The (Most) Nabobist

The Way We Are in The New Yorker, 2007-02-19.

The last time our water went off, it was early summer. I got up at my regular hour, and saw that Hugh was off somewhere, doing whatever it is he does. This left me alone to solve the coffee problem—a sort of Catch-22, as in order to think straight I needed caffeine, and in order to make that happen I needed to think straight. Once, in a half-sleep, I made it with Perrier, which sounds plausible but really isn’t. On another occasion, I heated up some leftover tea and poured that over the grounds. Had the tea been black rather than green, the coffee might have worked out, but, as it was, the result was vile. It wasn’t the sort of thing you’d try more than once, so this time I skipped the teapot and headed straight for a vase of wildflowers sitting by the phone on one of the living-room tables.