Shopgirl by Steve Martin

night.”
    â€œI didn’t get the message. My machine is acting funny,” she lies.
    â€œDo you want to have dinner tonight? It’s my last night here for a while.”
    Mirabelle can’t answer. Ray repeats himself:
    â€œAre you all right?”
    This time, she lets her tone speak for her. “I’m pretty okay.”
    â€œWhat’s the matter?” says Ray.
    â€œI’m supposed to go to the doctor.”
    â€œWhy? Why do you have to go to the doctor? What’s wrong?”
    â€œNo. I have to go to my . . . I take Serzone, but it stopped working.”
    â€œWhat’s Serzone?” says Ray.
    â€œIt’s like Prozac.”
    â€œDo you want me to take you to the doctor? Do you want me to come over there and take you to the doctor?”
    â€œI probably should see him. . . .”
    â€œI’ll come and take you.”
    Within an hour, Ray collects her, drops her off at Dr. Tracy’s, and sits in his car, waiting for Mirabelle in a no-waiting zone in Beverly Hills. He can see the stream of people going in and out of this medical building and wonders how Mirabelle can afford such treatment, but it is a Neiman’s employee benefit that provides her with a local doctor, and luckily, her doctor has moved from the valley, twenty miles from her apartment, to the Conrad Medical Building two blocks from her job. Ray sees a beautiful woman in her thirties exiting the building with a broad-brimmed hat pulled low over her face, hiding two freshly enormous lips. Ray Porter guesses there is a waiting period after injection while they deflate to an approximation of actual human form. He sees a vibrant Chiquita with her ass vacuum-packed into a yellow rayon wrap, her torso perched on two tree stumps. He sees what he thought didn’t exist except as parody: a leather-skinned businessman with dyed black hair, his shirt open to his waist, and his chest laden with fourteen karat. He clinks as he darts across the street.
    He sees a dozen or so women who have decided that overkill is best in the breast department. He wonders if they are kidding; he wonders if the men who adore them excuse their lapse in taste and love them anyway, or see them as splendid examples of woman as hyperbole. This is what he likes about Mirabelle; her beauty is uncultivated and he can trust that what is there at night will be there in the morning, too. He wonders what it is that makes him willing to sit in his car on a street, this millionaire, waiting for a twenty-eight-year-old girl. Is it his lust for her, or is something happening inside him that makes him care for her in an unexpected, unpredictable way?
    He sees a family of tourists, with a sixteen-year-old daughter who is so purely beautiful that it makes him ashamed of the lewd image he fleetingly conjures.
    Ray has very loose boundaries on what he considers fair game, although rarely has he allowed himself to dip below the arbitrary twenty-five-year-old watermark. What distinguishes him from the man with dyed hair who clinked across Bedford Drive a few moments ago is that whether he knows it or not, Ray is actually looking for someone. But he needs to be killed off several times by getting in too deep with the wrong person; he needs to break a heart and know that he has caused it, and to experience the sudden loss of interest that can occur within hours of a high peak of desire.
    At this point in his transition from boy to man, he does not know the difference between a woman who is feasible and one who is not. This is still to come. Meanwhile, his eye roams around and focuses his unconscious on what can be a woman’s smallest desirable quanta. The back of her neck seen in the shadow of her hair. The arch of her foot resting in an open sandal. An appealing contrast in the color of her blouse and skirt. These glimpses propel his desire, yet because he won’t admit to himself how small the thing is that he wants, he inflates it to include her