On a romantic bicycle trip through Burgundy, suddenly the husband turns up missing. A misunderstanding follows, and a monumental case of : SEPARATION ANXIETY

First, this is how the story ends:

I’m sitting at an outdoor table of a French cafe. Before me is the town square of Nuits-St.-Georges, a charming village near Dijon. There is a 13th century Romanesque church nearby. There are cobblestones. I am eating a pear.

A blue van, of the type favored by the French police, pulls up 60 feet from me. Out steps three burly gendarmes. Out steps my then-wife. Our eyes lock, we rush together with a cry. There are tears. There may be symphonic music swelling in the background. Unquestionably, there is pear juice.

And this is how the story begins:

My wife and I were nine days into a monthlong bike trip in France. We had pedaled from Paris to the heart of Burgundy. On this day our route took us through the Co^te d’Or--one of the world’s most famous wine regions.

It had not been a vintage September. Two days before, heavy rains had forced us to dash to a train station, where we boarded a local that was headed south for the town of Autun. We arrived damp and grumpy.

Day nine dawned cold and gray too. Right before noon, however, the sun broke through. So, just outside the hamlet of Ladoix-Serrigny, I stopped pedaling long enough to take a landscape photo. The Emperor Charlemagne once owned vineyards in this area. For a thousand years, rows of grapevines have undulated up these southeast-facing slopes like giant green snakes.

“Go on,” I told my wife. “I’ll catch up in a second.”

Off she rode, and I turned back to my composition. It took awhile. The focus ring on the camera had jammed. I struggled with it for a few minutes before giving up and biking after her.

By the time I got to Ladoix-Serrigny she was not to be seen. Nobody was to be seen. It was lunchtime. The somnambulant French village had become outright catatonic. Everyone in Ladoix-Serrigny was home, eating or napping.

At the edge of town--a matter of several hundred yards--there were signs to Corgoloin, the next hamlet on our route. It was less than two miles away, so I pedaled on, assuming my wife had pushed ahead, inspired by the sunlight.

But there was no trace of her in Corgoloin either. And traces are easy to detect in a town the size of Corgoloin. Had I somehow passed her? Where could she have gone? Amid growing concern and confusion--I had most of the maps, she spoke most of the French--I decided to return to village No. 1.

Ladoix-Serrigny was as empty as before, except for a little old lady, dressed in black, who was hanging out clothes. I biked fitfully back and forth then decided to bike to Nuits-St.-Georges, a crossroads town about six miles on. Eventually, I reasoned, she was bound to show up there.

*

I arrived around 2 p.m. I found a table at a cafe on the main square, leaned my bike against one chair and sat in another. And sat, and sat.

Finally, I ordered a cafe au lait. A man wearing a beret walked past with a baguette under his arm. Charming. I ordered another cafe au lait. Bells in the ancient church struck 4 o’clock. The smell of baking croissants wafted by. It was silly to worry, I thought, she’d show up soon enough. And I reached into my bike bag for a pear.

But as a golden afternoon light settled over the land, warming me and millions of Pinot Noir grapes, a drama of operatic proportions was being played out just a few miles away.

My wife, it seems, had begun searching for me about the same time I began searching for her. As I rode back and forth, so did she. It was as if we were practicing some horrible new Olympic event: synchronized biking.

On one of these laps, my wife saw, coming out from behind some raspberry bushes, a man on a motorbike. He was a dark-complexioned man, who perhaps drove without the usual French insouciance.

In one breathtaking leap of logic, she knew, beyond a reasonable doubt, that this (possibly) non-Frenchman had knocked me off my bike, dragged me to a nearby field, beaten me to death and ripped the camera from my dying fingers.

The swarthy man motored past. In panic, my wife pedaled to Ladoix-Serrigny. The lunch hour had passed and a man was selling cheeses by the side of the road. She rode up, and to the astonished vendor and his four customers gasped: “Help me! I think my husband has been hurt!”

Two customers, a nice couple, offered to help. “We must phone the police,” they said. Soon a blue van carrying three cops roared up.

Reaching new heights of French fluency, my wife blurted out the awful details: biking, lost, swarthy, motorcyclist.

“We will search the countryside,” announced the cops, and motioned for my wife to jump into the van. Meanwhile, the nice couple had enlisted their friends (effectively the entire town). “We’ll search too,” chorused the townsfolk, who no doubt would have been carrying torches if all this had happened at night.

Somehow, in the excitement, the motorcyclist had become an Arab terrorist. (To be fair, European papers that summer a dozen years ago had been filled with the news of sensational anti-Israeli bombings in Europe.) The police van zoomed off. The townsfolk scattered through the vineyards, Cherchez l’Arabe! (“Look for the Arab!”) on everybody’s lips.

*

After about an hour’s search, the police van rounded a curve and overtook a dark-complexioned man on a motorbike. “Stop, you!”

It was like a bad French cop show. They surrounded him, hands on their batons, and questioned him roughly. “Have you seen a tourist on a red bicycle? Where have you been this afternoon? What have you been doing?”

They turned to my wife. “Is this the guy?” Appalled by their treatment of the motorcyclist, my wife suddenly switched loyalties. Looking my murderer in the eye, she said, “I’m not sure.” (Later she would tell me, “Well, they didn’t exactly read him his Miranda rights.”)

The gendarmes reluctantly let him go, unfrapped. Back into the van, they sped about the country roads looking again for my body. By 5 p.m. I was still missing. The police decided to drive to Nuits-St.-Georges for additional help.

Which brings me back to the end of the story.

The van pulls up; my wife shouts,”That’s my husband!” The cops laugh. “Il mange une poire!” one says. (“He’s eating a pear!”). As we hug, they applaud.

But eventually the reunion embrace ends. My wife steps back and looks at me. She looks at the half-eaten pear and at the empty cups of cafe au lait. Suddenly dry-eyed, she asks, “Where have you been?” The merry sun goes down behind the church; warmth ebbs from the vineyards. “Why did you leave me behind?”

And I know that the real horror story is just about to begin.