Владимир Набоков. Лолита (english)
страница №10
...ish pokerchips. And there she sat, hands clasped in her lap, and dreamily brimmed
with a diabolical glow that had no relations to me whatever.
I plumped down my heavy paper bag and stood staring at the bare ankles
of her sandaled feet, then at her silly face, then again at her sinful feet.
"You've been out," I said (the sandals were filthy with gravel).
"I just got up," she replied, and added upon intercepting my downward
glance: "Went out for a sec. Wanted to see if you were coming back."
She became aware of the bananas and uncoiled herself tableward.
What special suspicion could I have? None indeed--but those muddy,
moony eyes of hers, that singular warmth emanating from her! I said nothing.
I looked at the road meandering so distinctly within the frame of the
window. . . Anybody wishing to betray my trust would have found it a
splendid lookout. With rising appetite, Lo applied herself to the fruit. All
at once I remembered the ingratiating grin of the Johnny next door. I
stepped out quickly. All cars had disappeared except his station wagon; his
pregnant young wife was not getting into it with her baby and the other,
more or less canceled, child.
"What's the matter, where are you going?" cried Lo from the porch.
I said nothing. I pushed her softness back into the room and went in
after her. I ripped her shirt off. I unzipped the rest of her, I tore off
her sandals. Wildly, I pursued the shadow of her infidelity; but the scent I
traveled upon was so slight as to be practically undistinguishable from a
madman's fancy.
17
Gros Gaston, in his prissy way, had liked to make
presents--presents just a prissy wee bit out of the ordinary, or so he
prissily thought. Noticing one night that my box of chessmen was broken, he
sent me next morning, with a little lad of his, a copper case: it had an
elaborate Oriental design over the lid and could be securely locked. Once
glance sufficed to assure me that it was one of those cheap money boxes
called for some reason "luizettas" that you buy in Algiers and elsewhere,
and wonder what to do with afterwards. It turned out to be much too flat for
holding my bulky chessmen, but I kept it--using it for a totally different
purpose.
In order to break some pattern of fate in which I obscurely felt myself
being enmeshed, I had decided--despite Lo's visible annoyance--to spend
another night at Chestnut Court; definitely waking up at four in the
morning, I ascertained that Lo was still sound asleep (mouth open, in a kind
of dull amazement at the curiously inane life we all had rigged up for her)
and satisfied myself that the precious contents of the "luizetta" were safe.
There, snugly wrapped in a white woolen scarf, lay a pocket automatic:
caliber .32, capacity of magazine 8 cartridges, length a little under one
ninth of Lolita's length, stock checked walnut, finish full blued. I had
inherited it from the late Harold Haze, with a 1938 catalog which cheerily
said in part: "Particularly well adapted for use in the home and car as well
as on the person." There it lay, ready for instant service on the person or
persons, loaded and fully cocked with the slide lock in safety position,
thus precluding any accidental discharge. We must remember that a pistol is
the Freudian symbol of the Ur-father's central forelimb.
I was now glad I had it with me--and even more glad that I had learned
to use it two years before, in the pine forest around my and Charlotte's
glass lake. Farlow, with whom I had roamed those remote woods, was an
admirable marksman, and with his .38 actually managed to hit a hummingbird,
though I must say not much of it could be retrieved for proof--only a little
iridescent fluff. A burley ex-policeman called Krestovski, who in the
twenties had shot and killed two escaped convicts, joined us and bagged a
tiny woodpecker--completely out of season, incidentally. Between those two
sportsmen I of course was a novice and kept missing everything, though I did
would a squirrel on a later occasion when I went out alone. "You like here,"
I whispered to my light-weight compact little chum, and then toasted it with
a dram of gin.
18
The reader must now forget Chestnuts and Colts, and accompany us
further west. The following days were marked by a number of great
thunderstorms--or perhaps, thee was but one single storm which progressed
across country in ponderous frogleaps and which we could not shake off just
as we could not shake off detective Trapp: for it was during those days that
the problem of the Aztec Red Convertible presented itself to me, and quite
overshadowed the theme of Lo's lovers.
Queer! I who was jealous of every male we met--queer, how I
misinterpreted the designations of doom. Perhaps I had been lulled by Lo's
modest behavior in winter, and anyway it would have been too foolish even
for a lunatic to suppose another Humbert was avidly following Humbert and
Humbert's nymphet with Jovian fireworks, over the great and ugly plains. I
surmised, donc, that the Red Yak keeping behind us at a discreet
distance mile after mile was operated by a detective whom some busybody had
hired to see what exactly Humbert Humbert was doing with that minor
stepdaughter of his. As happens with me at periods of electrical disturbance
and crepitating lightnings, I had hallucinations. Maybe they were more than
hallucinations. I do not know what she or he, or both had put into my liquor
but one night I felt sure somebody was tapping on the door of our cabin, and
I flung it open, and noticed two things--that I was stark naked and that,
white-glistening in the rain-dripping darkness, there stood a man holding
before his face the mask of Jutting Chin, a grotesque sleuth in the funnies.
He emitted a muffled guffaw and scurried away, and I reeled back into the
room, and fell asleep again, and am not sure even to this day that the visit
was not a drug-provoked dream: I have thoroughly studied Trapp's type of
humor, and this might have been a plausible sample. Oh, crude and absolutely
ruthless! Somebody, I imagined, was making money on those masks of popular
monsters and morons. Did I see next morning two urchins rummaging in a
garbage can and trying on Jutting Chin? I wonder. It may all have been a
coincidence--due to atmospheric conditions, I suppose.
