Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

‘One remembers, Van, those little things much more clearly than the big fatal ones. As for example the clothes you wore at any given moment, at a generously given moment, with the sun on the chairs and the floor. I was practically naked, of course, being a neutral pure little child. But she wore a boy’s shirt and a short skirt, and all you had on were those wrinkled, soiled shorts, shorter because wrinkled, and they smelled as they always did after you’d been on Terra with Ada, with Rattner on Ada, with Ada on Antiterra in Ardis Forest — oh, they positively stank, you know, your little shorts of lavendered Ada, and her catfood, and your caked algarroba!’

Should that letter, now next to the brandy, listen to all this? Was it from Ada after all (there was no address)? Because it was Lucette’s mad, shocking letter of love that was doing the talking.

‘Van, it will make you smile’ [thus in the MS. Ed.].

‘Van,’ said Lucette, ‘it will make you smile’ (it did not: that prediction is seldom fulfilled), ‘but if you posed the famous Van Question, I would answer in the affirmative.’

What he had asked little Cordula. In that bookshop behind the revolving paperbacks’ stand, The Gitanilla, Our Laddies, Clichy Clichés, Six Pricks, The Bible Unabridged, Mertvago Forever, The Gitanilla… He was known in the beau monde for asking that question the very first time he met a young lady.

‘Oh, to be sure, it was not easy! In parked automobiles and at rowdy parties, thrusts had to be parried, advances fought off! And only last winter, on the Italian Riviera, there was a youngster of fourteen or fifteen, an awfully precocious but terribly shy and neurotic young violinist, who reminded Marina of her brother… Well, for almost three months, every blessed afternoon, I had him touch me, and I reciprocated, and after that I could sleep at last without pills, but otherwise I haven’t once kissed male epithelia in all my love — I mean, life. Look, I can swear I never have, by — by William Shakespeare’ (extending dramatically one hand toward a shelf with a set of thick red books).

‘Hold it!’ cried Van. ‘That’s the Collected Works of Falknermann, dumped by my predecessor.’

‘Pah!’ uttered Lucette.

‘And, please, don’t use that expletive.’

‘Forgive me — oh, I know, oh, I shan’t.’

‘Of course, you know. All the same, you are very sweet. I’m glad you came.’

‘I’m glad, too,’ she said. ‘But Van! Don’t you dare think I "relanced" you to reiterate that I’m madly and miserably in love with you and that you can do anything you want with me. If I didn’t simply press the button and slip that note into the burning slit and cataract away, it was because I had to see you, because there is something else you must know, even if it makes you detest and despise Ada and me. Otvratitel’no trudno

(it is disgustingly hard) to explain, especially for a virgin — well, technically, a virgin, a kokotische virgin, half poule, half puella. I realize the privacy of the subject, mysterious matters that one should not discuss even with a vaginal brother — mysterious, not merely in their moral and mystical aspect —’

Uterine — but close enough. It certainly came from Lucette’s sister. He knew that shade and that shape. ‘That shade of blue, that shape of you’ (corny song on the Sonorola). Blue in the face from pleading RSVP.

‘— but also in a direct physical sense. Because, darling Van, in that direct physical sense I know as much about our Ada as you.’

‘Fire away,’ said Van, wearily.

‘She never wrote you about it?’

Negative Throat Sound.

‘Something we used to call Pressing the Spring?’

‘We?’

‘She and I.’

N.T.S.

‘Do you remember Grandmother’s scrutoir between the globe and the gueridon? In the library?’

‘I don’t even know what a scrutoir is; and I do not visualize the gueridon.’

‘But you remember the globe?’

Dusty Tartary with Cinderella’s finger rubbing the place where the invader would fall.

‘Yes, I do: and a kind of stand with golden dragons painted all over it.’

‘That’s what I meant by "gueridon." It was really a Chinese stand japanned in red lacquer, and the scrutoir stood in between.’

‘China or Japan? Make up your mind. And I still don’t know how your inscrutable looks. I mean, looked in 1884 or 1888.’

Scrutoir. Almost as bad as the other with her Blemolopias and Molospermas.

‘Van, Vanichka, we are straying from the main point. The point is that the writing desk or if you like, secretaire —’

‘I hate both, but it stood at the opposite end of the black divan.’