Madly

by Ruthie Knox

  “It’s hard to think about,” she said finally. Winston was staring at his plate, half covered in cold sole. “I know that’s stupid.”

  “I understand.”

  Then his gaze caught on something behind her, and the server was at their table again, bearing a plate of cheese and a perfectly sliced apple that reminded her of Ben. Behind him, a second man had a tray of drinks. They were presented with dessert menus. It was a decadent flurry, but she’d lost her appetite for the pageantry of this place.

  When the servers left, Winston cleared his throat.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just want to have fun, you know, you and me together? I don’t want one more thing to be heavy. Hard.”

  “Of course.”

  “I hate it when you say ‘of course.’ It means yes, you agree with me, and it means no, you don’t agree with me but you’re going to do what I say anyway. I can’t tell if I’m crushing your soul or what.”

  His expression, when he met her eyes, was naked and helpless. So that was a yes.

  “Don’t look at me like that.” She shook her head. “Don’t, please.”

  She had to watch as he shuttered his face. He closed the windows to his heart in his eyes, tightened his mouth. He turned himself into a parody, like the waiter, like the menu, like the Imperial Club.

  “Excuse me.”

  Winston folded his napkin on the table, set down his fork on the correct side of his plate, and left her alone to deal with the fact that she couldn’t take back what she’d said, or how she’d said it.

  And she didn’t really want to.

  —

  “What shall we do until it’s time for Beatrice’s meeting?”

  He stood by her arm beside the table, having returned from the bathroom looking only mildly careworn, signed the tab, and handed it off to a waiter. Allie took it as a good omen that he was willing to smile at her. A good omen of what, she couldn’t say. That he wouldn’t push her where she wasn’t willing to go?

  Whether that was good, or correct, or what she deserved, she didn’t let herself think about. She wanted to be with him tonight, but only if they kept it…not fun, since fun didn’t seem like quite the right word for this thing she and Winston had going, but something like fun.

  Non-future-focused. Non-confusing. Non-Allie-can’t-handle-this-right-now.

  “What do you want to do?” she asked. Bea texted that she had “some intel” and wanted everyone to come to her coffeehouse during her shift so they could “talk strategy.” Everyone, apparently, meant Bea, Allie, and Winston, Nev and Cath, May, and Winston’s assistant, a woman named Chasity. It had all been arranged before Allie even learned about it from Winston.

  It made her feel both pleased and overtaken.

  “I’m not sure,” Winston said. “We could walk, perhaps? It’s a lovely day.”

  The temperature had climbed. It was sweltering and humid. “Is it a British thing to always call the weather lovely unless it could actually kill you?”

  He brushed lint off the pocket of his suit coat. “I suppose it is, yes. My mother—you should meet my mother, I think she’d enjoy you—she used to take us on holiday to Wales. We’d rent a small cottage and visit sheep farms, watch them make cheese, that sort of thing. She felt it was good for us to explore our heritage. Always, there would be at least one day when we went bathing, and the water would be cold enough to freeze your bollocks off, but you weren’t to say. You were to put up an umbrella, and a windbreak, spread out your towels on this gray shoreline with these absolutely frightful waves tumbling in, and say to each other, ‘Isn’t this perfectly lovely?’ ”

  “This is not dissimilar to what it’s like to jump into a lake in northern Michigan in June.”

  “Something you’ve done a good deal of?”

  “My family has a cabin in the U.P.” At his questioning look, she explained, “The Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It’s north of Wisconsin. Up by Canada.” Allie stood and stuck out her elbow. “Let’s walk.”

  They didn’t, though—not right away. Winston decided there was somewhere in particular he wanted to take her, so he called Jean, and half an hour later they’d been deposited at a familiar location.

  “This is your office.” She pointed to a familiar hot dog vendor. “There, that’s your hot dog stand.”

  “You know, I’ve never purchased one of his hot dogs.”

  “I had three with Jean. They are fucking delish. Where are we walking?”

  “It’s this way.”

