Longing

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The next night was the formal opening of the Congress, ushered in by a twilight cocktail buffet in the courtyard of the Hofburg—one of Vienna’s eighteenth-century palaces. The inside of the building had been renovated so that the public rooms exuded all the institutional charm of American motel dining rooms, but the courtyard was still back in the mists of the eighteenth century. We arrived at that purple hour—eight o’clock on a late July evening. Long tables stood framing the edges of the courtyard. Waiters moved through the crowd holding aloft champagne glasses (sweet German Sekt, it turned out to be, alas). Even the analysts were glittering in the mauve dusk. Rose Schwamm-Lipkin wore a pink beaded Hong Kong sweater, a red satin skirt, and her dressiest orthopedic sandals. Judy Rose slithered by in a braless body suit of silver lamé. Even Dr. Schrift was wearing a plum velvet dinner jacket and a large azalea-pink satin bow tie. And Dr. Frommer was in tails and a top hat. Bennett and I moved through the crowd looking for someone we knew. We wandered aimlessly until a waiter dispensing champagne gently dipped his tray to us and gave us something to do. I drank fast, hoping to get drunk immediately—no trick at all for me. In about ten minutes I was wandering through the still more purple mist seeing champagne bubbles in the corners of my eyes. I was supposedly in search of the ladies’ room (but really, of course, in search of Adrian). I found thousands of him stretching back into infinity in a long mirrored baroque hallway outside the ladies’ room. He shimmered in the mirrors. An infinite number of Adrians in beige corduroy trousers and plum-colored turtlenecks and brown suede jackets. An infinite number of dirty toenails in an infinite number of Indian sandals. An infinite number of meerschaum pipes between his beautiful curling lips. My zipless fuck? My man under the bed! Multiplied like the lovers in Last Year at Marienbad. Multiplied like Andy Warhol’s self-portraits. Multiplied like the Thousand and One Buddhas in the Temple at Kyoto. (Each Buddha has six arms, each arm has an extra eye…how many pricks did these millions of Adrians have? And each prick symbolizing the infinite wisdom and infinite compassion of God?) “Hello, ducks,” he says, turning to me. “I have something for you,” I say, handing him the inscribed book I’ve been carrying around all day. The edges of the pages are beginning to fray from my sweaty palms. “You sweetheart!” He takes the book. We link arms and start walking down the mirrored hall. “Galeotto fu il libro e chi lo scrisse,” as my old buddy Dante would say. The poems pimped for love, and their author too. The book of my body was open and the second circle of hell wasn’t far off. “You know,” I say, “we’ll probably never see each other again.” “Maybe that’s why we’re doing this,” he says.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  The looser styles might fit her, I thought. I was feeling generous. The Egyptian slid the cigarettes and M&M’s across the counter with a scrap he’d ripped from a brown paper bag. “You still owe me six fifty from last week,” he said, and wrote down the sum I now owed on top of that, along with my name, which I was stunned he knew. I could only assume I’d come down for a snack during a blackout. The Egyptian taped the scrap of paper on the wall next to his rolls of scratch tickets. I put the cigarettes and the Klondike bar and the M&M’s in my coat pocket, took my coffees, and went back upstairs to my apartment. I suppose a part of me wished that when I put my key in the door, it would magically open into a different apartment, a different life, a place so bright with joy and excitement that I’d be temporarily blinded when I first saw it. I pictured what a documentary film crew would capture in my face as I glimpsed this whole new world before me, like in those home improvement shows Reva liked to watch when she came over. First, I’d cringe with surprise. But then, once my eyes adjusted to the light, they’d grow wide and glisten with awe. I’d drop the keys and the coffee and wander in, spinning around with my jaw hanging open, shocked at the transformation of my dim, gray apartment into a paradise of realized dreams. But what would it look like exactly? I had no idea. When I tried to imagine this new place, all I could come up with was a cheesy mural of a rainbow, a man in a white bunny costume, a set of dentures in a glass, a huge slice of watermelon on a yellow plate—an odd prediction, maybe, of when I’m ninety-five and losing my mind in an assisted-living facility where they treat the elderly residents like retarded children. I should be so lucky, I thought. I opened the door to my apartment, and, of course, nothing had changed. I threw my first empty coffee cup in the toppling pile of garbage around the trash can in the kitchen, broke back the lid of the second cup, downed a few trazodone, smoked a cigarette out the window, then flopped down on my sofa. I ripped open the M&M’s, ate them and a couple of Zyprexa, and watched Regarding Henry, dozing, the forgotten Klondike bar melting in my pocket. Reva showed up halfway through the movie with a huge tin of caramel popcorn. I answered the door on my hands and knees. “Can I leave this here?” she asked. “If I keep it at my house, I’m afraid I’ll eat it all.” “Uh-huh,” I grunted.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Give them an ambiguity that lets them see what they want to see, capture their imagination with little voyeuristic glimpses into your dark soul. The Greek philosopher Socrates was one of history's greatest seducers; the young men who followed him as students were not just fascinated by his ideas, they fell in love with him. One such youth was Alcibiades, the notorious playboy who became a powerful political figure near the end of the fifth century B.C. In Plato's Symposium, Alcibiades describes Socrates's seductive powers by comparing him to the little figures of Silenus that were made back then. In Greek myth, Silenus was quite ugly, but also a wise prophet. Accordingly the statues of Silenus were hollow, and when you took them apart, you would find little figures of gods inside them—the in- ner truth and beauty under the unappealing exterior. And so, for Alci- biades, it was the same with Socrates, who was so ugly as to be repellent but whose face radiated inner beauty and contentment. The effect was confus- grateful thanks to you!