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox
memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day when I first
knew with utter certainty that the red convertible was following us. I do
remember, however, the first time I saw its driver quite clearly. I was
proceeding slowly one afternoon through torrents of rain and kept seeing
that red ghost swimming and shivering with lust in my mirror, when presently
the deluge dwindled to a patter, and then was suspended altogether. With a
swishing sound a sunburst swept the highway, and needing a pair of new
sunglasses, I pussled up at a filling station. What was happening was a
sickness, a cancer, that could not be helped, so I simply ignored the fact
that our quiet pursuer, in his converted state, stopped a little behind us
at a cafe or bar bearing the idiotic sign: The Bustle: A Deceitful Seatful.
Having seen to the needs of my car, I walked into the office to get those
glasses and pay for the gas. As I was in the act of signing a traveler's
check and wondered about my exact whereabouts, I happened to glance through
a side window, and saw a terrible thing. A broad-backed man, baldish, in an
oatmeal coat and dark-brown trousers, was listening to Lo who was leaning
out of the car and talking to him very rapidly, her hand with outspread
fingers going up and down as it did when she was very serious and emphatic.
What struck me with sickening force was--how should I put it?--the voluble
familiarity of her way, as if they had known each other--oh, for weeks and
weeks. I saw him scratch his cheek and nod, and turn, and walk back to his
convertible, a broad and thickish man of my age, somewhat resembling Gustave
Trapp, a cousin of my father's in Switzerland--same smoothly tanned face,
fuller than mine, with a small dark mustache and a rosebud degenerate mouth.
Lolita was studying a road map when I got back into the car.
"What did that man ask you, Lol?"
"Man? Oh, that man. Oh yes. Oh, I don't know. He wondered if I had a
map. Lost his way, I guess."
We drove on, and I said:
"Now listen, Lo. I do not know whether you are lying or not, and I do
not know whether you are insane or not, and I do not care for the moment;
but that person has been following us all day, and his car was at the motel
yesterday, and I think he is a cop. You know perfectly well what will happen
and where you will go if the police find out about things. Now I want to
know exactly what he said to you and what you told him."
She laughed.
"If he's really a cop," she said shrilly but not illogically, "the
worst thing we could do, would be to show him we are scared. Ignore him,
Dad."
"Did he ask where we were going?"
"Oh, he knows that" (mocking me).
"Anyway," I said, giving up, "I have seen his face now. He is not
pretty. He looks exactly like a relative of mine called Trapp."
"Perhaps he is Trapp. If I were you--Oh, look, all the nines are
changing into the next thousand. When I was a little kid," she continued
unexpectedly, "I used to think they'd stop and go back to nines, if only my
mother agreed to put the car in reverse."
It was the first time, I think, she spoke spontaneously of her
pre-Humbertian childhood; perhaps, the theatre had taught her that trick;
and silently we traveled on, unpursued.
But next day, like pain in a fatal disease that comes back as the drug
and hope wear off, there it was again behind us, that glossy red beast. The
traffic on the highway was light that day; nobody passed anybody; and nobody
attempted to get in between our humble blue car and its imperious red
shadow--as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil
mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glass-like
virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind me, with his stuffed
shoulders and Trappish mustache, looked like a display dummy, and his
convertible seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk
connected it with out shabby vehicle. We were many times weaker than his
splendid, lacquered machine, so that I did not even attempt to outspeed him.
O lente currite noctis equi! O softly run, nightmares! We climbed
long grades and rolled downhill again, and heeded speed limits, and spared
slow children, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black wiggles of curves
on their yellow shields, and no matter how and where we drove, the enchanted
interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like, the viatic counterpart
of a magic carpet. And all the time I was aware of a private blaze on my
right: her joyful eye, her flaming cheek.
A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscross streets--at
half-past-four p.m. in a factory town--was the hand of chance that
interrupted the spell. He beckoned me on, and then with the same hand cut
off my shadow. A score of cars were launched in between us, and I sped on,
and deftly turned into a narrow lane. A sparrow alighted with a jumbo bread
crumb, was tackled by another, and lost the crumb.
When after a few grim stoppages and a bit of deliberate meandering, I
returned to the highway, our shadow had disappeared.
Lola snorted and said: "If he is what you think he is, how silly to
give him the slip."
"I have other notions by now," I said.
"You should--ah--check them by--ah--keeping in touch with him, fahther
deah," said Lo, writhing in the coils of her own sarcasm. "Gee, you
are mean," she added in her ordinary voice.
We spent a grim night in a very foul cabin, under a sonorous amplitude
of rain, and with a kind of prehistorically loud thunder incessantly rolling
above us.
"I am not a lady and do not like lightning," said Lo, whose dread of
electric storms gave me some pathetic solace.
We had breakfast in the township of Soda, pop. 1001.
"Judging by the terminal figure," I remarked, "Fatface is already
here."
"Your humor," said Lo, "is sidesplitting, deah fahther."
We were in sage-brush country by that time, and there was a day or two
of lovely release (I had been a fool, all was well, that discomfort was
merely a trapped flatus), and presently the mesas gave way to real
mountains, and, on time, we drove into Wace.
