Freud, Nabokov, Love, & Lo
To return to the narrative of our first date, Zach and I left the ladies alone. He and I entered into the throngs of people out on the street for a fun-filled Friday night and we walked the narrow alleys and wide boulevards, talking together like old friends. In the back of both of our minds was the thought of our beloveds whispering sweet nothings to each other in his bed.
We continued the conversation of his ex-nympho and he told me some truly horrific stories, culminating in the statement, “There just were no boundaries for her at all. None. I knew I had to break it off when she tried to get me to fuck her with her parents in the same room. That was it. That was the last straw.”
“Wow,” was all I could muster.
“Yeah, she had a lot of problems.”
“She was your first girlfriend, wasn’t she? I mean, she took your virginity, right?”
“How did you know?”
“And she cheated on you too, right?”
“How do you know these things?”
“And she broke your heart.”
“Am I that open of a book?”
“A lot of our current sexuality is wrapped up in that first one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, take me, for instance. The girl who Christened me got not only my virginity, but my unfailing love and devotion. As it turned out, she eventually cheated on me with more men than I can count. It devastated me. In some ways, I never recovered from the shock. And I’m sure, in some complex, mysterious way, that’s why I’m here tonight. I mean, that’s why I get off on Lo’s nymphomania and her sexploits with other people.”
“Yeah,” he said as he seemed to be having an ‘ah-ha’ moment, “that makes total sense. I never thought about it that way till now.” I’m not sure what dots he was connecting in his head, but somehow something I said resonated with him.
“Take for instance the opening of Lolita,” I said, making reference to a work we both admired, “where Humbert Humbert grounds the entire obsession he has with Lo in that unique experience he had on the cusp of adolescence in the park — his formative, short lived ‘romance’ with the nymphet Annabel Leigh. That offhanded reminiscence of his is the key to understanding the entire complex psychology of the text — or at least the narrator’s complex psychology. That’s one thing that I try to explore — Lo’s psychology. It’s sorely missing from Nabokov’s novel and something that I really strive to penetrate.”
“Interesting choice of words.”
“What is?”
“Penetrate.”
“Oh dear! Yes, a Freudian slip if ever there was one.”
He laughed.
“But you see what I mean,” I continued, “here I am, over twice Lo’s age and twice your age and I’m still struggling with and working out the impressions left on me when I was sixteen.”
At that moment, for an instant, our age differences became apparent to me. Prior to my articulating it, I felt like a peer of this intelligent, articulate, and engaging youth. Someone once said that each of us, as we get older, only see ourselves as fixed at a certain age. We may be much older, but we don’t see ourselves that way or feel that way. For me, I’ve come to realize, my fixed age is twenty-four. If I meet a person younger than twenty-four, that person seems young to me. If I meet a person older (even my very own age — a classmate of mine from high school even), then that person seems older than I (or I see him or her as also still twenty-four). It is a very strange phenomenon. What is your fixed age?
[Excerpt from the story, “Sexplorations,” from the blog: mysexlifewithlola.com]
