Chapter 14

I had lunch in town. The house was still empty when I strolled back. I spent the afternoon working.

I felt proud of myself. I had introduced myself as teacher and father figure without exasperating the girl. What I began to picture was not she, but my own creation, another, brilliant Lolita--perhaps, more real than Lolita; overlapping, encasing her. And nothing prevented me from repeating a performance. Perhaps the next lesson would be on the ancient Greeks, or an unbiased perspective on her own nation’s cheery imperialism. The afternoon drifted on and on, in ripe silence.

No Lolita came home--she had gone with the Chatfields to a movie. The table was laid with more elegance than usual: candlelight, if you please. In this mawkish aura, Mrs. Haze gently touched the silver on both sides of her plate as if touching piano keys, and smiled down on her empty plate (was on a diet), and said she hoped I liked the salad (recipe lifted from a woman's magazine). She hoped I liked the cold cuts, too. It had been a perfect day. Mrs. Chatfield was a lovely person. Phyllis, her daughter, was leaving tomorrow for a three-week summer camp.

And suddenly I had a perfect idea, far better than any lesson I could impart on the girl in tiny doses—Lo would go to camp, too. At first, Charlotte was reticent. Never having gone to a camp herself, she did not know what went on there. Neither did I, but I was positive it would be a much more revelatory experience than lying out on the veranda each day. At camp, she would learn respect, sportsmanship, perhaps even find an opportunity to showcase her voice in a talent show. I would miss the girl, to be certain, if for no other reason than the buffer she provided between myself and Haze, yet I think it was that very buffer that Charlotte considered when she relented to my idea. Lolita, it was decided, would go Thursday, stay there after Phyllis had left, until school began.

Suddenly, my toothache returned. Must have been an enormous molar, with an abscess as big as a maraschino cherry.

Charlotte visited me in my room later, trying to help. "We have," said Haze, "an excellent dentist. Our neighbor, in fact. Dr. Quilty. Uncle or cousin, I think, of the playwright. Think it will pass? Well, just as you wish. In the fall I shall have him 'brace' her, as my mother used to say. It may curb Lo a little. I am afraid she has been bothering you frightfully all these days. And we are in for a couple of stormy ones before she goes. She has flatly refused to go, and I confess I left her with the Chatfields because I dreaded to face her alone just yet. The movie may mollify her. Phyllis is a very sweet girl, and there is no earthly reason for Lo to dislike her. Really, monsieur, I am very sorry about that tooth of yours. It would be so much more reasonable to let me contact Ivor Quilty first thing tomorrow morning if it still hurts. And, as you said, a summer camp is so much healthier, and--well, it is all so much more reasonable as I say than to mope on a suburban lawn and use mamma's lipstick and go into tantrums at the least provocation. And it won't be all play either. The camp is run by Shirley Holmes--you know, the woman who wrote Campfire Girl. Camp will teach Dolores Haze to grow in many things--health, knowledge, temper. And particularly in a sense of responsibility towards other people. Shall we take these candles with us and sit for a while on the piazza, or do you want to go to bed and nurse that tooth?"

I saw what the woman was up to, already plotting for the weeks ahead with the gentleman tenant all to herself. “Nurse that tooth,” I replied.