Oh, disaster. Some confusion had occurred, she had misread a date in
the Tour Book, and the Magic Cave ceremonies were over! She took it bravely,
I must admit--and, when we discovered there was in kurortish Wace a summer
theatre in full swing, we naturally drifted toward it one fair mid-June
evening. I really could not tell you the plot of the play we saw. A trivial
affair, no doubt, with self-conscious light effects and a mediocre leading
lady. The only detail that pleased me was a garland of seven little graces,
more or less immobile, prettily painted, barelimbed--seven bemused pubescent
girls in colored gauze that had been recruited locally (judging by the
partisan flurry here and there among the audience) and were supposed to
represent a living rainbow, which lingered throughout the last act, and
rather teasingly faded behind a series of multiplied veils. I remember
thinking that this idea of children-colors had been lifted by authors Clare
Quilty and Vivian Darkbloom from a passage in James Joyce, and that two of
the colors were quite exasperatingly lovely--Orange who kept fidgeting all
the time, and Emerald who, when her eyes got used to the pitch-black pit
where we all heavily sat, suddenly smiled at her mother or her protector.
As soon as the thing was over, and manual applause--a sound my nerves
cannot stand--began to crash all around me, I started to pull and push Lo
toward the exit, in my so natural amorous impatience to get her back to our
neon-blue cottage in the stunned, starry night: I always say nature is
stunned by the sights she sees. Dolly-Lo, however, lagged behind, in a rosy
daze, her pleased eyes narrowed, her sense of vision swamping the rest of
her senses to such an extent that her limp hands hardly came together at all
in the mechanical action of clapping they still went through. I had seen
that kind of thing in children before but, by God, this was a special child,
myopically beaming at the already remote stage where I glimpsed something of
the joint authors--a man's tuxedo and the bare shoulders of a hawk-like,
black-haired, strikingly tall woman.
"You've again hurt my wrist, you brute," said Lolita in a small voice
as she slipped into her car seat.
"I am dreadfully sorry, my darling, my own ultraviolet darling," I
said, unsuccessfully trying to catch her elbow, and I added, to change the
conversation--to change the direction of fate, oh God, oh God: "Vivian is
quite a woman. I am sure we saw her yesterday in that restaurant, in Soda
pop."
"Sometimes," said Lo, "you are quite revoltingly dumb. First, Vivian is
the male author, the gal author is Clare; and second, she is forty, married
and has Negro blood."
"I thought," I said kidding her, "Quilty was an ancient flame of yours,
in the days when you loved me, in sweet old Ramsdale."
"What?" countered Lo, her features working. "that fat dentist? You must
be confusing me with some other fast little article."
And I thought to myself how those fast little articles forget
everything, everything, while we, old lovers, treasure every inch of their
nymphancy.
19
With Lo's knowledge and assent, the two post offices given to the
Beardsley postmaster as forwarding addresses were P.O. Wace and P.O.
Elphinstone. Next morning we visited the former and had to wait in a short
but slow queue. Serene Lo studied the rogues' gallery. Handsome Bryan
Bryanski, alias Anthony Bryan, alias Tony Brown, eyes hazel, complexion
fair, was wanted for kidnapping. A sad-eyed old gentleman's faux-pas was
mail fraud, and, as if that were not enough, he was cursed with deformed
arches. Sullen Sullivan came with a caution: Is believed armed, and should
be considered extremely dangerous. If you want to make a movie out of my
book, have one of these faces gently melt into my own, while I look. And
moreover there was a smudgy snapshot of a Missing Girl, age fourteen,
wearing brown shoes when last seen, rhymes. Please notify Sheriff Buller.
I forget my letters; as to Dolly's, there was her report and a very
special-looking envelope. This I deliberately opened and perused its
contents. I concluded I was doing the foreseen since she did not seem to
mind and drifted toward the newsstand near the exit.
"Dolly-Lo: Well, the play was a grand success. All three hounds lay
quiet having been slightly drugged by Cutler, I suspect, and Linda knew all
your lines. She was fine, she had alertness and control, but lacked somehow
the responsiveness, the relaxed vitality, the charm of
my--and the author's--Diana; but there was no author to applaud us as
last time, and the terrific electric storm outside interfered with our own
modest offstage thunder. Oh dear, life does fly. Now that everything is
over, school, play, the Roy mess, mother's confinement (our baby, alas, did
not live!), it all seems such a long time ago, though practically I still
bear traces of the paint.
"We are going to New York after tomorrow, and I guess I can't manage to
wriggle out of accompanying my parents to Europe. I have even worse news for
you. Dolly-Lo! I may not be back at Beardsley if and when you return. With
one thing and another, one being you know who, and the other not being who
you think you know, Dad wants me to go to school in Paris for one year while
he and Fullbright are around.
"As expected, poor Poet stumbled in Scene III when arriving at the bit
of French nonsense. Remember? Ne manque pas de dire ю ton amant, Chimхne,
comme le lac est beau car il faut qu'il t'y mиne. Lucky beau! Qu'il
t'y--What a tongue-twister! Well, be good, Lollikins. Best love from
your Poet, and best regards to the Governor. Your Mona. P.S. Because of one
thing and another, my correspondence happens to be rigidly controlled. So
better wait till I write you from Europe." (She never did as far as I know.
