Thursday, New Year’s Eve, day zero: An operetta of cooking and cocktails and ringing out and ringing in. Friday, day one: I wake up wincing. The dreaded post-NYE souvenir starts its walk around the inside of my skull. Achey shower, achey clothing, achey coffee, achey noon-hour breakfast — an achey toasted Engmuf clamped around an achey over-easy egg. We stretch our second-string bottle of champagne out into a leisurely parade of dilute mimosas, letting the tiny bubbles and OJ pulp battle it out in chintzy crystal flutes. We watch the afternoon snow. We watch an afternoon movie. Most of the day the clouded-over sky is a low-wattage off-white, the sun a dim floating disc that you can stare right at. Having a Friday off as a pure recovery day is a great big puff pastry. I read books and study the views out the windows and avoid work and work-thoughts. I keep pace with the pounding, power-walking upstairs ache and pretend I have been cleansed of concerns. The hours creep, we forget the time, we construct breathtaking sandwiches and stay up very late.

Saturday, day two: Bright. Sunday, day three: Dark.

“… I don’t recall what the title of the book was, but the illustration has your signature on it, is dated 1980, and depicts an exasperated-looking cowgirl standing next to a tuxedoed skeleton lying on the ground at her feet. The two of them are holding empty champagne glasses and are emitting word balloons containing indecipherable handwritten scrawl …”

Jumbo eggs, twenty-minute grits, black coffee, brilliant and brainpan-assaulting kitchen-window sunshine, fizzy orange flutes. Wikipedia the Wise on the mimosa: In some places, it is traditional to use leftover, somewhat flat champagne from the night before to construct mimosas. YES! Hair of the dog that bit me, Lloyd …

Three drinks from Marguerite Yourcenar: Memoirs of Hadrian, Greek wine:

Wine initiates us into the volcanic mysteries of the soil, and its hidden mineral riches; a cup of Samos drunk at noon in the heat of the sun or, on the contrary, absorbed of a winter evening when fatigue makes the warm current be felt at once in the hollow of the diaphragm and the sure and burning dispersion spreads along our arteries, such a drink provides a sensation which is almost sacred, and is sometimes too strong for the human head. No feeling so pure comes from the vintage-numbered cellars of Rome; the pedantry of great connoisseurs of wine wearies me.

How Many Years, champagne:

He fills his tooth glass with the sparkling liquid, coldly and deliberately drinks it down, refills the glass, and repeats until the whole bottle is gone. Not that Michel-Charles is a heavy drinker: his knowledge of fine vintages has made him a connoisseur and anything but an alcoholic. But he has acquired from his father a formula that he will pass on to his son: If you want to raise yourself to the level of a party that you really don’t want to attend, the best thing is to consume, in small swallows, an entire bottle of fine champagne; without this, people and things will merely be what they are.

Fires:

Alcohol sobers me. After a few swallows of brandy, I no longer think of you.