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.

Page 38 of 170 · 20 per page

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  We walked over to a tree and sat down under it. I lay with my head on his lap. Aimlessly, I began fiddling with his fly. I half unzipped it and took his soft penis in my hand. “It’s little,” he said. I looked up at him, his green-gold eyes, the blond hair over his forehead, the laugh lines in the corners of his mouth, his sunburned cheeks. He was still beautiful to me. I longed for him with a yearning that was no less painful for being part nostalgia. We kissed for a long time, his tongue making dizzying circles in my mouth. No matter how long we went on kissing his penis stayed soft. He laughed his sunny laugh and I laughed too. I knew he’d always hold back on me. I knew I’d never really possess him, and that was part of what made him so beautiful. I would write about him, talk about him, remember him, but never have him. The unattainable man. We drove toward Paris. I insisted I wanted to go home, but Adrian tried to prevail on me to stay. He was afraid of losing my loyalty now. He sensed I was drifting away. He knew I was already filing him in my notebook for future reference. As we approached the outskirts of Paris, we began seeing graffiti scrawled under the highway bridges. One of them read: FEMMES! LIBERONS-NOUS! SIXTEENSeduced & Abandoned The vote, I thought, means nothing to women. We should be armed. —Edna O’Brien Paris again. We arrive coated with the dust of the road. Two migrants out of John Steinbeck, two dusty vaudeville performers out of Colette. Peeing by the side of the road is all very charmingly Rousseauian in theory, but in practice, it leaves your crotch sticky. And one of the disadvantages of being a woman is peeing in your shoes. Or on them. So we arrive in Paris, sticky, dusty, and slightly pissed upon. We are back in love with each other—that second stage of love which consists of nostalgia for the first stage. That second stage of love which comes when you desperately feel you are falling out of love and cannot stand the thought of still another loss. Adrian fondles my knee. “How are you, love?” “Fine, love.” We no longer know how much is real and how much fake. We are one with our performance. I am determined by now to find Bennett and try again if he’ll take me back. But I haven’t the slightest idea where Bennett is. I decide to attempt phoning him. I assume that he’ll have gone back to New York. He hates knocking around Europe almost as much as I do.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  We eat ourselves into a stupor on the day, and he spoils the kids with a crazy amount of gifts come the New Year – but he just won’t do Christmas. I think we’re going to stay with friends in London – it depends if the kids agree. A couple we’ve known a long time. We went there two years ago – it was lovely. They’re Jewish, so there’s no issue. That’s just the way Howard likes it: no rituals, no superstitions, no traditions and no images of Santa Claus. It sounds strange, I guess, but we’re used to it.’ ‘I don’t believe you – you’re having fun with me.’ ‘It’s true! Actually, when you think about it, it’s a pretty Christian policy. Thou shalt worship no graven images; thou shalt have no other God but me – ’ ‘I see,’ said Carlene, dismayed by the levity with which Kiki was approaching the subject. ‘But who is his God?’ Kiki was limbering up to answer this difficult question, when she was distracted by the noise and colour of a group of Africans one  On Beauty block along. Taking up half the sidewalk selling their rip-offs, and among them, surely among them – But, as she called his name, a cross-stream rabble of shoppers blocked her sight line, and by the time they’d passed the mirage had vanished. ‘Isn’t that weird? I always think I see Levi. Never the other two. It’s that uniform – cap, hood, jeans. All those boys are wearing exactly the same thing as Levi. It’s like this goddamn army . I see boys who look like him just about everywhere I go.’ ‘I don’t care what the doctors say,’ said Carlene, leaning on Kiki as they walked the short flight of steps to an eighteenth-century townhouse, hollowed out to accommodate goods and their buyers and sellers; ‘the eyes and the heart are directly connected.’ In this place they found a cane that was a reasonable approximation of the one in Carlene’s mind. Also some monogrammed handkerchiefs, and then the most dreadful cravat. Carlene was satisfied. Kiki suggested they take these gifts to the in-store wrapping service. Carlene, who had never considered that such indulgence might exist, hovered all the while over the girl who was doing the wrapping, and could not restrain herself from occasionally offering her own fingers to press down a bit of tape or help position a bow. ‘Ah – a Hopper,’ said Kiki, pleased at the coincidence. It was a print of Road in Maine , one of a series of poorly reproduced litho-graphs of famous American paintings meant to signal the classiness of this store in contrast to the mall they’d just been in. ‘Someone’s just walked down there,’ she murmured, her finger travelling safely along the flat, paintless surface. ‘Actually, I think it was me. I was moseying along counting those posts. With no idea where I was going. No family. No responsibilities. Wouldn’t that be fine!’