Part 2 Chapter 3
Afternote
Fate, Chance, Choice
After the long lapse of eight rather blank years, and the cursory montage of passing-of-time scenes in Pt. 3 Ch. 1, Van’s story suddenly slows again as it builds toward the dramatic centerpiece of Part Three, Lucette’s fateful suicide. Fateful, but introduced by way of two chance encounters, first with Greg, then with Cordula, imparting and confirming information about Lucette in Paris.
Nabokov wants to suggest both the fatedness of Lucette’s death and the strong elements of chance (here in Pt. 3 Ch. 2), freedom (in Pt. 3 Ch. 3), and independent lines of causality (in Pt. 3 Ch.4).
Nabokov prepares here for Pt. 3 Ch. 5 by introducing the connection between Lucette and Tobak: Greg mentions to Van that he has heard from Tobak that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four, Cordula also knows her whereabouts, and Van tells Cordula he will sail back to Manhattan on his “favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff” (458). No wonder when Lucette too hears in Pt. 3 Ch. 3 that Van is sailing on the Tobakoff she calls the Tobaks as soon as Van is out of earshot (466-67) to “wangle” their owners’ suite on the liner “in one minute flat” (477).
Greg and rivalry
Van’s chance meetings with both Greg and Cordula allow for last echoes of both Ardis (via Greg) and Van’s transitions beyond Ardis (via Cordula).
His meeting with Greg emphasizes the passing of time, and the contrast between Greg (“chubby and bald”) and Van (“so boyish”), between the staid, boring, hopelessly doting Greg and the dashing, rakish Van (“Diet of champagne, not beer. . . . Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp”) (453).
Throughout the meeting with Greg, Van encounters the reality or shadow of rivals for Ada. Even the Eugene Onegin echoes in Van’s response to Greg’s “My wife is pretty portly, too”—“Tak tï zhenat (so you are married). Didn’t know it . . . ”—conjure up, via Onegin’s displacement by Prince N., both Van’s current rival for Ada, Vinelander, and Greg as a would-be past rival, had he had the courage: “‘No, no, her mother is a Brougham.’ Might have replied ‘Ada Veen,’ had Mr. Vinelander not been a quicker suitor” (454).
Greg’s reminiscent lament—“Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!”—suddenly pricks Van’s jealousy—was Greg, too, a rival lover?—and lead to a swift change of tone, even as the echo of Eugene Onegin repeats, but with a new formality and frostiness: “You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long—.” The furled umbrella at hand now jumps into prominence: its shape resembles the cane with which Van had hoped to thrash Philip Rack and signals the danger Van’s jealousy poses to his rivals.
But Greg’s admission that “Neither did she”—neither did Ada know of his love (she did guess his feelings, but discouraged him promptly enough in 1884 and 1888 to ensure he never dared to voice them)—immediately relaxes Van’s tension, only for Greg’s explanation to retrigger Van’s wariness in other directions: Greg was “‘—terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.’ Numerous? Two? Three?” But Van settles into complacency: “Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors.”
Greg cannot stop dwelling on the pangs of the past:
“So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr. Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius—dead, dead, all dead!”
Suddenly the hopelessly yearning Greg has shattered Van’s complacency, with his mention of Krolik as another lover—whom Van had suspected only for a moment, as he and Ada leafed through Kim’s album, but chose not to dwell on. But from this moment on, Krolik will loom in Van’s memory as an additional shadow between the radiance of Ardis the First and the gathering darkness of Ardis the Second.
Cordula and adultery
After parting from Greg, “a moment later” Van sees Cordula bending down to console two tied-up poodlets. He strokes her behind, and after “indignation” gives way to “gay recognition,” he propositions her: “I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!” The emphasis on adultery and cuckoldry persists even after their swift copulation and its recapitulation in a drab little hotel across the street: “Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new.”
