[ 474 ]

	borough and that gentleman’s extremely compliant and ac-
	complished niece. He wanted to make a note of it—and was
	amused to find that all three pencils had not only left his bed
	table but had neatly aligned themselves head to tail along the
475.05	bottom of the outer door of the adjacent room, having covered
	quite a stretch of blue carpeting in the course of their stopped
	escape.
	The steward brought him a Continental breakfast, the
	ship’s newspaper, and the list of first-class passengers. Under
475.10	“Tourism in Italy,” the little newspaper informed him that a
	Domodossola farmer had unearthed the bones and trappings of
	one of Hannibal’s elephants, and that two American psychia-
	trists (names not given) had died an odd death in the Bocaletto
	range: the older fellow from heart failure and his boy friend
475.15	by suicide. After pondering the Admiral’s morbid interest in
	Italian mountains, Van clipped the item and picked up the
	passenger list (pleasingly surmounted by the same crest that
	adorned Cordula’s notepaper) in order to see if there was any-
	body to be avoided during the next days. The list yielded the
475.20	Robinson couple, Robert and Rachel, old bores of the family
	(Bob had retired after directing for many years one of Uncle
	Dan’s offices). His gaze, traveling on, tripped over Dr. Ivan
	Veen and pulled up at the next name. What constricted his
	heart? Why did he pass his tongue over his thick lips? Empty
475.25	formulas befitting the solemn novelists of former days who
	thought they could explain everything.
	The level of the water slanted and swayed in his bath imi-
	tating the slow seesaw of the bright-blue, white-flecked sea in
	the porthole of his bedroom. He rang up Miss Lucinda Veen,
475.30	whose suite was on the Main Deck amidships exactly above his,
	but she was absent. Wearing a white polo-neck sweater and
	tinted glasses, he went to look for her. She was not on the
	Games Deck from where he looked down at some other red-
	head, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing

[ 475 ]

	a letter at passionate speed and he thought that if ever he
	switched from ponderous factitude to light fiction he would
	have a jealous husband use binoculars to decipher from where
	he stood that outpour of illicit affection.
476.05	She was not on the Promenade Deck where blanket-swathed
	old people were reading the number-one best seller Salzman
	and awaiting with borborygmic forebubbles the eleven o’clock
	bouillon. He betook himself to the Grill, where he reserved a
	table for two. He walked over to the bar and warmly greeted
476.10	bald fat Toby who had served on the Queen Guinevere in
	1889, and 1890, and 1891, when she was still unmarried and he
	a resentful fool. They could have eloped to Lopadusa as Mr.
	and Mrs. Dairs or Sardi!
	He espied their half-sister on the forecastle deck, looking
476.15	perilously pretty in a low-cut, brightly flowered, wind-worried
	frock, talking to the bronzed but greatly aged Robinsons. She
	turned toward him, brushing back the flying hair from her
	face with a mixture of triumph and embarrassment in her ex-
	pression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert
476.20	who beamed after them, waving similarly raised hands to her,
	to him, to life, to death, to the happy old days when Demon
	paid all the gambling debts of their son, just before he was
	killed in a head-on car collision.
	She dispatched the pozharskiya kotletï with gratitude: he was
476.25	not scolding her for popping up as some sort of transcendental
	(rather than transatlantic) stowaway; and in her eagerness to
	see him she had botched her breakfast after having gone dinner-
	less on the eve. She who enjoyed the hollows and hills of the
	sea, when taking part in nautical sports, or the ups and oops,
476.30	when flying, had been ignominiously sick aboard this, her first
	liner; but the Robinsons had given her a marvelous medicine,
	she had slept ten hours, in Van’s arms all the time, and now
	hoped that both he and she were tolerably awake except for
	the fuzzy edge left by the drug.

