Love can be such a cruel, cruel thing well, when you break up, that is

The voice on the telephone was rushed, I could hardly hear her. She’d been leaving messages on my machine all day for me to call her, but I just couldn’t do it. Or wouldn’t do it, I guess would be more accurate.

“Lacey was hit by a car. I thought you’d want to know.”

Somewhere along the telephones lines connecting us I hoped a bird got zapped and fell to the pavement.

“I would never want to know that,” I said.

She told me that wasn’t what she meant and that I wasn’t funny.

Months ago the conversation would have been nicer, easier, sweeter. We didn’t really know each other then and we liked it.

“Is she okay?”

“She’s getting worked on, we won’t know. But she’s alive.”

“I’m sorry.”

I didn’t know what else to say. I’d hardly spoken to the girl in weeks, and thought maybe I forgot how. It used to be easy. There were no angry telephone lines in between us then, no, a pillow maybe, or an armrest in a flickering theater. Not this static air and this crackling receiver that made it all more awkward, all more detached.

“I hope she’ll be okay,” I said. “She was a great dog, she’ll be all right.”

She didn’t answer. I felt like I was under a guillotine, waiting for the dial tone.

“Yeah,” she said. “I just thought you’d want to know.”

“Call me tomorrow,” I told her, and she didn’t answer. Just the fumbled clicking of plastic on plastic and the dead air.

I once told her that our entire relationship was based on dogs. The irony was incredible. Ironic irony if that’s even possible.

I had met her in a restaurant where I worked and agreed to watch her dog for a weekend the first day I met her. A tan and black puppy, I took care of her in my high-rise apartment with the tile floors that were receptive to her accidents. A week later I was receptive to her owner.

After our classes we would drive out to the pound to get Lacey her shots once a month. I hated it and loved it. There is something inherently depressing about a dog pound in the middle of summer and it reminded me of old newsreel footage from Auschwitz, Germany, but I would never say that out loud. The dogs in cages barely big enough for them to turn around, with dirty bed sheets thrown over one corner for shade and a dented water dish filled with mud. It was a no-kill shelter so they always had a lot of dogs.

The first thirty seconds are the worst. They catch you with their eyes and they pull you over. You’d go over anyway, but it’s that whiteness right below their dark corneas that pulls you to the cage. The way they look at you. That desperation. I say the first thirty seconds are the worst but it doesn’t end there, no, it goes on from dog to dog, puppy to puppy, cage to cage. They know they have a half a minute to be as cute as possible, to out-cute the others. To be special. They jump up and they lick your face and your hands and they sniff and they lick some more until you move on to the next and by that time they are already lying back down. By the dirty water dish. Moving on. They know that in that thirty second window if they can make you coo and make you hug them tight and make you hold them up in the air and say “this one,” or hum the tune to “How much is that doggy in the window” then they can leave and go home with you. How they know, I have no idea but it took advertising analysts a hundred years to come up with the same concept for billboards. And we think we’re so much smarter…

So we’d take Lacey to get her shots. I would drive and she’d put her head on my shoulder and we’d talk about our little puppy, the one that was so special, the cutest dog in the world. And we’d tell each other why we found her or how she found us and we’d smile and look back at her on the back seat, sitting there with her head cocked and her ears flopped and her big paws bracing her.

“She is the cutest little thing,” she’d say and I’d nod.

College is the worst time for a love life. I mean it can be the best time too and not in a Tale of Two Cities kind of reference, but in a real honest way. We’re all growing up and growing up together and we’re a part f something and we’re important. And we know it. So I kept after her dog for a while when she went back home to see her parents on the holidays and before the summer came, we lost the newness and when you lose that, you better do something quick or you’re both just going to wander away and you won’t even see it coming. They call it drifting apart, “we just drifted apart.” Such a lie. It’s more like crashing into a shoreline -- not seeing the lighthouse.

So it happened.

Everyone loves a puppy that doesn’t own one. When you own one you love the puppy for the first week, then you have to try to love it. You have to want to love it. It sounds terrible, but the puppy loses its novelty. It’s that newness I was talking about. She’ll chew things and start to teethe and she’ll nip at your fingers and sometimes draw blood. She’ll have accidents and they won’t be so cute and one day she’ll learn if she whimpers a bit you pay more attention and if she barks you’ll do anything, and then you really have to work to love that puppy as much as you did when you first got her. You’ll notice it with your friends too when she bites their ankles and makes their ears hurt with her sharp yelp. They’ll withdraw and they’ll half-smile and push her out of the way so they can see the TV. And you’ll know then that she’s your puppy and you love her more than anything, and they don’t understand, they can’t. She sleeps in your bed.

So that’s how it went with the girl. A girl isn’t like a puppy, no, there are no physical obligations, only emotional, and in this world emotions are expendable or at least at some point in history we let them be. I told everyone the lighthouse had a bad bulb when they asked what happened to her, and they didn’t understand what I meant but eventually they quit asking. I only did it so I could smile to myself. I needed to smile.

Not a lot is more hostile than that kind of departure. With nothing to blame, everything is to blame and it’s the “confusion that makes us act so cold” or so I heard in a song once and I believe it. I stopped watching her dog and I stopped seeing her and I can only hope that animal of hers holds nothing but the deepest contempt for me. But I never ever wanted to have to picture her under the wheels of an automobile or folded against a curbside.

And right now here she is on the other end of a telephone that just went dead. Somewhere in the same city, in a house, with her dog in the hospital.