This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett Page B

long enough to go to Paris. No two people are ever together long enough to enjoy word games.
    The waiter returned and instead of bringing me a glass of wine, he poured the wine into my glass right from the bottle. This struck me as very sophisticated. Our appetizers came. They were something I wanted. Something I had chosen carefully. I remember that when I bit into whatever it was, I closed my eyes, stunned that anything could be so delicate, so delicious. “I say a word, and then I tell you if the word is or isn’t it. For example,” I picked up my wineglass. “It is glass, but it isn’t wine.”
    Karl nodded.
    â€œNow you can ask me one word, and I’ll tell you if it is or it isn’t, and we keep going until you figure out what the difference is.”
    â€œIs it a plate?” he asked.
    â€œIt isn’t a plate, but it is a bottle.”
    He waited a minute. He thought it over. “I don’t get it.”
    â€œIt takes some time,” I said. “It’s a rabbit, but it’s not a box.”
    He finished his appetizer, whatever it was. He didn’t offer me a bite. “I don’t know.”
    â€œIt’s a tree but it isn’t a leaf.”
    â€œI give up,” he said.
    â€œIt’s Woody, but it isn’t Mia.”
    â€œI don’t know,” he said. “Tell me.”
    I went on for a while, not telling him, throwing out words in patterns that irritated him profoundly. The main course arrived. I can very nearly smell it now. It was so succulent, complex, divine, but I cannot for the life of me say what it was. “It’s pretty,” I said. “But it isn’t shoes.”
    â€œStop it.”
    â€œIt isn’t stop or go or wait.” Even as I said it, I could see myself stepping out of the car into traffic. It is traffic. I had told Mark I was through if he didn’t tell me the answer. I said it much more colorfully than that. But when the answer came to me later, an easy lightning bolt slicing open my head, I wasn’t angry anymore. I got it. It had taken me more than an hour but I got it, and that joy, so sudden and unexpected, was the reward.
    The waiter kept refilling my glass, though I don’t remember asking him to. The desserts were sublime, and we pushed them aside. The bill—I do remember that much—was $350. We may as well have piled the money on the table and put a match to it. This had been the best meal either one of us had ever had in our lives, and we missed it.
    â€œI’m glad I found out now what kind of person you are,” Karl said. He had never been so angry at me, not before or since. I knew how he felt. As we were walking away from the restaurant, I broke down and told him. I did it because he was walking so quickly and my heels were too high and I didn’t know how to get back to the hotel alone. I told him, and I ruined everything. Mark had been smart to weather my fury so that I could find the answer for myself, because once I found it, I forgave him. Karl, on the other hand, just stayed mad. He told me I was cruel and cold, and the next night at L’Arpège, he told me it was over.
    â€œYou’re not breaking up with me in a fish restaurant in Paris,” I said. “Not over this.”
    And so he didn’t. We stayed together for ten years after that, and then we married. It has been a very happy union. Our fight in Taillevent is a tattoo on our relationship, though. Neither of us will ever forget it, but it all strikes me as funny now. The sad part is that the meal is gone forever. It’s a fault of our brains to remember the fight while forgetting the sole. Was it sole? I know what I said, but I can only dream about what I must have eaten.
    ( New York Times Magazine , November 26, 2006)

This Dog’s Life
    I T HAPPENED LIKE this: after a walk in the park, Karl and I saw a young woman sitting in a car talking to a dog. Even from a distance, through