"Look, I'm not defined by this relationship. I wasn't when I was in it and, I don't want to be in the aftermath of it. And that's really important to me. Let's let everybody move on and live their lives, and hopefully everybody will be really happy."

  Jennifer Aniston never wanted to be a poster girl. Really, she did''t. But somehow, she became the Ninties' answer to Farrah Fawcett: TV's prime-time paragon of feminine beauty, imitated everywhere from the halls of high fashion to the most mundane suburban malls.

  Sometimes we ask the dumbest questions, introducing topics we're too cowardly to bring up in any forthright or otherwise respectable way, we play dumb, pretending the insane question we're about to ask isn't attached to a painfully intimate, complex answer.

  Just such a question was asked of Jennifer Aniston recently: It was pathetic, and it went something like this: So, what have you learned lately?

  The answer began with a deep, involuntary laugh that continued for several seconds before subsiding as Ms. Aniston collected herself courteously, straightening herself up on the ottoman on which she was perched, and then continued, "Hmmm. Let's see." She considered. "Not much. It's been pretty slow. Everything's just coasting along...," she said, and then she gave me a king of healing half smile and amended her answer. "I don't know. Everything?"

  Last August, a Santa Barbara man allegedly took a cab to Malibu, stiffed the driver, scaled a nine-foot fence, slipped through the front door of Jennifer Aniston's rented two-bedroom house, and announced that Ms. Aniston was expecting him. Though he was soon chased down the beach by the housekeeper, arrested for burglary, and ordered by a judge to come no closer than one hundred yards of Aniston until 2008, the man's real misfortune was his timing. For once she wasn't home. "I'm trying to hatch a plan where I don't actually have to leave the house, and I think I'm figuring it out. I haven't got it quite down," she says, but then reconsiders. "Let's see... I got home last Thursday from Chicago, and I didn't leave the house until Tuesday. So that's six days, and I didn't feel like I hadn't left. I had walks on the beach. I got as much of my reading done as I could. I thought it was great."

  The house Aniston is not leaving is an unfussy beach bungalow, built of dark wood and filled with white furniture and artifacts that project a carefully cultivated calm, a soothing aesthetic born of Asia and priced and packaged in Santa Monica. A large stone bowl filled with koi and lotus blossoms sits at the front door in the gaze of a young Buddha. Incense is burning in the hallway. On the white walls of the foyer are panels depicting comical, curiously unsexy sexual positions as prescribed in the Kama Sutra. On another wall is a sepia-toned photo of an enormous elephant cuddling with a little Asian boy, taken by the photographer Gregory Colbert, whose pictures of big animals and small children her ex-husband collected.

  She's alone inside. Posted out front is man who knows my name, and I suspect there's another man sweeping the beach or patrolling the slender strip of land around the house. She's been sitting on the back deck writing thank-you notes when I arrive. She greets me at the door, barefoot and with an easy smile you don't expect of someone so hunted. She acts happy to see me-- there's a genuine sense in which she seems flattered that someone came all this way to see her; to hear what she has to say. Of course, maybe she's acting.

  When she lets me in, her mood changes as she discovers that the note she's just written has fluttered off the back deck on the wind. "That blows," Aniston says, holding her hair back with one hand and scanning the beach for signs of stationery. "That literally blows." She stands on tiptoe, nine-tenths of her taut legs stretching out from faded Levi's cutoffs, an inch of fringe flipped up to good effect. She squints into the sun and bites her lip just like Rachel Green might, perhaps picturing the inevitable celebrity-weekly close-up of that same note in a grainy circle beside a photo of her writing on the deck, taken by one of the photographers that trawl the beach in front of her house, disguised as regular beachgoers, with their rented girlfriends and their coolers stuffed with Telephoto lenses. I study her face of clues: Whom was the note written to, and how much would it blow for it to end up in the hands of Bonnie Fuller?

