The Penny Pinchers Club (4 page)

“Good you know Griff,” the driver said, unwinding the winch. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have been able to retrieve this vehicle until nine A.M. Monday.”

“The president’s spot.” Griff folded his arms. “You couldn’t find anywhere else to park? On this whole campus, five hundred acres, you pick in front of the president’s house.”

It definitely ranked as one of the more mortifying moments of my life, even if Griff seemed to find it funny.

“Now you can understand why I was kind of panicked. Look.” I held out my arm. “I’m still shaking.”

He took my hand and squeezed it firmly in his large one. “Don’t worry, Kat. It’s over. Not even a fine.” He dropped my hand and headed back to the MG.

. . . And out of my life forever. No!

“I can’t thank you enough.” My mind raced for a reasonable excuse to keep him around. “Please. At least let me buy you dinner.”

He hesitated, twirling his keys. “I bet you have a boyfriend.”

“So?”

“So, what would he think about you taking out a man you just met?”

“It’s not like he owns me, Griff. I am my own woman. And, besides, my offer is just common courtesy. Nothing more.”

“All right. Why not?” He jumped back into the MG. “How about we meet at the A&B? There’s a lane in the back where the cops never check for scofflaws like you.”

The A&B was the Alchemist & Barrister, on Nassau Street, a hangout for students and tourists, which meant it was always crowded. Griff was right: The cops never patrolled the lane behind it, though that might have been why there was never any parking there. Eventually, I ended up leaving the Honda at Chloe’s and hoofing the five blocks to the restaurant.

When I finally arrived, I found the most unusual sight. Griff at a table surrounded by three or four students eagerly vying for his attention. Over their heads, our gazes met and he waved me over.

“This is Kat.” He openly took my hand and pulled me next to him. “These are my slack-jawed undergrads whining and whinging about their course loads. It’s all they ever do.”

They weren’t whining, they were joshing with him, punching his arm and cracking jokes. From snippets of their conversations, I gleaned that they were in the intro to economics course Griff taught at Princeton to help pay for his PhD. Apparently, as he told me later, he did odd jobs for Barb Gladstone out of fondness for the old dame, a major benefactor of the university who took a liking to young, handsome men who followed her husband’s passion.

“She insists I use her library,” he said, bending close because the yelling at the table was so loud. “She claims it’s because she likes to see her husband’s books being read, though I suspect she just likes men. Barb was a gorgeous woman back in her day. Blond. Blue eyed. Very shapely.” He took another sip of his beer. “Kind of like you.”

Several plates of French fries appeared on the table, along with numerous beers. A few more students joined us and pushed me so close to Griff that he had no choice but to put his arm around the back of my seat. I didn’t object. Nor did I mind as the heat of his strong thigh burned into mine or that his arm had dropped down from the seat and ended up around my shoulders. By the end of the evening, I was practically on his lap.

Tucked into him, warm and secure, I experienced a startling epiphany that my entire life had been leading up to this one point, to wandering through Barb Gladstone’s house and meeting this man.
He’s the guy, the one I’ve been waiting for
, I thought as Griff occasionally put his lips to my ears to provide a bit of context to one of the students, his breath warm against my neck.

A girl across from us eyed me with envy, and I felt myself blush.

There wasn’t much of what the students were saying that I remember. What I never forgot, however, was our conversation afterward when we were alone.

We talked about how he ended up in Princeton from his native Oregon. (He’d met a girl, who promptly dumped him once they moved to the East Coast.) We talked about his love of hiking and roughing it on the trail and my love of beachside resorts with spas and swim-up bars.

We talked about both Marxes, Karl and Groucho, and about how Barb Gladstone desperately wanted him to marry her granddaughter Caroline, who was as smart as soap and just as sickening. I learned about his fascination with British cars and educated him about all things Bruce Springsteen. (To this day, I cannot believe he’d never heard of the Stone Pony.)

