The Penny Pinchers Club

by Sarah Strohmeyer

  I tried putting myself back to when I was twenty-three and so madly in love with Griff that I couldn’t help relating every simple act to him. The coffee I drank was the coffee Griff preferred. The book I read, he’d suggested. My favorite shirt was his favorite shirt, the one he casually commented made me look hot. The music I listened to was the stuff he liked. The food . . . the newspapers . . . the politics . . .

  Gradually, I remembered how great it was. The electricity and anticipation of seeing him again. His intelligence and sly wit. All of them used to make me swoon. And all of them I’d come to take for granted.

  “Nothing went wrong,” I said. “It was simply that I met Griff and fell in love because Griff was . . . Griff.”

  Liam laughed. “I see,” he said knowingly. “Then it really wasn’t me, it was him.”

  “In a way, yes.”

  “Then that’s good.” He patted my hand. “It makes me feel so much better. You were in love, Kat. Really, truly in love with him because true love can’t be described or quantified. You can’t say I love so-and-so because she’s got a mean serve or shares the same conservative values.”

  I noticed he used the past tense; he said I was in love with Griff.

  “And that’s what you used to say about Paige.”

  “When I met her, she fit all my criteria. I didn’t even know I had criteria. But suddenly it was like I had a mental checklist. Physically fit? Check. Catholic? Check. Republican? Check. It made committing myself to someone after you so much easier. Just the facts, ma’am.”

  I let go of his hand. “Hold on. You’re a Republican?”

  “Used to be. In my tax bracket, it’s inevitable.” He took back my hand. “But you know what I used to say when people like my mother asked why I wanted to marry you?”

  “You said I had the smokingest body ev-er.”

  “I said, because she’s Kat. That was all I could come up with. She’s Kat.”

  “And here I thought it was because I was the spitting image of the Madonna that hung over your grandmother’s bed.”

  “Oh, yeah. There was that. That was creepy.” He ran his hand up my arm, slowly, sensuously.

  The waves crashing nearby sounded far away, like when you hold a shell to your ear. “We’re stuck,” I said. “You know perfectly well neither of us is going to make a pass at the other.”

  “Not when you’re still in love with your husband, no. I’m a cad, but I’m not dumb enough to let you break my heart again. He might be planning to leave you. And for that I’m sorry since it’s obvious you’re mad for the guy. Still.”

  Liam said out loud what I’d been too frightened to admit. For all my planning and preparations, including the meeting with Toni Feinzig, despite our money woes and near bankruptcy, despite his emails to Bree, I loved my husband. I realized that the day the Princeton Pen story appeared, and I knew it the moment his plane took off for Alaska and I was alone in my house without him.

  I loved him and didn’t want to be with Liam or anyone else.

  “And if I didn’t love Griff?”

  He pulled me to him, pressing my head to his chest. “Then I would make mad, passionate love to you for days on end until you forgot him entirely.”

  “You think you could do that . . . at your age?”

  “Wise guy.” He kissed the top of my head. “I think I could manage.”

  He stroked my hair as I let myself sink into his warm chest, his heart beating steadily under my ear, the comforting smell of his cashmere sweater mixing with his aura of solid responsibility. Why is it that men who exert restraint are so much sexier than their opposites?

  I sighed, safe and comfortable. Glad to know sex was off the table. Well, partly glad.

  There was a strange peace, I’d learned from my months of penny pinching, that came from tying one’s self to the mast while negotiating the swirling seas of desire. Whether it was lust for a luxurious leather sofa or a charming ex, virtue had its own rewards. Or was that membership? Never could quite remember.

  “So where does that leave us?” I said, fingering the hem of his sweater. His style was impeccable. “Besides stuck, I mean.”

  “Friends? Allies? Admirers? I don’t know.”

  “Or perhaps,” I said, everything coming together, “there’s a way for us to stay in each other’s lives, happily.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “It involves money.”

  “Yeah? Show me anything worthwhile in life that doesn’t.”

