The Penny Pinchers Club (5 page)

“Okay, but you’ll want to pencil me in for the rest
.
”

“The rest of what?”

“Your life. You thought I was joking. I wasn’t. Not a day’s gone by since we met, Kat, when I haven’t thought about you and that . . .”

The next I knew, he was kissing me at the gates of Princeton in front of his student, in front of the entire campus.

Yes, the rest-of-your-life line was corny. It was the kind of corny line nerdy econ grad students dream up while taking breaks from writing love letters to Ayn Rand. (Griff later admitted he’d started working on it the night he’d left me in Chloe’s parking lot.) Which might be why it’s the one our daughter has always loved the most.

I was certain that I had it all that rainy late September day. I was in love with a man who was so intellectually stimulating and masculine and sexy, the touch of his hand against mine could trigger a shiver of erotic pleasure. I had the job I wanted, and soon after, I had an adorable baby girl, Laura.

We were blessed with plenty, more than enough. No, I never moved into a huge colonial in Morrisville, nor did I join a country club and spend my days lunching and shopping and chauffeuring kids in a wood-paneled station wagon. Because money was always tight at our house, I had to go back to work when Laura was six months old and I have never known the luxury of never worrying about bills.

If there was one regret, it was that I didn’t pause in our whirlwind courtship to stop and analyze that offhand comment Griff had made about wasting money on parking tickets. How to handle money is one of those uncomfortable premarital topics that couples are supposed to discuss, along with kids and religion.

And, like most new couples, we artfully dodged it.

Maybe it was because I was so young and having too much fun and so giddily in love to ruin the magic by sitting him down and laying out a balance sheet. But more likely it was because I already sensed there was a conflict.

Griff was a saver; I was a spender. Therein lay the seeds of our destruction.

Despite that, we managed to survive our many, many fights about money intact, more together and more in love than we were on that fall day outside Princeton.

Or so I believed, until twenty years passed and I zipped open the suitcase from his trip to the West Coast to find I’d made an awful mistake. I’d married the wrong man.

CHAPTER THREE

T
wo wrappers from Trojan Mint Tingle condoms. That’s what I found in the pocket of Griff ’s khakis while unpacking the suitcase from his trip to San Francisco.

My first question—after the initial wave of revulsion—was what normal man would insist on a minty tingle there? Mint was for fighting gingivitis, no?

More important, what was my husband doing with two condom wrappers while on a business trip?

This was the key issue I might have completely overlooked if Viv had not been standing guard while I did the wash. “What’s that!” she screeched, pointing to the shiny blue and green papers perched on a pile of lint. “Are those Griff ’s?”

“NO!” I said too quickly. “Griff must have found them in the . . .”

Hold on. Where must he have found them?

My mind fast-forwarded to an image of Griff naked on a king-sized bed in some San Francisco Marriott, his strong, familiar legs spread as an anonymous woman with long auburn hair and a fabulous body ripped the mint-flavored wrapper with her teeth and slowly unrolled the condom over his . . .

No! Griff?
My
Griff? Never. Yes, he had a robust male sex drive, but he also possessed impressive self-control. More to the point, he loved me and loved his family. He wouldn’t have done anything to jeopardize losing us. It was out of the question.

“Griff must have found them in the airport bathroom and stuffed them in his pocket to keep a kid from seeing . . . or something.” I decided to change the conversation to a topic Viv never tired of—her love life. “So. How did it go with Henry last night? Get lucky?”

“Come on, Kat.” She slid off the dryer and put her coffee on the folding table. “Is there something you’d like to tell me?” Viv checked me over her art deco half-glasses with the crazy swirls as if I were one of her lackadaisical students in American Writers lying about a late paper.

Though we were only twenty-two months apart in age,Viv always seemed much older and more together, the hair on her blond bob never out of place, her white capris neatly pressed and spotless. I attributed her personal order to the fact that she never had to deal with children or a husband, but the truth was Viv was not the type to lose sight of the ball. Other younger sisters might have found that obnoxious, but I found her steadiness reassuring. It only made me love her more.

