Cheapskate in Love

chapter 15





On Wednesday of the next week, Bill met Stan for lunch. Usually, a month or two would pass before they would get together again, but Bill had something so important to communicate that he couldn’t wait that long. In fact, he was so eager to talk to Stan, he offered to pay for lunch. That wasn’t much of an enticement for Stan, because Bill wanted to go back to the Chinese lunch buffet, where they had eaten the last time. But Stan was glad to see his friend, and there was time in his schedule to meet. Returning to the same cafeteria-style restaurant appealed to Bill, because he was determined to receive the five-dollar lunch special this time. He wouldn’t make the mistake—costly in his mind—that he had made before.

With Stan, Bill thought he would have the most sympathetic audience for what he wanted to say. Bill felt his life was at a turning point, and he wanted to share the good news and hear someone else, anyone else, affirm that what he had persuaded himself to be true was indeed true. He had been at similar turning points before, but this time he was convinced that there would be a romantic revolution in his single state and a union of two in his future. Ever since his Friday commute home, he had been telling people of his surprise encounter on the train and how much impact it was going to have on his life.

The first person he had told was Jonathan at the apartment building. From the train station, Bill had sped home in his car, hurried across the parking lot, and streaked through the lobby. Panting from all of his haste, he broke the news, leaning over the front desk in close proximity to Jonathan’s face. Jonathan hardly looked up from his cell phone game. “That’s nice,” he said, when Bill finished. “She sounds cute.” Jonathan had heard too many of Bill’s amorous hopes before to think that this one had any more substance than the rest.

The apartment building manager and janitor, whom Bill saw on Saturday by chance, reacted in the same way. They barely paused in their work to listen. There were a few residents in the building that Bill was familiar with, whom he thought might congratulate him and wish him well, but the ones he saw responded with polite coldness. They knew enough about him to restrain their belief when he said anything about women. “How interesting,” one of them said, much like the others. “I guess a train ride can take you places you never imagined.”

To Helen, he didn’t say a word about the momentous event that had occurred. Why would he? He avoided communication with her. He had no use for her. She found out about it, however, from Jonathan and another resident. “Bill’s at it again,” they said. “Says he found a real trophy this time.”

“I wonder what his trophy found in him,” she replied. No one could tell her that.

Normally, Bill would not share with his sister Marie any tidings about a woman until he had gone on at least one date, but this time was different. The future was certain in his mind, and he had to spread the happiness around.

Marie was smoking when he called. “You don’t want to come over here and eat again, do you?” she rasped. “There’s nothing here to eat, unless you’re going to pick up something and bring it.”

“No, I’m not coming over,” he said with a surge of joy in his voice, which immediately aroused her suspicion.

“Why not? Something wrong? Wait, don’t tell me. You found another woman.”

“I did, sis. How’d you guess?” Bill shouted in surprise. He was happy, as if he was a child again with a couple of cookies.

“I’m psychic,” she deadpanned. “And don’t call me sis. I hate it.” Bill could not say anything to persuade her that this time would turn out differently.

The lukewarm to frigid reception Bill received from his listeners over the weekend, when he related his life-changing chance meeting, made him hesitate to inform his coworkers. They could be a little insensitive, he knew. But the great, promising nature of what he had experienced made his silence impossible. He had to tell them. Although they could be mean and uncaring, they were like family. In fact, they were more than family to him, because he was single. He could not contain his excitement around them. He had to let them know on Monday morning.

At first, their reaction to what he told them was different; it was much more supportive than he had expected. At least that is how it appeared to him. Katie, of course, paid no attention to the major milestone he described. She was busy updating her friends online about her weekend, which was full of more surprises and drama, in her mind, than anything that happened to Bill or anyone else. But the others were attentive throughout his narration and asked questions and gave him advice on what restaurant to go to in Manhattan and where to visit in San Francisco. True, they were looking at each other a lot while he spoke and seemed to smile more than usual. At one point, when he told them Tanya had asked if he wore a Rolex, Debbie seemed about to explode with laughter, but a well-timed cookie, which she shoved in her mouth, defused whatever seemed to be tickling her, and her composure returned. Claire, Matt, and Debbie could be real pals when they wanted to, Bill thought to himself. He finished his story and started to work, satisfied that they saw the Friday encounter as he did, recognized the joyous change it portended in his life, and wished him success.

Doubts about their support soon crept into his mind, however. All three quickly left to go to the bathroom, or so they said, and they were there for an unusually long time. They were still absent when Bill went to the lobby on their floor to make a business call. As he sat down in the lobby, an elevator cab opened. He immediately looked that way, because sounds burst out of it of people laughing so hard they were near tears. There inside, he saw Claire, Debbie, and Matt, sprawling against the sides of the cab and falling on each other, like epileptics in the midst of seizures, their eyes closed, unable to support themselves. He heard Debbie say, “I can’t go back. I can’t. I can’t face him. Not yet. He’s too much. How can he think she has any interest in him? What a...” Before she could finish, the elevator door closed. Matt had pressed a button. The three went back to another floor to recover, unaware that Bill had seen them.

