Cheapskate in Love (11 page)

“What’s that noise?” he wanted to know.

“Oh, nothing,” Katie said vaguely. “I think it’s about a
client email. Everyone’s at Claire’s desk, reading her computer screen.”
Claire, Debbie, and Matt were still shaking with uncontrollable laughs,
although the violence of their outbursts was diminishing. More emphatically
than before, Katie motioned them to be quiet, rapidly waving her hands up and
down.

“I hope they can handle whatever it is,” Bill said. “I’m in
too much pain to do any work from home today.”

“They can handle it. I know they can handle it,” Katie
stated. “They will soon have
everything
under control, I’m sure.” She glared at her coworkers, and the laughter died
away completely. “Are you taking anything for your pain?” she asked Bill.

“Just some codeine,” he said. “Linda gave me a bottle of
ginseng or something like that, which I threw in the drawer with all the other
bottles she’s given me. That stuff doesn’t work. She wanted to poke some
needles in me, too, but I’m not her voodoo doll.”

“You should get some rest,” Katie told him. “That’s the best
thing. I hope you feel better.”

“I do feel better,” he asserted. “I’m not talking to Linda
anymore.”

The others erupted into laughter again, and Katie took her
phone off the speaker, talking through the receiver to wrap up the call with
Bill.

Little work was accomplished in the office that morning,
because Claire, Debbie, and Matt were busy envisioning different scenarios
under which Bill was injured and Linda victorious, each possibility becoming
more preposterous than the last. With such a fertile topic, their jokes and
conversation flowed in a torrent of nonstop hilarity.

Meanwhile, Katie, who appeared to be working, continued to
communicate all the momentous details of her weekend to her friends, with far
greater precision and thoroughness than she ever exerted on duties that she was
officially paid to do. She considered her morning quite productive and just as
enjoyable as that of the others. Although she was the youngest employee in the
office, she judged herself to be the most mature. “They’ve been laughing about
the old guy all morning,” she wrote to a friend. “They think they’re better
than him, but I don’t see it. They obviously can’t find anything better to do
than talk about him.”

Chapter 13

Toward the end of the week, Bill was able to return to the
office, although his mobility was still greatly impaired by the injury to his
back.

He was careful to avoid any discussion of the hiking
incident with his coworkers. He feared that, if he
was
drawn into a conversation about the event, he would soon slip and explicitly
state that he had been with Linda, although he had told them that he was not
going to see her again. He was afraid they might find out she had forced him to
walk until exhaustion in the rain, and that she wouldn’t even carry his
backpack after he fell. He did not want to say that he had had to abandon the
backpack in the woods, because his injured back could not support the weight;
it had been impossible for him to hold it, since the only way he was able to
hobble to the car was by gripping a sturdy branch with both hands on which he
could lean to stay upright. He did not want to mention that her refusal to
shoulder the backpack was a second injury that he could never forgive; it was practically
a new backpack, purchased within a year, and losing it was the main reason he
was not speaking with her. He could not overlook such a deliberate waste of his
money. That was a deep blow, causing more lasting pain than the fall. (To be
fair to Linda, it must be admitted that the piece of luggage had been deeply
discounted when he bought it, because it was poorly constructed and a hideous
florescent green. Only someone like Bill, who cared most of all about the
purchase price, would have thought the backpack worth buying in the first
place.) To preserve his self-respect and, to a lesser extent, avoid remembering
the lost backpack, he felt he had to maintain as much secrecy about the day as
possible among his colleagues.

When anyone asked what had happened to him, and his
coworkers were persistent in asking, especially Matt, who kept trying to trick
answers out of him with leading questions, Bill would change the subject or
respond vaguely about weather and terrain conditions that day. Soon he completely
ignored sneaky queries from Matt, because Bill saw if
he
became hooked by one
, like a fish caught nibbling a worm, he would never
escape. Just like a fish, he’d be cut into a hundred little pieces and fried.
His coworkers, like cats, would clean his bones.