“If I had something to tell you, you’d be the first to know.” I bat-ted my eyes. “Or not.”

“Look, maybe Mom was right. Maybe he
is
a skunk. Not that I’m agreeing with her. Just that it’s important to check in with reality every now and then.”

I let that pass, having become accustomed to my mother’s bizarre refusal to forgive me for not marrying Liam. Twenty years of Griff paying her compliments, hopping up to do the dishes, helping her plan my parents’ retirement, and she still grumbled about him being a perpetual student even though he
wasn’t
a perpetual student, he was a tenure-tracked professor at Emerly College.

“You and I know that deep down, she’s crazy about him.” I threw the khakis in the wash. “Besides, Griff wouldn’t cheat on me in a million years.” I added a pair of black socks to the washing machine, not bothering to straighten them out from their balls.

She raised an eyebrow. “How can you be so sure? He did seduce you away from Liam.”

“
He
didn’t seduce me away from Liam. I seduced myself.”

Point taken, Viv moved on to the next. “Well, he’s incredibly good looking for his age and he’s surrounded by pretty, young, smart undergrads all day. Office hours behind closed doors, including that cute PhD assistant of his . . .”

“Bree?” Beyond ridiculous. “Not likely. She’s getting married.”

“When? She’s been engaged for years and there’s yet to be a wedding date!” Vivian waved her hand dismissively. “Anyway, you, especially, know all too well that even the most decent women succumb to flings in the weeks leading up to their weddings. You think it was coincidence that you and Griff got together right before Liam proposed?”

“My meeting Griff was pure fate.”

“Uh-huh.” She folded her arms. “Okay, so if Griff is with Bree, I guess that would be fate, too.”

Finished sorting, I slammed the door to the front-load washer and pressed power. “It’s a little different,Viv. Griff and I’ve been married for ages. We have a daughter, a house. We have more than a lot in common.”

Did we? I was never quite sure. There was our sexual compatibility, of course, and then there were the usual things married people share—love of our dog, favorite restaurants and movies, friends who liked the same movies and restaurants we did—but what about our other passions?

As much as I tried to feign interest in his theories of the Fed’s role in creating the latest economic downturn, I’d long ago lost the enthusiasm I’d shown in the early stages of our relationship for Griff ’s academic passions. Maybe because he’d been working on a book about the Fed for so long his nonstop discussion of it had turned into white noise.

That was bad of me, I knew. But there were so many other things on my mind these days—getting Laura into college and getting out from under Chloe’s thumb being my current obsessions. I just didn’t have the time to fold my arms and smile as he droned on about money supply manipulation and interest rates and whatever else it was the Fed did to keep the economy rolling when I had dinner to get on the table and laundry to fold and Chloe’s letters to write.

Nor, might I add, did Griff want to hear about polished granite versus granite tiles (trendy, but easily stained) for kitchen counters. And he definitely didn’t want to go shopping for them.

Viv would not drop it, though. “I’m on your side, Kat. You know that. However, when a couple has been married as long as you two have, they can get bored with each other and seek new stimulation. It’s pure biology. We humans were never meant to be married for so long, you know. When this country was founded, the average life span was thirty-six. People didn’t have midlife crises back then because they were dead!”

My sister had developed the most interesting theories from that continuing education course she’d taken on the Revolutionary War.

“Not that I’m saying Griff would intentionally hit on Bree, but you have to admit she does worship him. That’s very flattering to a man—especially a man in his forties.”

I thought back to how I, too, had hung on to Griff ’s every word, how I, like Bree and his students at Emerly, could have raptly listened to him talk for hours.

Slightly mad at myself for being a bad wife, at Viv for bringing up Bree, and at Griff for having condom wrappers in his pockets, I dumped a basket of clean whites onto the folding table and said definitively, “He’s not having an affair. That’s all there is to it. Let’s move on.” I started folding towels, my hands shaking slightly when I brought corner to corner.

The machine stopped and Viv opened the front door, water spilling onto the floor as she yanked the khakis out of the wash. “Then check the other pocket.”

“If you’re so sure . . .”

