The next morning, after Donna travels back to Naples without you, you sit alone in a café in Vienna drinking one melange after another. The waitress stands in front of the table in a pink uniform. You order a mineralwasser. You feel triumphant for a moment for speaking in German. Then you see yourself in the mirror. You look gaunt and you hair looks funny. You wish your table did not face the mirror. If only your girlfriend were here, you could both pretend you weren't breaking up. You wish you were a better girlfriend. Then, you would stay in love with her. After five years together, you know what to expect. Donna is beautiful and stable. She sits on community boards, and chairs advisory committees. In the beginning, these things drew the two of you together. But now, her tasks to help change the world have grown to fill something else that should have happened between the two of you. You remember her laughing when you tried to talk to her about that.

"Love changes," she'd said to you as if you were a child.

You stare at the waitress in the mirror. She has a bright red/orange crewcut that clashes nicely with her pink uniform. Her big black glasses have slipped forward on her nose and the three earrings in each ear jangle against each other as she works the espresso machine. You smile and think how great she must look in her black leather jacket. Everyone in Vienna seems to have a great leather jacket. You see that she is wearing birkenstocks. You want to ask her out. You want her to whisper "gestalt" in your ear.

The Gustav Klimt postcards on your table sparkle like magic when you look at their picture side but your mind goes blank looking at that space where you are supposed to write. The white vacuum sucks your eyes through to the beginning of this vacation where you were going to accomplish something, you are not sure what. "Having fun" or some witty version of it is what You'm supposed to write on the post card. All you can think to write is "wish you were here instead of me". For the first time you feel depressed. Sometimes, you blame it on Vienna: the rain, the neoclassical monuments, the relentless parade of Aryans. Sometimes, you think it is your life. You think of the psychology student and the chronically unemployed librarian you have had affairs with recently. They both have very little money. They both talk a lot about feelings. The psychology student is in love with you. Sometimes you think you are in love with her. But psychology eludes you. It reminds you of history and, so far, you believe history is cyclical.

You think of your friends in New York as you swirl sips of coffee froth on your tongue. You appraise them one by one as if you are St. Peter auditing their lives. You do so based on 4 categories: apartment, job, lover and general happiness index. In the apartment and work categories they are scoring very high. But their lover and general happiness indexes are down. Of course no one said that your friends are representative of the general population. You know that you are not. You score high only in the lover category. Love, you think soberly, is not that tangible. Then you think of all the tangible things Donna and you will have to divide after the break up: the car, the tent, the vacuum cleaner, the rug, the painting, the couch and all the clothes. You wonder how this could have happened. You have never had a relationship as long and fulfilling as this one. When you say that it sounds so mechanical, it sounds as bored as you feel. Donna is great. In fact, technically speaking, Donna is a better person than you are. But you want a change. You have discovered that this is what leads to affairs. Your friends are more analytical: they talk about patterns, they talk about underlying weaknesses, mutual faults. You think about the fault running along the underbelly of our relationship. You know you are feeling the tremors of the earthquake to come.