Cheapskate in Love (9 page)

Jonathan was waiting at the door to lock Bill’s apartment,
after Helen finished administering the medicine. But Helen thought she should
stay a while, watching Bill, in case a more serious problem appeared. She told
Jonathan she would remain, until Bill woke up and confirmed that he was feeling
better.

“That’s very nice of you,” Jonathan said. “Call me if you
need help. I hope he appreciates what you’re doing for him.”

“Thanks, Jonathan,” Helen answered. “He should, but whether
he will is another question. Guys find it hard to be grateful. It rubs their
ego the wrong way.”

“That sounds about right,” he replied, closing the door, not
thinking that what she said might apply to him. “He can have a fat head.”
Jonathan hustled back to the front desk and resumed playing a game on his cell
phone.

Left alone in the apartment, Helen finally had an
opportunity to look around and see what was there. Before she had been unable
to notice much in her rush to help Bill and had only received a vague
impression that the place was rather disorganized and dirty. A very brief tour
of the dining area, living area, kitchen, bathroom, and closets strengthened
her initial opinion into a certainty. “God, what a pig,” she said to herself.
“No woman has been in here for a while, unless it was a sow.” Right then, a
rude animal sound startled her, and she momentarily thought a sow might
actually be in the apartment, concealed in the clutter, but when she heard the
sound again she perceived that it came from the top of the bed. Bill had begun
to snore.

To pass the time until Bill awoke, Helen looked for
something to read. There was no bookcase in the apartment, and at first she
couldn’t see any books, except a bible and some religious volumes. But by
searching through the litter on top of the dining table, she discovered a book,
How to Be a Billionaire
.
An involuntary laugh burst out of her. She wondered how far Bill was on his way
to becoming a billionaire. There didn’t seem to be any signs of his success in
the apartment. She looked at him sleeping and couldn’t detect any mega-rich
glow emanating from his body. Not that there would be, she thought, if by some
chance he became wealthy. She had observed well-to-do people, people born into
mounds of money or lucky in their career, and most of the time she thought
average working-class people made a better impression than they did. Since she
didn’t know how to become a billionaire, she thought it might be worthwhile to
read the book, although she wasn’t interested in adopting any new precepts for
herself. Maybe in the future she could quiz Bill about his
money-making
progress.

With the book, she went to the couch and sat down. To her
alarm, she sank further toward the floor than she expected; she wondered how
difficult it was going to be to stand up again. Why would anyone keep such a
worn-out piece of cheap furniture, she asked herself. Especially a want-to-be
billionaire, she thought, remembering the book. She laughed again. Soon she was
paging through the book, reading as well as she could amidst Bill’s thunderous,
rhythmic snoring, which was like the crashing of the surf on a rocky beach.

After a few chapters, she grew tired of the simplistic rules
and clichés of the book and threw it aside. “No one’s going to become rich
reading that,” she said aloud. “The only person who’s going to benefit from
that book is the author.”

For a while, she watched Bill sleep. There was a pained look
on his face and in his posture from the accident, but she thought there was
also
a stillness
, a greater appearance of relaxation
than she had ever seen in him before. Perhaps, it was the effect of the codeine
that he had taken. Perhaps, it was due to her presence. She preferred to think
that the second explanation was the more accurate one. When she had seen him
around other women or in one of his relationships that he told everyone about,
bragging like a teenager, he always seemed to be acting a part. He never seemed
emotionally involved with the woman. Most of the time, it appeared he was
trying to manipulate those women into liking him, without truly liking them in
return. He should feel more relaxed around me, Helen thought, because he’s
certainly not trying to impress me. In fact, he doesn’t do anything for me at
all, unless giving me a faded bouquet counts.

Such a realization would prompt most people to do nothing
for someone whom they thought was doing nothing for them, but Helen was
magnanimous by nature. She didn’t want a man treating her like a relative of
the queen of England, putting on an elaborate show to please her. She wasn’t
insecure or self-centered, a fussy orchid that would expire without the
perfect, coddling climate. She was more like an oak tree, sturdy and strong.
She wanted to be appreciated for who she was and what she did. Since she was
tired of sitting around being useless, she decided to wash the dirty dishes in
Bill’s apartment. She simply had to do
something
,
while she was there.

That decision of small importance precipitated a sequence of
related actions, and soon she was involved in a full-scale reorganization and
cleaning of the apartment. While collecting the dirty dishes scattered around
the studio, she discovered that the refrigerator contained spoiled food.
Without much hesitation—who else was going to do this, she
thought—she removed everything from the refrigerator and freezer. Then
she cleaned the
appliance’s
inside surfaces, which
probably had not been done for twenty years, and put back in only what was
fresh. The kitchen cabinets received a similar treatment. All edibles for which
the expiration date had passed were tossed out, and all dining and cooking
wares were sorted and stored in an orderly fashion. The countertop, backsplash,
and floor were thoroughly scoured and mopped. The kitchen was a vastly
different place when she was done. Twenty years of use had been wiped clean.

Surveying the rest of the apartment, Helen perceived a
greater domain of dirt and disorganization than the kitchen had been. A weaker
person would have picked up the bible, lowered herself or himself onto the
couch and read, especially Psalms and its lamentations, until Bill awoke.
Helen, however, took a deep breath and started to work. She could not sit and
be idle, pretending to read in such an indoor wilderness, when she had just
tamed the kitchen outback and returned it to a civilized form. “There is a time
for everything,” she said wisely, paraphrasing the third chapter of
Ecclesiastes and adding a new twist. “The time has come to clean this sty completely.”

