Dangerous to Men

A porcelain-skinned heiress, fresh from her father’s funeral pyre in Saigon, docks in San Francisco disguised as a giddy child; she intends to torment her appointed guardian—a stodgy botanist who still believes in parasols, stamp-collecting, and pre-war etiquette—until he begs for annulment of the wardship. Instead of crinolines she swathes herself in sailor suits, chews bubble-gum, and punctuates every syllable with a hopscotch skip, turning his Tudor mansion into a carnival of shrieks, broken Ming vases, and midnight ukulele raids. The ruse curdles when she unmasks the fiancée—an orchidaceous socialite whose laughter tinkles like counterfeit coin—as a fortune-hunter grazing simultaneously on the guardian’s bank account and on his octogenarian uncle’s plate-gold arteries. To detonate this sugar-coated scam, the pseudo-adolescent metamorphoses again: kohl-rimmed gaze, dropped waists, cigarette holders, becoming a siren who could sell sin in a Sunday-school corridor. In the ensuing tango of masks—child, coquette, avenger—she ricochets between nursery and boudoir until every pretense shatters like crystal under a stiletto. When the dust settles, only one appetite remains undisguised: the guardian’s realization that the woman he sought to pension off is the only partner who can match his heartbeat to hers.