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--"
"In the beginning the heroine was the cover focus, and the hero was just a handsome prop," Vivian noted. "That was the heyday of the 'bodice ripper' covers that gave the genre such a bad name.
Remember the heroine with her hair flowing over her shoulders and her front falling out of her dress?"
"The Love Is a Wild Assault days," Susan agreed. "Don't look askance at me, Temple, there really was a romance novel titled that. As women readers became more open about what they wanted in romance novels, the heroine went from a passive, reluctant object of unwanted masculine onslaught to--"
"An adoring, willing, ogling prop at the feet of the new romance cover star--the mighty hero." Kit shook her head.
Temple smiled. "I take it some of you dislike the new hero-central covers."
"Some of us," Vivian said, "have loathed the old clinch covers and the intermediate 'dueling cleavage'
covers of bare-chested hero and half bare-breasted heroine all along. Now we loath the newest wrinkle: he alone in all his muscular, hairy glory, although he can't have hair on his face or his chest, for God's sake. Male models are waxed and air-brushed into unreality just like female ones. And, in the process, somehow women have been pushed off center stage in what's considered a women's genre, written by women for women."
"Oh, Viv, you're just griping because you have a master's degree in history to protect you from intimations of sleaze."
LaDonna's face beamed as the waitress wafted a large round pizza tray onto her end of the table.
"Face it, honey. Hunks are in, so we writers might as well enjoy the view. Besides, it's liberating to have men as sex objects for a change."
"What do you think?" Temple asked Susan as the second pizza tray hovered and then descended like an aluminum UFO in their midst.
The group separated their chosen slices from the artery-clotting herd and installed them on bread plates. Discussion stalled as cheese extended into thin strings and knives excised edible bites.
Susan thoughtfully nibbled a sauce-gored slice. "The new covers offer positives and negatives. Lots of romance covers nowadays have beautifully embossed and foiled fronts with more mainstream and neutral subject matter: flowers, fabric, and precious objects. The front cover opens to an interior step-back painting: the old clinching couple--or the man alone in a few cases."
"Now those you could take on the subway, or a bus." Sophisticated Vivian, with her black blunt-cut bob, managed to fit her comment in between swallows. She was attacking her pizza like Attila the Hun.