Vera (55 page)

In the immediate, and through Irving Lazar, she negotiated a comfortable arrangement with Kubrick. Her husband was to be granted every creative freedom in his work; he was not to be paid for fewer than twenty-six weeks or detained in Hollywood for longer than thirty-four; he was to be entitled to a vacation. In exchange he guaranteed Kubrick his exclusive attention
and agreed to participate in the film's publicity. By rail the couple traveled from New York to Los Angeles; having spent a decade in upstate New York, Véra was exhilarated to emerge from the snowbound Rockies into the brilliant California sunshine. Upon arrival Vladimir met with Kubrick at his Universal Studios bungalow, after which he began devoting eight-hour days to the screenplay. On March 11 the Nabokovs moved into a lovely hillside house on Mandeville Canyon Road, a home that came with avocado, tangerine, lemon, and hibiscus trees and, best of all, with Klara, an excellent six-day-a-week, live-in housekeeper. At the same time Véra rented a car with which to ferry her husband to story meetings. He was more enthralled by the vehicle than was its driver. “
Papa says ‘it's an amazing white Impala,' ” Véra told Dmitri. “I say it's an ‘enormous thing from which I can't see my own wings.' ” She was unaccustomed to no-glare glass; as ever, she drew a certain comfort from reflections. Moreover, something seemed off in the Impala's proportions. Véra could discuss neither the car nor the California roadways without recourse to the word “hypertrophied.”
She found Los Angeles's sprawl daunting, New York driving simple by comparison, the Impala both unfashionable and almost impossible to park. “
We don't go anywhere,” she wrote Elena Levin, “and we live quite far from downtown, too, so it takes hours to get to the studio for conferences.” It was about a forty-minute drive.

For the most part she settled into the land of perfect rootlessness happily. To a great extent what pleased her in California life was its resemblance to something else: It was, she felt, “an illusion of European life as reflected in a—not crooked, but—unusual mirror.” She made the trip to the studio (which was by no measure downtown) only every two to three weeks. While Vladimir sat in the Mandeville Canyon yard with his index cards, she communed with her typewriter. In the letters that issued from it—even the one asking Mondadori to procure a “Lolita doll” for their inspection, as her husband suspected copyright infringement; or the one chastising Dmitri for his disrespect for deadlines—she sounds sunny, casual, at ease, often positively giddy. Didn't Walter Minton think he needed a California vacation? The Nabokovs were playing tennis three times a week with an excellent coach; Véra had made
great progress with her backhand. Marvelous reviews continued to pour in from all over the world. Dmitri had already begun to sing on provincial Italian stages with much success; proudly Véra compiled scrapbooks on both of her men. Vladimir expected to finish his script before the six months were out. They rubbed elbows with their share of celebrities: They dined with James Mason and Sue Lyon, who were cast in the film; they
talked with David Selznick and Ira Gershwin.
^*
At a party they were introduced to Marilyn Monroe.
^†
Later Vladimir joked that they did their best to avoid these gatherings, at which he
inevitably offended someone. He asked John Wayne what he did for a living. (“
I'm in pictures,” Wayne replied.) He asked a woman
he vaguely recognized if she was French; it was Gina Lollobrigida. While friends were now addressing the Nabokovs as “Dear Rock Hudson and Greta Garbo,” Véra proved as resistant to this brush with celebrity as she was to the Impala. Her day-to-day life was far from glamorous. In mid-June she apologized for her silence to Filippa Rolf, Nabokov's fan in Sweden, who had turned out to be a poet, and a better correspondent than Véra:

The Hollywood interlude was twice prolonged, once at Kubrick's request, a second time because Vladimir was happily researching the new book in a local library and did not want his progress interrupted. This was one of several periods in which Véra explained that various matters would have to wait until he was again “movable.” The fall itinerary remained undecided; the Mandeville Canyon lease was extended until October 10. September was devoted to
Pale Fire
, for which Véra undertook various arcane research assignments: She compiled a
catalogue of tree descriptions—“a hoar-leaved willow,” “a cloven pine,” “a knotty-entrailed oak”—in Shakespeare. She set the “word golf” records of which Kinbote brags—from “hate” to “love,”
from “lass” to “male” in three moves—working out the solutions on index cards. By the time the Nabokovs boarded the Super Chief, on October 12, the
East had begun to seem entirely unreal to Véra. She had hoped to revisit old haunts and old friends before continuing to Europe but managed only to fly, by herself—it was her first trip by air—to Ithaca, to rearrange the personal effects there. (On her return, as if obliging a theme of the life, the keys to the Nabokovs' trunk challenged their owners to a protracted game of hide-and-seek.) During the two weeks in New York the couple saw only close friends and relatives, save for the occasional chance encounter. On Fifth Avenue one afternoon they ran into German-born Jenni Moulton, whose husband had left Cornell for Princeton. Mrs. Moulton was not the first to notice a change in Véra, with whom celebrity seemed to agree; she was radiant in a silver mink stole. “
I thought of you every day in California,” Véra informed the younger woman. “Mrs. Nabokov, I cannot think of a single reason why you should think of me,” replied the startled professor's wife. “But my dear, in Hollywood we had a German maid,” came the icy response.

The
Queen Elizabeth
carried the Nabokovs back to Europe on the afternoon of November 2, 1960. They made their way circuitously to the south of France, never much out of the sight of reporters, settling temporarily at Nice's sumptuous Hotel Negresco. They picked up the housing search where they had left off, renting a spacious apartment in an ornate, mustard-yellow building well past its splendid prime, directly on the Promenade. The place was sober but well-appointed; the pale greenish sea lay just beyond its windows. To the fourth-floor doorjamb Véra tacked a visiting card, on which she printed “Mr. and Mrs. Nabokov.” Vladimir found the sea—and even the rain—highly conducive to his work;
he began writing the minute they brought their bags into the place. Véra especially appreciated the proximity to Milan and Dmitri, whom they had never before left alone for so long, and who had a more liberal interpretation of a budget than his parents would have liked. Nothing would budge the nomads now; it took a fiction to tie them to earth. Véra was hugely relieved. Her husband had had no real peace since the publication of
Lolita
, and the embryonic
Pale Fire
had nearly died for the screenwriting interruption. She
vowed that they were not leaving Nice until the novel was out of danger. All the same the couple's foothold on the planet remained a tentative one. When Nabokov alerted Wilson in 1964 that they were heading for America,
he had some difficulty with his phrasing. It was unclear to him whether they were “going to America” or “sailing home.” He settled on the latter.

On Véra's part, there appears to have been little temptation to return. The couple's protests that they intended one day to do so, in a month, a season,
a year—as serious as they may have seemed in 1961—largely amounted to a polite formality, the exile's abstract idea of return. They did not want to be perceived as disloyal, or ungrateful, or—worst of all—tax exiles, none of which they were. Nor did they want to jeopardize their American citizenship. The party line for the first years was that they were abroad only provisionally; the idea of splitting their time between America and Europe seemed appealing. After the 1960 Hollywood stint Vladimir spent a total of six weeks in America, Véra—who was willing to fly—slightly more. It was not so much that they were avoiding America as that they were embracing a state of semi-permanence; while they were neither light nor leisurely packers, the Nabokovs enjoyed their freedom of movement. Or did for the most part. In the last Cornell year Vladimir had asked where a prized student and her husband expected to settle and was informed they expected “
to be in motion for some time to come.” “That's a nice town,” he had chuckled approvingly. Véra had long written to friends that their plans were vague, the itinerary negotiable, with a hint of triumph. She was after all the daughter of a man whose life had been predicated on residency permits. At the end of the year, in Lugano, she complained of fatigue to Lisbet Thompson, her old Berlin friend, who noticed she looked worn down. She had every reason to feel, with Pnin, “
battered and stunned by thirty-five years of homelessness,” but claimed to revel in the undecided future. Two more years would elapse before finally she conceded: “
Nomadic life is a wonderful thing—for a time. Then it becomes something of a strain. I am well qualified to say so after some 45 years of it. However, we still remain ‘homeless.' ” At the end of 1961 the Nabokovs were advised to settle on a fixed address for the most paradoxical of reasons: As the Paul, Weiss lawyers demonstrated, a taxpayer cannot be said to be away from home if his only home is wherever he happens to be working. In order to deduct their traveling expenses from their taxes, the couple needed to maintain a permanent residence from which they could be said to be away.

