Look at the Harlequins!

by Vladimir Nabokov

  “Does see,” I said, accepting the relay-race baton, “that, depending on the speed of one’s revolution, palings and awnings pass counterwise around you either with the heavy lurch of a merry-go-round or (saluting Audace) in a single brisk flip like that of the end of a striped scarf (Audace smiled, acknowledging the Audacianism) that one flings over one’s shoulder. But when one lies immobile in bed and rehearses or rather replays in one’s mind the process of turning, in the manner described, it is not so much the pivotal swing which is hard to perceive mentally—it is its result, the reversion of vista, the transformation of direction, that’s what one vainly strives to imagine. Instead of the liquor-store direction smoothly turning into the opposite one, as it does in the simplicity of waking life, poor Twidower is baffled—”

  I had seen it coming but had hoped that I would be allowed to complete my sentence. Not at all. With the infinitely slow and silent movement of a gray tomcat, which he resembled with his bristly whiskers and arched back, King left his seat. He started to tiptoe, with a glass in each hand, toward the golden glow of a densely populated sideboard. With a dramatic slap of both hands against the edge of the table I caused Mrs. Morgain to jump (she had either dozed off or aged tremendously in the last few minutes) and stopped old King in his tracks; he silently turned like an automaton (illustrating my story) and as silently stole back to his seat with the empty Arabesque glasses.

  “The mind, my friend’s mind, is baffled, as I was saying, by something dreadfully strainful and irksome in the machinery of the change from one position to another, from east to west or west to east, from one damned nymphet to another—I mean I’m losing the thread of my tale, the zipper of thought has stuck, this is absurd—”

  Absurd and very embarrassing. The two cold-thighed, cheesy-necked girleens were now engaged in a quarrelsome game as to who should sit on my left knee, that side of my lap where the honey was, trying to straddle Left Knee, warbling in Tyrolese and pushing each other off, and cousin Fay kept bending toward me and saying with a macabre accent: “Elles vous aiment tant!” Finally I pinched and twisted the nearest buttock, and with a squeal they resumed their running around, like that eternal little pleasure-park train, brushing the brambles.

  I still could not disentangle my thoughts, but Audace came to my rescue.

  “To conclude,” he said (and an audible ouf! was emitted by cruel Louise), “our patient’s trouble concerns not a certain physical act but the imagining of its performance. All he can do in his mind is omit the swiveling part altogether and shift from one visual plane to another with the neutral flash of a slide change in a magic lantern, whereupon he finds himself facing in a direction which has lost, or rather never contained, the idea of ‘oppositeness.’ Does anybody wish to comment?”

  After the usual pause that follows such offers, John King said: “My advice to your Mr. Twitter is to dismiss that nonsense once for all. It’s charming nonsense, it’s colorful nonsense, but it’s also harmful nonsense. Yes, Jane?”

  “My father,” said Mrs. King, “a professor of botany, had a rather endearing quirk: he could memorize historical dates and telephone numbers—for example our number 9743—only insofar as they contained primes. In our number he remembered two figures, the second and last, a useless combination; the other two were only black gaps, missing teeth.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” cried Audace, genuinely delighted.

  I remarked it was not at all the same thing. My friend’s affliction resulted in nausea, dizziness, kegelkugel headache.

  “Well yes, I understand, but my father’s quirk also had its side effects. It was not so much his inability to memorize, say, his house number in Boston, which was 68 and which he saw every day, but the fact that he could do nothing about it; that nobody, but nobody could explain why all he could make out at the far end of his brain was not 68 but a bottomless hole.”

  Our host resumed his vanishing act with more deliberation than before. Audace lidded his empty glass with his palm. Though swine-drunk, I longed for mine to be refilled, but was bypassed. The walls of the round room had grown more or less opaque again, God bless them, and the Dolomite Dollies were no longer around.

  “In the days when I longed to be a ballerina,” said Louise, “and was Blanc’s little favorite, I always rehearsed exercises in my mind lying in bed, and had no difficulty whatever in imagining swirls and whirls. It is a matter of practice, Vadim. Why don’t you just roll over in bed when you want to see yourself walking back to that Library? We must be going now, Fay, it’s past midnight.”

