Lolita, Page 32

  Gently I rolled back to town, in that old faithful car of mine which was serenely, almost cheerfully working for me. My Lolita! There was still a three-year-old bobby pin of hers in the depths of the glove compartment. There was still that stream of pale moths siphoned out of the night by my headlights. Dark barns still propped themselves up here and there by the roadside. People were still going to the movies. While searching for night lodgings, I passed a drive-in. In a selenian glow, truly mystical in its contrast with the moonless and massive night, on a gigantic screen slanting away among dark drowsy fields, a thin phantom raised a gun, both he and his arm reduced to tremulous dishwater by the oblique angle of that receding world,--and the next moment a row of trees shut off the gesticulation.

  35

  I left Insomnia Lodge next morning around eight and spent some time in Parkington. Visions of bungling the execution kept obsessing me. Thinking that perhaps the cartridges in the automatic had gone stale during a week of inactivity, I removed them and inserted a fresh batch. Such a thorough oil bath did I give Chum that now I could not get rid of the stuff. I bandaged him up with a rag, like a maimed limb, and used another rag to wrap up a handful of spare bullets.

  A thunderstorm accompanied me most of the way back to Grimm Road, but when I reached Pavor Manor, the sun was visible again, burning like a man, and the birds screamed in the drenched and steaming trees. The elaborate and decrepit house seemed to stand in a kind of daze, reflecting as it were my own state, for I could not help realizing, as my feet touched the springy and insecure ground, that I had overdone the alcoholic stimulation business.

  A guardedly ironic silence answered my bell. The garage, however, was loaded with his car, a black convertible for the nonce. I tried the knocker. Re-nobody. With a petulant snarl, I pushed the front door--and, how nice, it swung open as in a medieval fairy tale. Having softly closed it behind me, I made my way across a spacious and very ugly hall; peered into an adjacent drawing room; noticed a number of used glasses growing out of the carpet; decided that master was still asleep in the master bedroom.

  So I trudged upstairs. My right hand clutched muffled Chum in my pocket, my left patted the sticky banisters. Of the three bedrooms I inspected, one had obviously been slept in that night. There was a library full of flowers. There was a rather bare room with ample and deep mirrors and a polar bear skin on the slippery floor. There were still other rooms. A happy thought struck me. If and when master returned from his constitutional in the woods, or emerged from some secret lair, it might be wise for an unsteady gunman with a long job before him to prevent his playmate from locking himself up in a room. Consequently, for at least five minutes I went about--lucidly insane, crazily calm, an enchanted and very tight hunter--turning whatever keys in whatever locks there were and pocketing them with my free left hand. The house, being an old one, had more planned privacy than have modern glamour-boxes, where the bathroom, the only lockable locus, has to be used for the furtive needs of planned parenthood.

  Speaking of bathrooms--I was about to visit a third one when master came out of it, leaving a brief waterfall behind him. The corner of a passage did not quite conceal me. Gray-faced, baggy-eyed, fluffily disheveled in a scanty balding way, but still perfectly recognizable, he swept by me in a purple bathrobe, very like one I had. He either did not notice me, or else dismissed me as some familiar and innocuous hallucination--and, showing me his hairy calves, he proceeded, sleepwalker-wise, downstairs. I pocketed my last key and followed him into the entrance hall. He had half opened his mouth and the front door, to peer out through a sunny chink as one who thinks he has heard a half-hearted visitor ring and recede. Then, still ignoring the raincoated phantasm that had stopped in midstairs, master walked into a cozy boudoir across the hall from the drawing room, through which--taking it easy, knowing he was safe--I now went away from him, and in a bar-adorned kitchen gingerly unwrapped dirty Chum, taking care not to leave any oil stains on the chrome--I think I got the wrong product, it was black and awfully messy. In my usual meticulous way, I transferred naked Chum to a clean recess about me and made for the little boudoir. My step, as I say, was springy--too springy perhaps for success. But my heart pounded with tiger joy, and I crunched a cocktail glass underfoot.

  Master met me in the Oriental parlor.

