HUMAN noose

Simone was one of that type. You know: something right off a Vogue or Cosmo cover, something right off a New York fashion-show runway, something right out of the collective American supermall unconscious. Green cat eyes, impeccable cheekbones, zero body fat. The type you'd think had never worked harder in her life than logging thousands of hours on nautilus machines or prancing in front of cameras. The type you envision lounging half-naked and sun-kissed by sparkling swimming pools in South-of-France resorts, politely declining the attentions of vacationing Polo-shirted executives with Aston Martin keys jangling in their pockets, sculpted cabana boys looking on hungrily from a distance. The Chanel type, the Saks Fifth Avenue type. The type that's a little disconcerting to meet in three dimensions because peripherally you keep seeing the edges of magazine pages and TV screens floating around her, the type your eyes keep trying to flatten back out into glossy photographic image, as if her actual physical presence marked some irksome rupture in the capitalist space-time continuum. She was the type other women love admitting is gorgeous because she's way out of their boyfriends' leagues anyway, the type even the most alpha-male frat boys can't bring themselves to ogle, reduced instead to the type of sanctimonious, deferential silence usually associated with art galleries and churches. Regal, stately, way past the crude discourse of hot, hers was the type of beauty so surface-slick even fantasies slide right off.