  Audace glanced at his wristwatch, uttered the exclamation which Time must be sick of hearing, and thanked me for a wonderful evening. Lady Morgain’s mouth mimicked the pink aperture of an elephant’s trunk as it mutely formed the word “loo” to which Mrs. King, fussily swishing in green, immediately took her. I remained alone at the round table, then struggled to my feet, drained the rest of Louise’s daiquiri, and joined her in the hallway.

  She had never melted and shivered so nicely in my embrace as she did now.

  “How many quadruped critics,” she asked after a tender pause in the dark garden, “would accuse you of leg pulling if you published the description of those funny feelings. Three, ten, a herd?”

  “Those are not really ‘feelings’ and they are not really ‘funny.’ I just wished you to be aware that if I go mad it will be in consequence of my games with the idea of space. ‘Rolling over’ would be cheating and besides would not help.”

  “I’ll take you to an absolutely divine analyst.”

  “That’s all you can suggest?”

  “Why, yes.”

  “Think, Louise.”

  “Oh. I’m also going to marry you. Yes, of course, you idiot.”

  She was gone before I could reclasp her slender form. The star-dusted sky, usually a scary affair, now vaguely amused me: it belonged, with the autumn fadeur of barely visible flowers, to the same issue of Woman’s Own World as Louise. I made water into a sizzle of asters and looked up at Bel’s window, square C2. Lit as brightly as e1, the Opal Room. I went back there and noted with relief that kind hands had cleared and tidied the table, the round table with the opalescent rim, at which I had delivered a most successful introductory lecture. I heard Bel’s voice calling me from the upper landing, and taking a palmful of salted almonds ascended the stairs.

  5

  Rather early next morning, a Sunday, as I stood, shawled in terry cloth, and watched four eggs rolling and bumping in their inferno, somebody entered the living room through a side door that I never bothered to lock.

  Louise! Louise dressed up in hummingbird mauve for church. Louise in a sloping beam of mellow October sun. Louise leaning against the grand piano, as if about to sing and looking around with a lyrical smile.

  I was the first to break our embrace.

  VADIM No, darling, no. My daughter may come down any minute. Sit down.

  LOUISE (examining an armchair and then settling in it) Pity. You know, I’ve been here many times before! In fact I was laid on that grand at eighteen. Aldy Landover was ugly, unwashed, brutal—and absolutely irresistible.

  VADIM Listen, Louise. I have always found your free, frivolous style very fetching. But you will be moving into this house very soon now, and we want a little more dignity, don’t we?

  LOUISE We’ll have to change that blue carpet. It makes the Stein look like an iceberg. And there should be a riot of flowers. So many big vases and not one Strelitzia! There was a whole shrub of lilac down there in my time.

  VADIM It’s October, you know. Look, I hate to bring this up, but isn’t your cousin waiting in the car? It would be very irregular.

  LOUISE Irregular, my foot. She won’t be up before lunch. Ah, Scene Two.

  (Bel wearing only slippers and a cheap necklace of iridescent glass—a Riviera souvenir—comes down at the other end of the living room beyond the piano. She has already turned kitchenward showing the beau-page back of her head and delicate shoulder
blades when she becomes aware of our presence and retraces her steps.)

  BEL (addressing me and casually squinting at my amazed visitor) Ya bezumno golodnaya (I’m madly hungry).

  VADIM Louise dear, this is my daughter Bel. She’s walking in her sleep, really, hence the, uh, non-attire.

  LOUISE Hullo, Annabel. The non-attire is very becoming.

  BEL (correcting Louise) Isa.

  VADIM Isabel, this is Louise Adamson, an old friend of mine, back from Rome. I hope we’ll be seeing a lot of her.

  BEL How do you do (question-markless).

  VADIM Well, run along, Bel, and put on something. Breakfast is ready. (To Louise) Would you like to have breakfast too? Hard-boiled eggs? A Coke with a straw? (Pale violin climbing stairs)

  LOUISE Non, merci. I’m flabbergasted.

