Free Transparent Things by Vladimir Nabokov Page B

her on the morrow to the preview of a Lesbian drama with a Lesbian cast. Their conversation lasted twenty-five minutes, Armande using a confidential undertone,and Phyllis speaking so sonorously that Hugh, who sat at a round table correcting a batch of galleys, could have heard, had he felt so inclined, both sides of the trivial torrent. He contented himself instead with the résumé Armande gave him upon returning to the settee of gray plush near the fake fireplace. As had happened on previous occasions, around ten o’clock a most jarring succession of bumps and scrapes suddenly came from above: it was the cretin upstairs dragging a heavy piece of inscrutable sculpture (catalogued as “
Pauline anide
”) from the center of his studio to the corner it occupied at night. In invariable response, Armande glared at the ceiling and remarked that in the case of a less amiable and helpful neighbor she would have complained long ago to Phil’s cousin (who managed the apartment house). When placidity was restored, she started to look for the book she had had in her hand before the telephone rang. Her husband always felt a flow of special tenderness that reconciled him to the boring or brutal ugliness of what not very happy people call “life” every time that he noted in neat, efficient, clear-headed Armande the beauty and helplessness of human abstraction. He now found the object of her pathetic search (it was in the magazine rack near the telephone) and, as he restored it to her, he was allowed to touch with reverent lips her temple and a strand of blond hair. Then he went back to the galleys of
Tralatitions
and she to her book, which was a French touring guide that listed many splendid restaurants, forked and starred, but not very many “pleasant, quiet, well-situated hotels” with three or more turrets and sometimes a little red songbird on a twig.
    “Here’s a cute coincidence,” observed Hugh. “One of his characters, in a rather bawdy passage—by the way should it be ‘Savoie’ or ‘Savoy’?”
    “What’s the coincidence?”
    “Oh. One of his characters is consulting a Michelin, and says: there’s many a mile between Condom in Gascogne and Pussy in Savoie.”
    “The Savoy is a hotel,” said Armande and yawned twice, first with clenched jaws, then openly. “I don’t know why I’m so tired,” she added, “but I know all this yawning only sidetracks sleep. I think I’ll sample my new tablets tonight.”
    “Try imagining you’re skimming on skis down a very smooth slope. I used to play tennis mentally when I was young and it often helped, especially with new, very white balls.”
    She remained seated, lost in thought, for another moment, then red-ribboned the place and went for a glass to the kitchen.
    Hugh liked to read a set of proofs twice, once for the defects of the type and once for the virtues of the text. It worked better, he believed, if the eye check came first and the mind’s pleasure next. He was now enjoying the latter and while not looking for errors, still had a chance to catch a missed boo-boo—his own or the printer’s. He also permitted himself to query, with the utmost diffidence, in the margin of a second copy (meant for the author), certain idiosyncrasies of style and spelling, hoping the great man would understand that not genius but grammar was being questioned.
    After a long consultation with Phil it had been decided not to do anything about the risks of defamation involved in the frankness with which R. described his complicated love life. He had “paid for it once in solitude and remorse, and now was ready to pay in hard cash any fool whom his story might hurt” (abridged and simplified citation from his latest letter). In a long chapter of a much more libertine nature (despite the grandiose wording) than the jock talk of the fashionable writers he criticized, R. showed a mother and daughter regaling their young lover with spectacularcaresses on a mountain ledge above a