[ 476 ]

	Quite kindly he asked where she thought she was going.
	To Ardis, with him—came the prompt reply—for ever and
	ever. Robinson’s grandfather had died in Araby at the age of
	one hundred and thirty-one, so Van had still a whole century
477.05	before him, she would build for him, in the park, several
	pavilions to house his successive harems, they would gradually
	turn, one after the other, into homes for aged ladies, and then
	into mausoleums. There hung, she said, a steeplechase picture
	of “Pale Fire with Tom Cox Up” above dear Cordula’s and
477.10	Tobak’s bed, in the suite “wangled in one minute flat” from
	them, and she wondered how it affected the Tobaks’ love life
	during sea voyages. Van interrupted Lucette’s nervous patter
	by asking her if her bath taps bore the same inscriptions as his:
	Hot Domestic, Cold Salt. Yes, she cried, Old Salt, Old Salzman,
477.15	Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!
	They met again in the afternoon.
	To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the after-
	noon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Ice-
	land and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open-
477.20	air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial
	gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhyth-
	mically flushed the green tiles, but Lucette was a hardy girl
	used to bracing winds no less than to the detestable sun. Spring
	in Fialta and a torrid May on Minataor, the famous artificial
477.25	island, had given a nectarine hue to her limbs, which looked
	lacquered with it when wet, but re-evolved their natural bloom
	as the breeze dried her skin. With glowing cheekbones and
	that glint of copper showing from under her tight rubber cap
	on nape and forehead, she evoked the Helmeted Angel of the
477.30	Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic
	blond maidens into konskie deti, freckled red-haired lads, chil-
	dren of the Sun Horse.
	She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where
	Van lay and said:

[ 477 ]

	“You can’t imagine”—(“I can imagine anything,” he in-
	sisted)—“you can imagine, okay, what oceans of lotions and
	streams of creams I am compelled to use—in the privacy of my
	balconies or in desolate sea caves—before I can exhibit myself
478.05	to the elements. I always teeter on the tender border between
	sunburn and suntan—or between lobster and Obst as writes
	Herb, my beloved painter—I’m reading his diary published by
	his last duchess, it’s in three mixed languages and lovely, I’ll
	lend it to you. You see, darling, I’d consider myself a pied
478.10	cheat if the small parts I conceal in public were not of the
	same color as those on show.”
	“You looked to me kind of sandy allover when you were
	inspected in 1892,” said Van.
	“I’m a brand-new girl now,” she whispered. “A happy new
478.15	girl. Alone with you on an abandoned ship, with ten days at
	least till my next flow. I sent you a silly note to Kingston, just
	in case you didn’t turn up.”
	They were now reclining on a poolside mat face to face, in
	symmetrical attitudes, he leaning his head on his right hand,
478.20	she propped on her left elbow. The strap of her green breast-
	cups had slipped down her slender arm, disclosing drops and
	streaks of water at the base of one nipple. An abyss of a few
	inches separated the jersey he wore from her bare midriff, the
	black wool of his trunks from her soaked green pubic mask.
478.25	The sun glazed her hipbone; a shadowed dip led to the five-
	year-old trace of an appendectomy. Her half-veiled gaze dwelt
	upon him with heavy, opaque greed, and she was right, they
	were really quite alone, he had possessed Marion Armborough
	behind her uncle’s back in much more complex circumstances,
478.30	what with the motorboat jumping like a flying fish and his
	host keeping a shotgun near the steering wheel. Joylessly, he
	felt the stout snake of desire weightily unwind; grimly, he re-
	gretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He ac-
	cepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his

[ 478 ]

	thigh and cursed nature for having planted a gnarled tree
	bursting with vile sap within a man’s crotch. Suddenly Lucette
	drew away, exhaling a genteel “merde.” Eden was full of
	people.
479.05	Two half-naked children in shrill glee came running toward
	the pool. A Negro nurse brandished their diminutive bras in
	angry pursuit. Out of the water a bald head emerged by spon-
	taneous generation and snorted. The swimming coach appeared
	from the dressing room. Simultaneously, a tall splendid crea-
479.10	ture with trim ankles and repulsively fleshy thighs, stalked
	past the Veens, all but treading on Lucette’s emerald-studded
	cigarette case. Except for a golden ribbon and a bleached
	mane, her long, ripply, beige back was bare all the way down
	to the tops of her slowly and lusciously rolling buttocks, which
479.15	divulged, in alternate motion, their nether bulges from under the
	lamé loincloth. Just before disappearing behind a rounded white
	corner, the Titianesque Titaness half-turned her brown face
	and greeted Van with a loud “hullo!”
	Lucette wanted to know: kto siya pava? (who’s that stately
479.20	dame?)
	“I thought she addressed you,” answered Van, “I did not
	distinguish her face and do not remember that bottom.”
	“She gave you a big jungle smile,” said Lucette, readjusting
	her green helmet, with touchingly graceful movements of her
479.25	raised wings, and touchingly flashing the russet feathering of
	her armpits.
	“Come with me, hm?” she suggested, rising from the mat.
	He shook his head, looking up at her: “You rise,” he said,
	“like Aurora,”
479.30	“His first compliment,” observed Lucette with a little cock
	of her head as if speaking to an invisible confidant.
	He put on his tinted glasses and watched her stand on the
	diving board, her ribs framing the hollow of her intake as she
	prepared to ardis into the amber. He wondered, in a mental

