Cheapskate in Love

chapter 29





Bill’s big day finally arrived.

After showering, he put on his tatty, old bathrobe. Since this was Saturday, he could enjoy a leisurely breakfast, a luxury only for the weekends, when there was no two-hour commute to work. On the small part of the table that was still clear of debris from Helen’s thorough cleaning, he ate a couple of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with his coffee. Half-way through his meal, he asked himself, “Shall I go dressy casual or casually dressy?” In his mind, there was a difference.

Donna had told him that the barbecue party would be an informal affair and everyone would be wearing casual clothes, but he didn’t want to disappoint her by being underdressed for the occasion. He also wanted people to see that they were together, a real couple. Since she was stunning and would look good in anything—especially in no clothes at all, he mused contentedly—more formal dress would make him a more fitting partner for her, he thought, while they had to wear clothes. The memory of how Tom looked in his jacket with Helen also flitted through his mind. It was another reason, he thought, why he should exert himself and appear more of a dandy than he needed to.

After a loud sip of coffee, he announced his verdict for the most appropriate apparel style, “Casually dressy it should be.”

When he had finished his sandwiches, he began the task of assembling an outfit in the chosen style. The first step was to find a pair of boxer shorts with a springy elastic waistband. Although no one at the party would notice if he was wearing one of his usual stretched-out pairs of underwear, he was concerned about post-party events. He wanted to make a good impression during intimate moments with Donna. He had rarely shown such concern with other women on previous dates, but Donna was different. He sensed that she would be less willing to tolerate saggy boxers.

“There won’t be anything drooping underneath them though,” he thought to himself with confidence, “so she’ll be satisfied on that point.”

Pulling out the dresser drawer, which contained his underwear, he picked up pair after pair. To test them, he stretched them a bit, but none snapped back. Finally, digging around the bottom of the drawer, he fished out a bright yellow pair. It looked like it had never been worn, and he didn’t wonder why. He would have thrown it back in the drawer, but he had tested the rest. He tried its elasticity, and it was all there.

“Hope it doesn’t glow in the dark,” he said, tossing it on the bed. A witty thought suddenly came to him. “If she asks, I’ll say she has brought a whole lot of sunshine into my life, and I’m bringing her some in return. And then I’ll remind her what happens where the sun shines: Small things and big things become bigger.” Elated with his cleverness, he chuckled and continued compiling his outfit for the party.

“Black socks are sexy,” he said, as he pulled out another dresser drawer.

His search for a nice pair of black socks or any other color, however, was as difficult as his hunt for a decent pair of boxers. Either the elastic was worn out at the tops of socks, or there were holes, or one of the pair was missing. He realized that he hadn’t been shopping for socks in a long time, but that realization didn’t motivate him to go out and spend money. He simply looked harder. His determination was rewarded, for he discovered in a bottom corner of the drawer, a brand new pair of light-colored socks with teddy bears embroidered on them. They had been a bargain purchase, like the sunny boxer shorts, both of which he had forgotten about. He held the socks up in the air to examine them, thought they had a warm, fuzzy feel, which would please Donna, and flung them on the bed, too.

“I wish I had a summer jacket,” he sighed, going to his closet.

Opening the closet half where his formal wear hung, he looked at the skimpy options with a slightly downcast look. Almost everything was a medium- or dark-colored wool jacket or suit, in a fabric weight unsuitable for warm weather. Suddenly, he snapped his fingers with mercurial inspiration.

“I’ll wear my seersucker suit. I haven’t worn that in a long time.”

He took it out and placed it on the bed. The seersucker fabric was the traditional one, with pale blue stripes next to white.

Sliding the closet doors, so that the other side was open, he contemplated the best choice for a shirt. “A light color would be cool,” he thought. “Donna is so hot, I’ll need all the cooling I can get.” But when he took out the first shirt to look at, a white one, he noticed that the collar was heavily sweat-stained. Pulling out each white or pastel-colored shirt from his closet, one after the other, he saw that all the collars were similarly dirty.