The letter contained an element of mysterious nastiness that I am too tired
today to analyze. I found it later preserved in one of the Tour Books, and
give it here ю titre documentaire. I read it twice.)
I looked up from the letter and was about to--There was no Lo to
behold. While I was engrossed in Mona's witchery, Lo had shrugged her
shoulders and vanished. "Did you happen to see--" I asked of a hunchback
sweeping the floor near the entrance. He had, the old lecherer. He guessed
she had seen a friend and had hurried out. I hurried out too. I stopped--she
had not. I hurried on. I stopped again. It had happened at last. She had
gone for ever.
In later years I have often wondered why she did not go forever
that day. Was it the retentive quality of her new summer clothes in my
locked car? Was it some unripe particle in some general plan? Was it simply
because, all things considered, I might as well be used to convey her to
Elphinstone--the secret terminus, anyway? I only know I was quite certain
she had left me for ever. The noncommittal mauve mountains half encircling
the town seemed to me to swarm with panting, scrambling, laughing, panting
Lolitas who dissolved in their haze. A big W made of white stones on a steep
talus in the far vista of a cross street seemed the very initial of woe.
The new and beautiful post office I had just emerged from stood between
a dormant movie house and a conspiracy of poplars. The time was 9 a.m.
mountain time. The street was charming it into beauty, was one of those
fragile young summer mornings with flashes of glass here and there and a
general air of faltering and almost fainting at the prospect of an
intolerably torrid noon. Crossing over, I loafed and leafed, as it were,
through one long block: Drugs, Real Estate, Fashions, Auto Parts, Cafe,
Sporting Goods, Real Estate, Furniture, Appliances, Western Union, Cleaners,
Grocery. Officer, officer, my daughter has run away. In collusion with a
detective; in love with a black-mailer. Took advantage of my utter
helplessness. I peered into all the stores. I deliberated inly if I should
talk to any of the sparse foot-passengers. I did not. I sat for a while in
the parked car. I inspected the public garden on the east side. I went back
to Fashions and Auto Parts. I told myself with a burst of furious
sarcasm--un ricanement--that I was crazy to suspect her, that she
would turn up any minute.
She did.
I wheeled around and shook off the hand she had placed on my sleeve
with a timid and imbecile smile.
"Get into the car," I said.
She obeyed, and I went on pacing up and down, struggling with nameless
thoughts, trying to plan some way of tackling her duplicity.
Presently she left the car and was at my side again. My sense of
hearing gradually got tuned in to station Lo again, and I became aware she
was telling me that she had met a former girl friend.
"Yes? Whom?"
"A Beardsley girl."
"Good. I now every name in your group. Alice Adams?"
"The girl was not in my group."
"Good. I have a complete student list with me. Her name please."
"She was not in my school She is just a town girl in Beardsley."
"Good. I have the Beardsley directory with me too. We'll look up all
the Browns."
"I only know her first name."
"Mary or Jane?"
"No--Dolly, like me."
"So that's the dead end" (the mirror you break your nose against).
"Good. Let us try another angle. You have been absent twenty-eight minutes.
What did the two Dollys do?"
"We went to a drugstore."
"And you had there--?"
"Oh, just a couple of Cokes."
"Careful, Dolly. We can check that, you know."
"At least, she had. I had a glass of water."
"Good. Was it that place there?"
"Sure."
"Good, come on, we'll grill the soda jerk."
"Wait a sec. Come to think it might have been further down--just around
the corner."
"Come on all the same. Go in please. Well, let's see." (Opening a
chained telephone book.) "Dignified Funeral Service. NO, not yet. Here we
are: Druggists-Retail. Hill Drug Store. Larkin's Pharmacy. And two more.
That's all Wace seems to have in the way of soda fountains--at least in the
business section. Well, we will check them all."
"Go to hell," she said.
"Lo, rudeness will get you nowhere."
"Okay," she said. "But you're not going to trap me. Okay, so we did not
have a pop. We just talked and looked at dresses in show windows."
"Which? That window there for example?"
"Yes, that one there, for example."
"Oh Lo! Let's look closer at it."
It was indeed a pretty sight. A dapper young fellow was vacuum-cleaning
a carpet upon which stood two figures that looked as if some blast had just
worked havoc with them. One figure was stark naked, wigless and armless. Its
comparatively small stature and smirking pose suggested that when clothed it
had represented, and would represent when clothed again, a girl-child of
Lolita's size. But in its present state it was sexless. Next to it, stood a
much taller veiled bride, quite perfect and intact except for the
lack of one arm. On the floor, at the feet of these damsels, where the man
crawled about laboriously with his cleaner, there lay a cluster of three
slender arms, and a blond wig. Two of the arms happened to be twisted and
seemed to suggest a clasping gesture of horror and supplication.
"Look, Lo," I said quietly. "Look well. Is not that a rather good
symbol of something or other? However"--I went on as we got back into the
car--"I have taken certain precautions. Here (delicately opening the glove
compartment), on this pad I have our boy friend's car number."
