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agents with transparent get-ahead schemes and ready stashes of cocaine, ridiculous intrusions and edicts from distant and invisible but all-seeing—spies everywhere!—studio execs (young thoroughbred prostitutes across their middle-aged laps, lines of white powder running along the low-fat flesh covering exquisite arched spines): how close to actual did these shopworn figures stand?
    And her, typecasting too, a fraction of another movie commonplace: heavy-framed utilitarian spectacles and tightly reined hair understood by audience and script alike as an unprepossessing bud disguising an inevitable flowery beauty; the dour, pencil-in-hand scholarly demeanor undermining a buoyant though compliant femininity. The situation could be undone by a fresh perspective and the right man, not to mention the off-camera discovery of a push-up bra and cinching belt, contact lenses, bright lipstick, and expert strokes of a curling iron.
    During that monotonous departmental meeting Marta had snickered, thinking of Cyd Charisse’s grey-suited Stalinist functionary (“ Nyet , Comrade”) in Silk Stockings , whose officious military façade melted into a cascade of pastel chiffon after the briefest exposure to French couture and gung-ho American joie de vivre. Little had Lenin suspected the fragility of ideology. Marta, reluctantly drawn to the sheen of the idea, wished for longer hair.
    She resigned herself to waiting. If nothing else, a studio meeting would strike a bold line between fact and fancy.
    2 .
    I f the countless mysteries of the impending term of employment were mildly worrisome, a certifiable known served to buttress Marta’s reluctance.
    She hadn’t dwelled on it in years, but Marta easily recalled a singular encounter with one man, later (and later still: the anecdote had circulated a few times) renamed SRLFI, the Stellar Representative of the Local Film Industry. The guy’s preference, the Stevester, came nowhere close to eligible for use.
    Regret entwined the memory, which also served readily as an ambiguous cautionary tale.
    The situation seemed innocuous on paper, Marta had decided, potentially no better or worse than any other blind date—a contradictory phenomenon that demanded low expectations and a fine thread of optimism from all parties concerned. As she languished in the final semester of a second graduate degree, jittery and melancholic in turn, she’d been set up on a date by Judy, whose insistent refrains about growing really tired of Marta’s lack of initiative had abruptly turned into a strategic initiative.
    Judy zealously believed that the meager—“shut-in,” “Norman Bates-ish,” and “mole-like” her rotating choice of terms—routines of graduate students atrophied their social skills and thereby stunted their written work’s heft: who could trust output by an intellectual with merely theoretical knowledge of life? Grad students befriending Judy were soon informed that “balance” encapsulated her worldview; innate evangelism also meant everyone in Judy’s sphere of influence must convert. “Get out there,” she’d said to Marta, “you’re a virtual sciophobe.” Marta, exacting with word use, gathered that Judy meant “afraid of your own shadow,” but conceded a relative proximity.
    A professed free spirit, Judy borrowed key lines from the American philosophical tradition of Auntie Mame; and she preached the Gospel of Carpe Diem too. Seizing opportunity—men, grants, choice seating in seminar rooms and the graduate student lounge—pulsed through her veins, natural, obligatory, the secret to the fully realized life. As for caveat emptor, Judy dismissed the phrase as Cowardly Lion’s rationalization for quaking in the shadows, a living doormat.
    Marta, despite years of feminism and post-this and post-that literary theory meant to gnaw away at the truisms of suspect, oppressive