I should have picked up on it a lot earlier, really. But, you know, I am not always a very good judge of character.

It's not that there was anything wrong with Chandler (aside from her name). In fact, she was beautiful, intelligent, and down-to-earth. She and I had friends in common, and we liked a lot of the same things. She was good company, most of the time. Except for that smile.

When Chandler smiled, it was wide, and curled at the edges like The Joker's. Her lips, naturally red, would stretch to thin purple strips of flesh in order to accommodate a full display of her teeth - and what teeth they were! Absolutely even, flawlessly white, long and straight like pickets on a fence, and framed by an adorable pink gumline. I remember her teeth perfectly - because I spent most of my time staring at them.

It was her line of defense, I know now. She grinned when she felt uncomfortable, when she was bored, when she was angry, and of course when she was happy. Her face must have ached from smiling all the time, and particularly when in my company. With me, she was especially prone to bobbing her head up and down while making a strange, rough noise in the back of her throat - laughing, I assumed, like Ernie of Sesame Street.

Of course, later I figured out that there really wasn't any laughter about it, that she was hissing at me like an enraged goose behind that soulless grin. But back then, I didn't understand. Back then, I never looked people in the eye.

We were all alone in a foreign country, a couple of 20-year-olds doing a year abroad in France. We took an apartment together, Chandler and I, a little two-bedroom on the ground floor of a rich couple's walkup. They had marble steps and stained-glass windows; we had tiny rooms, metal cots, and windows that let out onto the sidewalk. We were in heaven.

Chandler took the big room, because she'd found the apartment. I took to inviting boys over for dinner, and wine, and more wine... We formed a tribe with a couple of guys from the exchange program, and the four of us used to sit and talk until early morning. As the conversations became more and more intimate, I started keeping track of our funnier and more ribald comments. As I recall, most of them had to do with ass-fucking. I thought this was hilarious, and wrote the prize pieces down on a whiteboard in the hallway.

This was only one of a long string of incidents involving my writing things down that other people didn't want to have recorded.

I think the whiteboard was the first straw for Chandler, but it eventually became an emblem of my uncouthness. Every time I would write a new quote on it, she would stand nearby, looking at me sideways and hissing through that great wall of teeth. She never complained about that or any of my other annoying habits (of which, I'm sure, there were plenty)...

Oh I just ran out of steam. Maybe I'll finish this another time.