The theme of adultery sounds in numerous (two? three?) ways in the literary backgrounds as well as the foreground of the chapter: (1) the Eugene Onegin allusions evoke Pushkin’s conclusion: Onegin, now in love with Tatiana, writing to her, unable not to fall on his knees before her, her refusal to respond to his advances, despite freely admitting her love, and her husband’s arrival to find Onegin in his wife’s room, when Pushkin whisks the scene away (see 454.03-10n and 454.19n); (2) Van’s Akimovich/Arkadievich confusion over Greg’s patronymic, recalling Marina’s affair with G.A. Vronsky, her love life more complicated than the “chto-to shlozhnovato” imbroglios in the script they plan to shoot together, and echoing the Tolstoyan adulterers Vronsky, Anna Arkadievna Karenin and Stepan Arkadievich Oblonsky (see 455.05-06n); (3) the multiple, convoluted, cynical adulteries in Maupassant’s Bel-Ami, apparently echoed in the juxtaposition of “wedding present” and a promise of repeated adultery in Van’s farewell from Cordula (see 457.33-458.01n and 458.13-14n).
Greg versus Cordula, or Fidelity versus Jealousy:
The chapter sharply and abruptly juxtaposes two familiar figures from Van’s youth: staid Greg, still full of his hopeless old yearning for Ada but married, presumably faithfully, to his “pretty portly” wife, and racy Cordula, who momentarily flares at the man stroking her behind, and perfunctorily protests at Van’s importunate proposition, before making love twice and following up invitingly his invitation for future assignations.
The contrast between Van’s comportment toward Greg and toward Cordula also highlights with particular starkness the recurrent hypocrisy in his behavior: his jealous possessiveness toward his past with Ada, even if she is now married to another man (whom he will gleefully and proudly cuckold in a later chapter), and his gleeful pursuit of another woman in his present, and his exultant cuckolding of her husband even as he offers her a wedding gift. He had felt seethingly jealous of Cordula at Brownhill college, suspecting her of being the lesbian Ada had hinted at, despite his claim that “The girls don’t matter . . . it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you” (158-59); and he had been rushing to kill or maim his rival “fellows” at the end of Ardis the Second when he found Cordula on the train, and after trying to solicit from her Percy de Prey’s and Rack’s addresses, promptly caressed her under the table (303), before coupling with her and even living with her as he recovered from the wound sustained in the duel sparked, despite its irrelevance, by the jealous rage he had felt against Ada’s partners.
Lucette and Greg: hapless adorers
Pt. 3 Ch. 2 doubly prepares for Lucette’s last brief re-entry into Van’s life by Van’s hearing from Greg (and ultimately Tobak) that she is staying at the Alphonse Four and by his confirming the fact with Ivan Tobak’s wife, Cordula. But Greg and Cordula prepare for Lucette and her death in other ways.
Nabokov’s sense of the perennial variety of human individuality in relation to love and sex, explicit in his interview with Alberto Ongaro in 1966 (TWS 347), in the midst of rapidly writing Ada, is evident throughout the novel, not least in the contrast between Van and Ada, on the one hand, and Lucette on the other. Human variety in sex stands out in the very structure of Pt. 3 Ch. 2, in the juxtaposition of Greg and Cordula. Greg, yearning devotedly and obsessively for Ada, has probably been a virgin until marriage, and in the fixation of his passion recalls Lucette, fixated and unrewarded in her lifelong passion for Van, while Cordula eagerly and insouciantly plays the field as an experienced teenager and as a beloved wife. Her farewell—it will be her last—from Van (“She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula!,” 458) could not be more different from Lucette’s. One takes rash risks in multiple lovers, and remains exuberantly buoyant; the others risks all in her single-minded devotion to Van, and sinks to her death.
Greg was deeply and haplessly in love with Ada in his youth, and in Van’s presence still cannot stop reverting to his old feelings: “So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep” (454). Lucette will soon be ready to give her life if she cannot have Van.
After saying he would have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar for a kiss of her instep, Greg adds: “You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession.” We know better, and Van certainly does. We know the depth of Van’s love and desire for Ada, even if, and because, it has already been so amply satisfied. Van naturally thinks little of Greg and his love-life: “Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever” (454). But despite the irony of Greg’s “you can’t understand that obsession,” and Van’s condescension to “my babbling shadow, my burlesque double” (455), Greg really has felt for Ada. His “It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree” matches Van’s and Demon’s sense of the intensity of their loves for Ada and for Marina at their peaks (see 454.29-30n). He cannot stop recalling it. Eager for news about Ada now, he gushes:
“Somebody told me she’s a movie actress.”
“I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen.”
“Oh, that would be terrible, I declare—to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly
see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers,
and the wreathed dachshund.” (455)
Greg’s surprising reaction testifies to the depth of his feeling for her, even now: the shock of his seeing her on screen, he imagines, would be almost like the shock of dying, opening up the flood of priceless old memories traditionally envisaged as one sinks into death.
