Cheapskate in Love

chapter 32





Pretending as if nothing was bothering her, Donna walked to the center of the dancing area and began to move to the beat of the rock music, without waiting for Bill. Like most of the others dancing, she responded to the music as if she had entered her own unregulated world, where she was unrestrained by any formal dance steps and unmindful of any partner. She shook, stepped and flailed her arms at will, her eyes half shut.

Although Bill was feeling harassed and beaten down a bit, when he saw Donna dancing, he recovered at once. The visions that he had had the past week of them together in a ballroom, out-dancing the competition, madly happy and wildly in love, were no longer puffs of electrical currents in his heated brain. They had begun to materialize. One of them was already dancing. Soon there would be two.

With springy feet and soaring spirits, he bounded onto the dance floor, despite the amount he had eaten, and grabbed her hands. Trying as she was to melt into the mental indolence and passivity that is the primary effect of loud, throbbing rock music, she wasn’t aware of his approach or the presence of anyone else. With his hands firmly holding hers, he stepped in close, pulling her tight, and then stepped far backwards, extending his arms, as he started to swing dance.

Donna was jolted out of her private world of rock sensations. Her eyes flashed wide open. “What are you doing?” she hissed at him, trying to remain cool.

“Can’t you swing dance?” he asked, pulling her close to him again.

“This is rock music,” she said, resisting his pull.

“So we swing faster,” was his logical response, as he stretched his arms and stepped back again.

“Stop it,” she ordered. Breaking free of his grasp, she went back to rock dancing, keeping a safe distance from his hands.

For a moment, Bill stood still, wondering what to do. He wanted to swing dance. He didn’t like or listen to rock music—those songs all sounded the same to him—but still he thought it was possible to swing dance to it, although big-band tunes would be better. In his view, rock dancing was more like staging a controlled convulsion than real dancing. Yet Donna was here, and he wanted to be with her, so he awkwardly tried to make his body move to the repetitive, pounding beat. He started to jerk his arms around in a kind of clumsy, freestyle movement and paced back and forth in the same place, with a lame two-step.

Nearby on the dance floor were Tanya and Leo, rubbing their bodies together in strange, animalistic contortions, like two snakes in a mating ritual. They had both seen the fracas between Donna and Bill. When it was over, out of the corner of her eye, Donna observed Tanya whisper something in Leo’s ear, which made them both laugh and kiss each other. Donna was roused into a rage again, because she knew they were laughing at her. Yet she tried to ignore them as much as she was ignoring Bill. There was a history, however, of mutual animosity between her and Leo, and Leo was not willing to let Donna’s difficulty pass without some further, public remark. He was not a gentleman.

“Hey, Donna,” he hooted. “Is that your new boyfriend?”

“No,” snapped Donna, who was not a gentlewoman. “If you’re tired of your illegal alien, you can have him.”

“Looks like you finally want to play with your own age group: Senior citizens,” he said, mocking her again. He and Tanya laughed like hyenas at this joke.

“Go beat him up,” Donna screamed at Bill.

“What?” Bill asked, confused. He had never been told to beat someone up before. He wasn’t even sure if he had ever bullied someone before, except maybe his sister, when they were children.

“Beat him up,” she screeched. “Do you have a gun?”

Bill was astonished by her question and didn’t know what to say or do. He had never held a gun in his life. He had never wanted to touch one. He didn’t even know where to find one.

“That tropical flower couldn’t harm a fly,” said Leo in scorn. Unlike Bill, he looked like he had a gun somewhere and knew how to use it very well.

“The fly would hurt him,” taunted Tanya. She and Leo laughed like hyenas again.

“Don’t just stand there,” Donna fumed at Bill. “Teach him a lesson.” She gave him more encouragement by shoving him violently at Leo.

Bill was caught off balance by Donna’s shove, and though he tried to catch himself, he fell into Leo, who was less than eight feet away.

“Watch it, buddy,” Leo warned him.

“You should apologize to Donna,” Bill said. Although Donna owed Bill an apology for pushing him, Bill practiced an old-fashioned form of chivalry with his dates, even when ladies like Linda, Tanya, and Donna showed themselves to be undeserving of such gallant treatment. He was going to try and protect them, defending their dignity and persons, even when his need for protection was much greater.

“Well, I’m not,” Leo answered, as he thrust Bill back into Donna.

“Don’t let that mobster push you around,” Donna yelled at Bill, and she shoved him back at Leo. “He just talks tough.”

Bill was too alarmed to hear that Leo might be part of the mob to say anything to him this time when they bumped together. Bill wondered if he had literally fallen into some serious, dangerous trouble.

“Tell your old lady to get some manners,” Leo grunted and tossed him back.

“And better taste in men,” Tanya sneered. She knew who was buttering her bread.

“Get them,” Donna screamed at Bill, sending him on his way again.

Like a volleyball, Bill was smacked back and forth between Donna and Leo, with Tanya now joining in her team’s effort. With each sally from the opposing sides, Bill became increasingly queasy, as the contents of his stomach churned in agitation. A crowd had gathered when the contest had first broken out, and the more they saw Bill being lobbed from one side to the other, the more their enjoyment at the spectacle intensified. When it seemed as if Leo and Tanya were going to win the match—Bill came close to toppling Donna to the ground with him one time—a few eager hands flew to Donna’s aid. With their assistance, she was able to throw Bill harder than ever at Leo. Hit off balance by Bill’s stronger impact, Leo stumbled backwards a few steps.