  He led her southward, to Battery Park, and then they wandered its paths in a westerly direction. Winston looked around a lot, semicasually, but she didn’t ask whether he knew where they were going. It didn’t matter.

  “Would you hold my hand?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  He extended his, and she clasped their palms together. He was hot, too, probably overheating in his suit, his palm slightly damp in hers, but pleasant.

  There were other couples strolling, too, young people and old people, a busy restaurant spilling waiting customers onto the sidewalk. The sun hit the water and the buildings at an angle, casting bright light into their eyes.

  “This was on the list.” He said it with only mild curiosity, a cue she could pick up and run with or drop.

  “It was.”

  “You put it on.”

  “I did.”

  “ ‘Walk, holding hands.’ Not so terribly racy as some of the other items.”

  “No.”

  “Yet you put it on. In the midst of thinking of racy things you wanted, you thought of this as well.”

  “Yeah. Matt wasn’t…The thing is, everybody always told me how much he adored me. ‘Matt loves you so much,’ friends would tell me, or even strangers, and I’d tell myself, too, you know, ‘This guy loves you so much, don’t fuck it up.’ ”

  All those months and years she’d spent with Matt, the whole time certain that he loved her more than she loved him. The whole time worried that she needed to figure out how to love him more, to be more open and more generous, more demonstrative.

  It wasn’t until after she’d moved out, and found herself living in May’s empty house, alone, without her dogs, without Matt, that she started to wonder, if he loved her so much, why didn’t he ever touch her? Why didn’t he seem more proud of the things she’d actually accomplished?

  “When we first met,” she said, “he seemed really into me, like the way I dressed, like he was proud of all of me—but I think he was only attracted to those things as long as he didn’t feel responsible for them. Once I belonged to him, I was his, and he would tell people how much he loved me, but he didn’t do stuff that made me feel loved.”

  “Like hold your hand.”

  “Yeah. Or, say, compliment my clothes. And even before Matt, actually. I had a few boyfriends in college and high school. None of them were big hand holders. Did you and Rosemary hold hands?”

  He glanced at her, then at their joined fingers. “Once upon a time.”

  “Long ago and far away, huh?”

  She felt his shrug in her own shoulder. “I wouldn’t have wanted to hold my hand either, by the end.”

  In the too bright sunlight, under the trees, holding his hand, she watched his face. Sorrow, and reproach, and then something like acceptance.

  “I think the main thing divorce has taught me is how little I want to put up with sadness,” he said. “My own, or the sadness of the people I love. There’s not enough time in life to be miserable, and let misery make us mean.” He swung her arm with his, forward and back. “It’s better to hold hands.”

  They did, all the way to the Irish Hunger Memorial: a perfect little jewel of New York that she’d never heard of and never would have discovered without Winston to guide her there.

  It was a small stone cottage set on a small green hill, a fallow potato field, a green space in the city, a piece of public art.

  It was a place for walking around on, for thinkin
g about loss, and death, and what life is supposed to be worth.

  They walked over it together, and he held her hand.

  Chapter 18

  Beatrice stood with her right foot out of her sandal, the bare sole balanced against her inner left calf, her eyes cast to the ceiling.

  Her thinking pose. Rosemary had once been called to the headmaster’s office at Bea’s school to discuss the disruption their eleven-year-old daughter caused when she insisted on standing that way during exams.

  It’s just how I think, Bea had explained, tearfully, that evening at home.

  They were all assembled at her coffeehouse, as she’d ordered. He’d had to promise Chasity a particularly generous bonus next quarter in order to obtain her consent to turn up at such a nontraditional venue, and he’d worked himself up worrying over how she would get here and whether she’d be able to navigate the tables and foot traffic in her wheelchair, when of course it turned out she was perfectly competent to handle all the arrangements without his assistance. They’d taken over one corner of the shop, spread out among a flowered sofa in a terrible state of disrepair, two stained leather wingback chairs, and a table with only three legs.

