Preface
I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader’s mind. No matter how many times we reopen “King Lear,” never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs . . . . Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them. Thus X will never compose the immortal music that would clash with the second-rate symphonies he has accustomed us to. Y will never commit murder. Under no circumstances can Z ever betray us.
Humbert Humbert, in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
BLUSHING plays an important part in the pages that follow. I do some of it myself, perhaps too much, but I should probably do some blushing here as well, because I have described Veronica McCall inaccurately. I have described her as she appears in my mind’s eye: I have let myself be seduced by the image that remains there, and I have presented it as if it were accurate, have even claimed that the image was recorded and preserved with particular precision, although logic tells me that it can’t be accurate at all.
In my mind’s eye, Veronica is wearing—on the occasion of our first meeting—a beige knit dress made of thin, soft wool. It has long sleeves, and the neckline is a wide scoop, so wide that the dress falls off one smooth shoulder. Surely my memory can’t be correct about this dress, about the fullness of Veronica’s hips in it, or about the way the dress clings to her. All that must be part of a much later memory, since I met Veronica in the fourth grade.
Peter Leroy
Small’s Island
December 28, 1983
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🎧 123: “I have often noticed . . .”