If you have a dog you must love your dog. You must love your dog and at the same time, you must build a can of coins to shake at your dog if she barks in the night. You must build the can of coins to shake at your dog if she barks in the middle of the night and when she barks in the middle of the night you must shake the can of coins at her and say, No barking!, and go back to bed, and in the morning you must feel, mixed with other feelings, relief it was your husband who rose early to take her out for a walk and found shit in her crate. You must feel this. You have no choice.

Now that I have a dog I have to talk to my dog. I talk to my dog the way people talk to their dogs. It feels strange. One thing I’m focused on is that I don't want to say I'm her Mommy. That seems weird to me. So I tried using other referents for myself besides Mommy. Instead of, Mommy doesn’t want you to do that I said, Your female owner doesn’t want you to do that. Female to differentiate myself from David, her male owner. He is trying so hard to have a good relationship with the dog, and I didn’t want to sabotage it. You see how crazy it gets, right away. Anyway, I said, Your female owner doesn’t want you to do that and then it sounded so strange that I thought I needed to explain things to the dog, so I tried to explain my discomfort, to the dog, about being called her Mommy and then I just tried to walk a while without saying anything, which also seemed strange, and then I took her for too long a walk so I had to end it by carrying her home in my arms. I was worried about her.

She’s very beautiful. I think she’s very smart.

Mom called from Rome to ask about the dog and in passing noted that her dog is my dog’s uncle, which sounded fine until I figured out that this was because he is my brother. According to my Mom. So do you think that I don’t want to say that I’m the dog’s Mommy because I’m acting out some kind of Freudian drama? I don’t think so. I think I’m just being a jackass. I think it’s like the time I went to a small town in France for a wedding and there was some old tradition in the town having to do with cows and weddings that had, over time, become a tradition in which a plastic inflatable cow was brought onto the dance floor and people had to dance with it. I fled the dance floor but one American woman, trapped, danced the hell out of that cow. Sometimes committing oneself to idiocy is the only honorable thing to do.

Le Gaudron is closed. Well, it’s opened again, but it’s not the same. It’s better, which is worse. I don’t care. It’s nothing to me. I live 3,638 miles away from it. I didn’t even like it there. Flies circled lazily, the bread wasn’t very good, and one of the women who worked there, an enormous lady with a piggy face and blue eye shadow, hated me. But the case was filled with strange and beautiful pastries, miracles of sugar, and the banquette faced the case. I had a plan to eat one of each of the pastries before we left Brussels—I knew, always, my time was limited—as an experiment or task, but instead I just ate the éclairs. I think, in retrospect, that was wise of me.

One night I was the only person in the café, close to closing, and I heard one of the women working there say to the fat woman, So why don’t you close up? The fat woman inclined her bouffant head towards me and said, venomously, Elle est là. One of the first times, by the way, I understood someone else’s conversation in French. After that night the sign on the door advertising the hours was amended to note that table service ended a half an hour before the café closed. They meant me.

One day soon after we moved to Brussels, I couldn’t leave the apartment. I couldn’t work and I lay in the bed with the covers pulled up. David couldn’t get out of work yet, wouldn’t for a while. Eventually, I went to the Gaudron.

One evening everyone who came into the Gaudron had crutches, a cane, or a wheelchair, except me.

There were a lot of dogs at the Gaudron. I don’t know why, but once, watching the little white dog belonging to the table next to me scrounge around at the base of the table for pastry scraps, I was inspired. I thought, All you have to do is be that dog. Nothing came from this except for something I can't explain to anyone else, but that I find occasionally useful.

You would not believe how much a juice cost. Sometimes, but not from the fat lady, I would get a free cookie with my coffee. The ham sandwiches were passable. The chocolate, from a mix. Everyone smoked. I should find my notes from then, I should find what I wrote. I may have written that I was homesick, but that was a lie.

I felt simple as a milkmaid yesterday, walking to the library. It was so quaint of me! But the car was blocked in and I wanted to go to the library and get some books. And the library’s not that far. And it wasn’t that hot.

I had my camera with me, so on the way I tried to take pictures, but the truth is I never walk to the library, and there’s nothing meaningful on the way. A couple of dogs with electronic collars on stood at the boundaries of their electronic field and barked, so I took their pictures, which drove them wild. I passed the spot where a house I liked has been torn down and replaced it with something huge and corporate, but how can I take a picture of what’s missing? You’d just see a three-car garage. At the library I found a number of things I wanted to read, including The Sheltering Sky, and sat in a chair facing out the big picture window. I thought about taking a picture of the view there, but it wasn’t a very good view, the big tree was lifeless and there was too much grass and road.

When we lived in the city I worked at a private library that was probably a perfect place. It was old and very pretty and had a large collection, and upstairs there were lockers to keep your computer in and a room with desks where people could write books. If you needed to, you could go into the stacks and look for things, and if you found things you wanted to read you could go down to the big reading room, where there were little writing tables and couches and often an old man, snoring. It was always the same old man, and his snoring would grow loud and quiet again, without him waking up. There were very few bathrooms and only one place to make a phone call, which led to tension, which interested and distracted me. Another old man, not the snorer, used to occupy the ground level toilet from 12:30 to 1, the last solid minute of which was taken up spraying Lysol. I knew this because I could hear it from outside the door, and because when I entered after he left I breathed in great billowing clouds of it, and almost choked to death.

When I couldn’t write my book in a temporary way, I sat at my computer and typed in things about all the other people in the room, including my thoughts on the likelihood that they were sitting at their computers typing things about me. There was one woman who was incredibly sensitive to sound, or very bad at concentrating, or very good at not doing her work. The sound of work being backed up on a floppy disk would drive her absolutely crazy, she would start moving in her seat and breathing dramatically and looking around to make eye contact with other noise haters and finally, if it went on too long, would stand up and ask the person to stop. She didn’t like clicking, either, and typing could upset her. I wondered who was better at not doing her work, her or me as I watched her. Then we had a run-in at the phone booth which ended when she shouted “Shit!” at me and ran down the stairs, and I realized her problems were larger than procrastination. Another woman, whom I idolized for her profound bosom, professorial clothes, and air of extreme competence, was writing about Anne Frank. I don’t remember the men so well, although I could of course check my notes about this. The library was a seventeen-minute walk from my apartment, which was also perfect. In the winter the sunny side of Park was five degrees warmer than any other part of the city.

In The Chateau, William Maxwell writes that people often underestimate the perfect, or at least that’s how I remember it. I can’t find it anywhere in the book.