Cheapskate in Love

by Booth, Skittle

  Unwilling to admit that her efforts had been useless, Claire had another idea and told Katie to go grab her purse. Bill and Matt wondered what Claire was up to. “What does every woman want?” she announced mysteriously.

  “Money,” said Bill.

  “A baby,” said Matt.

  “Wrong,” said Claire. “They want a movie star.” She spoke with the assurance of the best authority—herself. “You may not be one, Bill, but you can look like one. A little blush will give you a California glow. A little mascara will draw attention away from all the bags under your eyes. And a dash of lipstick will make you look hot-blooded. You’ll be sexy, movie-star material.”

  To Matt, what Claire said made a little sense. He had to see first. To Bill, it made none. “No, no, no,” he insisted. “I just want a picture. Just take the picture. I don’t need makeup.”

  Claire, however, had her way. She was after all his boss and knew best. Two visitors, who disembarked from the elevator during Bill’s glamorization, saw Claire coloring his face and asked if they were having a costume party. Bill twisted his head to them suddenly and responded with New York crotchetiness that there wasn’t any party, which caused the red lipstick in Claire’s hand to streak across his cheek. Claire had to grab his chin tightly to prevent another mishap. The visitors were amused to hear from Matt that Bill was only having his picture taken for a dating website.

  “There,” said Claire, beaming with satisfaction at her work when she finished. “Doesn’t that look better?” she stated out of politeness as a question. Bill had no mirror to see for himself. He looked at Matt’s reaction. Matt thought it best to stifle his opinion and bobbed his head without nodding yes or no. Katie kept looking at her cell phone to see what time it was.

  “Now we can take the picture,” Claire trumpeted. She put Katie in the right spot to take the photo. Claire and Matt stood behind Katie.

  “Wait, Katie,” Claire said. “One more adjustment. Cross you legs, Bill. You’ll look more like a gentleman, a cultured man of the world.” Bill crossed his legs.

  Matt objected. “No. Don’t cross your legs.” Bill uncrossed his legs.

  “Tilt your head a bit to the right,” Claire directed. Bill did.

  “No, to the left,” Matt urged. Bill obeyed.

  “The right side shows your softer features,” Claire explained, insisting. Bill turned there.

  “Your face has a more masculine look when you turn to the left,” Matt responded.

  Tired of turning his head from left to right and all the other preparations, which he did not think were going to help him in his online wooing, Bill looked straight ahead. “Katie, take the picture.”

  “Smile,” Claire said. Bill crinkled his face into a fake smile with his teeth showing.

  “No teeth,” Matt said. Bill sealed his lips.

  “A genuine smile shows teeth,” Claire observed. Bill’s teeth reappeared.

  “His teeth are bad,” Matt replied. Bill’s teeth disappeared. With a strained, half-smiling look on his face, as if he was walking into a wind storm, Bill held his body rigid in its staged casualness, looking as comfortable as a monkey in a medical experiment.

  Claire had another idea and burst out, “He would look better with a facial. He has so many blackheads on his face, and they’re so big, he seems to have a rare form of chicken pox.”

  “His hair should be dyed,” Matt added. “There’s too much grey in it. Dark hair would easily take twenty years off his appearance.” He gave Bill another look. “Well, at least ten.”

  Bill was fed up with such helpful advice. “Katie, I’m ready.” Katie took three photographs. The first two times he blinked with the flash.

  As Katie photographed him, Claire remarked to Matt with a lowered voice that Bill could still hear, “He has a fifteen percent chance of succeeding with these photos, I think.”

  “You’re optimistic,” Matt replied. “I think it’s less than two percent. He’d probably have more responses without posting any picture at all.”

  “Thanks, Katie,” Bill said, relieved that the ordeal was over and he could finally relax. “If you could send me those photos, that would be great. I’m going to stay here and make some calls.”

  “Sure, no problem,” Katie said, fleeing back to her desk and all her electronic socializing that had been interrupted.

  Claire and Matt looked at each other, certain that one of Bill’s calls would be personal. They had both known him for a while—three years for Claire and a year for Matt—which was ample time to understand the elementary workings of Bill’s mind.

  “Is doctor Linda on that list?” Claire simpered.

  “She must be wondering why you haven’t called yet,” Matt snickered.

  “I have work to do,” announced Bill, appearing to be completely unruffled by their impertinent remarks. He didn’t even look at them, because he had already started to read through the messages on his Blackberry.

  Claire and Matt walked down the corridor, back toward the office. When they thought they were out of Bill’s hearing range, peals of laughter broke loose. The merry sounds still reached his ears.