  "Now who are you?" he asked in a high hoarse voice, his hands thrust into his dressing-gown pockets, his eyes fixing a point to the northeast of my head. "Are you by any chance Brewster?"

  By now it was evident to everybody that he was in a fog and completely at my so-called mercy. I could enjoy myself.

  "That's right," I answered suavely. "Je suis Monsieur Brustere. Let us chat for a moment before we start."

  He looked pleased. His smudgy mustache twitched. I removed my raincoat. I was wearing a black suit, a black shirt, no tie. We sat down in two easy chairs.

  "You know," he said, scratching loudly his fleshy and gritty gray cheek and showing his small pearly teeth in a crooked grin, "you don't look like Jack Brewster. I mean, the resemblance is not particularly striking. Somebody told me he had a brother with the same telephone company."

  To have him trapped, after those years of repentance and rage ... To look at the black hairs on the back of his pudgy hands ... To wander with a hundred eyes over his purple silks and hirsute chest foreglimpsing the punctures, and mess, and music of pain ... To know that this semi-animated, subhuman trickster who had sodomized my darling--oh, my darling, this was intolerable bliss!

  "No, I am afraid I am neither of the Brewsters."

  He cocked his head, looking more pleased than ever.

  "Guess again, Punch."

  "Ah," said Punch, "so you have not come to bother me about those long-distance calls?"

  "You do make them once in a while, don't you?"

  "Excuse me?"

  I said I had said I thought he had said he had never--

  "People," he said, "people in general, I'm not accusing you, Brewster, but you know it's absurd the way people invade this damned house without even knocking. They use the vaterre, they use the kitchen, they use the telephone. Phil calls Philadelphia. Pat calls Patagonia. I refuse to pay. You have a funny accent, Captain."

  "Quilty," I said, "do you recall a little girl called Dolores Haze, Dolly Haze? Dolly called Dolores, Colo.?"

  "Sure, she may have made those calls, sure. Any place. Paradise, Wash., Hell Canyon. Who cares?"

  "I do, Quilty. You see, I am her father."

  "Nonsense," he said. "You are not. You are some foreign literary agent. A Frenchman once translated my Proud Flesh as La Fierte de la Chair. Absurd."

  "She was my child, Quilty."

  In the state he was in he could not really be taken aback by anything, but his blustering manner was not quite convincing. A sort of wary inkling kindled his eyes into a semblance of life. They were immediately dulled again.

  "I'm very fond of children myself," he said, "and fathers are among my best friends."

  He turned his head away, looking for something. He beat his pockets. He attempted to rise from his seat.

  "Down!" I said--apparently much louder than I intended.

  "You need not roar at me," he complained in his strange feminine manner. "I just wanted a smoke. I'm dying for a smoke."

  "You're dying anyway."

  "Oh, chucks," he said. "You begin to bore me. What do you want? Are you French, mister? Woolly-woo-boo-are? Let's go to the barroomette and have a stiff--"

  He saw the little dark weapon lying in my palm as if I were offering it to him.

  "Say!" he drawled (now imitating the underworld numbskull of movies), "that's a swell little gun you've got there. What d'you want for her?"

  I slapped down his outstretched hand and he managed to knock over a box on a low table near him. It ejected a handful of cigarettes.

  "Here they are," he said cheerfully. "You recall Kipling: une femme est une femme, mais un Caporal est une cigarette? Now we need matches."

&n
bsp; "Quilty," I said. "I want you to concentrate. You are going to die in a moment. The hereafter for all we know may be an eternal state of excruciating insanity. You smoked your last cigarette yesterday. Concentrate. Try to understand what is happening to you."

  He kept taking the Drome cigarette apart and munching bits of it.

  "I am willing to try," he said. "You are either Australian, or a German refugee. Must you talk to me? This is a Gentile's house, you know. Maybe, you'd better run along. And do stop demonstrating that gun. I've an old Stern-Luger in the music room."

  I pointed Chum at his slippered foot and crushed the trigger. It clicked. He looked at his foot, at the pistol, again at his foot. I made another awful effort, and, with a ridiculously feeble and juvenile sound, it went off. The bullet entered the thick pink rug, and I had the paralyzing impression that it had merely trickled in and might come out again.

