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finally slink through the crowd and into the heart of the matter. The party needs a volume control but there isn’t one, and everyone would be straining to hear each other except they are all talking simultaneously. Loki and Del Rey decide to brave the tumult at the bar, and at first Mirabelle hangs loosely by them, but eventually the chaos separates them and she finds herself in the vacant narrow rim that circles the room between the crowd and the paintings. Only this time she is less intent on the pictures and more intent on who and what is going on in the room. In a sea of black dresses, she is the only one wearing any color, and she is the only one wearing almost no makeup, including the men. Her eyes scan the room and spot several celebrities dressed in the latest nomad/wanderer fashion and several very handsome men who have learned to give off the seductive impression that they would be consummate fathers.
    One in particular attracts her, one who looks as though he does not know he is handsome, who looks slightly lost and like an actual working artist, whom she dubs the Artist/Hero. She sees him notice her staring, so she skillfully moves her eyes away, where she sees the absolute opposite of his pleasure-giving radiance. It is Lisa. Lisa is one of the cosmetics girls at Neiman’s, and Mirabelle can’t help but recoil. What is she doing here? This girl does not belong at an art opening. She is on Mirabelle’s turf, where an eked-out high school diploma is just not enough. But Lisa holds her own, and here’s why. Lisa, thirty-two, can be counted among the very beautiful. She has pale red hair that hangs in soft ringlets against skin that has never seen the sun. She is slender and oval faced, with shapely legs that pin themselves into a pair of provocative high heels. Her breasts, though augmented, rise above the line of her dress and seem to beckon, successfully keeping the secret of their artificiality. She appears sunny, a quality that Mirabelle can call upon only for special occasions.
    Lisa wears high heels even to lunch. In fact, she over-dresses for every occasion, because without the splash that her wardrobe makes, she believes that no man will like her. She fools herself by thinking that in some way she is pursuing a career by making important contacts with successful men, and that the sex is tangential. The men play along, too. They think that she likes them, that her hand jobs aren’t bought. These men allow her to feel interesting. After all, aren’t they listening to every word? She believes that only in her body’s perfection can she be loved, and her diet focuses on five imaginary pounds that keep her from perfection. This weight anxiety is not negotiable. No convincing makes it otherwise, even from the most sincere of her lovers. Lisa’s idea of fun is going to bars and taunting college men by making them believe she is available. A good time is measured by the abandon she can muster; the more people who are crammed into a Mercedes heading to a party in the hills, the more valid the proof that she is having fun. At thirty-two, Lisa does not know about forty, and she is unprepared for the time when she will actually have to know something in order to have people listen to her. Her penalty is that the men she attracts with her current package see her only from a primitive part of their brains, the childish part that likes shiny objects that make noise when rattled. Older men looking for playthings and callow boys driven by hormones access these areas more easily than the clear-thinking wife seekers of their late twenties and early thirties.
    There is a third category of men who like Lisa. These are the men whose relationship to women is driven by obsession and possession, and she will be the ugly target of more than one such man in her lifetime. To Mirabelle, the idea of being an object of obsession is alluring and represents a powerful love. She fails to understand,