Clouds again interfered with that picnic on that unattainable lake. Is it Fate scheming. Yesterday I tried on before the mirror a new pair of bathing trunks.
Wednesday. In the afternoon, Haze (common-sensical shoes, tailor-made dress), said she was driving downtown to buy a present for a friend of a friend of hers, and would I please come too because I have such a wonderful taste in textures and perfumes. ‘Choose your favourite seduction,’ she purred. What could Humbert, being in the perfume business, do? She had me cornered between the front porch and her car. ‘Hurry up,’ she said as I laboriously doubled up my large body in order to crawl in (still desperately devising a means of escape). She had started the engine, and was genteelly swearing at a backing and turning truck in front that had just brought old invalid Miss Opposite a brand new wheel chair, when my Lolita’s sharp voice came from the parlour window: ‘You! Where are you going? I’m coming too! Wait!’ ‘Ignore her,’ yelped Haze (killing the motor); alas for my fair driver; Lo was already pulling at the door on my side. ‘This is intolerable,’ began Haze; but Lo had scrambled in, shivering with glee. ‘Move your bottom, you,’ said Lo. ‘Lo!’ cried Haze (sideglancing at me, hoping I would throw rude Lo out). ‘And behold,’ said Lo (not for the first time), as she jerked back, as the car leapt forward. ‘It is intolerable,’ said Haze, violently getting into second, ‘that a child should be so ill-mannered. And so very persevering. When she knows she is unwanted. And needs a bath.’
My knuckles lay against the child’s blue jeans. She was barefooted; her toenails showed remnants of cherry-red polish and there was a bit of adhesive tape across her big toe; and, God, what would I not have given to kiss then and there those delicate-boned, long-toed, monkeyish feet! Suddenly her hand slipped into mine and without our chaperon’s seeing, I held, and stroked, and squeezed that little hot paw, all the way to the store. The wings of the driver’s Marlenesque[76] nose shone, having shed or burned up their ration of powder, and she kept up an elegant monologue about the local traffic, and smiled in profile, and pouted in profile, and beat her painted lashes in profile, while I prayed we would never get to that store, but we did.
I have nothing else to report, save, primo[77]: that big Haze had little Haze sit behind on our way home, and secundo[78]: that the lady decided to keep Humbert’s Choice for the backs of her own shapely ears.
Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People’s Encyclopaedia, I found a map of the States that a child’s pencil had started copying out on a sheet of lightweight paper, upon the other side of which, counter to the unfinished outline of Florida and the Gulf, there was a mimeographed list of names referring, evidently, to her class at the Ramsdale school. It is a poem I know already by heart.
A poem, a poem, forsooth! So strange and sweet was it to discover this ‘Haze, Dolores’ (she!) in its special bower of names, with its bodyguard of roses – a fairy princess between her two maids of honour. I am trying to analyse the spine-thrill of delight it gives me, this name among all those others. What is it that excites me almost to tears (hot, opalescent, thick tears that poets and lovers shed)? What is it? The tender anonymity of this name with its formal veil (‘Dolores’) and that abstract transposition of first name and surname, which is like a pair of new pale gloves or a mask? Is ‘mask’ the keyword? Is it because there is always delight in the semi-translucent mystery, the flowing charshaf, through which the flesh and the eye you alone are elected to know smile in passing at you alone? Or is it because I can imagine so well the rest of the colourful classroom around my dolorous and hazy darling: Grace and her ripe pimples; Ginny and her lagging leg; Gordon, the haggard masturbator; Duncan, the foul-smelling clown; nail-biting Agnes; Viola, of the blackheads and the bouncing bust; pretty Rosaline; dark Mary Rose; adorable Stella, who has let strangers touch her; Ralph, who bullies and steals; Irving, for whom I am sorry. And there she is there, lost in the middle, gnawing a pencil, detested by teachers, all the boys’ eyes on her hair and neck, my Lolita.
