Chris’s one and only book to date had also been a biography of a sort. The nice thing about Elaine was that she had not made an issue of the book’s stormy history and seemed to have no objection to working with him. Amazing, he thought, what you learn to settle for.

The restaurant Ari Weingart had recommended was tucked between an interface store and an office-supply shop in the open-air wing of the mallway. Most of these stores were closed for the evening, and the concourse had a vaguely derelict aspect in the cooling autumn air. But the diner, a franchise Sawyer’s Steak Seafood, was doing a brisk business. Big crowd, lots of talk in the air. They grabbed a vinyl booth by the wide concourse window. The decor was chrome and pastel and potted plants, very late-twentieth-century, the fake reassurance of a fake antiquity. The menus were shaped like T-bones.

Chris felt blissfully anonymous.

“Good God,” Elaine said. “Darkest suburbia.”

“What are you ordering?”

“Well, let’s see. The All-Day Breakfast? The Mom’s Comfort Meat Loaf?”

A waiter approached in time to hear her name these offerings in a tone of high irony. “The Atlantic Salmon is good,” he said.

“Good for what, exactly? No, never mind. The salmon will do. Chris?”

He ordered the same, embarrassed. The waiter shrugged and walked away.

“You can be an incredible snob, Elaine.”

“Think about where we are. At the cutting edge of human knowledge. Standing on the shoulders of Copernicus and Galileo. So where do we eat? A truck stop with a salad bar.”

Chris had never figured out how Elaine reconciled her close attention to food with her carefully suppressed middle-age spread. Rewarding herself with quality, he guessed. Sacrificing quantity. Balancing act. She was a Wallenda of the waistline.