— yet not forgetting a bone I have to pick with you." • "Ah, sweet woman, what have I done?" was courteous Rivalin's reply. • "You have annoyed me through a friend of mine, the best I ever had. " • "Good heavens," thought he, "what does this mean? What have I done to displease her? What does she say I have done?" and he imagined that unwittingly he must have injured a kinsman of hers some time at their knightly sports and that was why she was vexed with him. But no, the friend she referred to was her heart, in which he made her suffer: that was the friend she spoke of But he knew nothing of that. • "Lovely woman," he said with all his accustomed charm, "I do not want you to be angry with me or bear me any ill will. So, if what you tell me is true, pronounce sentence on me yourself: I will do whatever you command." • "I do not hate you overmuch for what has happened," was the sweet girl's answer, "nor do I love you for it. But to see what amends you will make for the wrong you have done me, I shall test you another time." • And so he bowed as if to go, and she, lovely girl, sighed at him most secretly and said with tender feeling: • "Ah, dear friend, God bless you!" From this time on the thoughts of each ran on the other. • Rivalin turned away, pondering many things. He pondered from many sides why Blancheflor should be vexed, and what lay behind it all.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Rescuers can make excellent victims, particularly if you enjoy chival- rous or maternal attention. If you are a woman, play the damsel in distress, giving a man the chance so many men long for—to act the knight. If you are a man, play the boy who cannot deal with this harsh world; a female Rescuer will envelop you in maternal attention, gaining for herself the added satisfaction of feeling more powerful and in control than a man. An air of sadness will draw either gender in. Exaggerate your weaknesses, but not through overt words or gestures—let them sense that you have had too little love, that you have had a string of bad relationships, that you have got- ten a raw deal in life. Having lured your Rescuer in with the chance to help you, you can then stoke the relationship's fires with a steady supply of needs and vulnerabilities. You can also invite moral rescue: you are bad. You have done bad things. You need a stern yet loving hand. In this case the Rescuer gets to feel morally superior, but also the vicarious thrill of in- volvement with someone naughty. The Roué. These types have lived the good life and experienced many pleasures. They probably have, or once had, a good deal of money to fi- nance their hedonistic lives. On the outside they tend to seem cynical and jaded, but their worldliness often hides a sentimentality that they have struggled to repress. Roués are consummate seducers, but there is one type that can easily seduce them—the young and the innocent. As they get 158 • The Art of Seduction older, they hanker after their lost youth; missing their long-lost innocence, they begin to covet it in others. If you should want to seduce them, you will probably have to be some- what young and to have retained at least the appearance of innocence. It is easy to play this up—make a show of how little experience you have in the world, how you still see things as a child. It is also good to seem to resist their advances: Roués will think it lively and exciting to chase you. You can even seem to dislike or distrust them—that will really spur them on. By be- ing the one who resists, you control the dynamic. And since you have the youth that they are missing, you can maintain the upper hand and make them fall deeply in love. They will often be susceptible to such a fall, be- cause they have tamped down their own romantic tendencies for so long that when it bursts forth, they lose control. Never give in too early, and never let your guard down—such types can be dangerous.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  The young Napoleon Bonaparte, twenty-six at the time, had no inter- est in such revelries. He had made a name for himself as a bright, audacious general who had helped quell rebellion in the provinces, but his ambition was boundless and he burned with desire for new conquests. So when, in October of that year, the infamous thirty-three-year-old widow Josephine de Beauharnais visited his offices, he couldn't help but be confused. Jose- phine was so exotic, and everything about her was languorous and sensual. (She capitalized on her foreignness—she came from the island of Mar- tinique.) On the other hand she had a reputation as a loose woman, and the shy Napoleon believed in marriage. Even so, when Josephine invited him to one of her weekly soirees, he found himself accepting. At the soiree he felt totally out of his element. All of the city's great writers and wits were there, as well as the few of the nobility who had survived—Josephine herself was a vicomtesse, and had narrowly escaped the guillotine. The women were dazzling, some of them more beautiful than the hostess, but all the men congregated around Josephine, drawn by her graceful presence and queenly manner. Several times she left the men behind and went to Napoleon's side; nothing could have flattered his inse- cure ego more than such attention. He began to pay her visits. Sometimes she would ignore him, and he would leave in a fit of anger. Yet the next day a passionate letter would ar- rive from Josephine, and he would