Pnin

with tasselled belt and satin lapels, won at an émigré charity bazaar in Paris twenty years ago - how the time flies! This jacket he wore with a pair of old tuxedo trousers, likewise of European origin. Peering at himself in the cracked mirror of the medicine chest, he put on his heavy tortoise-shell reading glasses, from under the saddle of which his Russian potato nose smoothly bulged. He bared his synthetic teeth. He inspected his cheeks and chin to see if his morning shave still held. It did. With finger and thumb he grasped a long nostril hair, plucked it out after a second hard tug, and sneezed lustily, an 'Ah!' of well-being rounding out the explosion.
    At half past seven Betty arrived to help with final arrangements. Betty now taught English and History at Isola High School. She had not changed since the days when she was a buxom graduate student. Her pink-rimmed myopic grey eyes peered at you with the same ingenuous sympathy. She wore the same Gretchen-like coil of thick hair around her head. There was the same scar on her soft throat. But an engagement ring with a diminutive diamond had appeared on her plump hand, and this she displayed with coy pride to Pnin, who vaguely experienced a twinge of sadness. He reflected that there was a time he might have courted her - would have done so, in fact, had she not had a servant maid's mind, which had remained unaltered too. She could still relate a long story on a 'she said-I said-she said' basis. Nothing on earth could make her disbelieve in the wisdom and wit of her favourite woman's magazine. She still had the curious trick - shared by two or three other small-town young women within Pnin's limited ken - of giving you a delayed little tap on the sleeve in acknowledgement of, rather than in retaliation for, any remark reminding her of some minor lapse: you would say, 'Betty, you forgot to return that book,' or 'I thought, Betty, you said you would never marry,' and before she actually answered, there it would come, that demure gesture, retracted at the very moment her stubby fingers came into contact with your wrist.
    'He is a biochemist and is now in Pittsburgh,' said Betty as she helped Pnin to arrange buttered slices of French bread around a pot of glossy-grey fresh caviare and to rinse three large bunches of grapes. There was also a large plate of cold cuts, real German pumpernickel, and a dish of very special vinaigrette, where shrimps hobnobbed with pickles and peas, and some miniature sausages in tomato sauce, and hot pirozhki (mushroom tarts, meat tarts, cabbage tarts), and four kinds of nuts, and various interesting Oriental sweets. Drinks were to be represented by whisky (Betty's contribution), ryabinovka (a rowanberry liqueur), brandy-and-grenadine cocktails, and of course Pnin's Punch, a heady mixture of chilled Chateau Yquem, grapefruit juice, and maraschino, which the solemn host had already started to stir in a large bowl of brilliant aquamarine glass with a decorative design of swirled ribbing and lily pads.
    'My, what a lovely thing!' cried Betty.
    Pnin eyed the bowl with pleased surprise as if seeing it for the first time. It was, he said, a present from Victor. Yes, how was he, how did he like St Bart's? He liked it so-so. He had passed the beginning of the summer in California with his mother, then had worked two months at a Yosemite hotel. A what? A hotel in the Californian mountains. Well, he had returned to his school and had suddenly sent this.
    By some tender coincidence the bowl had come on the very day Pnin had counted the chairs and started to plan this party. It had come enclosed in a box within another box inside a third one, and wrapped up in an extravagant mass of excelsior and paper that had spread all over the kitchen like a carnival storm. The bowl that emerged was one of those gifts whose first impact produces in the recipient's mind a coloured image, a blazoned blur, reflecting with such emblematic force the sweet nature of the donor that the tangible attributes of the thing are dissolved, as it were, in this pure inner blaze, but suddenly and forever leap into brilliant being when praised by an outsider to whom the true glory of the object is unknown.

7
    A musical tinkle reverberated though the small house, and the Clementses entered with a bottle of French champagne and a cluster of dahlias.
    Dark-blue-eyed, long-lashed, bob-haired Joan wore an old black silk dress that was smarter than anything other faculty wives could