29

In mid-July, 1886, while Van was winning the table-tennis tournament on board a “luxury” liner (that now took a whole week to reach in white dignity Manhattan from Dover!), Marina, both her daughters, their governess, and two maids were shivering in more or less simultaneous stages of Russian influentsa at various stops on their way by train from Los Angeles to Ladore. A hydrogram from Chicago awaiting Van at his father’s house on July 21 (her dear birthday!) said: “dadaist impatient patient arriving between twenty-fourth and seventh call doris can meet regards vicinity.”

“Which reminds me painfully of the golubyanki (petits bleus) Aqua used to send me,” remarked Demon with a sigh (having mechanically opened the message). “Is tender Vicinity some girl I know? Because you may glare as much as you like, but this is not a wire from doctor to doctor.”

Van raised his eyes to the Boucher plafond of the breakfast room and, shaking his head in derisive admiration, commented on Demon’s acumen. Yes, that was right. He had to travel incontinently to Garders (anagram of “regards,” see?) to a hamlet the opposite way from Letham (see?) to see a mad girl artist called Doris or Odris who drew only gee-gees and sugar daddies.

Van rented a room under a false name (Boucher) at the only inn of Malahar, a miserable village on Ladore River, some twenty miles from Ardis. He spent the night fighting the celebrated mosquito, or its cousin, that liked him more than the Ardis beast had. The toilet on the landing was a black hole, with the traces of a fecal explosion, between a squatter’s two giant soles. At 7 A.M. on July 25 he called Ardis Hall from the Malahar post office and got connected with Bout who was connected with Blanche and mistook Van’s voice for the butler’s.

“Dammit, Pa,” he said into his bedside dorophone, “I’m busy!”

“I want Blanche, you idiot,” growled Van.

“Oh, pardon” cried Bout, “un moment, Monsieur.”

A bottle was audibly uncorked (drinking hock at seven in the morning!) and Blanche took over, but scarcely had Van begun to deliver a carefully worded message to be transmitted to Ada, when Ada herself who had been on the qui vive all night answered from the nursery, where the clearest instrument in the house quivered and bubbled under a dead barometer.

“Forest Fork in Forty-Five minutes. Sorry to spit.”

“Tower!” replied her sweet ringing voice, as an airman in heaven blue might say “Roger.”

He rented a motorcycle, a venerable machine, with a saddle upholstered in billiard cloth and pretentious false mother-of-pearl handlebars, and drove, bouncing on tree roots along a narrow “forest ride.” The first thing he saw was the star gleam of her dismissed bike: she stood by it, arms akimbo, the black-haired white angel, looking away in a daze of shyness, wearing a terrycloth robe and bedroom slippers. As he carried her into the nearest thicket he felt the fever of her body, but only realized how ill she was when after two passionate spasms she got up full of tiny brown ants and tottered, and almost collapsed, muttering about gipsies stealing their jeeps.

It was a beastly, but beautiful, tryst. He could not remember—

(That’s right, I can’t either. Ada.)

—one word they said, one question, one answer; he rushed her back as close to the house as he dared (having kicked her bike into the bracken)—and that evening when he rang up Blanche, she dramatically whispered that Mademoiselle had une belle pneumonie, mon pauvre Monsieur.

Ada was much better three days later, but he had to return to Man to catch the same boat back to England—and join a circus tour which involved people he could not let down.

His father saw him off. Demon had dyed his hair a blacker black. He wore a diamond ring blazing like a Caucasian ridge. His long, black, blue-ocellated wings trailed and quivered in the ocean breeze. Lyudi oglyadïvalis’ (people turned to look). A temporary Tamara, all kohl, kasbek rouge, and flamingo-boa, could not decide what would please her daemon lover more—just moaning and ignoring his handsome son or acknowledging bluebeard’s virility as reflected in morose Van, who could not stand her Caucasian perfume, Granial Maza, seven dollars a bottle.

(You know, that’s my favorite chapter up to now, Van, I don’t know why, but I love it. And you can keep your Blanche in her young man’s embrace, even that does not matter. In Ada’s fondest hand.)