Ada, or Ardor

by Vladimir Nabokov

  Van considered for a moment those red round cheeks, that black goatee.

  “Ne uznayosh’ (You don’t recognize me)?”

  “Greg! Grigoriy Akimovich!” cried Van tearing off his glove.

  “I grew a regular vollbart last summer. You’d never have known me then. Beer? Wonder what you do to look so boyish, Van.”

  “Diet of champagne, not beer,” said Professor Veen, putting on his spectacles and signaling to a waiter with the crook of his ‘umber.’ “Hardly stops one adding weight, but keeps the scrotum crisp.”

  “I’m also very fat, yes?”

  “What about Grace, I can’t imagine her getting fat?”

  “Once twins, always twins. My wife is pretty portly, too.”

  “Tak tï zhenat (so you are married)? Didn’t know it. How long?”

  “About two years.”

  “To whom?”

  “Maude Sween.”

  “The daughter of the poet?”

  “No, no, her mother is a Brougham.”

  Might have replied “Ada Veen,” had Mr. Vinelander not been a quicker suitor. I think I met a Broom somewhere. Drop the subject. Probably a dreary union: hefty, high-handed wife, he more of a bore than ever.

  “I last saw you thirteen years ago, riding a black pony—no, a black Silentium. Bozhe moy!”

  “Yes—Bozhe moy, you can well say that. Those lovely, lovely agonies in lovely Ardis! Oh, I was absolyutno bezumno (madly) in love with your cousin!”

  “You mean Miss Veen? I did not know it. How long—”

  “Neither did she. I was terribly—”

  “How long are you staying—”

  “—terribly shy, because, of course, I realized that I could not compete with her numerous boy friends.”

  Numerous? Two? Three? Is it possible he never heard about the main one? All the rose hedges knew, all the maids knew, in all three manors. The noble reticence of our bedmakers.

  “How long will you be staying in Lute? No, Greg, I ordered it. You pay for the next bottle. Tell me—”

  “So odd to recall! It was frenzy, it was fantasy, it was reality in the x degree. I’d have consented to be beheaded by a Tartar, I declare, if in exchange I could have kissed her instep. You were her cousin, almost a brother, you can’t understand that obsession. Ah, those picnics! And Percy de Prey who boasted to me about her, and drove me crazy with envy and pity, and Dr. Krolik, who, they said, also loved her, and Phil Rack, a composer of genius—dead, dead, all dead!”

  “I really know very little about music but it was a great pleasure to make your chum howl. I have an appointment in a few minutes, alas. Za tvoyo zdorovie, Grigoriy Akimovich.”

  “Arkadievich,” said Greg, who had let it pass once but now mechanically corrected Van.

  “Ach yes! Stupid slip of the slovenly tongue. How is Arkadiy Grigorievich?”

  “He died. He died just before your aunt. I thought the papers paid a very handsome tribute to her talent. And where is Adelaida Danilovna? Did she marry Christopher Vinelander or his brother?”

  “In California or Arizona. Andrey’s the name, I gather. Perhaps I’m mistaken. In fact, I never knew my cousin very well: I visited Ardis only twice, after all, for a few weeks each time, years ago.”

  “Somebody told me she’s a movie actress.”

  “I’ve no idea, I’ve never seen her on the screen.”

  “Oh, that would be terrible, I declare—to switch on the dorotelly, and suddenly see her. Like a drowning man seeing his whole past, and the trees, and the flowers, and the wreathed dachshund. She must have been terribly affected by her mother’s terrible death.”

  Likes the word “terrible,” I declare. A terrible suit of clothes, a terrible tumor. Why must I stand it? Revolting—and yet fascinating in a weird way: my babbling shadow, my burlesque double.

  Van was about to leave when a smartly uniformed chauffeur came up to inform “my lord” that his lady was parked at the corner of rue Saigon and was summoning him to appear.

  “Aha,” said Van. “I see you are using your British title. Your father preferred to pass for a Chekhovian colonel.”

  “Maude is Anglo-Scottish and, well, likes it that way. Thinks a title gets one better service abroad. By the way, somebody told me—yes, Tobak!—that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four. I haven’t asked you about your father? He’s in good health?” (Van bowed.) “And how is the guvernantka belletristka?”

