She told me about a past lover named Lucy who had been a truly magnetic and irresistible person. Lucy could talk, she said, enchantingly and for hours on a whole range of subjects. She was studying geopolitics and the Russian language, and told everyone she wanted to be a foreign correspondent. She had an enormous amount of hobbies and interests. Flying kites, for instance. That was one of the things they had first talked about, was her love of kite-flying. Although now, she said, looking back on it she realized Lucy might have been the kind of person who played up her hobbies in order to make herself seem like a more interesting and unusual person than she really was. Anecdotally, she did not remember Lucy actually ever flying a kite, but this proved nothing. Lucy also surfed, skiied, played recreational hockey, swam on the women’s water polo team, spoke two foreign languages in addittion to Russian, and had learned to fly a biplane by herself as a teenager in rural Indiana. She remembered long conversations in which Lucy talked for hours while entire groups of people listened. She was the funniest person in any room she was in, and it seemed she was friends with every single person on campus, so that when they walked around together she had the feeling she was walking around with a celebrity. Lucy was the most fantastic storyteller and letter-writer, and wrote her jaw-dropping poetry, love letters, even quoted from Vita Sackville West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, which she now understood was embarrassing, but at the time she found quite moving. The letters she wrote were pages long, and came regularly, slipped under the door into her dorm room or slipped into the door jamb. She had retained all of the letters in a box under her bed, although she hadn’t opened the box and read one in years, so she admitted the letters could have declined in her estimation since she last read them. But I think, she said, if I read one of them today I would be just as impressed and flattered and seduced as I was on the day I first received it. Lucy had come onto her very strong, she said, and pursued her with a furious single-mindedness. Their first date was still one of the most memorable nights of her life. So at first she had been drawn into Lucy’s orbit rapidly and without any resistance.

As she told this story she was driving us down a bumpy alleyway in her thirty year-old golden Lexus, which rode very close to the asphalt, and I was trailing my hand out of the open window, feeling the cool air of the night on my palm. One day, and she didn’t remember exactly how, she said, she realized that, for Lucy, it didn’t matter who the letters were being written to. Lucy didn’t care about the particulars of her life or her being. For Lucy, it was only important that the love letters were being written, and they had to be written to someone. Without knowing how she got there she found herself huddled inside the lover-shaped cutout Lucy had made, and Lucy was now busy painting in the background around her on all sides. When she realized this, Lucy’s big stories and soliloquies became intolerable, when just a few days before they had been so charming. She remembered sitting on the main green in a circle of people as Lucy regaled them with a hilarious story, and looking around the circle of laughing people from her place right next to Lucy, some of the people rocking back and forth with the force of their laughter, and feeling that she was slowly sinking backwards, exiting her body and vanishing downwards and backwards into the cold grass. It happened just like that, seeing through a person, she said, and it wasn’t a process of them becoming transparent, it was a process of herself becoming transparent.

After that, she said, she just couldn’t look at her the same way again. She had never again had such a change of heart about a person in her whole life. She normally thought of herself as a very balanced and measured person who is willing to give anyone a second chance. But this time it wasn’t a matter of second chances.

I said can you really not remember how you came to this realization? Was there an instance of her forgetting a crucial personal detail about you, or confusing you with another person or something like that? No, she said, I don’t remember a gaffe, or a single instance in which I realized something was off, I only remember the feeling of disgust I had for myself when I realized I was an interchangeable audience member for Lucy to figure herself out in front of. I was quiet for a long moment when she said this, and she turned the wheel of the Lexus very slowly to easy us into a bumpy turn. We were driving in long, oblong circles around the streets of an old neighborhood we both liked, near to where she currently lived.

This is a very muddled story, she said, and it’s OK if you don’t understand what I mean. It’s so difficult to describe the way she was. No, I said, it’s not a muddled story at all. I can imagine her perfectly. It makes perfect sense that a person like this exists. It’s the exact way I would expect her to behave. Yes, she said, but when I broke up with her, she really surprised me. I expected her to take it well, even standing up, but when I told her I wanted to end things, she screamed and slammed her fist into the trunk of a tree.