I couldn’t help comparing him to Liam, as unfair as that was. With Liam, our conversations skipped across the surface, landing on safe topics—work, movies, what was on TV, and where we should go to dinner. With Griff, it was more of a mind meld. He engaged me, demanded details, thought about my answers, and laughed frequently. Under the table, his thigh brushed against mine, sending shivers up my entire leg. Once, he absently tucked my hair behind my ear in such a way that I feared my entire being would explode.

As the night ended and Griff walked me to my car, there was the inevitable “As for that boyfriend you mentioned. . . .” He ran a hand over my shoulders. “How serious are you two, anyway?”

I sucked in a breath, wishing briefly that Liam wasn’t in the picture. “Let’s just say,” I began, choosing the most telling metaphor,“that a few months ago he bought a five-bedroom house in Morrisville.”

Griff dropped his hand. “Ah.”

My heart plummeted. Part of me had being dying to kiss him, to find out what he tasted like, what he felt like, and now, with the mention of Liam, that option was off the table. We got to my Honda and I stuck the key in the lock, determined to do the right thing. And then, before my better half could get control, I turned and it happened.

He kissed me the way I’d always dreamed, hand stroking my chin, lifting it to him, arm around my waist, slowly bringing me closer, pressing himself gently against me against my car. How long we remained like that, I had no idea. Long enough to process a million thoughts—that I shouldn’t be doing this, that if Liam saw us, he’d have been heartbroken, that I wanted Griff to kiss me deeper. He did. That I wanted to wrap my whole body around him. I did. That both of us wanted desperately to go someplace where we could take off all our clothes and feel our bodies, naked, together.

We didn’t.

“I guess that’s it, then.” He gave my hands a squeeze, as he had in the Princeton parking lot hours ago. “Considering you and . . .”

“Liam.” I swallowed hard. “I guess so.”

“Right.” He backed up, paused, and walked off.

I got into my rescued Honda and drove to the apartment I shared with Suzanne, who was lying on our old green couch watching
St. Elmo’s Fire
on our new VCR, to which she was addicted. I took one look at Andrew McCarthy making out with Ally Sheedy and promptly proceeded to pour out my heart in big heaping sobs.

“Stick with Liam,” she said, rubbing my back. “This new guy is not
the one
. Liam’s
the one
because he loves you slightly more than you love him and a wise woman will always marry a man who loves her more than she loves him. That’s the key to a successful marriage.”

She was absolutely no help. So I went to bed, and I went on with my life, working for Chloe, going out with Liam and trying to forget Griff, until that Easter on the beach when Liam proposed and it hit me that it was simply impossible to forget this man, this landscaper-cum-PhD student whose lips along my neck sent me into a state of frenzy.

There was just no ethical way I could say yes to Liam. Not that I had any assurance of being with Griff. Quite the opposite. Only, that having experienced what I suspected was true love, I knew in my bones I could not honestly spend my future with anyone else without making both of us miserable.

“I can’t,” was all I could say to Liam, removing the ring and pressing it in the palm of his hand. “But I know some other woman will be thrilled to have this.”

He was shocked and, after a moment of speechlessness, recovered himself enough to ask, “Who is he?”

I told him the basics, tactfully leaving out my intense feelings of lust and longing and substituting them with rational thoughts about doubt, as if Griff had been nothing more than a handy touchstone at an appropriate juncture. It felt crummy.

“But I don’t have doubts.” Liam grabbed me by the shoulders. “Even if you do, you have to ask yourself if you will ever meet another man who will love you and take care of you as I will, who will ensure you never have a minute of financial worry, who will see to it that your happiness always, always comes before his.”

Today, the concept of life without a minute of financial worry is a far more romantic fantasy than Caribbean vacations, moonlit walks on the beach, and Venetian sunsets combined.

But when you’re in your early twenties and have just found a man who can turn your legs to jelly with nothing more than a knowing glance, who can kiss you into oblivion, life without financial worries is right down there with annuities and insurance premiums. Meaningless and as boring as a mothballed gray suit.

That afternoon of the rejected marriage proposal none of the Novaks would speak to me as I packed up and left before Liam returned, having set out to walk the rest of the beach by himself.

