Ada

Was she Really Pretty, at 12? Did he want--would he ever want--to caress her, to really caress her? Her black hair cascaded over one clavicle and the gesture she made of shaking it back and the dimple on her pale cheek were revelations with an element of immediate recognition about them. Her pallor shone, her blackness blazed. The pleated skirts she liked were becomingly short. Even her bare limbs were so free from suntan that one's gaze, stroking her white shins and forearms, could follow upon them the regular slants of fine dark hairs, the silks of her girlhood. The iridal dark brown of her serious eyes had the enigmatic opacity of an Oriental hypnotist's look (in a magazine's back-page advertisement) and seemed to be placed higher than usual, so that between their lower rim and the moist lower lid a cradle crescent of white remained when she stared straight at you. Her long eyelashes seemed blackened and, in fact, were. Her features were saved from elfin prettiness by the thickish shape of her parched lips. Her plain Irish nose was Van's in miniature. Her teeth were fairly white but not very even.

Her poor pretty hands--one could not help cooing with pity over them--rosy in comparison with the translucent skin of the arm, rosier even than the elbow that seemed to be blushing for the state of her nails: She bit them so thoroughly that all vestige of free margin was replaced by a groove cutting into the flesh with the tightness of wire and lending an additional spatule of length to her naked finger tips. Later, when he was so fond of kissing her cold hands, she would clench them, allowing his lips nothing but knuckle, but he would fiercely pry her hand open to get at those flat blind little cushions. (But, oh, my, oh, the long, languid, rose-and-silver, painted and pointed, delicately stinging onyxes of her adolescent and adult years!)

What Van experienced in those first strange days when she showed him the house--and those nooks in it where they were to make love so soon--combined elements of ravishment and exasperation. Ravishment--because of her pale, voluptuous, impermissible skin, her hair, her legs, her angular movements, her gazelle-grass odor, the sudden black stare of her wide-set eyes, the rustic nudity under her dress; exasperation--because between him, an awkward schoolboy of genius, and that precocious, affected, impenetrable child there extended a void of light and a veil of shade that no force could overcome and pierce. He swore wretchedly in the hopelessness of his bed as he focused his swollen senses on the glimpse of her he had engulfed when, on their second excursion to the top of the house, she had mounted a captain's trunk to unhasp a sort of illuminator through which one acceded to the roof (even the dog had once gone there), and a bracket or something wrenched up her skirt and he saw--as one sees some sickening miracle in a Biblical fable or a moth's shocking metamorphosis--that the child was darkly flossed. He noticed that she seemed to have noticed that he had or might have noticed (what he not only noticed but retained with tender terror until he freed himself of that (continued on page 164)Ada(continued from page 150) vision--much later--and in strange ways), and an odd, dull, arrogant look passed across her face: Her sunken cheeks and fat pale lips moved as if she were chewing something, and she emitted a yelp of joyless laughter when he, big Van, slipped on a tile after wriggling in his turn through the skylight. And in the sudden sun, he realized that until then, he, small Van, had been a blind virgin, since haste, dust and dusk had obscured the mousy charms of his first harlot, so often possessed.

His sentimental education now went on fast. Next morning, he happened to catch sight of her washing her face and arms over an old-fashioned basin on a rococo stand, her hair knotted on the top of her head, her nightgown twisted around her waist like a clumsy corolla out of which issued her slim back, rib-shaded on the near side. A fat snake of porcelain curled around the basin, and as both the reptile and he stopped to watch Eve and the soft woggle of her bud breasts in profile, a big mulberry-colored cake of soap slithered out of her hand, and her black-socked foot hooked the door shut with a bang that was more the echo of the soap's crashing against the marble board than a sign of pudic displeasure.

•

Their first free and frantic caresses had been preceded by a brief period of strange craftiness, of cringing stealth. The masked offender was Van, but Ada's passive acceptance of the poor boy's behavior seemed tacitly to acknowledge its disreputable and even monstrous nature. A few weeks later, both were to regard that phase of his courtship with amused condescension; at the time, however, its implicit cowardice puzzled her and distressed him--mainly because he was keenly conscious of her being puzzled.

