Maybe it’s because I hardly make my way to the Upper East Side or something, but the night before I was supposed to go over to Nicole’s for dinner, I had this mad dream in which I had to cross the All Hong Kong Bridge linking Beijing and Shanghai, infiltrating the underground Hello Kitty office along the way to hack into its network of international spies. At one point a bomb freefell in an apocalyptic sky. Following its trajectory with terrified eyes, a bystander shouted: “No! That’s where the Dior show is being held!” And still I had to get to Nicole’s, and I was late, and now it was raining, too.

Happily, the reality of getting to Nicole’s involved very little more than hopping the F to the 6, calmly reading Flaubert the whole way. And when I got there it was warm and welcoming, and I was swiftly handed a glass of champagne, and the house smelled of good food to come. Over a mushroom-and-red-cabbage salad and plump, fluffy couscous with zucchini and sweet, tender shrimp—

(Because of a small matter of an unfortunate allergy to prawns, I was concerned when I saw that shrimp was going to be served—only because it pointed to limited consumption. As allergies go, mine is a minor one: what happens when I eat soft-shelled creatures is that my mouth and throat get itchy—so I usually proceed warily, watching out for when the itching begins, at which point, regretfully, I stop. And I know maybe the solution is so simple as to just not eat shrimp, but the thing is, it is so tasty. Anyway this time when the itching began after shrimp number two, I just moved on to shrimp number three, and four, and five, and finally the itching went away, which just goes to show that sometimes if you have a food allergy, you can beat it into submission. Um, I guess if you don’t stop breathing and fall over first.)

—Nicole told us about a recently deceased Texan relative named Uncle Brother; and Suzanna told us about her farmhouse in Iowa with a barn made of trees in such a way that its roof is a lace of treetops; and Bill told us about when he and his band “toured the West Coast” with one gig in Seattle; and Nicole is going to give me her recipe for chocolate pecan pie. “I like a chocolate-covered graham cracker,” I said. “Is there anything chocolate-covered you don’t like?” Bill asked. “Um. No, I suppose not,” I said. “Chocolate-covered bugs?” he said. “Chocolate-covered rocks? Sticks?” “Bill,” I said, “that’s just not nice.”

We sped downtown in a cab on the FDR around midnight. Over the East River, the Pepsi-Cola sign was lit up like jollity.

Later, walking home on Ninth Street, I saw a wooden door, blue like a bird, lying on the pavement, and it occurred to me that if I were to turn the old-timey glass knob and open the door, I might step through the sidewalk into anyplace, it was that kind of night, and that kind of light, and that kind of silence all around. Thing is, the only place I wanted to be at that moment was in bed, and bed was just around the corner, so I continued on, me and my heels, click-click-clicking past the sleeping brownstones.