  So I did.

  At first, Liam insisted on just giving me a blank check for $10,000 which he dismissed as “a minor fee.” But then, I was able to convince him he would benefit from our arrangement the most if he had creative input, too.

  “You know you’re better at design than I am,” I said, tossing the salad in his mother’s antique wooden bowl. “If you hadn’t had a bunch of He-Man brothers and a father who’d order you to bench-press something if he heard you so much as comment on the drapes, you’d definitely have gone into interior decorating rather than business.”

  He acted doubtful as he gently flipped flounder filets at the stove. “You know, it’s not like I work at Burger King, Kat. I’m responsible for thousands of employees in over one hundred countries. People depend on me to keep the company at its best. They depend on me for their livelihood.”

  Which was why his iPhone had gone off fourteen times this evening until we both agreed to turn off our cells.

  “I’m not asking you to get out there and meet with Mr. and Mrs. So-and-So about expanding their master bedroom. What I’m suggesting is that you be involved. Help me choose styles, set our direction. Make our online firm an outlet for your creativity.”

  He turned off the stove and cut up a lemon.

  “And you never know,” I added. “If this pharmaceutical CEO thing doesn’t work out, you’ll always have Interiors by Kat and Liam.”

  He winced.

  “Lemon in your eye?”

  “No. Kat and Liam. Sounds like a bad folk group. Kat and Liam sing ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ ”

  “If you had a hammer,” I said, plunking the bowl on the table, “you’d use it to fix the shingles that have flown off this roof.”

  By the morning, Liam and I had a rough sketch of our new business: an online individualized consultation service for regular, everyday homeowners and apartment dwellers who needed advice on paint, lighting, flooring, furniture, window treatments, you name it, but who couldn’t shell out the big bucks.

  Most of the $10,000 would go toward developing a top-notch website and software that would accurately replicate the colors and lighting of digital photos sent by potential clients. If we were successful, it would mean the rich man’s province of personal interior design would be available to the masses.

  Like Madeleine Granville.

  Perhaps it was because I’d had Madeleine Granville on my mind that I resorted to her as an excuse when Griff called me the next morning while I toodled up the Atlantic City Expressway, rejuvenated and inspired, itching to get started on my new adventure.

  “Hey! You got in okay.” The clock said eight thirty—four thirty Alaska time. “Can’t sleep?”

  “Haven’t slept all night.” His voice was strained, terse. “Where the hell were you, Kat?”

  “What? Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Laura’s in the hospital.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Without looking, I dangerously moved right and slowed down as I drifted into the breakdown lane, the fluttering in my chest so rapid I feared I was having a breakdown of a different sort. “I can be there in an hour. Is she okay?”

  “She’s fine. Now. Already back at NYU. They think it must have been food poisoning. She went with a group down to Chinatown for dinner and... that’s not the point.I couldn’t reach you last night,Kat. Laura needed her health insurance info and I didn’t have it. Hell, I was in Anchorage four thousand miles away!”

  I’d never heard him so angry and
I couldn’t say I blamed him. “Calm down, Griff. It’s not helping—”

  “I don’t care who it’s helping. It was a nightmare. I left a dozen messages on the machine and tried your cell.”

  How could I have been so neglectful? Laura might have really needed me and I would have been unreachable. What was I saying? I was unreachable.

  “Did she get the info?”

  “Only after Viv used her spare key to get into the house and found it in my home office in the basement.” There was a beat and he added, somewhat sinisterly, “Your sister certainly seems to know her way around our personal stuff.”

  Busted, I thought back to the afternoon of our anniversary party when she and Adele were permitted carte blanche to sift through everything. “Yes, well, she’s been helping me sort out the finances.” Boy, was he ever going to love that.

  “I’m not sure that’s wise, letting Viv in on our private financial mess, but I’m too beat to get into it with you right now. The bottom line is you needed to be available, Kat. You’re her mother. Where were you?”