With his friend Stan, Bill had no need to conceal what had
happened, because they talked infrequently. By the time they met again, Bill
had recovered enough that he could simply gloss over the incident. However,
over the following months, Bill told Stan much more about that day in his
usual, indirect, unexpected, piecemeal way. Eventually, Stan was able to put
the pieces together. Through his long familiarity with Bill and a little
detective skill, Stan could interpret what Bill told him with a good deal of
precision.

Especially when the subject was dating, Stan was accustomed
to doubting what Bill said, because he had learned that Bill rarely described
events accurately, in which he had played a part. In Stan’s view, Bill left out
more than he explained in order to brighten the impression he gave of himself.
The hike, which at first in Bill’s bits of retelling, seemed to have been some
kind of surreal event, like a landscape by Dali, with bizarre parts that didn’t
belong together and a mad monster running everywhere, later shaped itself, in
Stan’s mind, into an ordinary tale of human weakness. Although Bill made it
seem like he was dragged against his will into an alien landscape and set upon
by terror after terror, Stan eventually concluded that he was an equal
participant. In fact, Bill was the necessary participant for what had
transpired. Without him, there would have been no hike. In the unfolding of
that day, he pictured Bill as a sort of apple-cheeked shepherd, in the manner
of Boucher, chasing his cherubic shepherdess and taking a tumble through his
own excessive cupidity.

On Bill’s first day back at work, the pain he suffered from
performing his normal commuter travel to Manhattan was so great that he was
forced to go home, after spending only the morning in the office. He had
allotted extra time for his trip into the city and had walked slowly—that
was the only way he
could
move. But
since he had rarely moved from his bed, while he had been at home recuperating,
and his back was still not fully healed, his usual commuting routine was
unusually demanding and exceeded his endurance. Claire told him he should take
a taxi home to prevent straining his back even more. “You could seriously
disable yourself,” she warned, but the idea of paying for a taxi to his
apartment building on Long Island had an instant salutary effect on his
well-being
. He walked out of the office with more vigor than
he had shown even before the accident on some days.

When he left the office, Claire, Debbie, and Matt openly
ridiculed what none of them had mentioned to Bill when he was there, although
when they had first seen him, they had stared at it in amused amazement. Even
Katie, who normally did not join in their discussions, had something to add.
The irresistible subject of their ridicule was his hair. At one point, Debbie
went so far as to call it something out of a horror movie.

The following day, a Friday, Bill worked until his usual
finishing time. The energy and drive he had summoned the day before when
leaving the office had deserted him and would not come back, as much as he
wanted it to. He could only walk slowly, very slowly, to Penn Station to catch
the train home. Commuters streamed past him on the sidewalk and in the
underground passages to the Long Island Railroad track, where he needed to go.
He had never walked so slowly in his life and felt like a seventy-year-old man,
until a man, who looked like he was close to eighty years old, hurried by him
with everyone else. Then he felt he had turned
ninety
years old. He tried to move a little faster, lest a
centenarian race by him, too, leaving him to think he was the oldest person
alive. Sadness settled upon him, as he wondered why he had fallen.

Due to his creeping pace, he missed his regular train and
the one after that. The next one was already boarding passengers, when he
arrived. He gently entered the first car and walked hesitatingly like someone
unsure where to sit, although he wasn’t unsure at all. When he finally came to
an empty row, he took the window seat. He had walked nearly to the end of the
car, before coming to this empty row. He placed his briefcase in the aisle seat
next to him. Normally, he set it on the floor near his feet, but today he
wasn’t in the mood for company.

Moments before the train departed, his attention was
arrested by the dazzling appearance of a tall, blonde woman boarding the front
of the car. She seemed to be around thirty years old. Her exotic demeanor
indicated that she came from somewhere in Eastern Europe, maybe the Ukraine or Russia.
Bill couldn’t pull his eyes away from her. She was attractive, slim with a
large bust, and dramatically dressed in a miniskirt with a low-cut,
short-sleeved top and sleek, high-heeled shoes. She was stunning, except for a
noticeable air of hardness and determination in her behavior, which, along with
her rather big bones, took away from her feminine appearance. Bill couldn’t
detect any flaw, however. To him, she was a perfect female specimen.