As the ass I was I had not memorized it. What remained of it in my mind
were the initial letter and the closing figure as if the whole amphitheater
of six signs receded concavely behind a tinted glass too opaque to allow the
central series to be deciphered, but just translucent enough to make out its
extreme edges--a capital P and a 6. I have to go into those details (which
in themselves can interest only a professional psychologue) because
otherwise the reader (ah, if I could visualize him as a blond-bearded
scholar with rosy lips sucking la pomme de sa canne as he quaffs my
manuscript!) might not understand the quality of the shock I experienced
upon noticing that the P had acquired the bustle of a B and that the 6 had
been deleted altogether. The rest, with erasures revealing the hurried
shuttle smear of a pencil's rubber end, and with parts of numbers
obliterated or reconstructed in a child's hand, presented a tangle of barbed
wire to any logical interpretation. All I knew was the state--one adjacent
to the state Beardsley was in.
I said nothing. I put the pad back, closed the compartment, and drove
out of Wace. Lo had grabbed some comics from the back seat and,
mobile-white-bloused, one brown elbow out of the window, was deep in the
current adventure of some clout or clown. Three or four miles out of Wace, I
turned into the shadow of a picnic ground where the morning had dumped its
litter of light on an empty table; Lo looked up with a semi-smile of
surprise and without a word I delivered a tremendous backhand cut that
caught her smack on her hot hard little cheekbone.
And then the remorse, the poignant sweetness of sobbing atonement,
groveling love, the hopelessness of sensual reconciliation. In the velvet
night, at Mirana Motel (Mirana!) I kissed the yellowish soles of her
long-toed feet, I immolated myself . . . But it was all of no avail. both
doomed were we. And soon I was to enter a new cycle of persecution.
In a street of Wace, on its outskirts . . . Oh, I am quite sure it was
not a delusion. In a street of Wace, I had glimpsed the Aztec Red
Convertible, or its identical twin. Instead of Trapp, it contained four or
five loud young people of several sexes--but I said nothing. After Wace a
totally new situation arose. For a day or two, I enjoyed the mental emphasis
with which I told myself that we were not, and never had been followed; and
then I became sickeningly conscious that Trapp had changed his tactics and
was still with us, in this or that rented car.
A veritable Proteus of the highway, with bewildering ease he switched
from one vehicle to another. This technique implied the existence of garages
specializing in "stage-automobile" operations, but I never could discover
the remises he used. He seemed to patronize at first the Chevrolet genus,
beginning with a Campus Cream convertible, then going on to a small Horizon
Blue sedan, and thenceforth fading into Surf Gray and Driftwood Gray. Then
he turned to other makes and passed through a pale dull rainbow of paint
shades, and one day I found myself attempting to cope with the subtle
distinction between our own Dream Blue Melmoth and the Crest Blue Oldsmobile
he had rented; grays, however, remained his favorite cryptochromism, and, in
agonizing nightmares, I tried in vain to sort out properly such ghosts as
Chrysler's Shell Gray, Chevrolet's Thistle Gray, Dodge's French Gray . . .
The necessity of being constantly on the lookout for his little
mustache and open shirt--or for his baldish pate and broad shoulders--led me
to a profound study of all cars on the road--behind, before, alongside,
coming, going, every vehicle under the dancing sun: the quiet vacationist's
automobile with the box of Tender-Touch tissues in the back window; the
recklessly speeding jalopy full of pale children with a shaggy dog's head
protruding, and a crumpled mudguard; the bachelor's tudor sedan crowded with
suits on hangers; the huge fat house trailer weaving in front, immune to the
Indian file of fury boiling behind it; the car with the young female
passenger politely perched in the middle of the front seat to be closer to
the young male driver; the car carrying on its roof a red boat bottom up . .
. The gray car slowing up before us, the gray car catching up with us.
We were in mountain country, somewhere between Snow and Champion, and
rolling down an almost imperceptible grade, when I had my next distinct view
of Detective Paramour Trapp. The gray mist behind us had deepened and
concentrated into the compactness of a Dominion Blue sedan. All of a sudden,
as if the car I drove responded to my poor heart's pangs, we were slithering
from side to side, with something making a helpless plap-plap-plap under us.
"You got a flat, mister," said cheerful Lo.
I pulled up--near a precipice. She folded her arms and put her foot on
the dashboard. I got out and examined the right rear wheel. The base of its
tire was sheepishly and hideously square. Trapp had stopped some fifty yards
behind us. His distant face formed a grease spot of mirth. This was my
chance. I started to walk towards him--with the brilliant idea of asking him
for a jack through I had one. He backed a little. I stubbed my toe against a
stone--and there was a sense of general laughter. Then a tremendous truck
loomed from behind Trapp and thundered by me--and immediately after, I heard
it utter a convulsive honk. Instinctively I looked back--and saw my own car
gently creeping away. I could make out Lo ludicrously at the wheel, and the
engine was certainly running--though I remembered I had cut it but had not
applied the emergency brake; and during the brief space of throb-time that
it took me to reach the croaking machine which came to a standstill at last,
it dawned upon me that during the last two years little Lo had had ample
time to pick up the rudiments of driving. As I wrenched the door open, I was
goddamn sure she had started the car to prevent me from walking up to Trapp.
Her trick proved useless, however, for even while I was puruing her he had
made an energetic U-turn and was gone. I rested for a while. Lo asked wasn't
I going to thank her--the car had started to move by itself and--Getting no
answer, she immersed herself in a study of the map. I got out again and
commenced the "ordeal of the orb," as Charlotte used to say. Perhaps, I was
losing my mind.
