洛丽塔(Lolita)

14

　　Because it supposedly tied up with her interest in dance and dramatics, I had permitted Lo to take piano lessons with a Miss Emperor (as we French scholars may conveniently call her) to whose blue-shuttered little white house a mile or so beyond Beardsley Lo would spin off twice a week. One Friday night toward the end of May (and a week or so after the very special rehearsal Lo had not had me attend) the telephone in my study, where I was in the act of mopping up Gustave's — I mean Gaston's — king's side, rang and Miss Emperor asked if Lo was coming next Tuesday because she had missed last Tuesday's and today's lessons. I said she would by all means — and went on with the game. As the reader may well imagine, my faculties were now impaired, and a move or two later, with Gaston to play, I noticed through the film of my general distress that he could collect my queen; he noticed it too, but thinking it might be a trap on the part of his tricky opponent, he demurred for quite a minute, and puffed and wheezed, and shook his jowls, and even shot furtive glances at me, and made hesitating half-thrusts with his pudgily bunched fingers — dying to take that juicy queen and not daring — and all of a sudden he swooped down upon it (who knows if it did not teach him certain later audacities?), and I spent a dreary hour in achieving a draw. He finished his brandy and presently lumbered away, quite satisfied with this result (mon pauvre ami, je ne vous ai jamais revu et quoiqu'il y ait bien peu de chance que vous voyiez mon livre, permettez-moi de vous dire que je vous serre la main bien cordialement, et que toutes mes fillettes vous saluent). I found Dolores Haze at the kitchen table, consuming a wedge of pie, with her eyes fixed on her script. They rose to meet mine with a kind of celestial vapidity. She remained singularly unruffled when confronted with my discovery, and said d'un petit air faussement contrit that she knew she was a very wicked kid, but simply had not been able to resist the enchantment, and had used up those music hours — O Reader, My Reader! — in a nearby public park rehearsing the magic forest scene with Mona. I said "fine" — and stalked to the telephone. Mona's mother answered: "Oh yes, she's in" and retreated with a mother's neutral laugh of polite pleasure to shout off stage "Roy calling!" and the very next moment Mona rustled up, and forthwith, in a low monotonous not untender voice started berating Roy for something he had said or done and I interrupted her, and presently Mona was saying in her humbles, sexiest contralto, "yes, sir," "surely, sir" "I am alone to blame, sir, in this unfortunate business," (what elocution! what poise!) "honest, I feel very bad about it" — and so on and so forth as those little harlots say.

　　So downstairs I went clearing my throat and holding my heart. Lo was now in the living room, in her favorite overstuffed chair. As she sprawled there, biting at a hangnail an mocking me with her heartless vaporous eyes, and all the time rocking a stool upon which she had placed the heel of an outstretched shoeless foot, I perceived all at once with a sickening qualm how much she had changed since I first met her two years ago. Or had this happened during those last two weeks? Tendresse? Surely that was an exploded myth. She sat right in the focus of my incandescent anger. The fog of all lust had been swept away leaving nothing but this dreadful lucidity. Oh, she had changed! Her complexion was now that of any vulgar untidy highschool girl who applies shared cosmetics with grubby fingers to an unwashed face and does not mind what soiled texture, what pustulate epidermis comes in contact with her skin. Its smooth tender bloom had been so lovely in former days, so bright with tears, when I used to roll, in play, her tousled head on my knee. A coarse flush had now replaced that innocent fluorescence. What was locally known as a "rabbit cold" had painted with flaming pink the edges of her contemptuous nostrils. As in terror I lowered my gaze, it mechanically slid along the underside of her tensely stretched bare thigh — how polished and muscular her legs had grown! She kept her wide-set eyes, clouded-glass gray and slightly bloodshot, fixed upon me, and I saw the stealthy thought showing through them that perhaps after all Mona was right, and she, orphan Lo, could expose me without getting penalized herself. How wrong I was. How mad I was! Everything about her was of the same exasperating impenetrable order — the strength of her shapely legs, the dirty sole of her white sock, the thick sweater she wore despite the closeness of the room, her wenchy smell, and especially the dead end of her face with its strange flush and freshly made-up lips. Some of the red had left stains on her front teeth, and I was struck by a ghastly recollection — the evoked image not of Monique, but of another young prostitute in a bell-house, ages ago, who had been snapped up by somebody else before I had time to decide whether her mere youth warranted my risking some appalling disease, and who had just such flushed prominent pommettes and a dead maman, and big front teeth, and a bit of dingy red ribbon in her country-brown hair.

　　"Well, speak," said Lo. "Was the corroboration satisfactory?"

　　"Oh, yes," I said. "Perfect. yes. And I do not doubt you two made it up. As a matter of fact, I do not doubt you have told her everything about us."

　　"Oh, yah?"

　　I controlled my breath and said: "Dolores, this must stop right away. I am ready to yank you out of Beardsley and lock you up you know where, but this must stop. I am ready to take you away the time it takes to pack a suitcase. This must stop or else anything may happen."

　　"Anything may happen, huh?"

