Cheapskate in Love (14 page)

“I injured my lower back. I couldn’t move for a few days.”

“Did you see a doctor?”

“That’s not the point.” Bill was a bit exasperated, because
the talk was drifting away from what he wanted to say. He also didn’t like doctors.
They reminded him of his age and mortality. “The point is, I missed my train
and took a later one. And it’s a good thing I did. Because on that train, a
beautiful, young Ukrainian—she’s twenty-seven. She was sad when I said
she looked thirty. On a scale of one to ten, she’s a ten. Linda is about an
eight, eight and a half. But Tanya—that’s her name—is a ten. She’s
electrifying. And she sat down next to me.”

“Maybe she thought you were her father.” Stan didn’t think
Bill’s big news unusual. It fell into a pattern of other amazing, unexpected,
unforgettable interactions Bill claimed to have had with other women in the
past. Frequently when they met, there seemed to be another such story. Stan
couldn’t understand why so many women—and they always seemed to be
foreigners, or a generation removed from being an immigrant—bothered to
notice Bill. Was there something about Bill that intrigued foreign women? Stan
had no idea what that might be. Could they tell the difference between a single
man and a married one by sight? Stan rarely felt that he was the object of a
woman’s attention, including his wife’s. However, unlike Bill, he wasn’t always
on the lookout for women, so that must be why, Stan thought, he rarely had any
adventures similar to Bill’s. He also thought that the women with whom Bill had
such experiences were always immigrants or close to it, because Bill considered
them to be less expensive to acquire and retain than American women. For that
important, economical reason, he chased after them.

“Ha, ha. She didn’t think I was her father,” Bill countered.
“She thought I was hot. We talked, until I had to get off the train.”

“She didn’t want to go home with you?”

“She was going to her brother’s further to the east.”

“So?”

Over the weekend, Bill had asked himself the same question
that Stan was asking now. Bill hadn’t been able to come up with a satisfactory
explanation. He had told himself that she had family obligations, which
prevented her from calling all weekend and had forced her to stay on the train
when he left. But when he thought about
it, that
had
appeared to be a flimsy excuse. She was an adult and single. How much interest
could she have in visiting a married brother with children? “She said she had
to go,” Bill said, as doubts began to flood into his brain. The streetlight in
his mind began to flash red.

“If she thought you were hot, and you thought she was hot,
sounds like something should be cooking.” That’s how Bill thought, Stan knew.
He was trying to put the meeting into perspective for Bill, and he was
succeeding.

“I wasn’t too comfortable,” Bill admitted. “She wanted to
know if I was wearing a Rolex. That’s why she grabbed my wrist. She asked if I
had a house and how much I made. She asked those things within the first few
minutes. It seemed too early.”

“Oh, I see. She saw sucker written on your forehead in big
capital letters. S-U-C-K-E-R. Sucker.”

“No, it’s not like that. She makes eight dollars an hour and
is trying to find a way to stay in this country.”

“Like I said, sucker. When she found out that you don’t wear
a Rolex, don’t own a house, and don’t make enough to buy her clothes and
jewelry on Madison Avenue, she knew she was wasting her time with you. She
doesn’t care what country she’s in, as long as she’s well off.”

Bill knew that Stan was right. Stan had thrown a harsh light
on Bill’s misty imagination of himself and Tanya, and the fantasy had
evaporated like the morning dew. Bill now felt he was never going to see Tanya
again, but he couldn’t admit that to Stan or himself just yet. He had invested
so much hope and planning in her that if he gave up so quickly, he would appear
to be a fool to everyone, including himself. He had to stick to his story for a
while. Besides, there was no one to take her place in his thoughts yet.

“She said she would call,” Bill insisted pathetically. “She
likes seafood. I was thinking we should go to Le
Bernardin
.”
Bill mispronounced the name of the expensive restaurant. He had never been
there and wasn’t sure where it was, but he mentioned it because Claire had
suggested it to him that morning. She had pronounced the name correctly, and
she had eaten there, too, so Bill knew it would impress Tanya, even if the cost
depressed him.