[ 479 ]

	footnote that might come handy some day, if sunglasses or any
	other varieties of vision, which certainly twist our concept of
	“space,” do not also influence our style of speech. The two
	well-formed lassies, the nurse, the prurient merman, the nata-
480.05	torium master, all looked on with Van.
	“Second compliment ready,” he said as she returned to his
	side. “You’re a divine diver. I go in with a messy plop.”
	“But you swim faster,” she complained, slipping off her shoul-
	der straps and turning into a prone position; “Mezhdu prochim
480.10	(by the way), is it true that a sailor in Tobakoff’s day was not
	taught to swim so he wouldn’t die a nervous wreck if the ship
	went down?”
	“A common sailor, perhaps,” said Van. “When michman
	Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around
480.15	comfortably for hours, frightening away sharks with snatches
	of old songs and that sort of thing, until a fishing boat rescued
	him—one of those miracles that require a minimum of coopera-
	tion from all concerned, I imagine,”
	Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that
480.20	he was buying an island in the Gavailles (“incorrigible dreamer,”
	drawled Van). He had “wept like a fountain” in Nice, but had
	cried with even more abandon in Valentina, at an earlier cere-
	mony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding
	—in the Greek-faith style, if you please—looked like a badly
480.25	faked episode in an old movie, the priest was gaga and the
	dyakon drunk, and—perhaps, fortunately—Ada’s thick white
	veil was as impervious to light as a widow’s weeds. Van said
	he would not listen to that.
	“Oh, you must,” she rejoined, “hotya bï potomu (if only be-
480.30	cause) one of her shafer’s (bachelors who take turns holding
	the wedding crown over the bride’s head) looked momentarily,
	in impassive profile and impertinent attitude (he kept raising
	the heavy metallic venets too high, too athletically high as if
	trying on purpose to keep it as far as possible from her head),

[ 480 ]

	exactly like you, like a pale, ill-shaven twin, delegated by you
	from wherever you were,”
	At a place nicely called Agony, in Terra del Fuego. He felt
	an uncanny tingle as he recalled that when he received there
481.05	the invitation to the wedding (airmailed by the groom’s sinister
	sister) he was haunted for several nights by dream after dream,
	growing fainter each time (much as her movie he was to pursue
	from flick-house to flick-house at a later stage of his life) of
	his holding that crown over her.
481.10	“Your father,” added Lucette, “paid a man from Belladonna
	to take pictures—but of course, real fame begins only when
	one’s name appears in that cine-magazine’s crossword puzzle.
	We all know it will never happen, never! Do you hate me
	now?”
481.15	“I don’t,” he said, passing his hand over her sun-hot back and
	rubbing her coccyx to make pussy purr. “Alas, I don’t! I love
	you with a brother’s love and maybe still more tenderly. Would
	you like me to order drinks?”
	“I’d like you to go on and on,” she muttered, her nose buried
481.20	in the rubber pillow.
	“There’s that waiter coming. What shall we have—Hono-
	loolers?”
	“You’ll have them with Miss Condor” (nasalizing the first
	syllable) “when I go to dress. For the moment I want only
481.25	tea. Mustn’t mix drugs and drinks. Have to take the famous
	Robinson pill sometime tonight. Sometime tonight.”
	“Two teas, please.”
	“And lots of sandwiches, George. Foie gras, ham, anything.”
	“It’s very bad manners,” remarked Van, “to invent a name
481.30	for a poor chap who can’t answer: ‘Yes, Mademoiselle Condor.’
	Best Franco-English pun I’ve ever heard, incidentally.”
	“But his name is George. He was awfully kind to me yester-
	day when I threw up in the middle of the tearoom.”
	“For the sweet all is sweet,” murmured Van.

