‘On the contrary,’ replied Van, bringing off a passable imitation of bawdy mirth. ‘Had I not been a heterosexual male, I would have been a Lesbian.’

His trite reaction to her set piece, to her desperate cunning, caused Lucette to give up, to dry up, as it were, before a black pit with people dismally coughing here and there in the invisible and eternal audience. He glanced for the hundredth time at the blue envelope, its near long edge not quite parallel to that of the glossy mahogany, its left upper corner half hidden behind the tray with the brandy and soda, its right lower corner pointing at Van’s favorite novel The Slat Sign that lay on the sideboard.

‘I want to see you again soon,’ said Van, biting his thumb, brooding, cursing the pause, yearning for the contents of the blue envelope. ‘You must come and stay with me at a flat I now have on Alex Avenue. I have furnished the guest room with bergères and torchères and rocking chairs; it looks like your mother’s boudoir.’

Lucette curtseyed with the wicks of her sad mouth, à l’Américaine.

‘Will you come for a few days? I promise to behave properly. All right?’

‘My notion of propriety may not be the same as yours. And what about Cordula de Prey? She won’t mind?’

‘The apartment is mine,’ said Van, ‘and besides, Cordula is now Mrs Ivan G. Tobak. They are making follies in Florence. Here’s her last postcard. Portrait of Vladimir Christian of Denmark, who, she claims, is the dead spit of her Ivan Giovanovich. Have a look.’

‘Who cares for Sustermans,’ observed Lucette, with something of her uterine sister’s knight move of specious response, or a Latin footballer’s rovesciata.

No, it’s an elm. Half a millennium ago.

‘His ancestor,’ Van pattered on, ‘was the famous or fameux Russian admiral who had an épée duel with Jean Nicot and after whom the Tobago Islands, or the Tobakoff Islands, are named, I forget which, it was so long ago, half a millennium.’

‘I mentioned her only because an old sweetheart is easily annoyed by the wrong conclusions she jumps at like a cat not quite making a fence and then running off without trying again, and stopping to look back.’

‘Who told you about that lewd cordelude — I mean, interlude?’

‘Your father, mon cher — we saw a lot of him in the West. Ada supposed, at first, that Tapper was an invented name — that you fought your duel with another person — but that was before anybody heard of the other person’s death in Kalugano. Demon said you should have simply cudgeled him.’

‘I could not,’ said Van, ‘the rat was rotting away in a hospital bed.’

‘I meant the real Tapper,’ cried Lucette (who was making a complete mess of her visit), ‘not my poor, betrayed, poisoned, innocent teacher of music, whom not even Ada, unless she fibs, could cure of his impotence.’

‘Driblets,’ said Van.

‘Not necessarily his,’ said Lucette. ‘His wife’s lover played the triple viol. Look, I’ll borrow a book’ (scanning on the nearest bookshelf The Gitanilla, Clichy Clichés, Mertvago Forever, The Ugly New Englander) ‘and curl up, komondi, in the next room for a few minutes, while you — Oh, I adore The Slat Sign.’

‘There’s no hurry,’ said Van.

Pause (about fifteen minutes to go to the end of the act).

‘At the age often,’ said Lucette to say something, ‘I was at the Vieux-Rose Stopchin stage, but our (using, that day, that year, the unexpected, thronal, authorial, jocular, technically loose, forbidden, possessive plural in speaking of her to him) sister had read at that age, in three languages, many more books than I did at twelve. However! After an appalling illness in California, I recouped myself: the Pioneers vanquished the Pyogenes. I’m not showing off but do you happen to know a great favorite of mine: Herodas?’

‘Oh yes,’ answered Van negligently. ‘A ribald contemporary of Justinus, the Roman scholar. Yes, great stuff. Blinding blend of subtility and brilliant coarseness. You read it, dear, in the literal French translation with the Greek en regard — didn’t you? — but a friend of mine here showed me a scrap of new-found text, which you could not have seen, about two children, a brother and sister, who did it so often that they finally died in each other’s limbs, and could not be separated — it just stretched and stretched, and snapped back in place every time the perplexed parents let go. It is all very obscene, and very tragic, and terribly funny.’

‘No, I don’t know that passage,’ said Lucette. ‘But Van, why are you —’

‘Hay fever, hay fever!’ cried Van, searching five pockets at once for a handkerchief. Her stare of compassion and the fruitless search caused such a swell of grief that he preferred to stomp out of the room, snatching the letter, dropping it, picking it up, and retreating to the farthest room (redolent of her Degrasse) to read it in one gulp.

‘O dear Van, this is the last attempt I am making. You may call it a document in madness or the herb of repentance, but I wish to come and live with you, wherever you are, for ever and ever. If you scorn the maid at your window I will aerogram my immediate acceptance of a proposal of marriage that has been made to your poor Ada a month ago in Valentine State. He is an Arizonian Russian, decent and gentle, not overbright and not fashionable. The only thing we have in common is a keen interest in many military-looking desert plants especially various species of agave, hosts of the larvae of the most noble animals in America, the Giant Skippers (Krolik, you see, is burrowing again). He owns horses, and Cubistic pictures, and "oil wells" (whatever they are-our father in hell who has some too, does not tell me, getting away with off-color allusions as is his wont). I have told my patient Valentinian that I shall give him a definite answer after consulting the only man I have ever loved or shall ever love. Try to ring me up tonight. Something is very wrong with the Ladore line, but I am assured that the trouble will be grappled with and eliminated before rivertide. Tvoya, tvoya, tvoya (thine). A.’

