fist in a forthcoming scene, made a filthy remark in broken French.
‘Du sollst nicht zuhören,’ murmured Ada to German Dack before putting him back in Marina’s lap under the ‘accursed children.’ ‘On ne parle pas comme ça devant un chien,’ added Ada, not deigning to glance at Pedro, who nevertheless got up, reconstructed his crotch, and beat her to the pool with a Nurjinski leap.
Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture. The silly girl had heaped her hair under a rubber cap, and this gave an unfamiliar, vaguely clinical look to her neck, with its odd dark wisps and strags, as if she had obtained a nurse’s job and would never dance again. Her faded, bluish-gray, one-piece swimsuit had a spot of grease and a hole above one hip — nibbled through, one might conjecture, by a tallow-starved larva — and seemed much too short for careless comfort. She smelled of damp cotton, axillary tufts, and nenuphars, like mad Ophelia. None of those minor matters would have annoyed Van, had she and he been alone together; but the presence of the all-male actor made everything obscene, drab and insupportable. We move back to the lip of the pool.
Our young man, being exceptionally brezgliv (squeamish, easily disgusted), had no desire to share a few cubic meters of chlorinated celestino (‘blues your bath’) with two other fellows. He was emphatically not Japanese. He always remembered, with — shudders of revulsion, the indoor pool of his prep school, the running noses, the pimpled chests, the chance contacts with odious male flesh, the suspicious bubble bursting like a small stink bomb, and especially, especially, the bland, sly, triumphant and absolutely revolting wretch who stood in shoulder-high water and secretly urinated (and, God, how he had beaten him up, though that Vere de Vere was three years older than he).
He now kept carefully out of reach of any possible splash as Pedro and Phil snorted and fooled in their foul bath. Presently the pianist, floating up and showing his awful gums in a servile grin, tried to draw Ada into the pool from her outstretched position on the tiled margin, but she evaded the grab of his despair by embracing the big orange ball she had just fished out and, pushing him away with that shield, she then threw it toward Van, who slapped it aside, refusing the gambit, ignoring the gambol, scorning the gambler.
And now hairy Pedro hoisted himself onto the brink and began to flirt with the miserable girl (his banal attentions were, really, the least of her troubles).
‘Your leetle aperture must be raccommodated,’ he said.
‘Que voulez-vous dire, for goodness sake?’ she asked, instead of dealing him a backhand wallop.
‘Permit that I contact your charming penetralium,’ the idiot insisted, and put a wet finger on the hole in her swimsuit.
‘Oh that’ (shrugging and rearranging the shoulder strap displaced by the shrug). ‘Never mind that. Next time, maybe, I’ll put on my fabulous new bikini.’
‘Next time, maybe, no Pedro?’
‘Too bad,’ said Ada. ‘Now go and fetch me a Coke, like a good dog.’
‘E tu?’ Pedro asked Marina as he walked past her chair. ‘Again screwdriver?’
‘Yes, dear, but with grapefruit, not orange, and a little zucchero. I can’t understand’ (turning to Vronsky), ‘why do I sound a hundred years old on this page and fifteen on the next? Because if it is a flashback — and it is a flashback, I suppose’ (she pronounced it fieshbeck), ‘Renny, or what’s his name, René, should not know what he seems to know.’
‘He does not,’ cried G.A., ‘it’s only a half-hearted flashback. Anyway, this Renny, this lover number one, does not know, of course, that she is trying to get rid of lover number two, while she’s wondering all the time if she can dare go on dating number three, the gentleman farmer, see?’
‘Nu, eto chto-to slozhnovato (sort of complicated), Grigoriy Akimovich,’ said Marina, scratching her cheek, for she always tended to discount, out of sheer self-preservation, the considerably more slozhnïe patterns out of her own past.
‘Read on, read, it all becomes clear,’ said G.A., riffling through his own copy.
‘Incidentally,’ observed Marina, ‘I hope dear Ida will not object to our making him not only a poet, but a ballet dancer. Pedro could do that beautifully, but he can’t be made to recite French poetry.’
‘If she protests,’ said Vronsky, ‘she can go and stick a telegraph pole — where it belongs.’
The indecent ‘telegraph’ caused Marina, who had a secret fondness for salty jokes, to collapse in Ada-like ripples of rolling laughter (pokativshis’ so smehu vrode Adï): ‘But let’s be serious, I still don’t see how and why his wife — I mean the second guy’s wife — accepts the situation (polozhenie).’
Vronsky spread his fingers and toes.