[ 481 ]

	“And so were the old Robinsons,” she rambled on. “Not
	much chance, is there, they might turn up here? They’ve been
	sort of padding after me, rather pathetically, ever since we
	happened to have lunch at the same table on the boat-train,
482.05	and I realized who they were but was sure they would not
	recognize the little fat girl seen in eighteen eighty-five or -six,
	but they are hypnotically talkative—at first we thought you
	were French, this salmon is really delicious, what’s your home
	town?—and I’m a weak fool, and one thing led to another.
482.10	Young people are less misled by the passage of time than the
	established old who have not much changed lately and are not
	used to the long-unseen young changing.”
	“That’s very clever, darling,” said Van “—except that time
	itself is motionless and changeless.”
482.15	“Yes, it’s always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads
	move?”
	“Roads move.”
	After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hair-
	dresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed
482.20	on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case
	with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the
	platinum sun in its aura of “film-color” but only managing to
	fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil
	temptation.
482.25	A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava
	(peahen) reappeared—this time with an apology.
	Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spec-
	tacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her in-
	nocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he
482.30	looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature
	of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond
	hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory,
	her raven, her pale pout.
	“I was told,” she explained, “that a great friend of mine,

[ 482 ]

	Vivian Vale, the cootooriay—voozavay entendue?—had shaved
	his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?”
	“Logically, no, ma’am,” replied Van.
	She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not
483.05	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.
483.10	“You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome
	girls!”
	“I swear,“ said Van, “that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t
	deceive you.”
	“You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl.
483.15	If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.”
	“You promised me a harem,” Van gently rebuked her.
	“Not today, not today! Today is sacred.”
	The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick
	mad mouth.
483.20	“Come and see my cabin,” she pleaded as he pushed her away
	with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the
	fire of her lips and tongue. “I simply must show you their
	pillows and piano. There’s Cordula’s smell in all the drawers.
	I beseech you!”
483.25	“Run along now,” said Van. “You’ve no right to excite me
	like that. I’ll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not
	behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.”
	In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to
	the Captain’s table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr. and Mrs.
483.30	Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between
	the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and
	an ignoramus.
	He called the steward and bade him carry the note back,
	with the penciled scrawl: “no such couple.” He lay in his bath

[ 483 ]

	for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else
	besides a hysterical virgin’s body. He discovered an insidious
	omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with
	the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible—to
484.05	an automatic reader—since the truncated end of one sentence,
	and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted
	to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which
	he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh,
	had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his type-
484.10	script) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all
	things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende
	fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly).
	“Sure you’d not prefer the restaurant?” he inquired when
	Lucette, looking even more naked in her short evening frock
484.15	than she had in her “bickny,” joined him at the door of the
	grill. “It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating
	jazzband. No?”
	Tenderly she shook her jeweled head.
	They had huge succulent “grugru shrimps” (the yellow
484.20	larvae of a palm weevil) and roast bearlet à la Tobakoff. Only
	half-a-dozen tables were occupied, and except for a nasty engine
	vibration, which they had not noticed at lunch, everything was
	subdued, soft, and cozy. He took advantage of her odd demure
	silence to tell her in detail about the late pencil-palpating Mr.
484.25	Muldoon and also about a Kingston case of glossolalia involving
	a Yukonsk woman who spoke several Slavic-like dialects which
	existed, maybe, on Terra, but certainly not in Estotiland. Alas,
	another case (with a quibble on cas) engaged his attention
	subverbally.
484.30	She asked questions with pretty co-ed looks of doelike devo-
	tion, but it did not require much scientific training on a pro-
	fessor’s part to perceive that her charming embarrassment and
	the low notes furring her voice were as much contrived as her
	afternoon effervescence had been. Actually she thrashed in the

