Unless it can be proven to me . . . that, in the infinite run, it does not matter a jot that a North American girl-child named Dolores Haze had been deprived of her childhood by a maniac, unless this can be proven (and if it can, life is a joke) I see nothing for the treatment of my misery but the melancholy and very local palliative of articulate art.
—Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
G. WAS WRITING DAY AND NIGHT. HIS PUBLISHER WAS EXPECTING the delivery of the manuscript by the end of the month. It was a stage I’d learned to recognize. This was the second book he was preparing for publication since we’d met the previous year. From the bed, I observed the angular line of his shoulders, bowed over the little typewriter salvaged from the studio we’d run away from. His back, naked and perfectly straight. The fine musculature, the narrow waist wrapped in a towel. I now knew that this slender body came at a price. Rather a high price, in fact. Twice a year, G. went to a specialist Swiss clinic where he ate only salad and grains, and where alcohol and tobacco were forbidden. He came back each time looking five years younger.
Such vanity didn’t quite fit with the image I had of a man of letters. Yet it was this body, so smooth and hairless, so slim and lithe, so blond and firm, that I had fallen in love with. But I would have preferred not to know the secrets of its preservation.
In a similar register, I discovered that G. had a terrible phobia of any kind of physical blight. One day in the shower I noticed my chest and arms were covered in red welts. Naked and dripping, I rushed out of the bathroom to show him the marks. But when he saw the rash on my body, he looked utterly horrified, shielded his eyes with one hand, and said, without looking at me:
“Seriously, why are you showing me that? Are you trying to turn me off you completely or what?”
Another time, I was sitting on the bed at the end of the school day, staring at my shoes and crying. There was dead silence in the room. I’d made the mistake of mentioning the name of a classmate who’d invited me to a concert.
“What kind of concert?”
“The Cure. It’s New Wave. I was so embarrassed! Everyone knew who they were except me.”
“The what?”
“The Cure.”
“Would you like to explain what you plan to do at a New Wave concert? Apart from smoking joints while you jiggle your head up and down like a retard? And what’s this guy doing inviting you? Is he hoping to grope you between songs, or even worse, corner you in the dark and kiss you? I hope you said no, at least.”
As I approached my fifteenth birthday, G. had taken it into his head to control every area of my life. He basically appointed himself my moral guardian. I had to eat less chocolate so I didn’t get acne. Watch my figure, in general. Stop smoking (I smoked like a chimney).
Nor was my spiritual health to be overlooked. Every evening he made me read the New Testament, after which he would test me to see if I had understood the meaning of Christ’s message in each parable. He was astonished at the extent of my ignorance. I was an atheist, I hadn’t been baptized, I was the daughter of a feminist of the May ’68 generation, and I was rather mutinous regarding the treatment of women in the text that overall I found not only misogynistic but also repetitive and obscure. But fundamentally I was not displeased with this introduction. The Bible is, after all, a literary text without equal. “No,” G. objected when I said this, “it is the book from which all others flow.” Between embraces, he also taught me to do the Hail Mary in French and Russian. I had to know the prayer by heart and recite it to myself at night before going to sleep.
But good Lord, what was he afraid of? That the two of us were going to hell?
“Church is for sinners,” was his response.