Frank holds a tie in each hand. One is salmon, the other a pattern of green and gold diamonds. His shirt is red.

"Which one?" he asks.

Either is going to be disaster with that shirt, but I don't say this. It would prick his balloon, and I don't want to play Scrooge, not at Christmas. On the other hand he wants to make a good impression. I want him to make a good impression. What we do reflects on each other, and now it's these damn ties. I'll note the way people look at him, then at me, sizing me up. Is she the sort who insists her partner meet minimum standards of presentability, or does she discreetly defer?

"How about your blue striped one," I say. You can always improve your product. Frank nods and goes out humming. When he comes back, he's wearing the blue stripe. He's just turned sixty, and his sex appeal is going great guns. The frown lines on his forehead are signs of worldliness. And he's still got a powerful walk. He strides out as though he's just signed a multimillion dollar contract. He's good for another decade of flirting and looking prosperous.

"I've been looking forward to us going to this together," he says now.

"We always go to your office party together," I say.

"I mean it will be nice to be at the party with you, Sweetheart."

There was a time when he stayed by me at parties, showing me off. Now he heads immediately for the bar, gets into conversation. I don't think he's conscious of the change, and why should he be? His stock is going up. It's mine that's coming down. We'll go to this party, and he will be the man he is, with his classy assets--snazzy vehicle, fourteen carat credentials, success in the upper echelons of civil service, an attractive wife. His cache depends on others wanting what he's got, and he knows how to manipulate the market. Take my attractiveness. Its value for him depends on that staple of advertising, illusion. I seem in excellent shape for my age. And I agree to work the illusion. I spruce up my inventory, that intangible "presence," something you can't buy (though money helps you cobble it together), which is why its value has shot up. I seem on top of the game, whatever game's going, and Frank gets some of the return.

"We're a handsome couple," Frank says. He kisses me on the cheek. He's affectionate, and not stingy like those men whose wives have that bargain basement look. Also I've trained him to pitch in with housework. We have a schedule of who cooks when. You do this, I'll do that. If we don't agree, we negotiate until we do. It's as though we're in international shipping, sailing a ton of cargo here, whipping another two tons off to over there.

Now he holds my coat as though it's a joint contract. He's signed. Now it's my turn.

I chat with Frank's superior, his wife, three other men I haven't met before. One of them questions the advisability of extending most favored nation status to China. Then we're on to Sarajevo, Rwanda, East Timor and back to the aftermath of the L.A. riots. The wife deplores the latest murder by street gangs. All of us join her in this deploring. Snatches from a conversation behind me waft over. "Not liposuction," someone says. "It's her face. She got an eye lift." Now one of the liposuction men hails the new sensation in performance art, a woman whose assistants paint her with human blood in front of a scrim featuring coverage of the war in Bosnia. Anxious refugees in Mostar get upstaged by nipples and an arresting triangle of pubic hair.

I'm wearing a chic, crushed velvet sheath, the diamond earrings Frank gave me for our anniversary. On the downside my neck has started to sag. I used to think of this part of me as my throat, and an asset. It came to the fore whenever I threw back my head, and I threw back my head a lot then, flinging my long hair aside and striding on. Now this part of my anatomy resembles the national debt. Nor do I think of it now as my throat. It's my neck, and there is nothing romantic about it.

Strolling through the park last week I sat down to watch the kids on swings. A little girl tumbled out and skinned her knee in the sand. She came crying to where I sat beside her mother. The mother looked all of sixteen. She took the little girl on her lap. When her tears subsided, she wanted down again. She looked at me then, and I smiled. You could see her marshalling up her courage to come closer.

"Go on Sweetie," her mother said. "Go see granny."

This remark came at me like a sudden blow to the head. The word conjures a figure who can't cross a street by herself, a person who is unaware that the Soviet Union has collapsed. My soul plummeted. Later I stood before the full length mirror and gave myself a critical appraisal. There are creases at the corners of my eyes, but I'm still trim, with a nice pair of breasts which don't droop noticeably, and I'm vigorous and full of energy. But value is relative. I look great, when I'm the only one there.