  “Her last novel is called L’ami Luc. She just got the Lebon Academy Prize for her copious rubbish.”

  They parted laughing.

  A moment later, as happens so often in farces and foreign cities, Van ran into another friend. With a surge of delight he saw Cordula in a tight scarlet skirt bending with baby words of comfort over two unhappy poodlets attached to the waiting-post of a sausage shop. Van stroked her with his fingertips, and as she straightened up indignantly and turned around (indignation instantly replaced by gay recognition), he quoted the stale but appropriate lines he had known since the days his schoolmates annoyed him with them:

  The Veens speak only to Tobaks

  But Tobaks speak only to dogs.

  The passage of years had but polished her prettiness and though many fashions had come and gone since 1889, he happened upon her at a season when hairdos and skirtlines had reverted briefly (another much more elegant lady was already ahead of her) to the style of a dozen years ago, abolishing the interruption of remembered approval and pleasure. She plunged into a torrent of polite questions—but he had a more important matter to settle at once—while the flame still flickered.

  “Let’s not squander,” he said, “the tumescence of retrieved time on the gush of small talk. I’m bursting with energy, if that’s what you want to know. Now look; it may sound silly and insolent but I have an urgent request. Will you cooperate with me in cornuting your husband? It’s a must!”

  “Really, Van!” exclaimed angry Cordula. “You go a bit far. I’m a happy wife. My Tobachok adores me. We’d have ten children by now if I’d not been careful with him and others.”

  “You’ll be glad to learn that this other has been found utterly sterile.”

  “Well, I’m anything but. I guess I’d cause a mule to foal by just looking on. Moreover, I’m lunching today with the Goals.”

  “C’est bizarre, an exciting little girl like you who can be so tender with poodles and yet turns down a poor paunchy stiff old Veen.”

  “The Veens are much too gay as dogs go.”

  “Since you collect adages,” persisted Van, “let me quote an Arabian one. Paradise is only one assbaa south of a pretty girl’s sash. Eh bien?”

  “You are impossible. Where and when?”

  “Where? In that drab little hotel across the street. When? Right now. I’ve never seen you on a hobbyhorse yet, because that’s what tout confort promises—and not much else.”

  “I must be home not later than eleven-thirty, it’s almost eleven now.”

  “It will take five minutes. Please!”

  Astraddle, she resembled a child braving her first merry-go-round. She made a rectangular moue as she used that vulgar contraption. Sad, sullen streetwalkers do it with expressionless faces, lips tightly closed. She rode it twice. Their brisk nub and its repetition lasted fifteen minutes in all, not five. Very pleased with himself, Van walked with her for a stretch through the brown and green Bois de Belleau in the direction of her osobnyachyok (small mansion).

  “That reminds me,” he said, “I no longer use our Alexis apartment. I’ve had some poor people live there these last seven or eight years—the family of a police officer who used to be a footman at Uncle Dan’s place in the country. My policeman is dead now and his widow and three boys have gone back to Ladore. I want to relinquish that flat. Would you like to accept it as a belated wedding present from an admirer? Good. We shall do it again some day. Tomorrow I have to be in London and on the third my favorite liner, Admiral Tobakoff, will take me to Manhattan. Au revoir. Tell him to lo
ok out for low lintels. Antlers can be very sensitive when new. Greg Erminin tells me that Lucette is at the Alphonse Four?”

  “That’s right. And where’s the other?”

  “I think we’ll part here. It’s twenty minutes to twelve. You’d better toddle along.”

  “Au revoir. You’re a very bad boy and I’m a very bad girl. But it was fun—even though you’ve been speaking to me not as you would to a lady friend but as you probably do to little whores. Wait. Here’s a top secret address where you can always”—(fumbling in her handbag)—“reach me”—(finding a card with her husband’s crest and scribbling a postal cryptograph)—“at Malbrook, Mayne, where I spend every August.”

  She looked around, rose on her toes like a ballerina, and kissed him on the mouth. Sweet Cordula!

