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petting her tangle of yellow hair, and she said, Pork Pie, and he said, Let’s go running. It will make you feel better.
    She hissed like a cat. She hated running, even though the year before she had placed seventy-first in the NYC Marathon. In college, she was a speedster, a girl with big thighs and below-normal body fat. She ran so fast the pink bandana holding back her unruly hair always fell out during the last mile of her cross-country races. Now she was wearing out. She could barely touch her shins, and her knees popped when she walked up stairs. Her Achilles tendons felt like old rubber bands. Running had lost its charm, but it was habit, and she enjoyed its certain perks: high metabolism and perfect calves.
    It was three blocks from his classic six to the park, and she made them walk. He was wearing Princeton U, and she was wearing Tommy H, and his right hand was laced into her left hand. Neither of them wore rings.
    He said, I’ll give you ten bucks for every runner we pass in the park, and she said, It’s done.
    He laughed and looked at her with gooey eyes because that’s what they shouted to close deals in his business. And, moreover, some friends of his who had married last fall on Nantucket had passed out baseball caps with “It’s Done” embroideredacross the front because when Matthew proposed, Oona answered: “It’s done.”
    She got annoyed with him in the park because he was running faster than she wanted to, even though it meant they were passing loads of people, and with every person they passed, he said, Ka-ching, ka-ching. She was racking up the bucks, but she still wanted to kill him or something. He ran marathons too, though they never ran one in the same year. Competing was a strain, but so was not competing. When he ran one, she resented all the attention he received, and when she ran one, he always left for a long European business trip the next day. When they had first started dating three years ago, they had agreed to minimize the number of situations in which they directly competed since she got upset about the smallest losses, like being beat in Scrabble. She couldn’t manage her competitive feelings, he said, because she was a girl, and girls couldn’t leave things on the court. How essentialist of you, she had told him, and he drooped, because when she took him to the court intellectually, he knew he’d always lose.
    On the east side of the park underneath the crouching-panther statue, she said, Can we please slow down for Christ’s sake, and he said, At the top of the hill we can.
    She ratcheted back her pace near the Metropolitan Museum, but he didn’t. She had to roll onto her toes and exaggerate the swing of her arms to catch up with him. Then she sprinted ahead by a couple of steps, turned around, and said, Ka-ching, ka-ching, and he said, Double or nothing the rest of the way.
    You’re on, she said, and those were the last words they spoke until they hit the reservoir, where she vomited in the bushes as he stroked her sweaty back.
    Good job, he said, and she tried not to gloat, even though she knew that he had probably let her win. Naturally, he was much faster than she was. At home, he took four one-hundred-dollar bills from his shiny silver money clip and handed them to her.
    T wo misfits at a
happening
in the Meatpacking District—that’s how they’d met. Goldy had gone with friends of friends (in other words, acquaintances) with the goal of adding to her Friday night repertoire. Usually she alternated between getting tipsy with the Fast Five (whittled to three since not all of her cross-country team had shins for city sidewalks) or pretending to study great masterpieces at the Met while really sizing up her Internet date and wondering whether she should politely call it a night. On occasion, she relished going to a movie by herself, a tub of popcorn clenched between her knees, a Diet Coke with three splashes of the sugary stuff at her feet, or even staying in and