The mention of Ada as a movie actress prepares for her appearing unannounced on the cinema screen aboard the Tobakoff five days later, and the fatal effect that has on Lucette’s stratagems for seducing Van. But it also specifically and closely anticipates Lucette’s dying thoughts, at least as imagined by Van: without the conventionality of Greg’s assumption (“Like a drowning man . . . ”), but with some of the same specific details:
She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were afraid she might have done; . . . but she did see a few odds and ends as she swam like a dilettante Tobakoff in a circle of brief panic and merciful torpor. She saw . . . ; she saw . . . ; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-torn wreath. (494)
Van dismisses Greg and his feelings, as, until too late, he had dismissed Lucette and her feelings at Ardis, in his sense of the urgency and magnitude of his own feelings for Ada. This rakehell who will part from Greg to tup twice with Cordula cannot understand the helpless loyalty of those who love fixedly and without return.
Lucette, rivals, and damage
The umbrella Van carries when Greg hails him forms part of the pattern of sticks, canes, and the like that are an instrument and index of Van’s jealousy of Ada’s actual or potential partners.
When Greg volunteers “I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!” Van responds with a stiffer echo of Eugene Onegin: “You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long—” which, along with the umbrella by his side, indicates that he feels for a second the same punitive intent toward Greg as he had toward Percy and Rack, until Greg responds to Van’s “I did not know it” with the completely disarming “Neither did she.” Unable to leave his memories, though, Greg declares “I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep” (454; italics added). That harks back to the first flaring of the jealousy theme, as Van parts from Ada at the end of Ardis the First: “‘will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me? . . . it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you’ . . . fiercely beheading the tall arrogant fennels with his riding crop, Van returned to the Forest Fork” (158-59; italics added).
At the picnic on Ada’s sixteenth birthday Van, attacked by brazen rival Percy as timorous would-be-rival Greg watches on, wrestles his foe until he “lay panting like a dying gladiator,” then presses his thumbs in “to manipulate horribly that heaving thorax” (275). “Percy with a sudden bellow of pain intimated he had had enough. Van requested a more articulate expression of surrender, and got it. Greg, fearing Van had not caught the muttered plea for mercy, repeated it in the third person interpretative. Van released the unfortunate Count” (275). Van has prefaced his account of their fight with the gloating narrative prolepsis, revenge in anticipation, of “Percy, you were to die very soon—and not from that pellet in your fat leg, on the turf of a Crimean ravine, but a couple of minutes later when you opened your eyes and felt relieved and secure in the shelter of the macchie; you were to die very soon, Percy; but that July day in Ladore County . . . ” (273). Greg says he would have “consented to be beheaded by a Tartar . . . if in exchange I could have kissed her instep” (454). Percy has much more than kissed Ada’s instep, but he has fled Ladore for the Crimean War in a kind of love-suicide (“he was going to do everything to get killed, if that information helps,” Ada tells Van (296)), and indeed is shot in the head point-blank by a Tartar.
Van happily inflicts pain on his challenger, Percy, and happily recounts their hand-to-hand combat in a way that looks happily forward to Percy’s death in the Crimea. He buys three successive canes, one with “an alpenstockish point capable of gouging out translucent bulging eyes” (305), to thrash Rack, but finds Rack already on his deathbed, poisoned by his wife. Seething with rage, he challenges to a duel the absurdly irrelevant Captain Tapper and sends a powerful “piston blow” (304) into the nose of a porter trying to restrain him. But for all his anger, he does not cause serious harm to anyone who gets between himself and his love for Ada—except in two key cases.
He blinds blackmailer Kim Beauharnais, using “an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury” (445) and with the aid of former Ardis footman Jones, burns Kim’s “files—and most of Kalugano’s pine forest” (446). And shortly before Lucette jumps to her death from the Tobakoff, he and Lucette, just before entering the ship-board cinema, “examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van” (486). Nabokov has pointedly linked the theme of jealous rage and the violence inflicted on Kim Beauharnais with Van’s indifference to Lucette’s feelings, in his manipulating them at Ardis to ensure she will not come between him and Ada. Van’s concentration on self persistently harms others. (Cf. Boyd 1985/2001 168-74.)
