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hated us. You were from England and he was from Australia. We were like a reunion of colonies in a slow, slow car. I told you how my godmother had warned me against coming to Rennes. She said it was ugly, but I told you it reminded me of Canada. It was the first French place I’d been where I could see a connection to home.
    The three of us stayed in an old farmhouse they’d turned into a hostel. The rooms were like dormitories. The women’s room had rows of beds on two sides, set under the dormers. It made me think of an old musical my mother liked to watch, about seven girls trapped in a house with seven brothers. When we slept in those beds, we were like those girls. We bought bread and cheese in the village. Nigel had food we hadn’t seen in France: peanut butter, vegemite. We were starved for peanut butter. There was no kitchen and we ate off plastic bags on a picnic table in the yard, cutting everything with the same knife.
    We rented bicycles. We biked down between the trees on small roads and the ferns came to our shoulders. I was out in front, used to hills, you and Nigel behind. I had to stop pedalling and coast so as not to lose you. Nigel was surprised that my legs were so strong. It embarrassed him.
    Once a week I called my boyfriend in Canada and cried into the phone. I missed him in a practiced way, full of guilt and habit. We’d been living together a year. But I knew if I went home I would betray him again. The other man was a fifty-minute streetcar ride from my apartment. In the beginning I didn’t even know why I was making the trip. I would just dance up and down on one side of his kitchen counter and drink a lot of coffee. One day I sat on the arm of his couch, telling him things, and he stood behind me and slid his hands down into the neckline of my shirt. The tips of his fingers against my nipples. This is something I allowed. Once I brought over a book of poetry I loved and he said, about the author, She used to live here for a while. They’d been married while I was still in nursery school.
    He was someone I met on a job interview. I was about to graduate and thinking very keenly about what I might do with my life. On the way home from the interview I did what Mary used to do in the opening credits of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where she threw her hat up in the air and spun around. It was April, but still quite cold.
    The first time I saw him, we went to see a documentary about a woman who ran a brothel. I called my boyfriend and said I was staying downtown with this other man. It wasn’t a secret; everyone knew we were friends. My boyfriend said nothing to me about this friendship. We never fought about it. We were both pretending I was someone I’m not. I don’t know how to explain this. It was like walking a worn path: you just can’t see anything else, or any other way. Other people were more suspicious. They asked, What does a forty-five-year-old man want with a twenty-two-year-old girl?
    You can say this the other way around: What does a twenty-two-year-old girl want with a forty-five-year-old man. One day we were in bed and I looked down and saw a bra lying on the floor. Lace. C cup. He told me there was a woman living in his house. She’d been living there a year; they were trying to have a baby. The woman had once had a baby with someone else, but that baby died.
    You told me you were sleeping with your professor. He had invited you to live in his house in Manchester, with him and his wife. One night he came upstairs. I’m in my nightgown, you said, and he sits down on the edge of my bed and I start to cry.
    You had a boyfriend, too, with whom you were trying to work things out. We looked upon this coincidence like a lost ring found in the pocket of a coat you haven’t worn for a year.
    Everything was a mess, and we walked enormous distances together. We walked instead of hitchhiking. I wanted to see the house of Mme. de Sévigné.