  3

  The Bourbonian-chinned, dark, sleek-haired, ageless concierge, dubbed by Van in his blazer days “Alphonse Cinq,” believed he had just seen Mlle Veen in the Récamier room where Vivian Vale’s golden veils were on show. With a flick of coattail and a swing-gate click, Alphonse dashed out of his lodge and went to see. Van’s eye over his umbrella crook traveled around a carousel of Sapsucker paperbacks (with that wee striped woodpecker on every spine): The Gitanilla, Salzman, Salzman, Salzman, Invitation to a Climax, Squirt, The Go-go Gang, The Threshold of Pain, The Chimes of Chose, The Gitanilla—here a Wall Street, very “patrician” colleague of Demon’s, old Kithar K. L. Sween, who wrote verse, and the still older real-estate magnate Milton Eliot, went by without recognizing grateful Van, despite his being betrayed by several mirrors.

  The concierge returned shaking his head. Out of the goodness of his heart Van gave him a Goal guinea and said he’d call again at one-thirty. He walked through the lobby (where the author of Agonic Lines and Mr. Eliot, affalés, with a great amount of jacket over their shoulders, dans des fauteuils, were comparing cigars) and, leaving the hotel by a side exit, crossed the rue des Jeunes Martyres for a drink at Ovenman’s.

  Upon entering, he stopped for a moment to surrender his coat; but he kept his black fedora and stick-slim umbrella as he had seen his father do in that sort of bawdy, albeit smart, place which decent women did not frequent—at least, unescorted. He headed for the bar, and as he was in the act of wiping the lenses of his black-framed spectacles, made out, through the optical mist (Space’s recent revenge!), the girl whose silhouette he recalled having seen now and then (much more distinctly!) ever since his pubescence, passing alone, drinking alone, always alone, like Blok’s Incognita. It was a queer feeling—as of something replayed by mistake, part of a sentence misplaced on the proof sheet, a scene run prematurely, a repeated blemish, a wrong turn of time. He hastened to reequip his ears with the thick black bows of his glasses and went up to her in silence. For a minute he stood behind her, sideways to remembrance and reader (as she, too, was in regard to us and the bar), the crook of his silk-swathed cane lifted in profile almost up to his mouth. There she was, against the aureate backcloth of a sakarama screen next to the bar, toward which she was sliding, still upright, about to be seated, having already placed one white-gloved hand on the counter. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved romantic black dress with an ample skirt, fitted bodice and ruffy collar, from the black soft corolla of which her long neck gracefully rose. With a rake’s morose gaze we follow the pure proud line of that throat, of that tilted chin. The glossy red lips are parted, avid and fey, offering a side gleam of large upper teeth. We know, we love that high cheekbone (with an atom of powder puff sticking to the hot pink skin), and the forward upsweep of black lashes and the painted feline eye—all this in profile, we softly repeat. From under the wavy wide brim of her floppy hat of black faille, with a great black bow surmounting it, a spiral of intentionally disarranged, expertly curled bright copper descends her flaming cheek, and the light of the bar’s “gem bulbs” plays on her boudant front hair, which, as seen laterally, convexes from beneath the extravagant brim of the picture hat right down to her long thin eyebrow. Her Irish profile sweetened by a touch of Russian softness, which adds a look of mysterious expectancy and wistful surprise to her beauty, must be seen, I hope, by the friends and admirers of my memories, as a natural masterpiece incomparably finer and younger than the portrait of the similarly postured lousy jade with her Parisian gueule de guenon on the vile poster painted by that wreck of an artist for Ovenman.

  “Hullo there, Ed,” said Van to the barman, and she turned at the sound of his dear rasping voice.

  “I didn’t expect you to wear glasses. You almost got le paquet, which I was preparing for the man supposedly ‘goggling’ my hat. Darling Van! Dushka moy!”

  “Your hat,” he said, “is positively lautréamontesque—I mean, lautrecaquesque—no, I can’t form the adjective.”

  Ed Barton served Lucette what she called a Chambéryzette.

  “Gin and bitter for me.”

  “I’m so happy and sad,” she murmured in Russian. “Moyo grustnoe schastie! How long will you be in old Lute?”

  Van answered he was leaving next day for England, and then on June 3 (this was May 31) would be taking the Admiral Tobakoff back to the States. She would sail with him, she cried, it was a marvelous idea, she didn’t mind whither to drift, really, West, East, Toulouse, Los Teques. He pointed out that it was far too late to obtain a cabin (on that not very grand ship so much shorter than the Queen Guinevere), and changed the subject.