That night I dreamed that a liver spot on my hand had grown large, darkened and risen like a mole. I was horrified, but then circumstances inexplicably changed. Suddenly I was delighted: these great, dark growths were now considered beauty marks. Women were dying to have them. Others faked them, but mine was real.

"The question is," the woman next to me says, "if you dye your hair should you also dye your snatch." The canapes are very good, and we're picking and choosing. Across the room three young women have engaged Frank in conversation. He holds forth, they hover attentively. He tells a joke, they giggle. Their breasts have an attractive buoyancy. He gestures extravagantly. The four resemble an ad for Old Spice: no sweat.

"When I was in my twenties," the woman says, "for my boyfriend for Valentine's day I had mine shaved in the shape of a heart and dyed red."

I used to be that brazen, but less conscious of fashion. I was given to flinging my panties right and left as I made my way through life. I did a lot of comparison shopping, trying out samples, looking for the perfect product. But I wouldn't have dyed my pubic hair for anyone.

I try the lentil-walnut pate and consider: I'd pretty much given up those black market fleshy pursuits for long Saturday afternoons reading in the sun, but now I wonder. Should I still be losing sleep over a projected assignation? Are there no other statements to be made than those written in innuendo and piercing glances?

It used to be that when I walked into a room, the air in the room spruced up. I carried electric charge. Young men found me fascinating. They congregated, offering me h'or doeuvres, making appointments for coffee the following day. I was Helen without the bad rep and with a charge account that wouldn't come due. I launched some ships, threatened some perfectly durable marriages. It was all very dramatic, and galvanizing, and I gloried in The Eternal Feminine. I could choose or discard, approve or decline, create or destroy.

Now when I walk into a room the air has been spruced up by one of those young girls with spiked hair.

To the young I've become an obligation, like tithing. Young men notice me only at the checkout counter. They want to know if I'd like paper or plastic.

Yesterday as I walked to the corner grocery two young men came up the sidewalk, one in Esprit jeans and sneakers, the other head to toe leather, sporting snake skin boots. Engaged in animated conversation. They didn't look up. I kept to my side of the concrete. Still, at the moment we passed, I collided with the young man in leather. "Oh!" I said. He didn't look at me, deeply invested as he was in discourse, praising the musical virtues of a group called Penis Envy. At the same time, with the studied casualness that comes from assumptions buried so deeply their origins can't be traced, he straightened his arm and used it to move me gently but firmly aside, onto the grass.

I had the distinct feeling something had been stolen from me. But my purse was still slung from my shoulder. I thought of the Haitian soldier interviewed just after the execution style murder of the minister of justice. "You have seen nothing," he said to the reporter, "so nothing is going on."

The party's crowded now. Conversations take place at high volume. A woman spills champagne down the front of her red sequined dress. People flirt, people gossip. I step out onto the patio. Frank leans against the banister. Now there is only one young woman beside him, a Barbie doll with cleavage and thick, ringlet tresses the color of black quartz. She suggests the woman in the Lord and Taylor perfume ad: Zino, the fragrance of desire.

"Sweetheart!" Frank calls, waving me over. I approach with the distinct feeling I'm trespassing on staked out territory. Frank introduces me to Barbie. By way of filling her in, he praises my latest promotion, mentions an award I received, and my hefty Christmas bonus. He's proud of my achievement, but it might as well be his: she can't take her eyes off him. He's Ulysses just washed up on the beach, an investment opportunity, a whole new market for her product. She will take him to her father, the king, get the slaves to whip up a banquet.

Suddenly I wish I'd divorced at forty. These things would be easier if I weren't married. I wouldn't have to watch groupies launch themselves at Daddy. I could waltz in and out of parties as I pleased, and there would be no sticky situations. My thought flips back to this morning's paper. In the Most Admired Competition, Oprah and Queen Elizabeth were tied at a faltering two percent.

I want to like young women like Barbie, but it's not easy. I don't want to lie awake nights imagining Frank starting his second family. If it came to that, the fact that I'd be available would be worthless in this market. Besides, when Frank noticed my stock, I in turn invested heavily. I trained him by walking him through the exercises, giving him lots of chances to get it. He was an eager but slow learner, and I put in my time. A lot of fine tuning went into the final package. If you lose after all that, you kick yourself. You should have put the money into land.

