I was trying to impress her by saying something about the political scene, and the expression on her face said "yet another American moron." French, beautiful, older, she had taken me for one last look at her extravagant Los Angeles home. "As an artist, I suspect you have an interest in such things."

Her architect husband had designed and built it, she told me, and shortly afterward, while on assignment in Switzerland, cellphoned to tell her the marriage was over. Freshly divorced, exhausted by career and near-deranged with rage, she was dispossessing the house at last and invited me, a colleague, to see it and then fuck me senseless.

Didn't care for the house; a glutinous cement parapet pretending to a brittle modernism. I gazed at her spangled Louboutins as she led me to the top of a perilous metal staircase, with a tilting skylight that slashed the entire abode in two. We walked through empty rooms ornamented with latter-day fixtures, and in the chambre à coucher she turned to face me. Behind her, in a long, horizontal glass, a glimmery plane gallantly streamed off LAX.

A month later, on July 4, she appeared in a short, cobalt and scarlet dress, sporting an asymmetrical hairstyle. I said she looked like a Bond girl. "I'm going to the Hollywood Bowl with a potential future husband" she told me. A wry, moving-on smile burst my love bomb mid-air. Shortly after that she bullied the company into an extravagant severance package and quit, then moved into a picturesque apartment on Venice Beach. Independence.

_{^{Image: Madame Furieuse by Monsieur Chariot}}