[ 484 ]

	throes of an emotional disarray which only the heroic self-
	control of an American aristocrat could master. Long ago she
	had made up her mind that by forcing the man whom she ab-
	surdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even
485.05	once, she would, somehow, with the help of some prodigious
	act of nature, transform a brief tactile event into an eternal
	spiritual tie; but she also knew that if it did not happen on the
	first night of their voyage, their relationship would slip back
	into the exhausting, hopeless, hopelessly familiar pattern of
485.10	banter and counterbanter, with the erotic edge taken for
	granted, but kept as raw as ever. He understood her condition
	or at least believed, in despair, that he had understood it, retro-
	spectively, by the time no remedy except Dr. Henry’s oil of
	Atlantic prose could be found in the medicine chest of the past
485.15	with its banging door and toppling toothbrush.
	As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile
	and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in
	front of her like stylized angel wings, he reflected abjectly that
	he would have to endure, if conforming to his innermost code
485.20	of honor, five such days of ruttish ache—not only because she
	was lovely and special but because he could never go without
	girl pleasure for more than forty-eight hours. He feared pre-
	cisely that which she wanted to happen: that once he had tasted
	her wound and its grip, she would keep him insatiably captive
485.25	for weeks, maybe months, maybe more, but that a harsh
	separation would inevitably come, with a new hope and the
	old despair never able to strike a balance. But worst of all,
	while aware, and ashamed, of lusting after a sick child, he felt,
	in an obscure twist of ancient emotions, his lust sharpened by
485.30	the shame.
	They had sweet, thick Turkish coffee and surreptitiously he
	looked at his wrist watch to check—what? How long the tor-
	ture of self-denial could still be endured? How soon were cer-
	tain events coming such as a ballroom dance competition? Her

[ 485 ]

	age? (Lucinda Veen was only five hours old if one reversed
	the human “time current.”)
	She was such a pathetic darling that, as they proceeded to
	leave the grill, he could not help, for sensuality is the best
486.05	breeding broth of fatal error, caressing her glossy young shoul-
	der so as to fit for an instant, the happiest in her life, its ideal
	convexity bilboquet-wise within the hollow of his palm. Then
	she walked before him as conscious of his gaze as if she were
	winning a prize for “poise.” He could describe her dress only
486.10	as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches), ac-
	centuating 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. As they crossed land-
	ings where velvet ropes were hastily stretched by Russian
486.15	sailors (who glanced with sympathy at the handsome pair
	speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that
	deck, Lucette made him think of some acrobatic creature im-
	mune to the rough seas. He saw with gentlemanly displeasure
	that her tilted chin and black wings, and free stride, attracted
486.20	not only blue innocent eyes but the bold stare of lewd fellow
	passengers. He loudly exclaimed that he would slap the next
	jackanapes, and involuntarily walked backward with ridiculous
	truculent gestures into a folded deck chair (he also running the
	reel of time backward, in a minor way), which caused her to
486.25	emit a yelp of laughter. Feeling now much happier, enjoying
	his gallant champagne-temper, she steered Van away from the
	mirage of her admirers, back to the lift.
	They examined without much interest the objects of pleasure
	in a display window. Lucette sneered at a gold-threaded swim-
486.30	suit. The presence of a riding crop and a pickax puzzled Van.
	Half a dozen glossy-jacketed copies of Salzman were impres-
	sively heaped between a picture of the handsome, thoughtful,
	now totally forgotten, author and a Mingo-Bingo vase of im-
	mortelles.

[ 486 ]

	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?”
487.05	“Skip it,” she said. “You’re mine tonight. Mine, mine, mine!”
	She was quoting Kipling—the same phrase that Ada used to
	address to Dack. He cast around for a straw of Procrustean
	procrastination.
	“Please,” said Lucette, “I’m tired of walking around, I’m
487.10	frail, I’m feverish, I hate storms, let’s all go to bed!”
	“Hey, look!” he cried, pointing to a poster. “They’re show-
	ing something called Don Juan’s Last Fling. It’s prerelease and
	for adults only. Topical Tobakoff!”
	“It’s going to be an unmethylated bore,” said Lucy (Houssaie
487.15	School, 1890) but he had already pushed aside the entrance
	drapery.
	They came in at the beginning of an introductory picture,
	featuring a cruise to Greenland, with heavy seas in gaudy
	technicolor. It was a rather irrelevant trip since their Tobakoff
487.20	did not contemplate calling at Godhavn; moreover, the cinema
	theater was swaying in counterrhythm to the cobalt-and-emerald
	swell on the screen. No wonder the place was emptovato, as
	Lucette observed, and she went on to say that the Robinsons
	had saved her life by giving her on the eve a tubeful of Quietus
487.25	Pills.
	“Want one? One a day keeps ‘no shah’ away. Pun. You can
	chew it, it’s sweet.”
	“Jolly good name. No, thank you, my sweet. Besides you
	have only five left.”
487.30	“Don’t worry, I have it all planned out. There may be less
	than five days.”
	“More in fact, but no matter. Our measurements of time are
	meaningless; the most accurate clock is a joke; you’ll read all
	about it someday, you just wait.”

