So, she starts talking and she won’t stop. I think she was just waiting for someone to come along so she could unload her whole story. Now listen to this: she says she was discovered one day riding her bicycle down a dusty street in some tiny village in Norway to buy bread for her mother. She’s fifteen or sixteen at the time and some sleazeball steps out of a BMW in a slick suit and asks her if she wants to be a high-fashion model. That was it. She goes back and tells her parents the news and her mother’s mad because she’s forgotten to buy the bread but her father smells money and wants to meet the sleazeball. Next thing they know, the whole family’s on a plane to Paris.

The whole family?

Well yeah, she’s underage so her parents have to come along to chaperone.

Oh.

So, she comes to Paris and she’s an overnight success. She’s on the cover of international magazines; she’s making big money hand over fist; she travels to New York, Rome, Munich, London; all over the place.

With her parents still?

Still with her parents. I mean, can you imagine—they’re all from this little spit of a village in the backwoods of Norway; her dad’s a mailman or something, her mother’s never been on an airplane in her whole life, and suddenly they’re all thrown into this high-powered fashion world with photographers stalking them and agents cutting each other’s throats to get a piece of her.

No wonder she looked older than she actually was.

What?

No wonder she had sad eyes.

Right. Anyhow—long story short. After about three or four years of this her father commits suicide.

Oh no!

He throws himself off a cruise ship in the Bahamas and he’s never seen again.

My God.

A year later, her mother kills herself.

Stop it.

She does. Hangs herself in a hotel closet. The girl finds her the next morning.

The daughter?

Yeah. Just finds her hanging there with a bathrobe sash tied around her neck.

How old is she now?

The girl?

Yeah. The daughter. The model.

Pushing twenty, I guess.

Twenty. That’s still young. So what happens then?

She comes back to Paris and starts using smack.

This is a true story?

That’s what she told me.

And you believed her?

Why not?

You’d believe anything with a skirt attached to it.

No, I was way too drunk to care about bagging her. I was just listening.

And this is your provocation for condemning the French? They, somehow, corrupted a poor, innocent little girl from an itty-bitty Norwegian village? That’s kind of lame.

No, let me finish.

There’s more?