Cheapskate in Love (30 page)

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.

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.