We continued our grotesque journey. After a forlorn and useless dip, we
went up and up. On a steep grade I found myself behind the gigantic truck
that had overtaken us. It was now groaning up a winding road and was
impossible to pass. Out of its front part a small oblong of smooth
silver--the inner wrapping of chewing gum--escaped and flew back into our
windshield. It occurred to me that if I were really losing my mind, I might
end by murdering somebody. In fact--said high-and-dry Humbert to floundering
Humbert--it might be quite clever to prepare things--to transfer the weapon
from box to pocket--so as to be ready to take advantage of the spell of
insanity when it does come.
20
By permitting Lolita to study acting I had, fond fool, suffered her to
cultivate deceit. It now appeared that it had not been merely a matter of
learning the answers to such questions as what is the basic conflict in
"Hedda Gabler," or where are the climaxes in "Love Under the Lindens," or
analyze the prevailing mood of "Cherry Orchard"; it was really a matter of
learning to betray me. How I deplored now the exercises in sensual
simulation that I had so often seen her go through in our Beardsley parlor
when I would observe her from some strategic point while she, like a
hypnotic subject of a performer in a mystic rite, produced sophisticated
version of infantile make-believe by going through the mimetic actions of
hearing a moan in the dark, seeing for the first time a brand new young
stepmother, tasting something she hated, such as buttermilk, smelling
crushed grass in a lush orchard, or touching mirages of objects with her
sly, slender, girl-child hands. Among my papers I still have a mimeographed
sheet suggesting:
Tactile drill. Imagine Yourself picking up and holding: a pingpong
ball, an apple, a sticky date, a new flannel-fluffed tennis ball, a hot
potato, an ice cube, a kitten, a puppy, a horseshoe, a feather, a
flashlight.
Knead with your fingers the following imaginary things: a piece of
brad, india rubber, a friend's aching temple, a sample of velvet, a rose
petal.
You are a blind girl. Palpate the face of: a Greek youth, Cyrano, Santa
Claus, a baby, a laughing faun, a sleeping stranger, your father.
But she had been so pretty in the weaving of those delicate spells, in
the dreamy performance of her enchantments and duties! On certain
adventurous evenings, in Beardsley, I also had her dance for me with the
promise of some treat or gift, and although these routine leg-parted leaps
of hers were more like those of a football cheerleader than like the
languorous and jerky motions of a Parisian petit rat, the rhythms of
her not quite nubile limbs had given me pleasure. But all that was nothing,
absolutely nothing, to the indescribable itch of rapture that her tennis
game produced in me--the teasing delirious feeling of teetering on the very
brink of unearthly order and splendor.
Despite her advanced age, she was more of a nymphet than ever, with her
apricot-colored limbs, in her sub-teen tennis togs! Winged gentlemen! No
hereafter is acceptable if it does not produce her as she was then, in that
Colorado resort between Snow and Elphinstone, with everything right: the
white wide little-boy shorts, the slender waist, the apricot midriff, the
white breast-kerchief whose ribbons went up and encircled her neck to end
behind in a dangling knot leaving bare her gaspingly young and adorable
apricot shoulder blades with that pubescence and those lovely gentle bones,
and the smooth, downward-tapering back. Her cap had a white peak. Her racket
had cost me a small fortune. Idiot, triple idiot! I could have filmed her! I
would have had her now with me, before my eyes, in the projection room of my
pain and despair!
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before
going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or
pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the
score, always cheerful as she so seldom was in the dark life she led at
home. Her tennis was the highest point to which I can imagine a young
creature bringing the art of make-believe, although I daresay, for her it
was the very geometry of basic reality.
The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart
in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her
aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and
the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile
and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact. Her form was, indeed, an
absolutely perfect imitation of absolutely top-notch tennis--without any
utilitarian results. As Edusa's sister, Electra Gold, a marvelous young
coach, said to me once while I sat on a pulsating hard bench watching
Dolores Haze toying with Linda Hall (and being beaten by her): "Dolly has a
magnet in the center of her racket guts, but why the heck is she so polite?"
Ah, Electra, what did it matter, with such grace! I remember at the very
first game I watched being drenched with an almost painful convulsion of
beauty assimilation. My Lolita had a way of raising her bent left knee at
the ample and springy start of the service cycle when there would develop
and hang in the sun for a second a vital web of balance between toed foot,
pristine armpit, burnished arm and far back-flung racket, as she smiled up
with gleaming teeth at the small globe suspended so high in the zenith of
the powerful and graceful cosmos she had created for the express purpose of
falling upon it with a clean resounding crack of her golden whip.
It had, that serve of hers, beauty, directness, youth, a classical
purity of trajectory, and was, despite its spanking pace, fairly easy to
return, having as it did no twist or sting to its long elegant hop.
That I could have had all her strokes, all her enchantments,
immortalized in segments of celluloid, makes me moan today with frustration.
They would have been so much more than the snapshots I burned! Her overhead
volley was related to her service as the envoy is to the ballade; for she
had been trained, my pet, to patter up at once to the net on her nimble,
vivid, white-shod feet. There was nothing to choose between her forehand and
backhand drives: they were mirror images of one another--my very loins still
tingle with those pistol reports repeated by crisp echoes and Electra's
cries. One of the pearls of Dolly's game was a short half-volley that Ned
Litam had taught her in California.
