Lolita

auburn and almond, still Carmencita, still mine;
Changeons de vie, ma Carmen, allons vivre quelque part où nous ne serons jamais séparés;
Ohio? The wilds of Massachusetts? No matter, even if those eyes of hers would fade to myopic fish, and her nipples swell and crack, and her lovely young velvety delicate delta be tainted and torn—even then I would go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of your dear wan face, at the mere sound of your raucous young voice, my Lolita.
    “Lolita,” I said, “this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after.”
    Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi?
    “You mean,” she said opening her eyes and raising herself slightly, the snake that may strike, “you mean you will give us [us] that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is
that
what you mean?”
    “No,” I said, “you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me” (words to that effect).
    “You’re crazy,” she said, her features working.
    “Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps—well, no matter.” (A reprieve, I wanted to say but did not.) “Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your …
trousseau.”
    “No kidding?” asked Dolly.
    I handed her an envelope with four hundred dollars in cash and a check for three thousand six hundred more.
    Gingerly, uncertainly, she received
mon petit cadeau;
and then her forehead became a beautiful pink. “You mean,” she said, with agonized emphasis, “you are giving us
four thousand bucks?”
I covered my face with my hand and broke into the hottest tears I had ever shed. I felt them winding through my fingers and down my chin, and burning me, and my nose got clogged, and I could not stop, and then she touched my wrist.
    ’I’ll die if you touch me,” I said. “You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this.”
    “No,” she said. “No, honey, no.”
    She had never called me honey before.
    “No,” she said, “it is quite out of the question. I would sooner go back to Cue. I mean—”
    She groped for words. I supplied them mentally (
“He
broke my heart.
You
merely broke my life”).
    “I think,” she went on—“oops”—the envelope skidded to the floor—she picked it up—“I think it’s oh utterly
grand
of you to give us all that dough. It settles everything, we can start next week. Stop crying, please. You should understand. Let me get you some more beer. Oh, don’t cry, I’m so sorry I cheated so much, but that’s the way things are.”
    I wiped my face and my fingers. She smiled at the
cadeau.
She exulted. She wanted to call Dick. I said I would have to leave in a moment, did not want to see him at all, at all. We tried to think of some subject of conversation. For some reason, I kept seeing—it trembled and silkily glowed on my damp retina—a radiant child of twelve, sitting on a threshold, “pinging” pebbles at an empty can. I almost said—trying to find some casual remark—“I wonder sometimes what has become of the little McCoo girl, did she ever get better?”—but stopped in time lest she rejoin: “I wonder sometimes what has become of the little Haze girl …” Finally, I reverted to money matters. That sum, I said, represented more or less the net rent from her mother’s house; she said: “Had it not been sold years ago?” No (I admit I
had
told her this in order to sever all connections with R.); a lawyer would send a full account of the financial situation later; it was rosy; some of the small securities her mother had owned had gone up and up. Yes, I was quite sure I had to go. I had to go, and find him, and destroy him.
    Since I would not have survived the touch of her lips, I kept retreating in a mincing dance, at every step she and her belly made toward me.
    She and the dog saw me off. I was surprised (this a rhetorical figure, I was not) that the sight of the old car in which she had ridden as a child and a nymphet, left her so very indifferent. All she remarked was it was getting sort of purplish about the gills. I said it was hers, I could go by bus. She said don’t be silly, they would fly