That's the way I remember her

I remembered her as a coltish teenage smoker, the faint, moist ribbon of smoke rising like a thought escaping into the night—yet she was never one for parties, never for the loud commotion of crowded rooms. On Saturday evenings, Joan and I would sit on the cold, stone steps of the Metropolitan Museum, the city’s adrenal pulse thrumming through the streets as we talked in the tense, close darkness. She loved literature with a quiet, private fervor, returning each year to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, as though within its sleek, strange, and live pages she sought not merely a story, but the calm rhythm of a world she could trust.