[ 487 ]

	“Perhaps, not. I mean, perhaps I shan’t have the patience. I
	mean, his charwoman could never finish reading Leonardo’s
	palm. I may fall asleep before I get through your next book.”
	“An art-class legend,” said Van.
488.05	“That’s the final iceberg, I know by the music. Let’s go, Van!
	Or you want to see Hoole as Hooan?”
	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.
488.10	He enjoyed her impatience, the fool permitted himself to be
	stirred by it, the cretin whispered, prolonging the free, new,
	apricot fire of anticipation:
	“If you’re a good girl we’ll have drinks in my sitting room
	at midnight.”
488.15	The main picture had now started. The three leading parts—
	cadaverous Don Juan, paunchy Leporello on his donkey, and
	not too irresistible, obviously forty-year-old Donna Anna—
	were played by solid stars, whose images passed by in “semi-
	stills,” or as some say “translucencies,” in a brief introduction.
488.20	Contrary to expectations, the picture turned out to be quite
	good.
	On the way to the remote castle where the difficult lady,
	widowed by his sword, has finally promised him a long night
	of love in her chaste and chilly chamber, the aging libertine
488.25	nurses his potency by spurning the advances of a succession of
	robust belles. A gitana predicts to the gloomy cavalier that be-
	fore reaching the castle he will have succumbed to the wiles
	of her sister, Dolores, a dancing girl (lifted from Osberg’s
	novella, as was to be proved in the ensuing lawsuit). She also
488.30	predicted something to Van, for even before Dolores came out
	of the circus tent to water Juan’s horse, Van knew who she
	would be.
	In the magic rays of the camera, in the controlled delirium
	of ballerina grace, ten years of her life had glanced off and

[ 488 ]

	she was again that slip of a girl qui n’en porte pas (as he had
	jested once to annoy her governess by a fictitious Frenchman’s
	mistranslation): a remembered triviality that intruded upon the
	chill of his present emotion with the jarring stupidity of an
489.05	innocent stranger’s asking an absorbed voyeur for directions
	in a labyrinth of mean lanes.
	Lucette recognized Ada three or four seconds later, but then
	clutched his wrist:
	“Oh, how awful! It was bound to happen. That’s she! Let’s
489.10	go, please, let’s go. You must not see her debasing herself. She’s
	terribly made up, every gesture is childish and wrong—”
	“Just another minute,” said Van.
	Terrible? Wrong? She was absolutely perfect, and strange,
	and poignantly familiar. By some stroke of art, by some en-
489.15	chantment of chance, the few brief scenes she was given formed
	a perfect compendium of her 1884 and 1888 and 1892 looks.
	The gitanilla bends her head over the live table of Leporello’s
	servile back to trace on a scrap of parchment a rough map of
	the way to the castle. Her neck shows white through her long
489.20	black hair separated by the motion of her shoulder. It is no
	longer another man’s Dolores, but a little girl twisting an aqua-
	relle brush in the paint of Van’s blood, and Donna Anna’s castle
	is now a bog flower.
	The Don rides past three windmills, whirling black against
489.25	an ominous sunset, and saves her from the miller who accuses
	her of stealing a fistful of flour and tears her thin dress. Wheezy
	but still game, Juan carries her across a brook (her bare toe
	acrobatically tickling his face) and sets her down, top up, on
	the turf of an olive grove. Now they stand facing each other.
489.30	She fingers voluptuously the jeweled pommel of his sword,
	she rubs her firm girl belly against his embroidered tights, and
	all at once the grimace of a premature spasm writhes across the
	poor Don’s expressive face. He angrily disentangles himself
	and staggers back to his steed.

