Flora was tall, with curly red-blonde hair, and deadly smart. She always wore either extremely short skirts or extremely low-cut tops, but never both together. This, she once explained to me, was the rule: show them what you've got, but leave them wanting more. She had marvelously big, springy, pendulous breasts with faint pink up-angled nipples, as well as stupendously long, well-shaped legs, which at the moment she was slipping into a pair of ragged jeans. It was to be a cleavage day, then. I watched her reddish bush disappear into zippered demin; Flora never wore underwear.

Flora's talk was densely populated with the assholes and bastards and shitheads and cocksuckers and ball-busters who worked in "the industry," as she called it. "The industry" was also known as "the business" and was what most people thought of as "Hollywood." Flora made a more-than-decent living writing screenplays that were always just-barely-not produced. These screenplays often almost-starred Dustin Hoffman or or Faye Dunaway or Al Pacino, but something always came up at the last minute. Say what she would about industry and its shitheads and brown-nosers and motherfuckers and ass-kissers, it certainly paid well enough to keep her in moderate poverty and inebriation on Avenue A, which is to say, enough to support several large families in Bangalore or Jakarta.

Flora had a lunch meeting with some  bastard or dickwad or other, so we planned to meet at seven at a loungy bar around the corner on Tenth Street. That meant I had a few hours to kill. I had to buy a birthday present for my wife, though, truth be told, the relationship wasn't what it once was. By the time that mission was accomplished, my stomach had started grumpling, so I walked back to Avenue A to a little Thai place I liked, across from the park. I walked in and sat at one of the three tables. Oddly enough, the staff were all Japanese. It was after two o'clock, so things were slow. The cashier--slender, short-haired, very cute--left her machine and sat at my table.

"Do you mind?" she asked.

"Not at all." The green curry was devilishly hot.

"You're a writer, aren't you?'

"Does it show?"

"Whenever I walk past the coffe shop down the street, I see you through the window. Writing, always writing."

"Not always."

"No, not always. Sometimes reading."

"That's true."

"My name's Yukimi."

"Yukimi."

"Just remember: You"--she pointed at me, "key"--she made a motion of turning a key, "me"--she pointed to herself. "Oh, customer--talk to you later!"

People kept coming in for takeout, so Yukimi was busy at the register when I left. As I went out the door, she smiled and repeated the gesture -- you-key-me.

I liked Avenue A. In those days there were still a few junkies and hookers and predators of various types about, but within five minutes I could walk to a few decent bars, a lot more awful bars, a good photo shop, Japanese, Indian, Thai, Ukranian, Korean, Italian, Mexican and Tibetan restaurants, and a couple of good cafes. I walked up the street, to the cafe Yukimi knew. It was a good place. The staff there were surly but helpful, the broken-down sofas weren't too broken-down, and the music was good. Good was a mix of Eastern European pop, jazz, old country, Japanese metal, and various other oddments. I sat there reading and occasionally writing for a long while.

I still had an hour before meeting Flora, so I went next door to Doc Holliday's for a few beers. I loathed the place, but I believe loathing sometimes needs to be cultivated. The fake-country schtick attracted college boys on the weekend nights, but in the afternoon it was relatively less unbearable. I drank my cheap beers, put in my loathing time, and left. Seven o'clock.

When I walked into the vaguely seedy, vaguely trendy lounge on Tenth, Flora was seated at the bar, already boozy, talking with a Very Famous Movie Actress, also boozy. They were both laughing like elderly, depraved junior high girls, and neither saw me for at first.

Several years before, the Very Famous Movie Actress had made just one very, very big film, and nobody now remembered anything else she had done. The movie wasn't even very good, and of that whole film people only really remembered one particular scene, most particularly one five-second shot in which she showed the world a few linear centimeters of inward-turning flesh. On this rested her entire reputation. But the planet's most famous snatch had been good to her, and, years later, she was still spread (her face, that is) across metro station posters and the foldout pages of fashion magazines, shilling for cosmetics and perfumes around the globe.

The Very Famous Movie Actress was at that moment dressed in a thick gray turtleneck sweater and jeans, and looked great. Flora finally noticed me and made the introductions.