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Immediately afterwards, she went up to her room to plunge into the comic books acquired for rainy days at Camp Q (they were so thoroughly sampled by Thursday that she left them behind). I too retired to my lair, and wrote letters. My plan now was to leave for the seaside and then, when school began, resume my existence in the Haze household; for I knew already that I could not live without the child. On Tuesday they went shopping again, and I was asked to answer the phone if the camp mistress rang up during their absence. She did; and a month or so later we had occasion to recall our pleasant chat. That Tuesday, Lo had her dinner in her room. She had been crying after a routine row with her mother and, as had happened on former occasions, had not wished me to see her swollen eyes: she had one of those tender complexions that after a good cry get all blurred and inflamed, and morbidly alluring. I regretted keenly her mistake about my private aesthetics, for I simply love that tinge of Botticellian pink, that raw rose about the lips, those wet, matted eyelashes; and, naturally, her bashful whim deprived me of many opportunities of specious consolation. There was, however, more to it than I thought. As we sat in the darkness of the veranda (a rude wind had put out her red candles), Haze, with a dreary laugh, said she had told Lo that her beloved Humbert thoroughly approved of the whole camp idea “and now,” added Haze, “the child throws a fit; pretext: you and I want to get rid of her; actual reason: I told her we would exchange tomorrow for plainer stuff some much too cute night things that she bullied me into buying for her. You see, she sees herself as a starlet; I see her as a sturdy, healthy, but decidedly homely kid. This, I guess, is at the root of our troubles.” On Wednesday I managed to waylay Lo for a few seconds: she was on the landing, in sweatshirt and green-stained white shorts, rummaging in a trunk. I said something meant to be friendly and funny but she only emitted a snort without looking at me. Desperate, dying Humbert patted her clumsily on her coccyx, and she struck him, quite painfully, with one of the late Mr. Haze’s shoetrees. “Doublecrosser,” she said as I crawled downstairs rubbing my arm with a great show of rue. She did not condescend to have dinner with Hum and mum: washed her hair and went to bed with her ridiculous books. And on Thursday quiet Mrs. Haze drove her to Camp Q. As greater authors than I have put it: “Let readers imagine” etc.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Zora’s all-time academic fantasy was to address the faculty members of Wellington College with a barnstorming speech. ‘You want me to go?’ ‘Only, only , if you felt comfortable doing that.’ ‘Wait – a speech that I’d devised and written?’ ‘Well, I didn’t mean an actual speech speech – but I guess as long as you knew what you wanted to – ’ ‘I mean, what are we doing ,’ asked Zora loudly, ‘if we can’t extend the enormous resources of this institution to people who need it? It’s so disgusting .’ Claire smiled. ‘You’re perfect already.’ ‘Just me. You wouldn’t be there?’ ‘I think it would be much more powerful if it was you speaking your own mind. I mean, what I’d really like to do is send Carl himself, but you know . . .’ said Claire, sighing. ‘Depressing as it is, the truth is these people won’t respond to an appeal to their consciences in any language other than Wellington language. And you know Wellington language, Zora. You of all people. And I don’t mean to get overly dramatic here, but when I think of Carl, I’m thinking of someone who doesn’t have a voice and who needs someone like you, who has a very powerful voice, to speak for him. I actually think it’s that important. I also think it’s a beautiful thing to do for a dispossessed person in this climate. Don’t you feel that?’  On Beauty  Two weeks later Wellington College closed for the Christmas recess. The snow continued. Every night unseen Wellington street workers shovelled it back from the sidewalk. After a while every road was edged with grey ice banks, some over five feet high. Jerome came home. Many dull parties followed: for the Art History Department, drinks at the President’s house, and at the Vice-President’s, at Kiki’s hospital, at Levi’s school. More than once Kiki found herself walking around the perimeters of these hot, crowded rooms, champagne in hand, hoping to see Carlene Kipps somewhere among the tinsel and the quiet black maids, circulating with their trays of shrimp. Often enough she spotted Monty, leaning against the wainscoting in one of his absurd nineteenth-century three-piece suits, with his timepiece on a chain, bombastically opinionated, and almost always eating – but Carlene was never with him. Was Carlene Kipps one of these women who promises friendship but never truly delivers it? A friendship flirt? Or was Kiki herself mistaken in her expectations? This, after all, was the month in which families began tightening and closing and sealing; from Thanksgiving to the New Year, everybody’s world contracted, day by day, into the microcosmic single festive household, each with its own rituals and obsessions, rules and dreams. You didn’t feel you could call people. They didn’t feel they could phone you.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  It’s a pleasure to see you. I wish it were more often. Now take my damn name off that list.’ But the name stayed on, although no present was written beside it. They tramped though an enormous, chilly mall and found a few pieces of clothing for Victoria and Michael. Carlene was an erratic, panicky shopper; spending twenty minutes considering a single lovely item without buying it, and then buying three not so nice things in a flurry. She spoke a lot about bargains and value for money in a manner Kiki found faintly depressing, given the Kippses’ clearly robust finances. For Monty, though, Carlene wanted to get something ‘really nice’, and so they decided to brave three blocks of snow-walking in order to reach a fancier, smaller, specialist boutique that might have the cane with the carved handle which that Carlene had in mind. ‘What will you do at Christmas?’ asked Kiki, as they pressed through the crowds on Newbury Street. ‘Will you go somewhere – back to England?’ ‘Usually we have Christmas in the countryside. We have a beautiful cottage in a place called Iden. It’s near Winchelsea Beach. Do you know it?’ Kiki confessed ignorance. ‘It’s the most beautiful spot I know. But this year, we must stay in America. Michael’s already over, and he’ll stay till January third. I can’t wait to see him! Our friends have a house we’re to borrow in Amherst – just nearby where Miss Dickinson lived. You’d like it a lot. I’ve visited it – it’s lovely. It’s very big, though I think not as pretty as Iden. But the really wonderful thing is their collection. They have three Edward Hoppers, two Singer Sargents and a Miro´!’ Kiki gasped and clapped her hands. ‘Oh, my God – I love Edward Hopper. I can’t believe that! He floors me. Imagine having things like that in your own private home. Sister, I envy you that, I really do. I’d love to see that. That’s wonderful .’ ‘They dropped around the key today. I wish we were all already there. But I should really wait for Monty and the children to come home.’ This last word, said broodingly, brought other things to the  the anatomy lesson forefront of her mind. ‘How are things at home now, Kiki? I’ve thought of you a lot. Worried for you.’ Kiki passed an arm around her friend. ‘Carlene, honestly now, please don’t worry. It’s all fine. Everything’s settling down. Although Christmas is not the easiest time in the Belsey household,’ trilled Kiki, niftily turning the subject. ‘Howard can’t stand Christmas.’ ‘Howard . . . my word . He seems to hate such a lot of things. Paintings, my husband – ’ Kiki opened her mouth to counter this with she knew not what. Carlene patted her hand. ‘I’m mischievous – I was only being mischievous.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Among some treasures I lost during the wanderings of my adult years, there was a snapshot taken by my aunt which showed Annabel, her parents and the staid, elderly, lame gentleman, a Dr. Cooper, who that same summer courted my aunt, grouped around a table in a sidewalk café. Annabel did not come out well, caught as she was in the act of bending over her chocolat glacé , and her thin bare shoulders and the parting in her hair were about all that could be identified (as I remember that picture) amid the sunny blur into which her lost loveliness graded; but I, sitting somewhat apart from the rest, came out with a kind of dramatic conspicuousness: a moody, beetle-browed boy in a dark sport shirt and well-tailored white shorts, his legs crossed, sitting in profile, looking away. That photograph was taken on the last day of our fatal summer and just a few minutes before we made our second and final attempt to thwart fate. Under the flimsiest of pretexts (this was our very last chance, and nothing really mattered) we escaped from the café to the beach, and found a desolate stretch of sand, and there, in the violet shadow of some red rocks forming a kind of cave, had a brief session of avid caresses, with somebody’s lost pair of sunglasses for only witness. I was on my knees, and on the point of possessing my darling, when two bearded bathers, the old man of the sea and his brother, came out of the sea with exclamations of ribald encouragement, and four months later she died of typhus in Corfu. 4 I leaf again and again through these miserable memories, and keep asking myself, was it then, in the glitter of that remote summer, that the rift in my life began; or was my excessive desire for that child only the first evidence of an inherent singularity? When I try to analyze my own cravings, motives, actions and so forth, I surrender to a sort of retrospective imagination which feeds the analytic faculty with boundless alternatives and which causes each visualized route to fork and re-fork without end in the maddeningly complex prospect of my past. I am convinced, however, that in a certain magic and fateful way Lolita began with Annabel. I also know that the shock of Annabel’s death consolidated the frustration of that nightmare summer, made of it a permanent obstacle to any further romance throughout the cold years of my youth. The spiritual and the physical had been blended in us with a perfection that must remain incomprehensible to the matter-of-fact, crude, standard-brained youngsters of today. Long after her death I felt her thoughts floating through mine. Long before we met we had had the same dreams. We compared notes. We found strange affinities. The same June of the same year (1919) a stray canary had fluttered into her house and mine, in two widely separated countries.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  LaShonda had made an assumption early on that they were in similar situations, economically. There are so many different ways to need money. Levi didn’t need it like LaShonda needed it. ‘I’ll definitely work. The morning at least. I can’t come to the meeting, but put my name down, a’ight?’ ‘OK . . . sure . . . Sure, I’ll do that.’ ‘I could do with a little extra, that’s no joke – and this year I gotta get my Christmas shit to- geth -er. I always be sayin’ I’m gonna do it early this year and then I never do – just leave everything last minute just like always. But it’s expensive – oh, my word .’ ‘Yeah,’ said Levi pensively. ‘Shit gets tight for everybody this time of year . . .’ ‘I hear that,’ said LaShonda, and whistled. ‘And I ain’t got no one to do for me. I gotta do for myself, know what I mean? Baby, you taking your break? You want to come get some with me? I’m heading for Subway right about now.’ There was an alternative universe that Levi occasionally entered in his imagination, one in which he accepted LaShonda’s invitations, and then later they made love standing up in the basement of the store. Soon after, he moved in with her in Roxbury and took on her children as his own. They lived happily ever after – two roses growing out of concrete, as Tupac has it. But the truth was he wouldn’t know what to do with a woman like LaShonda. He wished he did know, but he didn’t. Levi’s girls were typically the giggly Hispanic teenagers from the Catholic school next door to his prep, and those girls had simple tastes: happy with a movie and some heavy petting in one of Wellington’s public parks. When he was feeling brave and confident, he sometimes hooked up with one of the exquisite fifteen-year-old LaShondas with the fake IDs that he met in Boston nightclubs, who took him semi-seriously for a  the anatomy lesson week or two until they drifted away, confused by his strange determination not to tell them anything at all about his life or to show them where he lived. ‘No . . . thanks, LaShonda . . . my break’s not till later.’ ‘All right, baby. I’ll miss you, though. You looking fine today – buff and all that.’ Levi flexed his bicep obligingly under LaShonda’s manicured touch. ‘ Damn . And the rest. Don’t be shy, now.’ He lifted his T-shirt up a little. ‘Baby, that ain’t even a six pack no more. That’s like a thirty-six pack or something! Ladies gotta look out for my boy Levi . . . damn . He ain’t a boy no more.’ ‘You know me, LaShonda, I like to take care of myself.’ ‘Yeah, but who gonna take care of you? ’ said LaShonda and laughed a good long time.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Furthermore, since the idea of time plays such a magic part in the matter, the student should not be surprised to learn that there must be a gap of several years, never less than ten I should say, generally thirty or forty, and as many as ninety in a few known cases, between maiden and man to enable the latter to come under a nymphet’s spell. It is a question of focal adjustment, of a certain distance that the inner eye thrills to surmount, and a certain contrast that the mind perceives with a gasp of perverse delight. When I was a child and she was a child, my little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952, after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the initial fateful elf in my life. We loved each other with a premature love, marked by a fierceness that so often destroys adult lives. I was a strong lad and survived; but the poison was in the wound, and the wound remained ever open, and soon I found myself maturing amid a civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but not a girl of twelve.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  When Howard got home, he was in that middling state of drunken-ness. Too drunk for work, not drunk enough to sleep. The house was empty. He went into the living room. Here was Murdoch, curled in on himself. Howard bent down and stroked his little hound face, tugging the brown-pink skin of his jaw away from harmless, blunted teeth. Murdoch stirred crossly. When Jerome was a baby, Howard liked to go into the nursery and touch his son’s creˆpey head, knowing he would wake, wanting him to. He had liked that warm, talc-scented company resting in his lap, little baby fingers stretching for the keyboard. Was it a computer, back then? No: a typewriter. Howard lifted Murdoch from his stinking basket, hooked him under one arm and brought him to the book-case. He passed a restless eye over the rainbow of spines and titles. But every one met with resistance in Howard’s soul – he did not want fiction or biography, he didn’t want poetry or anything  on beauty and being wrong academic written by anyone he knew. Sleepy Murdoch barked softly and got two of Howard’s fingers in his mouth. With his free hand Howard took a turn-of-the-century edition of Alice in Wonderland off the shelf and brought it with Murdoch to the couch. As soon as he was released, Murdoch retreated to his basket. He seemed to look at Howard resentfully as he did so and, once he was in his former position, hid his head between his paws. Howard placed a cushion at one end of the couch and stretched out along it. He opened the book and was drawn to a handful of capitalized phrases.        -     He read a few lines. Gave up. Looked at the pictures. Gave up. Closed his eyes. The next thing was a soft, heavy mass, weighing down the couch by his thigh, and then a hand on his face. The porch light was on, bathing the room in amber. Kiki took the book from his hands. ‘Complex stuff. You staying down here?’ Howard shunted up a little. He brought his hand to his eye and dug from it a hard piece of yellow sleep. He asked the time. ‘Late. Kids are back – didn’t you hear them?’ Howard had not. ‘Did you get back early? I wish you’d told me – I would have asked you to walk the Doc.’ Howard shunted up further and grasped her wrist. ‘Nightcap,’ he said, and had to repeat it because the first time it was just a croaking sound. Kiki shook her head. ‘Keeks, please. Just one.’ Kiki pressed her palms into her eye sockets. ‘Howard, I’m real  On Beauty tired. I’ve had an emotional evening. And for me, it’s a little late to drink.’ ‘Please, darling. One.’ Howard stood and went over to the drinks cabinet by the stereo.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  “Well, I see this really weird old house in Vermont—an abandoned monastery or abbey or something….” (Neither of us questioned the fact that there were abandoned monasteries and abbeys in Vermont.) “…With these extremely rustic floorboards and a skylight built into the roof. It would be sort of one big room which would be a studio and a bedroom with a big round bed under the skylight—and black satin sheets. And we’d have lots of Siamese cats—named things like John Donne and Maud Gonne and Dylan—you know.” I did, or at least I thought I did. “Anyway…” she continued, “…I see myself sort of as a cross between Gina Lollobrigida and Sophia Loren….” (Pia had dark hair.) “…What do you think?” She swept her greasy brown hair up on her head and held it there as she sucked in her cheeks and widened her large blue eyes at me. “I sort of think you’re more the Anna Magnani type,” I said, “earthy and basic, but terribly sensual.” “Maybe…” she said thoughtfully. She was posing in front of the mirror. “Oh, it’s disgusting,” she said after a while. “We never meet anyone the least bit worthy of us.” And she made a hideous face. — During our senior year at Music and Art, Pia and I opened our hostile minority of two to include a few other selected misfits. That was the closest we ever came to having a crowd. The group included a bosomy girl named Nina Nonoff whose claims to distinction were her necrophiliac passion for the ghost of Dylan Thomas, her supposed knowledge of Chinese and Japanese profanities, and her “contact” with a real Yalie (visions of football weekends for us all—but unfortunately the “contact” turned out to be a friend of a friend of an acquaintance of her brother’s). Nina’s mother also had a huge collection of “sex books” among which we included Coming of Age in Samoa and Sex and Temperament; any book with the word puberty in it was OK. And finally there was the sheer class of Nina’s father having created the Blue Wasp Series for radio in the 1940s. Jill Siegel, on the other hand, was a member of the group not so much for class as out of charity. She had little to contribute in the way of sophistication, but made up for this by means of her blind loyalty to us and the flattering way in which she aped our most florid affectations. An on-and-off member was Grace Baratto—a music major whose intellect we did not respect but who told fantastic stories about her sexual exploits. Though she denied it, we secretly told each other that she had probably “gone all the way.” “At the very least, she’s a demi-vierge,” Pia said. I nodded knowingly. Later I looked it up.