Lolita Inverted

My suspicion is that you expect this to start with a poem. Some deceptively sweet verse in simple couplets with perfectly placed alliteration to distract from the fact that I’m confessing a period of betrayal and lurid seduction. Now, assuming you are the voyeuristic type, and intuition tells me that you are, let’s not gloss over why you’re expecting a poem while here for a tale of all that is lewd: because the poem allows you to believe in love. It isn’t just lusting if you hold fast to the hope that he truly loves her.

Ah, there’s the rub, as another of my tortured literary contemporaries might say. Ask me to my face, no minced words or euphemisms employed, if I loved Lolita, and I can’t give you an answer with similar directness. The truth of the matter, of every matter in my life it turns out, is that I don’t know if I actually love anyone.

I supposed I love my mother in the way a person loves someone who could have been a superior version of what they were had they been given the chance. To say I love a version of my mother that didn’t exist isn’t entirely accurate but it’s not a full-throated falsehood either.

But Lo wasn’t my mother, and by the end of that fraught, tense summer, I knew too well that Lo lacked what is normally a common-found trait among her gender: the ability to give of one’s self. Not only was Lolita not my mother, she struggled to be a mother to anyone. Even her insufferable, darlingly put-upon daughter Charlotte.

The Hayes girl...she wasn’t missing anything. Every trait a woman was supposed to have, she had in spades.

For better or worse, it started in May, just as classes were wrapping up for the spring semester. My plan was to stay in the town rather than return home to deal with my father but, as is common with small communities, the lodging was scarce and promised away months in advance. In my ignorance (this was my first time having to deal with the issue of housing that wasn’t dealt with by a parental unit or an institution), I didn’t start looking for a place to stay until the week of finals. By that point, my off-handed comment of, “I’m sure I’ll be able to find something suitable” was becoming a repetitive joke among my colleagues. Colleagues makes them sound as if they were on the same plane as me academically but there’s frankly no other word to use. Friends was much too strong a word to use for these types.

I had expected very little from the lodging I procured for that summer. All I was able to afford, if I was unwilling to get a summer job, was a room in a house with a mother and daughter, and since I had been too busy during the semester to look as early as I should have my choices were limited. So limited, in fact, that I found myself lucky to find what I found yet still thought it not entirely up to my standards. Such is life with your humble narrator.

My basics would be covered: shelter and food were provided, mental stimulation could be found for free or cheap in the overly precious town I had deigned to live in. It cuddled next to the prestigious university of my boyhood fantasies like a needy parasite latching onto the life force of a more powerful being. The citizens of said town cooed about their own quaintness as if it were an asset, something to be proud of. Sheep crave shelter, I suppose.

The town was bereft of anything I would refer to as “gainful employment.” There was an astoundingly dead-end opportunity to be a soda-jerk or a pump jockey. In the underbrush of the social jungle that is a quaint town such positions are highly coveted so aspiring to them was beyond my imagination. Besides, my fingernails were too clean for either.

A few others in my situation had been keen enough to rent a house together a few miles out of town. They either drove or rode bikes to get where they needed to go and I hadn’t the ability or desire to attempt that so I had to turn down their offer when it came mid-semester.

“Com’on then, Humph,” the pack leader called Rusty said to me when I shrugged off the possibility of sharing his car. “Think of what it means to have a place a bit out of town and a way to get a young lady out there.”

My cringing was visible. It’s fortunate for me and my reputation that Rusty is not the most perceptive animal.

I had no aversion to sex. Or to ladies. It was the hunt for the smallest and the most delicate I was opposed to. The fact that so many men sought what was fragile in their prizes proved to me the weakness of masculinity clearer than any Kinsey-esque study: these men were so unsure in their role, they had to find the least challenging mate. Their mate could be afforded no will, no power. They sought prey, not a lover.

Neither here nor there, that point. A side-note to be kept in mind but not dwelled upon. Really, this is about my living arrangements for the summer and how lucky I was to find them yet how unfortunate I felt about it all. My father, god rest his bitter and black little soul, always told me I was an ungrateful piece of shit. I can’t say he was wrong when my complaints about having room and board for next to nothing came down to bemoaning a shared bathroom.

The town itself was its own brand of blandness. A white-washed, cobble-stoned ejaculation of Americana. Living directly in it, a short walk from the two fisherman bars and the greasy spoon, afforded me all the people-watching I could dream of albeit somewhat repetitive. There are only so many kinds of people and even fewer kinds in a town whose library doubled as a pie market on Sundays after church. My god, they still go to church. All of them. I gave them credit for not believing it at all, though. I was able to understand the small-time mentality enough to know that a private citizen might not be allowed to be as private as they would like. Appearances are kept up for their own sake, after all.

This was not something I experienced in the city as I grew up. Perhaps a bit when my father walked out on my mother in my teenage years but he provided enough to keep us in luxury. The only change I saw was my mother’s unwillingness to drink at the club anymore and the disappearance of what I thought were her lifelong friends. City types tend to be more open-minded about alternative situations.