  “No, you’re right, I’m sure you are,” Bea said to Nev. “But I do think we can bust this thing open if we put our heads together. I have this friend—Hang on. I’ve got a customer.”

  She bustled to her spot behind the counter, and the silence held for a moment as they watched her. It had been like this for twenty minutes of stop-and-start conversation. He thought perhaps she’d be fired if her employer found out how she was conducting business during her shift.

  On the other hand, none of her customers had complained. They all seemed to find her a perfectly adequate barista.

  Allie shifted on the davenport beside him, slid out of her shoes and crossed her legs one over the other to settle more comfortably on the cushion.

  Twenty-six years old. It had been a long time since he was capable of sitting comfortably in that position, even if the whim had struck him to do so. Which it had not.

  She dipped her head to rest it on his shoulder for a moment. When he looked at her, she smiled the smile of a woman who’d spent nearly two hours wandering in the heat holding his hand, and he wanted to order Bea to bring her another iced tea, but he left it alone.

  Whenever he glanced in the direction of May, sitting at the table, she was staring at him.

  Cath opened the toggle on a nylon bag suspended from her wrist, fussed in it for a moment, and withdrew a tangled string tube attached to a pair of knitting needles.

  “Ooh, what are you making?” Allie asked.

  “Stockings. I hope they’ll be stockings, anyway, they’re a right bitch, and if I mess up the lace pattern even a little bit, it shows. I had to frog eighteen inches last week.”

  Allie made a face like sucking lemons. “Balls to that.”

  “Right? But I want the stockings, so it’s the price I’m willing to pay.”

  “I have a friend on Etsy who sells hand-knit stockings for a small fortune. She hires knitters from India to help her fill the orders, and every time they get behind on production, she just raises the price.”

  Cath nodded. “All hail the maker who figures out how to get paid. I know this woman at the V and A who’s selling these pieces of slate and wood for putting across your tub? Like, just a piece of stone, or wood, with grooves in the bottom, so you can get in the bath and have a place to set your votive candle and your book and your vibrator, I guess, but she takes the best pictures, makes it look like if you have this piece of slate on your tub it’s going to turn bathing into an orgasmic experience like none you’ve ever had, and they go for a hundred and fifty pounds. Her boyfriend makes them for five, ten pounds in materials, plus shipping. They’ve earned enough to buy a flat in Kensington.”

  Chasity sighed and tapped furiously at the screen of her tablet. She’d taken three calls and consumed two double espressos on the house since her arrival. Winston had begun to doubt she would remain long enough for Bea to get to the point of their meeting.

  “Allie takes great pictures,” May said. And then, when no one replied, she clarified, “For her listings. On Etsy, and on her websites. Is that how you get more money?”

  Allie looked uncomfortable. “It helps.”

  “Tell me more about these photographs,” Winston said. “This is your primary form of marketing?”

  “It’s one, yeah. But it’s not so much marketing as…I don’t know. Paying attention to what people want, I guess. People who shop for vintage clothes want the fantasy of the past. That’s what they’re spending money for—not the dress, but the way it makes them feel. So I wear the clothes or pay models to wear them, with period makeup and hair and accessories, and I create a tableau in my studio with vintage furniture and accent pieces.”

  “She did this one with a flapper dress,” May said, “slinking on a chaise longue with seventeen strings of pearls and a cigarette in a holder.”

  “How much were you paid for the dress?” Winston asked.

  Allie blushed. “Seventeen hundred dollars.”

  “How much over market value?”

  “Nine hundred. Ish. It was missing some of the beadwork, which I disclosed in the listing, and that should’ve kept the value down, but…” She shrugged.

  Cath whistled. “Damn. That is impressive. Write down your websites for me, I want to see this shim-shammery of yours.”

  “That isn’t shim-shammery,” Nev said. “That’s good business, love.”

  Bea bounded back over and slid a pastry in front of May. “It’s apple. You seemed like an apple danish kind of person.”

  “I love them.”