She preferred acting to swimming, and swimming to tennis; yet I insist
that had not something within her been broken by me--not that I realized it
then!--she would have had on the top of her perfect form the will to win,
and would have become a real girl champion. Dolores, with two rackets under
her arm, in Wimbledon. Dolores endorsing a Dromedary. Dolores turning
professional. Dolores acting a girl champion in a movie. Dolores and her
gray, humble, hushed husband-coach, old Humbert.
There was nothing wrong or deceitful in the spirit of her game--unless
one considered her cheerful indifference toward its outcome as the feint of
a nymphet. She who was so cruel and crafty in everyday life, revealed an
innocence, a frankness, a kindness of ball-placing, that permitted a
second-rate but determined player, no matter how uncouth and incompetent, to
poke and cut his way to victory. Despite her small stature, she covered the
one thousand and fifty-three square feet of her half of the court with
wonderful ease, once she had entered into the rhythm of a rally and as long
as she could direct that rhythm; but any abrupt attack, or sudden change of
tactics on her adversary's part, left her helpless. At match point, her
second serve, which--rather typically--was even stronger and more stylish
than her first (for she had none of the inhibitions that cautious winners
have), would strike vibrantly the hard-cord of the net--and ricochet out of
court. The polished gem of her dropshot was snapped up and put away by an
opponent who seemed four-legged and wielded a crooked paddle. Her dramatic
drives and lovely volleys would candidly fall at his feet. Over and over
again she would land an easy one into the net--and merrily mimic dismay by
drooping in a ballet attitude, with her forelocks hanging. So sterile were
her grace and whipper that she could not even win from panting me and my
old-fashioned lifting drive.
I suppose I am especially susceptible to the magic of games. In my
chess sessions with Gaston I saw the board as a square pool of limpid water
with rare shells and stratagems rosily visible upon the smooth tessellated
bottom, which to my confused adversary was all ooze and squid-cloud.
Similarly, the initial tennis coaching I had inflicted on Lolita--prior to
the revelations that came to her through the great Californian's
lessons--remained in my mind as oppressive and distressful memories--not
only because she had been so hopelessly and irritatingly irritated by every
suggestion of mine--but because the precious symmetry of the court instead
of reflecting the harmonies latent in her was utterly jumbled by the
clumsiness and lassitude of the resentful child I mistaught. Now things were
different, and on that particular day, in the pure air of Champion,
Colorado, on that admirable court at the foot of seep stone stairs leading
up to Champion Hotel where we had spent the night, I felt I could rest from
the nightmare of unknown betrayals within the innocence of her style, of her
soul, of her essential grace.
She was hitting hard and flat, with her usual effortless sweep, feeding
me deep skimming balls--all so rhythmically coordinated and overt as to
reduce my footwork to, practically, a swinging stroll--crack players will
understand what I mean. My rather heavily cut serve that I had been taught
by my father who had learned it from Decugis or Borman, old friends of his
and great champions, would have seriously troubled my Lo, had I really tried
to trouble her. But who would upset such a lucid dear? Did I ever mention
that her bare arm bore the 8 of vaccination? That I loved her hopelessly?
That she was only fourteen?
An inquisitive butterfly passed, dipping, between us.
Two people in tennis shorts, a red-haired fellow only about eight years
my junior, and an indolent dark girl with a moody mouth and hard eyes, about
two years Lolita's senior, appeared from nowhere. As is common with dutiful
tyros, their rackets were sheathed and framed, and they carried them not as
if they were the natural and comfortable extensions of certain specialized
muscles, but hammers or blunderbusses or whimbles, or my own dreadful
cumbersome sins. Rather unceremoniously seating themselves near my precious
coat, on a bench adjacent to the court, they fell to admiring very vocally a
rally of some fifty exchanges that Lo innocently helped me to foster and
uphold--until there occurred a syncope in the series causing her to gasp as
her overhead smash went out of court, whereupon she melted into winsome
merriment, my golden pet.
I felt thirsty by then, and walked to the drinking fountain; there Red
approached me and in all humility suggested a mixed double. "I am Bill
Mead," he said. "And that's Fay Page, actress. Maffy On Say"--he added
(pointing with his ridiculously hooded racket at polished Fay who was
already talking to Dolly). I was about to reply "Sorry, but--" (for I hate
to have my filly involved in the chops and jabs of cheap bunglers), when a
remarkably melodious cry diverted my attention: a bellboy was tripping down
the steps from the hotel to our court and making me signs. I was wanted, if
you please, on an urgent long distance call--so urgent in fact that the line
was being held for me. Certainly. I got into my coat (inside pocket heavy
with pistol) and told Lo I would be back in a minute. She was picking up a
ball--in the continental foot-racket way which was one of the few nice
things I had taught her,--and smiled--she smiled at me!
An awful calm kept my heart afloat as I followed the boy up to the
hotel. This, to use an American term, in which discovery, retribution,
torture, death, eternity appear in the shape of a singularly repulsive
nutshell, was it. I had left her in mediocre hands, but it hardly
mattered now. I would fight, of course. Oh, I would fight. Better destroy
everything than surrender her. Yes, quite a climb.