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  Now you’ve got the idea.” — But by evening, when the beers wore off, I was depressed again. There was something so aimless about our days, our driving, our drinking. I didn’t even know what day of the week it was. I hadn’t seen a newspaper since Vienna. I had hardly even bathed, or changed my clothes. And what I missed most of all was my writing. I hadn’t written a poem in weeks and I began to feel that I never would be able to again. I thought of my used red electric typewriter sitting in New York, and a pang of yearning went through me. That was who I loved! I could see myself going back to Bennett for the sake of having custody of the typewriter. Like people who stay together “for the children” or because they can’t decide who’ll get the rent-controlled apartment. — That night we found a real campsite rather than a roadside. ( Le Camping , as they say in France.) It wasn’t fancy, but it had a swimming hole, a snack bar, a place where you could shower. I was dying for a shower and as soon as Adrian had staked out our parcel of ground, I made off to the shower house. As the dirt was rolling off me, I spoke to Bennett telepathically. “Forgive me,” I said to him wherever he was (and to myself, wherever I was). When I got back to the tent, Adrian had made a friend. Two friends, in fact. An American couple. She, coarsely pretty, red-haired, freckled, bosomy, Jewish, with a Brooklyn accent. He, bearded, brown-haired, fuzzy, fattish, with a Brooklyn accent. He was a swinging stockbroker who dabbled in hallucinogens. She was a swinging housewife who dabbled in adultery. They had a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a Volkswagen camper, three kids in camp, and the fourteen-year itch. Adrian was wowing the wife (Judy) with his English accent and Laingian theories (which had already worn thin with me). She looked just about ready to tent down with him. “Hi,” I said brightly to my compatriots and coreligionists. “Hi,” they said in one voice. “Now what?” said Adrian. “Bed first or booze?” Judy giggled. “Don’t mind me,” I said. “We don’t believe in possessiveness or possession.” I thought I was doing a pretty good imitation of Adrian. “We’ve got a steak we were about to grill,” the husband (Marty) offered nervously. “Would you like to join us?” When in doubt, eat. I knew his type. “Super,” said Adrian. The man who came to dinner. I could see he was really turned on by the prospect of screwing Judy with her husband looking on. That was his thing. Since Bennett was off the scene, he’d somewhat lost interest in me.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  Two days after their meeting, somebody had hand-delivered an extremely old-fashioned, unironic and frankly unAmerican visiting card to  Langham: Dear Kiki, Thank you so much for your kind visit. I should like to repay the call. Please let me know of a time that would be convenient to you, Yours truly Mrs C. Kipps In normal circumstances, of course, this card would have served as an ideal object of ridicule over a Belsey breakfast table. But, as it happened, the card arrived two days after the Belsey world fell apart. Pleasure was no longer on the menu. Ditto communal breakfasts. Kiki had taken to eating on the bus to work – a bagel and a coffee from the Irish store on the corner – and putting up with those disapproving looks that other women give big women when they’re eating in public. Two weeks later, upon rediscovering the card tucked in the kitchen magazine rack, Kiki felt somewhat guilty; silly as it was, she had meant to reply. But there was never a good time to broach the subject with Jerome. The important  the anatomy lesson thing at the time had been to keep her son’s spirits up, to keep the waters as calm as possible so that he might get in the boat his mother had spent so long carefully constructing and sail off to college. Two days before registration Kiki passed Jerome’s bedroom and witnessed him gathering his clothes into a ritualistic-looking mound in the middle of the floor – the traditional prelude to packing his bags. So now everyone was back in school. Everyone was enjoying the sense of new beginnings and fresh pastures that school cycles offer their participants. They were starting again. She envied them that. Four days ago, Kiki found the visiting card once again, in the bottom of her Alice Walker Barnes and Noble tote bag. Sitting in the bus with the card on her lap, she parsed it into its constitutive parts, examining first the handwriting, then the Anglicized phrasing, then the idea of the maid or cleaner or whoever she was being sent round with it; the thick English notepaper with something about Bond Street stamped in the corner, the royal blue ink of the italics. It was too ridiculous, really. And yet when she looked out of the back window of the bus, seeking any happy memories of the long, distressing summer, moments when the weight of what had happened to her marriage was not crushing her ability to breathe and walk down the street and have breakfast with her family, for some reason, that afternoon on the porch with Carlene Kipps kept rising up. She tried ringing. Three times. She sent Levi over with a note. The note received no reply. And on the phone it was always him, the husband, with his excuses. Carlene wasn’t feeling well, then she was asleep, and then yesterday: ‘My wife is not quite up to visitors just now.’