"So, is this your new boyfriend?" asked the Very Famous Movie Actress, keeping her eyes on mine.

"No. Lover."

"Does that mean I can borrow him?"

"We'll talk later."

The Very Famous Movie Actress disengaged my pupils. "I'll call you," she told Flora.

"Ciao."

"Ciao."

I watched her sway out the door. There was a car waiting outside.

"Well," said Flora, "What's for dinner?"

We argued back and forth for a couple of more drinks, but Flora was feeling cranky and drunk and unsociable, and so finally we decided to pick up some Chinese and take it back to her place. We sat at the tiny round formica table dipping our chopsticks into paper cartons and drinking cheap red wine.

"So, what do you have for me," Flora asked.

"What?" I had no idea.

"The backstory. The backstory of the fucking screenplay. Don't tell me you forg--"

"No, of course not."

"I'm waiting." I could barely remember the story, much less come up with a backstory. I'd been drinking, after all. And it had been nearly a week.

I tired to get the facts straight. "So... the killer... and his sexual, um, obsessions, right? The point is to explain how he got to be--"

"Yeah, yeah. Cut to the chase."

"As a child, he was sexually ab--" Flora squinched her lips together. She wasn't blinking.

"All right, let's say his mother really wanted a girl, so she dressed him as a--"

Her hands clasped together under her chin. Clenched. 

"OK, how about-- his father... his father was a secret transvestite, and--"

Her eyebrows scrunched together above her nose.

"Or... his family life was completely normal until the abduction...."

She glared.

"...by aliens. You could do it all with a couple of flashbacks. Subtly. OK, at the age of eight, he was taken up into their ship and subjected him to the works-- the proverbial anal probe, mind-fucking with his gender identity--hell, maybe even his species identity--reconfiguring his basic neurochemistry.... and you know, you had that seemingly pointless conversation between the two nuns about heaven and angels in the opening sequence.... What?"

The clenching and scrunching and squinching had vanished. She just stared. "I like it!"

"You do?"

"It's perfect! It ties it all together--the sexual confusion, the obsession with astronomy, the unnatrurally close relationship with his cat, the nuns... Oh, this is good. This is good. Let's see those ball-busters say no this. First thing tomorrow, I'm calling Elsa."

"Tomorrow's Sunday."

"Fuck Sunday. I'm calling her at dawn."

"I want story credit."

"Talk to my agent."

"Perfect. I'll talk to her tomorrow at dawn."

"Fuck that. You're not staying the night, and you're sure as fuck not talking to my agent. Besides, she'd drop me like a hot rock if she knew I was screwing a playwright."

"What a coincidence. My wife would drop me if she knew I was screwing a screenwriter."

"Duh."

"Actually, the screenwriter part would bother her a lot more than the screwing part. It'd be pretty much OK if you were an accountant or a cosmetologist. I could screw all the cosmetologists I like."

"Then why don't you?"

"Cosmetologists wouldn't go for me."

"They're not fucked up enough?"

"Yeah, too much self-esteem or something."

"So, what's she got against screenwriters, anyway?"

"It's not just screenwriters. It's actresses, painters, poets, oboists, sculptors, engravers, lighting designers, dancers, photographers, mimes, conductors, puppeteers... artists in general." She stopped her spoon halfway to her mouth and looked at me with real disgust.

"You'd screw a mime?"

"Why not? Imagine the sex."

"Why bother? Just screw a cosmetologist and wear earplugs."

That seemed to exhaust the topic, so we adjourned to the bedroom, where we got down to the serious business of manipulating and penetrating each other in various enjoyable ways. Flora was an extraordinarily good technician with a loving attention to detail, but she only came when she was on the bottom. This night she spent a lot of time on top, humoring me because she knew I enjoyed the view. She really did have spectacular tits.

It took some time for us to catch our breath afterward. We had worked up a sweat, and Flora's curls were plastered to her forehead. She propped herself on one elbow and looked at me.

"Seriously, what's she got against artists?" she asked.

"She thinks they're untrustworthy and promiscuous."

"Duh."