rush to see her. Soon he was spending most of his time with her. Her occasional shows of sadness, her bouts of anger or of tears, only deepened his attachment. In March of 1796, Napo- leon married Josephine. Two days after his wedding, Napoleon left to lead a campaign in northern Italy against the Austrians. "You are the constant object of my thoughts," he wrote to his wife from abroad. "My imagination exhausts itself in guess- ing what you are doing." His generals saw him distracted: he would leave meetings early, spend hours writing letters, or stare at the miniature of Josephine he wore around his neck. He had been driven to this state by the unbearable distance between them and by a slight coldness he now detected There are indeed men who are attached more by resistance than by yielding and who unwittingly prefer a variable sky, now splendid, now black and vexed by lightnings, to love's unclouded blue. Let us not forget that Josephine had to deal with a conqueror and that love resembles war. She did not surrender, she let herself be conquered. Had she been more tender, more attentive, more loving, perhaps Bonaparte would have loved her less. —IMBERT DE SAINT-AMAND, QUOTED IN THE EMPRESS JOSEPHINE: NAPOLEON'S ENCHANTRESS, PHILIP W.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  This was how I refurnished my apartment. One day, I brought the white fox fur coat with me to the Goodwill and handed it to the teenager taking donations through the door around the corner from the store entrance. He took it calmly, asked if I wanted a receipt. I watched his hands smooth the fur, as though he were assessing its value. Maybe he’d steal it and give it to his girlfriend, or his mother. I hoped he would. But then he just threw it in a huge blue bin. In August I bought a battery-operated radio and carried it with me to the park each day. I listened to the jazz stations. I didn’t know any names of the songs. The squirrels flocked to me as soon as I uncrumpled the bag of Corn Flakes. They ate straight from my palm, tiny black hands crunching into the cereal, cheeks ballooning. “You pigs!” I told them. They seemed perturbed by the music coming out of my little radio. I kept the volume low when I fed them. • • • I DIDN’T THINK MUCH of Ping Xi until I saw Reva. I called her on August 19 from the doorman’s cell phone. Despite all the sleep and forgetting, I still knew her number by heart, and recognized the date on the calendar as her birthday. She came over the following Sunday, nervous and smelling of a new perfume that reminded me of gummy worms, said nothing about the odd assortment of furniture and decorations in my apartment or my six-month disappearance, my lack of cell phone, the stacks of mildewed books lining the wall of the living room. She just said, “So, it’s been a while, I guess,” sat down where I pointed, at the Goodwill afghan that I’d spread out like a picnic blanket across the floor, and rattled on about her new position at her company. She described her boss as a “CIA tool,” rolling her eyes and emphasizing certain technical terms in her description of her duties. At first I couldn’t tell if they were aphorisms about sex positions. Everything about her seemed troublingly pornographic—her matte foundation, her darkly outlined lips, that perfume, the poised stillness of her hands. “Innovative solutions.” “Anatomy of workplace violence.” “Strong objectives.” She wore her hair in a lose chignon, my tiny pearl earrings budding from her earlobes like drops of milk, simultaneously perverse and innocent, I thought. She also wore my white eyelet blouse and a pair of jeans I’d given her. I felt no longing or nostalgia for the clothes. The jeans had frayed at the cuffs, an inch too long on Reva’s legs. I thought to suggest to her to have them professionally hemmed. There was a place on Eighty-third. “I just read this story in the New Yorker,” she said, and pulled the rolled- up issue out of her enormous purse.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Paper! But what atrocious paper! Talk about the history of the world through toilets—this toilet resembles nothing so much as an oubliette, and the paper seems to have dead bedbugs embedded in it. I lock the door, heave open the tiny window, toss Bennett’s bloody T-shirt out into the courtyard (thinking momentarily about sympathetic magic and all those tribal customs mentioned in The Golden Bough... will some evil sorcerer find Bennett’s T- shirt drenched with my blood and use it to cast a spell on both of us?). Then I sit down on the pot and begin devising a sort of sanitary napkin for myself with layers of toilet paper. The absurdities our bodies subject us to! Other than being doubled over with diarrhea in some stinking public toilet, I know of nothing more ignominious than getting your period when you have no Tampax. The odd thing is that I didn’t always feel this way about menstruation. I actually looked forward to my first period, longed for it, wanted it, prayed for it. I used to pore over words like “period” and “menstruation” in the dictionary. I used to recite a little prayer which went: please let me get my period today. Or, because I was afraid someone would hear me, I said: P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. I used to chant this on the toilet seat, wiping myself again and again and hoping to find at least a tiny spot of blood. But nothing. Randy had her period (or “got unwell,” as my liberated mother and grandmother said) and so did all the girls in my seventh-grade class. And my eighth-grade class. What big bosoms and C-cup Maidenform bras and curly pubic tendrils! What stirring discussions of Kotex and Modess, and (for the very, very daring) Tampax! But I had nothing to contribute. At thirteen I had only a “training bra” (training for what?) I didn’t fill, a few sparse brownish- red curls (not even blonde, for all that I was a natural blonde), and information about sex gleaned from all-night marathons with Randy and her best friend, Rita. So the prayers on the pot continued. P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T., P.L.M.G.M.P.T. And then, when I was thirteen and a half (ancient compared to Randy’s ten and a half), I finally “got it” on the Ile de France in Mid-Atlantic, as we returned en famille from that disastrously expensive (though tax-deductible) European jaunt. There were the four of us sharing an inner stateroom near the din of the engines (while our parents had an outer cabin on the Boat Deck) and suddenly I reached womanhood two and a half days out of Le Havre.