“Isn’t it gorgeous? Let’s go for a ride.” The sparkle of enamel danced in her dark eyes.

“Sure,” he said, opening a door and leaning inside, wrinkling his nose at the smell of the leather. “But first I have to change my clothes. I can’t ride in this thing dressed in coveralls.”

Soon she was twirling through Griffith Park, speeding, testing the brakes and the cornering. Shrubbery flew past the window in a green blur. At one point she charged a stop sign and Paul stomped the floor and yelled out something in French. Colette panic-stopped the car just past the sign, a puff of rubber smoke blowing ahead. “What the hell are you trying to do?” he said.

She smiled and his neck hit the headrest as the car squealed through the intersection and up the mountain, Colette trying her best to drive like the helmeted men in the commercials. On the outsides of curves, the tires droned like cellos, and when she arrived at the observatory, she saw that Paul was sweating.

She threw her right arm on the back of his seat and pulled off her sunglasses. “Well, what do you think?”

He swallowed. “Is this how you have to drive to own one of these things?”

“I’m just testing it out.”

“Babe, if you tried to drive like this back home on our roads, you’d wind up wrapped around a live oak for sure.”

She drew back her arm, but her smile stayed. “In California the roads don’t have potholes big enough to flip you into the woods.”

Paul looked around at the instrumentation, felt the dash as though it were a museum piece. “How much did this thing cost?”

“A lot.” She stared at him hard.

“Nice machine,” he said. “Nice color, silver.” He looked at the emblem that rose from the hood like a gun sight. “This is the kind of car that people point at and say things like ‘Hey, look at that!’”

She leaned over and gave him a wet kiss, then mashed the accelerator, the car bounding away from the curb in a puff of brown smoke and squealing into the first curve. Paul was oblivious to the velocity and the noise, able to feel only a cool spot on his lips as they drove all the way to the foot of the observatory road, where the electric yawp of a siren rose behind them and a state patrolman pulled Colette over. He was a motorcycle officer in pants so tight, he looked like a ballet dancer. He took off his mirrored sunglasses, looked at Colette and then at the automobile, seeming to focus on the hood ornament, bobbing his head as though amused at some private joke. Then he wrote her a ticket for $206.

Colette took the paper without a word, raised her window, and smiled, driving off in a wispy clatter of valves.