Mr. Moneybags
In 1983 I worked at a squash club. I was twenty-six, trying to be an actress, sober, poor as one could be without living on the street. The squash club guys glanced at me while they read their papers. My job was to smile, give them a towel, remember their names, and ask if they wanted anything else. I was also supposed to say, “Good morning.”
Photo by Hamish Duncan
They were driven captains of industry who knew to take a towel from a stack. I read scripts seeking my type, perky yet depressed. I wrote complaining letters to friends in other countries, started novels, one a murder mystery with a wealthy, ruthless squash player, dead on a squash court. I showed this to a literary agent. “Find a different genre,” she said.
It was a job and since no one else was around at that time of the morning to notice how I didn’t always smile and almost never remembered anyone’s name, I felt lucky. Then Mr. Moneybags showed up. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
“How are you?”
“Fine,” I answered, not looking up.
“What are you reading?”
I looked up. He was really old, like forty-five, really handsome in that ugly handsome sort of way and tall.
“Betrayal,” I said.
“Pinter. Great play. Nothing like infidelity.”
He didn’t wear a wedding ring.
“I wouldn’t know.”
I was dating a plumber from New Jersey for vague reasons; he was handsome and had a great house. I told myself I was in flux, but I had been unstable for so long, it deserved another name.
“Really,” he said. “You have infidelity written all over you.”
He took his towel and left.
I heard someone laughing. It was Manuel, the night janitor.
“Mr. Moneybags likes you,” he said.
“He’s annoying,” I said.
Manuel tapped his wrist. “Solid gold Rolex.”
Mr. Moneybags came out of the locker room to play squash. “Here,” he said, holding out his watch. For a moment I thought he was giving it to me. I imagined a year free of financial fear. “Hold it,” he said. The watch was very, very heavy. I looked up at him.
“Smile.”
I noticed how lidded his eyes were. I frowned.
The watch made my wrist look tiny. I thought about the tradition of women holding things, girls in movies holding boy’s jackets while they fought for example. It wasn’t me. I started to slide the watch off but then I saw how delicate my wrist looked. It was a nice surprise.
Mr. Moneybags played squash at Yale, owned his own company, had a brownstone on the Upper East Side, a house in the Hamptons, he worked out every Tuesday and Thursday. My co-worker Katie, an aspiring foot model, unsure if she should marry her boyfriend, because she felt she had missed something, told me these facts.
“I never dated anyone else,” she said, blonde ponytail bobbing while she vigorously folded towels. Katie loved talking to members, asking them how they were doing, remembering personal details like whether they had children or cancer or gone public on the Stock Exchange. Katie wore a nametag and she smiled all the time.
I knew I hadn’t missed anything.
“I like you,” Mr. Moneybags said one day, taking his Rolex back. “Have dinner with me.”
I glowered. My life wasn’t miserable, but it didn’t work very well. I kept almost getting cast in commercials and soap operas but then they’d tell me to work on my perkiness, or my zany next-door neighbor voice or my concerned mommy face. And the plumber was a dunderhead who drank too much beer and took drugs. Still, Mr. Moneybags seemed like a bad idea.
“No,” I said. “I have a boyfriend.”
“He doesn’t understand how smart you are.”
“Ask Kate out,” I said. “She thinks she missed something.”
Mr. Moneybags shook his head. “I want you,” he said.
Every Tuesday and Thursday I held his watch, we talked about books and I refused to have dinner with him. It was a perfect relationship.
I was in a play for children about a fox and a rabbit. I was the fox. My sister came to see me with her son, they cheered every time I outwitted the bunny who was, as the playwright wrote him, very dumb. Afterwards, we went to lunch and I told her about Mr. Moneybags. She suggested I keep his Rolex.
“If he wants you,” she said, leaning over to kiss her son, “he’d give you that watch.”
We talked about other things, her dissertation, my plumber boyfriend, her child’s ability to raise one eyebrow, my fear of wasting my life. She pointed out I was sober, and I said flattering things about my nephew. I was struck by my sister’s happiness, her sense of humor, and how much she believed in me.
