Watching for the sets: This is that restaraunt we went to with Jeff, on our trip to Albany, that summer when we loved giving up on things. This is the old place where we said, ‘We’re doing the same things everyone before us did.’ And we wondered at the spoons, shaped specially for oysters. I remembered to you a woman I had seen in Biloxi, all shrouded in black, the day James Brown died — Christmas Eve — and how she sat in the back of the casino, eating 24 oysters one by one, as if she were the goddess who counted out the hours of the day. ‘I am that woman,’ I said at the time, because I had thought I could become her — effusion of lonesomeness, ritual of the sea. Oh, Jeff. You bought us dinner. You thought it would make up for our salaries — pittances. It was wonderful, for those three days, to pretend we were old school reporters, wandering the assembly hall, meeting them in their offices. But how cold it must get there, we said. Look at how the roofs slope down to wait for snow.
