Madly (New York 2)

Jean sat up straight, alert. “There he is.”

Winston was striding across the plaza in front of his office building. He wore pinstripes today, and the sun gleamed off his wristwatch, his cuff links, his shined shoes. He veered to the right, heading away from them down the sidewalk.

“Where’s he going?”

“Probably thinks he’s taking the subway home. He can’t keep track of which way the station is.”

Allie watched Winston’s retreating back. He seemed cheerful, wandering off in completely the wrong direction. “How far are you going to let him go?”

But even as she asked, Jean was pulling away from the curb. “Can’t let him get too far, or we’ll lose him.” Her window lowered. “Flag him down.”

Allie unbuckled her seatbelt and stuck her whole torso out the window as the car slowed. “Hey, sugar, you looking for some company tonight? I’ll take real good care of you.”

Winston picked up his pace. His left hand came up and he shook his head without looking at her—his whole body saying, No, thank you.

Jean lost his shit. Head bent over the steering wheel, he drove three miles an hour and shook with silent laughter.

Allie couldn’t stop herself. “Come on, honey, take a look over here. I’ve got something you’ll like, I just know it.”

His hand was blocking his face now, a gesture that said, If I can’t see you, you can’t see me. He sort of flailed his briefcase at her.

“He thinks he’s getting solicited,” Jean wheezed. “At six o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday on Pearl Street.”

“Pull over.”

As the car neared the curb, Allie jumped out and jogged the half block Winston had put between himself and the car. “Hey! Winston!”

He finally turned around. She felt guilty then, at his obvious discomfort. When she was in college she’d sometimes done this, got caught up in the moment and taken a joke too far, but she’d thought she’d grown out of it.

Don’t worry about anyone but yourself, Allie. You never do.

She swallowed hard and found her voice. “It’s just me.” She gave him a low wave. “Hi.”

At first Winston only looked at her, a slow stock-taking sort of survey that made her aware of the sun shining through the gauzy white fabric of her dress. Possibly she was too naked in this outfit—or too something. Her short voile toga was suspended from thin ribbons of rhinestone, crisscrossed at her breasts. She wore gold platform sandals with gladiator straps to the knee and a vintage crown of gold-leaf laurel woven through with trailing crimson ribbons. It was a lot of outfit, and Winston was doing a lot of looking, which wasn’t, in Allie’s experience, generally a good thing.

A car horn sounded, making Winston jump. The traffic had started piling up behind Jean. “We came to get you,” Allie explained. “Want a ride?”

“Yes.”

Because she was nervous, embarrassed by her own excess, she said, “Come on, say it like you mean it, Chamberlain.”

Unexpectedly, he smiled. It broke over her, relief and pleasure.

“Yes. I do.” He did that thing she’d only seen in old movies where he waited for her to move toward the car and encircled his arm around her shoulders, without touching, as if he were guiding her. Suddenly, her mad-Gatsby-fever-dream outfit felt exactly right. Somehow, it went perfectly well with his charcoal pinstripes and grass-green Windsor knot.

—

“This is actually the most delicious thing I’ve ever eaten in all of my life.” Allie slurped at the bottom corners of her Popsicle, catching milky pineapple juice before it could run onto the back of her hand. “Why don’t they have these in Wisconsin?”

“Surely you have Popsicles.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have seven-dollar Popsicles made with fat chunks of fresh pineapple and magic fairy dust.”

Winston frowned at his Popsicle. “Yours must be better than mine. They’ve left out my fairy dust.”

“No, it’s got to be in there. That’s why it cost seven dollars.”

They strolled along the High Line, which Winston had sold to her as being “a sort of seaside boardwalk, except instead of views of the sea, there are a lot of brick buildings.” It was better than that, though, an elevated park with a walking path for city people and tourists to stroll along, peopl