  “I was . . .” Wait. Why did I have to explain to him where I was? I wasn’t some servant who was expected to be at the beck and call of my family 24/7. “You wanna know where I was? I was working, that’s where I was. I was with my very own client Madeleine Granville. But you wouldn’t know about her because you’re too wrapped up in that stupid book to know that I’m trying to break out on my own.”

  There. Take that, Mr. Self-Righteous.

  He returned my snap with an icy response. “You’re back to your old ways, Kat, aren’t you?”

  “Pardon?” I checked my side-view mirror and pulled onto the highway. Laura might have been okay, but I needed to be closer to her in case she needed me. “What old ways are those?”

  “Secrecy. One of the best outcomes of this frugality phase of yours—or, at least, so I thought—was that you’d become more open and honest about everything, including your spending. You don’t know how much it bugged me that you’d come home with a new skirt that you claimed you bought for $100, when really it was twice that.”

  “Look, if I did, it was because I was fed up with having to justify every purchase to you, like you were my father.”

  “Not your father. Quite the opposite. A partner. Have you forgotten that we’re a team, that we’re married?”

  A huge yellow Hummer was beginning to tailgate me, annoyed that I was on the phone AND maintaining the speed limit. As the days of flipping the bird were over for safety’s sake, I gently applied the brakes to really drive him mad.

  “You know, you’re right. I might have forgotten we’re married. Not exactly hard to do when you spend more time with your beloved Bree than your wife.”

  The Hummer passed and leaned on the horn while Griff contemplated that zinger.

  When he spoke again, he used the calm, rational tone that bugged me to no end. “I don’t know what it is with your obsession over Bree, but I’ll tell you one thing. She takes an interest in my work. She doesn’t roll her eyes or hint about being bored when I bring up the book, which I rarely do.”

  “That goes both ways, pal. You don’t care about my work, either. You couldn’t tell a stripe from a paisley and you don’t want to.”

  “Yeah, well,” he said, turning nasty, “there’s a difference between a job and a hobby.”

  The car began to shake as my foot pressed down on the gas going way, way too fast. “It’s not a hobby, Griff. That’s my living.”

  “Really? That’s news. Say . . . how’s business these days? Been to the office lately?” The sarcasm dripped.

  He knew I’d been fired. But . . . how?

  “Oh, that’s right. Another secret you kept from me. Too bad Chloe called right before I left to say she’d mailed you a box of your belongings. Also, FYI, your ex-lover’s been calling the office, looking for you.”

  I stomped on the brakes, hard, as I crested a hill and spied a spidery state trooper hiding in a U-turn. Too late, I realized. For my driving record . . . and my marriage.

  That’s why Griff had been so silent on the ride up to Newark, why he’d asked what I’d be doing with my week, why he’d graced me with nothing more than a brush of the lips before flying to Alaska. He hadn’t been daydreaming about interview questions or statistics, he’d been steaming about my lies.

  Guilt poured over me like hot oil.

  As did outrage. I was tired of keeping mum about his infidelities. There he was presenting himself as so high and mighty and he was anything but. To hell with Toni and her advice. To hell with waiting and saving for the moment when he decided to ask me for an official divorce. The truth was, I was sick of waiting, and didn’t what I want matter? For once.

  “For your information, I didn’t mention losing my job because I wanted to spare you some worry,” I began, the words flowing out fast and furious. “As for Liam, I’m helping him restore the house he bought, that’s it. I didn’t tell you to protect you and your precious ego.”

  “Oh, please. Liam Novak doesn’t even begin to impress. Corporate CEOs are a dime a dozen.”

  “Perhaps. But my hiding the fact I lost my job doesn’t even begin to compare with the fact you opened a secret bank account with $10,000, money that you didn’t want me to know about because you’re going to use it to run off with Bree as soon as Laura graduates.”

  Griff was silent for a few seconds. “Where did you get this?”