  As always, her body is in fighting shape, an asset too valuable not to be tuned and tanned and mostly uncovered. These months at the beach have given her a soft Pacific glow, from the brown tops of her feet to the prominent sculpture of her collarbones. A layer of downy blond hair stands at static attention on her upper arms; goose bumps cover her fat-free thighs. The famous hair is plentiful, an expensive tangle of highlights piled on her head and fastened somewhere I can't see. Long strands of it fall around her face. Part of me hopes she didn't shower for the occasion-- so sure-footed and confident in her natural beauty that she couldn't be bothered - but I suspect she has.

  She's wearing a necklace with a pendant bearing an Asian symbol. Beneath her filmy blue tank top is a black bra that looks expensive and is probably French. Her arms suggest a kind of feminine competence, contoured by years of effort and smoothed by shea butter. You wonder why she'd ever wear sleeves, if in fact she ever does.

  "Ah! Here it is!" she calls, spotting the off-white card that has blown through the French doors and into the sunny, most-sized living room. She plucks it off the ultrashaggy rug beneath us, slides it back into the envelope, and tucks it away. "Thank God," she says, folding one leg beneath her on the ottoman and stretching the other toward her dog, Norman. She is alert and open-- eager, almost. Her posture is excellent.

  Aniston has created a haven here, a comfortable cove where the honking blather of 2005 is kept at bay. The rumble of the Pacific is the dominant soundtrack, every surface except the glass coffee table is plush and forgiving, and the farthest any guest would have to reach for a smoke and a light is the eastern edge of the, where a squat crystal cylinder is filled with loose Merits. The detritus of heartbreak therapy is everywhere: a Vatican-sized cache of candles, an Ani DiFranco CD sitting on the speaker, a lazy sleeping dg to nuzzle and scratch, even a copy of Shel Silverstein's classic postbreakup self-esteem booster, The Missing Piece Meets the Big O.

  Aniston says that she has banished all the self-help from her bookshelves - says she's reached the point where "you say, 'Stop. Just stop looking at these other people's words. Your instincts are pretty all right.'" At this point, she seems less willing to "honor her journey" than to mock it, as well as all the articles about her "progress", with their "authoritative" diagnoses. "You know," and here she adopts a Terry Gross-as-life-coach voice, "the one where I'm 'surviving' and I'm doing 'okay'. Look, I'm not defined by this relationship. I wasn't when I was in it and, I don't want to be in the aftermath of it. And that's really important to me. Let's let everybody move on and live their lives, and hopefully everybody will be really happy."

  In the middle of the Malibu house is an open stairway that leads to the bedroom where Aniston sleeps. She describes herself as a "night processor", a phrase she invented to describe the phenomenon whereby she goes to sleep with questions and problems and wakes up with something like answers and solutions. The issues may be mundane and material or may be something else entirely. "I wake up and I'm like, I have to move the couch, you know? Or I gotta call my mother. Who knows? It could be, I don't know... How am I going to get through the next few months with some dignity and grace?"

  This year Aniston did exactly that. When the world begged for spite and bite, she tight-lipped in her ripped jeans, flip-flops, and summer-camp hoodie, on a movie set or at Courteney Cox's beach house, looking adorably brave. Her formula was straightforward: Keep your intentions clean and your mouth shut. And when you finally do open it - after all, the movie studios that employ you require it-- let your friends drop the withering quotes about your ex, leaving you to ride above the fray. Provide no commentary as he and his girlfriend span the globe, bringing glamour and greenbacks and goodwill wherever they go, carrying on in a casually flaunting manner that's just a bit disrespectful of your five years together. So if it's easier that you not leave the house for a while-- not see the play-by-play dissolution of the marriage depicted in fuchsia-and-yellow relief on every newsstand, not gaze up at the gargantuan billboard of the two of them looming over La Cienega Boulevard for five fucking moments and counting, not hear the Kanye West song that likens you to a jilted rapper... Well, let's just hope you've got a comfortable place by the shore in which to hole up with friends and quietly shed the parts of you that was Mrs. Brad Pitt.

