Cheapskate in Love

chapter 10





An hour later, Bill was sleeping soundly on his bed. He had taken the codeine pills from Helen, with very little show of self-reliant pride. In fact, because he only had strength to raise his head a little, he had allowed her to put the pills in his mouth and drank two cups of water from the glass that she held to his lips. She could see from the way he greedily slurped up the contents of the first glass that he was thirsty, so she demanded that he have another glass. Like a sick child, he submitted without any argument, although his mouth contorted itself into a slight pout at being told what to do. Within minutes of finishing the second glass of water, he had slipped into the world of dreams.

Jonathan was waiting at the door to lock Bill’s apartment, after Helen finished administering the medicine. But Helen thought she should stay a while, watching Bill, in case a more serious problem appeared. She told Jonathan she would remain, until Bill woke up and confirmed that he was feeling better.

“That’s very nice of you,” Jonathan said. “Call me if you need help. I hope he appreciates what you’re doing for him.”

“Thanks, Jonathan,” Helen answered. “He should, but whether he will is another question. Guys find it hard to be grateful. It rubs their ego the wrong way.”

“That sounds about right,” he replied, closing the door, not thinking that what she said might apply to him. “He can have a fat head.” Jonathan hustled back to the front desk and resumed playing a game on his cell phone.

Left alone in the apartment, Helen finally had an opportunity to look around and see what was there. Before she had been unable to notice much in her rush to help Bill and had only received a vague impression that the place was rather disorganized and dirty. A very brief tour of the dining area, living area, kitchen, bathroom, and closets strengthened her initial opinion into a certainty. “God, what a pig,” she said to herself. “No woman has been in here for a while, unless it was a sow.” Right then, a rude animal sound startled her, and she momentarily thought a sow might actually be in the apartment, concealed in the clutter, but when she heard the sound again she perceived that it came from the top of the bed. Bill had begun to snore.

To pass the time until Bill awoke, Helen looked for something to read. There was no bookcase in the apartment, and at first she couldn’t see any books, except a bible and some religious volumes. But by searching through the litter on top of the dining table, she discovered a book, How to Be a Billionaire. An involuntary laugh burst out of her. She wondered how far Bill was on his way to becoming a billionaire. There didn’t seem to be any signs of his success in the apartment. She looked at him sleeping and couldn’t detect any mega-rich glow emanating from his body. Not that there would be, she thought, if by some chance he became wealthy. She had observed well-to-do people, people born into mounds of money or lucky in their career, and most of the time she thought average working-class people made a better impression than they did. Since she didn’t know how to become a billionaire, she thought it might be worthwhile to read the book, although she wasn’t interested in adopting any new precepts for herself. Maybe in the future she could quiz Bill about his money-making progress.

With the book, she went to the couch and sat down. To her alarm, she sank further toward the floor than she expected; she wondered how difficult it was going to be to stand up again. Why would anyone keep such a worn-out piece of cheap furniture, she asked herself. Especially a want-to-be billionaire, she thought, remembering the book. She laughed again. Soon she was paging through the book, reading as well as she could amidst Bill’s thunderous, rhythmic snoring, which was like the crashing of the surf on a rocky beach.

After a few chapters, she grew tired of the simplistic rules and clichés of the book and threw it aside. “No one’s going to become rich reading that,” she said aloud. “The only person who’s going to benefit from that book is the author.”

For a while, she watched Bill sleep. There was a pained look on his face and in his posture from the accident, but she thought there was also a stillness, a greater appearance of relaxation than she had ever seen in him before. Perhaps, it was the effect of the codeine that he had taken. Perhaps, it was due to her presence. She preferred to think that the second explanation was the more accurate one. When she had seen him around other women or in one of his relationships that he told everyone about, bragging like a teenager, he always seemed to be acting a part. He never seemed emotionally involved with the woman. Most of the time, it appeared he was trying to manipulate those women into liking him, without truly liking them in return. He should feel more relaxed around me, Helen thought, because he’s certainly not trying to impress me. In fact, he doesn’t do anything for me at all, unless giving me a faded bouquet counts.

Such a realization would prompt most people to do nothing for someone whom they thought was doing nothing for them, but Helen was magnanimous by nature. She didn’t want a man treating her like a relative of the queen of England, putting on an elaborate show to please her. She wasn’t insecure or self-centered, a fussy orchid that would expire without the perfect, coddling climate. She was more like an oak tree, sturdy and strong. She wanted to be appreciated for who she was and what she did. Since she was tired of sitting around being useless, she decided to wash the dirty dishes in Bill’s apartment. She simply had to do something, while she was there.