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Let me rave and ramble on for a teeny while more, my dearest, since I know this letter has been by now torn by you, and its pieces (illegible) in the vortex of the toilet. My dearest, mon très, très cher, what a world of love I have built up for you during this miraculous June! I know how reserved you are, how “British.” Your old-world reticence, your sense of decorum may be shocked by the boldness of an American girl! You who conceal your strongest feelings must think me a shameless little idiot for throwing open my poor bruised heart like this. In years gone by, many disappointments came my way. Mr. Haze was a splendid person, a sterling soul, but he happened to be twenty years my senior, and—well, let us not gossip about the past. My dearest, your curiosity must be well satisfied if you have ignored my request and read this letter to the bitter end. Never mind. Destroy it and go. Do not forget to leave the key on the desk in your room. And some scrap of address so that I could refund the twelve dollars I owe you till the end of the month. Good-bye, dear one. Pray for me—if you ever pray. C.H. What I present here is what I remember of the letter, and what I remember of the letter I remember verbatim (including that awful French). It was at least twice longer. I have left out a lyrical passage which I more or less skipped at the time, concerning Lolita’s brother who died at 2 when she was 4, and how much I would have liked him. Let me see what else can I say? Yes. There is just a chance that “the vortex of the toilet” (where the letter did go) is my own matter-of-fact contribution. She probably begged me to make a special fire to consume it.

• From On Beauty (2005)

  I didn’t hear it very well the first time she mentioned it, and now it’s like it’s too late to ask. She’s always trying to fatten me up – she feeds me constantly. The rest of the family talk about sports and God and politics, and Carlene floats above it all like a kind of angel – and she’s helping me with prayer. She really knows how to pray – and it’s very cool to be able to pray without someone in your family coming into the room and (a) passing wind (b) shouting (c) analysing the ‘phoney metaphysics’ of prayer (d) singing loudly (e) laughing. So that’s Carlene Kipps. Tell Mom that she bakes. Just tell her that and then walk away chuckling . . . Now, listen to this next bit carefully: in the morning the whole kipps  kipps and belsey f am il y have breakfast together and a conversation together and then get into a car together (are you taking notes?) – I know, I know – not easy to get your head around. I never met a family who wanted to spend so much time with each other. I hope you can see from everything I’ve written that your feud, or whatever it is, is a complete waste of time. It’s all on your side, anyway – Monty doesn’t do feuds. You’ve never even really met – just a lot of public debates and stupid letters. It’s such a waste of energy. Most of the cruelty in the world is just misplaced energy. Anyway: I’ve got to go – work calls! Love to Mom and Levi, partial love to Zora, And remember: I love you, Dad (and I pray for you, too) Phew! Longest mail ever! Jerome XXOXXXX To: HowardBelsey@fas.Wellington.edu From: Jeromeabroad@easymail.com Date: 14 November Subject: Hello again Dad, Thanks for forwarding me the details about the dissertation – could you phone the department at Brown and maybe get me an extension? Now I begin to see why Zora enrolled at Wellington . . . lot easier to miss your deadline when Daddy’s the teacher J I read your one-liner query and then like a fool I searched for a further attachment (like, say, a letter???), but I guess you’re too busy/mad/ etc. to write. Well, I’m not. How’s the book going? Mom said you were having trouble getting going. Have you found a way to prove Rembrandt was no good yet? J The Kippses continue to grow on me.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I do not think they had more than a dozen patients (three or four were lunatics, as Lo had cheerfully informed me earlier) in that show place of a hospital, and the staff had too much leisure. However—likewise for reasons of show—regulations were rigid. It is also true that I kept coming at the wrong hours. Not without a secret flow of dreamy malice, visionary Mary (next time it will be une belle dame toute en bleu floating through Roaring Gulch) plucked me by the sleeve to lead me out. I looked at her hand; it dropped. As I was leaving, leaving voluntarily, Dolores Haze reminded me to bring her next morning … She did not remember where the various things she wanted were…“Bring me,” she cried (out of sight already, door on the move, closing, closed), “the new gray suitcase and Mother’s trunk”; but by next morning I was shivering, and boozing, and dying in the motel bed she had used for just a few minutes, and the best I could do under the circular and dilating circumstances was to send the two bags over with the widow’s beau, a robust and kindly trucker. I imagined Lo displaying her treasures to Mary … No doubt, I was a little delirious—and on the following day I was still a vibration rather than a solid, for when I looked out of the bathroom window at the adjacent lawn, I saw Dolly’s beautiful young bicycle propped up there on its support, the graceful front wheel looking away from me, as it always did, and a sparrow perched on the saddle—but it was the landlady’s bike, and smiling a little, and shaking my poor head over my fond fancies, I tottered back to my bed, and lay as quiet as a saint— Saint, forsooth! While brown Dolores, On a patch of sunny green. With Sanchicha reading stories In a movie magazine— —which was represented by numerous specimens wherever Dolores landed, and there was some great national celebration in town judging by the firecrackers, veritable bombs, that exploded all the time, and at five minutes to two P.M. I heard the sound of whistling lips nearing the half-opened door of my cabin, and then a thump upon it. It was big Frank. He remained framed in the opened door, one hand on its jamb, leaning forward a little. Howdy. Nurse Lore was on the telephone. She wanted to know was I better and would I come today?

