Vladimir Nabokov - The Enchanter

Yes, yes, it was worth it, he repeated mentally as he held her cold red hand and smilingly grimaced at the yelps of her inevitable companion: “I’m the one who found you a fiancé, I brought you your fiancé, I’m responsible for your fiancé!” (and she tried, in the style of an artilleryman swinging his gun, to give the unwieldy bride a whirl).

It was worth it, yes—no matter how long he would have to drag this cumbersome behemoth through the quagmire of marriage; it was worth it even if she outlived everybody; it was worth it for the sake of making his presence natural and of his license as future stepfather.

However, he did not yet know how to take advantage of that license, partly from lack of practice, partly in anticipation of incredibly greater liberty, but mainly because he could never manage to be alone with the girl. It was true that, with her mother’s permission, he took her to a nearby café, and sat, with his hands propped on his walking stick, watching as she leaned forward and ate her way into the apricot edge of some latticed pastry, thrusting out her lower lip to catch the sticky flakes. He tried to make her laugh, and chat with her as he would have with an ordinary child, but his progress was continually hampered by an obstructing thought: had the room been emptier and more cosy-cornered, he would have fondled her a little, without any special pretext and with no fear of strangers’ glances (more perceptive than her trustful innocence). As he walked her home, and as he lagged behind her on the stairs, he was tormented not only by a sense of missed opportunity but also by the thought that, until he had done certain specific things at least once, he could not count on the promises fate transmitted through her innocent speech, the subtle nuances of her childish common sense and her silences (when her teeth, from beneath the listening lip, pressed gently down on the pensive one), the gradual emergence of dimples on hearing old jokes that struck her as being new, and his intuitive perception of the undulations in her subterranean streams (without which she could not have had those eyes). So what if, in the future, his freedom of action, his freedom to do and repeat special things, would render everything limpid and harmonious? Meanwhile, now, today, a misprint of desire distorted the meaning of love. That dark spot represented a kind of obstacle that must be crushed, erased, as soon as possible—no matter with what forgery of bliss—so that the child might at last be aware of the joke and he might be rewarded by their having a good laugh together, by being able to take disinterested care of her, to meld the wave of fatherhood with the wave of sexual love.

Yes—the forgery, the furtiveness, the fear of the least suspicion, complaint, or innocent report (“You know, Mother, whenever nobody’s around he always starts caressing”), the necessity of being on his guard so as not to fall prey to a chance hunter in these heavily populated valleys—that was what now tormented him, and what would no longer exist in the freedom of his own preserve. But when? when? he thought in despair, as he paced his quiet, familiar rooms.

The following morning he accompanied his monstrous bride to some office. Thence she was going to the doctor, evidently in order to ask certain ticklish questions, since she instructed her bridegroom to go to her apartment and expect her for dinner in an hour. His nocturnal despair was forgotten. He knew that her friend (whose husband had not come at all) was also out doing errands—and the foretaste of finding the girl alone melted like cocaine in his loins. But when he rushed into the apartment he found her chatting with the charwoman amid a compass rose of drafts. He picked up a newspaper (dated the 32nd) and, unable to distinguish the lines, sat for a long while in the already done parlor, listening to the lively conversation during pauses in the vacuum’s howl in the adjoining room, glancing at the enamel of his watch as he mentally murdered the char and shipped the corpse off to Borneo. Then he heard a third voice and remembered that the old crone was in the kitchen too (he thought he heard the girl being sent to the grocer’s). Then the vacuum finished its wheezing and was turned off, a window slammed shut, and the street noise ceased. He waited out another minute, then got up and, humming sotto voce, with darting eyes, began exploring the now silent apartment.

No, she had not been sent anywhere. She was standing at the window of her room looking out into the street with her palms pressed against the glass.

She looked around and quickly said, with a toss of her hair and already resuming her observation, “Look—an accident!”

He moved closer and closer, sensing with his nape that the door had shut by itself, closer to the lithe concavity of her spine, to the gathers at her waist, to the lozenge-shaped checks of the cloth whose texture he could already palpate from seven feet away, to the firm, light-blue veins above the edge of her knee-high stockings, to the whiteness of her neck sheeny from the sidewise light next to her brown curls, which received another vigorous toss (seven-eighths habit, one little eighth flirtatiousness). “Ah, an accident… a taxi dent …,” he mumbled, pretending to peer through the empty window over the crown of her head but seeing only the tiny flecks of dandruff in its silky vertex.

“It’s the red one’s fault!” she exclaimed with conviction.

“Ah, the red one… We’ll get the red one,” he continued incoherently and, standing in back of her, feeling faint, abolishing the final inch of the melting distance, took hold of her hands from behind and began senselessly spreading and tugging them, while she did no more than gently rotate the slender wristbone of her right hand, mechanically trying to point her finger at the guilty party. “Wait,” he said hoarsely, “press your elbows against your sides and let’s see if I can, if I can lift you.” Just then a bang came from the vestibule followed by the ominous rustling of a raincoat, and he moved away from her with an awkward abruptness, thrusting his hands in his pockets, clearing his throat with a growl, starting to say in a loud voice, “…at last! We’re famished here….” And, as they were sitting down to table, there was still an aching, frustrated, gnawing weakness in his calves.

After dinner some ladies came for coffee, and, toward evening, when the wave of guests had receded and her faithful friend had discreetly left for the cinema, the exhausted hostess stretched out on the couch.

“Go on home, my dear,” she said without raising her eyelids. “You must have things to take care of, you probably don’t have anything packed, and I’d like to go to bed, or else I won’t be up to doing anything tomorrow.”

With a short mooing sound to simulate tenderness he pecked her on the forehead, which was cold as cottage cheese, then said, “By the way, I keep thinking how sorry I feel for the girl. I suggest we keep her here after all. Why should the poor thing have to continue staying with strangers? It’s downright ludicrous now that there is a family once again. Think it over carefully, dearest.”

“And I’m still sending her off tomorrow,” she drawled in a feeble voice, without opening her eyes.

“Please, try to understand,” he continued more softly, for the girl, who had been dining in the kitchen, had apparently finished and her faint glow was present somewhere nearby. “Try to understand what I’m saying. Even if we pay them for everything, and even overpay them, do you think that will make her feel any more at home there? I doubt it. There’s a fine school there, you’ll tell me,” (she was silent) “but we’ll find an even better one here, apart from the fact that I am and always have been in favor of private instruction at home. But the main thing is… you see, people might get the impression—and you already heard one little hint of that kind just today—that, in spite of the changed situation, i.e., now that you have support of all kinds from me and we can get a larger apartment, arrange complete privacy for ourselves, and so forth, the mother and stepfather still tend to neglect the kid.”