Although Van had never had the occasion to witness anything close to virginal revolt on the part of Ada--not an easily frightened or overfastidious little girl, he could rely on two or three dreadful dreams to imagine her, in real, or at least responsible, life, recoiling with a wild look as she left his lust in the lurch to summon her governess or mother, or a gigantic footman (not existing in the house but killable in the dream--punchable with sharp-ringed knuckles, puncturable like a bladder of blood), after which he knew he would be expelled from Ardis--but even if he were to will himself to mock that image so as to blast it out of all consciousness, he could not feel proud of his conduct: In those actual undercover dealings of his with Ada, by doing what he did and the way he did it, with that unpublished relish, he seemed to himself to be either taking advantage of her innocence or else inducing her to conceal from him, the concealer, her awareness of what he concealed.

After the first contact, so light, so mute, between his soft lips and her softer skin had been established--high up in that dappled tree, with only that stray ardilla daintily leavesdropping--nothing seemed changed in one sense, all was lost in another. Such contacts evolve their own texture; a tactile sensation is a blind spot; we touch in silhouette.

He could not say afterward, when discussing with her that rather pathetic nastiness, whether he really feared that his avournine might react with an outburst of real or well-feigned resentment to a stark display of desire, or whether a glum, cunning approach was dictated to him by considerations of pity and decency toward a chaste child, whose charm was too compelling not to be tasted in secret and too sacred to be openly violated: But something went wrong--that much was clear. The vague commonplaces of vague modesty so dreadfully in vogue 80 years ago, the unsufferable banalities of shy wooing buried in old romances as arch as Arcady, those moods, those modes, lurked, no doubt, behind the hush of his ambuscades and that of her toleration. No record has remained of the exact summer day when his wary and elaborate coddlings began; but simultaneously with her sensing that at certain moments he stood indecently close behind her, with his burning breath and gliding lips, she was aware that those silent, exotic approximations must have started long ago in some indefinite and infinite past and could no longer be stopped by her, without her acknowledging a tacit acceptance of their routine repetition in that past.

On those relentlessly hot July afternoons, Ada liked to sit on a cool piano stool of ivoried wood at a white-oilcloth'd table in the sunny music room, her favorite botanical atlas open before her, and copy out in color on creamy paper some singular flower. She might choose, for instance, an insect-mimicking orchid, which she would proceed to enlarge with remarkable skill. Or else she combined one species with another (unrecorded but possible), introducing odd little changes and twists that seemed almost morbid in so young a girl so nakedly dressed. The long beam slanting in from the French window glowed in the faceted tumbler, in the tinted water and on the tin of the paintbox--and while she delicately painted an eyespot or the lobes of a lip, rapturous concentration caused the tip of her tongue to curl at the corner of her mouth; and as the sun looked on, the fantastic, black-blue-brown-haired child seemed in her turn to mimic the mirror-of-Venus blossom. Her flimsy, loose frock happened to be so deeply cut out behind that whenever she concaved her back while moving her prominent scapulae to and fro and tilting her head--as with air-poised brush she surveyed her damp achievement, or with the outside of her left wrist wiped a strand of hair off her temple--Van, who had drawn up to her seat as close as he dared, could see down her sleek ensellure as far as her coccyx and inhale the warmth of her entire body. His heart thumping, one miserable hand deep in his trouser pocket--where he kept a purse with half a dozen ten-dollar gold pieces to disguise his state--he bent over her, as she bent over her work. Very lightly, he let his parched lips travel down her warm hair and hot nape. It was the sweetest, the strongest, the most mysterious sensation that the boy had ever experienced; nothing in his sordid venery of the past winter could duplicate that downy tenderness, that despair of desire. He would have lingered forever on the little middle knob of rounded delight on the back of her neck, had she kept it inclined forever--and had the unfortunate fellow been able to endure much longer the ecstasy of its touch under his wax-still mouth without rubbing against her with mad abandon. The vivid crimsoning of an exposed ear and the gradual torpor invading her paintbrush were the only signs--fearful signs--of her feeling the increased pressure of his caress. Silently, he would slink away to his room, lock the door, grasp a towel, uncover himself and call forth the image he had just left behind, an image still as safe and bright as a hand-cupped flame--carried into the dark, only to be got rid of there with savage zeal; after which, drained for a while, with shaky loins and weak calves, Van would return to the purity of the sun-suffused room, where a little girl, now glistening with sweat, was still painting her flower: the marvelous flower that simulated a bright moth that in turn simulated a scarab.