[ 489 ]

	Van, however, did not understand until much later (when
	he saw—had to see; and then see again and again—the entire
	film, with its melancholy and grotesque ending in Donna Anna’s
	castle) that what seemed an incidental embrace constituted the
490.05	Stone Cuckold’s revenge. In fact, being upset beyond measure,
	he decided to go even before the olive-grove sequence dissolved.
	Just then three old ladies with stony faces showed their disap-
	proval of the picture by rising from beyond Lucette (who was
	slim enough to remain seated) and brushing past Van (who
490.10	stood up) in three jerky shuffles. Simultaneously he noticed two
	people, the long-lost Robinsons, who apparently had been sep-
	arated from Lucette by those three women, and were now
	moving over to her. Beaming and melting in smiles of benev-
	olence and self-effacement, they sidled up and plumped down
490.15	next to Lucette, who turned to them with her last, last, last free
	gift of staunch courtesy that was stronger than failure and
	death. They were craning already across her, with radiant
	wrinkles and twittery fingers toward Van when he pounced
	upon their intrusion to murmur a humorous bad-sailor excuse
490.20	and leave the cinema hall to its dark lurching.
	In a series of sixty-year-old actions which now I can grind
	into extinction only by working on a succession of words until
	the rhythm is right, I, Van, retired to my bathroom, shut the
	door (it swung open at once, but then closed of its own accord)
490.25	and using a temporary expedient less far-fetched than that hit
	upon by Father Sergius (who chops off the wrong member in
	Count Tolstoy’s famous anecdote), vigorously got rid of the
	prurient pressure as he had done the last time seventeen years
	ago. And how sad, how significant that the picture projected
490.30	upon the screen of his paroxysm, while the unlockable door
	swung open again with the movement of a deaf man cupping
	his ear, 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 ]

	Then, for the sake of safety, he repeated the disgusting but
	necessary act.
	He saw the situation dispassionately now and felt he was
	doing right by going to bed and switching off the “ectric” light
491.05	(a surrogate creeping back into international use). The blue
	ghost of the room gradually established itself as his eyes got
	used to the darkness. He prided himself on his willpower. He
	welcomed the dull pain in his drained root. He welcomed the
	thought which suddenly seemed so absolutely true, and new,
491.10	and as lividly real as the slowly widening gap of the sitting
	room’s doorway, namely, that on the morrow (which was at
	least, and at best, seventy years away) he would explain to
	Lucette, as a philosopher and another girl’s brother, that he
	knew how agonizing and how absurd it was to put all one’s
491.15	spiritual fortune on one physical fancy and that his plight closely
	resembled hers, but that he managed, after all, to live, to work,
	and not pine away because he refused to wreck her life with a
	brief affair and because Ada was still a child. At that point the
	surface of logic began to be affected by a ripple of sleep, but
491.20	he sprang back into full consciousness at the sound of the
	telephone. The thing seemed to squat for each renewed burst
	of ringing and at first he decided to let it ring itself out. Then
	his nerves surrendered to the insisting signal, and he snatched
	up the receiver.
491.25	No doubt he was morally right in using the first pretext at
	hand to keep her away from his bed; but he also knew, as a
	gentleman and an artist, that the lump of words he brought up
	was trite and cruel, and it was only because she could not
	accept him as being either, that she believed him:
491.30	“Mozhno pridti teper’ (can I come now)?” asked Lucette.
	“Ya ne odin (I’m not alone),” answered Van.
	A small pause followed; then she hung up.
	After he had stolen away, she had remained trapped between
	the cozy Robinsons (Rachel, dangling a big handbag, had

[ 491 ]

	squeezed by immediately to the place Van had vacated, and Bob
	had moved one seat up). Because of a sort of pudeur she did not
	inform them that the actress (obscurely and fleetingly billed as
	“Theresa Zegris” in the “going-up” lift-list at the end of the
492.05	picture) who had managed to obtain the small but not unim-
	portant part of the fatal gipsy was none other than the pallid
	schoolgirl they might have seen in Ladore. They invited Lucette
	to a Coke with them—proselytical teetotalists—in their cabin,
	which was small and stuffy and badly insulated, one could hear
492.10	every word and whine of two children being put to bed by a
	silent seasick nurse, so late, so late—no, not children, but prob-
	ably very young, very much disappointed honeymooners.
	“We understand,” said Robert Robinson going for another
	supply to his portable fridge, “we understand perfectly that
492.15	Dr. Veen is deeply immersed in his Inter Resting Work—per-
	sonally, I sometimes regret having retired—but do you think,
	Lucy, prosit!, that he might accept to have dinner tomorrow
	with you and us and maybe Another Couple, whom he’ll cer-
	tainly enjoy meeting? Shall Mrs. Robinson send him a formal
492.20	invitation? Would you sign it, too?”
	“I don’t know, I’m very tired,” she said, “and the rock and
	roll are getting worse. I guess I’ll go up to my hutch and take
	your Quietus. Yes, by all means, let’s have dinner, all of us.
	I really needed that lovely cold drink.”
492.25	Having cradled the nacred receiver she changed into black
	slacks and a lemon shirt (planned for tomorrow morning);
	looked in vain for a bit of plain notepaper without caravelle or
	crest; ripped out the flyleaf of Herb’s Journal, and tried to
	think up something amusing, harmless, and scintillating to say
492.30	in a suicide note. But she had planned everything except that
	note, so she tore her blank life in two and disposed of the pieces
	in the W.C.; she poured herself a glass of dead water from a
	moored decanter, gulped down one by one four green pills,
	and, sucking the fifth, walked to the lift which took her one