That decision of small importance precipitated a sequence of related actions, and soon she was involved in a full-scale reorganization and cleaning of the apartment. While collecting the dirty dishes scattered around the studio, she discovered that the refrigerator contained spoiled food. Without much hesitation—who else was going to do this, she thought—she removed everything from the refrigerator and freezer. Then she cleaned the appliance’s inside surfaces, which probably had not been done for twenty years, and put back in only what was fresh. The kitchen cabinets received a similar treatment. All edibles for which the expiration date had passed were tossed out, and all dining and cooking wares were sorted and stored in an orderly fashion. The countertop, backsplash, and floor were thoroughly scoured and mopped. The kitchen was a vastly different place when she was done. Twenty years of use had been wiped clean.

Surveying the rest of the apartment, Helen perceived a greater domain of dirt and disorganization than the kitchen had been. A weaker person would have picked up the bible, lowered herself or himself onto the couch and read, especially Psalms and its lamentations, until Bill awoke. Helen, however, took a deep breath and started to work. She could not sit and be idle, pretending to read in such an indoor wilderness, when she had just tamed the kitchen outback and returned it to a civilized form. “There is a time for everything,” she said wisely, paraphrasing the third chapter of Ecclesiastes and adding a new twist. “The time has come to clean this sty completely.”

She collected the dirty clothing scattered around the studio and piled them near the door to take to the laundry room. Going through the items on the dining table and chairs, she found a better place for things she thought worth keeping in closets or kitchen cabinets. The things she thought were worthless, which was the majority of items, she put in the best place possible: The trash room in the hallway. She did the same with other objects that were scattered throughout the apartment. Even the contents in the closets were picked through. When she had finished sifting through almost everything in Bill’s apartment, the trash room was overflowing with empty boxes, worn out shoes, frayed clothing, parts of a bicycle, broken umbrellas, a defunct vacuum cleaner, burnt pans, junk mail, and an abundance of odds and ends of no clear value. She had discovered that he had a miser’s tendency for hoarding items, although she couldn’t understand how he thought that some of the stuff could ever be used again. He had an overwhelming inertia, she decided, when it came to personal tidiness. At first, she had been hesitant to toss items out, but the more she saw, the more certain she became that he had the habits of a pack rat and couldn’t do it himself. Ruthlessly, she rid the apartment of what she considered unnecessary. She then dusted, swept, and scrubbed all the surfaces in the apartment. The floor was parquet wood tiles, and she washed it on her hands and knees, changing the soapy water every ten square feet because it became so black so quickly.

Bill’s apartment literally sparkled when she was done. She looked around in satisfaction at her efforts. The furniture, floors, bathroom, and windows all glowed with the removal of years of dust, dirt, scum, and grime. All the smaller objects in the space were now neat and tidy. She smiled at what she had accomplished, until her eyes turned toward the bed and its occupant, and then she frowned. One last project demanded her attention.

Determined, she approached the bed. Bill was snoring heavily. Although there had been a few periods, while she scoured and straightened, in which his snoring had been replaced with quiet breathing, the sounds of a chainsaw had resumed. They would have unnerved a timid person, but they did not alarm her. With delicate hands, she unlaced Bill’s muddy shoes and pulled them off. Next, she took off his mud-splattered socks. Then she unbuckled his dirty pants and yanked those off, too. She decided to leave his soiled polo shirt on, because she thought he might be upset if she used a pair of scissors to remove it, but that was a difficult decision. The cheap shirt had made the bed dirty, and her hands were itching to rip it off him. Yet she knew that men can be childishly attached to old clothing for no good reason. Her deceased husband had been like that. To calm her offended sensibility, she pulled the top sheet and bedspread up to the chin of the sound sleeper. He had not moved during her disrobing operations.

“As soon as you wake up,” she said to sleeping Bill, as she stood next to him, “I’m going to strip every piece of clothing from you. I want to shave your head, too. What did you do to it? It looks awful. You’re definitely no sleeping beauty with that hair. ”

Since he was traveling far away in the land of Nod and couldn’t reply, her judgment went uncontested. She looked down upon him with the pleasure that comes from feeling indisputably in the right. Victory, however, did not make her proud, for immediately she went to the laundry room to wash his dirty clothes.