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in Sasha's story is saved only for positive events, like the sunny days of her and Frank's blooming relationship. Sasha tells Frank, "'Buttercups will always come out loves me'" (176) in the tell-all game of stripping petals from flowers. "You can only get the truth from daisies" (176), she reasons. Daisies, in fact, are a symbol of innocence and purity (Tokenz).

Sasha's journey to Italy is also a quest for personal renaissance. There, after days of solitude, reading and swearing off sex, she meets Leonardo. Intoxicated with the perfume of Italy's romance, she becomes his travel partner and love mate. She sits "enchanted by the Sicilian seaside, [she], who had never before seen free-growing cactus, steeped [herself] in the surprise of cactus fruit sparkling like garnets in the sunlight and the magenta profusion of bougainvillaea," while Leonardo photographs "his own native hibiscus" (129). The hibiscus, meaning consumed by love (Tokenz), presages the endurance connotation of the cactus (Tokenz), a necessary attribute for the accusatory lunch just a short while later when Leonardo blames his gonorrhea on her. Despite his initial anger and resentment, their time spent enduring the cure makes them grow closer than before. "There was nothing aphrodisiacal in the antibiotic; it was just that, sinners together, [they] suddenly had more and worse in common than with anyone else" (133).

Again, Sasha flashes back, this time to her college experience when she "fell hopelessly in love with philosophy" (137). The description of her academic infatuation is akin to her physical trysts: "Like any lover I can recall intimations of the affair long before it began in earnest" (138), she says. "Whatever challenge [she] came up with, philosophy always had an answer" (139); the same picturesque omnipotence she seeks when beauty, marriage, and all the other ultimate characteristics of womanhood fail her. Returning home for Christmas, she evades the jovial tunes of Jingle Bells in favor of the quiet garden of the Cleveland Museum of Art and the baroque sounds of Bach on the organ. Baroque means "irregular pearl," an appropriate description of Sasha herself.

Soon after, in the midst of Beethoven's Eroica Symphony, she becomes acquainted with Professor Donald Alport. Eroica, or Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, is often cited as the conclusion of the Classical Era and the commencement of musical Romanticism (Wikipedia), a style evoking frantic emotions and illustrative of Sasha's affair

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