There was a sinking in Bill’s spirits as he felt their treachery and desertion, but it was a momentary discomfort. He could still count on Stan, his best friend. Stan could be contradictory at times, Bill thought, but this time the evidence was so clear that he knew Stan would agree. He was almost certain of his support, which was the same thing as being absolutely certain for him, because little doubts had no sway over his thinking. His brain was like a traffic light with only two colors, green and red. He could barely wait to see Stan, even if he had to pay for Stan’s meal. He could bear that sacrifice for the opportunity to connect with another human being, who would share his rosy outlook.

As they had planned for lunch on Wednesday, Bill and Stan were seated at the same Midtown Chinese buffet restaurant they had gone to the last time. The place was crowded as before, with mostly Chinese Americans and Chinese immigrants. Stan was conspicuous for his well-groomed and well-dressed appearance, while Bill in his cheap, casual office clothes was barely distinguishable from the number of manual laborers eating lunch there, if his hair was overlooked. Since he had successfully ordered the five-dollar lunch special, he ate with more satisfaction and gusto than the time before. The food was disappearing from his plate with remarkable speed. No one in the restaurant could match his eating efficiency.

“You’ll never guess what happened to me,” he said between tossing fork-loads of food in his greedy mouth.

“Tell me,” Stan said. Like the typical executive, he disliked wasting his time.

“No. Guess.”

“OK,” Stan replied. He did not need any mental creativity to guess what Bill’s secret might involve. He knew there were only a couple of tracks that Bill’s mind traveled on, and by far the biggest one was devoted to women. “You hooked up with that spicy Asian dish we saw here last time...”

“No.”

“She’s Linda’s niece and...”

“Forget about Linda,” Bill interrupted again. “I’m through with her. I’m never seeing her again.”

“I’ve heard that before.”

“This time it’s true. When I saw her the weekend before last...”

“You saw her?”

“Against my better judgment I saw her, and she dragged me all over Bear Mountain for hours until I stumbled and fell. I was in bed for days.”

Although Stan had never met Linda, he thought that this story was a little lopsided in Bill’s favor. “I thought you said you weren’t going to see her.”

“I did, but it was the last time. Now keep guessing. You’re going to be surprised.”

Stan thought that that was unlikely, but he tried to think of something surprising. “You met a prostitute, who’s an ex-nun, and now you go to church every day together and pray in a dark side pew, where you can’t be seen. In the missionary position.”

“Family men like yourself are supposed to have some respect for religion,” Bill commented, disapproving of Stan’s humor.

“Right. And your head is full of holy thoughts when you’re in a church.”

“I’m a different person in church.”

“Yeah, right. I’m sure you know how to separate church from your usual state of mind.”

“I do.” Bill missed the meaning of Stan’s sarcasm about separation of church and state, because he was focused on something more important. “Are you tired of guessing?”

Stan was, but he thought what Bill would have to say was less interesting than another simplistic fiction. “The sexiest woman you’ve ever seen...”

“Now, you’re on it,” Bill encouraged, happy to hear Stan land upon this piece of truth. “She’s the hottest sex pot I ever laid eyes on. When I saw her, I couldn’t turn away.”

“She came up to you and started talking...”

“You’re right. She did. There were other seats she could have sat in, but she sat next to me.”

“When she rubbed you with her leg...”

“Yeah. And she grabbed my wrist. I thought she was going to grab something else.” Bill gave a big smile. In his excitement, in his belief that Stan was supporting him and confirming all that he had fantasized about the chance encounter, Bill began to embellish what had actually happened.

“Tingles went down your spine.”

“Yeah, that happened. And something else became as hard as my spine and tingled all over.” Bill was grinning like a monkey and ready to jump up and down like one, too, because Stan was such a great friend and saw everything just as he had.

“But when she undressed herself for you in bed, you realized she was a man.”

“Wrong again,” Bill shot back, disappointed that Stan couldn’t stop joking about a subject so serious and dear to him, although he himself had just been exaggerating and joking about it, too. Bill saw that there was no way to advance the conversation, unless he told Stan the good news directly without any more delay. “On the train ride home last Friday—it was a much later train than I usually take, because I had trouble walking from the fall the weekend before...”

“How much trouble? It sounds serious.”

“I injured my lower back. I couldn’t move for a few days.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“That’s not the point.” Bill was a bit exasperated, because the talk was drifting away from what he wanted to say. He also didn’t like doctors. They reminded him of his age and mortality. “The point is, I missed my train and took a later one. And it’s a good thing I did. Because on that train, a beautiful, young Ukrainian—she’s twenty-seven. She was sad when I said she looked thirty. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a ten. Linda is about an eight, eight and a half. But Tanya—that’s her name—is a ten. She’s electrifying. And she sat down next to me.”

