Miro trotted to our favorite bench, which was, thankfully by this time of the day, in the shade, and jumped up onto it. I sat beside him, but he turned away and ignored me. In the privacy of our home, Miro is a very affectionate creature, but in public he behaves like a teenager who has no interest in a parent's affection. I think he thinks it interferes with his I-am-not-a-dog pose.There is a sort of tribal camaraderie in the dog run that I hate. This sort of smug friendliness dog owners share that they feel entitles them to interact. If I were sitting on a bench in the park proper, no one would approach me, but in the dog run it's as if you are on some distant, weirdly friendly planet. "Oh, is that a standard poodle?" people will ask, or "How old is he?" or some other idiotic question. 

I suppose people have become so estranged and subsequently wary of one another that they grasp at any opportunity to connect, but chatting meaninglessly in the dog run is not really an antidote — in fact, I believe it only emphasizes our estrangement. I overhear these long conversations between people that are exclusively dog-related: what vet Trinket goes to; have you tried organic dog food? I even heard two people discussing the color and consistency of their dogs' poop. But fortunately the dog walkers, professionals that they are, only talk to one another, in the same way I have noticed that nannies and mothers never interact in the playground: each, like the dog walkers, sticks to its kind. And so Miro and I were left alone. Miro watched the other dogs for a moment and then sighed and slowly lowered himself down upon the bench, pushing me a bit with his hind feet so that he would have adequate space to recline. But I refused to shift so he was forced to hang his head over the end of the bench. He did this in a way that implied it was very difficult being a dog.

I thought about my mother, about her unexpected return, about this sudden and disappointing disruption in her life. I wasn't surprised that this marriage failed — there had been something weird about Mr. Angelosanto from the start, which was only eight months ago — but I had thought it would last longer than a few days. My mother was married to my father for fifteen years, and she was married to her second husband for two years, so I suppose this marriage was proportionate. I tried to figure out what percent of fifteen years two years was, so I could figure out what the corresponding percent of two years would be — might it be four days? Unfortunately, I have never been good in math. Numbers simply do not interest me or seem as real to me as words. At the gallery, when someone leaves a telephone number, I always have to ask them to repeat it. I can't write it down unless I record the numerals as they are spoken; they seem to evaporate in some way. My mind does not retain them, in fact it repels them, like Teflon.

But whether it was proportionate or not, four days is still a disappointingly short time for a marriage to endure. And one could argue that the curve should be just the opposite — that people should get better with subsequent marriages, not worse. At this rate, my mother would be abandoned at the altar if she dared wed again.

I wondered if divorce, like abuse, is handed down the generations. It made sense to me then, sitting there in the park, for it was impossible to imagine any enduring or lasting relationship for myself. The idea that there was one person with whom I would contentedly spend my adult years, or even a segment of them, seemed absurd. My father has never remarried — the woman he left my mother for died, suddenly and tragically, of ovarian cancer before they could both divorce and remarry (cancer moving more expeditiously than the court system), and although he is not religious (my parents were married in the Rainbow Room by a judge) I think he felt in some way punished by this death, and since then he has been involved briefly with a long string of much younger women who all seem to have the same artificial-looking blond "highlights" in their perfectly nice brown hair. I don't know if this is a generational thing or a predilection of my father's.

Love seems so fickle to me, people change too much, and the chances of affections coinciding over a lifetime seems improbable if not impossible.

For this reason, I do not plan to love anyone. I know they say it is better to have loved and lost then never to have loved at all, but love seems like finger-painting to me, something best done only by the very young, when it can be done almost primitively, for once one finger-paints, or loves, in earnest, one creates only a mess: that inevitable purplish-brown blur, those hastily packed suitcases, that embarrassing scene on the casino floor, garishly lit, air conditioned, inhuman.

That evening my mother went to have dinner with Hilda Temple, her life coach. My mother had been in conventional therapy for many years (in fact, she had spent the last couple of years in analysis), but shortly before she met Mr. Angelosanto, she decided that conventional therapy wasn't "working for her" and had begun to see a life coach. What you did was tell your life coach what your goals were and your life coach would encourage/pester you until you achieved said goals (or, more likely, moved on to a different form of therapy). Meeting Mr. Angelosanto had been one of my mother's goals — well, not meeting Mr. Angelosanto specifically, and in retrospect certainly not Mr. Angelosanto; the goal had been to find a partner — and with Hilda's help (or interference) this had been quickly achieved.