The last time I saw her was in the Gare du Nord.  She didn’t notice me, across the tracks in my tweed coat and angora beret, dressed a little too warmly for the unseasonably mild Parisian day.  She, on the other hand, was noticed by everyone, as she had always been.  Raven curls, sparkling green eyes, lips upturned in perpetual laughter.  And the red scarf.  Always the red scarf.  Even at – what were we then? – 50? – She was the woman every man noticed.  And every woman, too, for that matter.

I could have yelled across the expanse, but would it have mattered?  The station was a cacophony of screeching brakes as trains slowed to disgorge passengers and swallow new ones.  Families with matching luggage bumped two-wheelers down the steps to the platforms, waiting to board for Bordeaux, Barcelona, Prague.  Chattering children ran too far ahead of their parents.  Coffee splashed and spilled.  Tearful goodbyes were shared. Would she have heard me above such a din?

I first met Genevieve on move-in day at a small New England college that has since gone under. Like so many things in my life – gone.  My childhood home razed for condominiums. The apple farm where I picked Gravensteins and McIntoshes for my Mom’s famous apple strudel, sacrificed to airport expansion.  My Mom, too, gone from cancer at 81.  Not tragically young.  Just tragic for me.  My husband.  Gone, too. Gone with his clothes and the living room furniture; his toothbrush the only reminder that he had ever been there.  I suppose his leaving was tragic, too.  I don’t remember.

And Genevieve.  Genevieve had gone, as well, maybe thirty years ago, without explanation.  We heard she was in Berlin.  Or South Africa.  Or nowhere.  But here she was again, framed by the filtered light from the clerestory windows.  Just across the tracks. 

We had been inseparable from the first day of school, when she appeared, not carting carloads of records, books, clothes, and prints of Modigliani’s thin-necked blank-eyed women, like the rest of us.  One tapestry duffel was all she carried.  While everyone else unpacked and complained that there was not enough space for our record players, coffee makers, assortments of shampoos, perfumes, and lotions, she took five minutes to settle into our triple, then spent the rest of the afternoon reading The Joy of Sex and drinking Southern Comfort on her bed.  I loved her for that. I could not look away.  We lived poetry and breathed art.  We smoked Gauloises when we could get them, Marlboro’s when we could not.  We documented our lives in moody black and white photographs.  Here’s Gen catching snowflakes on her tongue.  Here I am dangling from a tree in my thrift shop finest.  Gen in the darkroom developing her series on women crying.  Me, painting the patterns made by cracked ice on the frozen lake.  Boys came around, but they weren’t as interesting to us as we were to each other.  We were each other’s worlds.  We needed no other.

Then suddenly, after four years of philosophy and anthropology, and feminist theory and iambic pentameter, after the Great Adventure of learning that there were great meals and horrid people in every country in Europe, after graduating with honors (me) and Suma Cum Laude (her) and landing poverty-level jobs in non-profit arts organizations, after signing a lease together on a two-bedroom with a view of the fire escape, after three straight months of heady soirees to celebrate our quasi-independence, one night she simply didn’t come home.  A week of panic, of talking to her parents, of talking to the police, of calling every single person mentioned in her journal, and then – a scrap of paper floated out of the pocket of my favorite sweater.  “Sorry.”

So I stood on the platform, staring at her, but not making a sound.  A train rolled in noisily.  Conductors yelled.  A great crowd of people snapped alert and rushed the train as seemingly thousands of people pushed their way off and then thousands more pushed their way on.  It was my train, but I stood immobile, willing Genevieve to look through the train windows and see me, as I was seeing her. Her head swiveled slowly and she stared in my direction, but I don’t know.  The train, full again, sighed mightily and belched on its way.  Car after car clattered along, and in a great final whoosh was gone.  And so was Genevieve.