“Maybe she thought you were her father.” Stan didn’t think Bill’s big news unusual. It fell into a pattern of other amazing, unexpected, unforgettable interactions Bill claimed to have had with other women in the past. Frequently when they met, there seemed to be another such story. Stan couldn’t understand why so many women—and they always seemed to be foreigners, or a generation removed from being an immigrant—bothered to notice Bill. Was there something about Bill that intrigued foreign women? Stan had no idea what that might be. Could they tell the difference between a single man and a married one by sight? Stan rarely felt that he was the object of a woman’s attention, including his wife’s. However, unlike Bill, he wasn’t always on the lookout for women, so that must be why, Stan thought, he rarely had any adventures similar to Bill’s. He also thought that the women with whom Bill had such experiences were always immigrants or close to it, because Bill considered them to be less expensive to acquire and retain than American women. For that important, economical reason, he chased after them.

“Ha, ha. She didn’t think I was her father,” Bill countered. “She thought I was hot. We talked, until I had to get off the train.”

“She didn’t want to go home with you?”

“She was going to her brother’s further to the east.”

“So?”

Over the weekend, Bill had asked himself the same question that Stan was asking now. Bill hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory explanation. He had told himself that she had family obligations, which prevented her from calling all weekend and had forced her to stay on the train when he left. But when he thought about it, that had appeared to be a flimsy excuse. She was an adult and single. How much interest could she have in visiting a married brother with children? “She said she had to go,” Bill said, as doubts began to flood into his brain. The streetlight in his mind began to flash red.

“If she thought you were hot, and you thought she was hot, sounds like something should be cooking.” That’s how Bill thought, Stan knew. He was trying to put the meeting into perspective for Bill, and he was succeeding.

“I wasn’t too comfortable,” Bill admitted. “She wanted to know if I was wearing a Rolex. That’s why she grabbed my wrist. She asked if I had a house and how much I made. She asked those things within the first few minutes. It seemed too early.”

“Oh, I see. She saw sucker written on your forehead in big capital letters. S-U-C-K-E-R. Sucker.”

“No, it’s not like that. She makes eight dollars an hour and is trying to find a way to stay in this country.”

“Like I said, sucker. When she found out that you don’t wear a Rolex, don’t own a house, and don’t make enough to buy her clothes and jewelry on Madison Avenue, she knew she was wasting her time with you. She doesn’t care what country she’s in, as long as she’s well off.”

Bill knew that Stan was right. Stan had thrown a harsh light on Bill’s misty imagination of himself and Tanya, and the fantasy had evaporated like the morning dew. Bill now felt he was never going to see Tanya again, but he couldn’t admit that to Stan or himself just yet. He had invested so much hope and planning in her that if he gave up so quickly, he would appear to be a fool to everyone, including himself. He had to stick to his story for a while. Besides, there was no one to take her place in his thoughts yet.

“She said she would call,” Bill insisted pathetically. “She likes seafood. I was thinking we should go to Le Bernardin.” Bill mispronounced the name of the expensive restaurant. He had never been there and wasn’t sure where it was, but he mentioned it because Claire had suggested it to him that morning. She had pronounced the name correctly, and she had eaten there, too, so Bill knew it would impress Tanya, even if the cost depressed him.

“You’d take that diamond digger there?” Stan was incredulous. He knew what a true cheapskate Bill was.

“Someone at the office suggested it,” Bill replied. “I was thinking of another seafood restaurant, The Blue Fin. I went there once on a date and saw a famous movie star. Can’t remember her name now.”

Stan had difficulty swallowing this restaurant suggestion, which was only slightly less expensive than the other. “Why don’t you just buy poor little Tanya...”

“She’s big-boned,” Bill interjected.

“A yacht, a big yacht, so she can catch her own fish and sail back to the Ukraine?”

Bill saw a suggestion in Stan’s sarcasm that Stan didn’t intend. “A cruise around Manhattan would be nice. She’s probably never been on one. There’s dinner and dancing. I wonder if she likes to dance.”

“This is ridiculous,” Stan vociferated. He knew that Bill’s infatuation had passed, and the process of forgetting Tanya had begun, but Stan refused to allow him any lingering wistfulness. He was going to try to pull out the root at once. “She’s not interested in you. She never was. She never will be. Did you try online dating again?”

“I don’t like that. I want to see women, go out on dates, not chat, chat, chat till my fingers fall off.” Bill wasn’t at all angered by Stan’s forcefulness. He was relieved to change the topic to something less embarrassing.

“Then go to a matchmaking service,” Stan ordered.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Do it.”

“Linda has made me so angry. She’s made me hate women. I don’t want to date. I don’t want to meet someone else like her.”

“Forget about her. Go get a massage. Go see a movie. Call a dating service.”

“You’re right. I should. But maybe Tanya will call.”

“Forget about her. She’s forgotten you.”

Bill pulled two pages printed from the Internet out of his briefcase and handed them to Stan. “What do you think of these tips for an older man, trying to date a young woman?”

Stan started reading the pages and laughed. The first tip was: Recognize that there is a difference in ages and act yours.

Bill grabbed the pages back from him. “My coworkers said I should get a facial. What do you think?” he asked. Bill wanted to know whether a facial would make him look younger and more appealing to the young women who appealed to him. He was trying to weigh the cost of such a luxury against the possible benefit.

Without any examination of Bill’s face, Stan immediately brought up what he had wanted to mention since they had met for lunch. “First, do something with your hair. It looks like a dead cat.”