On paying the check:
"Sometimes it is better to use the pen the restaurant provides, which is usually a cheap stick pen, even when the restaurant is quite fancy; sometimes it is more satisfying to wait with your hand on your own pen in your shirt pocket until the end of a story you are being told, and then, nodding and laughing, remove it from your pocket, hearing the clock of its clip as it slips off the shirt pocket's fabric and springs against the barrel, followed by a second click as you bare the ballpoint...audible even in loud restaurants, because the burble of voices is of a much lower frequency. And just as your signature is freed into illegibility by the wine, so you imagine that the very ink in the pen adheres more readily to the tiny pores on the surface of the ball because it has been warmed by your body and by the flow of all this conversation. Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants."
~Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
"Sometimes it is better to use the pen the restaurant provides, which is usually a cheap stick pen, even when the restaurant is quite fancy; sometimes it is more satisfying to wait with your hand on your own pen in your shirt pocket until the end of a story you are being told, and then, nodding and laughing, remove it from your pocket, hearing the clock of its clip as it slips off the shirt pocket's fabric and springs against the barrel, followed by a second click as you bare the ballpoint...audible even in loud restaurants, because the burble of voices is of a much lower frequency. And just as your signature is freed into illegibility by the wine, so you imagine that the very ink in the pen adheres more readily to the tiny pores on the surface of the ball because it has been warmed by your body and by the flow of all this conversation. Rarely do pens go dry in restaurants."
~Nicholson Baker, The Mezzanine
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