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house on Saturday? Joe’s going to be out. Come over around noon. We’ll sit around and swill wine and go out to dinner.”
    Dena nodded. “I think I can take the day off.”
    “Fine with me,” Louise said.
    “Sure,” Jacqueline murmured. “It’ll be fun.”
     
     
    It was admitted near the beginning of the Philebus that pleasure and intelligence are both parts of the good life, and yet we cannot decide which is closer to the good (or which determines the character of the good life) without concerning ourselves with what “the good” is.
    Jacqueline looked up from her typewriter. This was hardly a concern of the people out here, who had their own ideas about the good life. They would have taken Callicles’ position in this dialogue and argued for pleasure. She ruffled through the pages of the manuscript she was retyping, unable to concentrate; the intellectual pleasures Plato valued so highly could not overcome her restlessness.
    She glanced at her watch. She had not called Jerome last night, but he might be in his office now. Sarita Ames was teaching at UCLA; she could get together with her old classmate and bitch about how many philosophy departments still held Aristotle’s view of women. Giles Gunderson was at Irvine; there were a number of colleagues she might contact out here. They might draw her out of the spell Patti and her friends had cast, remind her that she was no longer a high school girl who envied the pretty and popular.
    She stood up and crossed to the bed. Telephone directories lay next to the telephone on the floor. She was leafing through the B’s before she realized that she was looking for Tad’s number. No Thaddeus Braun was listed in the local directory, and the Los Angeles book seemed a formidable obstacle.
    She went to the bedroom window and peered out. Tad was standing near the beach; she felt as though she had summoned him somehow. She hurried into the living room, but hesitated in front of the sliding glass door before she opened it.
    Tad strolled up the street, then halted below the terrace and raised a hand in greeting. “Hello, Jackie.”
    “Tad.” She tried to think of something to say. “Are you vacationing, or do you live out here?”
    “I’ve been out here for a while.” He had not really answered her question. Was he unemployed, looking for a position? Tad had been one of the better math students when she knew him; perhaps he did freelance consulting work for computer firms. “You’re visiting, aren’t you?”
    She nodded.
    “Mind if I come up for some coffee? You can tell me what you’ve been doing.”
    “I’ll come down,” Jacqueline said hastily. She backed away, closed the glass door, and hurried to the bedroom for her jacket. Better, she thought, to talk to him outside; she might have known him once, but he was a stranger now.
     
    As she came outside, he took her arm and led her toward the Strand. She almost pulled away, surprised at how ill at ease she felt.
    “How are all of you doing?” Tad asked. “You know—you and the other members of the Bod Squad.” She glanced at him sharply. “Come on, Jackie—a lot of guys in school called you that. Not the ones you went out with, just the ones who didn’t have a chance with you.”
    “Oh, we knew. We didn’t much care for the term.” She paused. “You might have read something about Louise’s ex-husband; he used to play for the Rams. He gave her a good settlement. Dena’s selling houses to rich people and going out with an Iranian millionaire from Beverly Hills.”
    “What about you?”
    “I’m just a philosophy professor on sabbatical. Patti invited me out when she and her husband were moving into their house, said their condo would be free until their new tenants moved in. Her husband’s a car dealer, kept pointing out his showrooms all the way in from LAX.”
    Two women cycled by as they came to the Strand. Tad gripped her arm more tightly. “Let’s walk down to the water.”
    She was