  "See what I mean?" said Quilty. "You should be a little more careful. Give me that thing for Christ's sake."

  He reached for it. I pushed him back into the chair. The rich joy was waning. It was high time I destroyed him, but he must understand why he was being destroyed. His condition infected me, the weapon felt limp and clumsy in my hand.

  "Concentrate," I said, "on the thought of Dolly Haze whom you kidnaped--"

  "I did not!" he cried. "You're all wet. I saved her from a beastly pervert. Show me your badge instead of shooting at my foot, you ape, you. Where is that badge? I'm not responsible for the rapes of others. Absurd! That joy ride, I grant you, was a silly stunt but you got her back, didn't you? Come, let's have a drink."

  I asked him whether he wanted to be executed sitting or standing.

  "Ah, let me think," he said. "It is not an easy question. Incidentally--I made a mistake. Which I sincerely regret. You see, I had no fun with your Dolly. I am practically impotent, to tell the melancholy truth. And I gave her a splendid vacation. She met some remarkable people. Do you happen to know--"

  And with a tremendous lurch he fell all over me, sending the pistol hurtling under a chest of drawers. Fortunately he was more impetuous than vigorous, and I had little difficulty in shoving him back into his chair.

  He puffed a little and folded his arms on his chest.

  "Now you've done it," he said. "Vous voila dans de beaux draps, mon vieux"

  His French was improving.

  I looked around. Perhaps, if--Perhaps I could--On my hands and knees? Risk it?

  "Alors, que fait-on?" he asked watching me closely.

  I stooped. He did not move. I stooped lower.

  "My dear sir," he said, "stop trifling with life and death. I am a playwright. I have written tragedies, comedies, fantasies. I have made private movies out of Justine and other eighteenth-century sexcapades. I'm the author of fifty-two successful scenarios. I know all the ropes. Let me handle this. There should be a poker somewhere, why don't I fetch it, and then we'll fish out your property."

  Fussily, busybodily, cunningly, he had risen again while he talked. I groped under the chest trying at the same time to keep an eye on him. All of a sudden I noticed that he had noticed that I did not seem to have noticed Chum protruding from beneath the other corner of the chest. We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.

  In its published form, this book is being read, I assume, in the first years of 2000 A.D. (1935 plus eighty or ninety, live long, my love); and elderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati, one of whom was utterly disorganized by a drug while the other was handicapped by a heart condition and too much gin. When at last I had possessed myself of my precious weapon, and the scenario writer had been reinstalled in his low chair, both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.

  I decided to inspect the pistol--our sweat might have spoiled something--and regain my wind before proceeding to the main item in the program. To fill in the pause, I proposed he read his own sentence--in the poetical form I had given it. The term "poetical justice" is one that may be most happily used in this respect. I handed him a neat typescript.

  "Yes," he said, "splendid idea. Let me fetch my reading glasses" (he attempted to rise).

  "No."

  "Just as you say. Shall I read out loud?"

  "Yes."

  "Here goes. I see it's in verse.

  Because you took advantage of a sinner

  because you took advantage

  because you took

  because you took advantage of my disadvantage ...

  "That's good, you know. That's damned good."

  ... when I stood Adam-naked

  before a federal law and all its stinging stars

  "Oh, grand stuff!"

  ... Because you took advantage of a sin

  when I was helpless moulting moist and tender

  hoping for the best

  dreaming of marriage in a mountain state

  aye of a litter of Lolitas ...

  "Didn't get that."

  Because you took advantage of my inner

  essential innocence

  because you cheated me--

  "A little repetitious, what? Where was I?"

  Because you cheated me of my redemption

  because you took

  her at the age when lads

  play with erector sets

  "Getting smutty, eh?"

  a little downy girl still wearing poppies

  still eating popcorn in the colored gloam

  where tawny Indians took paid croppers

  because you stole her

  from her wax-browed and dignified protector

  spitting into his heavy-lidded eye

  ripping his flavid toga and at dawn

  leaving the hog to roll upon his new discomfort

  the awfulness of love and violets

  remorse despair while you

  took a dull doll to pieces

  and threw its head away

  because of all you did

  because of all I did not

  you have to die

  "Well, sir, this is certainly a fine poem. Your best as far as I am concerned."

