Humbert's relationship with Rita

Humbert Humbert's relationship with Rita, which lasted from the summer of 1950 to the summer of 1952, was the most sustained and humanly stabilizing connection he formed after losing Lolita. Rita was twice Lolita's age and three-quarters of Humbert's: a very slight, dark-haired, pale-skinned adult weighing a hundred and five pounds, with charmingly asymmetrical eyes and an angular, rapidly sketched profile. Humbert picked her up one depraved May evening somewhere between Montreal and New York, at a darkly burning bar under the sign of the Tigermoth, where she was amiably drunk. She insisted they had gone to school together and placed her trembling little hand on his ape paw. Though his senses were only very slightly stirred, he decided to give her a try, and then adopted her as a constant companion.

Rita's Character and Background

Rita was, by Humbert's account, the sweetest, simplest, gentlest, and dumbest woman imaginable. In comparison to her, he judged, Valeria was a Schlegel and Charlotte a Hegel. She was so kind and such a good sport that Humbert believed she would have given herself to any pathetic creature or fallacy—an old broken tree or a bereaved porcupine—out of sheer chumminess and compassion. Her personal history was chaotic: she had recently divorced her third husband and had been abandoned by her seventh cavalier servant, with the others, the mutables, being too numerous and mobile to tabulate. Her brother, a prominent, pasty-faced politician and mayor of their home town, paid her several hundred dollars per month under the stringent condition that she never enter that town. Rita told Humbert, with wails of wonder, that every new boyfriend of hers would first of all take her toward Grainball City; it was a fatal attraction, and before she knew what was what, she would find herself following the flood-lit drive that encircled it, going round and round like a mulberry moth.

Life Together and the Search for Lolita

Rita had a natty little coup, and in it they traveled to California, giving Humbert's venerable vehicle a rest. Her natural speed was ninety. Humbert told her he was trying to trace a girl and plug that girl's bully, and Rita solemnly approved of the plan. In the course of some investigation she undertook on her own, around San Humbertino, she got entangled with a pretty awful crook; Humbert had the devil of a time retrieving her—used and bruised but still cocky. On another occasion, she proposed playing Russian roulette with his sacred automatic; Humbert said she could not, it was not a revolver, and they struggled for it until at last it went off, touching off a very thin and very comical spurt of hot water from the hole it made in the wall of their cabin room. He remembered her shrieks of laughter. The oddly prepubescent curve of her back, her ricey skin, and her slow languorous columbine kisses kept Humbert from mischief, though he noted that sex is but the ancilla of art.

The Cantrip College Interlude and Rita's Disappearance

In result of a venture into publishing an essay on "Mimir and Memory" in the Cantrip Review, Humbert was called from New York to Cantrip College for one year, from September 1951 to June 1952. He lodged there in special apartments for poets and philosophers, while Rita, whom he preferred not to display, vegetated somewhat indecorously in a roadside inn where he visited her twice a week. Then she vanished—more humanly than her predecessor had done. A month later, Humbert found her in the local jail. She was très digne, had had her appendix removed, and managed to convince him that the beautiful bluish furs she had been accused of stealing from a Mrs. Roland MacCrum had really been a spontaneous, if somewhat alcoholic, gift from Roland himself. Humbert succeeded in getting her out without appealing to her touchy brother, and soon afterwards they drove back to Central Park West, by way of Briceland.

The End of the Relationship

Humbert's relationship with Rita ended abruptly when he received the letter from Lolita, now Dolly Schiller, in September 1952. He read the letter while Rita was still asleep, smiled in her sleep, and kissed her on her moist brow. He left her forever, with a note of tender adieu which he taped to her navel—otherwise she might not have found it. He then set out alone, with his automatic pistol, to find and kill Clare Quilty. Rita, by her own account, had saved Humbert from the madhouse during the two dim years they cruised together, and she remained the most soothing and comprehending companion he ever had.