The Black Hole has no liquor license. He and Liz always used to stop at the liquor store across the street and get some beer before they went in. Now Matthew stops there, intending to get some beer, just as he would have in the good old days, but when he steps across the threshold the rush of old familiar feelings is strong, and it makes him realize that by bringing beer he’s likely to seem to be trying to re-create an evening from the past, to recapture something. ...

SO he’s going to have dinner with Liz at the Black Hole. Showering, dressing, getting ready — it all feels comfortingly familiar. For a while, before they moved out of the city to Lincoln, he and Liz must have eaten at the Black Hole once a week. It was a time when they were eating out nearly every evening because they were both so busy. ...

     “Mrs. Barber?” says his secretary. There is a question in her voice, and Matthew focuses on that detail. She’s new, and she has never had any contact with Liz. Matthew can imagine her disbelief when the woman on the phone claimed to be his wife, a wife she never knew existed. “The former Mrs. Barber,” he says, in just the way he would have corrected any other small error, ...

Chapter 4 Superior Indian Cookery MATTHEW IS AT WORK, in his office, two floors from the top of a two-year-old building in the section of Boston that was once the garment district and is now the financial district, where construction has been booming for the last several years. ...

     There are no chianti bottles here, but if there were, they would be broken, deliberately, just so. There are definitely no checkered tablecloths, but if there were, they would be artificially stained. We are dealing with a new order here, for new citizens of a new world, with inverted notions of trash and taste. . . .

Dolce Far Niente Are we the last to notice the assimilationist trend among ethnic restaurants? In the days of our youth, we could tell one from another. Crystal, white linen, supercilious maître d’ — it’s French, naturellement; red and gold — Chinese; downstairs — Indian; and so on. ...

WHEN BELINDA has gone, and Matthew’s in bed, he lies awake, wondering what he ought to do. Should he buy the coat for her? He could have it delivered to her. It could arrive with a clever note. “Because I loved you in it and loved you on it.” Not bad. . . .

     He wonders if she’s sick. She doesn’t drink cognac well. “In here,” she calls, from the bedroom. Only the lights of the city light the room. Belinda has spread the coat out on the bed, fur side up, and she’s lying on it, naked, stretching, enjoying the fur against her skin, almost writhing. For her the foreplay has already begun. 

     “We weren’t starving,” says Belinda, “I know that. I know how much worse off everyone else in the world was or is or whatever. I know that life was basically pretty comfortable, but for a girl, then anyway, for a girl to go to school in clothes that everybody recognized weren’t hers — I mean, I knew they were looking at me, and they knew I was wearing what Elaine Toomey wore last year. It was horrible.” ...

THE HOLE in Matthew’s living room wall now reaches from the window at the far end of the room to the window near his audio equipment, nearly half the length of the room. There is a distinct downward thermal gradient in its vicinity. Belinda hasn’t taken her coat off; she snuggles into it while she squats to inspect the hole. “Any leads?” she asks. “None,” says Matthew. “I was out here this morning for nearly an hour, sitting on the floor, hoping I’d smell it while the sun was coming up. I had a theory that the sun warms the cavity here and releases — well, whatever it is. Guess what? Not a thing. All I could smell was coffee. I’m sure the guys working on this think I’m nuts, and this morning I almost agreed with them.”  ...