After the dinner in ‘Ursus’ (the best Franco-Estotian restaurant in Manhattan Major) with Ada and Lucette Van Veen (the narrator and main character in VN's novel Ada, 1969) wants to learn from Lucette (Van's and Ada's half-sister) the name of Ada's fiancé and finds her in the process of slipping on her pale green nightdress over her head:
As soon as Edmund (not Edmond, who for security reasons — he knew Ada — had been sent back to Kingston) brought them home, Ada puffed out her cheeks, making big eyes, and headed for Van’s bathroom. Hers had been turned over to the tottering guest. Van, at a geographical point a shade nearer to the elder girl, stood and used in a sustained stream the amenities of a little vessie (Canady form of W.C.) next to his dressing room. He removed his dinner jacket and tie, undid the collar of his silk shirt and paused in virile hesitation: Ada, beyond their bedroom and sitting room, was running her bath; to its gush a guitar rhythm, recently heard, kept adapting itself aquatically (the rare moments when he remembered her and her quite rational speech at her last sanatorium in Agavia).
He licked his lips, cleared his throat and, deciding to kill two finches with one fircone, walked to the other, southern, extremity of the flat through a boudery and manger hall (we always tend to talk Canady when haut). In the guest bedroom, Lucette stood with her back to him, in the process of slipping on her pale green nightdress over her head. Her narrow haunches were bare, and our wretched rake could not help being moved by the ideal symmetry of the exquisite twin dimples that only very perfect young bodies have above the buttocks in the sacral belt of beauty. Oh, they were even more perfect than Ada’s! Fortunately, she turned around, smoothing her tumbled red curls while her hem dropped to knee level.
‘My dear,’ said Van, ‘do help me. She told me about her Valentian estanciero but now the name escapes me and I hate bothering her.’
‘Only she never told you,’ said loyal Lucette, ‘so nothing could escape. Nope. I can’t do that to your sweetheart and mine, because we know you could hit that keyhole with a pistol.’
‘Please, little vixen! I’ll reward you with a very special kiss.’
‘Oh, Van,’ she said over a deep sigh. ‘You promise you won’t tell her I told you?’
‘I promise. No, no, no,’ he went on, assuming a Russian accent, as she, with the abandon of mindless love, was about to press her abdomen to his. ‘Nikak-s net: no lips, no philtrum, no nosetip, no swimming eye. Little vixen’s axilla, just that — unless’ — (drawing back in mock uncertainty) — ‘you shave there?’
‘I stink worse when I do,’ confided simple Lucette and obediently bared one shoulder.
‘Arm up! Point at Paradise! Terra! Venus!’ commanded Van, and for a few synchronized heartbeats, fitted his working mouth to the hot, humid, perilous hollow.
She sat down with a bump on a chair, pressing one hand to her brow.
‘Turn off the footlights,’ said Van. ‘I want the name of that fellow.’
‘Vinelander,’ she answered.
He heard Ada Vinelander’s voice calling for her Glass bed slippers (which, as in Cordulenka’s princessdom too, he found hard to distinguish from dance footwear), and a minute later, without the least interruption in the established tension, Van found himself, in a drunken dream, making violent love to Rose — no, to Ada, but in the rosacean fashion, on a kind of lowboy. She complained he hurt her ‘like a Tiger Turk.’ He went to bed and was about to doze off for good when she left his side. Where was she going? Pet wanted to see the album. (2.8)
Darkbloom (‘Notes to Ada’): Nikak-s net: Russ., certainly not.
"The sacral belt of beauty" hints at sacrum (the large, triangle-shaped bone in the lower spine that forms part of the pelvis). Sacrum Sepulcrum (1917) is a sonnet by Vyacheslav Ivanov:
Мир духов есть; но мир сей не таков,
Каким его ты мыслишь, простодушный
Ловец чудес и знамений, послушный
Младенческим преданиям веков.
Знай: каждый лик, глядящий с облаков, —
Лишь марево зеркальности воздушной:
Небесное, о гость Земли радушной,
Отражено из темных тайников.
И каждое на небо вознесенье —
Сошествие в родную глубину;
И луч с небес — из гроба воскресенье.
Тот луч — ты сам. Мы душу все одну,
Вселенскую творим. Когда собою
Всех ощутишь, душа, — Жених с тобою.
V. Ivanov's sonnet ends in the words Zhenikh s toboyu (the Bridegroom is with you). V. Ivanov is the author of collections of poetry Kormchie zvyozdy ("Pilot Stars," 1903) and Cor Ardens (1907). 'Ursus' and Manhattan Major seem to hint at Ursa Major, a constellation in the northern sky also known as the Great Bear. V. Ivanov's Cor Ardens makes one think of Ardis (Daniel Veen's family estate where Van spends two summers and where he meets and falls in love with Ada) and of Ada or Ardor: a Family Chronicle (the full title of VN's novel).
Sepulcrum is a place where a corpse is buried, burial-place, grave, tomb, sepulchre. Neither Lucette (who in June 1901 commits suicide by jumping from Admiral Tobakoff into the Atlantic), nor Demon Veen (Van's and Ada's father who in March 1905 perishes in a mysterious airplane disaster above the Pacific) have a grave. In 1900 Van's, Ada's and Lucette's mother Marina dies of cancer and her body is burnt, according to her instructions.
Btw., kazhdyi lik (every face) mentioned by V. Ivanov in the second stanza of his sonnet brings to mind VN's story Lik (1939) and marevo zerkal'nosti vozdushnoy (the haze of airy specularity) makes one think of Marevo, in VN's novel Look at the Harlequins! (1974) Vadim Vadimovich Yablonski's favorite manor:
When the book made its belated appearance, as I gently aged, I might enjoy entertaining a few dear sycophantic friends in the arbor of my favorite manor of Marevo (where I had first "looked at the harlequins") with its alley of fountains and its shimmering view of a virgin bit of Volgan steppe-land. (1.5)