Douglas, Nelson - Midnight Louie 05-Cat in a Diamond Dazzle

"No problem," Kit said. "We have lots to talk about." She began with introductions. "Temple is my niece and totally trustworthy." (Temple thought that was a nice thing to say, especially since they had just met.) "The lady on the far left is Doctor Susan Schuler." (Temple paused as she worried her glasses from the squashed tote bag beside her. A doctor--that was interesting. What kind?)

"Do you mind if I take notes?" Temple asked. "Not for ... evidence or anything, but simply because I won't be able to tell you apart for a while."

"Hey, that's easy." A woman wearing a red, black and white flowered dress with puffed sleeves reached into the tiny patent leather bag trailing from a thin shoulder strap. "Slap on our con-vention badges, people, for Temple. We can remove them again in transit."

Soon Temple was gratefully studying the group's left shoulders.

"What kind of doctor are you?" she asked the woman named Susan, a low-key type who wore no makeup and whose short, permanent-waved hair was a greige Brillo pad.

"A gynecologist," said a younger woman in a yellow linen blazer, with a teasing laugh.

"Not a medical doctor," Susan said tolerantly.

"Ph.D?" Temple asked with the awe of a lowly B.A.

"Right, in anthropology."

"Susan's written a book on the roots of romance fiction," Kit said. " Alpha Men and Omega Women. "

"Any relation to that bestseller, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus? "

Everybody but Temple laughed. Susan reached into her canvas convention bag to extract a trade paperback with a plain-Jane cover.

"Afraid not, Temple. This is a scholarly tome from a university press, with a minuscule print run. Even persuading a university press to publish a book on a topic as despised as romance novels was a triumph."

Temple pulled over the book to riffle the pages. Chapter titles like "He Tarzan, You Jane" leaped out as they flashed by. Also "Wild West vs. Nest."

"It's yours." Susan's smile would melt nails and certainly dissolved any dry academic air clinging to her. "Instant background, and we academic press authors are pathetically happy to have people read our books, even if we have to give them away."

"Thanks. It looks fascinating--no, really! This chapter, "Hawks and Doves"--it sounds like a political thesis."

"Bless you! God knows I'd get more respect for analyzing dull matters like politics." Susan shook her curlicued head. "Hawks and doves are opposites, as they are in real life, but in romance novels the battle is the war between the sexes."

A jolly-looking woman with airy blond curls, wearing a nice, comfy knit pants outfit to disguise her nice, comfy expansive body, lifted a finger to pronounce: " The Flame and the Flower . Let us all bow our heads for a moment of silence."

Temple neither bowed nor kept the peace. "What does that mean?" she asked the blond grandmotherly type, whose nametag read LaDonna Morgan.

The other women laughed.

"It's a title," explained a sleek black woman of forty named Vivian Brown.

" The title," LaDonna corrected.

Even Kit had something to say on the subject. "The title that launched a thousand hips, so to speak.

The first sexually explicit historical romance written by a woman."

"What about Forever Amber ?" a woman named Lori asked. She had shining, long brown hair and a teenager's fresh-cream complexion, though she must have been Temple's age. Or more.

"A forerunner," Susan declared, "but not the true revolutionary work that Kathleen Woodiwiss's book was."

Temple watched the discussion, feeling that she was watching a tennis match from the much-confused point-of-view of the net.

"What do flames and flowers have to do with hawks and doves?" she wanted, very sensibly, to know.

"Titles," Susan explained. "The ever-important titles. The uninitiated sneer at what they see as stereotypical romance titles, not realizing the art of it. Oxymorons are all in the romance field."

"Oxymoron ..." Temple was sure she had once known what that word meant, long ago and far away, in a college communications class in Minnesota. "Not something I put on an untimely zit, is it?"

"Nor is it an idiotic castrated bovine." Kit's over articulated, prissy diction made everybody giggle.

"I think Kit is referring to what we call a plain bull with no balls in Missouri," LaDonna said.

"Is that why they call it the 'Show Me' state?" Lori threw in with a wicked grin.

"Oh, lawdy, we're gettin' bawdy." Vivian sighed. "Temple will think we're awful."

"You can't write about the world's most hilarious subjects-- love, sex and marriage--without a sense of humor," Kit said. "And Temple has been in the thea-tuh, dahlings. Nothing shocks her."

"Not true," Temple objected. "I've just learned not to show it. Right now, I am shocked that, with so many writers present, no one has explained 'oxymoron' yet in a clear, one-syllable manner."

"We bow to academe." Kit nodded at Susan, who had watched the byplay with a smile.

"The textbook definition is more confusing than Kit's, believe it or not: an oxymoron is 'a rhetorical figure in which an epigrammatic effect is created by the conjunction of incongruous or contradictory terms,' for example, 'a mournful optimist.' "

"Get that woman a copy editor! Simplify, simplify." LaDonna hooted, then put her hands on her ample hips. "I've always wanted a rhetorical figure, though."

"Not to mention an epigrammatic effect," Vivian added.

"That would be LaDonna in a Wonderbra," Lori teased her full-figured senior.

"Seriously." Susan smothered laughter in the stiffening corners of her mouth. "Seriously speaking, romance novels heighten the differences between the sexes before they resolve them. If literal oxymorons aren't used in titles, certainly suggestive opposites are employed. In these metaphors--we do all know what that means?--the man is the wild, untamed, consuming masculine element and the woman is the fragile, lovely, preserving or enduring element. Flame. Flower. The Flame and the Flower. "

A moment's silence held as each recalled a favorite, illustrative title.

" The Leopard and the Lark , " Sylvia put in.

" The Hawk and the Dove , " said Lori, nodding.

" The Tiger and the Titwillow,' " Temple interjected. "Or, with a bow to our new friend the oxymoron,

'The Bull and the Buttercup.' I get the picture, ladies."

"That's just one pattern of title." Susan was still grinning at Temple's impudent images.

Temple frowned in suspicion. "Why does the symbol representing the man always come first?"

"Because he gets his in the end," LaDonna said.

"What does he get?"

"He gets the girl," said Kit.

"He gets domesticated. Tamed." Susan sounded fully academic now. "That's why the titles exaggerate gender differences. That's where the oft-satirized 'Sweet, Savage' school of romance titles came from, and phrases like 'devil's angel' or 'steel and silk.' Don't let the namby-pamby female symbols fool you. Romances ultimately empower the woman. By succumbing to the force of masculine passion, swaying with the sensual storm, the heroine subdues the hero's lone-wolf ways and transforms him from demon lover into loving husband, helpmate and, ultimately, father."

" 'The Wolf and the Willow,' " Temple summed up sourly. She wasn't in the mood for the male-female gavotte or happy endings. "Okay. Granted that romance novels are complex blends of mythological models and pop culture, where do the cover guys fit in?"

"Between the sheets," impish Lori suggested, dimpling like a Regency Miss.

"Off the cover!" Vivian's fist pounded the table top.

"Hear, hear!" came from Kit.

"Now that's an interesting phenomenon," Susan began. "In the beginning--"