Free Look at the Harlequins! by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

that decision.
    Ivor said that if ever we wanted to sell Villa Iris he knew someone who would snap it up any time. Iris, he said, knew him too: David Geller, the actor. “He was (turning to me) her first beau before you blundered in. She must still have somewhere that photo of him and me in
Troilus and Cressida
ten years ago. He’s Helen of Troy in it, I’m Cressida.”
    “Lies, lies,” murmured Iris.
    Ivor described his own house in Los Angeles. He proposeddiscussing with me after dinner a script he wished me to prepare based on Gogol’s
Inspector
(we were back at the start, so to speak). Iris asked for another helping of whatever it was we were eating.
    “You will die,” said Ivor. “It’s monstrously rich. Remember what Miss Grunt (a former governess to whom he would assign all kinds of gruesome apothegms) used to say: ‘The white worms lie in wait for the glutton.’ ”
    “That’s why I want to be burned when I die,” remarked Iris.
    He ordered a second or third bottle of the indifferent white wine I had had the polite weakness to praise. We drank to his last film—I forget its title—which was to be shown tomorrow in London, and later in Paris, he hoped.
    Ivor did not look either very well or very happy; he had developed a sizable bald spot, freckled. I had never noticed before that his eyelids were so heavy and his lashes so coarse and pale. Our neighbors, three harmless Americans, hearty, flushed, vociferous, were, perhaps, not particularly pleasant, but neither Iris nor I thought Ivor’s threat “to make those Bronxonians pipe down” justified, seeing that he, too, was talking in fairly resonant tones. I rather looked forward to the end of the dinner—and to coffee at home—but Iris on the contrary seemed inclined to enjoy every morsel and drop. She wore a very open, jet-black frock and the long onyx earrings I had once given her. Her cheeks and arms, without their summer tan, had the mat whiteness that I was to distribute—perhaps too generously—among the girls of my future books. Ivor’s roving eyes, while he talked, tended to appraise her bare shoulders, but by the simple trick of breaking in with some question, I managed to keep confusing the trajectory of his gaze.
    At last the ordeal came to a close. Iris said she would be back in a minute; her brother suggested we “repair for a leak.” I declined—not because I did not need it—I did—but because I knew by experience that a talkative neighbor and the sight of his immediate stream would inevitably afflict me with urinary impotence. As I sat smoking in the lounge of the restaurant I pondered the wisdom of suddenly transferring the established habit of work on
Camera Lucida
to other surroundings, another desk, another lighting, another pressure of outside calls and smells—and I saw my pages and notes flash past like the bright windows of an express train that did not stop at my station. I had decided to talk Iris out of her plan when brother and sister appeared from opposite sides of the stage, beaming at one another. She had less than fifteen minutes of life left.
    Numbers are bleary along rue Despréaux, and the taxi-man missed our front porch by a couple of house lengths. He suggested reversing his cab, but impatient Iris had already alighted, and I scrambled out after her, leaving Ivor to pay the taxi. She cast a look around her; then started to walk so fast toward our house that I had trouble catching up with her. As I was about to cup her elbow, I heard Ivor’s voice behind me, calling out that he had not enough change. I abandoned Iris and ran back to Ivor, and just as I reached the two palm readers, they and I heard Iris cry out something loud and brave, as if she were driving away a fierce hound. By the light of a streetlamp we glimpsed the figure of a mackintoshed man stride up to her from the opposite sidewalk and fire at such close range that he seemed to prod her with his large pistol. By now our taxi-man, followed