  VADIM Yes, things have been getting a little out of hand, but you’ll see, she’s a special child, there’s no other child like her. All we need is your presence, your touch. She has inherited the habit of circulating in a state of nature from me. An Edenic gene. Curious.

  LOUISE Is this a two-people nudist colony or has Mrs. O’Leary also joined?

  VADIM (laughing) No, no, she’s not here on Sundays. Everything is fine, I assure you. Bel is a docile angel. She—

  LOUISE (rising to leave) There she comes to be fed (Bel descends the stairs in a skimpy pink robe). Drop in around tea time. Fay is being taken by Jane King to a lacrosse game in Rosedale. (Exits)

  BEL Who’s she? Former student of yours? Drama? Elocution?

  VADIM (moving fast) Bozhe moy! (good Lord!). The eggs! They must be as hard as jade. Come along. I’ll acquaint you with the situation, as your schoolmistress says.

  6

  The grand was the first to go—it was carried out by a gang of staggering iceberg movers and donated by me to Bel’s school, which I had reasons to pamper: I am not an easily frightened man but when I am frightened I am very much frightened, and at a second interview that I had had with the schoolmistress, my impersonation of an indignant Charles Dodgson was only saved from failure by the sensational news of my being about to marry an irreproachable socialite, the widow of our most pious philosopher. Louise, per contra, regarded the throwing out of a symbol of luxury as a personal affront and a crime: a concert piano of that kind costs, she said, as least as much as her old Hecate convertible, and she was not quite as wealthy as, no doubt, I thought she was, a statement representing that knot in Logic: the double-hitch lie which does not make one truth. I appeased her by gradually over-crowding the Music Room (if a time series be transformed into sudden space) with the modish gadgets she loved, singing furniture, miniature TV sets, stereorphics, portable orchestras, better and better video sets, remote-control instruments for turning those things on or off, and an automatic telephone dialer. For Bel’s birthday she gave her a Rain Sound machine to promote sleep; and to celebrate my birthday she murdered a neurotic’s night by getting me a thousand-dollar bedside Pantomime clock with twelve yellow radii on its black face instead of figures, which made it look blind to me or feigning blindness like some repulsive beggar in a hideous tropical town; in compensation that terrible object possessed a secret beam that projected Arabic numerals (2:00, 2:05, 2:10, 2:15, and so forth) on the ceiling of my new sleeping quarters, thus demolishing the sacred, complete, agonizingly achieved occlusion of its oval window. I said I’d buy a gun and shoot it in the mug, if she did not send it back to the fiend who sold it to her. She replaced it by “something especially made for people who like originality,” namely a silver-plated umbrella stand in the shape of a giant jackboot—there was “something about rain strangely attractive to her” as her “analyst” wrote me in one of the silliest letters that man ever wrote to man. She was also fond of small expensive animals, but here I stood firm, and she never got the long-coated Chihuahua she coldly craved.

  I did not expect much of Louise the Intellectual. The only time I saw her shed big tears, with interesting little howls of real grief, was when on the first Sunday of our marriage all the newspapers carried photographs of the two Albanian authors (a bald-domed old epicist and a long-haired woman compiler of children’s books) who shared out between them the Prestigious Prize that she had told everybody I was sure to win that year. On the other hand she had only flipped through my novels (she was to read more attentively, though, A Kingdom by the Sea, which I began slowly to pull out of myself in 1957 like a long brain worm, hoping it would not break), while consuming all the “serious” bestsellers discussed by sister consumers belonging to the Literary Group in which she liked to assert herself as a writer’s wife.

  I also discovered that she considered herself a connoisseur of Modern Art. She blazed with anger at me when I said I doubted that the appreciation of a green stripe across a blue background had any connection with its definition in a glossy catalogue as “producing a virtually Oriental atmosphere of spaceless time and timeless space.” She accused me of trying to wreck her entire view of the world by maintaining—in a facetious vein, she hoped—that only a Philistine misled by the solemn imbeciles paid to write about exhibitions could tolerate rags, rinds, and fouled paper rescued from a garbage can and discussed in terms “of warm splashes of color” and “good-natured irony.” But perhaps most touching and terrible of all was her honestly believing that painters painted “what they felt”; that a rather rough and rumpled landscape dashed off in the Provence might be gratefully and proudly interpreted by art students if a psychiatrist explained to them that the advancing thundercloud represented the artist’s clash with his father, and the rolling grainfield the early death of his mother in a shipwreck.