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  By putting the geography of the United States into motion, I did my best for hours on end to give her the impression of “going places,” of rolling on to some definite destination, to some unusual delight. I have never seen such smooth amiable roads as those that now radiated before us, across the crazy quilt of forty-eight states. Voraciously we consumed those long highways, in rapt silence we glided over their glossy black dance floors. Not only had Lo no eye for scenery but she furiously resented my calling her attention to this or that enchanting detail of landscape; which I myself learned to discern only after being exposed for quite a time to the delicate beauty ever present in the margin of our undeserving journey. By a paradox of pictorial thought, the average lowland North-American countryside had at first seemed to me something I accepted with a shock of amused recognition because of those painted oilcloths which were imported from America in the old days to be hung above washstands in Central-European nurseries, and which fascinated a drowsy child at bed time with the rustic green views they depicted—opaque curly trees, a barn, cattle, a brook, the dull white of vague orchards in bloom, and perhaps a stone fence or hills of greenish gouache. But gradually the models of those elementary rusticities became stranger and stranger to the eye, the nearer I came to know them. Beyond the tilled plain, beyond the toy roofs, there would be a slow suffusion of inutile loveliness, a low sun in a platinum haze with a warm, peeled-peach tinge pervading the upper edge of a two-dimensional, dove-gray cloud fusing with the distant amorous mist. There might be a line of spaced trees silhouetted against the horizon, and hot still noons above a wilderness of clover, and Claude Lorrain clouds inscribed remotely into misty azure with only their cumulus part conspicuous against the neutral swoon of the background. Or again, it might be a stern El Greco horizon, pregnant with inky rain, and a passing glimpse of some mummy-necked farmer, and all around alternating strips of quick-silverish water and harsh green corn, the whole arrangement opening like a fan, somewhere in Kansas. Now and then, in the vastness of those plains, huge trees would advance toward us to cluster self-consciously by the roadside and provide a bit of humanitarian shade above a picnic table, with sun flecks, flattened paper cups, samaras and discarded ice-cream sticks littering the brown ground. A great user of roadside facilities, my unfastidious Lo would be charmed by toilet signs—Guys-Gals, John-Jane, Jack-Jill and even Buck’s-Doe’s; while lost in an artist’s dream, I would stare at the honest brightness of the gasoline paraphernalia against the splendid green of oaks, or at a distant hill scrambling out—scarred but still untamed—from the wilderness of agriculture that was trying to swallow it.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  She sighed, and she deliberately rubbed her read against the stone wall, wanting somehow to punish it more so that after a few seconds she could feel the relief when she stopped doing this. Her sex would not stop its throbbing. It was sticky with its own wetness. Poor Princess Lizetta in the Hall of Punishments, did she suffer worse than this? At least she was not alone in the darkness, and suddenly even those who must pass her, taunting her, teasing her, stroking her swelling sex, seemed to Beauty a desirable company. She strained and twisted her hips. It was no comfort to her, and she did not understand why she felt this craving when only a little while ago her pain had been so great she had kissed Lady Juliana's slippers. She flushed to think of Lady Juliana's angry words, those reproving spanks that somehow hurt her worse than the others. And how the Pages must have laughed when a dozen Princess had probably played the little gathering game with the roses and done it better. But why, why had Beauty at the very end picked up that last rosebud, and why had she felt her breasts swollen with warmth when Lady Juliana took it from her lips? It had seemed in that moment that Beauty's nipples were cruel little caps that prevented pleasure from breaking loose in her. Strange thought. They seemed too tight for her then, her nipples, and her sex gaped and hungered and the moisture trickled down the inside of her thighs, and when she thought of Prince Alexi's smile, and Lady Juliana's brown eye, and the Prince's beautiful face, and even the Queen, yes, even the Queen's red lips, she felt herself burning in agony. Prince Alexi's sex was thick and dark, like all of him, and his nipples a dark, dark rose color. She tossed her head, rolled it against the wall. But why had she picked up the rose, offered it to pretty Lady Juliana? She stared forward in the darkness, and hearing a creaking sound very near to her, she thought she was imagining it. But in the darkness of the near wall, a seam of light appeared and widened. The door had been opened, and Prince Alexi slipped into the dressing room. Unbound, free, he was standing before her, and very gently, he pushed the door closed behind him. Beauty held her breath. He did not move, as if he must accustom himself to the darkness, and then immediately he came forward and released Beauty's wrists and ankles. She stood trembling. And then her arms were about him.