‘Prichyom tut polozhenie (situation-shituation)? She is blissfully ignorant of their affair and besides, she knows she is fubsy and frumpy, and simply cannot compete with dashing Hélène.’
‘I see, but some won’t,’ said Marina.
In the meantime, Herr Rack swam up again and joined Ada on the edge of the pool, almost losing his baggy trunks in the process of an amphibious heave.
‘Permit me, Ivan, to get you also a nice cold Russian kok?’ said Pedro — really a very gentle and amiable youth at heart. ‘Get yourself a cocoanut,’ replied nasty Van, testing the poor faun, who did not get it, in any sense, and, giggling pleasantly, went back to his mat. Claudius, at least, did not court Ophelia.
The melancholy young German was in a philosophical mood shading into the suicidal. He had to return to Kalugano with his Elsie, who Doc Ecksreher thought ‘would present him with drip lets in dry weeks.’ He hated Kalugano, his and her home town, where in a moment of ‘mutual aberration’ stupid Elsie had given him her all on a park bench after a wonderful office party at Muzakovski’s Organs where the oversexed pitiful oaf had a good job.
‘When are you leaving?’ asked Ada.
‘Forestday — after tomorrow.’
‘Fine. That’s fine. Adieu, Mr Rack.’
Poor Philip drooped, fingerpainting sad nothings on wet stone, shaking his heavy head, gulping visibly.
‘One feels… One feels,’ he said, ‘that one is merely playing a role and has forgotten the next speech.’
‘I’m told many feel that,’ said Ada; ‘it must be a furchtbar feeling.’
‘Cannot be helped? No hope any more at all? I am dying, yes?’
‘You are dead, Mr Rack,’ said Ada.
She had been casting sidelong glances, during that dreadful talk, and now saw pure, fierce Van under the tulip tree, quite a way off, one hand on his hip, head thrown back, drinking beer from a bottle. She left the pool edge, with its corpse, and moved toward the tulip tree making a strategic detour between the authoress, who — still unaware of what they were doing to her novel — was dozing in a deckchair (out of whose wooden arms her chubby fingers grew like pink mushrooms), and the leading lady, now puzzling over a love scene where the young chatelaine’s ‘radiant beauty’ was mentioned.
‘But,’ said Marina, ‘how can one act out «radiant,» what does radiant beauty mean?’
‘Pale beauty,’ said Pedro helpfully, glancing up at Ada as she passed by, ‘the beauty for which many men would cut off their members.’
‘Okay,’ said Vronsky. ‘Let us get on with this damned script. He leaves the pool-side patio, and since we contemplate doing it in color —’
Van left the pool-side patio and strode away. He turned into a side gallery that led into a grovy part of the garden, grading insensibly into the park proper. Presently, he noticed that Ada had hastened to follow him. Lifting one elbow, revealing the black star of her armpit, she tore off her bathing cap and with a shake of her head liberated a torrent of hair. Lucette, in color, trotted behind her. Out of charity for the sisters’ bare feet, Van changed his course from gravel path to velvet lawn (reversing the action of Dr Ero, pursued by the Invisible Albino in one of the greatest novels of English literature). They caught up with him in the Second Coppice. Lucette, in passing, stopped to pick up her sister’s cap and sunglasses — the sunglasses of much-sung lasses, a shame to throw them away! My tidy little Lucette (I shall never forget you…) placed both objects on a tree stump near an empty beer bottle, trotted on, then went back to examine a bunch of pink mushrooms that clung to the stump, snoring. Double take, double exposure.
‘Are you furious, because —’ began Ada upon overtaking him (she had prepared a sentence about her having to be polite after all to a piano tuner, practically a servant, with an obscure heart ailment and a vulgar pathetic wife — but Van interrupted her).
‘I object,’ he said, expelling it like a rocket, ‘to two things. A brunette, even a sloppy brunette, should shave her groin before exposing it, and a well-bred girl does not allow a beastly lecher to poke her in the ribs even if she must wear a motheaten, smelly rag much too short for her charms.’ ‘Ach!’ he added, ‘why the hell did I return to Ardis!’
‘I promise, I promise to be more careful from now on and not let lousy Pedro come near,’ she said with happy rigorous nods — and an exhalation of glorious relief, the cause of which was to torture Van only much later.
‘Oh, wait for me!’ yelped Lucette.
(Torture, my poor love! Torture! Yes! But it’s all sunk and dead. Ada’s late note.)
The three of them formed a pretty Arcadian combination as they dropped