Van took a clean handkerchief from a tidy pile in a drawer, an action he analogized at once by plucking a leaf from a writing pad. It is wonderful how helpful such repetitive rhythms on the part of coincidental (white, rectangular) objects can be at such chaotic moments. He wrote a short aerogram and returned to the parlor. There he found Lucette putting on her fur coat, and five uncouth scholars, whom his idiot valet had ushered in, standing in a silent circle around the bland graceful modeling of the coming winter’s fashions. Bernard Rattner, a heavily bespectacled black-haired, red-cheeked thick-set young man greeted Van with affable relief.

‘Good Log!’ exclaimed Van, ‘I had understood we were to meet at your uncle’s place.’

With a quick gesture he centrifuged them to waiting-room chairs, and despite his pretty cousin’s protests (‘It’s a twenty minute’s walk; don’t accompany me’) campophoned for his car. Then he clattered, in Lucette’s wake, down the cataract of the narrow staircase, katrakatra (quatre à quatre). Please, children not katrakatra (Marina).

‘I also know,’ said Lucette as if continuing their recent exchange, ‘who he is.’

She pointed to the inscription ‘Voltemand Hall’ on the brow of the building from which they now emerged.

Van gave her a quick glance — but she simply meant the courtier in Hamlet.

They passed through a dark archway, and as they came out into the colored air of a delicate sunset, he stopped her and gave her the note he had written. It told Ada to charter a plane and be at his Manhattan flat any time tomorrow morning. He would leave Kingston around midnight by car. He still hoped the Ladore dorophone would be in working order before his departure. Le château que baignait le Dorophone. Anyway, he assumed the aerogram would reach her in a couple of hours. Lucette said ‘uhn-uhn,’ it would first fly to Mont-Dore — sorry, Ladore — and if marked ‘urgent’ would arrive at sunrise by dazzled messenger, galloping east on the postmaster’s fleabitten nag, because on Sundays you could not use motorcycles, old local law, l’ivresse de la vitesse, conceptions dominicales; but even so, she would have ample time to pack, find the box of Dutch crayons Lucette wanted her to bring if she came, and be in time for breakfast in Cordula’s recent bedroom. Neither half-sibling was at her or his best that day.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘let’s-fix the date of your visit. Her letter changes my schedule. Let’s have dinner at Ursus next weekend. I’ll get in touch with you.’

‘I knew it was hopeless,’ she said, looking away. ‘I did my best. I imitated all her shtuchki (little stunts). I’m a better actress than she but that’s not enough, I know. Go back now, they are getting dreadfully drunk on your cognac.’

He thrust his hands into the warm vulvas of her mole-soft sleeves and held her for a moment on the inside by her thin bare elbows, looking down with meditative desire at her painted lips.

‘Un baiser, un seul!’ she pleaded.

‘You promise not to open your mouth? Not to melt? not to flutter and flick?’

‘I won’t, I swear!’

He hesitated. ‘No,’ said Van, ‘it is a mad temptation but I must not succumb. I could not live through another disaster, another sister, even one-half of a sister.’

‘Takoe otchayanie (such despair)!’ moaned Lucette, wrapping herself closely in the coat she had opened instinctively to receive him.

‘Might it console you to know that I expect only torture from her return? That I regard you as a bird of paradise?’

She shook her head.

‘That my admiration for you is painfully strong?’

‘I want Van,’ she cried, ‘and not intangible admiration —’

‘Intangible? You goose. You may gauge it, you may brush it once very lightly, with the knuckles of your gloved hand. I said knuckles. I said once. That will do. I can’t kiss you. Not even your burning face. Good-bye, pet. Tell Edmond to take a nap after he returns. I shall need him at two in the morning.’

6

The matter of that important discussion was a comparison of notes regarding a problem that Van was to try to resolve in another way many years later. Several cases of acrophobia had been closely examined at the Kingston Clinic to determine if they were combined with any traces or aspects of time-terror. Tests had yielded completely negative results, but what seemed particularly curious was that the only available case of acute chronophobia differed by its very nature — metaphysical flavor, psychological stamp and so forth — from that of space-fear. True, one patient maddened by the touch of time’s texture presented too small a sample to compete with a great group of garrulous acrophobes, and readers who have been accusing Van of rashness and folly (in young Rattner’s polite terminology) will have a higher opinion of him when they learn that our young investigator did his best not to let Mr T.T. (the chronophobe) be cured too hastily of his rare and important sickness. Van had satisfied himself that it had nothing to do with clocks or calendars, or any measurements or contents of time, while he suspected and hoped (as only a discoverer, pure and passionate and profoundly inhuman, can hope) that the dread of heights would be found by his colleagues to depend mainly on the misestimation of distances and that Mr Arshin, their best acrophobe, who could not step down from a footstool, could be made to step down into space from the top of a tower if persuaded by some optical trick that the fire net spread fifty yards below was a mat one inch beneath him.

Van had cold cuts brought up for them, and a gallon of Gallows Ale — but his mind was elsewhere, and he did not shine in the discussion which forever remained in his mind as a grisaille of inconclusive tedium.

They left around midnight; their clatter and chatter still came from the stairs when he began ringing up Ardis Hall — vainly, vainly. He kept it up intermittently till daybreak, gave up, had a structurally perfect stool (its cruciform symmetry reminding him of the morning before his duel) and, without bothering to put on a tie (all his favorite ones were awaiting him in his new apartment), drove to Manhattan, taking the wheel when he found that Edmond had needed forty-five minutes instead of half an hour to cover one fourth of the way.