by what I write” (letter of July 12, 1969, VNA)). Details like the Loddigesia Hummingbirds on the wallpaper, the Lurid Oncidium Orchid in a vaselet on one bedside table, the “separatum ‘Soft music as cause of brain tumors,’ by Dr. Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name)” (419) on the other, reflect Van and Ada and the wide range of their interests, for all their frequent and fervent focus on sex on the spacious bed between these tables and in front of that wallpaper. The first of these details, the Loddigesia Hummingbirds, may prove, for the reader who follows the clue, suggestive of aspects of the configuration of the scene’s erotic action (see 419.22-26n.), and the orchid in a vaselet may, for the reader prepared to search backwards, be pointedly reminiscent of a younger Lucette’s naivety and sexual anxiety, while to get the joke in “young Rattner’s waggish pen-name” the reader must thumb through a fat dictionary. All these details will need a curiosity and an effort utterly incompatible with the “simple sexual stimulation” and the “direct action upon the patient” which in the afterword to Lolita Nabokov deplores in pornography. The scene celebrates the free range of thought over art, nature, and knowledge, rather than the forced focus of pornographic gratification.

In the paragraph that follows, Nabokov veils the details of Van’s orgasm and Lucette’s—to cite Ada—“delicious spazmochka” (421) in the most riddling paragraph of the entire novel. In so far as we can solve it, Nabokov seems to suggest that what Van and Ada’s frottage, their caprice, their perverse purpose, their cricket-like or conjurer’s rubbing (see 420.15-16n), has made disappear is Lucette herself. Her consent was never sought: she had “Involuntarily . . . bent her head and frail spine; then she lay back on the outer half of Ada’s pillow in a martyr’s pudibund swoon” (418). The “helpless bed pet” (420) now escapes at the moment of sexual release.

If Nabokov as author has his purposes in rendering the scene as elaborately he does, Van as narrator has his own motives. He presents the scene as a sensory showpiece, a display of the cultural wealth he and Ada so lavishly enjoy, a stylistic equivalent of the four bottles of champagne and the mounds of caviar he downed on the eve of this scene. He does have retrospective regrets, after reading Lucette’s note, and later, after realizing where her distress ultimately leads, and in recounting the episode (“helpless. . . . Involuntarily . . . frail spine . . . martyr’s . . . swoon”) but he still cannot stop himself reliving and savoring the luscious overload of sensation and delectation.
           
He writes: “Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet” (420). He is proud of his father (and Ada’s). On the other hand, when an interviewer quoted Nabokov saying he loathed Van Veen, and asked “What do you hate most about him?,” he answered: “The demonic strain in him” (TWS 431).

Van is not unaware that he evokes the woman whom as a boy he called mother when he writes: “the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane” (419). Van knows that Aqua has been crushed by Demon’s treatment of her, and that Marina, “with perverse vainglory, used to affirm in bed that Demon’s senses must have been influenced by a queer sort of ‘incestuous’ (whatever that term means) pleasure (in the sense of the French plaisir, which works up a lot of supplementary spinal vibrato), when he fondled, and savored, and delicately parted and defiled, in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh (une chair) that was both that of his wife and that of his mistress, the blended and brightened charms of twin peris, an Aquamarina both single and double, a mirage in an emirate, a geminate gem, an orgy of epithelial alliterations” (19). On the page following these lines Van records Aqua’s sad progress: “After her first battle with insanity at Ex en Valais she returned to America, and suffered a bad defeat, in the days when Van was still being suckled by a very young wet nurse, almost a child, Ruby Black, born Black, who was to go mad too: for no sooner did all the fond, all the frail, come into close contact with him (as later Lucette did, to give another example) than they were bound to know anguish and calamity, unless strengthened by a strain of his father’s demon blood” (20). (For the Demon-Lucette opposition, see Boyd 1985/2001: 145-46.) Aware of the role he and Ada have played in Lucette’s life and death, as of the role Demon and Marina have played in Aqua’s, Van still has the “perverse vainglory” of his parents as he describes the débauche à trois as it concentrates to a single point that image of Demon fondling, and savoring, and delicately parting and defiling, “in unmentionable but fascinating ways, flesh” of two women so closely related to each other and to him.

Sexual Exclusiveness, Sexual Possessiveness, Sexual Sharing

To Ongaro, Nabokov stressed not only that love and sex are “always the same” (TWS 347) across time but also that they can also be very different for different individuals within the same epoch. He highlights this in the débauche:Ada’s active, heedless, and unapologetic instigation, Van’s “reasonably recalcitrant” hesitation but “pardonably yielding” capitulation and subsequent regret, Lucette’s passive resignation until she recoils in distress from such a travesty of all her hopes for connection with Van.
          
Throughout this chapter and the wider story Nabokov explores the complex interplay of amatory possessiveness, exclusiveness, voraciousness, and sharing, the varieties and ironies of possession and dispossession in love and sex: the desire to single out, settle, compete for, hoard and defend a single relationship, or to roam and explore, sample, or share. Ada and Van are fiercely concentrated on each other, but also spread their sexual energies widely; Lucette focuses intently on Van, although without expecting to compete with either his singular attachment to Ada or his compulsion for sexual multiplicity.
           
Jealousy, rivalry, and hypocrisy simmer often in this chapter. At Ursus, Ada and Lucette both monitor Van and Flora: Van notes again the “half-naked” (410) Flora’s charms, which “certainly added a secret bonus to the state of erotic excitement tingling in him from the moment that his two beauties had been unfurred” as “Ada and Lucette watched, unsmilingly, his facial reactions to the demure look of professional recognition on the part of the passing and repassing” Flora (411). Note in the full passage “his two beauties” and the “erotic excitement” amplified by Lucette’s attractions as well as Ada’s, and the vivid memories of Flora’s delights, and the additional spice for Van of recognizing Ada’s and Lucette’s jealousy.

The theme of sharing, and at the same time of jealous possessiveness, recurs as they are about to leave Ursus:

   “I say, Veen,” whinnied a voice near him (there were lots of lechers around), “you don’t rally need
two, d’you?”
Van veered, ready to cuff the gross speaker—but it was only Flora, a frightful tease and admirable mimic. (414)