  Since the very beginning of this year, when she and Pitt announced their separation, Aniston has garnered more sympathy than grieving Iraqi-war mothers, hurricane victims, and brain-dead Floridians. She has been a one-woman boon to the magazine industry, providing Us Weekly with nine cover photos and the year's best-seller, which included the headline JEN'S REVENGE. When she appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair, it was the magazine's best-selling issue since Carolyn Bessette Kennedy appeared post-humously in 1999.

  She tried not to be bothered by the Brad and ----- show-- the well-documented walks on the beach, the trip to the amusement park with ----'s adopted children, the way their relationship seeped out, photo by photo, as if they had enlisted In Touch Weekly to present their new love to the world. I ask her if she resents the way their relationship has unfolded so publicly. "No," she answers, "because I know what it is. I know what it is" - meaning, I think, a photo orgy orchestrated by the tabloids. "Yeah, there's a little bit of the 'C'mon, enough already. Just stop it.'" Ultimately, she'd rather transfer the blame to the people who publish the pictures, profit from her turmoil, and pick at the remains of her marriage as though it were carrion. "They serve the worst part of our culture," she says. "We've never needed to join together as people more than now, and still there's this sick need to take our own down - we're just dying to see other people get ripped apart or get some joy out of that." Consider the New York Post column Page Six, which claimed that Aniston would reveal in her Vanity Fair interview that Brad cheated. Despite her rep's denial, the columnist felt sure he'd have "the last laugh". "As if there's anything to laugh about in this whole situation at all," Aniston says. "That was just a game to him, this sick #$^%."

  Despite the million dollars an episode she was paid for Friends and her marriage to the world's most desirable man, Jennifer has always felt surprisingly familiar - approachable, even-- it's the backbone of her appeal, the key to her stardom. As she sits here in the living room of this prime beachfront rental, where everything she needs and desires - meals, friends, haircuts-- can be summoned instantly, she somehow still seems like the Jens we've known. The year she was born, 1969, Jennifer was the second most common girl's name in America, and in many ways, Aniston is everyone's Jen, the lovable striver who shuffled through the dorm in boxers and bunny slippers or got laid out by one too many Jäger shots. We've seen that jaw clench when her mother calls, seen her flip and reflip the hair until it's just right, seen her order the frilled-chicken salad and ask for the dressing on the side. Perhaps not the hottest girl in the room, but the hottest funny girl by far.

  So we root for Jennifer, because we know her struggles so well. All along we knew that our hometown girl would meet her match - be undone by a restless, shortsighted man and the fleeting allure of some dark beauty. In John Hughes terms, it's the quarterback of the football team waltzing off with the exotic exchange student while the homecoming queen is left crying on the bleachers. We're all pretty certain she deserved better.

  But the "America's sweetheart" rap gets tiresome, and limiting. Even Jennifer Aniston needs to play against type once in a while. Maybe that's why she chose to do Derailed, even though she had doubts early on about her place in such an edgy, violent movie. "It's Pavlovian," she says, "It was just the typical 'Oh, I don't buy me in this part.' It's just fear. Sort of like I felt when I read The Good Girl. That happens with projects that are a little more challenging. It's just a normal process." Derailed shows us another side of her. The one that's more dangerous that cute; tempting and just a little damaged, the picture of commuter melancholy in heels. Though we'll have trouble watching Rachel Green endure physical traumas that would never happen at Central Perk - being held at gunpoint by Xzibit - we'll enjoy watching her extramarital grapplings with Clive Owen, who seems to press himself against her in every dark alley of Chicago.