“You’d take that diamond digger there?” Stan was
incredulous. He knew what a true cheapskate Bill was.

“Someone at the office suggested it,” Bill replied. “I was
thinking of another seafood restaurant, The Blue Fin. I went there once on a
date and saw a famous movie star. Can’t remember her name now.”

Stan had difficulty swallowing this restaurant suggestion,
which was only slightly less expensive than the other. “Why don’t you just buy
poor little Tanya...
”

“She’s big-boned,” Bill interjected.

“A yacht, a big yacht, so she can catch her own fish and
sail back to the Ukraine?”

Bill saw a suggestion in Stan’s sarcasm that Stan didn’t
intend. “A cruise around Manhattan would be nice. She’s probably never been on
one. There’s dinner and dancing. I wonder if she likes to dance.”

“This is ridiculous,” Stan vociferated. He knew that Bill’s
infatuation had passed, and the process of forgetting Tanya had begun, but Stan
refused to allow him any lingering wistfulness. He was going to try to pull out
the root at once. “She’s not interested in you. She never was. She never will
be. Did you try online dating again?”

“I don’t like that. I want to see women, go out on dates,
not chat, chat, chat till my fingers fall off.” Bill wasn’t at all angered by
Stan’s forcefulness. He was relieved to change the topic to something less
embarrassing.

“Then go to a matchmaking service,” Stan ordered.

“I’ve been thinking about it.”

“Do it.”

“Linda has made me so angry. She’s made me hate women. I
don’t want to date. I don’t want to meet someone else like her.”

“Forget about her. Go get a massage. Go see a movie. Call a
dating service.”

“You’re right. I should. But maybe Tanya will call.”

“Forget about her. She’s forgotten you.”

Bill pulled two pages printed from the Internet out of his briefcase
and handed them to Stan. “What do you think of these tips for an older man,
trying to date a young woman?”

Stan started reading the pages and laughed. The first tip
was: Recognize that there is a difference in ages and act yours.

Bill grabbed the pages back from him. “My coworkers said I
should get a facial. What do you think?” he asked. Bill wanted to know whether
a facial would make him look younger and more appealing to the young women who
appealed to him. He was trying to weigh the cost of such a luxury against the
possible benefit.

Without any examination of Bill’s face, Stan immediately
brought up what he had wanted to mention since they had met for lunch. “First,
do something with your hair. It looks like a dead cat.”

Chapter 16

On Saturday morning, Bill drove his car slowly by a hair
salon and spa, in the small commercial center of the town in which he lived.
The salon was on a two-lane, two-way street without curbside parking. As best
as he could while driving, he tried to look through the large plate glass
window of the salon and see who was inside. The salon was on the right side of
the car, and when he passed by, he leaned in that direction as far as he could
without letting go of the steering wheel.

Although he had driven by the business several times already
that morning, he was still puzzled and uncertain about what to do. He knew that
he should go inside. Yet he wasn’t sure that he really wanted to. The traffic
light in his brain was blinking bright red then green in a dazzling rapid
sequence over and over. Bill’s will was paralyzed. He couldn’t decide to drive
away, and he couldn’t agree to park and enter the salon. This time, as on all
the occasions before, when he reached the intersection past the salon, he
turned to go around the block, so he could drive past the business again. He
had to observe more before he could make up his mind. He hoped he would see
something that would reassure him and allow his courage to collect itself, so
he could go in. What that something might be, he didn’t know. Two fears were
overloading the circuits of his brain that he couldn’t vanquish: First, he had
never entered a hair salon before. He wasn’t even sure that men went into such
places. Second, he had no idea what the costs might be. He was certain the
charge would be more at the salon than at the barbershop he went to, but he
didn’t know how much more. Guessing made him nervous. He had a serious,
disabling case of the jitters.

Despite his indecision about entering the salon, he had
persuaded himself that he needed to have his hair professionally dyed.
Normally, Bill did not care what he looked like, nor did he care what other
people thought of him. In his mind, saving money superseded any frivolous
interest in looking better. Although he expected the women that he dated to
dress and look like runway models, actresses, or tasteful porn stars, he did
not apply the same standard to himself. When he thought about how his exterior
affected women,
which
was something that rarely ever
crossed his mind, he figured they would be content to have him as he was. Why
wouldn’t they? There was a full-length mirror in his apartment. Yet he couldn’t
see anything physically wrong with his face, physique, or clothing.

