Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Oh no!” interrupted Van. “Two coffees, four eggs, et cetera. I refuse to let the staff know that I have two girls in my bed, one (teste Flora) is enough for my little needs.”

  “Little needs!” snorted Lucette. “Let me go, Ada. I need a bath, and he needs you.”

  “Pet stays right here,” cried audacious Ada, and with one graceful swoop plucked her sister’s nightdress off. Involuntarily Lucette bent her head and frail spine; then she lay back on the outer half of Ada’s pillow in a martyr’s pudibund swoon, her locks spreading their orange blaze against the black velvet of the padded headboard.

  “Uncross your arms, silly,” ordered Ada and kicked off the top sheet that partly covered six legs. Simultaneously, without turning her head, she slapped furtive Van away from her rear, and with her other hand made magic passes over the small but very pretty breasts, gemmed with sweat, and along the flat palpitating belly of a seasand nymph, down to the firebird seen by Van once, fully fledged now, and as fascinating in its own way as his favorite’s blue raven. Enchantress! Acrasia!

  What we have now is not so much a Casanovanic situation (that double-wencher had a definitely monochromatic pencil—in keeping with the memoirs of his dingy era) as a much earlier canvas, of the Venetian (sensu largo) school, reproduced (in “Forbidden Masterpieces”) expertly enough to stand the scrutiny of a bordel’s vue d’oiseau.

  Thus seen from above, as if reflected in the ciel mirror that Eric had naively thought up in his Cyprian dreams (actually all is shadow up there, for the blinds are still drawn, shutting out the gray morning), we have the large island of the bed illumined from our left (Lucette’s right) by a lamp burning with a murmuring incandescence on the west-side bedtable. The top sheet and quilt are tumbled at the footboardless south of the island where the newly landed eye starts on its northern trip, up the younger Miss Veen’s pried-open legs. A dewdrop on russet moss eventually finds a stylistic response in the aquamarine tear on her flaming cheekbone. Another trip from the port to the interior reveals the central girl’s long white left thigh; we visit souvenir stalls: Ada’s red-lacquered talons, which lead a man’s reasonably recalcitrant, pardonably yielding wrist out of the dim east to the bright russet west, and the sparkle of her diamond necklace, which, for the nonce, is not much more valuable than the aquamarines on the other (west) side of Novelty Novel lane. The scarred male nude on the island’s east coast is half-shaded, and, on the whole, less interesting, though considerably more aroused than is good for him or a certain type of tourist. The recently repapered wall immediately west of the now louder-murmuring (et pour cause) dorocene lamp is ornamented in the central girl’s honor with Peruvian “honeysuckle” being visited (not only for its nectar, I’m afraid, but for the animalcules stuck in it) by marvelous Loddigesia Hummingbirds, while the bedtable on that side bears a lowly box of matches, a karavanchik of cigarettes, a Monaco ashtray, a copy of Voltemand’s poor thriller, and a Lurid Oncidium Orchid in an amethystine vaselet. The companion piece on Van’s side supports a similar superstrong but unlit lamp, a dorophone, a box of Wipex, a reading loupe, the returned Ardis album, and a separatum “Soft music as cause of brain tumors,” by Dr. Anbury (young Rattner’s waggish pen-name). Sounds have colors, colors have smells. The fire of Lucette’s amber runs through the night of Ada’s odor and ardor, and stops at the threshold of Van’s lavender goat. Ten eager, evil, loving, long fingers belonging to two different young demons caress their helpless bed pet. Ada’s loose black hair accidentally tickles the local curio she holds in her left fist, magnanimously demonstrating her acquisition. Unsigned and un-framed.

  That about summed it up (for the magical gewgaw liquefied all at once, and Lucette, snatching up her nightdress, escaped to her room). It was only the sort of shop where the jeweler’s fingertips have a tender way of enhancing the preciousness of a trinket by something akin to a rubbing of hindwings on the part of a settled lycaenid or to the frottage of a conjurer’s thumb dissolving a coin; but just in such a shop the anonymous picture attributed to Grillo or Obieto, caprice or purpose, ober- or unterart, is found by the ferreting artist.

  “She’s terribly nervous, the poor kid,” remarked Ada stretching across Van toward the Wipex. “You can order that breakfast now—unless … Oh, what a good sight! Orchids. I’ve never seen a man make such a speedy recovery.”

  “Hundreds of whores and scores of cuties more experienced than the future Mrs. Vinelander have told me that.”