  If you have to make out with someone in a movie, I offer hopefully -

  "Let it be Clive Owen," she finishes. "He's just dashing. He's a debonair and dashing and dreamy. And,"' she continues, holding up her index finger to pause for a moment, "if you're going to be raped in a movie, it may as well be Vincent Cassel. I guess I was doing pretty good on both ends."'

  She has completed four movies in the past twelve months. In addition to Derailed, this month she'll star in a pseudo-sequel to The Graduate called Rumor Has It, as Mark Ruffalo's adrift fiancee who attempts to make sense of the present by reconnecting family events of thirty years ago that she believes inspired the story of The Graduate. It is the least surprising of her new roles, because it allows her to do what she does better than anyone: brow-crunching, befuddlement, zany confusion. In Friends with Money, which was directed by Nicole Holofcener (Lovely & Amazing), she plays a wake-and-bake housecleaner whose friends-- Catherine Keener, Frances McDormand, and Joan Cusack - all seem to have grown up and moved on without her. "I'm the stoner maid," she explains, "and I just can't seem to get my shit together. I steal from the people whose houses I clean, and I smoke their pot. It's definitely not a vanity piece."

  Having survived the Technicolor dissolution of her marriage, Aniston is not feeling terribly risk-averse about anything. "I think you have to be willing to fail," she says. "That's been a big lesson for me over the last year and a half of my life, that our definition of failure is sort of limited. It means just one thing: It's bad. You failed. You suck. As opposed to: You learned something, you got something out of it. You have to be willing to risk losing... love, risk losing relationships, risk losing friends by being truthful, you know what I mean?"

  But the project with the biggest buzz is The Break Up - if only because of those ubiquitous on-set photos of her cuddling with costar Vince Vaughn, and the reality-based ones that have emerged since (JEN'S LAP DANCE screamed the headline on the cover of the Post recently, accompanied by a photo of Aniston straddling and kissing Vaughn). In this movie, the two share a condominium that both refuse to leave after their relationship goes south. Aniston, for one, thinks it's going to be great. "But who knows? It could suck. I don't think it will, but if it does, I don't care. I had a blast."

  She slips off the ottoman and onto the cushy shag carpet next to her aged mutt, a former castmate. After he appeared on Friends, she had head shots made for him, but he was never hired again. "He was so fucking lazy that nobody wanted to work with him." She laughs. "He had this bad reputation."

  I reach for the crystal canister on the end table. "Do you mind?" I ask.

  "That's what they're there for," she replies cheerfully, and though she told me earlier that she restricts her vice to after dark, she takes a Merit herself. After all, she is entertaining. "I don't make people smoke on the deck," she says, screwing up her mouth, expressing her disapproval of the sort of people who do. She fetches two bottles of cold Evian and settles down to enjoy the day's first cigarette.

  "What were we talking about," she wonders. "Chicago?"

  Apart from the obvious therapeutic benefits of hanging out with Vaughn in his hometown at the peak of baseball and beer-drinking season - I like the idea of her in the stands with a Miller Lite mustache and bratwurst breath - the movie's plot had an odd and fortunate way of weaving in and out of her marital predicament. "I was able to kind of have a personal experience feed my creative experience and be close enough to it so I could access stuff, but also far enough away from it so I wasn't tortured and had to be put away. I never experienced that doing a movie called The Break Up could be as cathartic as it was... I guess I should have seen that one a mile away," she says, and laughs. "I had a blast. I danced more and played more in the last two months than in the last ten years."

  "Ten years?" I ask skeptically.

  She reconsiders. "It is kind of a grand statement, isn't it?"

  "I just wonder if the math is correct."

  "Let'' just say I went out dancing more than I have. Because tha''s a true fact."

  Something else happened in Chicago. She doesn't remember where she was or whom she was with, but at some point she looked up and emerged from the numbing haze that had engulfed her. "One say it's like a switch went off, and all of a sudden it was like, Men! Everywhere!" She smiles again and I notice goose bumps covering the tender undersides of her arms. "The cloud is lifting," she says. "I'm starting to see the light, and it's good."

