Cheapskate in Love

chapter 31





The barbecue party, to which Donna and Bill went, was held at a sprawling mansion of recent construction in the Hamptons, next to the ocean. An outlandish creation of wealth acquired in high finance, the house had more resemblance to a casino than a residence, because the proportions of the building had been so super-sized to accommodate large numbers of people. When the owners weren’t working long hours at their offices, they liked to entertain; they calculated their net worth not only by the sums in their bank accounts, but also by the number of bodies at their house parties.

The couple’s desire to gather and impress a horde within their residence was a natural one for them, since both husband and wife were loud, vain, and ostentatious. They had many so-called friends, such as Donna. Although they were considerably younger than Donna, their attachment to her was stronger than many of their friendships with other people. Similarities in the characters of all three and compatible personal needs created a special symbiotic relationship: With them, Donna could pretend to be younger than she was, while they could imagine that they were more mature.

As soon as Donna and Bill arrived, Donna ran and begged a pair of jeans from the man of the house for Bill. When she had them, she told Bill to go change in the upstairs bathroom and not come down till he had them on. He could find her then on the lower level where the great room was. That’s where everybody would be.

Bill tried to comply with her command. He wanted to please her by wearing the jeans; he thought they might be the key to getting into her pants later on. But when he saw how wide their waistband was, his gut quivered forcibly in resistance, and the idea of fitting into them struck him as hopeless. However, he still tried. In the bathroom, he jumped up and down in the pants in an attempt to tug them over his thighs and fasten them shut. He removed his underwear, in case that might be an obstacle. He even tried lying on the floor and pulling the pants on in a supine position, thinking that gravity might be making his middle section larger when he stood. Nothing helped put those thin jeans on his egg-shaped, overweight body.

Although he was deeply reluctant to disappoint Donna, his desire to join the party had become greater, since he had been kept from the free food long enough. He pulled on his underwear and seersucker pants again and left his tropical-print shirt untucked, in the hope that she would not notice what was covering his legs beneath.

Rock music boomed louder and louder, the further he descended toward the great room. When he was finally on the floor of that space, the music was throbbing in his ears, as if a street was being dug up in front of him with drills. The decibel level prevented much conversation from taking place, since people had to yell to be heard, but he thought that interesting, rational talk did not appear to be the goal of anyone there. All the guests that he could see were in their twenties, thirties, and maybe forties. They were casually dressed, as Donna had said they would be. Earlier in the week, she had told him that five hundred people were invited, but he thought that the number present was closer to two hundred. They were standing, sitting, moving around a little with drinks in hand. Apparently, they had come for the sake of being there and drinking, for when he could hear others try to communicate above the din, the boisterous inanities that they hollered back and forth didn’t seem worth the effort.

Since he wasn’t interested in trying to talk to someone yet, the noise didn’t bother him. He wanted food and lots of it. As he looked hungrily around the great room, which was a vast space, like a hotel banqueting room, he didn’t see any food tables. The bar was located on the opposite side of the room from where he stood, so he thought the food might be near there.

On his way to the bar, he saw Donna from a distance and waved at her with both hands. He acted like someone wearing a Mickey Mouse costume at Disneyland, greeting visitors. There was a big smile on his face. He was happy to see her again. Donna noticed him, saw his pants, and turned her back to him. She was much less happy than he.

At that moment, a hamburger on a plate, which a young man carried, caught his attention.

“Where did you get that?” Bill accosted him.

The young man pointed outside to the huge patio, which was accessible through several sliding glass doors. Bill now saw other guests coming in and going out. Forgetting all about Donna, he hurried outside.

The first table he arrived at on the patio was covered with a wide variety of hors d’oeuvres and salads, which many people were hovering around, complimenting and admiring, trying to decide what to take for themselves. Everything looked fresh and delicious.

“Where’s the real food?” Bill asked loudly, to no one in particular. He had pushed himself through the guests around the table to the food and saw that there were only light, low-calorie, vegetable-dense choices there.

Before anyone would answer—they were too busy staring at him, wondering how he had been invited—Bill noticed further away a professional chef in a tall white hat, cooking on a massive grill. There was another table besides the grill, and Bill sped to that location. On top of the second table, he discovered rows and rows of thick, juicy, grilled beef patties sticking out of buns. Also on the table were all kinds of ordinary and exotic toppings to add to the hamburgers, but he was much less interested in those garnishes. He was obsessed with meat.