• From The Folding Star (1994)

  "Now, the middle bit," said Echevin again with the sweet glow of discovery, a warm crinkling about his large pale eyes, "is what I found almost by accident when I went to Munich in the summer for the big Symbolist show. I met a man at a party one night and when he heard of my Orst connections he said would I go to his flat and look at a painting he had bought in a sale in Czechoslovakia which had the EO monogram on it. I must admit I hesitated. The owner himself clearly wasn't an expert, he was a perfectly nice dentist, but the odd provenance made me wonder, and the idea of treasures in Eastern Europe suddenly rising to the surface and becoming available was attractive too." It was clear how the story was going to end and we sat with expressions of placid encouragement and poked politely at the thick, off-white fish on our plates, a fish that must figure somewhere in Luc's catalogue, though I couldn't put a name to it myself. And that had me sunk for a heart-gripping ten seconds in the sensation of Luc: abruptly in his presence, I was starting to unbutton his shirt. . . "It wasn't quite so easy," our host was saying. "He took me off from the party in a taxi, he wanted to know straight away, it seemed. We drove and drove, and then we were on a sort of motorway and it turned out he lived in what was virtually another town; I was getting a bit restive, and I could see how anxious he was that I shouldn't get anxious, so there was a rather difficult kind of constraint. Eventually we reached a magnificent apartment block—absolutely brand new, he was evidently a very rich dentist—and went up about ten floors. He lived there with his fierce old mother; she emerged in her dressing-gown and shawl, looking very disorientated and very possessive.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  The man under the bed The man who has been there for years waiting The man who waits for my floating bare foot The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs The man at the end of the end of the line I met him tonight I always meet him He stands in the amber air of a bar When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers & ride through the air on their toothpick skewers When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through he arranges his face around its hollows he opens his pupilless eyes at me For years he has waited to drag me down & now he tells me he has only waited to take me home We waltz through the street like death & the maiden We float through the wall of the wall of my room If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks I wrap myself around him like the darkness I breathe into his mouth & make him real B SEVEN A Nervous Cough What we remember lacks the hard edge of fact. To help us along we create little fictions, highly subtle and individual scenarios which clarify and shape our experience. The remembered event becomes a fiction, a structure made to accommodate certain feelings. This is obvious to me. If it weren’t for these structures, art would be too personal for the artist to create, much less for the audience to grasp. Even film, the most literal of all the arts, is edited. —Jerzy Kosinski ennett asleep. Face up. Arms at sides. Marie Winkleman is not with him. I sneak into my own bed as the blue light comes down through the window. I am too happy to sleep. But what will I tell Bennett in the morning? I lie in bed thinking of Adrian (who has just driven off and by now must be hopelessly lost again). I adore him. The more he gets lost, the more perfect he appears in my eyes. I wake up at seven and lie in bed two more hours waiting for Bennett to awaken. He groans, farts, and gets up. He starts getting dressed in silence, stomping around the room. I am singing. I am skipping back and forth to the bathroom. “Where did you disappear to last night?” I say blithely. “We looked all over for you.” “Where did I disappear to?” “In that discotheque—you suddenly left. Adrian Goodlove and I looked all over for you....” “You looked all over for me?” He was very bitter and sarcastic. “You and your Liaisons Dangereuses,” he said. He mispronounced it.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  A greater endeavor lures me on: to fix once for all the perilous magic of nymphets. ” Humbert’s desires are those of a poet as well as a pervert, and not surprisingly, since they reflect, darkly, in a crooked enough mirror, the artistic desires of his creator. Humbert’s is a nightmare vision of the ineffable bliss variously sought by one Nabokov character after another. For a resonant summary phrase, one turns to Agaspher (1923), a verse drama written when Nabokov was twenty-four. An adaptation of the legend of the Wandering Jew, only its Prologue was published. Tormented by “dreams of earthly beauty,” Nabokov’s wanderer exclaims, “I shall catch you / catch you, Maria my inexpressible dream / from age to age!” 27 Near the end of another early work, the novel King, Queen, Knave (1928), an itinerant photographer walks down the street, ignored by the crowd, “yelling into the wind: ‘The artist is coming! The divinely favored, der gottbegnadete artist is coming!’ ”—a yell that ironically refers to the novel’s unrealized artist, businessman Dreyer, and anticipates and announces the arrival of such future avatars of the artist as the chessplayer Luzhin in The Defense (1930), the butterfly collector Pilgram in “The Aurelian” (1931), the daydreaming art dealer and critic Albert Albinus in Laughter in the Dark (1932), the imprisoned and doomed Cincinnatus in Invitation to a Beheading (1935–1936), who struggles to write, the inventor Salvator Waltz in The Waltz Invention (1938), and the philosopher Krug in Bend Sinister (1947), as well as poets manqués such as Humbert Humbert in Lolita (1955), and such genuine yet only partially fulfilled artists as Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev in The Gift (1937–1938), Sebastian Knight in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), and John Shade in Pale Fire (1962). When perceived by the reader, the involuted design of each novel reveals that these characters all exist in a universe of fiction arrayed around the consciousness of Vladimir Nabokov, the only artist of major stature who appears in Nabokov’s work.