Belles Lettres

The bus left early Friday morning, due to reach Judith's town in the Hudson Valley a little after lunch. She had said in her email she would pick me up at the station. On the way up, I worried we might somehow not find each other, that I might not recognize her, or it would be awkward. But when I arrived, it was clear there'd been no need. The town was tiny, the bus station just a rutted pullout by the side of the road. Judith sat at the wheel of a car parked across the street, a beat-up, toffee-colored coupe. She reached an arm out of the window and waved when she saw me, and a thick silver bracelet she was wearing caught the light.

I climbed down along with a few other passengers, and we waited as the bus released its air brakes and rumbled away. Judith had gotten out of the car. She was dressed in summer clothes, jeans and a white tank top with a high neck that exposed her small, rounded shoulder muscles.

"Molly," she said, when I got close. "I'm so glad you could make it."

"Me too," I said, and smiled. "Thanks for having me." We embraced tentatively, my weekend bag dangling between us.

Judith was a writer—a published writer, one I admired. She was older than I was, though I wasn't sure by how much, probably something like twenty years. We had met in person only once before, at a reading of hers at a club in the East Village the previous winter.

I had discovered her work a few years before that in a wooden bin of publisher's galleys at a new-and-used bookstore in the city. She had written a book about human-powered locomotion—which is to say walking, mostly, though also cycling, with nods to swimming, boating, climbing, and various wheeled vehicular contraptions. The book was subtitled "A History," but it was more of a miscellany than any kind of methodical treatment. It was the kind of book that's supposed to be informative but also elegantly written—literary, cultured, and stylish, above all else.

The subject struck me as pretentious, to be honest, but I cracked it open anyway. If I wanted quickly to confirm its unworthiness and move on, the joke was on me. The book was written beautifully, its voice graceful but spare, toggling among times and places, between facts and memories, quotes and morsels of research without a strain. I knew that kind of writing wasn't easy, because it was the kind of thing I'd been trying to do myself.

I turned the book over. On its rear flap was a black-and-white photo of the author, in which she turned her head slightly and averted her eyes, as if some heightened sense of modesty prevented her from locking gazes with the camera. She looked fit and aloof, with a long, curved neck, like a deer. I ran my finger over the minimal biography inscribed below it: Judith Dunbar lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and son.

When I reached the club in the Village on the evening of Judith's reading, I took off my puffer coat, folded it over my arm, and ordered a beer. Judith came to the riser and read from a work in progress about a quasi-legal bicycle road race from California to eastern Maryland. Unlike the Tour de France, the Ride Across America wasn't staged; that is, the clock kept running, and successful entrants rode basically nonstop, sleeping as little as an hour and a half each day. Part of her text recounted the ailments these riders routinely suffer, not just the expected blisters, chafed groins, and fatigue-related hallucinations and crashes, but also some bizarre ones, like a paralytic collapse of the neck and shoulder muscles, for which some riders resort to a medieval-looking brace to hold themselves upright. Judith was around fifty and looked like her photograph, including the turned-away, shy intensity. She had the same dark bangs; the same...