A WOMAN'S QUEST FOR SATISFACTION.

Byline: Bernadette Murphy Correspondent

What do women want? When it comes to relationships, are women looking for considerate protectors who bring flowers and open car doors, or do they prefer the trouble-making bad boys their mothers warned them about? Do they want men who appreciate their intellect, or are they hot for the guys who wolf-whistle at long legs in tight skirts and sexy heels?

``Yes, yes, yes, to all of it,'' might be the answer given by the main character in ``What She Saw,'' a multilayered, impressive first novel by Brooklyn writer Lucinda Rosenfeld. The novel recounts, in short story- like vignettes, the love life of Phoebe Fine, each piece focusing on her true love of the moment.

In grammar school, Roger ``Stinky'' Mancuso is the first boy to inspire midnight prayers (``let Stinky be in homeroom tomorrow'') and blind faith in superstition to control the trajectory of love's course (``if she could make it to school without having to wait for a single light to turn green''). Phoebe discovers, in Stinky's attentions, the magic of attraction and how it can transform a dull life into an enchanted existence. After that, she is hooked.

Moving through Phoebe's adolescence and into her mid-20s, the novel tells, with each new person Phoebe dates, the lessons of love learned, sometimes forgotten and often, belatedly revised. With Rosenfeld's insight and humor, the tales add up to a stinging indictment on the cult of beauty and our societal obsession with sex, while confirming an age- old truth: Love, and what we are willing to do to achieve it, often makes no sense.

At the outset, the stories are marked by a quiet innocence, the presex stage of carnal awakening when desire is still vague and comforting like a teddy bear. But sex and power soon mingle and propel Phoebe inexorably into the cynical world of competitive love. In college, she looses her virginity to a brooding anarchist who's majoring in feminist studies, before moving on to an illicit affair with the visiting professor of critical theory who's married. With the affair, the obsessive-compulsive nature of love is precisely limned, illuminating the fickle mindset of such attractions, the maddening fluctuation between I-should-know-better and what-the-hell.

Phoebe matures into a striking young woman who's hot and know it. There's rip-roaring sex and fiery encounters, yet, Phoebe finds, the adventures don't add up to much. ``The more experience she garnered,'' Rosenfeld tells us, ``the more eyeballs she saw lolling about in their sockets like so many lose marbles - the more it seemed to her that the state of arousal and the state of amity were two distinct principalities with no diplomatic ties.'' What does she want? She doesn't know, only that she still hasn't found it.

Throughout, the novel is inscribed with piquant, sharp writing and clear-eyed insights. Though the author strains on occasion - the story of a scam artist who takes advantage of Phoebe's neediness and bilks her out of her savings, for instance, stretches the reader's credulity - these lapses are generously offset by the intensely intimate portrait Rosenfeld paints of Phoebe's search for the elusive ``it'' of true love.

In the midst of the affair with her professor, for example, Phoebe's wide-eyed innocence remains heartbreakingly in place. Half-drunk and hungry for the professor's reassurance, she calls him late at night. `` 'I want to see you,' '' she shouts, ``in her best sex-toy voice - two parts pure bravura, one part little girl lost in the mall,'' hoping against hope that this time she'll find that which she cannot even name.

Brief, and sometimes comic, experiments in both promiscuity and celibacy are explored before the character settles down in a secure, healthy relationship. But the story doesn't end there, happily ever after, as one might expect. The reality of love is darker than any fairy tale, and Rosenfeld, to her credit, knows it. After a certain point, Phoebe realizes that even love can become boring, ``the way it always led down the same path, to the same ritualized lassitude, prompted by the same infantilizing gestures, the same debilitating vows ...'' Rosenfeld brings Phoebe's tale full circle to the hard reality few wish to acknowledge: that love isn't always magic, and that secure relationships do not spell the end of yearning.

Rather, the desire to stare at the next stranger you encounter on the subway and to create around him an elaborate fantasy of passion continues. Phoebe may have become wary of lust - ``the way it stamps whimsy with a sense of the inevitable ... and gloms onto a single name, a single face, a single tableau of our own raucous imaginations'' - as the inexplicable and logic-defining emotion it is. But to know the reality of desire, Rosenfeld reminds us, is not to be immune.

Los Angeles writer Bernadette Murphy is completing her first novel.

``What She Saw ...''

By Lucinda Rosenfeld

304 pages, Random House; $23.95.