“Those cleaners should scrub harder,” he grumbled. “I’ve been paying them. If Linda ran a cleaning business, she’d rub shirts spotless. She’d rub so hard, she’d turn them into threadbare rags.”

He concluded that he wouldn’t want Linda cleaning his shirts, but still he was distressed that he hadn’t noticed how stained the collars were before. Apparently, in his customary morning rush, on the infrequent days when he wore button-down shirts, he had never examined them. He searched through all of his shirts to see if there was one with a clean collar. He couldn’t find one, until he came to the last shirt, one that he rarely ever wore. It was a garish tropical-print shirt with short sleeves, a riotous mix of red, yellow, blue, and green, on a sickly teal background.

“Nothing wrong with this one,” he remarked, after checking it. “It’s a perfect shirt for a party in June.”

He laid it on the bed with the other clothes and critically appraised the ensemble. “Casual, yet dressy. Summery, yet cuddly. I’ll look better than Tom.”

Pleased with what he had selected to wear for the all-important occasion, he said, “It’s time to buy her gifts. Once she has those, she won’t be able to resist me.” As soon as he had put on ordinary, weekend clothes, he left his apartment to visit the shops that Stan had recommended.

First, he went to get the chocolates. His frustration inside the gourmet chocolate shop, which only offered imported filled chocolates, handmade in Paris, quickly reached a simmering point and was in danger of boiling over.

“Four dollars a piece?” he exclaimed to the salesclerk, almost shouting, when he was told the price. “For these little bitty things? What’s in them? Gold dust?”

The salesclerk, a young, well-mannered foreigner from Belgium with the name of Marc, had not met quite a character like Bill yet in the United States. But Marc was not going to be disturbed by someone who couldn’t recognize the finer things in life and pay accordingly.

“Chocolates with gold dust are a special order, and they cost more,” he replied with equanimity, unruffled by Bill’s temper. “Would you like to place an order?”

“No, I would not,” growled Bill. “Is anything in this place on sale?”

“No. We don’t have sales. There are some that expire today, which are reduced...”

“Give me fifty of them,” Bill snapped.

“Fifty? Are you sure? They must be eaten today.”

“I’ll tell her.”

“This is a gift? For a lady?” The idea of a woman eating fifty fine chocolates in a day was incomprehensible to Marc.

“Do you think I would buy anything here for myself?” was Bill’s flippant response. He couldn’t conceive of being in that store for anyone, except Donna. And he didn’t understand Marc’s concern. He could easily eat fifty of those teensy candies, and he thought that others, even Donna, were just as capable. Of course, if she wanted help, he would be ready. He was always prepared for an orgy of food.

Marc coolly appraised Bill from head to toe. Bill’s old, ill-fitting, unfashionable clothes told Marc that his customer’s parsimonious mindset extended to all aspects of his life. “No, not at all,” he replied, with concealed condescension. “I don’t think you would ever buy something for yourself here, or in many other places.”

Bill took considerable pride in his thrifty ways, but he was unsure whether Marc was complimenting him or not. So he waited in silence, while a box of fifty chocolates was wrapped for him in colorful paper and tied with a ribbon.

The amount that Bill had spent for chocolates hovered in his mind like a dark, cloudy turbulence when he went to pick out flowers. As he stood in front of the refrigerated cases, where exquisite roses, lilies, chrysanthemums, irises, and other flowers were displayed, along with their exquisite prices, his face became gloomier and gloomier. He looked like a man going to the gallows, without hope of a reprieve, on a brilliant spring day when the earth is in bloom.

“Red roses would be perfect,” he sighed in agony to the young Hispanic shop assistant, Elvira, who was trying to help him. “But they’re too much. I just spent a fortune. What do you have that says a lot for very little?”

Elvira pondered his request and looked around the shop. “Do you want to see our plastic flowers?” she asked.

“No,” he despaired. “Fresh ones, I need fresh ones. These are for a date.”