  “I may not be as bright as I used to be,” sadly said Ada, “but I know somebody who is not simply a cat, but a polecat, and that’s Cordula Tobacco alias Madame Perwitsky. I read in this morning’s paper that in France ninety percent of cats die of cancer. I don’t know what the situation is in Poland.”

  After a while he adored [sic! Ed.] the pancakes. No Lucette, however, turned up, and when Ada, still wearing her diamonds (in sign of at least one more caro Van and a Camel before her morning bath) looked into the guest room, she found the white valise and blue furs gone. A note scrawled in Arlen Eyelid Green was pinned to the pillow.

  Would go mad if remained one more night shall ski at Verma with other poor woolly worms for three weeks or so miserable

  Pour Elle

  Van walked over to a monastic lectern that he had acquired for writing in the vertical position of vertebrate thought and wrote what follows:

  Poor L.

  We are sorry you left so soon. We are even sorrier to have inveigled our Esmeralda and mermaid in a naughty prank. That sort of game will never be played again with you, darling firebird. We apollo [apologize]. Remembrance, embers and membranes of beauty make artists and morons lose all self-control. Pilots of tremendous airships and even coarse, smelly coachmen are known to have been driven insane by a pair of green eyes and a copper curl. We wished to admire and amuse you, BOP (bird of paradise). We went too far. I, Van, went too far. We regret that shameful, though basically innocent scene. These are times of emotional stress and reconditioning. Destroy and forget.

  Tenderly yours A&V.

  (in alphabetic order).

  “I call this pompous, puritanical rot,” said Ada upon scanning Van’s letter. “Why should we apollo for her having experienced a delicious spazmochka? I love her and would never allow you to harm her. It’s curious—you know, something in the tone of your note makes me really jealous for the first time in my fire [thus in the manuscript, for ‘life.’ Ed.] Van, Van, somewhere, some day, after a sunbath or dance, you will sleep with her, Van!”

  “Unless you run out of love potions. Do you allow me to send her these lines?”

  “I do, but I want to add a few words.”

  Her P.S. read:

  The above declaration is Van’s composition which I sign reluctantly. It is pompous and puritanical. I adore you, mon petit, and would never allow him to hurt you, no matter how gently or madly. When you’re sick of Queen, why not fly over to Holland or Italy?

  A.

  “Now let’s go out for a breath of crisp air,” suggested Van. “I’ll order Pardus and Peg to be saddled.”

  “Last night two men recognized me,” she said. “Two separate Californians, but they didn’t dare bow—with that silk-tuxedoed bretteur of mine glaring around. One was Anskar, the producer, and the other, with a cocotte, Paul Whinnier, one of your father’s London pals. I sort of hoped we’d go back to bed.”

  “We shall now go for a ride in the park,” said Van firmly, and rang, first of all, for a Sunday messenger to take the letter to Lucette’s hotel—or to the Verma resort, if she had already left.

  “I suppose you know what you’re doing?” observed Ada.

  “Yes,” he answered.

  “You are breaking her heart,” said Ada.

  “Ada girl, adored girl,” cried Van, “I’m a radiant void. I’m convalescing after a long and dreadful illness. You cried over my unseemly scar, but now life is going to be nothing but love and laughter, and corn in cans. I cannot brood over broken hearts, mine is too recen
tly mended. You shall wear a blue veil, and I the false mustache that makes me look like Pierre Legrand, my fencing master.”

  “Au fond,” said Ada, “first cousins have a perfect right to ride together. And even dance or skate, if they want. After all, first cousins are almost brother and sister. It’s a blue, icy, breathless day.”

  She was soon ready, and they kissed tenderly in their hallway, between lift and stairs, before separating for a few minutes.

  “Tower,” she murmured in reply to his questioning glance, just as she used to do on those honeyed mornings in the past, when checking up on happiness: “And you?”

  “A regular ziggurat.”

