The Penny Pinchers Club Read Free

takes a very special person to face that kind of humiliation every day—a stripper, maybe, or a Jehovah’s Witness. But without the Franklins being shoved in our panties or the promise of eternal salvation, Suzanne and I couldn’t see the point. We went down in PharMax history as achieving the worst sales ever, a dishonor in which we took weird pride.
    About the only good thing happening in my life back then was Liam Novak. Liam was a wunderkind on PharMax’s corporate track, destined to be CEO with his Wharton degree and uncanny memory for the most mind-numbing pharmaceutical minutiae.
    It helped that he was a rather sexy, Polish-Irish version of Dudley Do-Right, right down to his dimpled chin, fit physique, and blond hair that, unlike Dudley, he wore with a shock of long bangs, a style left over from his days at the all-boy Jesuit boarding school, George town Prep, where he’d starred as lacrosse captain and cross-country record holder.
    Lucky for me, I met Liam’s ideal of a perfect potential wife, probably because I’d been raised Roman Catholic, which pleased his conservative Irish Catholic mother, and because with my own white-blond hair; fair, almost transparent, complexion; ridiculously high forehead; and pale, pale blue eyes, I resembled the living incarnation of every beatific Madonna hanging over every Polish grandmother’s bed west of Warsaw. Not that that was something to be proud of, mind you. Back then I’d have much preferred to be compared with the other gap-toothed Madonna in pearls and lace bustiers—as would have most of the guys I dated.
    Except for Liam. He pursued me with the same gung-ho energy he used to win over PharMax’s shareholders and blitz his friends with ninety-five-mile-an-hour aces. Dinners at the upscale Princeton Inn, huge bouquets of flowers sent to my desk, shopping sprees on Fifth Avenue, and weekends at his family’s beachside compound in Avalon, New Jersey, were par for the course.
    This worked out well because I loved his family and they loved me. Such a boisterous bunch of mindless consumers like myself, not a deep thinker in the group. With Liam and at least two of his seven brothers and sisters, I’d spend entire days at the beach playing Frisbee or zoned out on the sand, shopping for bric-a-brac along Ninty-sixth Street in Stone Harbor and hitting the beachfront clubs afterward. No matter how late we stayed out on Saturday nights, though, Bridget Novak (Liam’s haggard mother) managed to rouse us out of bed and get us to the ten A.M. mass at Maris Stella every morning, delicate lace veils perched primly on our occasionally hungover heads.
    My own smitten mother used to call them “Kennedy South,” but she was wrong. Yes, like Joe Kennedy, Liam’s father, Karol, had come to America and “done good,” becoming the hands-down gypsum king of the tri-state area. But that was where all similarities between the Kennedys and the Novaks ended. Karol Novak had no more sense of noblesse oblige than Paris Hilton, and his politics were lever-pulling straight Republican like that of my father and so many other first-generation American Eastern Europeans.
    Even with a patriarch like Karol calling the shots, though, it was easy being Liam’s girlfriend because he loved me to death and also because he was gorgeous with a terrific sense of style. From his choice of automobile (BMW 3 series, nothing less) to Gucci loafers to Ray-Ban Aviators, everything Liam owned was top notch. It might sound shallow, but that made being with him all the more thrilling.
    Wherever we went, Liam would be mistaken for a minor actor (on General Hospital ?) or even a fashion model. Perfect strangers—middle-aged housewives, mostly—would stop him in the grocery store and ask if he’d been that man on the Calvin Klein billboard, the one in the white cotton briefs that was so obscene . (And sexy!)
    He’d win me over with his modest response, shrugging off the double takes and drinks sent to him