Ringo stands about 10 inches high at the shoulder, but he carries himself with supreme confidence. He fixed his lustrous black eyes on mine. Staring straight at me, he lifted his leg and urinated on the oven door.
Theoretically, Ringo is a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. You may have seen depictions of the breed peeking at you from portraits of monarchs and aristocrats. But the spaniels in the paintings are almost always the cinnamon-and-white variety known as a Blenheim spaniel.
My wife, Danielle, has a Blenheim. The Blenheim Cavalier is a true lapdog: easygoing, obedient, insinuating. Ringo is very different. He is exactly the color of a cup of espresso, mostly black-haired with a little brownish tinge at his extremities. That confusion is less absurd than it sounds. If an unwelcome stranger steps in his way, pound Ringo will stiffen and growl, murder in his eyes. Ringo came into my life in the spring of Miranda had returned to the United States after four years living in Israel.
She had thought seriously about staying there, but then the romantic relationship that had kept her in the country ended. Miranda was cast alone upon the open world. She relocated to Los Angeles to start over. She chose L. Los Angeles, however, is not a good place to recover from a broken heart. The huge distances that must be traveled to see a friend, the cultural obsession with the surface of things—they can reinforce loneliness.
Normally so cheerful and optimistic, Miranda was slowly succumbing to depression. So Danielle and I bought her a dog. The dog we meant to buy was a Blenheim. Miranda had grown up with one and dearly loved him. But the breeder Miranda selected had no Blenheims for sale, only a single black-and-tan male. Miranda brought him home. The friend who drove Miranda and Ringo back to L. Miranda—this glamorous and sophisticated young woman, who had earned her living as a model in Tokyo, Milan, and Tel Aviv—suddenly looked like her year-old self again.