  She may be rediscovering men-- and Vaughn might be the major revelation - but Aniston still slips into a healing estrogen bath from time to time, surrounding herself with old friends, new friends, Oprah, who hosted a weekend pajama party for Jen in September. While Aniston insists she's not "some über-feminist girl-power kind of chick," she concedes that weeks after the sleepover, she is "still on the Oprah high." She won't get specific - after all, she wants to be invited back - but does say that "Oprah knows how to throw up her skirt and have a good time."

  Aniston is convincing when she tells you the breakup isn't the worst thing that could happen to her. Part of her feels a responsibility to handle it well. "There are so man women who are crippled by divorce," she says, "crippled by it. Can't walk, and can't wake up again. I felt like there was a little part of it that I could put out there that was not about airing my dirty laundry but was just sort of saying that you can get through something like this and be as happy, if not happier, again."

  I remind her that she once said she wanted to be "a young mother" - and that she said it 1997. She laughs yet again, though faintly this time. It is her default response.

  "Oh well," she says, her palms up. "I really believed that. But then one day, you wake up and you realize, Well, that's not gonna happen..." She says this with a kind of screwball inflection that inspires confidence. She can handle this.

  She's looking forward to falling in love again. She feels fortunate that she'll get at least one more chance to experience that pheromonal craze that comes when the love is new and strong and right. She's standing on the back deck of her house now, leaning out toward the Pacific on the kind of afternoon that people move to Malibu for; the breeze is just cool enough to mitigate the abundant sunshine. She points out where the photographers stand in the surf and take aim as the sunbathes on the deck, and the canvas panels she's having made to thwart them.

  By the time you read this, Jennifer Aniston's dalliances - be they with Vaughn or some other lucky guy - will surely have helped her forget all about that dreamy ex-husband of hers. Too bad it will all have to be so public. She can close her eyes and conjure the pictures, write the headlines - can already see the complications. "It's just a bummer," she says. "It's such a hassle to think that you can't easily and privately fall in love or be courted or anything. But I doubt I have a choice in the matter. It's just something that comes with the dinner."

  Recently, Gwyneth Paltrow suggested that Aniston and her ex-husband were too willing to share their joy when the marriage was in good shape, and now they are paying the price. It seems a harsh thing to say about your ex and his former wife, but Aniston defends her. "You know, she's right. She's absolutely correct. I feel like there is a graveyard of celebrity couples who now have learned their lesson. You know, at the time you go, 'Celebrate it-- we're in love, and let's talk, and who cares?' Part of that's true. It kind of became a bizarre feeding frenzy for a period there. It just got a little out of control, that's all. So you learn those lessons. It's just about learning what to keep sacred."

  "What's the best thing about not being married?" I ask her.

  "Ahhh," she says gamely. "What's the best thing about not being married..." She slaps her thigh heartily and smiles too quickly. "Well... a lot of best things... There's a lot of good things, hard to say... What are good things about not being married, ahh... " and the silence builds. I hear the waves gathering themselves up and crashing on the beach outside. I see her face tighten, her jaw clenching, and I see the ordinariness of the heartbreak that lingers and the inadvertent cruelty of the question. "Ah, I don't know. I'm not good at these questions. Well, no, I'm trying to think. I can say, well, this is all mine," she says as she looks hopefully around the room, "so there's the good and the bad. And I guess you could say that I get to date again, which is - " she laughs "dreadful, but there is that fun of falling in love again, and people usually enjoy that part of a relationship."

  Aniston's not hiding a thing. America's sweetheart is a 36-year-old divorcee with a fresh perspective and a whole lot of lessons learned. She's a little sad, but don't you dwell on it. She'll get over it before you will.

  It is here that, in the spirit of bright futures and the enduring promise of a new romance, I say something else insane. "I guess now you can make out with strangers in bars," I offer, and she laughs in my face.