I unlocked the door to my hodgepodge decor. A plush blue sofa plumped beside a knockoff Eames dining room set. Lamps jutted in corners like twin rockets. Black-and-white photos of empty sidewalks hung on the wall. The sunlight in the apartment made the least effort and offered the most comfort—the long windows boasted no view but a busy street, yet they cast a lovely glow across the rooms. The woman who had sublet the place to me was a single, globetrotting airline food consultant who was gone for long stretches. She was groomed to the last cuticle and name-dropped her visits to international cities with a determined pleasure. And yet there were three dressers in the bedroom, a lot of expensive matching dishes tucked away in a closet box, and it was clear she’d owned a cat—the sofa was scratched. I wondered if she’d had a different life once.

I grabbed my stack of notes and sat down on the couch to page through them. In a few days, the actress was going to New York to play the real, still-living Françoise Gilot in a Broadway production of Pablo Picasso’s life. At age sixty-one, in Nazi-occupied Paris, Picasso had wandered up to two attractive young women sitting at a café table and offered them cherries. One of them, Françoise Gilot, was an emerging painter with a gallery show. Gilot had a luminous face—a long nose, dark eyebrows, and lush dark hair—and an intellectual and emotional fearlessness that drew Picasso to her, and she to him. They became confidants, then lovers, and later Gilot became the mother to two of his children. She also famously dumped Picasso in 1953.

In one of my fantasies, the actress and I would eat our requisite salads with dainty sides of grilled cheese and share our secret, abiding love for Gilot. Centuries of Western Civilization have seen many female beauties, geniuses, and queens, but only the most powerful, lovely, or prolific have made it into history books. Gilot happened to be all of the above, and she carved her own path despite Picasso’s vindictive attempts to squash her career. “If you attempt to take a step outside my reality . . . you’re headed straight for the desert,” he said when she told him she was leaving him. “And if you go, that’s exactly what I wish for you.”

Lying on the couch, I lingered over a splendid photo of Gilot and Picasso on the beach in Antibes in 1946, early in their relationship. She walks ahead of him, beaming, in a straw hat, a narrow-waisted beach dress, a necklace of chunky white shells. Her arms swing, her head is thrown back, her hair falls to her shoulders. Behind her follows Picasso, hoisting an enormous umbrella, its white fringe shining in the sun. Picasso, too, wears a smile, but the lines of his aging face make it a frowning smile, his eyes darkened with dread.