  “World’s best barista.” His daughter hooked her thumbs into the suspenders she wore over a ratty men’s T-shirt to hold up a pair of enormous Bermuda shorts that looked as though she’d pulled them from the bottom of some laundry pile. She had dark circles under her eyes and a line of dark blue stars trailing up her forearm he’d never seen before.

  A tattoo? He hoped it wasn’t a tattoo. It looked as though she’d inked it with a Biro, except the skin all around it was disturbingly pink, as though she’d drilled the ink into her own flesh.

  Winston began to wish her boss would turn up and fire her. Then perhaps she would run out of money and move into her apartment, where he could keep an eye on her and prevent her from mutilating herself further.

  “Nice stick and poke,” Cath said.

  “I know, right? I love it.”

  “What’s stick and poke?” Winston asked.

  Bea turned three-quarters away from him and asked her uncle, “So where were we?”

  “You have a friend,” Chasity prompted.

  “Oh! Right. I have a friend who works as a caterer nights, and he got a gig through a temp agency that’s going to pay him twice the usual rate, in cash, on Saturday morning. He’s supposed to get a text on Saturday by six A.M. telling him where to go, and it’s going to be in Manhattan, accessible by subway. So I’m thinking that’s got to be Justice.”

  “Can we get him to tell you when he finds out where it will be?”

  “He signed a confidentiality thing, but yeah, I think he’ll do it for me.”

  “Confidentiality agreements with temp caterers who don’t know what they’re catering for or where?” Chasity said. “This guy is begging for leaks at this point.”

  “Well, he’d need them,” Cath said. “He wants press and crowds. He can’t afford to keep secrets well, just well enough to keep an air of mystery around the unveiling.”

  “So, wait,” May interrupted, “you’re saying Justice wants people to know he’s planning something.”

  “That’s how these things build,” Cath explained. “Probably there’s press that already knows it’s happening. If Bea knows, and her friends are talking about it—”

  “I have another friend at the student newspaper who’s been chasing rumors online all week,” Bea int
errupted.

  May smiled. “That’s so good to hear. That means—”

  “But it’s not what we need to know,” Allie interrupted. “I mean, that’s great, if Ben can get Dad back here—”

  “He’ll get him,” May said. “You haven’t seen him when he’s got a job to do. I mean, if he’s not at the restaurant, he’s got to focus on something, and we gave him a mission, so he’s definitely going to bring Dad back. Don’t worry.”

  “It’s not that I’m worried, it’s just that even if Ben brings him here, and Bea’s connections can find us a time and a place for the art thing so we can drag Dad there, it’s too late by then, isn’t it? I want to see Mom before Justin deploys the Harry Winston.”

  “What Harry Winston?” Cath asked.

  “He bought jewelry,” Chasity said. “Forty-three thousand seven hundred dollars and eighteen cents worth of jewelry, to be precise.”

  Nev gave a low whistle. “How’d you find that out?”

  “I followed the money.”

  He looked at Winston. “Is this legal?”

  “Strictly speaking, yes. We’re in a gray area as far as client confidentiality, however.”

  Nev recrossed his legs and kept his eyes squarely on Winston’s. “Assure me this isn’t one of those gray areas where you’re manipulating people into doing things they’d prefer not to do.”

  “Nobody’s manipulating anybody,” Allie cut in. “Winston’s just trying to help.”

  “There’s helping, and then there’s invasion of privacy and blackmail,” Nev said coolly. “I’d like to ensure I haven’t wandered over to the wrong side of any fences.”

  Cath put her hand on his arm. “This isn’t the same.”

  A muscle ticked in Nev’s jaw. “You understand why I’m cautious.”

  “I understand your brother was an absolute dickhead to you back when we got together,” Cath said, “and it’s taken a long time to mend things between you enough for us to be here, so, yeah, you have to be cautious. But also I’m right here with you, with excellent radar for dickheads, and I’m telling you, City, baby, this isn’t the same.”

  “If you say so.”

  Cath pecked him on the cheek. “I do.”