  “From your—our—computer in the basement. That’s right. I read the emails. You can be pissed if you want, but put yourself in my position. How would you like to learn from Mac mail that I was planning on leaving you? How worthless and isolated and unloved would you feel if you were me?”

  The phone went dead.

  Good.

  I tossed it onto the floor of the car, wishing I could grind it into a million pieces as the flashing blues of the New Jersey State Police filled my whole car, reflecting my inner pulsating craziness.

  That was it. My marriage was over. It was done. Bring it on, I thought as the trooper took his sweet time checking my plates. Because I am fiscally in shape and ready.

  Later that day, after checking in with Laura and discovering that, indeed, she was fine, I had a good cry in a long hot shower. The old saw is that your life flashes before you when you die. If that’s so, then in my experience, the same was true for a dying marriage.

  I could not stop the mental loop of snapshots, one after the other, over and over. Griff at Barb Gladstone’s library table. Him at the Alchemist & Barrister joshing with the students. Kissing me outside the gates of Princeton. At our wedding in “Our Lady of Perpetual Pain,” asViv called our childhood church in South River. Later, biking through the golden vineyards in California on our honeymoon.

  Our first apartment with the loud upstairs neighbors and numerous roaches that Griff tried to extinguish by blocking every possible hole in those eight hundred square feet. Laura’s birth, so fast and furious there hadn’t been time for anesthesia. Her babyhood as Griff and I took turns pacing the floors so she’d stop crying. Taking her for walks in the stroller, dipping her toes in the baby pool. Our vacations down at the Shore when she chortled at the sight of soaring white seagulls.

  Christmases. Fourths of July. Anniversaries. Our life speeding up as the years went on, as we fulfilled the pledge of our wedding vows to become one. Sex, glorious, passionate moments of the physical expression of our love, was the icing on the cake. It was all so wonderful, not one moment could be held out as the best.

  And, now, it was over. And I was devastated as if half of me had been ripped out of my body and discarded.

  I checked the phone again. No message of apology from Griff. None on my cell, either.

  “Here.” Viv came over the next day with a triple venti latte from Starbucks. “It’s your favorite. Drink.”

  I couldn’t. It made me sick. All I wanted was to lie on the couch in my pj’s and robe. Was that too much to ask?

  “Lau
ra’s going to be home in three hours,” she said, thrusting out the coffee again. “You’ll need this.”

  “So she can find her mother not only depressed but also caffeinated?”

  “No. So you’ll get some energy and get dressed. You’ve got to pull yourself together for her sake, Kat. And, if I may be so bold to point out, you’ve also got to do some explaining to this Madeleine Granville.”

  I lifted my hands from where they’d be doing an adequate job of keeping the sunlight out of my eyes. “Why?”

  “Because you used her as an alibi for spending the night with your ex, that’s why. Think what would happen if Griff were to get nosy and make a few phone calls.”

  She was right. So right that I got dressed in a flash and drove down to Lambertville on the off chance that, being Sunday, she’d be in.

  She was—a good and a bad thing. Bad because I didn’t have an excuse to wimp out and drive home to Rocky River. Good because I could ask for her discretion in a matter involving my husband.

  “Come in,” she said, opening the door to her painted checkerboard floor.

  I took small pride in seeing that the place had been transformed from a somber, dusty church outbuilding to a cozy cottage with warm golden walls and a red-walled library. Inexpensively black-framed photographs covered the walls, making her seem not so lonely and desperate. There were books everywhere and the fireplace in the living room roared merrily, staving off the spring chill.

  “Check out the kitchen.” She led the way in slippers and jeans, a loose William & Mary sweatshirt falling almost to her knees. “I did as you said.”

  Even on a gray day, the kitchen glowed. She’d run bead board halfway up the walls and topped it with a chair rail, all painted a soft white. The rest was painted in “Tiffany Blue.” The appliances had been updated with stainless-steel varieties, and the counters were made out of maple and inexpensive soapstone tiles. The room coordinated with the white, yellow, and red rugs on the refinished floors.