To prove I had absolutely no doubts, I thrust my hand into the other pocket and held up my find. Not a teal green wrapper. Hah! A damp, crumpled piece of paper.

She pinched it out of my hand. “Let me see this.”

Was it instinct? A wife’s sixth sense? Or maybe I was shaken from Vivian’s comment about Griff and Bree. For some reason, I felt anxious.

Griff had seemed distant when he was in San Francisco, but I’d told myself that that was because he always shut off the world whenever he became immersed in a project. It had nothing to do with the fact that he and Bree were a coast away working side by side for three weeks researching his book and that she was a twenty-eight-year-old prodigy with the flexibility of a seventh-level yoga master and a body to match.

Absolutely nothing at all.

“It’s a receipt from two days ago.” Viv scrutinized it with FBI precision. “Wasn’t that the night Laura had her accident?”

The Thursday before, Laura had suffered a fender bender with a state trooper outside the hospital where she was working for the summer. No big deal except she hit a freaking state trooper! And when I tried to call Griff about it, there was no answer at his hotel or his cell all night. His explanation the following day was that he’d turned off his phones and crashed early to hop the six A.M. back home.

“Yup.” I threw the khakis back in and restarted the machine.

“So when you were trying to get hold of Griff to tell him about Laura’s accident and he claimed he was tucked in bed trying to get his beauty sleep, according to this, he was at the Four Seasons Hotel running up a $236 dinner bill.”

“No way.”

“See for yourself.”

It was my turn to snatch the receipt. Everything about what she’d said was so not Griff. It wasn’t just that he never lied or dallied about with young women. It was also that he never went out for $200 dinners. He was way too careful about money to blow it on something so frivolous and expensive as a Four Seasons dinner.

Heck, I couldn’t buy a $60 lamp without him grilling me as to why it was necessary. And the fifteenth of every month, when the credit card bills were paid, was like being on the witness stand, with Griff examining and cross-examining my every purchase.

Not that we were unusual in that respect. I’d once read that money is THE issue couples fight about most often (next to sex—not a problem for us). But there was no comfort in keeping miserable company while my friends seemed to be able to clean out Saks without blinking. There they were with their Marc Jacobs satchels and Lancome lips, not a care in the world, while I was clutching a Target tote and feeling guilty.

Guilty because I was having bad thoughts about Griff, evil thoughts dripping with resentment that I knew was corroding our marriage. Green envy prodded me to ask why he couldn’t have gone into business like Caroline’s husband, Clark, a chinless college dropout who’d made a killing in commercial real estate. If only Griff had used his Ivy League credentials to
make
money instead of
research
money, we’d never have cause to fight.

At my very worst, I even entertained the unthinkable:
If I’d married Liam, I never would have had to worry about money.

I tried to see it Griff ’s way. After all, what was holding ME back from being the breadwinner now that Laura—our one and
easy
child—was grown? Why was it Griff ’s job to be the provider? And, by the way, didn’t I pride myself on being part of a new generation of women who were financially independent?

It might have helped if Griff splurged now and then—a $500 tent or a $300 pair of hiking boots. But the more I spent, the more disciplined he became, like Jack Sprat.

I drove a Lexus because Chloe insisted it was necessary to assure our clients we were like them (rich), so he pushed his old Toyota way past the 150k mark. My daily addiction to triple venti lattes was the family joke, one that we could afford because Griff tolerated the burnt sludge from the economics department lounge. He even wore the same old ratty gray wool sweater so I could update my wardrobe with a cashmere twinset.

Which was why never in a million years would he have gone out for a $236 dinner. Never.

But there it was. Last Thursday at 10:03 Pacific daylight time (1:03 A.M. Central New Jersey), a bill of $236 paid with his MasterCard.

Hold on . . .
MasterCard!

We didn’t own a MasterCard. Though what did I know, really? I was oblivious when it came to our credit cards, our limits, and worst of all, our running balances. The best I could do was carry those nasty envelopes from the mailbox to the bowl by the phone until Griff took them to his home office in the basement, where he calculated all the family finances, much to my mixed relief and fear.