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 (continued on page 263)Ada(continued from page 164) 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 that, 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 go down, because Marina wants Kim to take our picture--holding hands and grinning" (grinning, and then turning back to her hideous flower).

•

That night, because of the bothersome blink of remote sheet lightning through the black hearts of his sleeping arbor, Van had abandoned his two tulip trees and gone to bed in his room. The tumult in the house and the maid's shriek interrupted a rare, brilliant, dramatic dream, whose subject he was unable to recollect later, although he still held it in a saved jewel box. As usual, he slept naked, and wavered now between pulling on a pair of shorts or draping himself in his tartan lap robe. He chose the second course, rattled a matchbox, lit his bedside candle and swept out of his room, ready to save Ada and all her larvae. The corridor was dark; somewhere the dachshund was barking ecstatically. Van gleaned from subsiding cries that the so-called "baronial barn," a huge beloved structure three miles away, was on fire. Fifty cows would have been without hay and Larivière without her morning coffee cream, had it happened later in the season. Van felt slighted. They've all gone and left me behind, as old Firs mumbles at the end of The Cherry Orchard (Marina was an adequate Mme. Ranevskaya).

With the tartan toga around him, he accompanied his black double down the accessory spiral stairs leading to the library. Placing a bare knee on the shaggy divan under the window, Van drew back the heavy red curtains.

As two last retainers, the cook and the night watchman, scurried across the lawn toward a horseless trap or break that stood beckoning them with erected thills (or was it a rickshaw? Uncle Dan once had a Japanese valet), Van was delighted and shocked to distinguish, right there in the inky shrubbery, Ada in her long nightgown passing by with a lighted candle in one hand and a shoe in the other as if stealing after the belated ignicolists. It was only her reflection in the glass. She dropped the found shoe in a wastepaper basket and joined Van on the divan.

"Can one see anything, oh, can one see?" the dark-haired child kept repeating, and a hundred barns blazed in her amber-black eyes, as she beamed and peered in blissful curiosity. Van relieved her of her candlestick, placing it near his own longer one on the window ledge. "You are naked, you are dreadfully indecent," she observed without looking and without any emphasis or reproof, whereupon he cloaked himself tighter, Ramses the Scotsman, as she knelt beside him. For a moment they both contemplated the romantic night piece framed in the window. He had started to stroke her, shivering, staring ahead, following with a blind man's hand the dip of her spine through the batiste.

"Look, gypsies," she whispered, pointing at three shadowy forms--two men, one with a ladder, and a child or dwarf--circumspectly moving across the gray lawn. They saw the candlelit window and decamped, the smaller one walking à reculons, as if taking pictures.

"I stayed home on purpose, because I hoped you would, too--it was a contrived coincidence," she said, or said later she'd said--while he continued to fondle the flow of her hair and to massage and rumple her nightdress, not daring yet to go under and up, daring, however, to mold her nates until, with a little hiss, she sat down on his hand and her heels, as the burning castle of cards collapsed. She turned to him and next moment he was kissing her bare shoulder and pushing against her.

Van could not decide whether she really was utterly ignorant and as pure as the night sky--now drained of its fire color--or whether total experience advised her to indulge in a cold game. It did not really matter.

Wait, not right now, he replied in a half-muffled mutter.

She insisted: Iwannask, Iwannano--

He caressed and parted with his fleshy folds, parties très charnues, in the case of our passionate siblings, her lank loose, nearly lumbus-length (when she threw back her head as now) black silks as he tried to get at her bed-warm splenius.

"I wannask," she repeated as he greedily reached his hot pale goal.

"I want to ask you," she said quite distinctly, but also quite beside herself because his ramping palm had now worked its way through at the armpit, and his thumb on a nipplet made her palate tingle: ringing for the maid in Georgian novels--inconceivable without the presence of elettricità--"to ask you...."

"Ask," cried Van, "but don't spoil everything" (such as feeding upon you, writhing against you).

"Well, why," she asked (demanded, challenged, one flame crepitated, one cushion was on the floor), "why do you get so fat and hard there when you--"

"Get where? When I what?"

In order to explain, tactfully, tactually, she belly-danced against him, still more or less kneeling, her long hair getting in the way, one eye staring into his ear (their reciprocal positions had become rather muddled by then).