Frank introduces the topic of extending most favored nation status to China. He and I discuss this. Barbie continues her subliminal assault. Finally I step closer, putting myself smack in the middle of her crosshairs.

"What's your take on this?" I say, directing my comment to her, giving her the opportunity for eye contact. "Should we give the Chinese the benefit of the doubt?"

But she manages to smile over my shoulder. Her signals signal her eagerness to put herself entirely at Frank's disposal.

I think of the Empress of Japan who at a state function collapsed in a faint and became mute.

Now Frank takes my elbow.

"I need to speak to Jack before we leave," he says. "Let's go in."

Barbie leans forward, touches his arm.

"Promise me you'll come to my party," she says. "You've got to promise me."

It's March, and there are crocuses blooming, new spring in people's steps. I lunch with a friend--poached salmon and the season's first asparagus. Before the check comes, I head for the ladies' room, run a comb through my hair. Suddenly a young woman sweeps in, goes straight for the mirror. It's Barbie. Though my reflection is there beside hers, she shows no sign of remembering she's seen me before. She concentrates on a quality check of the product, gets busy repairing her nicks.

My mother was wrong when she insisted cheerily, as she almost always did, that there was more than enough for everybody. She would not admit the truth: for women there is a shortage. But the market thrives on shortages. Shortages are only a debit if you're the one caught short.

This girl is gorgeous but she doesn't quite believe it. She imagines flaws because she's been trained to look for them. At twenty I was the product of conflicting reports. I'd been told that I interrupted too much and that I didn't stand up for myself. That I was too eager, and at the same time too withdrawn. Too pushy, and too shy. Too loud, too soft, too indiscreet, too reticent, too fat, too thin. Too young for what I needed, too old to be so needy.

The result was I felt I'd had only crumbs, the skimpiest, most threadbare of loves. A little hug now and then from my busy mother, proscriptions for moral improvement from dad. I looked sumptuous, but inside I was a starveling, a little match girl hoarding my handful of flares, striking one only when I was desperate.

I needed a shower of gold. And I'd been programmed to believe I was helpless, that men were the ones who would supply what I needed, that sex was where I would at last be fed. I was ravenous, and I went out and shoved my pretty tits in the face of the first man who looked at me longer than he should have. I didn't care whether he had children, a wife, a dying mother. If there were older women around, I swear I couldn't see them. I gave myself to him like I was the Academy Award.

I see this same desperation of juice and cell and soul in

Barbie. Nothing seduces like desperation. Men mistake need for passion, and congratulate themselves. They've found a frothy honey-pot to stick their tongues into: other guys should be so lucky. You see it in porn films: women crazy for attention, the men reading this as admiration.

Underneath the garter belts and boots with cleats, these girls are the Somalia of the emotions. They crawl across the desert on their hands and knees toward the next polluted spring, dragging themselves on for a handful of mealies.

But the fact is that if there's a drought, nothing grows. Suddenly I want Barbie to feel confident, lavished with strokes and praises. I want to make contact, find common ground. It's ridiculous that we should exist, just now, in opposition. I want to feel some little thread of understanding between us, at least the recognition that we're in this together. Because we are: a day will come when she's going to arrive where I am, and the world in which this happens will not have changed much.

"You've got gorgeous hair," I tell her. We're given to extremes, those of us who've suffered deprivation. We excel in extravagant praise, extravagant blame. She recognizes the mode. Possibly I remind her of her mother, another woman who was no doubt given to extremes.

"Really," I say. "You look stunning. Got a boyfriend?"

"Not right now," she says, grimly. There is no envy in her glance, only dread. And why not: she has no resources with which to meet the crisis my reflection represents. There's a photograph of those pine trees they'd planted at Chernobyl just before the disaster. Afterward their needles, which should have grown toward the light, turned away as though stunned. They began to grown downward, toward the black ground.

Now she throws the lip gloss into her purse and heads for the door.

"Wait," I say. "You're beautiful, you really are. You should enjoy it, it's a gift."

She looks at me in disbelief.

"Get real," she says, and walks out.