Shaking with excitement, as if he had stumbled upon a gold mine, Bill grabbed a plate and quickly set three hamburgers on it. He smeared a little ketchup, mustard, relish, and onion on the inner side of each top bun. Unable to wait any longer and drooling from gluttonous cravings, he bit deeply into one prepared hamburger and grabbed three more plain ones from the rows. After garnishing them lightly, as he had the first three, while still trying to chew and swallow the wad of food in his mouth, he lifted his plate, stacked with hamburgers, and looked for a place to sit. The closest vacant chair was at a table otherwise filled in the crowded outdoor seating area. Taking another big bite of a hamburger, he hustled over to it. After confirming that the chair was not taken, he sat down and stuffed himself like a contestant in a speed-eating contest, shoving the six large hamburgers down his throat as fast as possible. People around him stared and whispered, but Bill continued to feast, completely unconcerned about his neighbors. At that moment, he was attending to his stomach and couldn’t be bothered by social niceties.

When he had finished his quick meal, he went back to the burger buffet table, moving more slowly than before, but determined to sate every real and imaginary prick of hunger he had. He took three more hamburgers. When the same few condiments had been applied, Bill chowed, standing by the table, unwilling to waste time by finding a seat. His rate of consumption decreased with each hamburger. He had to push the last of the third one into his mouth to make it disappear, as if he was clearing a clogged toilet with a plunger. He looked longingly and lovingly at the remaining hamburgers on the table, but he had no more room inside for the scrumptious little mountains of meat. His gorge soaked in bile was already rising slightly in his esophagus from his stomach with a burning sensation. He tried to stretch his waistband, which was digging into his skin, by putting his hands under his shirt and pulling it outwards, but it would not expand. Sadly, he thought it necessary to leave the grill table for now and wash down the heap of hamburgers with a beer to try and create space for more.

Ambling slowly inside on his way to the bar, Bill had the shock of recognizing someone he knew at the party besides Donna: Tanya. She was with her new boyfriend, Leo, a tough-looking creature, who had an abundance of tattoos and a diamond earring. With one hand, he was drinking from a beer bottle, while his other hand was wrapped around her waist. Both of her hands were fully engaged in hanging onto him. What little amount of attention they could spare from each other was spent soaking up the deaf-inducing atmosphere of the great room. Bill was practically in front of Tanya before he realized who she was. He became ecstatic with joy at seeing someone he knew.

“Tanya, you’re here. I thought I’d never see you again,” he shouted.

She looked at him coldly, without any sign of recognition.

“It’s me, Bill. We met on the train. Remember?” He was gesturing, emoting, hyper-animated at this unexpected chance encounter.

“Sorry. I don’t know you,” she said loudly. Her hands were still firmly attached to Leo, like the tendrils of a pea plant clinging to a trellis.

“Sure, you do. You thought I was wearing a Rolex.” Bill held up his old watch to jog her memory.

“I know what a Rolex looks like,” she said to Leo, caressing his wrist on her waist, which bore that brand of watch. Although she may have been an expert in watches, to an untrained eye Leo’s watch looked quite similar to Bill’s inexpensive street model. Both were chunky, charmless, industrial-looking assemblages of metal and glass.

“You sure wanted to know what I had on my wrist, though,” Bill shouted with a big grin.

Tanya pulled herself closer to Leo, as if she was in danger of falling to the floor. “He’s bothering me,” she complained, shouting and pouting at the same time.

“Beat it, buddy,” Leo told Bill.

“But we’re friends,” Bill replied.

The dispute seemed in danger of escalating. Leo stared menacingly at Bill and started flexing his chest muscles under his tight t-shirt. Fortunately, Tanya, who had turned away from Bill, stroked Leo’s face with her finger to calm him. After taking another swig of beer, he kissed Tanya. That kiss led to an extended, theatrical kissing show, as if they were performers trying to prove something to each other and everyone else, which effectively ended the conversation with Bill.

“I just wanted to say hi,” Bill whined, but they weren’t listening. Seeing how he was excluded, he walked away, crestfallen.

At the bar, which was littered with empty bottles and glasses, he nursed a beer alone. Other people were continually coming for drinks and leaving, and he tried to start conversations, especially with the young, attractive women, but everyone looked at him, as if he were a stranger, an unusual stranger. Some responded to him a little. Others smiled wanly. Others kept their distance altogether. After his first beer, he asked one of the barkeepers for another, which he guzzled.

Beer didn’t have the desired effect, as far as he could tell, of speeding up the digestion of what he had eaten, allowing him to enjoy more hamburgers. If anything, the liquor appeared to ferment the contents of his stomach and cause them to fizzle, making him feel more full. Since he couldn’t eat anymore, he decided it was time to dance. He went looking for his gorgeous partner.

