The original of Laura

CHAPTER THREE

Flora was barely fourteen when she lost her virginity to a coeval, a handsome ballboy at the Carlton Courts in Cannes. Three or four broken porch steps — which was all that remained of an ornate public toilet or some ancient templet — smothered in mints and campanulas and surrounded by junipers, formed the site of a duty she had resolved to perform rather than a casual pleasure she was now learning to taste. She observed with quiet interest the difficulty Jules had of drawing a junior-size sheath over an organ that looked abnormally stout and at full erection had a head turned somewhat askew as if wary of receiving a backhand slap at the decisive moment. Flora let Jules do everything he desired except kiss her on the mouth, and the only words said referred to the next assignation. One evening after a hard day picking up and tossing balls and pattering in a crouch across court between the rallies of a long tournament the poor boy, stinking more than usual, pleaded utter exhaustion and suggested going to a movie instead of making love; whereupon she walked away through the high heather and never saw Jules again — except when taking her tennis lessons with the stodgy old Basque in uncreased white trousers who had coached players in Odessa before World War One and still retained his effortless exquisite style. Back in Paris Flora found new lovers. With a gifted youngster from the Lanskaya school and another eager, more or less interchangeable couple she would bicycle through the Blue Fountain Forest to a romantic refuge where a sparkle of broken glass or a lace-edged rag on the moss were the only signs of an earlier period of literature. A cloudless September maddened the crickets. The girls would compare the dimensions of their companions. Exchanges would be enjoyed with giggles and cries of surprise. Games of blindman's buff would be played in the buff. Sometimes a voyeur would be shaken out of a tree by the vigilant police.

This is Flora of the close-set dark-blue eyes and cruel mouth recollecting in her midtwenties fragments of her past, with details lost or put back in the wrong order, TAIL between DELTA and SLIT, on dusty dim shelves, this is she. Everything about her is bound to remain blurry, even her name which seems to have been made expressly to have another one modeled upon it by a fantastically lucky artist. Of art, of love, of the difference between dreaming and waking she knew nothing but would have darted at you like a flatheaded blue serpent if you questioned her knowledge of dreaming.

She returned with her mother and Mr. Espenshade to Sutton, Mass., where she was born and now went to college […] At eleven she had read A quoi r?vent les enfants, by a certain Dr. Freud, a madman. The extraits came in a St. Léger d'Eric Perse series of Les grands repr?sentants de notre?poque though why great representatives wrote so badly remained a mystery.

A sweet Japanese girl, who took Russian and French because her stepfather was half French and half Russian, taught Flora to paint her left hand up to the radial artery (one of the tenderest areas of her beauty) with miniscule information, in so called "fairy" script, regarding names, dates and ideas. Both cheats had more French than Russian; but in the latter the possible questions formed, as it were, a banal bouquet of probabilities:

[DN: references are to Lomonsov and Derzhavin, Tatyana and Eugene Onegin, and Tolstoy's Ivan Ilyich; [] = intentional blank space throughout]

What kind of folklore preceded poetry in Rus?; speak a little of Lom, and Derzh.; paraphrase T's letter to E.O.; what does I. I.'s doctor deplore about the temperature of his own hands when preparing to [] his patient? — such was the information demanded by the professor of Russian Literature (a forlorn looking man bored to extinction by his subject). As to the lady who taught French Literature, all she needed were the names of modern French writers and their listing on Flora's palm caused a much denser tickle. Especially memorable was the little cluster of interlocked names on the ball of Flora's thumb: Malraux, Mauriac, Maurois, Michoux, Michima, Montherland and Morand. What amazes one is not the alliteration (a joke on the part of a mannered alphabet); not the inclusion of a foreign performer (a joke on the part of that fun loving little Japanese girl who would twist her limbs into a pretzel when entertaining Flora's lesbian friends); and not even the fact that virtually all those writers were stunning mediocrities as writers go (the first in the list being the worst); what amazes one is that they were supposed to "represent an era" and that such repr?sentants could get away with the most execrable writing, provided they represent their times.