THE SHOPLIFTER’S APPRENTICE <i> by Ellen Lesser (Simon & Schuster: $16.95; 127 pp.) </i>

Did he find her “lovely”? one of Ellen Lesser’s protagonists wonders while posing nude for a painter. “When he looked at her shoulder, delicately rendered, was he thinking of her?” Lesser’s sensitive characters often cast about this way for signs of who they are and what they want. Rather than experiencing the sudden epiphanies that lend drama to the lives of many fiction characters, however, they, like real people, must make do with only glimpses of self-discovery.

These glimpses (also as in real life) are often taken reluctantly. Rachel’s feelings are ambivalent, for instance, when the husband of her old college friend Susan enters the room just as Rachel was about to tell her how “so much of herself was suspended, how she seemed still to be only paying her dues . . . while other people were actually living.” “She greeted the sight of him with a mixture of indignation and relief,” Lesser writes. “She felt strangely vulnerable, precarious, as though she’d come to the brink of something and wasn’t sure whether she was being held back or saved.”

Lesser affirms her character’s indecision as natural and necessary in these gentle stories, subtly illustrating how a certain degree of reserve can help bind us to the human community. In the title story, for example, Rachel sees a “strangely handsome” man filch a champagne bottle from a store. More nervous than he, she flees the store, but after sleeping with him that night, she comes to envy his wealth of stolen amenities. Eventually, that “fine veil” separating her hands from the merchandise falls away, allowing her to take at will and stimulating a “rush of chemicals (that) wasn’t only fear, it was a terrible freedom. Anything could happen now.” By becoming so strong-headed, Lesser implies, the woman also has become isolated, unable to show vulnerability and thus, unable to receive love.