He was now deep into middle age, and to people who could
judge appearances objectively, he definitely looked like an ordinary victim of
time’s cruel treatment. He looked worse than ordinary, in fact, because he
seldom exercised, ate unhealthful foods—and too much of them—and
was never ever seen in fine apparel, which can conceal some bodily
imperfections and make a person more attractive. Yet in spite of his obvious
personal detractions, subjectively he considered himself a youngish man, not
just at heart but also in body, and still good-looking, as he really once had
been over thirty years ago. Then, he had not needed fancy clothing to improve
his looks, for the greatest possible adornment is youth, as every older person
knows too well.

Although it seems impossible that he could persist at his
age in believing he was a man in his twenties, he did. Although evidence to the
contrary was literally in his face, he did not know who he was in a physical
sense. Maybe because the changes time inflicts upon us are so gradual, he never
had an obvious reason to reevaluate his opinion of himself. The changes in his
body from day to day were so tiny, so imperceptible, like they are for all of
us, that they did not startle him into thinking differently about himself. When
he looked at a mirror, which he never did for long, he saw a memory of himself.
He didn’t see what was actually there. Certainly, he wished his hair wasn’t so
thin or so grey, but those were minor points. Otherwise, he was satisfied with
himself, as he always had been. However, when Stan firmly and emphatically
stated that his multi-colored hair made him look old and senile, like someone
who couldn’t see what showed in a mirror and do some adjusting, that sort of
logic pierced through Bill’s hard head easily. He hated being called old. To be
told that he looked both old and senile made him think that he needed to do
something, even if he had to pay for it.

Later on the same day when he had gone to lunch with Stan,
he casually asked his coworkers what they thought of his hair. He wanted to see
whether Stan’s judgment was an isolated one. Bill wasn’t the type who was
quickly convinced into spending money on
himself
, and
he thought that most of Stan’s opinions were fine for someone who had a bigger
paycheck. His coworkers paused at his question and looked at each other with
wondering expressions. There was a smatter of mild comments in response. “It’s
sort of OK.” “I’ve seen worst.” “Did you do it yourself?” Suddenly the dam of
their politeness and pent-up repugnance broke—no one had given him their
honest opinion about his hair before—and he was convinced that he had to
take action. Katie contributed the most to his certainty. Although her words
were not as personal and biting as the others, he thought that her inability to
remain neutral was the most urgent sign that his hair needed fixing. “My
grandfather tried to dye his hair once, and it was a mess, just like yours,”
she said. He did not want to be compared to anyone’s grandfather.

While Bill was driving around the block, so he could pass in
front of the salon again and look through the window once more, a conversation
took place inside that concerned him.

“Donna,” said Catherine. “Have you seen that car that keeps
driving by?”

Donna, who was the owner of the salon, stood nearest to the
window in the interior. She was busy cutting the hair of a customer. Because
the front desk was situated between her and the window, she could not be
clearly seen by anyone passing by in a car or on the sidewalk, and she was
someone whom people would notice. In excellent shape for a woman who had
reached her mid-fifties, Donna could pretend to be much younger than she was,
and she did. Plastic surgery helped support the illusion. In addition to her
physical attractions, she exuded a warm sensuality more common to women of a childbearing
age that men of all ages found irresistible. While she had been married for
more than twenty-five years, she had been frequently and secretly admired and
occasionally propositioned, but she had always refused to be unfaithful. Her
former husband was a policeman and very handsome. However, since they had
divorced about a year ago, Donna found the attention she received from strange
men much more flattering and passively encouraged it. Although she already had
a much younger, jealous boyfriend, who disapproved of her showing interest in
other men, she did what she wanted to. He always forgave her, and her husband
now wanted her back. Like Helen of Troy, men couldn’t let go of her and fought
over her. She considered her profession as a hairdresser a form of artistic
expression and dressed mostly in black.