Clothed in one of her old nightgowns, Lo lay on her side with her back to me, in the middle of the bed. Her lightly veiled body and bare limbs formed a Z. She had put both pillows under her dark tousled head; a band of pale light crossed her top vertebrae.
I changed into pajamas and wondered what to do next.
Now this was something the intruder had not expected. I was as quiet as could be, yet here she was staring at me, and thickly calling me "Barbara." It took me a moment to realize she was talking in her sleep. Softly, with a hopeless sigh, Dolly turned away, resuming her initial position. For at least two minutes I waited on the brink: I was resigned to sleeping on the floor, but there was no chance I was going to surrender my pillow to her. Her faint breathing had the rhythm of sleep. Finally I heaved myself onto a narrow margin of bed, stealthily pulled at the pillow further from her head, and Lolita lifted her head and gaped at me, displeased. I took the pillow anyway.
Slowly her head turned away and dropped onto her single pillow. I settled down at the foot of the bed and lay cold and still on my narrow strip of carpet. Some time passed, nothing changed, and I decided I might risk pulling the blanket a little closer to me, so that it might fall on my shivering side and, if only slightly, warm me. But hardly had I moved it an inch than her breathing was suspended, and I had the odious feeling that little Dolores was wide awake and would explode in screams if I moved her blanket a bit more. Please, reader, laugh all you want: at least smile a little. After all, there is no harm in smiling.
There is nothing louder than an American hotel; and, mind you, this was supposed to be a quiet, cozy, old-fashioned, homey place--"gracious living" and all that stuff. The clatter of the elevator's gate--some twenty yards northeast of my head but as clearly perceived as if it were inside my left temple--alternated with the banging and booming of the machine's various evolutions and lasted well beyond midnight. Every now and then, immediately east of my left ear, the corridor would brim with cheerful, resonant and inept exclamations ending in a volley of good-nights. When that stopped, a toilet immediately north of my cerebellum took over. It was a manly, energetic, deep-throated toilet, and it was used many times. Its gurgle and gush and long afterflow shook the wall behind me. Then someone in a southern direction was extravagantly sick, almost coughing out his life with his liquor, and his toilet descended like a veritable Niagara, immediately beyond our bathroom. And when finally all the waterfalls had stopped, and the enchanted hunters were sound asleep, the avenue under the window of my insomnia, to the west of my wake--a staid, eminently residential, dignified alley of huge trees--degenerated into the despicable haunt of gigantic trucks roaring through the wet and windy night.
Just as I was beginning to nod off, Lo made a trip to the bathroom for a draft of water. She took the resilient and cold paper cup in her shadowy hand and gulped down its contents gratefully, her long eyelashes pointing cupward, and then, with an infantile gesture, little Lolita wiped her lips against my shoulder. She fell back on her pillow and was instantly asleep again.
My pillow smelled of hair. Time and again my consciousness folded, my shuffling body entered the sphere of sleep, shuffled out again, never for long. If I dwell at some length on the tremors and groupings of that distant night, it is to underscore the extent to which I was out of my element, and to allude to a far more insomnia-inducing element: that my child’s kidnapper was in that very hotel, himself surely not sleeping but scheming. And I had spoken with him, the louse.
In the first antemeridian hours there was a lull in the restless hotel night. Then around four the corridor toilet cascaded and its door banged. A little after five a reverberating monologue began to arrive, in several installments, from some courtyard or parking place. It was not really a monologue, since the speaker stopped every few seconds to listen (presumably) to another fellow, but that other voice did not reach me, and so no real meaning could be derived from the part heard. Its matter-of-fact intonations, however, helped to bring in the dawn, and the room was already suffused with lilac gray, when several industrious toilets went to work, one after the other, and the clattering and whining elevator began to rise and take down early risers and downers, and for some minutes I miserably dozed, and Charlotte was a mermaid in a greenish tank, and somewhere in the passage Dr. Boyd said "Good morning to you" in a fruity voice, and birds were busy in the trees, and then Lolita yawned.
By six she was wide awake, and by six fifteen she had dragged me down to breakfast. Sleep or no, I was up.
Between that time, she had already unburdened herself of her dark camp secret: she had met a boy. She went into the affair with a candid detail (open-mouthed kisses and the like) that I tried, in vain, to avoid. Soon, she was probing into my own awful adolescence.
"You mean," she persisted, now kneeling above me, "you never had a girlfriend when you were a kid?"
"Never," I answered quite truthfully.
However, I shall not bore my learned readers with a detailed account of Lolita's presumption. Suffice it to say that in this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had tried to utterly and hopelessly deprave, was less corruption than she herself suspected.