  “The last time I saw you,” said Van, “was two years ago, at a railway station. You had just left Villa Armina and I had just arrived. You wore a flowery dress which got mixed with the flowers you carried because you moved so fast—jumping out of a green calèche and up into the Ausonian Express that had brought me to Nice.”

  “Très expressioniste. I did not see you or I would have stopped to tell you what I had just learned. Imagine, mother knew everything—your garrulous dad told her everything about Ada and you!”

  “But not about you and her.”

  Lucette asked him not to mention that sickening, maddening girl. She was furious with Ada and jealous by proxy. Her Andrey, or rather his sister on his behalf, he was too stupid even for that, collected progressive philistine Art, bootblack blotches and excremental smears on canvas, imitations of an imbecile’s doodles, primitive idols, aboriginal masks, objets trouvés, or rather troués, the polished log with its polished hole à la Heinrich Heideland. His bride found the ranch yard adorned with a sculpture, if that’s the right word, by old Heinrich himself and his four hefty assistants, a huge hideous lump of bourgeois mahogany ten feet high, entitled “Maternity,” the mother (in reverse) of all the plaster gnomes and pig-iron toadstools planted by former Vinelanders in front of their dachas in Lyaska.

  The barman stood wiping a glass in endless slow motion as he listened to Lucette’s denunciation with the limp smile of utter enchantment.

  “And yet (odnako),” said Van in Russian, “you enjoyed your stay there, in 1896, so Marina told me.”

  “I did not (nichego podobnago)! I left Agavia minus my luggage in the middle of the night, with sobbing Brigitte. I’ve never seen such a household. Ada had turned into a dumb brune. The table talk was limited to the three C’s—cactuses, cattle, and cooking, with Dorothy adding her comments on cubist mysticism. He’s one of those Russians who shlyopayut (slap) to the toilet barefoot, shave in their underwear, wear garters, consider hitching up one’s pants indecent, but when fishing out coins hold their right trouser pocket with the left hand or vice versa, which is not only indecent but vulgar. Demon is, perhaps, disappointed they don’t have children, but really he ‘engripped’ the man after the first flush of father-in-law-hood. Dorothy is a prissy and pious monster who comes to stay for months, orders the meals, and has a private collection of keys to the servants’ rooms—which our dumb brunette should have known—and other little keys to open people’s hearts—she has tried, by the way, to make a practicing Orthodox not only of every American Negro she can catch, but of our sufficiently pravoslavna
ya mother—though she only succeeded in making the Trimurti stocks go up. One beautiful, nostalgic night—”

  “Po-russki,” said Van, noticing that an English couple had ordered drinks and settled down to some quiet auditing.

  “Kak-to noch’yu (one night), when Andrey was away having his tonsils removed or something, dear watchful Dorochka went to investigate a suspicious noise in my maid’s room and found poor Brigitte fallen asleep in the rocker and Ada and me tryahnuvshih starinoy (reshaking old times) on the bed. That’s when I told Dora I would not stand her attitude, and immediately left for Monarch Bay.”

  “Some people are certainly odd,” said Van. “If you’ve finished that sticky stuff let’s go back to your hotel and get some lunch.”

  She wanted fish, he stuck to cold cuts and salad.

  “You know whom I ran into this morning? Good old Greg Erminin. It was he who told me you were around. His wife est un peu snob, what?”

  “Everybody is un peu snob,” said Lucette. “Your Cordula, who is also around, cannot forgive Shura Tobak, the violinist, for being her husband’s neighbor in the telephone book. Immediately after lunch, we’ll go to my room, a numb twenty-five, my age. I have a fabulous Japanese divan and lots of orchids just supplied by one of my beaux. Ach, Bozhe nwy—it has just occurred to me—I shall have to look into this—maybe they are meant for Brigitte, who is marrying after tomorrow, at three-thirty, a head waiter at the Alphonse Trois, in Auteuil. Anyway they are greenish, with orange and purple blotches, some kind of delicate Oncidium, ‘cypress frogs,’ one of those silly commercial names. I’ll stretch out upon the divan like a martyr, remember?”

  “Are you still half-a-martyr—I mean half-a-virgin?” inquired Van.

  “A quarter,” answered Lucette. “Oh, try me, Van! My divan is black with yellow cushions.”

  “You can sit for a minute in my lap.”