Leveraged by the success of applications aiming at the ``free'' sharing of data in the Internet, the paradigm of peer-to-peer (P2P) computing has been devoted substantial consideration recently. This paper presents an abstraction for remote object interaction in a P2P environment, called borrow/lend (BL). We present the principles underlying our BL abstraction, and its implementation in Java. We contrast our abstraction with established abstractions for distributed programming such as the remote method invocation or the tuple space, illustrating how the BL abstraction, obviously influenced by such predating abstractions, unifies flavors of these, but also how it captures the constraints specific to P2P environments.