Throughout the session, we had the feeling that the company had been bilked by a charlatan in a rumpled tweed jacket.  In fact, we were convinced that the jacket, a disguise, a costume worn to meet our expectations of what a psychologist ought to wear, was proof that the charlatan was a charlatan, a crook in psychologist’s clothing.  Upon emerging from the session, however, we were astonished to find that as a result of the training we had received in perceiving a mound of sand as individual grains, we were able to perceive the staggering fee the company had paid this tweedy fellow as individual dollar bills!  Not a stack of bills, mind you, but individual bills.  With just a little more effort, we were able to see the fee as a mound of quarters, and then as individual quarters.  We are forced to admit that we really must have learned something.  It may take a great deal of company time for practice, but we think that eventually we will be able to perceive the fee as individual pennies, and then we will know that each and every one of them was money well spent.

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.  They’d finally given up on the idea of children, had even abandoned their halfhearted investigation into adoption, and Liz had thrown herself into work at John Hancock, determined to impress people and to rise, and succeeding at both.  They kept returning to the Black Hole because it was comfortable in the way that old corduroys are.  There was the added comfort of feeling anonymous: even though they ate there so often, no one connected with the place ever gave any sign of recognizing them.  How pleasant it is to be no one now and then.  They could just sit, talk a little if they were in the mood, or barely talk at all if they were too tired or stunned from work, hiding their silence in the business of eating an Indian meal—tearing bread apart, scooping rice up, transferring curries from bowls to plates.  Those were wonderful evenings, it seemed, but after Liz left, Matthew began to wonder.  Maybe what he’d taken for silent contentment was to her just silence, or worse.  No.  All that is over.  Fourteen years of marriage.  Fourteen months apart.  It’s over.  She’s coming back.

Reservations Recommended is published in paperback by Picador, a division of St. Martin’s Press, at $12.00.

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Reservations Recommended is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, dialogues, settings, and businesses portrayed in it are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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First published by Crown Publishers, Inc., 201 East 50th Street, New York, New York 10022. Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

Now available in paperback from Picador USA, a division of St. Martin’s Press.

For information about publication rights outside the U. S. A., audio rights, serial rights, screen rights, and so on, e-mail Alec “Nick” Rafter, the author’s earnest agent.

The illustration at the top of the page is an adaptation of an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions. The boy at the controls of the aerocycle doesn’t particularly resemble Peter Leroy—except, perhaps, for the smile.