Vladimir Nabokov: The Enchanter

She said nothing.

“Of course you can do as you please,” he said nervously, frightened by her silence (he had gone too far!).

“I’ve already told you,” she drawled with that same ridiculous, martyrlike softness, “that what is paramount to me is my peace and quiet. If it is disrupted I shall die…. Listen: there she goes scraping her foot on the floor or banging something—it wasn’t very loud, was it?—yet it’s already enough to give me a nervous spasm and make me see spots before my eyes. And a child cannot live without banging around; even if there are twenty-five rooms all twenty-five will be noisy. Therefore you’ll have to choose between me and her.”

“No, no—don’t even say such things!” he cried with a panicky catch in his throat. “There isn’t even any question of choosing…. Heaven forbid! It was just a theoretical consideration. You’re right. All the more so, because I, too, value peace and quiet. Yes! I’m in favor of the status quo, and let the gossips keep jabbering. You’re right, dearest. Of course, I don’t rule out that perhaps later on, next spring… if you’re quite well again …”

“I’ll never be quite well,” she answered softly, raising herself and, with a creak, rolling heavily onto her side. Then she propped up her cheek with her fist and, with a shake of her head and an oblique glance, repeated the same sentence.

The next day, following the civil ceremony and a moderately festive dinner, the girl left after having twice, in front of everyone, touched his shaven cheek with her cool, unhurried lips: once over the champagne glass to congratulate him, and then at the door, as she was saying good-bye. After which he brought over his suitcases and spent a long time arranging his things in her former room where, in a bottom drawer, he found a little rag of hers that told him far more than those two incomplete kisses.

Judging by the tone that the person (he found the appellation “wife” inapplicable to her) used to emphasize how it was generally more convenient to sleep in separate rooms (he did not argue) and how she herself, incidentally, was accustomed to sleeping alone (he let it go by), he could not avoid the conclusion that that very night he was expected to be instrumental in the first infraction of that habit. As the murk gradually thickened outside the window, and he felt increasingly foolish sitting next to her couch in the parlor, wordlessly compressing or applying to his tense jowl her ominously obedient hand, with bluish freckles on its glossy back, he perceived ever more clearly that the moment of reckoning had arrived, that now no escape remained from what he had of course long foreseen, but without giving it much thought (when the moment comes I’ll manage somehow); now that moment was knocking at the door and it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver) would be physically unable to tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet undisclosed miracles of surgery… here his imagination was left hanging on barbed wire.

Already at dinner, first refusing a second glass with an apparent lack of resolve, then seeming to yield to temptation, he had, for safety’s sake, explained to her that at moments of elation he was subject to sundry angular aches. So now he began gradually releasing her hand and, rather crudely feigning twinges in his temple, said he was going out for a breath of air. “You must understand,” he added, noticing the oddly intent gaze (or was he imagining things?) of her two eyes and wart, “you must understand—happiness is so new to me… and your closeness… no, I never even dared dream of having such a wife….”

“Just don’t be long. I go to bed early, and don’t like being awakened,” she answered, letting down her freshly waved hair and tapping the top button of his waistcoat with her fingernail; then she gave him a little shove, and he realized that the invitation was not declinable.

Now he was roaming amid the shivering indigence of the November night, through the fog of streets that, ever since the Great Flood, had fallen into a state of perpetual damp. In an attempt to distract himself, he concentrated on his bookkeeping, his prisms, his profession, artificially magnifying its importance in his life—and it all kept dissolving in the mush, the feverish chill of the night, the agony of undulating lights. Yet, for the very reason that any kind of happiness was totally out of the question at the moment, something else suddenly became clear. He took precise measure of how far he had come, evaluated the entire instability and spectrality of his calculations, this whole quiet madness, the evident error of the obsession, which was free and genuine only when flowering within the confines of fantasy but which had now deviated from that sole legitimate form, to embark (with the pathetic diligence of a lunatic, a cripple, an obtuse child—yes, at any moment it would be rebuffed and thrashed!) on designs and actions that lay within the sole competence of adult, material life. And he could still get out of it! Flee immediately, then send a hurried letter to that person explaining that cohabitation was impossible for him (any reasons would do), that only a somewhat eccentric sense of compassion (expand) had motivated his commitment to support her, and that now, having legitimated it forever (be more specific), he was once again withdrawing into his fairyland obscurity.

“On the other hand,” he continued mentally, under the impression that he was still pursuing the same sober line of reasoning (and not noticing that a banished barefoot creature had returned by the back door), “how simple it would be if dear Mummy were to die tomorrow. But no—she’s in no hurry, she has sunk her teeth into life, and will hang on, and what do I stand to gain if she takes her time dying, and what arrives for her funeral will be a touch-me-not of sixteen or a stranger of twenty? How simple it would be” (he reflected, pausing, quite appropriately, by the illuminated display window of a pharmacy) “if there were some poison handy…. Certainly wouldn’t need much, if, for her, a cup of chocolate is as deadly as strychnine! But a poisoner leaves his cigarette ash in the descended elevator…. Besides, they’ll inevitably open her up, out of sheer habit.” And even though reason and conscience vied with each other (all the while egging him on a little) in affirming that in any case, even if he were to find an untraceable poison, he was not one to commit murder (unless, perhaps, the poison were quite, quite untraceable, and even then—in the extreme hypothesis—for the sole purpose of curtailing the torments of a wife who was doomed, no matter what), he gave free rein to the theoretical development of an impossible thought as his absent gaze stumbled on impeccably packaged vials, the model of a liver, a panopticon of soaps, the reciprocal, splendidly coral-colored smiles of a feminine head and a masculine one gazing gratefully at each other. Then he slitted his eyes, cleared his throat, and, after a moment’s hesitation, entered the pharmacy.

When he returned home it was dark in the apartment—the hope darted through his mind that she might already be asleep, but, alas, the door to her bedroom had been underlined with rulerlike precision by a fine-honed point of light.

“Charlatans …,” he thought with a grim contortion. “We’ll have to stick to the original version. I’ll say good night to the dear departed and turn in.” (What about tomorrow? What about the next day? What about all the days after that?)

But in the middle of his farewell speeches about his migraine, by her luxuriant headboard, things suddenly, unexpectedly, and spontaneously took a sharply angled turn and identity became immaterial, so that, after the fact, it was with astonishment that he discovered the corpse of the miraculously vanquished giantess and gazed at the moiré girdle that almost totally concealed her scar.