Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  The level of the water slanted and swayed in his bath imitating the slow seesaw of the bright-blue, white-flecked sea in the porthole of his bedroom. He rang up Miss Lucinda Veen, 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 redhead, in a canvas chair on the Sun Deck: the girl sat writing 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.

  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 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 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 expression, and presently they took leave of Rachel and Robert 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 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, 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.

  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 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 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, Ardent Chambermaid, Comatose Captain!

  They met again in the afternoon.

  To most of the Tobakoff’s first-class passengers the afternoon of June 4, 1901, in the Atlantic, on the meridian of Iceland and the latitude of Ardis, seemed little conducive to open-air frolics: the fervor of its cobalt sky kept being cut by glacial gusts, and the wash of an old-fashioned swimming pool rhythmically 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 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 Yukonsk Ikon whose magic effect was said to change anemic blond maidens into konskiya deti, freckled red-haired lads, children of the Sun Horse.

  She returned after a brief swim to the sun terrace where Van lay, and said:

  “You can’t imagine”—(“I can imagine anything,” he insisted)—“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 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 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 all over when you were inspected in 1892,” said Van.

  “I’m a brand-new girl now,” she whispered. “A happy new 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, 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. 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, 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 regretted not having exhausted the fiend in Villa Venus. He accepted the touch of her blind hand working its way up his thigh and cursed nature tor 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.

  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 spontaneous generation and snorted. The swimming coach appeared from the dressing room. Simultaneously, a tall splendid creature 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 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 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 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.”

  “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 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 natatorium master, all looked on with Van.

  “Second compliment read
y,” 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 shoulder straps and turning into a prone position; “Mezhdu prochim (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 michwan Tobakoff himself got shipwrecked off Gavaille, he swam around 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 cooperation from all concerned, I imagine.”

  Demon, she said, had told her, last year at the funeral, that 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 ceremony, which poor Marina did not attend either. The wedding—in the Greek-faith style, if you please—looked like a badly 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 because) 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), 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 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.

  “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?”

  “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 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 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 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 yesterday when I threw up in the middle of the tearoom.”

  “For the sweet all is sweet,” murmured Van.

  “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, 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. 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.”

  “Yes, it’s always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads move?”

  “Roads move.”

  After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed 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.

  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 spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he 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, 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 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.”

  “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.

  “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!”

  “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. 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 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 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 typescript) 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 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 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. 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.

  She asked questions with pretty co-ed looks of doelike devotion, but it did not require much scientific training on a professor’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 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 absurdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even 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 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, retrospectively, by the time no remedy except Dr. Henry’s oil of Atlantic prose could be found in the medicine chest of the past with its banging door and toppling toothbrush.