  He folded and handed it back to me.

  I asked him if he had anything serious to say before dying. The automatic was again ready for use on the person. He looked at it and heaved a big sigh.

  "Now look here, Mac," he said. "You are drunk and I am a sick man. Let us postpone the matter. I need quiet. I have to nurse my impotence. Friends are coming in the afternoon to take me to a game. This pistol-packing farce is becoming a frightful nuisance. We are men of the world, in everything--sex, free verse, marksmanship. If you bear me a grudge, I am ready to make unusual amends. Even an old-fashioned rencontre, sword or pistol, in Rio or elsewhere--is not excluded. My memory and my eloquence are not at their best today but really, my dear Mr. Humbert, you were not an ideal stepfather, and I did not force your little protegee to join me. It was she made me remove her to a happier home. This house is not as modern as that ranch we shared with dear friends. But it is roomy, cool in summer and winter, and in a word comfortable, so, since I intend retiring to England or Florence forever, I suggest you move in. It is yours, gratis. Under the condition you stop pointing at me that [he swore disgustingly] gun. By the way, I do not know if you care for the bizarre, but if you do, I can offer you, also gratis, as house pet, a rather exciting little freak, a young lady with three breasts, one a dandy, this is a rare and delightful marvel of nature. Now, soyons raisonnables. You will only wound me hideously and then rot in jail while I recuperate in a tropical setti
ng. I promise you, Brewster, you will be happy here, with a magnificent cellar, and all the royalties from my next play--I have not much at the bank right now but I propose to borrow--you know, as the Bard said, with that cold in his head, to borrow and to borrow and to borrow. There are other advantages. We have here a most reliable and bribable charwoman, a Mrs. Vibrissa--curious name--who comes from the village twice a week, alas not today, she has daughters, granddaughters, a thing or two I know about the chief of police makes him my slave. I am a playwright. I have been called the American Maeterlinck. Maeterlinck-Schmetterling, says I. Come on! All this is very humiliating, and I am not sure I am doing the right thing. Never use herculanita with rum. Now drop that pistol like a good fellow. I knew your dear wife slightly. You may use my wardrobe. Oh, another thing--you are going to like this. I have an absolutely unique collection of erotica upstairs. Just to mention one item: the in folio de-luxe Bagration Island by the explorer and psychoanalyst Melanie Weiss, a remarkable lady, a remarkable work--drop that gun--with photographs of eight hundred and something male organs she examined and measured in 1932 on Bagration, in the Barda Sea, very illuminating graphs, plotted with love under pleasant skies--drop that gun--and moreover I can arrange for you to attend executions, not everybody knows that the chair is painted yellow--"

  Feu. This time I hit something hard. I hit the back of a black rocking chair, not unlike Dolly Schiller's--my bullet hit the inside surface of its back whereupon it immediately went into a rocking act, so fast and with such zest that any one coming into the room might have been flabbergasted by the double miracle: that chair rocking in a panic all by itself, and the armchair, where my purple target had just been, now void of all live content. Wiggling his fingers in the air, with a rapid heave of his rump, he flashed into the music room and the next second we were tugging and gasping on both sides of the door which had a key I had overlooked. I won again, and with another abrupt movement Clare the Impredictable sat down before the piano and played several atrociously vigorous, fundamentally hysterical, plangent chords, his jowls quivering, his spread hands tensely plunging, and his nostrils emitting the soundtrack snorts which had been absent from our fight. Still singing those impossible sonorities, he made a futile attempt to open with his foot a kind of seaman's chest near the piano. My next bullet caught him somewhere in the side, and he rose from his chair higher and higher, like old, gray, mad Nijinski, like Old Faithful, like some old nightmare of mine, to a phenomenal altitude, or so it seemed, as he rent the air--still shaking with the rich black music--head thrown back in a howl, hand pressed to his brow, and with his other hand clutching his armpit as if stung by a hornet, down he came on his heels and, again a normal robed man, scurried out into the hall.