And in Pt. 3 Ch. 2 Nabokov not only links Greg with Van’s anger toward his rivals but also involves Lucette. In his longest speech to Cordula, Van offers her the apartment that she passed on to him and that he used to shelter Jones, his accomplice in the assault on Kim; mentions that he will sail on the Admiral Tobakoff; mocks Tobak for his just having been cuckolded again (“Tell him to look out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new,” 458); and asks for Cordula’s confirmation about Lucette: “Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?” (458). Cordula, so robust sexually, where Lucette is so frail, admits to having been “a very bad girl. But it was fun” (458), before offering Van a future assignation: “‘Here’s a top secret address where you can always’—(fumbling in her handbag)—‘reach me’—(finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph)—‘at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August” (458). The name of this de Prey estate recalls the “Malbrouk s’en va t’en guerre” so pointedly linked with the departure for war and death of the other de Prey of whom Van is so rancorously jealous (see MOTIFS: Malbrook, and 288.14-16n). Cordula’s scribbling the contact address for a future assignation on a notecard with the Tobak crest links not only with the theme of Tobak’s cuckolding, his “antlers,” but also with Lucette’s doomed search for something to write a suicide note on (“looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or crest,” 492) when her attempt to invite Van back to Ardis with her (466), and then to set up a tryst aboard the Tobakoff, have both failed, and she can see no future with Van and wants nothing else in life.
Cordula and Lucette: “Whore” and VirginIn Pt. 3 Ch. 2, Cordula does not mention Lucette. Van solicits from her confirmation of his “cousin’s” whereabouts: “Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?”; Cordula merely replies “That’s right” (458). But Cordula and Lucette have been part of shared patterns building since Cordula’s first appearance, patterns that start to come to a head here.
Cordula has featured (1) in the first detailed scene after Van’s parting from Ada at Ardis the First, an encounter in a bookshop after the briefly summarized party at her mother’s place; (2) in the first scene after Van’s parting from Ada at Ardis the Second, aboard the train taking Van to Kalugano; and (3) in the first scene after Van and Ada have been parted in Manhattan, in Van’s encounter with first Greg then Cordula on a Paris street.
In the first of these scenes, fourteen-year-old Van makes a crude advance to fifteen-year-old Cordula, although he had “had little time for Cordula, round-faced, small, dumpy, in a turtle-neck sweater of dark-red wool” (164) at the party earlier that evening: “‘How could I get in touch with you?’ he asked. ‘Would you come to Riverlane? Are you a virgin?’ ‘I don’t date hoodlums,’ she replied calmly” (165).
In the second scene, aboard the Kalugano train, Cordula’s mother suggests her daughter take “this angry young demon to the tea-car” (302); there Cordula expresses surprise “‘that you actually noticed me today. Two months ago you snubbed me.’ ‘You had changed. You had grown lovely and languorous. You are even lovelier now. Cordula is no longer a virgin!’” (303), and a few moments later he “started to caress her under the table, but she gently removed his hand, whispering ‘womenses’” (303). Again his approach to her is direct and crass, but Cordula is unperturbed: she can handle even pushy male sexuality with cool ease.
In the final scene in this triad, in Paris, years after they have been happy lovers, Van accosts Cordula as she bends down to two poodlets and strokes her with his fingertips. She “straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition)” (456). He swiftly propositions her, in a way that foregrounds the fact that she is now married: “Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!” (456). She offers a faint patter of protest while also leaving an invitation ajar: “Really, Van. . . . You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others” (456-57). He persists, and when she acquiesces—“You are impossible. Where and when?”—he wastes no time: “Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises—and not much else.” Van knows these cheap Paris hotels with their bidets that prostitutes routinely use to sluice themselves. “Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five” (457). “Astraddle” at first seems to refer to the sexual act, and it may still do so, but as the sentence proceeds it becomes clear that the word particularly describes Cordula astride the bidet; she perhaps rides Van twice, but certainly they make love twice and she washes herself off a second time astride the bidet. Afterwards she feels invigorated rather than in the least abashed: “You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun—even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores” (458). Indeed, the whole scene has been emphatically that of picking up a streetwalker: from the initial approach, to the immediate recourse to the nearest cheap hotel, to the anticipation of the bidet and then Cordula’s using it for the first time, contrasted but allied with the habitual practice of “sad, sullen streetwalkers” (457), and the setting up of a future assignation. “Very pleased with himself” (457), Van has indeed treated Cordula—whose virginity he had asked about in 1884 and was pleased to intuit she had lost in 1888—as a happy hooker.
