Ada, or Ador: A Family Chronicle

If the relief, any relief, of a lad’s ardor had been Van’s sole concern; if, in other words, no love had been involved, our young friend might have put up — for one casual summer — with the nastiness and ambiguity of his behavior. But since Van loved Ada, that complicated release could not be an end in itself; or, rather, it was only a dead end, because unshared; because horribly hidden; because not liable to melt into any subsequent phase of incomparably greater rapture which, like a misty summit beyond the fierce mountain pass, promised to be the true pinnacle of his perilous relationship with Ada. During that midsummer week or fortnight, notwithstanding those daily butterfly kisses on that hair, on that neck, Van felt even farther removed from her than he had been on the eve of the day when his mouth had accidentally come into contact with an inch of her skin hardly perceived by him sensually in the maze of the shattal tree.

But nature is motion and growth. One afternoon he came up behind her in the music room more noiselessly than ever before because he happened to be barefooted — and, turning her head, little Ada shut her eyes and pressed her lips to his in a fresh-rose kiss that entranced and baffled Van.

‘Now run along,’ she said, ‘quick, quick, I’m busy,’ and as he lagged like an idiot, she anointed his flushed forehead with her paintbrush in the semblance of an ancient Estotian ‘sign of the cross.’ ‘I have to finish this,’ she added, pointing with her violet-purple-soaked thin brush at a blend of Ophrys scolopax and Ophrys veenae, ‘and in a minute we must dress up because Marina wants Kim to take our picture — holding hands and grinning’ (grinning, and then turning back to her hideous flower).

17

The hugest dictionary in the library said under Lip: ‘Either of a pair of fleshy folds surrounding an orifice.’

Mileyshiy Emile, as Ada called Monsieur Littré, spoke thus: ‘Partie extérieure et charnue qui forme le contour de la bouche… Les deux bords d’une plaie simple’ (we simply speak with our wounds; wounds procreate) ‘…C’est le membre qui lèche.’ Dearest Emile!

A fat little Russian encyclopedia was solely concerned with guba, lip, as meaning a district court in ancient Lyaska or an arctic gulf.

Their lips were absurdly similar in style, tint and tissue. Van’s upper one resembled in shape a long-winged sea bird coming directly at you, while the nether lip, fat and sullen, gave a touch of brutality to his usual expression. Nothing of that brutality existed in the case of Ada’s lips, but the bow shape of the upper one and the largeness of the lower one with its disdainful prominence and opaque pink repeated Van’s mouth in a feminine key.

During our children’s kissing phase (a not particularly healthy fortnight of long messy embraces), some odd pudibund screen cut them off, so to speak, from each other’s raging bodies. But contacts and reactions to contacts could not help coming through like a distant vibration of desperate signals. Endlessly, steadily, delicately, Van would brush his lips against hers, teasing their burning bloom, back and forth, right, left, life, death, reveling in the contrast between the airy tenderness of the open idyll and the gross congestion of the hidden flesh.

There were other kisses. ‘I’d like to taste,’ he said, ‘the inside of your mouth. God, how I’d like to be a goblin-sired Gulliver and explore that cave.’

‘I can lend you my tongue,’ she said, and did.

A large boiled strawberry, still very hot. He sucked it in as far as it would go. He held her close and lapped her palate. Their chins got thoroughly wet. ‘Hanky,’ she said, and informally slipped her hand into his trouser pocket, but withdrew it quickly, and had him give it himself. No comment.

(‘I appreciated your tact,’ he told her when they recalled, with amusement and awe that rapture and that discomfort. ‘But we lost a lot of time — irretrievable opals.’)