Tuesday, after staying in all afternoon and reading a hundred pages of Flaubert—

(The Flaubert story is, After my party last week, I found a stray umbrella in the hallway. “J’ai gagné une ombrelle,” I said to Gab. “Pas une ombrelle,” he said, “c’est un parapluie.” “Oh, yeah,” I said, “je lis trop de Flaubert.”)

—a girl feels good leaving the house as the sun sets, walking toward the pale blue and skinny clouds west of Ninth Street.

In Chelsea, as I headed for Printed Matter in the almost-bitter almost-winter wind, the Matthew Marks Gallery was a lightbox on a darkened street. Inside, an installation of Paris postcards blown up to larger than human size, a couple of baguettes the size of the Eiffel Tower the size of the Abbesses métro station entrance the size of a cup of black coffee; a woman-sized woman and a dog-sized dog, both made of giant seashells, in the middle of the room; umbrellas hanging from the ceiling, Magritte-style, in purple and green and black and white. Not part of the installation but part of the scene, a fifties grey metal desk and a fifties grey metal chair and a young grey art-world dude with the barest hint of a hello. My heels on the poured concrete floor echoed round the room.

Down the street at Comme des Garçons, Andrea and I entered through the egg-shaped glass door—very Mork and Mindy. The clothes were in turns stylish and crazy, and then there was the pair of gold mary-janes, and then there was the rhubarb-sherbet perfume.

It was time for tea after, because we like tea, and what’s not to like at the Wild Lily Tea Room with its goldfish pond a hollow in the concrete floor, the large dried green chrysanthemums floating on the water, spindly sculptures of spidery beauty; its cute Japanese waitgirls with their transparent colored-plastic aprons and thick legwarmers and hair up and down at the same time; its collection of teacups, including the dainty blue Staffordshire with a curvy rim and a flower printed on the inside; its lychee tea, just sweet enough and just strong enough, in a glass pot, the stewed lychees collected plump and white at the bottom, waiting to be pierced with a long fork.

It was warm in there, and the lights were low, and the scent of steamed dumplings was delicate in the air. And we probably would have stayed, had we not had somewhere else to be, and had that somewhere else not been, O happy day, the Union Square Café. Oh, Union Square Café, how good you are to me, what with your ricotta raviolini with lettuce and slippery mushrooms and your genius sprinkling of fresh mint;—

(Oh. Mushrooms. Maud lent me a dictionary the other day, and this is not just any dictionary, people, it’s a Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré from 1947. There’s a brown dandelion drawing stamped onto the front of its muted orange cover, where it says “Je sème à tout vent.” Where the fat spine has cracked from years of thumbing through the book, seven small bronze staples hold it all together. Inside, fine engravings on yellowed pages, just pages and pages of marvel—parts of a house; gymnastic exercises; Hindu art; things to measure with; vehicles, from a pram to a tilbury to a dirigible; choke holds; Louis XIII style; Louise XIV style; Louis XV and XVI style; natural calamities; mollusks; the products and animals and peoples of Asia. And in color there is a page on champignons: the fairy-tale-like Amanite oronge; the spotted Amanite tue-mouches; the gently blushing Hypholome; the uneasy green Lactaire vixqueux; the stout Bolet tête de nègre; the Truffe, a malcontent, uneven blackish lump tucked in a corner at the bottom of the collection.)

—your Chatham cod crispy and flaky and salty in all the right ways; your—and I’d known it would be mine from the time I’d made our table reservation at noon—banana tart hot and sweet under a golden carapace of caramel. When Andrea tried the tart, she said, “Do we need to order another one?” “No,” I said, “if we order another dessert, it’ll have to be a different one, because everything else on the menu looked incredible, too.” Then I had another forkful of tart. “Okay, no, wait,” I said, “okay, order another one.”

On the train home, Andrea couldn’t stop admiring some girl’s shoes. I told her to post a Missed Connections, but she just laughed.