[ 492 ]

	click up from her three-room suite straight to the red-carpeted
	promenade-deck bar. There, two sluglike young men were in
	the act of sliding off their red toadstools, and the older one
	said to the other as they turned to leave: “You may fool his
493.05	lordship, my dear, but not me, oh, no.”
	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!
493.10	She had no purse with her. She almost fell from her convex
	ridiculous seat as she fumbled in her shirt pocket for a stray
	bank note.
	“Beddydee,” said Toby the barman with a fatherly smile,
	which she mistook for a leer. “Bedtime, miss,” he repeated and
493.15	patted her ungloved hand.
	Lucette recoiled and forced herself to retort distinctly and
	haughtily:
	“Mr. Veen, my cousin, will pay you tomorrow and bash
	your false teeth in.”
493.20	Six, seven—no, more than that, about ten steps up. Dix
	marches. Legs and arms. Dimanche. Déjeuner sur l’herbe. Tout
	le monde pue. Ma belle-mère avale son râtelier. Sa petite chienne,
	after too much exercise, gulps twice and quietly vomits, a pink
	pudding onto the picnic nappe. Après quoi she waddles off.
493.25	These steps are something.
	While dragging herself up she had to hang onto the rail.
	Her twisted progress was that of a cripple. Once on the open
	deck she felt the solid impact of the black night, and the
	mobility of the accidental home she was about to leave.
493.30	Although Lucette had never died before—no, dived before,
	Violet—from such a height, in such a disorder of shadows and
	snaking reflections, she went with hardly a splash through the
	wave that humped to welcome her. That perfect end was
	spoiled by her instinctively surfacing in an immediate sweep—

[ 493 ]

	instead of surrendering under water to her drugged lassitude
	as she had planned to do on her last night ashore if it ever did
	come to this. The silly girl had not rehearsed the technique of
	suicide as, say, free-fall parachutists do every day in the element
494.05	of another chapter. Owing to the tumultuous swell and her not
	being sure which way to peer through the spray and the dark-
	ness and her own tentaclinging hair—t,a,c,l—she could not
	make out the lights of the liner, an easily imagined many-eyed
	bulk mightily receding in heartless triumph. Now I’ve lost my
494.10	next note.
	Got it.
	The sky was also heartless and dark, and her body, her head,
	and particularly those damned thirsty trousers, felt clogged
	with Oceanus Nox, n,o,x. At every slap and splash of cold wild
494.15	salt, she heaved with anise-flavored nausea and there was an
	increasing number, okay, or numbness, in her neck and arms.
	As she began losing track of herself, she thought it proper to
	inform a series of receding Lucettes—telling them to pass it on
	and on in a trick-crystal regression—that what death amounted
494.20	to was only a more complete assortment of the infinite fractions
	of solitude.
	She did not see her whole life flash before her as we all were
	afraid she might have done; the red rubber of a favorite doll
	remained safely decomposed among the myosotes of an un-
494.25	analyzable brook; 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 a pair of new vair-furred bedroom
	slippers, which Brigitte had forgotten to pack; she saw Van
	wiping his mouth before answering, and then, still withholding
494.30	the answer, throwing his napkin on the table as they both got
	up; and she saw a girl with long black hair quickly bend in
	passing to clap her hands over a dackel in a half-tom wreath.
	A brilliantly illumined motorboat was launched from the
	not-too-distant ship with Van and the swimming coach and the

[ 494 ]

[ 495 ]