Cheapskate in Love

chapter 7





When Bill could no longer hear his coworkers, he rose and looked down the corridor where they had gone. Then he looked in the opposite direction. Seeing no one, he pressed the up button on the elevator controls. When an elevator came, he quickly entered the cab.

He exited the elevator on the floor above and snuck into a small meeting room, which was empty. Inside, after he shut the door, he looked at his Blackberry and thought for a few moments. With a sinking feeling, he decided he would surrender himself to the hands of fate and make a call. A voice he recognized quickly answered on the other end, full of annoyance and accusation. “What took you so long?” it demanded.

As she spoke with Bill, Linda was busy with a patient in the alternative medicine clinic at her house. She wore a white lab jacket and stood near a male patient in his fifties. He was exposed, except for his boxer shorts, and lay on a treatment table with needles stuck in him from head to toe. Linda had just finished placing those needles in the appropriate spots when Bill called. The patient had come on account of a car accident that had given him a whiplash injury six months previously. On this day, he was receiving acupuncture for the first time. He had not wanted to come. He was deeply skeptical about the usefulness of alternative medicine and fearful of needles. The only reason he had made the appointment with Linda is that his regular physician had failed to diagnose or eliminate the persistent pain, which he felt from the accident, and urged him to try acupuncture. The physician knew several patients whom Linda had helped.

“Hi, Linda. It’s me, Bill,” Bill said cheerfully, pretending that yesterday had never happened. Instead of recalling that she was crazy and that he had sworn to never speak with her again, he reverted to being the hardy, young buck nuzzling his soft, shy doe. Again he was the dashing cavalier paying court to his alluring, coy mistress.

“I know who it is,” she said, without any trace of coyness.

“I got all of your messages,” he rushed on, eager to insinuate himself in the sensitive affections of his sweetheart. “But I’ve been so busy. I had a hundred things to do at the office. Calls kept coming in. I was being pulled here and there. I had to send email after email. My coworkers wouldn’t leave me alone.” At that moment, he recalled the makeup and rubbed his face with his spare hand to remove it, never ceasing to talk. “There’s a big pitch coming up next week that I have to prepare for.”

“Answer my question,” she interrupted, flinging off any sign of shyness. “Can you or not?”

“I didn’t have time to call until now,” the courtier continued. “I’m sorry. I’ll try to get away sooner next time. You’re more important than any work I have to do. I won’t let it happen again.”

“Yes or no,” his angel thundered, as if judgment day had come.

“I can definitely go for a hike Saturday,” he assured his darling, concluding his premeditated speech. “I would love to see you again. We’ll have a great time.” With those selling words, he closed a better pitch than he gave most clients.

While Linda and Bill had been chatting, the patient on the table felt something on his left ear and touched the spot with his hand. He was alarmed to see blood on his finger. “My ear is bleeding,” he suddenly said to Linda in alarm, raising his head from the table.

“Don’t be a baby,” she snapped at the patient.

“What did you say?” Bill asked her. He thought she had spoken to him and was uncertain if she was as happy as he was that they would be seeing each other again. He then heard the patient screaming, “I want out of here! Take these needles out!” Those words consoled Bill immediately, because he knew that Linda was momentarily distracted. He was completely put at ease when he heard her shout back, “Shut up and relax! Act like a man. It’s just a little blood.” The sound of a door being slammed told him that Linda would very soon be able to concentrate all her attention on him.

“It’s good you can go. If you were trying to waste my time now, I would hang up,” Linda said to Bill, with a voice a little sweeter than she had used with the patient, whom she had left in the room alone. She now stood in a hallway.

“I’m glad you’re happy,” Bill replied enthusiastically. “I want you to be happy. Where do you want to hike?”

“The mountain,” she said, meaning Bear Mountain in upstate New York.

“The mountain?” he asked timidly. He was not accustomed to walking long distances and even less skilled at walking uphill. “Don’t you want to go to the beach?” he wondered, hoping as hard as he could.

“Mountain” was the definitive, non-negotiable response.

“OK, let’s go to the mountain,” he sighed. The thought of going there made him anxious, because he knew the punishing pace that Linda would set. He had hiked with her before. Yet since he was trying to win her heart and mind, reckless and crazy as they might be, he didn’t want to disappoint her. He reluctantly agreed. “When we meet, I’ll have a surprise for you,” he went on.

“No candy,” she warned.

“No, not chocolate,” he said. “Do you remember saying something about my hair?”

She didn’t. How could she, since she didn’t think much about what she said to him? And why would she, since Bill showed her the same consideration?

At that moment, their conversation ended because the patient, whom Linda had left inside the room, walked out fully clothed without a needle sticking in him. The patient didn’t say a word to her and only briefly glanced at her, as he walked out of the clinic. She followed him, screaming continually, until he drove away in his car. “What are you doing? Get back in there! You have to pay me! You can’t leave! You idiot!” She was so seized with anger that her professional advice lapsed into Chinese, mixed with plenty of swearing.

Bill listened for a while, marveling at the fluency and fire of his little lovebird. He thought what she did for money was a bunch of bunk, but he had to admire the intensity of her belief. He hoped he could see some of that passion Saturday night and Sunday morning in her bedroom. On that hike, he thought, he really had to conserve his strength, so he could perform well in the post-mountain workout. At the very moment he thought that, a particularly violent burst of screaming came from Linda. It disturbed his pleasure-planning and recalled to mind a fight he had had with her before. To banish such an unwelcome remembrance, Bill ended the call and went back to work. He was happy to imagine what tomorrow would bring.

That night in the bathroom of his apartment, he prepared the surprise for Linda he had hinted at. She had mentioned in the past that he would look better if he dyed his hair and had once given him the number for an expensive salon where one of her patients worked. But the comment from his coworkers was the real reason he undertook the transformation. He didn’t place much value in anything Linda said, although he sometimes pretended to, in order to flatter her. Flattery was an essential part of dating, he thought. All of the women he saw seemed to expect it.

Standing in front of the mirror above his bathroom sink, he applied hair dye to his thinning, greying hair, as carefully as he could. Although he kept turning his head back and forth to see if the coloring solution was applied evenly, he did not cover the sides and back of his head as well as the front.

“A little more here,” he said to himself. He squeezed the dye bottle above the crown of his head, and a gob spurt out.

“Damn,” he cursed, quickly trying to spread the excess dye through his hair.