They’d chosen a restaurant on Broadway, where the bread was shaped like sea turtles and the food had to be retrieved from a labyrinth. It was good food, and plentiful, but it was impossible to deal with all that entertainment. She also had a hard time looking down at her plate. A black cavity opened up beneath her when she tried. Like a hole in the ice, she thought, and looked up at the ceiling, but that didn’t help. As they ate, Pete and Anthony narrated scenes from their life together. In some of them, she appeared as a walk-on from the old days, and then she would try to laugh along with them, but at some​ 69point she got to her feet. “I’m just going to stand up and talk,” she said. “My legs are starting to fall asleep,” she said, though that wasn’t true. It was the hole in the ice, she was scared of sliding down into it. Anthony had teased her a bit. She looked funny, he said, and she considered asking whether they knew a good doctor, but she couldn’t deal with the consequences of seeing a doctor, so she just stood.

It was while she was standing there that she caught sight of a man down on another level of the restaurant. He was a relatively old man. Brown and wrinkled from the sun, and he had hair that was much too black, cut in that style that men had when she was a girl. Glam rock hair, and he stood chatting with women who had been variously patched together. None of them were pretty. Everyone she’d met downtown looked as if they were a bit ill, and the fellow down there on the other level was as thin as a razorblade.