She collected the dirty clothing scattered around the studio
and piled them near the door to take to the laundry room. Going through the
items on the dining table and chairs, she found a better place for things she
thought worth keeping in closets or kitchen cabinets. The things she thought
were worthless, which was the majority of items, she put in the best place
possible: The trash room in the hallway. She did the same with other objects
that were scattered throughout the apartment. Even the contents in the closets
were picked through. When she had finished sifting through almost everything in
Bill’s apartment, the trash room was overflowing with empty boxes, worn out
shoes, frayed clothing, parts of a bicycle, broken umbrellas, a defunct vacuum
cleaner, burnt pans, junk mail, and an abundance of odds and ends of no clear
value. She had discovered that he had a miser’s tendency for hoarding items,
although she couldn’t understand how he thought that some of the stuff could
ever be used again. He had an overwhelming inertia, she decided, when it came
to personal tidiness. At first, she had been hesitant to toss items out, but
the more she saw, the more certain she became that he had the habits of a pack
rat and couldn’t do it himself. Ruthlessly, she rid the apartment of what she
considered unnecessary. She then dusted, swept, and scrubbed all the surfaces
in the apartment. The floor was
parquet wood tiles
,
and she washed it on her hands and knees, changing the soapy water every ten
square feet because it became so black so quickly.

Bill’s apartment literally sparkled when she was done. She
looked around in satisfaction at her efforts. The furniture, floors, bathroom,
and windows all glowed with the removal of years of dust, dirt, scum, and
grime. All the smaller objects in the space were now neat and tidy. She smiled
at what she had accomplished, until her eyes turned toward the bed and its
occupant, and then she frowned. One last project demanded her attention.

Determined, she approached the bed. Bill was snoring
heavily. Although there had been a few periods, while she scoured and
straightened, in which his snoring had been replaced with quiet breathing, the
sounds of a chainsaw had resumed. They would have unnerved a timid person, but
they did not alarm her. With delicate hands, she unlaced Bill’s muddy shoes and
pulled them off. Next, she took off his mud-splattered socks. Then she
unbuckled his dirty pants and yanked those off, too. She decided to leave his
soiled polo shirt on, because she thought he might be upset if she used a pair
of scissors to remove it, but that was a difficult decision. The cheap shirt
had made the bed dirty, and her hands were itching to rip it off him. Yet she
knew that men
can
be childishly attached to old
clothing for no good reason. Her deceased husband had been like that. To calm
her offended sensibility, she pulled the top sheet and bedspread up to the chin
of the sound sleeper. He had not moved during her disrobing operations.

“As soon as you wake up,” she said to sleeping Bill, as she
stood next to him, “I’m going to strip every piece of clothing from you. I want
to shave your head, too. What did you do to it? It looks awful. You’re
definitely no sleeping beauty with that hair. ”

Since he was traveling far away in the land of Nod and
couldn’t reply, her judgment went uncontested. She looked down upon him with
the pleasure that comes from feeling indisputably in the right. Victory,
however, did not make her proud, for immediately she went to the laundry room
to wash his dirty clothes.

Chapter 11

Later on that evening around seven, after Helen had neatly
stored away Bill’s now clean clothes in his closets and dresser, she brought
bags of food supplies and the necessary cooking utensils to his apartment from
hers to make chicken soup. She thought the soup would do him some good, when he
woke up. While she chopped vegetables and cooked the meal, he continued to
sleep and snore and didn’t appear to be any nearer to rising. She had worked
hard cleaning his apartment and couldn’t postpone her dinner, so when the soup
was ready, she sat down at the dining table and ate. It had been many, many
years since a dinner had been eaten at that table.

The aroma of well-made chicken soup filled the apartment. It
was the finest smell of food to ever originate in that space since Bill had
lived there, and he was drawn from unconsciousness by the delicious odor. His
raucous snoring subsided to the quiet rise and fall of normal breathing. He was
no longer sleeping, but he lay still with his eyes shut, sniffing like someone
who lies in a meadow during spring, when wildflowers are blooming, and the air
is rich with the scent of life and growing things. In his semi-conscious state,
he associated the smell with Linda, who was an excellent cook, although she
mostly made stir-fries. He could distinguish the sounds of someone in his
apartment, and in his drowsiness he could not think of
who
else might be there. He opened his eyes. That was one of the few parts of his
body that he could move easily and the only part he dared to move at the
moment, so he lay looking blearily at the ceiling.

“Linda, is that you?” he asked, in the smoothest voice his
injured state allowed, hoping without any justification that she had come to
look after him. In his poorly functioning brain, he thought that maybe his
injury had triggered a delayed compassion on her part.

“Bill, you’re awake,” Helen said in surprise. She quickly
left the table and went to him. “How are you feeling?”

He did not feel grateful. Immediately, he knew who was
talking to him. He now became fully alert. “You’re still here?” he grumbled
nastily. “I said you could go.”

“How could I leave you all alone, when you’re paralyzed? I
couldn’t leave a dog or cat alone in your condition.” Helen spoke to him firmly
yet gently, like a nurse tending to a crotchety, old man, which Bill was well
on his way to becoming.

“I’m not paralyzed,” he argued. “I can get up. There’s
nothing wrong with me. I don’t need any babysitter. I’ll show you.” With an
abundance of grunting, groaning, and gritting his teeth, Bill slowly succeeded
in raising himself into a sitting position in bed. The codeine had made it
possible for him to sit up, but movement was still painful, and he was sweating
in agony from the exertion. “See. I’m fine,” he rasped.

Helen could contain her laughter, but not her smiling.
“Would you like to join me for dinner then?” she asked. “I’ll set a place on
the table for you. While you were sleeping, I did a little cleaning, and
there’s room now to eat.”

She went to the kitchen to fetch another place setting for
Bill, and he looked at the table. He couldn’t believe it was empty of
everything except Helen’s dishes. It appeared to be a mirage to him. He had to
confirm with his hands that the mound of clutter had been removed.