My wife studied for the dog like when you buy a house, and finally she bought a border terrier, a small dog, but not as small as the ridiculous dogs you see in the streets of Paris. Small enough for an apartment but not a dog to make you a fool. Oliver and I went down the elevator, out through the courtyard and toward the Luxembourg. He ran ahead of me on the orange strap. He was excited about everything, still a puppy. He didn’t know not to sniff at women’s shoes, like he didn’t know not to shit on the carpet. I smiled at the women in the shoes and they smiled back. I had not wanted a dog, but the children loved him. It was true they did not fight so much now. The day my wife brought him home, my daughter held the dog in her arms and said, “This is the happiest day of my life.” Children are whores. They will say anything. But I thought it could be true.

I had never trained a dog. I had not even taken this dog for a walk, because I could not take him for lunch at the Polo. When I was still working for the Greeks, with the shipping, we were given a beautiful Arabian horse, a king’s horse. We had no use for it, but to slaughter it would offend the king, so it must be kept like a king’s horse, and that was left to me. I found a stable, and thought I would ride in the Bois de Boulogne, but the horse would not cross the road. We reached the road each time, and then it stopped. The most elegant horse you have ever seen, afraid of roads. I tried a long time to make the horse cross, and then paid an old cavalry officer to train the horse in the cavalry style. Make the horse obey. Be the commander. He came back to me in six weeks and said the horse did not want to cross the road. So maybe Oliver did not want to shit outside. This would be a problem. We were at the street corner, almost to the jardin, and I was thinking how the dog would like to see the trees and the grass, and then Oliver ran on his long orange strap into the road. A Mercedes taxi hit him square with the tire.