Friday. I long for some terrific disaster. Earthquake. Spectacular explosion. Her mother is messily but instantly and permanently eliminated, along with everybody else for miles around. Lolita whimpers in my arms. A free man, I enjoy her among the ruins. Her surprise, my explanations, demonstrations, ullulations. Idle and idiotic fancies! A brave Humbert would have played with her most disgustingly (yesterday, for instance, when she was again in my room to show me her drawings, school-artware); he might have bribed her – and got away with it. A simpler and more practical fellow would have soberly stuck to various commercial substitutes – if you know where to go, I don’t. Despite my manly looks, I am horribly timid. My romantic soul gets all clammy and shivery at the thought of running into some awful indecent unpleasantness. Those ribald sea monsters. ‘Mais allez-y, allez-y![79]’ Annabel skipping on one foot to get into her shorts, I seasick with rage, trying to screen her.
Same date, later, quite late. I have turned on the light to take down a dream. It had an evident antecedent. Haze at dinner had benevolently proclaimed that since the weather bureau promised a sunny weekend we would go to the lake Sunday after church. As I lay in bed, erotically musing before trying to go to sleep, I thought of a final scheme how to profit by the picnic to come. I was aware that mother Haze hated my darling for her being sweet on me. So I planned my lake day with a view to satisfying the mother. To her alone would I talk; but at some appropriate moment I would say I had left my wrist watch or my sunglasses in that glade yonder – and plunge with my nymphet into the wood. Reality at this juncture withdrew, and the Quest for the Glasses turned into a quiet little orgy with a singularly knowing, cheerful, corrupt and compliant Lolita behaving as reason knew she could not possibly behave. At 3 a.m. I swallowed a sleeping pill, and presently, a dream that was not a sequel but a parody revealed to me, with a kind of meaningful clarity, the lake I had never yet visited: it was glazed over with a sheet of emerald ice, and a pockmarked Eskimo was trying in vain to break it with a pickaxe, although imported mimosas and oleanders flowered on its gravelly banks. I am sure Dr. Blanche Schwarzmann would have paid me a sack of schillings for adding such a libidream to her files. Unfortunately, the rest of it was frankly eclectic. Big Haze and little Haze rode on horseback around the lake, and I rode too, dutifully bobbing up and down, bowlegs astraddle although there was no horse between them, only elastic air – one of those little omissions due to the absent-mindedness of the dream agent.
Saturday. My heart is still thumping. I still squirm and emit low moans of remembered embarrassment.
Dorsal view. Glimpse of shiny skin between T-shirt and white gym shorts. Bending, over a window sill, in the act of tearing off leaves from a poplar outside while engrossed in torrential talk with a newspaper boy below (Kenneth Knight, I suspect) who had just propelled the Ramsdale Journal with a very precise thud on to the porch. I began creeping up to her – ‘crippling’ up to her, as pantomimists say. My arms and legs were convex surfaces between which – rather than upon which – I slowly progressed by some neutral means of locomotion: Humbert the Wounded Spider. I must have taken hours to reach her: I seemed to see her through the wrong end of a telescope, and toward her taut little rear I moved like some paralytic, on soft distorted limbs, in terrible concentration. At last I was right behind her when I had the unfortunate idea of blustering a trifle – shaking her by the scruff of the neck and that sort of thing to cover my real manège[80], and she said in a shrill brief whine: ‘Cut it out!’ – most coarsely, the little wench, and with a ghastly grin Humbert the Humble beat a gloomy retreat while she went on wisecracking streetward.
But now listen to what happened next. After lunch I was reclining in a low chair trying to read. Suddenly two deft little hands were over my eyes: she had crept up behind as if re-enacting, in a ballet sequence, my morning manoeuvre. Her fingers were a luminous crimson as they tried to blot out the sun, and she uttered hiccups of laughter and jerked this way and that as I stretched my arm sideways and backwards without otherwise changing my recumbent position. My hand swept over her agile giggling legs, and the book like a sleigh