  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 darli
ng, 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.

  Chapter 8

  A light shower was in the forecast for Saturday, and when the morning dawned, thick grey clouds in the sky confirmed the likelihood of rain. Bill tried to persuade Linda to change her plan, but she was inexorable. She would not watch TV. She would not go to a movie. She would not exercise at a gym. She wouldn’t even go shopping, which was the last suggestion Bill made, because it was the most costly substitute activity. He was somewhat relieved that she didn’t want to shop, since he felt compelled to pay for her purchases, when they went to stores together, and she was accustomed to a much more expensive lifestyle than him on account of her wealth. He came from the old school of relationships and thought the man should always pick up the tab, no matter how much it hurt his wallet. The women Bill dated always allowed him to indulge this chauvinistic tendency, without complaint.

  When Bill arrived at Linda’s house to go to Bear Mountain, he did not need to point out the surprise for her. “What happened to your hair?” she exclaimed instantly. She stood staring at his head with her arms straight at her side. He leaned in for a kiss, as usual, but she backed up, locked in a stare with eyes wide open, as if an alien from outer space was bending toward her.

  “I dyed it,” he said, abandoning his attempt to kiss her. “Don’t you like it? I did it for you.”

  “Who dyed it?” she cried.

  “I dyed it,” he repeated.

  “You killed it,” she blurted out. “It died.”

  She insisted that he go and have his hair fixed immediately, and that was a reasonable request. It looked like a multicolored wig or the pelt of a raccoon, an old, hoary raccoon. The multitude of shades in his thinning hair extended from tan to the darkest brown—all dusted with the grey of age—because the dye had not been uniformly applied or allowed to set for the proper duration. Bill, however, was adverse to such an extreme measure as spending more money to beautify hair, even if it was on his head, and dismissed her advice. “Color highlights are in,” he said, trying to make a joke. “Next time, I’ll do a better job.” Linda was more interested in going hiking than worrying about what he looked like, so eventually she let the matter drop, although she avoided looking at him the rest of the day.

  Since it was doubtful that Bill’s car could travel the distance to Bear Mountain and return, they went together in Linda’s car, and she drove. During most of the trip to the park, she entertained Bill by telling him what a piece of junk his automobile was and what kind of car he should buy. The best choice, she explained in detail, was the kind of car she was driving. Bill asked an occasional question, but mostly stared out the window, fearful that he would be walking uphill and downhill for hours.

  He knew they would easily arrive in the park before eleven in the morning. She had wanted to come so early—it was the earliest time they had ever started a hike together—because she said she felt stressed. The strain of her relationship with Bill was probably the cause, but she didn’t say that, because she wasn’t the introspective type. She only said that she wanted to release the psychological pressure she felt through vigorous, extended exertion. That was all she was certain about. Acupuncture wasn’t going to cure a mind-body imbalance by itself, she knew. Bill didn’t share her philosophy of health. Although he was somewhat sad and depressed, even if he wouldn’t admit it to himself, hours of hiking were not going to make him feel better. On the contrary, it would exhaust him to the point where he c
ould hardly move. He had agreed to come, however, because he wanted to mend the broken tie between them. In his innermost thoughts, he doubted that he was compatible with Linda, but he repressed those nuisance notions for now, since there was not another object for him to lavish his affection on at the moment.

  Unless it started to rain, he was certain she would continue to punish him with her marathon march until at least five o’clock. Without rainfall, he knew he wouldn’t be able to convince her to go for a drive instead or have an early dinner. His power of persuasion over her was nonexistent. Since the rain had not yet appeared and might not at all, the closer they came to their destination, the more sluggish and despondent he grew, while she became more energetic and high-spirited.

  When they arrived, Linda leaped out of the car and started stretching, while Bill unloaded a backpack and put it on. Filled with water bottles, food, bug repellent, a first aid kit, a blanket, and umbrellas, it was heavy and caused Bill to walk leaning forward to balance the weight. He willingly served as the beast of burden, because he thought that was the man’s role. But he hardly had a choice, because Linda would never offer to help.

  In the sunlight of early summer, the natural beauty of Bear Mountain and the surrounding Hudson valley lands can fill the eyes and hearts of people of all ages with a comfort and deep solace that no city ever can. The majestic, wide Hudson River sparkles and surges onward, as if it were the source of life, nourishing the abundant trees and other plant life that press upon its shores. Even under a clouded sky, the area retains a somber, stirring magnificence. It is a vision of earthly glory in any weather, a sight to behold by anyone who can see.