"Repeat!" he cried as if she were far away, a reflection in a dark window.

"You will show me at once," said Ada firmly.

He discarded his makeshift kilt, and her tone of voice changed immediately.

"Oh, dear," she said as one child to another. "It's all skinned and raw. Does it hurt? Does it hurt horribly?"

"Touch it quick," he implored.

"Van, poor Van," she went on in the narrow voice the sweet girl used when speaking to cats, caterpillars, pupating puppies. "Yes, I'm sure, it smarts, would it help if I'd touch, are you sure?"

"You bet," said Van, "on n'est pas bête à ce point" ("there are limits to stupidity," colloquial and rude)."Relief map," said the primrose prig, "the rivers of Africa." Her index traced the blue Nile down into its jungle and traveled up again. "Now what's this? The cap of the Red Bolete is not half as plushy. In fact" (positively chattering), "I'm reminded of geranium or, rather, pelargonium bloom."

"God, we all are," said Van.

"Oh, I like this texture, Van, I like it! Really I do!"

"Squeeze, you goose, can't you see I'm dying."

But our young botanist had not the faintest idea how to handle the thing properly--and Van, now in extremis, driving it roughly against the hem of her nightdress, could not help groaning as he dissolved in a puddle of pleasure.

She looked down in dismay.

"Not what you think," remarked Van calmly. "This is not number one. Actually, it's as clean as grass sap. Well, now the Nile is settled stop Stanley."

Van stretched himself naked in the now motionless candlelight.

"Let us sleep here," he said. "They won't be back before dawn relights Uncle's cigar."

"My nightie is trempée," she whispered.

"Take it off; this plaid sleeps two."

"Don't look, Van."

"That's not fair," he said and helped her to slip it up and over her hair-shaking head. She was shaded with a mere touch of coal at the mystery point of her chalk-white body. A bad boil had left a pink scar between two ribs. He kissed it and lay back on his clasped hands. She was inspecting from above his tanned body the ant caravan to the oasis of the navel; he was decidedly hirsute for so young a boy. Her young round breasts were just above his face. It is, however, true that Van was not unaware of a glass box of Turkish Traumatis on a console too far to be reached with an indolent stretch. The tall clock struck an anonymous quarter and Ada was presently watching, cheek on fist, the impressive, though oddly morose, stirrings, steady clockwise launch and ponderous upswing of virile revival.

But the shag of the couch was as tickly as the star-dusted sky. Before anything new happened, Ada went on all fours to rearrange the lap robe and cushions. Native girl imitating rabbit. He groped for and cupped her hot little slew from behind, then frantically scrambled into a boy's sand-castle-molding position; but she turned over, naïvely ready to embrace him the way Juliet is recommended to receive her Romeo. She was right. For the first time in their love story, the blessing, the genius of lyrical speech descended upon the rough lad, he murmured and moaned, kissing her face with voluble tenderness, crying out in three languages--the three greatest in all the world--pet words upon which a dictionary of secret diminutives was to be based and go through many revisions till the definitive edition of 1967. When he grew too loud, she shushed, shushingly breathing into his mouth, and now her four limbs were frankly around him as if she had been lovemaking for years in all our dreams--but impatient young passion (brimming like Van's overflowing bath while he is reworking this, a crotchety gray old word man on the edge of a hotel bed) did not survive the first few blind thrusts; it burst at the lip of the orchid, and a bluebird uttered a warning warble, and the lights were now stealing back under a rugged dawn, the firefly signals were circumscribing the reservoir, the dots of the carriage lamps became stars, wheels rasped on the gravel, all the dogs returned well pleased with the night treat, the cook's niece Blanche jumped out of a pumpkin-hued police van in her stockinged feet (long, long after midnight, alas)--and our two naked children, grabbing lap robe and nightdress and giving the couch a parting pat, pattered back with their candlesticks to their innocent bedrooms.

•

"And do you remember," said gray-mustached Van as he took a Cannabina cigarette from the bedside table and rattled a yellow-blue matchbox, "how reckless we were, and how Larivière stopped snoring but a moment later went on shaking the house, and how cold the iron steps were, and how disconcerted I was--by your--how shall I put it?--lack of restraint?"

"Idiot," said Ada, from the wall side, without turning her head.

"Their first free and frantic caresses had been preceded by a brief period of strange craftiness."