Back home, Suzanne was aghast. (“Liam is the most generous and handsome man to walk the earth. If you don’t want him, I do!”) But her disappointment could not compare to that of my mother’s, who acted like a child when I showed up for Easter dinner without him.

“But we were going to have a party!” She bit into a slice of
cwiebak
, the Polish comfort food of choice. “Your father even put in a bottle of
pezsgo
. Now what are we going to do with it?”

Pop!
Viv held the prized Hungarian champagne over the sink to catch the foam. “I’ll take care of it, Mom. Not to worry.” She helped herself to a sip and smacked her lips. “Pretty good. Hey, you think if we invited this guy Griff up for a glass, he’d help us celebrate?” She ducked as my mother’s
cwiebak
flew past her head.

Over Viv’s laughing, my father asked who the hell Griff was.

I did not call Griff to celebrate. Nor did I call Liam to commiserate. Instead, I soldiered forward, convincing myself I’d made the right decision until word came through the PharMax grapevine that Liam had unexpectedly married in a huge church in Bedminster less than twelve weeks after we’d broken up.

Her name was Paige, and she was a professional tennis player as well as the daughter of the founder of a competing corporation, Trident Pharmaceuticals. Suzanne said word around PharMax was that Liam had tendered his resignation and was already on the corporate track at his father-in-law’s company. The wedding had been attended by two hundred people, including a few celebrities and politicians, with a reception at the exclusive and elegant Fiddler’s Elbow Country Club. Afterward, the newlyweds flew to the south of France for a two-week-long honeymoon.

“An elaborate shindig like that would be impossible to pull off at the last minute,” Suzanne said, handing me a copy of his wedding announcement in the
New York Times
. “You don’t think he had this Paige on the back burner all along, do you?”

“Not Liam. He’s not the type to cheat.” In his heartbreak over me, he must have impulsively asked her to marry him, and realizing he was such a catch, she’d snapped at the chance. “I’m afraid it’s a rebound thing.”

I studied the picture of my ex and the petite bride with short brown hair and firm tennis-pro body in her strapless white gown. His head was bent lovingly toward hers and she was looking up at him with such adoration, it eased some of the guilt I’d felt for leaving him on that Avalon beach. He’d found what he was looking for: a devoted wife. Good.

Still, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of regret.
That could have been me
.

Well, it was over, I thought. He was married and for all I knew, Griff had returned to Oregon. Suzanne and I found a larger apartment, blew our savings on new furniture, and hunkered down for the duration of what we suspected would be many, many years as single women.

A few weeks after we moved, however, I was crossing Nassau Street on a blustery fall day, trying to shield a book of wallpaper samples from a sudden shower, when Griff stepped through the gates of Princeton, smack into my path. He was in a gray T-shirt, gesticulating as he spoke to a young woman with shiny chestnut hair that she flipped absently with one hand.

My first instinct was to run, but he shouted my name and told me to “hold up.”
Please,
I prayed as he jogged in my direction.
Please just say hello and good-bye.

“Hello,” he said breathlessly. “How’ve you been?”

“Fine, fine. Busy, busy.” I tapped the book of wallpaper samples and worked on keeping an upbeat tone. “Apparently Barb didn’t ruin my boss’s career after all. Business is booming. I even got a raise.”

“Excellent.” He couldn’t have cared less. “So are you . . .”

“Married?” I held up my left hand to show I wasn’t.

He took one long look and, as if just understanding what I’d meant, broke into a knowing grin. “Actually, I was going to ask you to dinner since I think you got off easy with the French fries and beer at the A&B.”

Horrified that I’d presumed he’d been asking about my marital state, I blurted, “Can’t do it tonight.”

“How about the rest of your life?”

Was he serious? “What about . . . ?” I nodded to the woman waiting patiently a block away.

He followed my gaze and said, “That’s one of my students, nothing more, of course. How could I even look at another woman after kissing you?”

I didn’t care if he was slightly teasing me. I was so happy that he was still interested and that we were both free, I could barely keep myself from dragging him back to my apartment then and there. “How about we start with dinner tonight and see where that takes us?”