The Love Life Of An Idealist - Looking For Mr. Right While Doing Good, A Thankless Task

Vicki Bates was well on into middle age but had lost neither her political idealism nor desire to find Mr. Right. Both were somehow conflated - her desire for a more perfect world and a perfect mate were born of the same optimism. The world could indeed become a more verdant, peaceful, and congenial place if only we put our backs into it; and a man who treated her as an equal, loved her for her intelligence, her spirit, and her character simply had to be out there somewhere 

Now, Vicki was no raving beauty nor ever had been.  She tried her best for a svelte figure but always fell off the wagon for cheesecake and chocolate truffles.  She did what she could to tame her wild hair - some stray, unwanted gene had been passed on through the Alvarez side of the family, too much Dominican and not enough German-Irish - and spent a fortune on makeup and facelifts; but to no avail.  She felt as doughy in the wrong places as ever. 

Men are willing to see the real woman but only if access to her is through beauty - a hard lesson for any plain and ordinary woman, but particularly difficult for a progressive idealist like Vicki.  The world would never become a better place if these bullying, misogynist notions persisted. 

There was chatter in the office about how to find a man - surprising since it was an era of identity, feminism, and female authority and a professional cadre of university-educated women - but persistent nevertheless.  The West Wing of the National Gallery was a particularly good place to meet the right kind of man as was the Renwick Gallery - both had a particular knowledgeable cachet and a quiet appeal. 

 

Her alumnae club was of no use - Wellesley was still an all-women's college - and her political clubs and associations were disappointing.  As much as she hated to admit it, progressivism simply did not attract the best, brightest, and beautiful.   Every day from her lunch hour sojourn in Lafayette Park, she watched with secret envy the cavalcade of young, blonde blue-eyed women and tall, chisel-jawed, confident men come and go from the White House. 

While she appreciated her male colleagues' political sympathies, to a man they were inept at love - or even the fundamentals of courtship.  They bumbled and bungled, got lost in the weeds of climate change and civil rights when all she wanted was a kind word or more importantly some seductive interest. 

Time was marching on, she was not getting any younger, and her pull-by date was fast approaching.  Women have a narrow window for sexual allure and she was bumping up against it.  Before long she would be a silhouette, unremarked, unnoticed, and left sitting on the curb.  'I must act', she said. 

Political activism was an anodyne for her anxiousness - an acceptable Zoloft taken regularly to distract her from her growing frustration.  She was present at every No Kings protest in the Washington area, joining her colleagues from Richmond to Delaware in the happy jubilee celebrations of unity and purpose. She marched in picket lines in front of the White House protesting America's military adventurism, and stood among a thousand women on the National Mall demanding abortion rights. 

Yet each one of these ventures were unsatisfying.  For all the camaraderie, solidarity, and righteousness, they produced nothing, meant nothing except to those in the ranks, and were at best empty affairs. They were fillers, temporary emotional expressions which were far from her core.  As much as she hated to say it, she wanted to be loved - or more crudely, she wanted to be fucked. 

Of course men being what they are, bulldogs and rubes when it comes to courtship, she could have rolled over for any one of them to satisfy the itch at least. 

Each progressive issue had its own following, and the men all seemed to be of the same ilk. The women's rights men were uxorious, timid, and deferential but the thought of Bob Muzelle, a sagging, morose, whimpering 'Is it OK if I kiss you' charade of manhood made her want to retch.

The climate men were either dour, depressed, and angry; or were hysterical Chicken Littles.  The socialists were rabbinical, the ethnic rights advocates were short and perturbed, and the internationalists cartoonish Utopians.  

It seemed as though each corner of the progressive canon had its own identity, a kind of showy calling card of belonging.  There was no such fol-de-rol for the conservative men with Wall Street incomes and two homes.  Conservatives were mainline, old guard, and sexually literate - exactly what Vicki was looking for but couldn't manage to cross Pennsylvania Avenue. 

'What about a gigolo?', suggested a friend. Surprised that there were still such things and not really believing there were, she laughed.  What an idea! But then again she had seen The Roman Spring Of Mrs. Stone and American Gigolo. Why not? Cole Porter wrote a song about it

I should like you all to know,
I'm a famous gigolo.
And of lavender, my nature's got just a dash in it.
As I'm slightly undersexed,
You will always find me next
To some dowager who's wealthy rather than passionate.
Go to one of those night club places
And you'll find me stretching my braces
Pushing ladies with lifted faces 'round the floor.
But I must confess to you
There are moments when I'm blue.
And I ask myself whatever I do it for.

Vicki was nonplussed.  What was she thinking? What self-respecting woman ever resorted to that? How tacky, how distasteful, how...well, simply not done. 

Mrs. Elizabeth Longworth, owner of the private club 'with men's and women's best interests in mind', had predominantly male clients drawn from the movers and shakers of Washington.  She was known for her discretion, her tact, her absolute secrecy, and her beautiful women.  A night with one of Elizabeth's girls was worth the price, an unforgettable evening of courtship, a five-star dinner cooked by La Lion d'Or's chef Pierre de Valmont, and the penthouse suite at the Mayflower. 

Mrs. Longworth also serviced women - matrons from Georgetown's finest salons, ladies from Miami Beach, and dowagers from Park Avenue and Beacon Hill.  The scenario was of course different, more formal, more properly conservative, more romantic and indelibly sweet; but it provided the same product with sophisticated. 

It all seemed so Republican, Vicki thought.  Imagine me! She of all people, known for her support of women, longtime feminist, indomitable soldier for the independence, freedom, and sexual liberty of her sisters, in paid sexual company.  It was not only unthinkable for her as a well-brought up woman, one still in her prime, but as a devoted progressive. 

Yet there was shabby, clueless Bob Muzelle, a toadying sexual simpleton reminding her of the penury of daring-do in the progressive ranks.  No Chris Hemsworths among them, no trysts and idylls, just ponderous, pouchy, doughy men who wanted to do good. 

'Where have I been?' she asked herself, 'when the answer was as plain as the nose on my face'; and in one fell swoop she crossed the aisle, casting her lot in with the Great Gatsby crowd with nary a second thought.  It couldn't happen overnight of course, elision from progressive partisan to conservative, but flying one's true colors made all the difference in the world - not American flags and MAGA hats, but a makeover with Monsieur de Gramont, a Palm Beach forward look, and a bubbliness that charmed and won over her newfound suitors. 

'I'm a new woman', Vicki said happily to a friend; and indeed she did seem happy, satisfied, and fulfilled.  Perhaps not yet loved for herself by a lover who roamed her inner rooms but very close to it. 

The non-profit lot, the ones east of Florida Avenue, the homely, raggedy Ann women who plugged away at global warming or migrant farm workers were gone from view, left far back in the rearview mirror.  She had saved herself, opened new doors and simply loved the occasion of sin. 

Wars Are For Winning - Iran And The New Calculus Of American Will

With the current war in Iran, Donald Trump has left moral exceptionalism behind.  Wars are for winning, and in the spirit of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman who did not hesitate to use overwhelming military force to defeat the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese, the American President has not hesitated to eliminate the leaders of the Iranian theocracy, to destroy Iran's offensive and defense military capacity, and to reduce its energy, power, and transportation infrastructure to rubble. 

America is now in a struggle with an enemy which shares the brutality of Genghis Khan and operates under a moral system which is antithetical to ours.  The creation of an Islamic caliphate, one in which strict Koranic and Sharia Law are established, practiced, and enforced, is the only goal.  

Like the West’s medieval Crusades, the march of Islamic militancy is in the honor of God, the establishment of His kingdom.  Of course secular and venal interests will always be important and the fights of Iran, al-Qaeda, ISIS, al-Shabab, and others have territorial and economic interests driving them as well; but the struggle is fought for higher ends.

For these terrorist regimes, the death of civilians, therefore, has no relevance since the ends of battle are religious and spiritual.  The ends justify the means far more than any secular struggle. What Americans consider heinous crimes – blowing up school buses, crowded markets, and residential neighborhoods – have no moral implication per se.  They are only necessary measures to assure the final and ultimate moral end.

In this war with Iran, the United States' ally is Israel, the  only country that has understood the dangerous, aggressive militancy of Islam, and they fight with the same moral rectitude and purpose as their radical Islamic opponents.  They will brook absolutely no threat to the Jewish homeland, and civilian Palestinian and Iranian deaths are the price the enemy must pay for its aggression and permanent hostility.  The Israelis know that they are fighting an enemy who uses a territorial imperative – a Palestinian state and the creation of an Islamic caliphate – only as pretext for the annihilation of Israel, the ridding of Arab lands of the infidel, and in preparation for universal Islamic rule.

Israel's stand with the United States in its war against Iran is an extension of this existential faith.  Iran, sponsor of Middle East terrorism, intent on building a nuclear bomb and the missiles to deliver it, and an implacable hatred of Israel and the West, must be destroyed before it is too late.  In a matter of months, not years, the regime could build enough missiles and drones to deter any counter attack and to indiscriminately attack, threaten, and cause instability in the Gulf states.  The time for determined military action in a war to annihilate the theocratic regime and completely neutralize its military capacity is now. 

Radical Islam is expansionist by expressed design and Koranic sanction,  Israel is only self-protective but defiantly so. Radical Islam is not simply another culture to be respected and understood for its principles, traditions and history.  It is the enemy to be defeated if not annihilated.

Within a historical context, war has been a permanent feature of human society since the Paleolithic.  An expression of a violent, territorial, aggressive, self-interested human nature, it will always exist and the only way to stop the natural aggressive intents of individuals, countries, regions, and religions is to do so with force.

Wars have never been fought with moral restraint - force must be met with force and peace results either when an attacking force is defeated or their is a military standoff.  The Cold War was such a standoff, and the Pax Romana was one of complete Roman control. 

Tolstoy wrote of Napoleon's Franco-Russian war and the famous Battle of Borodino, but Russians were always at war. In the 18th century alone Russia fought Poland, the Turks, the Swedes, and the Persians at least once. 

The rest of Europe was no different.  England alone fought the Hundred Years’ War, the Eighty Years’ War, the War of the Roses; and constant wars against the Dutch, Spanish, French, Scottish, Irish, and Portuguese.  England was racked by twenty-five bloody civil wars between 1088 and 1746.  Minor skirmishes, internal conflicts, palace revolts and rebellions are not even counted.

Before the Battle of Agincourt described in Shakespeare’s Henry V, the king visits his troops in disguise to gauge the mood of the enlisted men.  They tell him that the king has brought them to France to fight a war based on his own dubious claims and that although it is their duty to die for him and for England, they are unhappy that they will perish for such a cause.

Since WWII wars have been fought fought as much as with soldiers’ safety in mind than in victory. The defeat of the enemy – Iraqi, Afghani, or Vietnamese -  has been conditional on limited American casualties.  Battlefield generals have always calculated personnel losses when defining military strategy.  If too many men were lost, then the battle would be lost.  

Marcus Aurelius fighting his last wars against the restive German tribes did indeed calculate risks to the cavalry and to his infantry, but was not making moral decisions, only practical ones.  American generals on the contrary very much consider the moral implications of G.I. deaths.

The wars of the early and mid-20th century and those before were also only marginally concerned with civilian populations, unlike today when ‘collateral damage’ is always to be avoided and risk to non-combatants carefully calculated.  American persistent but recent moral rectitude and sense of democratizing mission demands such calculations.

It was most definitely not so during World War II when we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo and dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki – all deliberate attempts to incinerate civilian populations.  The only relevant objective was the defeat of the Nazis and the Japanese.  Any other consideration was irrelevant.

In the Vietnam War, perhaps because American leaders were never really convinced of the rightness of their cause, a special emphasis was placed on ‘winning the hearts and minds’ of Vietnamese civilians.  This effort was designed to both show American beneficence and generosity and to gain local allies.  As history has shown, this idealistic notion never worked, nor ever had a chance of working.  

The Vietnamese showed themselves to be a brutal, implacable enemy which had only one thought in mind – defeating the Americans by killing them.  Ho Chi Minh of course understood the psychology of war and knew how to rattle American forces through the uncertainty and unpredictability of attacks, by quickly removing their dead, and by the placement of landmines; and he understood American history and current political opinion and knew that we would get tired of war.  Yet he was determined and unstoppable in his fight to kill and remove.

Times have changed.  America has finally accepted the ineluctable realities of human nature, war, and the endless conflicts over domain, territory, resources, and hegemonic control.  The calculus has not shifted to one applicable throughout history.  Wars will always occur and they are for winning - not ro compromise, not conciliation, not negotiation or commiseration

As an expression of this newfound, historical imperative, Donald Trump has joined the new geopolitical triumvirate - Russia, China, and America, all countries with the implacable will of dominance, control, and socio-cultural influence.  The triad are not partners but adversaries, but in their competitive will are unlikely to fight each other.  America's war in Iran is as much about showing China and Russia that the old American contingencies are gone.  

America is back. 

Tennessee Williams, Baby Doll And Pure Sexuality - The Indefinable Sexual Allure Of The Select Few

De Joan Merchant was born and raised in a dry spit of land in the middle of Eddy Lafourche a cypress tangle of alligators, swamp rats, and cottonmouths where her father dredged, fished, trapped and netted every live thing that lived in that backwater.  Every morning after cornpone, fatback, and coffee he set out into the swamp to check his trap line.  If he was lucky he might come upon a panther, raccoon, or opossum, but usually came back with a haul of catfish and a water snake or two. 

Alvin Merchant often wondered why he stayed put, waterlogged and penurious in this forgotten place, but his family had always lived in or near the swamp, denizens of it no different than crocodiles, alligators, and black bears. It might have been different if his children had been restive, anxious for New Orleans or Charleston; but they seemed to take to the watery life. De Joan was a good helper, a real trooper, and Alvin relied on her for her sharp eyes, willingness to work, and good spirit. 

The Merchant place was not the only cabin in the woods and were not alone in the swamp. Other families clustered on the land, built a church and a school, ferried goods to and from the swamp, and lived a happy though meager existence.  The residents were not bothered by taxes, limits, or revenuers and in a way lived in a forgotten idyll. 

Yet the charm, the simple allure of a quiet, natural life began to fade once De Joan reached early adolescence.  Most girls mature slowly, evenly, progressively into womanhood, but it all came at once to the Merchant girl who found herself in full womanhood before she was out of he fifth grade. As remarkably she was fully aware of her sexuality, that particular female potency that comes to very few at such a young age. 

She toyed with the boys of her age, a sexually diffident lot, attracted older ones who sniffed out a female in heat as sharply s a black bear, and had sex with Harper Ward, wholesaler and landowner from Lanier who visited Eddy Lafourche in the Spring and Fall. 'Come visit me', said Harper, and one day De Joan took the outboard through the swamp to the bayou and to the small own of Lanier. 

Tennessee Williams wrote about Baby Doll Meighan in his screenplay for Baby Doll and she could have been De Joan Merchant.  'A voluptuous girl under twenty, on a bed, the covers thrown off' is Williams' opening liner notes. She is simple and uneducated, but with a languor and irresistible feline sexuality no man can refuse. 

 

Williams was fascinated with sex and sexuality, perhaps best expressed in A Streetcar Named Desire. Stanley is a sex object, the male version of Baby Doll - a simple, man with a primitive virility - a sexual allure which overcomes notions of class, intelligence, or sophistication.  He for Williams is male sexuality, undiluted, unrestrained, and unaffected by opprobrium or dissent. 'We've had this date with each other since the beginning', he tells Blanche.  Stanley's pure machismo and Blanche's matching sexual desire make sex inevitable.  There is an ineluctable potency to the attraction, a pre-human, animal need; something beyond debate or consideration. 

Baby Doll is the feminine version of Stanley - sexually desirous, infinitely desirable, and irresistible to all men.  She represents the purest, unadulterated female sexuality.  There is only the sexual urge, the desire to be taken, the irrepressible need for sexual satisfaction.  

Like Baby Doll, De Joan Merchant had no idea what drove her to Lanier and into the bed of Harper Ward except for his intent. Some men are like that, wrote Williams, incapable of restraint, invulnerable, and driven only by desire for women.  Blanche calls Stanley a brute, barely evolved from the apes, an evolutionary throwback, a primitive; and she is right. He is more animal than human, a proto-male, an unstoppable sexual desire. 

So it was not surprising that De Joan motored her launch out of the swamp to Ward's bed.  She could smell him five miles off through the twists and turns in the swamp, past the nests of water moccasins, the burrows of voles, and fox lairs, through the cypress roots, the narrows where moss and wild lilie.  s clogged her way, out to open water and the bayou to tie up at the Ward dock. 

Vaccaro, Baby Doll's lover wants her as a woman but also as the instrument of vendetta.  Her husband has burned down Vaccaro's cotton mill, and taking his wife was the ultimate vengeance.  The play is one of deliberate, canny, practiced seduction highlighting another one of Williams' frequent themes - sex has its consequences, usually ignored because of the nature of sexual desire.  Yet Baby Doll is powerless, so aroused by male pursuit is she. 

 

'Saint or sinner' has been the male take on femininity since the beginning, and the most adept women have blended the two into an irresistible, indistinguishable mix; but the Baby Dolls and De Joan Merchants of the world - and their Stanley Kowalski male counterparts - are far less devious and complex.  They are throwbacks, sexual creations alone, primitive in nature only but expressively mature in their understanding of their desire and its effect on others. 

Woody Allen, an admirer of Tennessee Williams created a Baby Doll-De Joan character in his movie Match Point.  In a cafe scene, the future lover of the Scarlett Johannsen character says 'You realize the effect you have on men, don't you'.  She replies, 'No one has asked for their money back'.  

She is irresistible in a Baby Doll way - soft, pliable, welcoming, infinitely desirable - and her lover cannot stay away. 

Most women are circumspect in their desire.  They are looking for a proper mate; and most men may dally with insignificant women, they have their eyes on the prize.  The very few do not deny that part of their nature which makes them indelibly male or female, accept that it is what defines them, determines them, and completes their design. 

Vladimir Nabokov in his novel Lolita creates what he calls a nymphet, a young girl with a preternatural sexuality- a sexuality that describes and motivates her more than anything else; and in parallel creates an older man who cannot resist her - a man with the same indefinable male desire as that of Stanley, a desire which becomes an obsession. 

D.H. Lawrence in Lady Chatterley's Lover creates the same scenario but with a more oblique obsession. The two lovers want 'sexual mutuality', that coming together which Lawrence considers epiphanic.  Sex is not only on everyone's mind, it is the be-all and end-all of human experience. 

Baby Dolls rarely end up well.  Baby Doll Meighan is used by Vaccaro, De Joan Merchant was passed from lover to lover and ended up back in Eddy Lafourche catching swamp rats, catfish, and beavers; but this does not deny the principle - they were Darwinian prizes. 

Islam, The Religion Of Peace - Except For The Nasty Bits About The Jews

Fatma Yilmaz was a polite, God-fearing, devout and considerate Muslim who fasted, prayed,  and read the Quran.  She visited the elderly, sick and shut-ins during Ramadan, observed all the Muslim holidays in a generous spirit of family and community, and hoped that Allah would smile upon her faith and good works. 

She was critical of selective readings of the Quran, those  Suras that urge death to the infidel, speak of the hateful, insidious and genocidal nature of the Jews, demand an unquestioning faith in the will of Allah, and foresee an ultimate world Islamic caliphate realized through the force of arms. 

'Nothing of the sort', she insisted.  These verses have only to do with Islamic solidarity, unified faith in Allah and the hope for a spiritual Utopia and the rest of the Quran reflects the central ethos of Islam, that it is a religion of peace.

'Islam is a gutter religion' said social critic Christopher Harkins in a speech to the Athanasius Society, 'a theocratic bulldozing Genghis Khan juggernaut masquerading as faith.  A nonsensical, hysterical, absurd quackery with the gall to claim divine inspiration.  The sooner the world is relieved of this insensate crock, the better'. 

Easier said than done, of course, since Islam continues to attract adherents - 'marginalized cultural derelicts in the sinkholes of the Third World' who, desperate for some mantle of respectability and social promise, have taken to 'the world's religious freak show'. 

When Israel countered the Hamas terrorist attacks on Jerusalem, Fatma demurred, insisting on the divine right of Islamic destiny, the necessary elimination of the Jews, and the expansion of Islamic rule throughout the Middle East and the world

 . 

The expansionist, hegemonistic, aggressive move to spread Islam by any means possible and to create a world sanctioned by Allah with no dissenters was inspired, ineluctable, and certain. 

Most of the Islamic world is illiterate, uneducated, and dying of preventable disease.  It is a failed culture, said Harkins, a humiliating example of ignorant, bullheaded, reflexive faith. 

Fatma was vehement in her objection.  Islam was a civilizing force, spreading the world of Allah and the divine principles of the faith worldwide.  ISIS, al-Shabab, Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis were not terrorists but divine emissaries, crusaders as anointed and holy as any of Pope Clement's crusader armies. 

Why were Muslims always getting the short end of the stick?  Why after medieval brilliance, algebra, zero, and astronomy, had Muslims fallen so far off the rails. Why in the Middle East were Syrian, Iraqi, and Lebanese Muslims still stuck in mud while Israelis enjoyed a European standard of living? Why was backwardness endemic in Muslim communities? And why this persistent, viral, bilious hatred of Jews?

'Many of my friends are Jews' said Mehmet Erdogan, Turkish weaver and manager of Istanbul Fabrics, proprietor of a wholesale garment warehouse in Bethesda.  Mehmet Bey had made his fortune in America, but he was exaggerating his inclusive, multicultural claim. All the Jews he had known were money-grubbing weasels, sniveling little hawk-nosed miscreants out only to make a buck.

'Enough of this bullshit' said Fatma's brother Ahmed, a tailor at Mehmet Bey's establishment, who was bound and determined to test the inter-cultural waters.  'Jewish women are women', he said to Mehmet Bey and made overtures to Esther Pilchman, assistant cutter at a rival factory, in a calculating measure of inter-ethnic harmony.  

The whole idea of a Jewish lover - kinky hair, smelling of smoked fish, sallow skin and a watchmaker’s hunchback - was repulsive, but he had to know.  Thee must be some commonality.  After all Islam and Judaism were both Abrahamic religions, neither community ate pork, and both were halal and prayed to one God.

 

'Don't ask', he replied to his brothers who said, 'Disgusting Jew', but he had been tempted by those full Syrian lips, the swarthiness of Palestine, and the eagerness of a New York Jewish princess.  He never let on how taken he was by The Jezebel of Orchard Street.

On Friday at the mosque he prayed with his Muslim brothers but noticed for perhaps the first time, the absence of women. Of course the Quran pronounced them unclean harlots, trollops, and common whores and his sexual life would be one of cold penury - wife Mariam lying under the sheets to preserve her dignity while he labored over her.

Better a Jew than one of these bagged, passionless Muslim hags.

And then he met Marlise Finch, as white, Christian, and wholesome as could be, a woman who could strip him of his faith and Muslim identity and leave him standing there naked, alone and desperate for more. 

She had always wanted to sleep with a Muslim.  They couldn't all be 9/11 bombers, ISIS terrorists, and incarcerating Saudi camel-jockeys, and so it was that she and Mehmet Bey began their brief, exhausting experimental affair in her Soho loft walkup. 

She, according to the Quran was an infidel, a non-believer, a dismal variant of the divine canon.  She was a free spirit - just what he wanted.; but just as he was getting used to the sight of a naked woman welcoming his advances,  a wave of guilty apostasy choked him, stunted his curiosity and desire.  He was a Muslim eunuch. 

'Allah has condemned me', he said, 'consigned me to a Muslim purgatory.  Here I am a good Muslim desirous of ridding the world of apostasy but only a failed, shameful Christian idolater. 

After Friday prayers Mehmet sought out the imam of the mosque and confessed his fall from grace. 'I have sinned, Blessed One, I have consorted with a Jew and a Christian harlot'.  

Now, confession is not within the Muslim catechism, so the imam was taken by surprise at the young man's candor. 

Frustrated in love and hating the Jew even more because of it, he joined a radical Muslim political group hewing to the Islamic party line and became a crusader, a man in the avant garde of the movement to establish a Muslim caliphate and to rid the world of infidels. 

'Whoever said Islam was a religion of peace?', he asked. 'We are militants, crusaders, Turkic soldiers in the neo-armies of Genghis Khan. Heads on stakes is our meme'. 

Liberals in America shout 'Islamophobia' when conservatives call out the rising, violent militancy of Islam; but soon progressive heads will roll. Inclusivity is the Devil's playground, and Islamic zealots cannot wait to take scalps from the credulous American dupes.

Tales Of First Love, Innocence, And Obsession - Nabokov, Lolita, And Everyone Else

Coleman Silk, the main character in Phillip Roth's novel, The Human Stain, is having an affair with a much younger woman - an uneducated, barely literate woman with a psychopathic, stalking ex-husband. Coleman's friend warns him and says the relationship can only end badly. At best he will end up disappointed, at worst dead at the hands of the husband. 

Coleman pauses, looks at his friend and says, 'Granted, she's not my first love, and granted she's not my best love; but she certainly is my last love.  Doesn't that count for something?'

All three loves recalled are unforgettable. Everyone remembers their first love, an adolescent, unformed, but irresistible passion. No one can forget their best love - we replay the tape over and over again in our minds; and those who discover love much later in life and find in a December-May affair a satisfaction they never knew they had lost, lead a charmed life.  

Of all three it is the first, young love which is most indelible, the one by which all other loves are measured, an ultimate love ironically experienced at the very beginning. 

Vladimir Nabokov describes this profound yet limiting love in Lolita. There can be no love more pure and absolute than that within the embrace of innocence, he says, a love before either child even knows what it means or is supposed to mean and therefore of a virginal purity, 'a divine sublimity'.  Yet that love necessarily confines one within endless comparisons. 

Here speaking of Annabel, Humbert says:

All at once we were madly, clumsily, shamelessly, agonizingly in love with each other; hopelessly, I should add, because that frenzy of mutual possession might have been assuaged only by our actually imbibing and assimilating every particle of each other’s soul and flesh; but there we were unable even to mate as slum children would have so easily found an opportunity to do.

 After one wild attempt we made to meet at night in her garden (of which more later), the only privacy we were allowed was to be out of earshot but not out of sight on the populous part of the plage.

There, on the soft sand, a few feet away from our elders, we would sprawl all morning, in a petrified paroxysm of desire, and take advantage of every blessed quirk in space and time to touch each other: her hand, half-hidden in the sand, would creep toward me, its slender brown fingers sleepwalking nearer and nearer; then, her opalescent knee would start on a long cautious journey; sometimes a chance rampart built by younger children granted us sufficient concealment to graze each other’s salty lips; these incomplete contacts drove our healthy and inexperienced young bodies to such a state of exasperation that not even the cold blue water, under which we still clawed at each other, could bring relief

Humbert instinctively knew then that his childhood friendship with her was special, irreplaceable, and unforgettable.  How could he not then compare her with every other woman he met? He had known Annabel in an impossibly unique time and place.

When he meets Lolita, time collapses - she is Annabel and first love can be rediscovered and relived:

It was the same child - the same frail, honey-hued shoulders, the same silky supple bare back, the same chestnut head of hair. A polka-dotted black kerchief tied around her chest hid from my aging ape eyes, but not from the gaze of young memory, the juvenile breasts I had fondled one immortal day.

And, as if I were the fairy-tale nurse of some little princess (lost, kidnapped, discovered in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiled at the king and his hounds), I recognized the tiny dark-brown mole on her side.

With awe and delight (the king crying for joy, the trumpets blaring, the nurse drunk) I saw again her lovely indrawn abdomen where my southbound mouth had briefly paused; and those puerile hips on which I had kissed the crenulated imprint left by the band of her shorts -that last mad immortal day behind the 'Roches roses.' The twenty-five years I had lived since then, tapered to a palpitating point, and vanished.

Time is what Humbert sought to abolish. Time is the enemy of all lovers. Obsession has a life of its own: the object, however irreplaceable and particular it seems, can change, though it is in the nature of obsession not to recognize that.

Humbert is fortunate and unfortunate. Fortunate because he discovered love and innocence - romantic perfection - and unfortunate because no experience could ever match up to the purity, the beauty, and the almost spiritual essence of that first love. 

An unpublished story on the nature of innocence, and the foundational value it has to love, restates the theme:

Nancy Bell pulled her dress up over her head and stood naked as the water droplets from the ferns dripped onto her face and arms.  “They are my jewels”, she said to Henry Halter, “and one day you can buy me real ones.”

It was cool and dark in the woods behind his house.  Once when he was little he got lost in the woods and thought he would never find his way out. There were bears and wolves, and he might wander for days without finding his way home. 

For years he never set foot in the woods until Nancy Bell had asked him.  He knew that the wild animals were not real, but he still hesitated at the mountain laurel bushes at the back of their yard, and never took the narrow path into the woods. That was how childhood worked, he later thought, full of crazy imaginary things that scared you, and one day you woke up and they weren’t there anymore, and the woods was just a dark, wet place where you would prefer not to go.

Nancy Bell sat next to him in school the next day, so close together in the auditorium that their legs touched.  She smelled fresh and clean, like talcum powder and lilac soap, and she was wearing the same dress that she had worn in the woods.  He noticed a bit of dried oak leaf on her dress that she had not seen and remembered how she had put her clothes neatly in a pile on a mossy patch under his father’s favorite tree.

In June before the mosquitoes started biting, they sat naked in the woods and told stories to each other.  Nancy made up the rules and said that no story could be about their parents or brothers and sisters. “Make them up”, she said. “Make everything up”, and so each afternoon before the mosquitoes hatched from the wet oak leaves and puddles where the rain sluiced down the tallest trees and collected beneath them, they invented places where there were no people but people-animals.

 “Your house has disappeared”, Nancy said, “and so has mine. All we can see is the trees and the squirrels. I have made everything outside the woods disappear.”

Henry compared every woman he met with Nancy Bell; and they never measured up.  They were too matter-of-fact or too determined; too focused or too deliberate and precise.  None had Nancy’s ability to change things to suit her or to make things go away. Henry was never fully aware that she was doing this to him, making his choices for him; and when he once considered it, he laughed. They were only children, after all, and one summer with Nancy Bell was nothing. So what was it, then?

Nabokov believed that the past was far more than a part of a time-space continuum, but the most important one.  The present is a chimera, he said, imagined milliseconds of ‘reality’, bounded by the possibility of the future and the long, defining, significance of what went before.  

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness. Although the two are identical twins, man, as a rule, views the prenatal abyss with more calm than the one he is heading for

We are not just determined by the past.  We are the past. First loves are never lost.

Is the obsession worth the frustration? The endless comparisons, the repeated failures to measure up? A moot question.   A love for Annabel or Nancy Bell is ineradicable, as present now as it was then, as determinant and inescapable as ever. 

Humbert did not exchange Annabel for Lolita - they were one and the same.  Henry Halter might never find another Nancy Bell, but if he did, the two would be as indistinguishable.  First loves are permanent.