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I realized I was the only shopper in that rather eerie place where I moved about fish-like, in a glaucous aquarium. I sensed strange thoughts form in the minds of the languid ladies that escorted me from counter to counter, from rock ledge to seaweed, and the belts and the bracelets I chose seemed to fall from siren hands into transparent water. I bought an elegant valise, had my purchases put into it, and repaired to the nearest hotel, well pleased with my day. Somehow, in connection with that quiet poetical afternoon of fastidious shopping, I recalled the hotel or inn with the seductive name of The Enchanted Hunters which Charlotte had happened to mention shortly before my liberation. With the help of a guidebook I located it in the secluded town of Briceland, a four-hour drive from Lo’s camp. I could have telephoned but fearing my voice might go out of control and lapse into coy croaks of broken English, I decided to send a wire ordering a room with twin beds for the next night. What a comic, clumsy, wavering Prince Charming I was! How some of my readers will laugh at me when I tell them the trouble I had with the wording of my telegram! What should I put: Humbert and daughter? Humberg and small daughter? Homberg and immature girl? Homburg and child? The droll mistake—the “g” at the end—which eventually came through may have been a telepathic echo of these hesitations of mine. And then, in the velvet of a summer night, my broodings over the philter I had with me! Oh miserly Hamburg! Was he not a very Enchanted Hunter as he deliberated with himself over his boxful of magic ammunition? To rout the monster of insomnia should he try himself one of those amethyst capsules? There were forty of them, all told—forty nights with a frail little sleeper at my throbbing side; could I rob myself of one such night in order to sleep? Certainly not: much too precious was each tiny plum, each microscopic planetarium with its live stardust. Oh, let me be mawkish for the nonce! I am so tired of being cynical. 26 This daily headache in the opaque air of this tombal jail is disturbing, but I must persevere. Have written more than a hundred pages and not got anywhere yet. My calendar is getting confused. That must have been around August 15, 1947. Don’t think I can go on. Heart, head—everything. Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita, Lolita. Repeat till the page is full, printer. 27 Still in Parkington. Finally, I did achieve an hour’s slumber—from which I was aroused by gratuitous and horribly exhausting congress with a small hairy hermaphrodite, a total stranger. By then it was six in the morning, and it suddenly occurred to me it might be a good thing to arrive at the camp earlier than I had said.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  The bud-stage of breast development appears early (10.7 years) in the sequence of somatic changes accompanying pubescence. And the next maturational item available is the first appearance of pigmented pubic hair (11.2 years). My little cup brims with tiddles. A shipwreck. An atoll. Alone with a drowned passenger’s shivering child. Darling, this is only a game! How marvelous were my fancied adventures as I sat on a hard park bench pretending to be immersed in a trembling book. Around the quiet scholar, nymphets played freely, as if he were a familiar statue or part of an old tree’s shadow and sheen. Once a perfect little beauty in a tartan frock, with a clatter put her heavily armed foot near me upon the bench to dip her slim bare arms into me and tighten the strap of her roller skate, and I dissolved in the sun, with my book for fig leaf, as her auburn ringlets fell all over her skinned knee, and the shadow of leaves I shared pulsated and melted on her radiant limb next to my chameleonic cheek. Another time a red-haired school girl hung over me in the métro , and a revelation of axillary russet I obtained remained in my blood for weeks. I could list a great number of these one-sided diminutive romances. Some of them ended in a rich flavor of hell. It happened for instance that from my balcony I would notice a lighted window across the street and what looked like a nymphet in the act of undressing before a co-operative mirror. Thus isolated, thus removed, the vision acquired an especially keen charm that made me race with all speed toward my lone gratification. But abruptly, fiendishly, the tender pattern of nudity I had adored would be transformed into the disgusting lamp-lit bare arm of a man in his underclothes reading his paper by the open window in the hot, damp, hopeless summer night. Rope-skipping, hopscotch. That old woman in black who sat down next to me on my bench, on my rack of joy (a nymphet was groping under me for a lost marble), and asked if I had stomachache, the insolent hag. Ah, leave me alone in my pubescent park, in my mossy garden. Let them play around me forever. Never grow up. 6 A propos: I have often wondered what became of those nymphets later? In this wrought-iron world of criss-cross cause and effect, could it be that the hidden throb I stole from them did not affect their future? I had possessed her—and she never knew it. All right. But would it not tell sometime later? Had I not somehow tampered with her fate by involving her image in my voluptas? Oh, it was, and remains, a source of great and terrible wonder.

