The California Model’s features: small fine nose, curvy mouth, wide-set blue eyes.

This is the Look, in the society of the Look:

Freckles on cheeks, under a sunburn that might start peeling right now.

That brake light in your brain.…

Well, it’s worth a little adrenaline, Jim thinks. Of course everyone is beautiful these days, we’re in California after all, but for Jim, Virginia Novello is it. And here she is talking to him. She has before, of course, a bit remotely perhaps, and in the context of Arthurness, but now … Jim offers her his new margarita and she takes a sip. Arm muscles slide and bunch under tan skin, silky hairs on forearm gleam in the light. Her white blouse is a nice change from all the spectrum-slide primaries in the room. These are fabrics that are colored in a very narrow band of the spectrum, say fifteen hertz, so that you can, for instance, just begin to see a blue blouse shade into violet, or yellow into green, across the whole of the piece of cloth. It’s a great look, and very popular because of that, but still, a change is nice. Kind of bold.

“Ping-pong is funny,” Jim says. “It really varies from day to day how much you can count on your game working. You know?”

“I think most sports are like that. The edge comes rarely. Maybe it goes beyond sports, eh?”

Jim nods, regarding her. Her smile, seldom seen, small and controlled, is actually quite nice. He doesn’t know much about her, despite the admiration from a distance. Business executive of some sort? Funny match with Arthur’s political activism. Maybe that’s why they broke up. Let’s not worry about it.

They go out on the balcony, and Jim asks her about her work. She helps to administer Fashion Island, the old mall above Newport Beach. So she’s working for the management company hired by the Irvine Corporation, which owns the land. The old rancho dismemberment wealth, extending two hundred years into time … although Irvine’s only a name now, the family long out of it. Jim talks about this aspect of the land ownership of OC, and Virginia listens, interested and inquisitive. “It’s funny, you never think about how things got this way,” she says brightly.

Well. Jim does. But he passes on that. He tells her about the recent archaeological dig under Fluffy Donuts, making himself the butt of the jokes, and she laughs. The Fool, after all, can be a useful role, as he already knows. Especially after a show of competence at the ping-pong table; then it can be mistaken for modesty. They watch cars track over the freeways. Leaning over the red geraniums that line the balcony’s top, their arms brush together. It’s accidental and means nothing, sure.

“Do you surf?” Virginia asks.