Strane and I sit close, our knees touching. While we eavesdrop on the couples, he slides his hand onto my thigh. “Do you like your drink?” He ordered us each a Sazerac. It all tastes like whiskey to me.
His hand slides farther between my legs, his thumb brushing the crotch of my underwear. He has an erection; I can tell by how he shifts his hips and clears his throat. I know, too, that he likes touching me next to the men his age and their old wives.
I drink another Sazerac, and another, and another. Strane’s hand doesn’t leave my legs.
“You’re all goose pimples,” he murmurs. “What kind of girl doesn’t wear stockings in November?”
I want to correct him and say, You mean tights—nobody says “stockings,” this isn’t the nineteen fifties, but before I can, he answers his own question.
“A bad girl, that’s what kind.”
In the hotel lobby, I hang back while he checks into our room. I inspect the empty concierge desk, accidentally brush a pile of brochures onto the floor. On the elevator up to the room, Strane says, “I think that man at the front desk winked at me.” He kisses me as it dings for our floor, like he wants someone to be waiting on the other side, but the doors open onto an empty hallway.
“I’m going to be sick.” I grab a handle, push down hard. “Come on, open up.”
“That’s not our room. Why did you let yourself get this drunk?” He ushers me down the hallway and into the room, where I make a beeline for the bathroom, sinking to the floor and curling my arms around the toilet. Strane watches from the doorway.
“A hundred-fifty-dollar dinner down the drain,” he says.
I’m too drunk for sex but he still tries. My head lolls against the pillows as he pushes my legs apart. The last thing I remember is telling him not to go down on me. He must have listened; I wake up with my underwear on.
In the morning, as he drives me back to Atlantica, the radio plays Bruce Springsteen. “Red Headed Woman.” Strane sneaks glances at me, smiling slyly at the lyrics, trying to get me to smile, too.
Well, listen up, stud
Your life’s been wasted
Till you’ve got down on your knees and tasted
A red headed woman.
I lean forward, turn it off. “That’s disgusting.”
After a few miles of silence, he says, “I forgot to tell you, that new counselor at Browick is married to a professor at your college.”
I’m too hungover to care. “How thrilling,” I mumble, my cheek pressed against the cool window, the coastline flying by.
Henry’s office is on the fourth floor of the biggest building on campus, concrete and brutalist, the eyesore of Atlantica. Most departments are housed there; the fourth floor belongs to English professors, open office doors revealing desks and armchairs and overstuffed bookshelves. Every single one reminds me of Strane’s—the scratchy sofa and seafoam glass. Whenever I walk this hallway, time feels flat, like it’s folded onto itself over and over, a piece of paper into a crane.
Henry’s door is ajar, and through the few inches I see he’s at his desk, watching something on his laptop. When I knock lightly on the doorframe, he jumps, hitting the space bar on his keyboard to pause the video.
“Vanessa,” he says, pulling open the door. There’s a timbre to his voice like he’s pleased to see me standing there and not anyone else. His office is still as bare as it was when I glimpsed inside before the semester began. No rug on the floor, nothing on the walls, but clutter has begun to emerge. Loose papers spread across the desk, books lie haphazard on the shelves, and a dusty black backpack hangs by one strap from the filing cabinet.
“Are you busy?” I ask. “I can come back another time.”
“No, no. Just trying to get some work done.” We both glance at the video paused on his laptop, a guy with a guitar frozen mid-strum. “Emphasis on ‘trying,’” he adds, and gestures to the extra chair. Before I sit, I gauge the distance of the chair from his desk—close but far enough away that he can’t reach over and suddenly touch me.
“I have an idea for my final paper,” I say, “but it would mean bringing in a text we didn’t read in class.”
“What were you thinking?”
“Um, Nabokov? How Shakespeare shows up in Lolita?”
During my freshman year, in a class on unreliable narrators, I called Lolita a love story and the professor cut me off, saying, “Calling this novel a love story indicates an unconscionable misreading on your part.” She wouldn’t even let me finish what I was trying to say. Ever since then, I haven’t dared bring it up in any of my classes.
But Henry just crosses his arms and leans back in his chair. He asks what connections I see between Lolita and the plays we’ve read, so I explain the parallels I’ve found: Lavinia from Titus scratching her rapists’ names in the dirt and raped, orphaned Lo scoffing at the suggestion she do the same thing if strange men offer her candy; how Henry IV’s Falstaff lures Hal away from his family the way a pedophile lures a wayward child; the virginal symbolism of Othello’s strawberry handkerchief and the strawberry-print pajamas Humbert gives Lo.
At the last point, Henry frowns. “I don’t remember that detail of the pajamas.”
I stop, mentally thumb through the novel, trying to recall the exact scene, if it’s before Lo’s mother died, or if it’s at the first hotel Lo and Humbert stay at together, at the very beginning of their first road trip. Then my body jumps. I remember Strane taking the pajamas out of a dresser drawer, the feel of the fabric between my fingers, trying them on in his bathroom, the harsh lights and cold tile floor. Like a scene from a movie I watched years ago, something observed from a safe distance.
I blink. From his chair, Henry watches me with gentle eyes, lips softly parted.
“Are you ok?” he asks.
“I might be remembering that one wrong,” I say.
He says that it’s fine and the whole thing sounds great, excellent, far and away the best paper topic he’s heard so far, and he’s heard from almost everyone.
“You know,” he says, “my favorite line in Lolita is about the dandelions.”
I think for a moment, try to place it . . . dandelions, dandelions. I can picture the line on the page, toward the beginning of the novel, when they’re in Ramsdale, Lo’s mother still alive. “Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons.”
“The moons,” I say.
Henry nods. “Changed from suns to moons.”
For a second, it’s like our brains are connected, like a wire snaked out of mine and planted itself into his, both of us seeing the same image, seeded and full in our heads. It seems strange that his favorite line in the whole sordid novel is something so chaste. Not any of the descriptions of Lolita’s supple little body or Humbert’s attempts at self-justification, but an unexpectedly lovely image of a front yard weed.
Henry shakes his head and the wire between us snaps, the moment over.
“Well, anyway,” he says. “It’s a good line.”
November 17, 2006
Just back from talking with the Professor about Lolita for a half hour. He told me his favorite line (“Most of the dandelions had changed from suns to moons,” pg. 73). At one point, he said “nymphet,” and hearing that word made me want to tear him open and eat him.