  9

  After some exploration, they tracked down a rerun of The Young and the Doomed (1890) to a tiny theater that specialized in Painted Westerns (as those deserts of nonart used to be called). Thus had Mlle Larivière’s Enfants Maudits (1887) finally degenerated! She had had two adolescents, in a French castle, poison their widowed mother who had seduced a young neighbor, the lover of one of her twins. The author had made many concessions to the freedom of the times, and the foul fancy of scriptwriters; but both she and the leading lady disavowed the final result of multiple tamperings with the plot that had now become the story of a murder in Arizona, the victim being a widower about to marry an alcoholic prostitute, whom Marina, quite sensibly, refused to impersonate. But poor little Ada had clung to her bit part, a two-minute scene in a traktir (roadside tavern). During the rehearsals she felt she was doing not badly as a serpentine barmaid—until the director blamed her for moving like an angular “backfish.” She had not deigned to see the final product and was not overeager to have Van see it now, but he reminded her that the same director, G. A. Vronsky, had told her she was always pretty enough to serve one day as a stand-in for Lenore Colline, who at twenty had been as attractively gauche as she, raising and tensing forward her shoulders in the same way, when crossing a room. Having sat through a preliminary P.W. short, they finally got to The Young and the Doomed only to discover that the barmaid scene of the barroom sequence had been cut out—except for a perfectly distinct shadow of Ada’s elbow, as Van kindly maintained.

  Next day, in their little drawing room, with its black divan, yellow cushions, and draftproof bay whose new window seemed to magnify the slow steady straight-falling snowflakes (coincidentally stylized on the cover of the current issue of The Beau & the Butterfly which lay on the window ledge), Ada discussed her “dramatic career.” The whole matter secretly nauseated Van (so that, by contrast, her Natural History passion acquired a nostalgic splendor). For him the written word existed only in its abstract purity, in its unrepeatable appeal to an equally ideal mind. It belonged solely to its creator and could not be spoken or enacted by a mime (as Ada insisted) without letting the deadly stab of another’s mind destroy the artist in the very lair of his art. A written play was intrinsically superior to the best performance of it, even if directed by the author himself. Otherwise, Van agreed with Ada that the talking screen was certainly preferable to the live theater for the simple reason that with the former a director could attain, and maintain, his own standards of perfection throughout an unlimited number of performances.

  Neither of them could imagine the partings that her professional existence “on location” might necessitate, and neither could imagine their traveling together to Argus-eyed destinations and living together in Hollywood, U.S.A., or Ivydell, England, or the sugar-white Cohnritz Hotel in Cairo. To tell the truth they did not imagine any other life at all beyond their present tableau vivant in the lovely dove-blue Manhattan sky.

  At fourteen, Ada had firmly believed she would shoot to stardom and there, with a grand bang, break into prismatic tears of triumph. She studied at special schools. Unsuccessful but gifted actresses, as well as Stan Slavsky (no relation, and not a stage name), gave her private lessons of drama, despair, hope. Her debut was a quiet little disaster; her subsequent appearances were sincerely applauded only by close friends.

  “One’s first love,” she told Van, “is one’s first standing ovation, and that is what makes great artists—so Stan and his girl friend, who played Miss Spangle Triangle in Flying Rings, assured me. Actual recognition may come only with the last wreath.”

  “Bosh!” said Van.

  “Precisely—he too was hooted by hack hoods in much older Amsterdams, and look how three hundred years later every Poppy Group pup copies him! I still think I have talent, but then maybe I’m confusing the right podhod (approach) with talent, which does not give a dry fig for rules deduced from past art.”

  “Well, at least you know that,” said Van; “and you’ve dwelt at length upon it in one of your letters.”

  “I seem to have always felt, for example, that acting should be focused not on ‘characters,’ not on ‘types’ of something or other, not on the fokus-pokus of a social theme, but exclusively on the subjective and unique poetry of the author, because playwrights, as the greatest among them has shown, are closer to poets than to novelists. In ‘real’ life we are creatures of chance in an absolute void—unless we be artists ourselves, naturally; but in a good play I feel authored, I feel passed by the board of censors, I feel secure, with only a breathing blackness before me (instead of our Fourth-Wall Time), I feel cuddled in the embrace of puzzled Will (he thought I was you) or in that of the much more normal Anton Pavlovich, who was always passionately fond of long dark hair.”

  “That you also wrote to me once.”

  The beginning of Ada’s limelife in 1891 happened to coincide with the end of her mother’s twenty-five-year-long career. What is more, both appeared in Chekhov’s Four Sisters. Ada played Irina on the modest stage of the Yakima Academy of Drama in a somewhat abridged version which, for example, kept only the references to Sister Varvara, the garrulous originalka (“odd female”—as Marsha calls her) but eliminated her actual scenes, so that the title of the play might have been The Three Sisters, as indeed it appeared in the wittier of the local notices. It was the (somewhat expanded) part of the nun that Marina acted in an elaborate film version of the play; and the picture and she received a goodly amount of undeserved praise.