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Thursday. Last night we sat on the piazza, the Haze woman, Lolita and I. Warm dusk had deepened into amorous darkness. The old girl had finished relating in great detail the plot of a movie she and L. had seen sometime in the winter. The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner). We sat on cushions heaped on the floor, and L. was between the woman and me (she had squeezed herself in, the pet). In my turn, I launched upon a hilarious account of my arctic adventures. The muse of invention handed me a rifle and I shot a white bear who sat down and said: Ah! All the while I was acutely aware of L.’s nearness and as I spoke I gestured in the merciful dark and took advantage of those invisible gestures of mine to touch her hand, her shoulder and a ballerina of wool and gauze which she played with and kept sticking into my lap; and finally, when I had completely enmeshed my glowing darling in this weave of ethereal caresses, I dared stroke her bare leg along the gooseberry fuzz of her shin, and I chuckled at my own jokes, and trembled, and concealed my tremors, and once or twice felt with my rapid lips the warmth of her hair as I treated her to a quick nuzzling, humorous aside and caressed her plaything. She, too, fidgeted a good deal so that finally her mother told her sharply to quit it and sent the doll flying into the dark, and I laughed and addressed myself to Haze across Lo’s legs to let my hand creep up my nymphet’s thin back and feel her skin through her boy’s shirt. But I knew it was all hopeless, and was sick with longing, and my clothes felt miserably tight, and I was almost glad when her mother’s quiet voice announced in the dark: “And now we all think that Lo should go to bed.” “I think you stink,” said Lo. “Which means there will be no picnic tomorrow,” said Haze. “This is a free country,” said Lo. When angry Lo with a Bronx cheer had gone, I stayed on from sheer inertia, while Haze smoked her tenth cigarette of the evening and complained of Lo.

• From Fear of Flying (1973)

  I straddled the bidet and peed rivers into it, astonished at how long I’d gone without emptying my bladder. Then I washed my sore and sticky crotch and cleaned out the bidet. I splashed my face with tap water and gave myself a perfunctory sponge bath. The dirt streaked off my arms as it had when I was a child and played outdoors all day. I went to try the lock on the door to make sure it was secure. When someone coughed in the next room, I nearly hit the ceiling. Relax, I commanded myself. But I was dimly aware that being able to get up and wash was at least a sign of life. Real lunatics just lie there in their own piss and shit. Some comfort. I was really grasping at straws. You’re better off than someone, I said and had to laugh. Naked and somewhat encouraged by being a little cleaner, I stood before the flaking full length mirror. I had the oddest sunburn from our days of driving in the open car. My knees and thighs were red and peeling. My nose and cheeks were red. My shoulders and forearms were burnt to a crisp. But the rest of me was nearly white. A curious patchwork quilt. I stared into my eyes, white-circled from having worn sunglasses for weeks. Why was it I could never decide what color my eyes were? Was that significant? Was that somehow at the root of my problem? Grayish blue with yellow flecks. Not quite blue, not quite gray. Slate blue, Brian used to say, and your hair is the color of wheat. “Wheaty hair,” he called it, stroking it. Brian had the brownest eyes I’d ever seen—eyes like a Byzantine saint in a mosaic. When he was cracking up he used to stare at his eyes in the mirror for hours. He would turn the light on and off like a child, trying to catch his pupils suddenly dilating. He spoke literally then of a looking-glass world, a world of antimatter into which he could pass. His eyes were the key to that world. He believed that his soul could be sucked out through his pupils like albumen being sucked from a pierced egg. I remembered how attracted I was to Brian’s craziness, how fascinated I was with his imagery. In those days I was not writing surrealist poems but rather conventional, descriptive poems with lots of overly clever wordplay. But later, when I began to delve deeper and allow my imagination freer rein, I often felt I was seeing the world through Brian’s eyes and that his madness was the source of my inspiration. I felt as if I had gone crazy with him and come back up.