Just before the door closed, Helen stuck her head back inside. “Are you sure you can lock up?” she asked. “I can ask the front desk to do it.”
“I’ll be there, as soon as you close the door,” he answered impatiently.
“OK. Just thought I should check. It’s a long way from the bed to the door,” she pointed out.
“I can make it,” he said curtly.
Helen was unconvinced, but she stepped back into the hallway, firmly pulling his door closed. She wanted to see how long it would take him to lock it, if he could. “I’ll give him five minutes,” she said to herself. “Then I’ll get Jonathan. I ought to call an ambulance for that sick puppy.” She put her bags on the floor, while she waited.
From where she stood, his moans and groans, as he forced himself to stand, were clearly audible. She thought about calling out to him, insisting on his staying where he was, because she was going to have Jonathan lock the door, but she kept quiet. Next she heard an extended bellowing, somewhat similar to the sound of a moose in mating season, as Bill hobbled the length of the apartment toward the door, as fast as he could. When he slammed into the door, pressing his whole body against it to support himself, the thud made Helen jump. When she heard the lock turn, she said to herself, “I can scarcely believe it. That big puppy dog has more strength and willpower than it seems, although he can’t take much care of himself.” She wasn’t sure what he was doing, when she heard him moaning and groaning again. She listened closely, trying to make sense of his noises. At that time, he was turning his body around until his back was against the door, in an attempt to return to the bed. When he slid to the floor, whimpering, too weak from pain to make the journey back from where he came, she realized what situation his stubbornness had put him in.
“Men,” she said to herself, with a feeling of superiority. “They’re all the same. He’s just like George was.” Picking up her bags, which she had set down to listen, she walked proudly to her apartment, leaving Bill to contemplate his femaleless condition from the vantage point of his sparkling-clean parquet floor.
The next morning at the office, Katie was busy updating her friends with all of her likes and dislikes from the weekend, which were numerous and more of a priority than any work-related task, when her desk phone rang. She checked the phone’s screen and recognized Bill’s number. He usually was one of the first people to come into the office, arriving nearly an hour before she did, so she expected that he was calling in sick. Claire, Debbie, and Matt had been wondering where he might be, so Katie thought she might as well satisfy all of their curiosity at once. Otherwise, they would be bothering her until they found out everything that she learned from talking with Bill. She wanted to be able to focus on her personal matters again as soon as possible, without further interruption. She didn’t understand why her coworkers were so interested in what Bill did or where he was, but she was not going to discourage them or try to analyze them. She had better things to do.
“Shhhh,” Katie hissed, before picking up her phone. “It’s loverboy.” Claire, Debbie, and Matt immediately perked up and stopped chatting among themselves to listen. After Katie answered her phone and traded greetings with Bill, she put her phone on speaker, so everyone could hear. Bill did not perceive the switch to speakerphone from her use of the handset.
“I won’t be coming in today. I had a little accident on Saturday,” Bill explained to Katie, which the others all heard. “Don’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t say anything to anyone,” Katie truthfully promised.
“The others will think I’m old,” Bill said.
“He is old,” Claire whispered.
“And in denial,” Debbie added.
“But young at heart,” Matt cracked. The women looked at him with straight faces, as if he were Bill. “Joke,” Matt said to them. “It was a joke. Ha ha.”
“I can move, but it won’t be until tomorrow or later this week that I can make it in,” Bill continued.
Bill’s coworkers looked at each other with quizzical looks, unable to guess what had happened to him.
“OK, Bill,” Katie replied. “Take it easy. Did you see a doctor?”
“I was with a doctor when it happened,” he answered grimly.
Raucous bursts of laughter came from Claire, Debbie, and Matt in unison. They all had some insight now into what might have occurred on Saturday, and they remembered how Bill had said on Friday that he was never going to see Linda again. Katie tried to stifle their boisterous sounds with hand gestures. “You mean Linda?” she asked Bill.
“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, ca
using 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...”
Tanya couldn’t see Bill’s wristwatch, which was covered by his sleeve cuff, so she interrupted his prophetic utterances regarding their fate. “Do you have the time,” she asked.
Bill raised his hand and pushed back his cuff. “It’s...”
Cheapskate in Love Page 8