Van at first finds Cordula dumpy, but soon thinks of her in sexual terms, especially four years later when she has become “lovely and languorous” (303). He has always discounted Lucette’s childish looks by comparison with her sister’s, but when Lucette at sixteen asks to visit him at Kingston, he wonders whether after four years “she had become fat and freckled, or had joined the graceful Zemski group of nymphs” (367). Not only does he see instantly that “the Z gene had won” (367) but he soon finds himself with an erection at the thought of her underneath her clothes, and that socially awkward state persists the whole time she remains with him. She has already sent him a year earlier “a rambling, indecent, crazy, almost savage declaration of love in a ten-page letter” (366) and now she volunteers:
“Van . . . 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, 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. (371)
After hearing Cordula’s confirmation in Pt. 3 Ch. 2 that Lucette is at the Alphonse, Van heads there and asks the concierge if she is in. While he waits for an answer, his “eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla” (459). The concierge returns, shaking his head, and Van heads across a side street to a bar where he makes out “in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent—at least, unescorted . . . the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling—as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time” (460). He takes in at fondly lingering length Lucette’s profiled beauty under “the extravagant brim of the picture hat” that she is wearing (461). Over lunch back at her hotel, she gushes
“ . . . Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. . . . I’ll stretch out upon the divan
like a martyr, remember?”
“Are you still half-a-martyr—I mean half-a-virgin?” inquired Van.
“A quarter,” answered Lucette. “Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.”
“You can sit for a minute in my lap.”
“No—unless we undress and you ganch me.”
“My dear, as I’ve often reminded you, you belong to a princely family but you talk like the loosest Lucinda
imaginable” (463-64).
Not only do the question of Lucette’s virginity, now she is no longer a child, and the revolving bookstand with the revolving The Gitanilla, both recall Van’s question to Cordula, but the image of the lone woman in a picture hat at a bar, possibly or probably a whore, also connects with Cordula and the jealousy theme.
Meeting Ada at Brownhill College, for the first time since Ardis the First, Van is disconcerted not only that she has to be chaperoned, but that the chaperone turns out to be Cordula. Parting from Ada after Ardis and a final tryst at Forest Fork, Van has implored her: “will you be faithful, will you be faithful to me?” (158). She replies: “my love, my Van, I’m physical, horribly physical, I don’t know, I’m frank, qu’y puis-je? Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying—” (158). Van responds: “The girls don’t matter . . . it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you” (158-59). Yet at Brownhill Van unleashes a furious denunciation of the homosexuality veiled as heterosexuality in Proust, an oblique assault on Ada and Cordula for their presumed lesbian romps. Cordula can sense the agitation but not the reason:
“Ada, what on earth is he talking about? Some Italian film he has seen?”
“Van,” said Ada in a tired voice, “you do not realize that the Advanced French Group at my school has
advanced no farther than to Racan and Racine.”
“Forget it,” said Van.
“But you’ve had too much Marcel,” muttered Ada.The railway station had a semi-private tearoom supervised by the stationmaster’s wife under the school’s idiotic auspices. It was empty, save for a slender lady in black velvet, wearing a beautiful black velvet picture hat, who sat with her back to them at a “tonic bar” and never once turned her head, but the thought brushed him that she was a cocotte from Toulouse. (169)
Van notices the second harlot in a picture hat in Kalugano—after his talk with Cordula leads him nearly to miss the stop where he hopes to find and thrash Philip Rack, his hurried exit, his crashing into somebody stooping to pick up a bag, the explosion of his jealousy-fuelled wrath in the face of the pointedly irrelevant Captain Tapper, and his challenging Tapper to a duel. Unable to locate Rack, Van buys “his second walking stick,” the “rude, stout article with a convenient grip and an alpenstockish point” (305), and
walked for a while along Main Street—one of a million Main Streets—and then, with a surge of healthy hunger,
entered a passably attractive restaurant. He ordered a beefsteak with roast potatoes, apple pie and claret. At the
far end of the room, on one of the red stools of the burning bar, a graceful harlot in black—tight bodice, wide skirt,
long black gloves, black-velvet picture hat—was sucking a golden drink through a straw. In the mirror behind the
bar, amid colored glints, he caught a blurred glimpse of her russety blond beauty; he thought he might sample her
later on, but when he glanced again she had gone (307).
