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lines were etched around his eyes; his pale skin was starting to freckle, and there were even thinning patches visible in his blunt-cut fair hair. He wore a plaid button-down shirt cut off at the shoulders, a fad that made the arms look bulkier, more chiseled. The shirt was open to the navel. He looked like a wild hot Marine.
    “I heard you were at the Morning Party,” I said after we’d embraced over the top of the fence, after I’d smelled Greg’s familiar sweet scent that gave me a stab of confusing desire.
    He frowned. “Who told you that?”
    “What difference does it make? Half of New York City was there.”
    “I decided to go at the last minute,” he admitted bashfully. “I was bored.”
    “So how was it? Did you … enjoy yourself?” I asked, wanting but not wanting to know if Greg had met anybody. Eight months into a breakup, on a migration toward emotional autonomy, we’d traveled enough distance from each other by now not to cave in emotionally at the thought of the other making love with someone else. And yet we hadn’t gone quite far along enough for our romantic adventures to be an easy topic of conversation.
    “How could you meet anybody at one of those events? Or I should say, how could you believe you’d meet anybody, since nearly everyone except me was on Ecstasy?”
    “I’m your best friend,” I mocked.
    “Your best girlfriend,” Greg said.
    “Who are you, again? Where did we meet?” we both said in unison and laughed.
    “Fucking grim, isn’t it?” Greg said.
    “Fucking grim to be single again.”
    For some reason I remembered the first time we’d ever made love, how Greg had presented me with a gift-wrapped condom and how corny I thought it was at the time. I’d gone through that period where I thought it was charming, but now it seemed corny again.
    I walked the length of the dog run and passed through the gate. Casey rushed me, jumped up and gleefully placed his paws on my shoulders. He had a taller, lankier frame than most Labradors, splashes of white on each of his paws as well as on his chest; his head was slim like a hound’s. The blue squash ball in his mouth was dropped at my feet, and I picked it up and heaved it. By the time I reached Greg, he was looking wistful.
    “What’s wrong now?” I said almost accusingly.
    “Something just made me sad, okay?” he said defensively.
    “What is it?” I wondered if I should put my arm around him.
    He fought to steady his voice. “Just that we seem to get along better now that we’ve broken up.”
    “Is that so uncommon?”
    “But you keep your distance. In order to skip over everything that makes you feel uncomfortable.”
    “What am I supposed to do? Continue to beat my breast?”
    “I’m not saying that.”
    It occurred to me that exactly one year had passed since Greg had announced to me that he was having a summer affair. Ironically, he’d broken the news not ten feet away from where we now stood, while Casey was chasing a ball. Although it was not quite clear at the time, it turned out that Greg was retaliating for the fact that I’d left him in the city for the summer and brought Casey up to Vermont, where I had tried to write another novel in a rented house, a novel that I ended up abandoning.
    “So are you always going to keep me at arm’s length?” Greg asked me now.
    “I didn’t know that I was,” I said, although the words echoed with what some other ex-lovers had told me.
    “Come on, of course you are. And doesn’t that have something to do with the fact that you don’t want to share Casey anymore?”
    I began digging a hole into the layer of wood chips that cushioned the ground of the dog run. “We’ve been through this so many times, Greg,” I said. “I mean, as far as I’m concerned, outside of the fact that we don’t sleep together nothing is all that different. I may not trust you as much as I used to. But that’s not really required, is it?”
    Casey had plopped the ball at