  “Ever since I planned to go on the stage,” said Ada (we are using her notes), “I was haunted by Marina’s mediocrity, au dire de la critique, which either ignored her or lumped her in the common grave with other ‘adequate sustainers’; or, if the role had sufficient magnitude, the gamut went from ‘wooden’ to ‘sensitive’ (the highest compliment her accomplishments had ever received). And here she was, at the most delicate moment of my career, multiplying and sending out to friends and foes such exasperating comments as ‘Durmanova is superb as the neurotic nun, having transferred an essentially static and episodical part into et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.’

  “Of course, the cinema has no language problems,” continued Ada (while Van swallowed, rather than stifled, a yawn). “Marina and three of the men did not need the excellent dubbing which the other members of the cast, who lacked the lingo, were provided with; but our wretched Yakima production could rely on only two Russians, Stan’s protege Altshuler in the role of Baron Nikolay Lvovich Tuzenbach-Krone-Altschauer, and myself as Irina, la pauvre et noble enfant, who is a telegraph operator in one act, a town-council employee in another, and a schoolteacher in the end. All the rest had a macédoine of accents—English, French, Italian—by the way what’s the Italian for ‘window’?”

  “Finestra, sestra,” said Van, mimicking a mad prompter.

  “Irina (sobbing): ‘Where, where has it all gone? Oh, dear, oh, dear! All is forgotten, forgotten, muddled up in my head—I don’t remember the Italian for “ceiling” or, say, “window.” ’ ”

  “No, ‘window’ comes first in that speech,” said Van, “because she looks around, and then up; in the natural movement of thought.”

  “Yes, of course: still wrestling with ‘window,’ she looks up and is confronted by the equally enigmatic ‘ceiling.’ In fact, I’m sure I p
layed it your psychological way, but what does it matter, what did it matter?—the performance was perfectly odious, my baron kept fluffing every other line—but Marina, Marina was marvelous in her world of shadows! ‘Ten years and one have gone by-abye since I left Moscow’ “—(Ada, now playing Varvara, copied the nun’s “singsongy devotional tone” (pevuchiy ton bogomolki, as indicated by Chehov and as rendered so irritatingly well by Marina). “ ‘Nowadays, Old Basmannaya Street, where you (turning to Irina) were born a score of yearkins (godkov) ago, is Busman Road, lined on both sides with workshops and garages (Irina tries to control her tears). Why, then, should you want to go back, Arinushka? (Irina sobs in reply).’ Naturally, as would every fine player, mother improvised quite a bit, bless her soul. And moreover her voice—in young tuneful Russian!—is substituted for Le-nore’s corny brogue.”

  Van had seen the picture and had liked it. An Irish girl, the infinitely graceful and melancholy Lenore Colline—

  Oh! qui me rendra ma colline

  Et le grand chêne and my colleen!

  —harrowingly resembled Ada Ardis as photographed with her mother in Belladonna, a movie magazine which Greg Erminin had sent him, thinking it would delight him to see aunt and cousin, together, on a California patio just before the film was released. Varvara, the late General Sergey Prozorov’s eldest daughter, comes in Act One from her remote nunnery, Tsitsikar Convent, to Perm (also called Permwail), in the backwoods of Akimsk Bay, North Canady, to have tea with Olga, Marsha, and Irina on the latter’s name day. Much to the nun’s dismay, her three sisters dream only of one thing—leaving cool, damp, mosquito-infested but otherwise nice and peaceful “Permanent,” as Irina mockingly dubs it, for high life in remote and sinful Moscow, Id., the former capital of Estotiland. In the first edition of his play, which never quite manages to heave the soft sigh of a masterpiece, Tchechoff (as he spelled his name when living that year at the execrable Pension Russe, 9, rue Gounod, Nice) crammed into the two pages of a ludicrous expository scene all the information he wished to get rid of, great lumps of recollections and calendar dates—an impossible burden to place on the fragile shoulders of three unhappy Estotiwomen. Later he redistributed that information through a considerably longer scene in which the arrival of the monashka Varvara provides all the speeches needed to satisfy the restless curiosity of the audience. This was a neat stroke of stagecraft, but unfortunately (as so often occurs in the case of characters brought in for disingenuous purposes) the nun stayed on, and not until the third, penultimate, act was the author able to bundle her off, back to her convent.