• From The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty (1983)

  "Don't try to understand all that I say at once. Merely listen and see if the story in the end does not soothe you. Remember, you cannot possibly escape this place. No matter what you do the Court will find ways to wring amusement from you. Even a wild, teeth-gnashing slave can be bound and used in an abundance of different ways to amuse everyone. So accept this limit; and then try to understand your own limits and how you must broaden them." "O, if I know you love me I can accept, I can accept anything." "I do love you. But the Prince loves you, too. And even so, you must seek your path of acceptance." He embraced her, then gently forcing his tongue between her lips, kissed her violently. He suckled her breasts until they were almost sore, as she arched her back moaning again, her passion rising. He lifted her under him and once again he drove his organ into her, turning her gently so they lay on their sides facing one another. "They shan't rouse me tomorrow for anything and for that alone I'll be punished." He smiled. "But I do not care. It's worth it, to have you, to hold you, and to be with you." "But I can't bear to think of you punished." "Be comforted that I shall deserve it, and the Queen must be satisfied, and I belong to her, just as you belong to her and you belong to the Prince, and should he catch you he would have every right to punish me further." "But how can I belong to him and to you?" "As easily as you might belong as well to the Queen and Lady Juliana. Did you not give Lady Juliana the rose? I wager that before the month is out, you will be mad to please Lady Juliana. You will dread her displeasure; you will hunger for her paddling just as you fear it." Beauty turned her face away and buried it in the straw because it was already true. Tonight she had been glad to see Lady Juliana. And this was the way she felt about her Prince. "Now, listen to my story and you will understand more. It is not a neat explanation. But you will see something of a mystery unfolded." PRINCE ALEXI TELLS OF HIS CAPTURE AND ENSLAVEMENT WHEN IT came time to send Tributes to the Queen," Prince Alexi said, "I was not at all resigned to be chosen. There were other Princes who were brought forward to go with me, and we were told that our service with the Queen would last no more than five years at most, and that we would return greatly enhanced in wisdom, patience, self-control, and all virtues.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  —covered mirrors and stilled grandfather clocks, listless afternoons silent but for sniffling and the creaks of old floorboards as someone in an apron came out from the kitchen saying, “You should eat something.” And I wanted a mother. I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza. Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted. She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked. A few times that week, people visited the house, and my mother would do her hair and makeup, spray air freshener, raise the blinds. She got phone calls from Peggy twice a day. “I’m fine, Peggy. No, don’t come over. I’m going to take a bath and a nap. Sunday? Fine, but call first.” In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store. “This girl is my daughter, and I permit her to purchase alcohol. Call if you’d like to verify her identity. The number is . . .” I bought her vodka. I bought her whiskey and mixers. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. She’d been a heavy drinker for years. Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that. I remember one afternoon, she came out of her room and walked past me where I lay on the floor sobbing. She went to the kitchen, wrote a check for the housekeeper, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, told me to turn down the television, and went back to her room. That was the worst of it. I was pretty upset. I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was “doing.” And nobody called to ask me. Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me. We didn’t get to be friends until later that year. For the rest of my week of mourning, my moods trespassed out of the standard categories I’d come to recognize. One moment was silent and gray, Technicolor and garish and absurd the next. I felt like I was on drugs, though I had taken nothing. I didn’t even drink that week until a man from the university, Professor Plushenko, one of my father’s colleagues, came to the house, and my mother attempted to entertain him.

• From My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018)

  —covered mirrors and stilled grandfather clocks, listless afternoons silent but for sniffling and the creaks of old floorboards as someone in an apron came out from the kitchen saying, “You should eat something.” And I wanted a mother. I could admit that. I wanted her to hold me while I cried, bring me cups of warm milk and honey, give me comfy slippers, rent me videos and watch them with me, order deliveries of Chinese food and pizza. Of course I didn’t tell her that this was what I wanted. She was usually passed out in her bed with the door locked. A few times that week, people visited the house, and my mother would do her hair and makeup, spray air freshener, raise the blinds. She got phone calls from Peggy twice a day. “I’m fine, Peggy. No, don’t come over. I’m going to take a bath and a nap. Sunday? Fine, but call first.” In the afternoons, I took the car out, driving aimlessly or to the mall or the supermarket. My mother left me lists of things to buy, with a note for the guy at the liquor store. “This girl is my daughter, and I permit her to purchase alcohol. Call if you’d like to verify her identity. The number is . . .” I bought her vodka. I bought her whiskey and mixers. I didn’t think she was in any real danger. She’d been a heavy drinker for years. Maybe I did take some pleasure in aiding her self-destruction by buying her booze, but I didn’t want my mother to die. It wasn’t like that. I remember one afternoon, she came out of her room and walked past me where I lay on the floor sobbing. She went to the kitchen, wrote a check for the housekeeper, took a bottle of vodka from the freezer, told me to turn down the television, and went back to her room. That was the worst of it. I was pretty upset. I couldn’t have described with any accuracy how I was “doing.” And nobody called to ask me. Everyone I knew at school hated me because I was so pretty. In hindsight, Reva was a pioneer: she was the only friend who ever really dared to try to know me. We didn’t get to be friends until later that year. For the rest of my week of mourning, my moods trespassed out of the standard categories I’d come to recognize. One moment was silent and gray, Technicolor and garish and absurd the next. I felt like I was on drugs, though I had taken nothing. I didn’t even drink that week until a man from the university, Professor Plushenko, one of my father’s colleagues, came to the house, and my mother attempted to entertain him.