At the desk, dignified, Roman-nosed man, with, I suggest, a very
obscure past that might reward investigation, handed me a message in his own
hand. The line had not been held after all. The note said:
"Mr. Humbert. The head of Birdsley (sic!) School called. Summer
residence--Birdsley 2-8282. Please call back immediately. Highly important."
I folded myself into a booth, took a little pill, and four about twenty
minutes tussled with space-spooks. A quartet of propositions gradually
became audible: soprano, there was no such number in Beardsley; alto, Miss
Pratt was on her way to England; tenor, Beardsley School had not telephoned;
bass, they could not have done so, since nobody knew I was, that particular
day, in Champion, Colo. Upon my stinging him, the Roman took the trouble to
find out if there had been a long distance call. There had been none. A fake
call from some local dial was not excluded. I thanked him. He said: You bet.
After a visit to the purling men's room and a stiff drink at the bar, I
started on my return march. From the very first terrace I saw, far below, on
the tennis court which seemed the size of a school child's ill-wiped slate,
golden Lolita playing in a double. She moved like a fair angel among three
horrible Boschian cripples. One of these, her partner, while changing sides,
jocosely slapped her on her behind with his racket. He had a remarkably
round head and wore incongruous brown trousers. There was a momentary
flurry--he saw me, and throwing away his racket--mine--scuttled up the
slope. He waved his wrists and elbows in a would-be comical imitation of
rudimentary wings, as he climbed, blow-legged, to the street, where his gray
car awaited him. Next moment he and the grayness were gone. When I came
down, the remaining trio were collecting and sorting out the balls.
"Mr. Mead, who was that person?"
Bill and Fay, both looking very solemn, shook their heads.
That absurd intruder had butted in to make up a double, hadn't he,
Dolly?
Dolly. The handle of my racket was still disgustingly warm. Before
returning to the hotel, I ushered her into a little alley half-smothered in
fragrant shrubs, with flowers like smoke, and was about to burst into ripe
sobs and plead with her imperturbed dream in the most abject manner for
clarification, no matter how meretricious, of the slow awfulness enveloping
me, when we found ourselves behind the convulsed Mead twosome--assorted
people, you know, meeting among idyllic settings in old comedies. Bill and
Fay were both weak with laughter--we had come at the end of their private
joke. It did not really matter.
Speaking as if it really did not really matter, and assuming,
apparently, that life was automatically rolling on with all its routine
pleasures, Lolita said she would like to change into her bathing things, and
spend the rest of the afternoon at the swimming pool. It was a gorgeous day.
Lolita!
21
"Lo! Lola! Lolita!" I hear myself crying from a doorway into the sun,
with the acoustics of time, domed time, endowing my call and its tell-tale
hoarseness with such a wealth of anxiety, passion and pain that really it
would have been instrumental in wrenching open the zipper of her nylon
shroud had she been dead. Lolita! In the middle of a trim turfed terrace I
found her at last--she had run out before I was ready. Oh Lolita! There she
was playing with a damned dog, not me. The animal, a terrier of sorts, was
losing and snapping up again and adjusting between his jaws a wet little red
ball; he took rapid chords with his front paws on the resilient turf, and
then would bounce away. I had only wanted to see where she was, I could not
swim with my heart in that state, but who cared--and there she was, and
there was I, in my robe--and so I stopped calling; but suddenly something in
the pattern of her motions, as she dashed this way and that in her Aztec Red
bathing briefs and bra, struck me . . . there was an ecstasy, a madness
about her frolics that was too much of a glad thing. Even the dog seemed
puzzled by the extravagance of her reactions. I put a gentle hand to my
chest as I surveyed the situation. The turquoise blue swimming pool some
distance behind the lawn was no longer behind that lawn, but within my
thorax, and my organs swam in it like excrements in the blue sea water in
Nice. One of the bathers had left the pool and, half-concealed by the
peacocked shade of trees, stood quite still, holding the ends of the towel
around his neck and following Lolita with his amber eyes. There he stood, in
the camouflage of sun and shade, disfigured by them and masked by his own
nakedness, his damp black hair or what was left of it, glued to his round
head, his little mustache a humid smear, the wool on his chest spread like a
symmetrical trophy, his naval pulsating, his hirsute thighs dripping with
bright droplets, his tight wet black bathing trunks bloated and bursting
with vigor where his great fat bullybag was pulled up and back like a padded
shield over his reversed beasthood. And as I looked at his oval nut-brown
face, it dawned upon me that what I had recognized him by was the reflection
of my daughter's countenance--the same beatitude and grimace but made
hideous by his maleness. And I also knew that the child, my child, knew he
was looking, enjoyed the lechery of his look and was putting on a show of
gambol and glee, the vile and beloved slut. As she made for the ball and
missed it, she fell on her back, with her obscene young legs madly pedaling
in the air; I could sense the musk of her excitement from where I stood, and
then I saw (petrified with a kind of sacred disgust) the man close his eyes
and bare his small, horribly small and even, teeth as he leaned against a
tree in which a multitude of dappled Priaps shivered. Immediately afterwards
a marvelous transformation took place. He was no longer the satyr but a very
good-natured and foolish Swiss cousin, the Gustave Trapp I have mentioned
more than once, who used to counteract his "sprees" (he drank beer with
milk, the good swine) by feats of weight-lifting--tottering a...
