Free Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov

setting to the even less normal decor of those rare occasions when she desired him to possess her in bed, well under the bedclothes, while she telephoned, gossiping with a female friend or hoaxing an unknown male. Our Person’s capacity to condone all this, to find reasonable explanations and so forth, endears him to us, but also provokes limpid mirth, alas, at times. For example, he told himself that she refused to strip because she was shy of her tiny pouting breasts and the scar of a ski accident along her thigh. Silly Person!
    Was she faithful to him throughout the months of their marriage spent in frail, lax, merry America? During their first and last winter there she went a few times to ski without him, at Aval, Quebec, or Chute, Colorado. While alone, he forbade himself to dwell in thought on the banalities of betrayal, such as holding hands with a chap or permitting him to kiss her good night. Those banalities were to him quite as excruciating to imagine as would be voluptuous intercourse. A steel door of the spirit remained securelyshut as long as she was away, but no sooner had she arrived, her face brown and shiny, her figure as trim as that of an air hostess, in that blue coat with flat buttons as bright as counters of gold, than something ghastly opened up in him and a dozen lithe athletes started swarming around and prying her apart in all the motels of his mind, although actually, as we know, she had enjoyed full conjunction with only a dozen crack lovers in the course of three trips.
    Nobody, least of all her mother, could understand why Armande married a rather ordinary American with a not very solid job, but we must end now our discussion of love.

18
    In the second week of February, about one month before death separated them, the Persons flew over to Europe for a few days: Armande, to visit her mother dying in a Belgian hospital (the dutiful daughter came too late), and Hugh, at his firm’s request, to look up Mr. R. and another American writer, also residing in Switzerland.
    It was raining hard when a taxi deposited him in front of R.’s big, old, and ugly country house above Versex. He made his way up a graveled path with streams of bubbly rainwater running on either side. He found the front door ajar, and while tramping the mat noticed with amused surprise Julia Moore standing with her back to him at the telephone table in the vestibule. She now wore again the pretty pageboy hairdo of the past and the same orange blouse. He had finished wiping his feet when she put back the receiver and turned out to be a totally different girl.
    “Sorry to have made you wait,” she said, fixing on him a pair of smiling eyes. “I’m replacing Mr. Tamworth, who is vacationing in Morocco.”
    Hugh Person entered the library, a comfortably furnished but decidedly old-fashioned and quite inadequately lighted room, lined with encyclopedias, dictionaries, directories,and the author’s copies of the author’s books in multiple editions and translations. He sat down in a club chair and drew a list of points to be discussed from his briefcase. The two main questions were: how to alter certain much too recognizable people in the typescript of
Tralatitions
and what to do with that commercially impossible title.
    Presently R. came in. He had not shaved for three or four days and wore ridiculous blue overalls which he found convenient for distributing about him the tools of his profession, such as pencils, ball pens, three pairs of glasses, cards, jumbo clips, elastic bands, and—in an invisible state—the dagger which after a few words of welcome he pointed at our Person.
    “I can only repeat,” he said, collapsing in the armchair vacated by Hugh and motioning him to a similar one opposite, “what I said not once but often already: you can alter a cat but you cannot alter my characters. As to the title, which is a perfectly respectable synonym of the word ‘metaphor,’ no savage steeds will pull it from under me. My