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Princess. But rather than identify every “Annabel Lee” echo occurring in the first chapter and elsewhere, the text of the poem is provided: It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;— And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me. She was a child and I was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the winged seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me. And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud by night Chilling my Annabel Lee; So that her high-born kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea. The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me:— Yes! that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling And killing my Annabel Lee. But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:— For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise but I see the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea. Poe is referred to more than twenty times in Lolita (echoes of “my darling” haven’t been counted), far more than any other writer (followed by Mérimée, Shakespeare, and Joyce, in that order). Not surprisingly, Poe allusions have been the most readily identifiable to readers and earlier commentators (I pointed out several in my 1967 Wisconsin Studies article, “Lolita: The Springboard of Parody” [see bibliography]). See also the earlier articles by Elizabeth Phillips (“The Hocus-Pocus of Lolita, “Literature and Psychology, X [Summer 1960], 97–101) and Arthur F. DuBois (“Poe and Lolita,” CEA Critic, XXVI [No. 6, 1963], 1, 7). More recent is Carl R. Proffer’s thorough compilation in Keys to Lolita (henceforth called Keys), pp. 34–45. Although my Notes seldom discuss in detail the significance of the literary allusions they limn, Poe’s conspicuous presence surely calls for a few general remarks; subsequent Notes will establish the most specific—and obvious—links between H.H. and Poe (e.g., their “child brides”; see Virginia ... Edgar).

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  I remember the thing so exactly because I wrote it really twice. First I jotted down each entry in pencil (with many erasures and corrections) on the leaves of what is commercially known as a “typewriter tablet”; then, I copied it out with obvious abbreviations in my smallest, most satanic, hand in the little black book just mentioned. May 30 is a Fast Day by Proclamation in New Hampshire but not in the Carolinas. That day an epidemic of “abdominal flu” (whatever that is) forced Ramsdale to close its schools for the summer. The reader may check the weather data in the Ramsdale Journal for 1947. A few days before that I moved into the Haze house, and the little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart the contents of the note he swallowed) covers most of June. Thursday. Very warm day. From a vantage point (bathroom window) saw Dolores taking things off a clothesline in the apple-green light behind the house. Strolled out. She wore a plaid shirt, blue jeans and sneakers. Every movement she made in the dappled sun plucked at the most secret and sensitive chord of my abject body. After a while she sat down next to me on the lower step of the back porch and began to pick up the pebbles between her feet—pebbles, my God, then a curled bit of milk-bottle glass resembling a snarling lip—and chuck them at a can. Ping. You can’t a second time—you can’t hit it—this is agony—a second time. Ping. Marvelous skin—oh, marvelous: tender and tanned, not the least blemish. Sundaes cause acne. The excess of the oily substance called sebum which nourishes the hair follicles of the skin creates, when too profuse, an irritation that opens the way to infection. But nymphets do not have acne although they gorge themselves on rich food. God, what agony, that silky shimmer above her temple grading into bright brown hair. And the little bone twitching at the side of her dust-powdered ankle. “The McCoo girl? Ginny McCoo? Oh, she’s a fright. And mean. And lame. Nearly died of polio.” Ping. The glistening tracery of down on her forearm. When she got up to take in the wash, I had a chance of adoring from afar the faded seat of her rolled-up jeans. Out of the lawn, bland Mrs. Haze, complete with camera, grew up like a fakir’s fake tree and after some heliotropic fussing—sad eyes up, glad eyes down—had the cheek of taking my picture as I sat blinking on the steps, Humbert le Bel.

• From The Annotated Lolita (1991)

  Thursday. We are paying with hail and gale for the tropical beginning of the month. In a volume of the Young People’s Encyclopedia, 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. Angel, Grace Austin, Floyd Beale, Jack Beale, Mary Buck, Daniel Byron, Marguerite Campbell, Alice Carmine, Rose Chatfield, Phyllis Clarke, Gordon Cowan, John Cowan, Marion Duncan, Walter Falter, Ted Fantasia, Stella Flashman, Irving Fox, George Glave, Mabel Goodale, Donald Green, Lucinda Hamilton, Mary Rose Haze, Dolores Honeck, Rosaline Knight, Kenneth McCoo, Virginia McCrystal, Vivian McFate, Aubrey Miranda, Anthony Miranda, Viola Rosato, Emil Schlenker, Lena Scott, Donald Sheridan, Agnes Sherva, Oleg Smith, Hazel Talbot, Edgar Talbot, Edwin Wain, Lull Williams, Ralph Windmuller, Louise 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 honor. I am trying to analyze 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 semitranslucent 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 colorful 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.