She walked through the car, looking intently at all of the
male passengers, gazing like a cat in search of prey. Bill thought she was
looking for a seat, so when she looked at him, still some rows away, he flashed
her a big smile, which she returned after looking at him coldly for a few
seconds, as if she was uncertain. He removed his briefcase from the aisle seat,
and when she arrived at the row, she placed her small overnight bag in the
overhead rack and sat down next to him.

“Thank you,” she said in heavily accented English.

“No,
thank you
,”
Bill responded eagerly. After sitting alone at home for so many days, feeling
sorry for himself, thinking of how he was going to find someone new to date,
and worrying about how much it would cost to go back to the dating agency, he
could barely contain his excitement. The answer to his prayers seemed to have
arrived, and she wasn’t overdressed either. He was nearly trembling with
anticipation. He was on the verge of throwing his arms around her. “It isn’t
every day that I get to ride home with a beautiful, young woman next to me.”
Looking at her long legs, which were almost completely visible, he said in
admiration, “That must be the shortest skirt I’ve ever seen.”

“It’s warm today,” she replied, making a small attempt to
pull her skirt down by the bottom hem.

“Yeah, it is warm,”
Bill
joked.
“But you look more than warm. You look
hot
.”
He smiled at her insanely.

She did not catch the joke and wondered why he was leering
at her. She actually thought he was criticizing her. “I am a little hot,” she
said. “I had to walk fast to catch this train. I walked fifteen blocks. There
are so many people on the sidewalk. It’s hard to hurry.”

“Even if you walk slow, you’re still hot,” he said, grinning
like a mad man. “You’re hot, because you’re hot. Other women could walk a
hundred blocks. They could
run
a
hundred blocks. And they would never be as hot as you. They might be panting
like dogs, but they would never be hot. You’re hot, hot, hot.” Bill gestured
with both hands, each time he said “hot.” “Do you see what I mean now?”

Laughing, she said, “I understand.” She began to relax, but
only a little. She wondered if a rich man would act like Bill. In her country,
a rich person would never act this way. A poor person wouldn’t act this way
either. But Americans are different, she said to herself, sometimes very
different.

“Since I’m feeling the heat, I’d better say my name is Bill.
Hey, you know what? You and me together, we could be one hot bill. Get it?” He
pointed at her, then at himself. “You, hot, me, Bill. Hot bill. A hot bill,
that’s like a great show, a top ticket, an evening to remember. What do you
say?”

“I’m Tanya,” she said, smiling at his corny joke. His
ridiculous behavior was softening her social reserve. She extended her hand,
and he gave it a hearty shake. “Pleased to meet you,” she said.

“Tanya,” Bill repeated, while happiness sparkled in his
eyes. “What a lovely name. It goes really well with Bill, doesn’t it? Tanya and
Bill. Bill and Tanya. Doesn’t that sound nice? Just like we were meant to be
together. Don’t you think so?”

“Maybe,” she replied. Her eyes were busy scrutinizing him
from head to toe. He wasn’t wearing any designer clothing that she could see.
And she didn’t even want to look at his hair. It was badly botched. Only a man
could go outside with hair like that, she thought. A woman would never allow
herself to be seen in such an embarrassing state.

“Sure, it does,” he responded with exuberant cheerfulness.
“It wasn’t any coincidence that you walked into this train car and sat down
next to me. In this city of millions, where it’s so hard to find the person you
should be with, fate was drawing us together. Fate is telling us that we should
be together. I believe in fate. Don’t tell me that you don’t believe in fate. A
beautiful, young woman like
yourself
should listen to
what fate is saying. Fate is telling you...”