The doorbell rang, the dog barking in the distance and the cool September wind climbing through the window. I sat, my stomach tiny and full, wringing my hands for a moment before I decided that it was time to open the door. Humbert Humbert. My H.H. would be standing at the other side, sweaty and nervous, broad and older than ever. I looked barely pregnant, the bump in my stomach developed but small, like the ones you sometimes saw in magazines. Except, he wouldn’t see me that way. He’d see my hips, no longer in a straight line, curving my outline, and he’d be disgusted. My stomach would be protruding from me. I’d be larger than life in his eyes, no longer a girl, and he would no longer love me. Did I want him to love me? He had ruined me.
I’d been so tired when I had written him. Tired from the pregnancy, tired from the barking dog and barking husband, tired. Richard saved me and taught me what it was like to really be loved, but we can’t pay for life with love. The funds were fading fast, draining itself almost over night, and the first person I thought of was the man who had taken care of me, and hurt me, and escaped from me. So, I grabbed my pen and I began to write.
I opened the door and my Humbert Humbert, H.H. (was he ever mine?), stood at the door looking exactly like I’d left him. Except he had lost the glow that had once radiated from his skin like october sun, he had lost his stardust and was tarnished. Humbert Humbert had turned to rust. He was sweating, his eyes large, and he seemed so small. He looked at me as if he was to embrace me, but I turned away. My hand grasped my stomach, feeling a kick, and I knew that the last thing I could ever want was for him to touch me again. He wouldn’t be touching just me, not anymore, and just the thought of that was terrifying.
"We--e--ell!" I exhaled, fear feigned as wonder and welcome.
"Husband at home?" he croaked, his fist in his pocket. He was looking behind me, searching for Richard as if he was hiding behind a corner with gun in hand.
“Come in!” I said, flattening myself against the wall on tiptoe so Humbert could pass. I could not let him touch me.
He studied my home with silent disdain, the sweat pooling at his temples, and I regretted inviting him in the moment his large, blundering feet creaked against my wooden floors.
“Think about the money, Dolly,” I thought to myself. It occurred to me then that he would soon call me Lolita.
My slippers skidded against the floor and I stood in the middle of the room, nervous and sick, my baby so still I was almost afraid that I had lost him.
“Richard is downstairs,” I said, and Humbert stared at me as if I’d just told him an unfairly funny dirty joke.
“That’s not the fellow I want,” he said, his eyes familiar to the eyes that had lusted after me until I escaped them both.
“Not who?" I said
"Where is he? Quick!" I wanted him to leave right then and there. I had to keep reminding myself about the money. I just needed his money so I could never need him again.
"Look," I said, inclining my head to one side, shaking it and suddenly feeling so cold. "Look, you are not going to bring that up."
"I certainly am," he said, and looked as if he had found himself in the flashback of a memory. Except I would never be his. I was never his. He could not possess me anymore.
The minutes flew by, and I answered his questions about Richard and about Cue as the numbness I had begun to known so well swept over me. It crept upon me the way it had once did when someone touched me and, I hoped, it was creeping upon me for the last time.
H.H. kept asking me, sweating through his shirt, about the days after I had escaped him. I felt tears burning my eyes, a lump in my throat at the thought of everything that I had done to untangle myself from his grasp. I felt my baby kick, he was so strong and growing and I could not bear to have him hear even a whisper of the filth that sat like stagnant smoke in my past. I expressed this to Humbert, oh poor Humbert, and he nodded.
I could no longer feel a thing, the numbness had flooded me so quickly, and I stood on two feet staring at this man that I had adored and feared for so long, and suddenly, felt nothing for him at all. The terror was gone. The adoration was gone. All that had once been slipped between us and out the window with the wind.
"Lolita," he said, and it was not until he spoke that I realized I had been holding my breath, "this may be neither here nor there but I have to say it. Life is very short. From here to that old car you know so well there is a stretch of twenty, twenty-five paces. It is a very short walk. Make those twenty-five steps. Now. Right now. Come just as you are. And we shall live happily ever after."
I stared at him blankly, my heart falling to the floor.
"You mean," I said, opening my eyes and again flattening myself against the wal "you mean you will give us that money only if I go with you to a motel. Is that what you mean?" I felt a kind of nausea I had never felt before.
"No," he said, "you got it all wrong. I want you to leave your incidental Dick, and this awful hole, and come to live with me, and die with me, and everything with me.”
He kept calling Richard Dick and was shaking violently in his boots, his hair matted from so much sweat.
"You're crazy," I said, rocking back and forth, hand on stomach.
"Think it over, Lolita. There are no strings attached. Except, perhaps--well, no matter." He wanted to say something more. I’m glad he didn’t.
"Anyway, if you refuse you will still get your . . . trousseau."
"No kidding?" I asked. I felt elated and the numbness slipped away, along with everything else.
He handed me this rather envelope, four hundred dollars in cash tucked inside, wrapped around a check for three thousand six hundred more. My heart was racing and now I was the one to sweat.
"You mean," I said, agony mixed with elation in my voice, "you are giving us four thousand bucks?"
Humbert Humbert, H.H. (he was never mine), the man who had once been so strong, stood in front of me with his head cradling in his hands, weeping all the tears I had always been too numb to weep. I had told myself I would not touch him, yet, I found myself reaching towards him and lightly pressing my hand on his wrist. He felt cold and harsh, the rusted golden boy shriveling at my touch.
"I'll die if you touch me," he said, moving back from me as if I had burnt him. "You are sure you are not coming with me? Is there no hope of your coming? Tell me only this."
"No," I said said. "No, honey, no."
And I meant it.
I had never called him honey before.
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