The third appearance of a woman in a picture hat alone at a bar is Lucette herself, in Paris, in the pose of a cocotte not from Toulouse but from Toulouse-Lautrec (Boyd 1985/2001: 129-131), as Van describes her in tender detail early in Pt. 3 Ch. 3. He meets her, still a virgin, just after he has happily treated Cordula, as she says, as one of his “little whores” (458).
Why does Nabokov juxtapose Cordula treated as a whore and Lucette standing like a lone whore at a bar, yet still a virgin?
He contrasts a Cordula utterly untroubled by sex, including by Van’s crude and quick advances, a woman who has entered sexuality in her own time and on her own terms, and Lucette, who has been rushed into sexuality at eight, seeing Van’s erect penis and his love-making with Ada, entangled in Van’s arms and affections at twelve, inveigled by Ada into lesbian romps at fourteen and the débauche à trois at sixteen but remains a sexually-troubled virgin. Lucette offers herself to Van, by letter in 1891, in person in Kingston in 1892, and still more directly in Paris in 1901 (“Oh, try me, Van! . . . ganch me . . . marry me . . . Let us kiss again, let us kiss again!” (464, 466, 467)) and even makes the “important, important telephone call” (466) to Cordula to “wangle” (477) the Tobak suite aboard the Tobakoff, to offer herself, one last desperate time, to Van. Van advances on Cordula with haste, in 1884, in 1888, in 1901, even treating her, this last time, as a whore; in an entirely different way Van and Ada introduce Lucette too early into sex, but Van at the same time withholds himself from Lucette, repeatedly stoking her desire (the cuddling embraces at Ardis the Second, the kiss on the axilla in the Manhattan apartment, the stroke of his trousers he invites her to at Kingston, the kiss on the mouth in Paris). Despite finding her so desirable, he resists her, even when she thrusts herself so eagerly at him. Cordula begins as virgin, becomes “no longer a virgin!” (303), and Van eventually treats her almost as a whore; Lucette becomes progressively less a virgin, but Van refuses her even when she insistently offers herself. Cordula is untroubled by Van’s sexuality and her own; Lucette desires Van ever more desperately but can find no outlet for the love she craves.
Cordula and Lucette: Jealousy and Competition
Pt. 3 Ch. 2 brings to the fore Van’s unashamed hypocrisy, his hot jealousy of other males around Ada (including Greg, for a second, and Krolik, forever, but discovered too late), and his almost simultaneous pursuit of other females (Cordula as he rushes after Rack, Cordula after his encounter with Greg), spiced, with Cordula in Paris, by the thought that he is cuckolding another man. Cordula by contrast has never felt a trace of jealousy toward Ada.
Van does not quite know the depths of his own jealousy. When he leaves Ada at the end of Ardis the First and implores her to be faithful, he responds to her “Oh dear, don’t ask me, there’s a girl in my school who is in love with me, I don’t know what I’m saying—” with “The girls don’t matter . . . it’s the fellows I’ll kill if they come near you” (158-59). But at Brownhill he is furiously jealous of Cordula, as Ada’s suspected lover. At the moment his jealousy is about to flare against Greg at Paris, just as he echoes Onegin’s spike of jealousy toward Prince N., Van thinks: “Might have replied ‘Ada Veen,’ had Mr. Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere” (454): the Vanda Broom who had made “constant passes at” Greg’s sister Grace and at Ada at Brownhill (323) and triggered Van’s jealousy of Cordula on his sole visit there.
For Van, Lucette always comes a very distant second to Ada at Ardis and after, and she knows it, but she feels no jealousy toward her sister. She brings Ada’s letter to Van at Kingston, foreseeing what its effect might be, and in Paris she offers to marry Van and live with him at Ardis, but to invite Ada there so that Van can “live with her in solid crystal with snow falling as if for ever all around pendant que je shee in Aspenis” (466). But while she feels no jealousy toward Ada, she has an astute awareness of Van’s jealous guarding of Ada: at Kingston, she tries to provoke his jealousy of her own sexual romps with Ada—and succeeds (despite his claim that far from loathing her and Ada, “Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian,” 382), as she does in kindling his jealousy toward other males by mentioning Ada’s “rather sad little affair” (380) with Johnny Starling. And for the price of a kiss she discloses Vinelander’s name to Van, triggering his dream that night, and another instance of the cane motif: “Mrs. Viner—no, Vingolfer, no, Vinelander. . . . ‘Mne snitsa saPERnik SHCHASTLEEVOY!’ (Mihail Ivanovich arcating the sand with his cane, humped on his bench under the creamy racemes). ‘I dream of a fortunate rival!’” (417).