Donna was talking to two much younger female friends, when he found her. The two Nats, as they were known—Nat being short for Nathalie—were both in their mid-thirties. Although they were not as attractively voluptuous as Donna, they had the greater attraction and luck of being younger than her. Consequently, they felt themselves to be on equal ground, if not at an advantage, when it came to the chief concern of all three in life: Men. Whenever they met up with each other, they would recount their recent adventures in that all-important realm, exaggerating every salacious detail for optimal storytelling effect.

When Bill came up to Donna, the two Nats stared at him in wide-eyed wonderment, because of the closeness with which he stood next to her. They scanned him from head to toe, as if he was a mannequin, wearing the next season’s new clothing. He was clearly the oldest, most out-of-shape, poorly dressed man at the party. Precisely at the same moment, they turned toward each other, like two parrots in a cage, to share their astonishment at seeing such a man act so familiar with Donna. “Oh my God,” was the alarm sounding in their eyes. “Is she that desperate? Is this the new man she’s seeing? She must be out of her mind and over the hill and telling us bigger lies than we’ve told her!”

Donna could tell what her girlfriends were thinking. She ignored Bill in the fervent hope that he would get the hint and go away. She hadn’t told anyone at the party that she had come with him, because he was too much of a humiliation.

“I’d never go back,” she told them feverishly, trying to make them forget about Bill and focus on what she was saying. “Never. And why should I? He can sit on my couch and cry all he wants to. I like to see that. He’s the one who broke the marriage. Thought he had something better. Like a fool, I shed some tears at first, but not anymore. Men fall over themselves to meet me, and I think the one I found is finally it. He’s...”

Bill thought this was an opportune moment to interrupt, since she was obviously talking about him. “Let’s dance,” he shouted, as suavely as he could, while he pulled at her arm.

“I’m busy,” she barked at him, shaking his hand from her arm. “Go away.” The eyes of the Nats protruded from their heads like frogs’ eyes. They were unsure what to think about Bill: Was he her new boyfriend or not? They were absorbing everything to dissect later with merciless cuts. To them, she said, “He’s better looking...”

“You’ve been talking since you got here,” Bill interrupted again.

“I like to talk. Please go away. Now.” Her voice had turned steely.

Bill, who was not good at reading women’s behavior, because he didn’t pay much attention to what they said or did, thought that the two Nats could help him persuade her. “Tell her she should dance,” he asked them. “Everyone wants to see her beautiful body in motion.”

Those two raised their eyebrows at his bizarre request, looked at each other simultaneously, and burst out laughing.

Donna was enraged at being made a fool of. “I’ll be back,” she told her friends, although she didn’t have much kindly feeling for them at the moment. Grabbing Bill by the arm, she jerked him away, pulling him outside.

When they were on the patio, where it was possible to talk to someone without shouting, Donna stopped in a part that was less crowded. She whirled around to confront Bill, bringing her face within inches of his. Kissing was not on her mind.

“Jackass,” she stormed, furious and seething. “Why did you embarrass me in front of my friends?”

“What did I do?” Bill asked, in complete unawareness of any guilt.

“You opened your mouth.” Although Donna was trying to conceal her anger, other guests could see she was upset.

“All I said is that you have a beautiful body.” Bill thought a woman should appreciate being referred to as a good-looking object. Most women, in his view, were not.

“Who asked you to?”

“Should I have said ‘and the face of an angel?’”

“Oh, shut up. You shouldn’t say anything. Since you don’t know what to say, don’t say anything. And don’t do anything. You don’t know what to do. You don’t know what to say. You don’t know how to dress. You don’t know anything. You’re an embarrassment.”

“Tell me what you want. Just tell me what you want, and I’ll do it.”

“I’ll dance one song with you. Then I want you to disappear, until I’m ready to go.”

“Two songs.”

“One. That’s it.”

“I’m a good dancer.”

“I don’t care if you’re the reincarnation of Fred Astaire and dancing on Broadway. One dance is it.”

“That’s not much fun. What kind of party is this, if you only dance one song?”

Donna was finished arguing with him. She had told him what she would do, and there was nothing more to say. She was smoldering with anger, but she controlled herself. Without waiting for him, she strode directly to the portion of the very large patio that had been set aside as a dance floor. When Bill had seen that area earlier in his hunt for food, it had struck him as a perfect place for his dancing exploits to come later that evening with Donna. Lights had been strung over that section of the patio, so dancing could continue into the night. Speakers around the area provided enough sound. But now, dejected and still not knowing what their argument had been about, he wasn’t in the mood to dance. He followed her to the dance floor anyway.