Order Just the Right Woman

American culture remains significantly conflicted about sex despite all the available advice, accoutrements, media displays, and, of course, a revolution. Under the lingering influence of our Puritan forefathers, the sexual pendulum seems to swing in wide swaths from permissive to repressive attitudes.

Sexuality and its place in human relationships is the centering topic of each story in Santa Ynez winemaker William Cates' slender volume of seven short stories. This is brave writing because some tongues will cluck even at the revelation of such a topic. Mr. Cates often delineates his characters and their motivations with finesse, and though he occasionally misses the mark, each of these nicely varied stories poses questions and observations about human nature well worth reflecting on.

Writing about sex and pain are two of the most difficult subjects a writer can tackle. We don't have a particularly rich language base for either, and it is impressive both that Mr. Cates manages to write about sex without ever going over the top and that he writes from a female point of view with considerable persuasiveness.

In the first story, "A Close Shave," the ending feels a little forced, but Mr. Cates strikes the perfect note about adolescence, the time when young men have glands for brains and young women begin to understand the power they wield. This story focuses on a na0x95ve and easily impressed high school student and a highly conscious young temptress who makes the act of applying lipstick sensuous enough to raise more than blood pressure.

The next story, "Felicity's Secrets," is a joyful middle-aged man's fantasy come true, while still essentially innocent and often amusing. Sitting at home by himself, a well-married protagonist enjoys an evening with herbal tea, magazines and gas fireplace logs. We know precisely who this guy is. And then the unlikely happens: he answers the doorbell and who should it be but the Felicity's Secret Catalogue representative, the very one he's seen on those glossy pages. She's come, sample case in hand, to help him pick appropriate gifts for his upcoming anniversary.

In the title story, the young Russian bride of a well-established, 60-year old American "wore a smile the way someone would wear a tattoo." The proud groom takes his pigtailed wife to the supermarket and she experiences a culture shock. "The Sistine Chapel could not have produced more awe," Cates writes. While she seems to take genuine pleasure in her husband and his love of algebra and tropical frogs, he can't leave well enough alone, and soon he's playing Pygmalion with results had hadn't entirely intended.

Power, Mr. Cates well understands, is an issue in any relationship, and in "The Undiscovered Moons of Jupiter" a popular professor whom Cates describes as having "corn yellow wavy hair and boyish good looks," is fond of being close with his adoring female students. His severe-looking wife bears up until she literally lets her hair down to fight fire with fire. What she finds out about her own erotic nature and about erotic power prove delightful and revealing.

Undiscovered or long-buried sensuality centers several of these stories. "Certainty" finds a woman in a neatly walled life -- complete with good children and a solid community standing -- in which her husband needs to satisfy his "primal urges" only every couple of months. She is awakened to a richer and vaguely terrifying sense of self by a dear friend who is the first ever to see her and honor her as a woman.

"Viveca" is the middle name of a long-married woman who has retired and taken up bird watching after a bout with cancer. Cancer has taught her that "once you've spent time in an oncologist's office, you're free to do anything in this world that's life affirming." As the self she knows when she uses her first name Amy, her marriage isn't horrific, but her husband has settled into his work and golf and sees her primarily as an appendage. He mocks her for spending the day counting birds, but she refrains from joking about his days spent "trying to knock a little ball into holes in the ground." Her bird-watching partner, a man half her age, treats her with tenderness and honors her sensuality. He rechristens her Viveca, and she becomes both versions of herself, unsure of what the future holds but sure that she's whole and alive as never before.

Themes of fidelity and infidelity -- to life, yourself and your partner -- weave through these stories. Each of these characters is vulnerable, and it would be easy to serve them up in some wry or ironic ending. William Cates does, for the most part, a more difficult thing, leaving choices for his characters, because he's more interested in exploring opening doors and possibilities than in slamming them artfully.

REVIEW: Reflections on sex and human nature

LIN ROLENS, NEWS-PRESS CORRESPONDENT

Book cover art by Gwen Cates