That cane contains a threat of violence, ghoulishly explicit in the second cane Van buys with Rack in mind and ghoulishly actualized in his venting on Kim of his rage at being parted from Ada (his “use of an alpenstock to release a brute’s fury,” 445). A hint of that danger lingers in the umbrella he carries when his jealousy flares momentarily in his meeting with Greg and even when he stands staring at Lucette in her picture hat in a bar shortly after.
The motif of the dangerous cane recurs one last time just before Van and Lucette step into the Tobakoff’s cinema to watch a prerelease film:
They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swimsuit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van. . . .
He clutched at a red rope and they entered the lounge.
“Whom did she look like?” asked Lucette. “En laid et en lard?”
“I don’t know,” he lied. “Whom?”
“Skip it,” she said. “You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!” (486-87)
Lucette sneers because the gold-threaded swimsuit reminds her of the “Titianesque Titaness” (479), the “Miss Condor” (481) stalking Van, flaunting her breasts and butt near the shipboard pool earlier in the day. Lucette asks Van whom she looked like, and although Van has noted in “Miss Condor” “a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features” (482)—Ada’s, of course—he pretends not to have seen the similarity.
Lucette is not jealous of Ada. But she is of the “Titianesque Titaness,” whose interest in Van by the pool threatens her own appeal to him there, where she has already caused “the stout snake of desire” to “weightily unwind” in Van (478). The voluptuous stranger has “greeted Van with a loud ‘hullo!’” (479), prompting Lucette to ask Van who she is; when Lucette leaves for a hairdressing appointment, the woman approaches Van to talk, “as if having spied on his solitude” (482), only for Lucette to come back for her cigarettes. Van’s response to these advances has not encouraged the buxom bikinist, but Lucette does not know that. The woman in gold
hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready—and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
“See you aprey,” said Miss Condor.
Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those
gluteal lobes and folds.
“You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!”
“I swear,” said Van, “that she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.”
“You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing
it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.” (483)
Lucette, who has punned in French in calling the stranger “Miss Condor,” puns in French again in calling her “one of your gruesome girls”: pun on slang grue, “tart, whore.”
Lucette does not regard Ada jealously as her rival; but she inevitably is. Lucette does ask Van to leave with her when Ada appears on the screen in Don Juan’s Last Fling: “That’s she! Let’s go, please, let’s go. You must not see her debasing herself. She’s terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong—” (489). Van watches on, but, “upset beyond measure” (490) by a scene in the film, decides to go, abandoning Lucette to be polite to the Robinsons who have shuffled along the row. When, after the film is at last over and she calls his room (“Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?”), he answers “Ya ne odin (I’m not alone)” (491). She can only assume he is, after all, with that grue, that golden condor.
He is not. But he has been, as it were, with another woman. He has drained himself thoroughly of the sexual temptation Lucette has built up in him all day by masturbating, twice: “And how sad, how significant that the picture projected upon the screen of his paroxysm . . . was not the recent and pertinent image of Lucette, but the indelible vision of a bent bare neck and a divided flow of black hair and a purple-tipped paint brush”(490), in other words of Ada on screen just now bringing to mind “a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks” (489).
This seems to have taken us far from Pt. 3 Ch. 2. But there Van copulates, twice, with Cordula, treating her as all but a whore. And when, a little later, Van finds Lucette, lunches with her, and visits her suite, “he removed his glasses and pressed his mouth to her mouth, and she tasted exactly as Ada at Ardis, in the early afternoon, sweet saliva, salty epithelium, cherries, coffee. Had he not sported so well and so recently, he might not have withstood the temptation, the impardonable thrill” (467). Cordula as whore in Paris ensures that Lucette remains a virgin, just as at sea Lucette jealously thinks that the “gruesome” “Miss Condor” has thwarted her last chance of losing her virginity to Van and proceeds instead to lose her life—when in fact, as always, it has been Ada who blocks her chance of Van and happiness.
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