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  I would like to thank Catherine Léouzon, who some years ago intro- duced me to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and the world of Valmont. I would like to thank David Frankel, for his deft editing and for his much-appreciated advice; Molly Stern at Viking Penguin, for overseeing the project and helping to shape it; Radha Pancham, for keeping it all orga- nized and being so patient; and Brett Kelly, for moving things along. With heavy heart I would like to pay tribute to my cat Boris, who for thirteen years watched over me as I wrote and whose presence is sorely missed. His successor, Brutus, has proven to be a worthy muse. Finally, I would like to honor my father. Words cannot express how much I miss him and how much he has inspired my work. iX Contents Acknowlegments • ix Preface • xix Part One The Seductive Character page 1 The Siren page 5 A man is often secretly oppressed by the role he has to play—by always having to be responsi- ble, in control, and rational. The Siren is the ultimate male fantasy figure because she offers a total release from the limitations of his life. In her presence, which is always heightened and sexually charged, the male feels transported to a realm of pure pleasure. In a world where women are often too timid to project such an image, learn to take control of the male libido by embodying his fantasy. The Rake page 17 A woman never quite feels desired and appreciated enough. She wants attention, but a man is too often distracted and unresponsive. The Rake is a great female fantasy-figure—when he de- sires a woman, brief though that moment may be, he will go to the ends of the earth for her. He may be disloyal, dishonest, and amoral, but that only adds to his appeal. Stir a woman's repressed longings by adapting the Rake's mix of danger and pleasure. The Ideal Lover page 29 Most people have dreams in their youth that get shattered or worn down with age. They find themselves disappointed by people, events, reality, which cannot match their youthful ideals. Ideal Lovers thrive on people's broken dreams, which become lifelong fantasies. You long for ro- mance? Adventure? Lofty spiritual communion? The Ideal Lover reflects your fantasy. He or she is an artist in creating the illusion you require. In a world of disenchantment and baseness, there is limitless seductive power in following the path of the Ideal Lover. xi xii • Contents The Dandy page 41 Most of us feel trapped within the limited roles that the world expects us to play. We are in- stantly attracted to those who are more fluid than we are—those who create their own persona.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  Eva injected poetry into his To attend the theater when she does, gaze at her beauty— \ From the shoulders up she's time \ Most delectably spent, a feast for adoring glances, \ For the eloquence of eyebrows, the speaking sign. \ Applaud when some male dancer struts on as the heroine, \ Cheer for each lover's role. \ When she leaves, leave too—but sit there as long as she does: \ Waste time at your mistress's whim. . . . \ Get her accustomed to you; \ Habit's the key, spare no pains till that's achieved. \ Let her always see you around, always hear you talking, \ Show her your face night and day. \ When you're confident you'll be missed, when your absence \ Seems sure to cause her regret, \ Then give her some respite: a field improves when fallow, \ Parched soil soaks up the rain. \ Demophoön's presence gave Phyllis no more than mild excitement; \ It was his sailing caused arson in her heart. \ Penelope was racked by crafty Ulysses's absence, \ Protesilaus, abroad, made Laodameia burn. \ Short partings do best, though: time wears out affections, \ The absent love fades, a new one takes its place. \ With Menelaus away, Helen's disinclination for sleeping \ Alone led her into her guest's \ Warm bed at night. Were you crazy, Menelaus? —OVID, THE ART OF LOVE, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN Concerning the Birth of Love • Here is what happens in the soul: • 1. Admiration. • 2. You think, "Mow delightful it Poeticize Your Presence • 281 life. Her language was florid and theatrical; she surrounded him with atten- tion, indeed to the point of suffocation, but a woman's dutiful service to a great man was a classic image, and was celebrated in innumerable tango bal- lads. Yet she managed to remain elusive, mysterious, like a movie star you see all the time on the screen but never really know. And when Perón was finally alone, in prison, these poetic images and associations burst forth in his mind. He idealized her madly; as far as he was concerned, she was no longer an actress with a tawdry past. She seduced an entire nation the same way. The secret was her dramatic poetic presence, combined with a touch of elusive distance; over time, you would see whatever you wanted to in her. To this day people fantasize about what Eva was really like. Familiarity destroys seduction.

• From The Art of Seduction (2001)

  A favorite of Louis XIV's, the thirty-six- year-old Marquis was a brave soldier with an acid wit. He was also an in- curable Don Juan. Although he was short, and certainly not handsome, his impudent manners and his military exploits made him irresistible to women. The Grande Mademoiselle had noticed him some years before, ad- miring his elegance and boldness. But it was only this time, in 1669, that she had a real conversation with him, if a short one, and although she knew of his lady-killer reputation, she found him charming. A few days later they ran into each other again; this time the conversation was longer, and Lauzun proved more intelligent than she had imagined—they talked of the playwright Corneille (her favorite), of heroism, and of other elevated top- ics. Now their encounters became more frequent. They had become friends. Anne Marie noted in her diary that her conversations with Lauzun, when they occurred, were the highlight of her day; when he was not at court, she felt his absence. Surely her encounters with him came frequently enough that they could not be accidental on his part, but he always seemed surprised to see her. At the same time, she recorded feeling uneasy— strange emotions were stealing up on her, she did not know why. 179 Many women adore the elusive, \ Hate overeagerness. So, play hard to get, \ Stop boredom developing. And don't let your entreaties \ Sound too confident of possession. Insinuate sex \ Camouflaged as friendship. I've seen ultrastubborn creatures \ Fooled by this gambit, the switch from companion to stud. —OVID, THEART OF LOVE, TRANSLATED BY PETER GREEN On the street, I do not stop her, or I exchange a greeting with her but never come close, but always strive for distance. Presumably our repeated encounters are clearly noticeable to her; presumably she does perceive that on her horizon a new planet has loomed, which in its course has encroached disturbingly upon hers in a curiously undisturbing way, but she has no inkling of the law underlying this movement. . . . Before I begin my attack, I must 180 • The Art of Seduction Time passed, and the Grande Mademoiselle was to leave Paris for a week or two. Now Lauzun approached her without warning and made an emotional plea to be considered her confidante, the great friend who would execute any commission she needed done while she was away. He was poetic and chivalrous, but what did he really mean?