‘That’s very clever, darling,’ said Van ‘— except that time itself is motionless and changeless.’
‘Yes, it’s always I in your lap and the receding road. Roads move?’
‘Roads move.’
After tea Lucette remembered an appointment with the hairdresser and left in a hurry. Van peeled off his jersey and stayed on for a while, brooding, fingering the little green-gemmed case with five Rosepetal cigarettes, trying to enjoy the heat of the platinum sun in its aura of ‘film-color’ but only managing to fan, with every shiver and heave of the ship, the fire of evil temptation.
A moment later, as if having spied on his solitude the pava (peahen) reappeared — this time with an apology.
Polite Van, scrambling up to his feet and browing his spectacles, started to apologize in his turn (for misleading her innocently) but his little speech petered out in stupefaction as he looked at her face and saw in it a gross and grotesque caricature of unforgettable features. That mulatto skin, that silver-blond hair, those fat purple lips, reinacted in coarse negative her ivory, her raven, her pale pout.
‘I was told,’ she explained, ‘that a great friend of mine, Vivian Vale, the cootooriay — voozavay entendue? — had shaved his beard, in which case he’d look rather like you, right?’
‘Logically, no, ma’am,’ replied Van.
She hesitated for the flirt of a second, licking her lips, not knowing whether he was being rude or ready — and here Lucette returned for her Rosepetals.
‘See you aprey,’ said Miss Condor.
Lucette’s gaze escorted to a good-riddance exit the indolent motion of those gluteal lobes and folds.
‘You deceived me, Van. It is, it is one of your gruesome girls!’
‘I swear,’ said Van, ‘that’s she’s a perfect stranger. I wouldn’t deceive you.’
‘You deceived me many, many times when I was a little girl. If you’re doing it now tu sais que j’en vais mourir.’
‘You promised me a harem,’ Van gently rebuked her.
‘Not today, not today! Today is sacred.’
The cheek he intended to kiss was replaced by her quick mad mouth.
‘Come and see my cabin,’ she pleaded as he pushed her away with the very spring, as it were, of his animal reaction to the fire of her lips and tongue. ‘I simply must show you their pillows and piano. There’s Cordula’s smell in all the drawers. I beseech you!’
‘Run along now,’ said Van. ‘You’ve no right to excite me like that. I’ll hire Miss Condor to chaperone me if you do not behave yourself. We dine at seven-fifteen.’
In his bedroom he found a somewhat belated invitation to the Captain’s table for dinner. It was addressed to Dr and Mrs Ivan Veen. He had been on the ship once before, in between the Queens, and remembered Captain Cowley as a bore and an ignoramus.
He called the steward and bade him carry the note back, with the penciled scrawclass="underline" ‘no such couple.’ He lay in his bath for twenty minutes. He attempted to focus on something else besides a hysterical virgin’s body. He discovered an insidious omission in his galleys where an entire line was wanting, with the vitiated paragraph looking, however, quite plausible — to an automatic reader — since the truncated end of one sentence, and the lower-case beginning of the other, now adjacent, fitted to form a syntactically correct passage, the insipidity of which he might never have noticed in the present folly of his flesh, had he not recollected (a recollection confirmed by his typescript) that at this point should have come a rather apt, all things considered, quotation: Insiste, anime meus, et adtende fortiter (courage, my soul and press on strongly).
‘Sure you’d not prefer the restaurant?’ he inquired when Lucette, looking even more naked in her short evening frock than she had in her ‘bickny,’ joined him at the door of the grill. ‘It’s crowded and gay down there, with a masturbating jazzband. No?’
Tenderly she shook her jeweled head.
They had huge succulent ‘grugru shrimps’ (the yellow larvae of a palm weevil) and roast bearlet à la Tobakoff. Only half-a-dozen tables were occupied, and except for a nasty engine vibration, which they had not noticed at lunch, everything was subdued, soft, and cozy. He took advantage of her odd demure silence to tell her in detail about the late pencil-palpating Mr Muldoon and also about a Kingston case of glossolalia involving a Yukonsk woman who spoke several Slavic-like dialects which existed, maybe, on Terra, but certainly not in Estotiland. Alas, another case (with a quibble on cas) engaged his attention subverbally.
She asked questions with pretty co-ed looks of doelike devotion, but it did not require much scientific training on a professor’s part to perceive that her charming embarrassment and the low notes furring her voice were as much contrived as her afternoon effervescence had been. Actually she thrashed in the throes of an emotional disarray which only the heroic self-control of an American aristocrat could master. Long ago she had made up her mind that by forcing the man whom she absurdly but irrevocably loved to have intercourse with her, even once, she would, somehow, with the help of some prodigious act of nature, transform a brief tactile event into an eternal spiritual tie; but she also knew that if it did not happen on the first night of their voyage, their relationship would slip back into the exhausting, hopeless, hopelessly familiar pattern of banter and counterbanter, with the erotic edge taken for granted, but kept as raw as ever. He understood her condition or at least believed, in despair, that he had understood it, retrospectively, by the time no remedy except Dr Henry’s oil of Atlantic prose could be found in the medicine chest of the past with its banging door and toppling toothbrush.
As he gloomily looked at her thin bare shoulders, so mobile and tensile that one wondered if she could not cross them in front of her like stylized angel wings, he reflected abjectly that he would have to endure, if conforming to his innermost code of honor, five such days of ruttish ache — not only because she was lovely and special but because he could never go without girl pleasure for more than forty-eight hours. He feared precisely that which she wanted to happen: that once he had tasted her wound and its grip, she would keep him insatiably captive for weeks, maybe months, maybe more, but that a harsh separation would inevitably come, with a new hope and the old despair never able to strike a balance. But worst of all, while aware, and ashamed, of lusting after a sick child, he felt, in an obscure twist of ancient emotions, his lust sharpened by the shame.
They had sweet, thick Turkish coffee and surreptitiously he looked at his wrist watch to check — what? How long the torture of self-denial could still be endured? How soon were certain events coming such as a ballroom dance competition? Her age? (Lucinda Veen was only five hours old if one reversed the human ‘time current.’)
She was such a pathetic darling that, as they proceeded to leave the grill, he could not help, for sensuality is the best breeding broth of fatal error, caressing her glossy young shoulder so as to fit for an instant, the happiest in her life, its ideal convexity bilboquet-wise within the hollow of his palm. Then she walked before him as conscious of his gaze as if she were winning a prize for ‘poise.’ He could describe her dress only as struthious (if there existed copper-curled ostriches), accentuating as it did the swing of her stance, the length of her legs in ninon stockings. Objectively speaking, her chic was keener than that of her ‘vaginal’ sister. As they crossed landings where velvet ropes were hastily stretched by Russian sailors (who glanced with sympathy at the handsome pair speaking their incomparable tongue) or walked this or that deck, Lucette made him think of some acrobatic creature immune to the rough seas. He saw with gentlemanly displeasure that her tilted chin and black wings, and free stride, attracted not only blue innocent eyes but the bold stare of lewd fellow passengers. He loudly exclaimed that he would slap the next jackanapes, and involuntarily walked backward with ridiculous truculent gestures into a folded deck chair (he also running the reel of time backward, in a minor way), which caused her to emit a yelp of laughter. Feeling now much happier, enjoying his gallant champagne-temper, she steered Van away from the mirage of her admirers, back to the lift.