  I could not prevent her from purchasing specimens of the pictorial art in vogue but I judiciously steered some of the more repulsive objects (such as a collection of daubs produced by “naïve” convicts) into the round dining room where they swam blurrily in the candlelight when we had guests for supper. Our routine meals generally took place in the snackbar niche between the kitchen and the housemaid’s quarters. Into that niche Louise introduced her new Cappuccino Espresso Maker, while at the opposite end of the house, in the Opal Room, a heavily built, hedonically appareled bed with a padded headboard was installed for me. The adjacent bathroom had a less comfortable tub than my former one, and certain inconveniences attended my excursions, two or three nights per week, to the connubial chamber—via drawing room, creaky stairs, upper landing, second-floor corridor, and past the inscrutable chink-gleam of Bel’s door; but I treasured my privacy more than I resented its drawbacks. I had the “Turkish toupet,” as Louise called it, to forbid her to communicate with me by thumping on her floor. Eventually I had an interior telephone put in my room, to be used only in certain emergencies: I was thinking of such nervous states as the feeling of imminent collapse that I experienced sometimes in my nocturnal bouts with eschatological obsessions; and there was always the half-full box of sleeping pills that only she could have filched.

  The decision to let Bel stay in her apartment, with Louise as her only neighbor, instead of refurnishing a spiral of space by allotting those two east-end rooms to Louise—“perhaps I too need a studio?”—while transferring Bel with bed and books to the Opal Room downstairs and leaving me upstairs in my former bedchamber, was taken by me firmly despite Louise’s rather bitchy countersuggestions, such as removing the tools of my trade from the library in the basement and banishing Bel with all her belongings to that warm, dry, nice and quiet lair. Though I knew I would never give in, the very process of shuffling rooms and accessories in my mind made me literally ill. On top of that, I felt, perhaps wrongly, that Louise was enjoying the hideous banality of a stepmother-versus-step-daughter situation. I did not exactly regret marrying her, I recognized her charm and functional qualities, but my adoration for Bel was the sole splendor, the sole breathtaking mountain in the drab plain of my emotional life. Being in many ways an extraordinarily stupid person, I had simply not reckoned with the tangles and tensions of what was mea
nt to look like a model household. The moment I woke up—or at least the moment I saw that getting up was the only way to fool early-morning insomnia—I started wondering what new project Louise would invent that day with which to harass my girl. When two years later this gray old dolt and his volatile wife, after treating Bel to a tedious Swiss tour, left her in Larive, between Hex and Trex, at a “finishing” school (finishing childhood, finishing the innocence of young imagination), it was our 1955–1957 period of life à trois in the Quirn house, and not my earlier mistakes, that I recalled with curses and sobs.

  She and her stepmother stopped speaking to each other altogether; they communicated, if need be, by signs: Louise, for instance, pointing dramatically at the ruthless clock and Bel tapping in the negative on the crystal of her loyal little wristwatch. She lost all affection for me, twisting away gently when I attempted a perfunctory caress. She adopted again the wan absent expression that had dimmed her features at her arrival from Rosedale. Camus replaced Keats. Her marks deteriorated. She no longer wrote poetry. One day as Louise and I were packing for our next trip to Europe (London, Paris, Pisa, Stresa, and—in small print—Larive) I started removing some old maps, Colorado, Oregon, from the silk “cheek” inside a valise, and the moment my secret prompter uttered that “shcheka” I came across a poem of hers written long before Louise’s intrusion into her trustful young life. I thought it might do Louise good to read it and handed her the exercise-book page (all ragged along its torn root but still mine) on which the following lines were penciled:

  At sixty, if I’ll look back,

  jungles and hills will hide

  the notch, the source, the sand