Yet another taxi passes them by, and Albie, who is hardly without dorky tendencies, croons, Baby, it’s cold outside, just the one line and it’s off-key. Bunny suggests that they walk instead. “We could be here all night before we get a cab.” She gets no argument from Albie. A native Manhattanite, he always prefers to walk, and Bunny is as comfortable in high heels as she would be in a pair of those Finnish nature shoes that her sister wears.
The wind is with them; that is, at their backs, wind that periodically gusts, hurrying them along as if they were fallen leaves or candy wrappers. They blow past revelers who are hunched over pushing into the wind, their heads lowered like battering rams. Forging ahead is a cluster of five young women wearing those occasional plastic eyeglasses, 2009, coated in silver glitter. The double zeroes are centered to look like the round-rim eyeglasses worn by Harry Potter. The girls shriek as the wind musses their hair and blows their dresses tight against their thighs, and Bunny predicts that before the night is over, one of them will have barfed on the sidewalk, another will be bent over a bathroom sink in a bar on Third Avenue, and the other three will weep with pity for themselves.
“How generous of you,” Albie notes, and Bunny says, “You want to bet I’m right?”
“You can’t bet when the outcome is impossible to know.”
“I was speaking rhetorically.”
“Right,” Albie says. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.” Bunny taps the side of her head, and says, “You’re not all there.”
“Look who’s talking.” Albie puts his arm around Bunny and pulls her close to him.