Vladimir's editors routinely located the Nabokovs by reading of them in the paper; often enough they received mail from one publisher at another publisher's offices. They were on the one hand immovable and on the other unrooted, just as the work that had liberated them from Ithaca was so savagely, pitch-perfectly American and so fiercely exotic. August 1961, when Véra had expected to be packing for a New York winter, found the couple in Montreux, Switzerland, at the Hotel Belmont. The woman who had changed flat tires by the side of the road in the dead of an upstate New York night, who had driven through hailstorms and dodged tornadoes, had become so accustomed to staying put in the evenings that she found it an adventure
to go out for dinner that month, when she drove the twenty miles from Villars to Montreux in the dark. “We would like to get settled, go out as little as possible, and devote our lives to V.'s and Dmitri's work,” she announced. At the same time she luxuriated in the idea that, at least in his reputation, her husband's hold on the planet was an aterrestrial one. Quite literally, he was at large. “
A really spectacular achievement on the part of the international mail service was when they delivered to my husband in Montreux a letter that had been addressed to ‘Vladimir Nabokov, New Orleans'—one of the few big American cities which we never visited,” she marveled, a few years after the couple had taken their lawyers' advice and established a base in Montreux.

For the most part visitors to Nice were discouraged, save—as Vladimir described them—for
the thoughtful and intelligent ones whose presence proved a tonic after a full day's work. Relatives, even those living nearby, were dissuaded from calling. Just after Christmas, he advised a cousin that he had come to the Riviera expressly to write without interruption. He went nowhere and saw no one. Four days later, Véra replied to Filippa Rolf, whom she had cordially invited to visit in a Christmas card. The Swedish poet had proposed a mid-January trip, assuring Véra, “
I hope you know I am eminently and supernaturally able to take care of myself.” Véra assured her that even with Vladimir's schedule, an hour or two a day could surely be found for socializing. They had only just begun to realize that Nice was not quite as isolated as they had expected it to be. “
Gallimard is about to release
Autres Rivages
(Conclusive Evidence, alias Speak, Memory) and reporters are descending on Vladimir from Paris, Cologne, Israel etc.,” she noted,
sounding pleased, especially as the intrusions were not preventing her husband from writing assiduously. She invited Rolf for dinner on Saturday evening, January 14.

A measure of the couple's social isolation in Nice could be taken in their hot-potato handling of an invitation that arrived, at George Weidenfeld's urging, from the eccentric Daisy Fellowes, a Weidenfeld author living amidst her leopard-skin prints in a baronial villa in Roquebrune. She invited the Nabokovs to dine in mid-month; Vladimir, not recognizing her name and concluding her cable was from a brash stranger, had opted to ignore it. (Fellowes had attended Weidenfeld's
Lolita
party, but so had every one in London.) Véra did not think this would be right and telephoned; a very awkward
conversation—and a long and charming lunch—ensued. Véra felt dreadful about the near-gaffe, confessing it immediately to Weidenfeld. That winter afternoon they lunched with a British newspaper magnate, Prince Pierre Grimaldi, and Marcel Pagnol, whose work they did not know, but who evidently fared better than had John Wayne; the Nabokovs pronounced the French novelist charming. It was the taxi driver who carried them to Roquebrune who won their hearts, however. He had so beautifully recounted the story of his dead wife that both passengers found themselves on the verge of tears in the backseat.
Handing over carfare at the end of the trip struck them as entirely the wrong gesture.