“Maybe you should give him a chance,” she said as we parted. “He gets you.”
So, I agreed to have dinner with him. I wore something tight and short. He found my stories about bad auditions and awful jobs amusing. The meal cost as much as one month’s rent in my Hoboken apartment. He drank two glasses of the bottle of wine he ordered and gave the rest to the maitre d’. It was a very pricey bottle of wine.
“Why don’t you drink again?”
“I’m bad news,” I said. “I get morbid and critical.”
“I think you’ve had some setbacks,” he said, picking up one of my hands and gently stroking it. “You deserve better things.” I decided this was not the time to ask for his watch.
A few more weeks went by, the fox/bunny play ended, and I started to question my relationship with the plumber. It wasn’t anything specific just a feeling that we weren’t a good match. It was February, gray and icy in New York, a time to revaluate things especially those related to career and love. My place in Hoboken was heated by the kitchen oven and the bedroom was freezing. I was lying in bed reading Cosmopolitan, eating chocolate and sulking. My plumber boyfriend was supposed to call about our weekend plans. The phone rang late and I picked it up and spoke in my coldest tone. The voice on the other end sounded like someone attempting to avoid screaming. “Come now,” the person said. “She’s going to die.”
My sister had been hit by a drunk driver. She was in a coma and not expected to recover. Her body was shattered and, we soon found out, her brain was dead. All the years she had spent learning so many things, French, math, motherhood, Emerson, Yeats, the Rolling Stones, how to be a big sister were wiped out.
Everything was very bad. I tried to help my family, her husband, baby-sit her son, breathe and be brave, not drink, but it was hard. I stopped going to auditions and I was gently fired from the job at the squash club for my lack of joy. They were sympathetic but they needed someone happy to hand out towels. I went to live with my plumber boyfriend, whispering over the phone, “Just pretend you love me for a little while.” It was hard to cope with someone who didn’t eat or speak, who wandered around the house in a nightgown and Wellington boots, who sat and stared out the window like someone’s crazy old aunt. So, I went home.
There were messages on my telephone from concerned friends. I played them back and then realized the last one was Mr. Moneybags.
“Hey,” he said. “I need someone to hold my watch.” Clearly, he didn’t know what happened.
I called him. I explained very calmly about the accident, the coma, the decision to turn the machines off, how I had been trying to help, my subsequent break-down and the loss of my job.
“Where’s your boyfriend?” he asked.
“I scared him,” I said. “We broke up.”
“Putz,” he said. “Look,” he said. “That’s the saddest story I ever heard in my life. I want to take care of you. We can drive out to my house in the Hamptons and you can just be there. You said you loved the ocean. You don’t have to talk to me. I just want to help you.”
“Why?”
“Because you need to be cherished.”
He picked me up in a vintage Mercedes Benz convertible outside my apartment. In six weeks, I had lost enough weight to create another small human being. But he didn’t give me the look — the I don’t know what to say look. He just drove. I sat and stared out the window, my eyes raw with the crying that began and ended each day. His house was a mansion, the sheets the highest thread count possible, everything expensive and nice and yes, comforting. We ate from a gourmet take-out store and then I went to bed.
The next morning he drove me to the beach and stood holding a vast, very nice towel as I plunged into the ocean, something I had wanted to do since she had stopped breathing because we had been swimmers, swimmers in the Cape Cod waves, in lakes and streams and pools and even though it was mid-April and the cold of it drove needles into my scalp and slapped my skin hard enough to paralyze, nothing had felt that good since she died.
“You amaze me,” he said as he brought me a cup of tea while I sat on the deck like some old movie star swaddled in blankets and dark glasses in the weak sun. I looked up at him and wondered if this was the moment, I would be asked to pay him back.
“Why?” I asked.
“Did you really love her that much?”
“Yes,” I said.
Questions about the dead are funny things. You want people to ask them, but they should not be stupid. This was a good question. I wanted to be able to tell someone that but it had not been possible. Mr. Moneybags nodded. He understood. He wasn’t going to give me his Rolex, but he gave me sanctuary.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach