I even loved the way Eugenides felt in my mouth, the way Lo-lee-ta felt in Humbert Humbert’s, but I wanted to think about him, I didn’t want us to be friends. I lived in the real world, and the real world was sad, and he lived in literature, and literature was beautiful. Meeting him, talking to him, seeing that he might leave his fly unzipped, that he might have spinach in his teeth, that he might enjoy the attention of nineteen-year-olds, I couldn’t bear the possibility.
