Read Online Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov - Free Book Online Page A

days of brief courtship and marriage, Hugh Person did not know where to look for words that would convince her, that would touch her, that would bring bright tears to her hard dark eyes! Per contra, something he said by chance, not planning the pang and the poetry, some trivial phrase, would prompt suddenly a hysterically happy response on the part of that dry-souled, essentially unhappy woman. Conscious attempts failed. If, as happened sometimes, at the grayest of hours, without the remotest sexual intent, he interrupted his reading to walk into her room and advance toward her on his knees and elbows like an ecstatic, undescribed, unarboreal sloth, howling his adoration, cool Armande would tell him to get up and stop playing the fool. The most ardent addresses he could think up—my princess, my sweetheart, my angel, my animal, my exquisite beast—merely exasperated her. “Why,” she inquired, “can’t you talk to me in a natural human manner, as a gentleman talks to a lady, whymust you put on such a clownish act, why can’t you be serious, and plain, and believable?” But love, he said, was anything but believable, real life
was
ridiculous, yokels laughed at love. He tried to kiss the hem of her skirt or bite the crease of her trouserleg, her instep, the toe of her furious foot—and as he groveled, his unmusical voice muttering maudlin, exotic, rare, common nothings and everythings, into his own ear, as it were, the simple expression of love became a kind of degenerate avian performance executed by the male alone, with no female in sight—long neck straight, then curved, beak dipped, neck straightened again. It all made him ashamed of himself but he could not stop and she could not understand, for at such times he never came up with the right word, the right waterweed.
    He loved her in spite of her unlovableness. Armande had many trying, though not necessarily rare, traits, all of which he accepted as absurd clues in a clever puzzle. She called her mother, to her face,
skotina
, “brute”—not being aware, naturally, that she would never see her again after leaving with Hugh for New York and death. She liked to give carefully planned parties, and no matter how long ago this or that gracious gathering had taken place (ten months, fifteen months, or even earlier before her marriage, at her mother’s house in Brussels or Witt) every party and topic remained for ever preserved in the humming frost of her tidy mind. She visualized those parties in retrospect as stars on the veil of the undulating past, and saw her guests as the extremities of her own personality: vulnerable points that had to be treated thenceforth with nostalgic respect. If Julia or June remarked casually that they had never met art critic C. (the late Charles Chamar’s cousin), whereas both Julia and June had attended the party, as registered in Armande’s mind, she might get very nasty, denouncing the mistake in a disdainful drawl, and adding, with belly-dance contortions: “In that case you must have forgotten also thelittle sandwiches from Père Igor” (some special shop) “which you enjoyed so much.” Hugh had never seen such a vile temper, such morbid
amour-propre
, so self-centered a nature. Julia, who had skied and skated with her, thought her a darling, but most women criticized her, and in telephone chats with one another mimicked her rather pathetic little tricks of attack and retort. If anybody started to say “Shortly before I broke my leg——” she would chime in with the triumphant: “And I broke both in my childhood!” For some occult reason she used an ironic and on the whole disagreeable tone of voice when addressing her husband in public.
    She had strange whims. During their honeymoon in Stresa, on their last night there (his New York office was clamoring for his return), she decided that last nights were statistically the most dangerous ones in hotels without fire escapes, and their hotel looked indeed most