Tennis with Lolita and Eddy

Tennis with Lolita and Eddy

I was playing tennis with my friend Eddy yesterday, as I have done thousands of times before. We were at the Coral Gables Country Club (which is less tony than it sounds). It was a clear crisp sunny day, which is unusual for Miami (humid, hot). We were virtually alone at noon on a clay court. Eddy is a sixty-eight-year-old retired Swiss banker—slim, fit, fast, skilled, hard-hitting, six-foot tall. The man can play tennis (no weakness on the backhand). That morning I had been reading Brian Boyd’s gripping biography of Nabokov, which had reached the point at which Lolita was written (700 pages in). As it happens, I had suggested to Eddy that he read that novel. He opened his tennis bag and pulled out a brand-new copy of the book. He had brought it in order that I could indicate to him what part of the preliminaries he should read (he had the annotated version), since I had told him not to skip the Foreword by John Ray, Jr., PhD. So, there we were on the tennis court book in hand, with Nabokov’s words spilling out (“white widowed male”, “light of my life”)—he being himself a tennis player and chronicler of Lolita’s tennis game. I told Eddy that in a few days he would be reading the greatest description of the game of tennis ever written. I wonder what he will make of the book whose magic never seems to dim. I wonder what discussions we will have of it on court as he reads it. Will it affect our tennis? Eddy, me, Nabokov, Lolita—all together on the tennis court—a sublime confluence, in my book. We went on to play for nearly two hours in that bright clear air. If only Vladimir could have witnessed it.