After a moment of reflection, she asked, “Do you want a potted plant?”

“No,” he wailed. In his misery, he turned his back on the refrigerated cut flowers and looked around the shop. In a corner, he saw a large, pyramidal display with a profusion of gladiolas, chrysanthemums, and carnations. The floral arrangement was on a stand to which a small sign was attached that read “Eighty percent off.” Bill’s eyes zeroed in on the sign.

“How much is that?” he asked, excitedly.

“Forty dollars. It was for a funeral. But an autopsy was called. Suspicious circumstances, they said.” Elvira shrugged her shoulders. She didn’t have an opinion about the death.

“I’ll take it,” Bill crowed.

“For your date?” she asked, puzzled.

“Of course,” Bill explained. “I’m not going to a funeral.”

She shrugged again. It was best, she thought, not to inquire too much into the lives of her customers or hold too many opinions. Knowledge and opinions could turn into liabilities, she believed. But when Bill said he would also take the stand for the arrangement, if it was free, she couldn’t help forming the view that he was exceedingly cheap, someone who really wanted a whole lot for very little.

With his gifts in hand, Bill hurried home for a quick, light lunch before dressing for the party. Since he would be eating heavily that evening, he didn’t want to spoil his appetite. Because he had become lost trying to find both shops—the stress of spending money clouded his mind—it was also a late lunch. It was already two o’clock, and he was behind the schedule he had planned for himself. Although the party began that evening at six, and Donna had told him that he could come over at five thirty or even six, since the distance to the party wasn’t far from where she lived, he wanted to arrive at her place no later than four. He wanted to create an opportunity for them to get to know each other better. However, he didn’t imagine they would spend all of the pre-party time at her house talking. He told her that he had to come early, because the person giving him a lift had to go somewhere and couldn’t drop him off later.

Despite his best efforts to suck down food and speed dress, he was delayed in leaving his apartment, on account of the pants of the seersucker suit. The suit had been bought years ago when his waist was less wide, and at first he didn’t think he would be able to zip and fasten the pants shut at all. But the thought of missing his date with Donna drove him to the edge of hysteria. By grunting, struggling, and sucking in his abdomen, he finally succeeded. He made his belt extra tight to keep the zipper and tab fastener closed.

“Gotta be careful on the fast dances,” he said to himself, hesitant to inhale too deeply.

Suddenly his Blackberry rang with an incoming text message: “Come to yoga with me. You need lose weight. Call me Linda.”

“She knows I hate yoga,” he vented in annoyance, deleting the message. “Tomorrow, I’m going to tell her it’s really over. She’ll have to find another loser to torture. I’m a winner now.”

He put on the seersucker jacket and fastened a button. Looking into the full-length mirror to check his appearance, he saw that the jacket pulled tightly around the button, and his midriff looked like the skin of a pineapple, so he unbuttoned the jacket. He couldn’t find anything else amiss with his appearance. The tropical-print shirt really popped to his eye underneath the seersucker suit. The jarring visual effect seemed to be the height of fashion to him.

“You could give Tom a few tips about grooming and style,” he haughtily told his reflection.

Sliding his Blackberry into an inside pocket on his jacket and making sure he had the directions to Donna’s house, he prepared to leave his apartment. As he reached the door, he turned around and involuntarily stopped. Despite his lateness, a sudden reflective mood seized him. For a few lingering moments, he looked at the place and everything inside. Remarkably little had changed, he noted, in the twenty-some years he had lived there. Although he still felt young, like a man in his twenties, when he had first seen the studio, he had been much younger than he was now. He had been in the prime of his life. The possibilities for his future were then unlimited, and his stay in that rectangular box certainly seemed like it would only be temporary. Two decades had turned out differently than expected, he thought with some regret, but tonight hope had come into his heart again.

“I’m ready to leave this castle and never return,” he said without any trace of nostalgia.

Filled with optimism and moving with a sprightly step, he left his apartment, humming snatches of big-band swing music.