Free Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov Page A

monologizing receiver. A minute later (her brother with all his defects was a mercifully concise phoner), she, still beaming, embraced me, and we moved to her bedroom for our last “
fairela-mourir
” as she called it in her tender aberrant French.
    Ivor was to fetch us at seven P.M . I had already put on my old dinner jacket; Iris stood sideways to the hallway mirror (the best and brightest in the whole flat) veering gently as she tried to catch a clear view of the back of her silky dark bob in the hand glass she held at head level.
    “If you’re ready,” she said, “I’d like you to buy some olives. He’ll be coming here after dinner, and he likes them with his ‘postbrandy.’ ”
    So I went downstairs and crossed the street and shivered (it was a raw cheerless night) and pushed open the door of the little delicatessen shop opposite, and a man behindme stopped it from closing with a strong hand. He wore a trench coat and a beret, his dark face was twitching. I recognized Lieutenant Starov.
    “Ah!” he said. “A whole century we did not meet!”
    The cloud of his breath gave off an odd chemical smell. I had once tried sniffing cocaine (which only made me throw up), but this was some other drug.
    He removed a black glove for one of those circumstantial handshakes my compatriots think proper to use at every entry and exit, and the liberated door hit him between the shoulder blades.
    “Pleasant meeting!” he went on in his curious English (not parading it as might have seemed but using it by unconscious association). “I see you are in a
smoking
. Banquet?”
    I bought my olives, replying the while, in Russian, that, yes, my wife and I were dining out. Then I skipped a farewell handshake, by taking advantage of the shopgirl’s turning to him for the next transaction.
    “What a shame,” exclaimed Iris—“I wanted the black ones, not the green!”
    I told her I refused to go back for them because I did not want to run into Starov again.
    “Oh, that’s a detestable person,” she said. “I’m sure he’ll try now to come and see us, hoping for some
vaw-dutch-ka
. I’m sorry you spoke to him.”
    She flung the window open and leant out just as Ivor was emerging from his taxi. She blew him an exuberant kiss and shouted, with illustrative gestures, that we were coming down.
    “How nice it would be,” she said as we hurried downstairs, “if you’d be wearing an opera cloak. You could wrap it around both of us as the Siamese twins do in your story. Now, quick!”
    She dashed into Ivor’s arms, and was the next moment in the safety of the cab.
    “Paon d’Or,” Ivor told the driver. “Good to see you, old boy,” he said to me, with a distinct American intonation (which I shyly imitated at dinner until he growled: “Very funny”).
    The Paon d’Or no longer exists. Although not quite tops, it was a nice clean place, much patronized by American tourists, who called it “Pander” or “Pandora” and always ordered its “putty saw-lay,” and that, I guess, is what we had. I remember more clearly a glazed case hanging on the gold-figured wall next to our table: it displayed four Morpho butterflies, two huge ones similar in harsh sheen but differently shaped, and two smaller ones beneath them, the left of a sweeter blue with white stripes and the right gleaming like silvery satin. According to the headwaiter, they had been caught by a convict in South America.
    “And how’s my friend Mata Hari?” inquired Ivor turning to us again, his spread hand still flat on the table as he had placed it when swinging toward the “bugs” under discussion.
    We told him the poor ara sickened and had to be destroyed. And what about his automobile, was she still running? She jolly well was—
    “In fact,” Iris continued, touching my wrist, “we’ve decided to set off tomorrow for Cannice. Pity you can’t join us, Ives, but perhaps you might come later.”
    I did not want to object, though I had never heard of