The original of Laura

CHAPTER FIVE

A brilliant neurologist, a renowned lecturer and a gentleman of independent means, Dr. Philip Wild had everything save an attractive exterior. However, one soon got over the shock of seeing that enormously fat creature mince toward the lectern on ridiculously small feet and of hearing the cock-a-doodle sound with which he cleared his throat before starting to enchant one with his wit. Laura disregarded the wit but was mesmerized by his fame and fortune.

Fans were back that summer — the summer she made up her mind that the eminent Philip Wild, PH, would marry her. She had just opened a boutique d'eventails with another Sutton coed and the Polish artist Rawitch, pronounced by some Raw Itch, by him Rah Witch. Black fans and violet ones, fans like orange sunbursts, painted fans with dubtailed Chinese butterflies oh they were a great hit, and one day Wild came and bought five (five spreading out her own fingers like pleats) for "two aunts and three nieces" who did not really exist, but never mind, it was an unusual extravagance on his part. His shyness surprised and amused Flaura. Less amusing surprises awaited her. Today after three years of marriage she had had enough of his fortune and fame. He was a domestic miser. His New jersey house was absurdly understaffed. The ranchito in Arizona had not been redecorated for years. The villa on the Riviera had no swimming pool and only one bathroom. When she started to change all that, he would emit a kind of mild creak or squeak, and his brown eyes brimmed with sudden tears.

She saw their travels in terms of adverts and a long talcum-white beach with the tropical breeze tossing the palms and her hair; he saw it in terms of forbidden foods, frittered-away time, and ghastly expenses.

The novel My Laura was begun very soon after the end of the love affair it depicts, was completed in one year, published three months later, and promptly torn apart by a book reviewer in a leading newspaper. It grimly survived and to the accompaniment of muffled grunts on the part of the librarious fates, its invisible hoisters, it wriggled up to the top of the bestsellers' list then started to slip, but stopped at a midway step in the vertical ice. A dozen Sundays passed and one had the impression that Laura had somehow got stuck on the seventh step (the last respectable one) or that, perhaps, some anonymous agent working for the author was buying up every week just enough copies to keep Laura there; but a day came when the climber above lost his foothold and toppled down, dislodging numbers seven and eight and nine in a general collapse beyond any hope of recovery.

The "I" of the book is a neurotic and hesitant man of letters who destroys his mistress in the act of portraying her. Statically — if one can put it that way — the portrait is a faithful one. Such fixed details as her trick of opening her mouth when toweling her inguen or of closing her eyes when smelling an inodorous rose are absolutely true to the original, similarly the spare prose of the author with its pruning of rich adjectives.

Philip Wild read "Laura" where he is sympathetically depicted as a conventional "great scientist" and though not a single physical trait is mentioned, comes out with astounding classical clarity under the name of Philidor Sauvage.