He pulled up as I walked on the side of a busy Lyon road, the type that becomes a highway once it hits the outskirts of town. Ignoring the thick traffic behind him, he stalked me slowly in a compact car, beckoned to me through his open window, across the empty passenger seat.
In a square outside a large church, likely Catholic, I stared through the sides of a glass phone booth onto the late-July day. Green hovered somewhere high, probably the leaves of plane trees and their shadows, as well as bright coins of light.
Wet, red, and sweet, I consumed almost enough of the fruit to make myself sick. Between Paris and Aix-en-Provence, one of my closest friendships had dissolved. Elle and I knew each other from Cheyenne, though our intimacy only flourished during our college years in Amherst.
The alchemy of sharing tea rolls and conversation, of steadily revealing our wounded, ecstatic emotional selves on long car rides around the Pioneer Valley, had quickly deepened an adolescent acquaintance into an early adult friendship.
There was something wild and charming about Elleβher bawdy stories and her good table manners. I have the image of her tall, slim frame striking power poses in the kitchen I shared with my older sister and young niece. The sudden dissolution of our friendship and its summer travel plansβfirst stop Paris, then Aix-en-Provence and Dijonβleft me feeling my company, my very being, was unwanted. An insecure twenty-three-year-old prude, I made the people around me feel guilty for hunting their pleasure.
