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I went to find Rita who introduced me with her vin triste smile
to a pocket-sized wizened truculently tight old man saying this was--what
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was the name again, son?--a former schoolmate of hers. He tried to retain
her, and in the slight scuffle that followed I hurt my thumb against his
hard head. In the silent painted part where I walked her and aired her a
little, she sobbed and said I would soon, soon leave her as everybody had,
and I sang her a wistful French ballad, and strung together some fugitive
rhymes to amuse her:
The place was called Enchanted Hunters. Query:
What Indian dyes, Diana, did thy dell
endorses to make of Picture Lake a very
blood bath of trees before the blue hotel?
She said: "Why blue when it is white, why blue for heaven's sake?" and
started to cry again, and I marched her to the car, and we drove on to New
York, and soon she was reasonably happy again high up in the haze on the
little terrace of our flat. I notice I have somehow mixed up two events, my
visit with Rita to Briceland on our way to Carntrip, and our passing through
Briceland again on our way back to New York, but such suffusions of swimming
colors are not to be disdained by the artist in recollection.
27
My letterbox in the entrance hall belonged to the type that allows one
to glimpse something of its contents through a glassed slit. Several times
already, a trick of harlequin light that fell through the glass upon an
alien handwriting had twisted it into a semblance of Lolita's script causing
me almost to collapse as I leant against an adjacent urn, almost my own.
Whenever that happened--whenever her lovely, childish scrawl was horribly
transformed into the dull hand of one of my few correspondents--I used to
recollect, with anguished amusement, the times in my trustful, pre-dolorian
past when I would be misled by a jewel-bright window opposite wherein my
lurking eye, the ever alert periscope of my shameful vice, would make out
from afar a half-naked nymphet stilled in the act of combing her
Alice-in-Wonderland hair. There was in the fiery phantasm a perfection which
made my wild delight also perfect, just because the vision was out of reach,
with no possibility of attainment to spoil it by the awareness of an
appended taboo; indeed, it may well be that the very attraction immaturity
has for me lies not so much in the limpidity of pure young forbidden fairy
child beauty as in the security of a situation where infinite perfections
fill the gap between the little given and the great promised--the great
rosegray never-to-be-had. Mes fenétres! Hanging above blotched sunset
and welling night, grinding my teeth, I would crowd all the demons of my
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desire against the railing of a throbbing balcony: it would be ready to take
off in the apricot and black humid evening; did take off--whereupon the
lighted image would move and Even would revert to a rib, and there would be
nothing in the window but an obese partly clad man reading the paper.
Since I sometimes won the race between my fancy and nature's reality,
the deception was bearable. Unbearable pain began when chance entered the
fray and deprived me of the smile meant for me. "Savez-vous qu'þ dix ans
ma petite ètait folle de vous?" said a woman I talked to at a tea in
Paris, and the petite had just married, miles away, and I could not
even remember if I had ever noticed her in that garden, next to those tennis
courts, a dozen years before. And now likewise, the radiant foreglimpse, the
promise of reality, a promise not only to be simulated seductively but also
to be nobly held--all this, chance denied me--chance and a change to smaller
characters on the pale beloved writer's part. My fancy was both
Proustianized and Procrusteanized; for that particular morning, late in
September 1952, as I had come down to grope for my mail, the dapper and
bilious janitor with whom I was on execrable terms started to complain that
a man who had seen Rita home recently had been "sick like a dog" on the
front steps. In the process of listening to him and tipping him, and then
listening to a revised and politer version of the incident, I had the
impression that one of the two letters which that blessed mail brought was
from Rita's mother, a crazy little woman, whom we had once visited on Cape
Cod and who kept writing me to my various addresses, saying how wonderfully
well matched her daughter and I were, and how wonderful it would be if we
married; the other letter which I opened and scanned rapidly in the elevator
was from John Farlow.
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the
stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No
matter how many times we reopen "King Lear," never shall we find the good
king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly
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