I’ve often noticed that there is a moment when a man develops enough confidence and ease in a relationship to bore you to death.

He wore a cowboy hat with the eye of a peacock feather stuck in the band, and he was one of those creatures so young and almost mystically cheerful that he seemed doomed.

I love hordes. They screen out free choice; you’re free at last: stuck.

Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduced by the right person.

You know, when you come to think about it, it’s a wonder women have anything to do with men at all, and no surprise that men have devised all kinds of schemes to bind women to them, like not giving them any money. If you had your choice of sleeping with a beautiful soft creature or a large hard one, which would you pick? I mean, if they both had the same amount of money?

We went to more art parties and took a lot of cocaine; cocaine being the drug of divorce and October being a divorce month since people want to get it over with before the holidays.

I looked at William, his dashing cossack-sort of appearance so impossible to imagine naked beside me. It wasn’t the way he looked that made him impossible. It was what he said. It was his sense of humor. He would not resist a pun. And any man who will not resist a pun will never lie up-pun me.

“Sometimes if you can’t get what you want, you get what the person you want wants.”

The funny thing was that I’d always believed that sex masterpieces were the best kind. Better than Bach, the Empire State Building, or Marcel Proust. I believe that most people put ninety-eight percent of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvelous love scenes. I believe that adultery is an art form. In France, they more or less lay their cards on the table and ennoble love affairs for the creative adventures they are, because for most people, these are the only creative adventures they’ll ever have.

I also have nearly perfect teeth, which I believe is the real secret to the universe. Nice teeth, flashing out of even a pock-marked face, equal survival of the species. I know you never think of nice bones pulsing away in clean, healthy calcium, but some inner conclusion is jumped to by people who see nice teeth.

Shawn is one of the few men on earth who does not take the opportunity to kick you when you’re down. He makes your faults sound like the inevitable by-products of how brilliant you are.

There is something fascinating about a person’s face when they’re not falling apart because of their imperfections and self-loathing. Pleasure is a lure.

I’d never known what a tar-baby was until Shawn explained one afternoon in Laguna that a tar-baby is one of those people who drive you crazy through your life by never responding to anything you do no matter what kind of display you cook up for their delight. And the more you try to embrace your tar-baby, the more you get stuck in the tar and the worse everything is.

It must have been his basic mediocre brain that drew people to him; he was like an animal who’s too much of an animal to comprehend the inevitability of his own death, and that kind of person is always a comfort.

(If you’re wondering why I was tossing my friends at Nikki like fish, you’re probably a person who has no tendency for society and who does not like to spend hours on the phone reliving parties. You do not like to find things out from women. One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about six women and the information that was exchanged, commonly called gossip, was enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the women and I looked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed, the man said, “What are all you girls doing out here? Come in and join the party.” And the summit conference was over.

And to make sure you did nothing untoward once inside they had raised lumps in the asphalt on the winding hilly road so you could only go ten mph. “Speed bumps” Shawn told me they were called, and I laughed at the name.

Women I know are always saying that they’re glad, after all, that they weren’t popular in high school, because all the girls who were are now taking Valium and are divorced and stupid. But everyone knows that it would have been much better to have been popular in high school when your blood was clean, and pure lust and kisses lasted forever. Chocolate Cokes in high school are better than caviar on a yacht when you’re forty-five. It’s common knowledge.

It was forever fascinating to me that men never noticed much about Mary other than, “Well, I mean, she’s pretty and everything . . .” That high gloss, which floored women, went right over men’s heads. It was as though they had no receivers for her particular wavelength.

Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. They want their lover to remember the way they held a glass. They want to haunt. Men don’t work like that as far as I’ve been able to judge. Men aren’t haunted by the way a woman holds a glass. Men are haunted by women who’re just like the one who married dear old dad. (“He can’t possibly be serious; she’s too fat!” one overhears, only to remember that his mother is too fat.) Or else they love a woman because they think she is absolutely unlike their mother and is such an affront to everything their mother stands for that it will plague her for the rest of her life.