　　I snatched away the stool she was rocking with her heel and her foot fell with a thud on the floor.

　　"Hey," she cried, "take it easy."

　　"First of all you go upstairs," I cried in my turn, — and simultaneously grabbed at her and pulled her up. From that moment, I stopped restraining my voice, and we continued yelling at each other, and she said, unprintable things. She said she loathed me. She made monstrous faces at me, inflating her cheeks and producing a diabolical plopping sound. She said I had attempted to violate her several times when I was her mother's roomer. She said she was sure I had murdered her mother. She said she would sleep with the very first fellow who asked her and I could do nothing about it. I said she was to go upstairs and show me all her hiding places. It was a strident and hateful scene. I held her by her knobby wrist and she kept turning and twisting it this way and that, surreptitiously trying to find a weak point so as to wrench herself free at a favorable moment, but I held her quite hard and in fact hurt her rather badly for which I hope my heart may rot, and once or twice she jerked her arm so violently that I feared her wrist might snap, and all the while she stared at me with those unforgettable eyes where could anger and hot tears struggled, and our voices were drowning the telephone, and when I grew aware of its ringing she instantly escaped.

　　With people in movies I seem to share the services of the machina telephonica and its sudden god. This time it was an irate neighbor. The east window happened to be agape in the living room, with the blind mercifully down, however; and behind it the damp black night of a sour New England spring had been breathlessly listening to us. I had always thought that type of haddocky spinster with the obscene mind was the result of considerable literary inbreeding in modern fiction; but now I am convinced that prude and prurient Miss East — or to explode her incognito, Miss Fenton Lebone — had been probably protruding three-quarter-way from her bedroom window as she strove to catch the gist of our quarrel.

　　"...This racket... lacks all sense of..." quacked the receiver, "we do not live in a tenement here. I must emphatically..." I apologized for my daughter's friends being so loud. Young people, you know — and cradled the next quack and a half.

　　Downstairs the screen door banged. Lo? Escaped?

　　Through the casement on the stairs I saw a small impetuous ghost slip through the shrubs; a silvery dot in the dark — hub of the bicycle wheel — moved, shivered, and she was gone.

　　It so happened that the car was spending the night in a repair shop downtown. I had no other alternative than to pursue on foot the winged fugitive. Even now, after more than three years have heaved and elapsed, I cannot visualize that spring-night street, that already so leafy street, without a gasp of panic. Before their lighted porch Miss Lester was promenading Miss Fabian’s dropsical dackel. Mr. Hyde almost knocked it over. Walk three steps and runt three. A tepid rain started to drum on the chestnut leaves. At the next corner, pressing Lolita against an iron railing, a blurred youth held and kissed — no, not her, mistake. My talons still tingling, I flew on.

　　Half a mile or so east of number fourteen, Thayer Street tangles with a private lane and a cross street; the latter leads to the town proper; in front of the first drugstore, I saw — with what melody of relief! — Lolita's fair bicycle waiting for her. I pushed instead of pulling, pulled, pushed, pulled, and entered. Look out! some ten paces away Lolita, though the glass of a telephone booth (membranous god still with us), cupping the tube, confidentially hunched over it, slit her eyes at me, turned away with her treasure, hurriedly hung up, and walked out with a flourish.

　　"Tried to reach you at home," she said brightly. "A great decision has been made. But first buy me a drink, dad."

　　She watched the listless pale fountain girl put in the ice, pour in the coke, add the cherry syrup — and my heart was bursting with love-ache. That childish wrist. My lovely child. You have a lovely child, Mr. Humbert. We always admire her as she passes by. Mr. Pim watched Pippa suck in the concoction.

　　J'ai toujours admiré l'?uvre du sublime Dublinois. And in the meantime the rain had become a voluptuous shower.

　　"Look," she said as she rode the bike beside me, one foot scraping the darkly glistening sidewalk, "look, I've decided something. I want to leave school I hate that school I hate the play, I really do! Never go back. Find another. Leave at once. Go for a long trip again. But this time we'll go wherever I want, won't we?"

　　I nodded. My Lolita.

　　"I choose? C'est entendu?" she asked wobbling a little beside me. Used French only when she was a very good little girl.

　　"Okay. Entendu. Now hop-hop-hop, Lenore, or you'll get soaked." (A storm of sobs was filling my chest.)

　　She bared her teeth and after her adorable school-girl fashioned, leaned forward, and away she sped, my bird.

　　Miss Lester's finely groomed hand held a porch-door open for a waddling old dog qui prenait son temps.

　　Lo was waiting for me near the ghostly birch tree.

　　"I am drenched," she declared at the top of her voice. "Are you glad? To hell with the play! See what I mean?"

　　An invisible hag's claw slammed down an upper-floor window.

　　In our hallway, ablaze with welcoming lights, my Lolita peeled off her sweater, shook her gemmed hair, stretched towards me two bare arms, raised one knee:

　　"Carry me upstairs, please. I feel sort of romantic tonight."

　　It may interest physiologists to learn, at this point, that I have the ability — a most singular case, I presume — of shedding torrents of tears throughout the other tempest.