My Dark Vanessa(97)
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.
He picked up on something strange about me, how deeply I know the novel. When I referenced some little detail—Humbert’s attraction to his first wife because of how her foot looked in a black velvet slipper—the Professor asked, “Are you reading this for another class, or . . . ?” Meaning, how do I know the book so well? I told him it’s mine. That it belongs to me.
I said, “You know how sometimes there’s a book that’s yours?” And he nodded, like he understood exactly.
I’m sure his intentions are pure, that he thinks I’m a bright girl with good insights, but then there are moments like this: before I left his office he watched me pull on my coat. I couldn’t find my sleeve, stumbled a little as I groped around for it. He made a small movement then, like he was about to help me, but stopped himself, controlled himself. His eyes, though, were soft, so soft. S. is the only other person who’s ever looked at me that way.
Am I being greedy or delusional? Another affair with a teacher, give me a break. Lightning doesn’t strike twice, etc. But if it did happen, would it even be considered the same sort of thing? The basic facts are much more palatable: twenty-one instead of fifteen, thirty-four instead of forty-two. Two consenting adults. Scandal or relationship, who’s to say?