One day after the old millennium’s end and the new one’s beginning, Sallie said to me — this was at lunch at Le Perigord on Esplanade, our favorite place: “Do you happen to remember”—she’d been thinking about it—“that first little watercolor we bought, in Old Saybrook? The tilted sailboat sail you could barely recognize in all the white sky. At that little shop near the bridge?” Of course I remembered it. It’s in my law office in Place St. Charles, a cherished relic of youth.
“What about it?” We were at a table in the shaded garden of the restaurant where it smelled sweet from some kind of heliotrope. Tiny wild parrots were fluttering up in the live-oak foliage and chittering away. We were eating a cold crab soup.
“Well,” she said. Sallie has pale, almost animal blue eyes and translucently caramel northern European skin. She has kept away from the sun for years. Her hair is cut roughly and parted in the middle like some Bergman character from the sixties. She is forty-seven and extremely beautiful. “It’s completely trivial,” she went on, “but how did we ever know back then that we had any taste. I don’t really even care about it, you know that. You have much better taste than I do in most things. But why were we sure we wouldn’t choose that little painting and then have it be horrible? Explain that to me. And what if our friends had seen it and laughed about us behind our backs? Do you ever think that way?”
“No,” I said, my spoon above my soup, “I don’t.”
“You mean it isn’t interesting? Or, eventually we’d have figured out better taste all by ourselves?”
“Something like both,” I said. “It doesn’t matter. Our taste is fine and would’ve been fine. I still have that little boat in my office. People pass through and admire it all the time.”
She smiled in an inwardly pleased way. “Our friends aren’t the point, of course. If we’d liked sad-clown paintings or put antimacassars on our furniture, I wonder if we’d have a different, worse life now,” she said. She stared down at her lined-up knife and spoons. “It just intrigues me. Life’s so fragile in the way we experience it.”
“What’s the point?” I had to return to work soon. We have few friends now in any case. It’s natural.
She furrowed her brow and scratched the back of her head using her index finger. “It’s about how altering one small part changes everything.”
“One star strays out of line and suddenly there’s no Big Dipper?” I said. “I don’t really think you mean that. I don’t really think you’re getting anxious just because things might have gone differently in your life.” I will admit this amused me.
“That’s a very frivolous way to see it.” She looked down at her own untried soup and touched its surface with the rim of her spoon. “But yes, that’s what I mean.”
“But it isn’t true,” I said and wiped my mouth. “It’d still be the thing it is. The Big Dipper or whatever you cared about. You’d just ignore the star that falls and concentrate on the ones that fit. Our life would’ve been exactly the same, despite bad art.”
“You’re the lawyer, aren’t you?” This was condescending, but I don’t think she meant it to be. “You just ignore what doesn’t fit. But it wouldn’t be the same, I’m sure of that.”
“No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been exactly the same. But almost.”
“There’s only one Big Dipper,” she said and began to laugh.
“That we know of, and so far. True.”
This exchange I give only to illustrate what we’re like together — what seems important and what doesn’t. And how we can let potentially difficult matters go singing off into oblivion.
The afternoon the puppy appeared, I sat down at the leather-top desk in our dining room where I normally pay the bills and diligently wrote out one of the hand-lettered signs you see posted up on laundromat announcement boards and stapled to telephone poles alongside advertisements for new massage therapies, gay health issues and local rock concerts. puppy, my sign said in black magic marker, and after that the usual data with my office phone number and the date (March 23rd). This sheet I xeroxed twenty-five times on Sallie’s copier. Then I found the stapler she used for putting up the AIDS marathon posters, went upstairs and got out an old braided leather belt from my closet, and went down to the garden to take the puppy with me. It seemed good to bring him along while I stapled up the posters about him. Someone could recognize him, or just take a look at him and see he was available and attractive and claim him on the spot. Such things happen, at least in theory.
When I found him he was asleep behind the ligustrums in the far corner. He had worked and scratched and torn down into the bricky brown dirt and made himself a loll deep enough that half of his little body was out of sight below ground level. He had also broken down several ligustrum branches and stripped the leaves and chewed the ends until the bush was wrecked.
When he sensed me coming forward he flattened out in his hole and growled his little puppy growl. Then he abruptly sat up in the dirt and aggressively barked at me in a way that — had it been a big dog — would’ve alarmed me and made me stand back.
“Puppy?” I said, meaning to sound sympathetic. “Come out.” I was still wearing my suit pants and white shirt and tie — the clothes I wear in court. The puppy kept growling and then barking at me, inching back behind the wrecked ligustrum until it was in the shadows against the brick wall that separates us from the street. “Puppy?” I said again in a patient, cajoling way, leaning in amongst the thick green leaves. I’d made a loop out of my belt, and I reached forward and slipped it over his head. But he backed up farther when he felt the weight of the buckle, and unexpectedly began to yelp — a yelp that was like a human shout. And then he turned and began to claw up the bricks, scratching and springing, his paws scraping and his ugly little tail jerking, and at the same time letting go his bladder until the bricks were stained with hot, terrified urine.
Which, of course, made me lose heart since it seemed cruel to force this on him even for his own good. Whoever had owned him had evidently not been kind. He had no trust of humans, even though he needed us. To take him out in the street would only terrify him worse, and discourage anyone from taking him home and giving him a better life. Better to stay, I decided. In our garden he was safe and could have a few hours’ peace to himself.
I reached and tried to take the belt loop off, but when I did he bared his teeth and snapped and nearly caught the end of my thumb with his little white incisor. I decided just to forget the whole effort and to go about putting up my signs alone.
I stapled up all the signs in no time — at the laundromat on Barracks Street, in the gay deli, outside the French patisserie, inside the coffee shop and the adult news on Decatur. I caught all the telephone poles in a four-block area. On several of the poles and all the message boards I saw that others had lost pets, too, mostly cats. Hiroki’s Lost. We’re utterly disconsolate. Can you help? Call Jamie or Hiram at … Or, We miss our Mittens. Please call us or give her a good home. Please! In every instance as I made the rounds I stood a moment and read the other notices to see if anyone had reported a lost puppy. But (and I was surprised) no one had.