“Punch him!” Donna bellowed. “Punch him! Knock him out!” She wanted Bill to capitalize on their side’s momentary advantage.

The well-heeled Hamptons crowd lit up with excitement. Seeing a pushing contest escalate into a real fight would be the indisputable highlight of their evening.

Leo had regained his footing, and he strode toward Bill with a grim, hostile demeanor. “Let me show you how,” he told Bill, who was quivering like a lamb before a butcher, ignorant of how to fist fight. Grabbing hold of Bill’s right arm with his left hand to render him defenseless, Leo slammed his right fist into Bill’s gut.

Bill bent forward in intense pain, inches from Leo’s body, and an arc of vomit exploded out of his mouth onto Leo’s chest. Leo released Bill, and he tried to step back from the fountain of filth. But grossed out and stunned, he tripped and fell on his butt in front of Bill, who remained where he was hunched over. Puke continued to shoot out of Bill, covering Leo with undigested hamburgers, soaked in beer and bile.

“I’m going to kill you,” Leo shouted. “I’m going to kill you! You’re dead! Damn you. You’re dead.” There was more anguish and helplessness in his shouts than terrifying threats.

Leo tried to stand up and move away from Bill’s spewing mouth, but Donna had quickly grabbed Tanya’s arms from behind when Bill had started to vomit. Now Donna pushed Tanya, who was screaming like a maniac and struggling, as if she was being deported back to the Ukraine, on top of Leo. Tanya knocked him back down and lay on him. Bill’s stomach was still emptying itself, and his barf coated her as well. Although it didn’t help her situation, Tanya couldn’t stop raving like a crazed lunatic or try to get up. She could only scream and writhe like an eel on Leo’s body.

“Get off me!” Leo exclaimed. “Shut up and get off!”

He tried to push her off, but she started to beat on his chest with her fists, although that made the puddles of vomit splatter in their faces.

“Idiot!” she shouted. “Why did you bring me here? I hate you and your stupid friends! You have the cheapest, ugliest Rolex!”

“Leo, you have such good taste in women,” remarked Donna smugly. Without waiting for an answer, she sailed into the house to freshen up. She was immensely satisfied with her performance on the dance floor.

The last heaves had shaken Bill’s body, and there was nothing left in his stomach to shower Leo and Tanya with. Weak and exhausted, he straightened up. “I think I ate too much,” he said, to no one in particular. Although he now had the room in his stomach he had hoped for earlier, he had no desire to eat. The rows of tasty hamburgers beckoning him nearby offered a unique, unforgettable opportunity to sate his greed and gluttony, but he didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to dance anymore either. He wanted to leave. He followed Donna into the house.

Donna’s reflections in the ladies’ room, while she freshened up, were very different from Bill’s reflections in the men’s room. After she wiped a few drops of perspiration from her forehead, she checked for stains on her clothing. “Thank God, they didn’t ruin this outfit,” she said to herself, finding none. While she fluffed her hair, she gazed at her image, with a contented smile. “Those kids are no match for me,” she thought. “I’m better looking, smarter, and stronger. By any real measure, I’m younger. I certainly need a younger boyfriend than Bill. That old goat, what a joke.” Leaning closer to the mirror to gaze at her beauty in more detail, she thought, after a minute of examining different sections of her face, “Monday I’ll have to call in for another Botox treatment.”

In the men’s room, Bill washed his face and neck again and again with cold water, as if he was trying to remove the memory of what had happened to him and arise in a new time and place. The delightful, romantic fantasy he had fashioned in his imagination during the previous week—happy chatter, electric dancing, passionate embraces—had been the empty thoughts of a fool. He knew that now too well. Instead of a fantasy come to life, the evening had been a phantasmagoria, in which he had been continually haunted, harassed, ridiculed, and hurt by evil characters swirling around him. Although it would seem that Bill’s train of thoughts should lead him to blame himself for what happened, as he should, that was not where his cogitations took him. A profound knowledge of human nature, even a scant acquaintance with it, tells us that humans seldom take responsibility for the predicaments they put themselves in. Bill was no exception. He blamed Donna for his night of misfortunes. Staring at himself in the mirror, feeling tired, sore in his stomach, and out of place, he thought, “Donna’s too old for me. I need a young girlfriend, not someone who only looks young. All she wants to do is stand around and talk to her friends. Or spend hours getting dressed. I need a young woman, who likes to dine, dance, and have fun.” The wrinkled, fleshy face in the mirror, which would have benefited from several Botox treatments, nodded in agreement.

Since Donna thought it would be anticlimactic for her to stay at the party after her glorious, personal victory on the dance floor, she wanted to leave, like Bill, too. Saying few words to each other about how they wished to go, they left the house and walked in silence to Donna’s car. There was no discussion of anything that had happened at the party, no excuses, no apologies, no sympathy.

When they were sitting in the car, Bill said, “You can drop me off at your place. My car is parked near your house.”

Donna didn’t look at him or react to this news in any way. She started her car, and the machine murmurs of her luxury automobile were the only sounds that were heard all the way to her home.