I’m a man who uses a tea bag twice, and tells himself that the tea often tastes better on the second use of the bag. I go out of my way to buy gas for my car at a station where it is usually 20 to 35 cents a gallon less than at a much closer station. When I discover red grapes or tangerines at a dollar cheaper per pound than the usual price at my nearby supermarket, I refrain from doing my touchdown dance, but I do find myself quietly pleased. If the weather is temperate enough for a few days in July or August for me not to have to turn on the air conditioning in our apartment, well, you won’t be surprised to learn, I’m cool with that.
Robert Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, said that if you have to watch the meter, you shouldn’t take cabs. I watch the meter and while doing so recall that Hutchins, a man with a handsome expense account all his adult days, probably never paid for a cab in his life. A few years ago I was taken by a wealthy couple to Daniel, the then-hot French restaurant in New York. “Didn’t I read somewhere that you were opposed to expensive wines?” my host, pouring a glass of wine for me, remarked. “Not at all,” I corrected him. “I’m only opposed to paying for expensive wines.” The notion of buying a $200 bottle of wine is upsetting to me, but then so, too, would be that of picking up a dinner check for $680 for four people, or spending $500 to take three kids to a baseball game, or spending the same sum for dinner and a night at the opera for two. Wrong, all of it, it all feels wrong.
Am I describing a genuine cheapskate here, or is something else going on? You will not, I think, be shocked to learn I believe something else is going on. Plain fact is, I don’t like waste. My father, a generous man, who gave large sums to charity and could be counted on to help out members of his extended family in need, when walking into an empty room in our apartment in which someone had left on the lights would invariably say, “Someone around here must think I have stock in General Electric.” As a small boy growing up during World War II, if I left any food on my plate, I was generally told that the people in Europe were starving and would be appalled by such waste.
I don’t believe a distaste for waste, which seems to have been ingrained in me, suggests either avarice or miserliness on my part. (I don’t think it suggests superior virtue, either.) I pick up my share of checks. I, too, give (though more modestly than did my father) to charity. I recognize the ultimate hopelessness of attempting to be economically moderate in all one’s dealings. One saves a bit here, then blows a lot there; it’s the way it goes. A good friend who shares my general view on this matter, a man wealthier than I, and who not long ago was going through a costly divorce, told me that the previous month he had received a bill for $14,000 from his divorce lawyer. “It drains all the satisfaction,” he said, “of coming upon a bargain in orange juice.”
I am not an unimaginative man. When younger I was a pretty good fantast. I fantasized athletic triumphs, attracting dazzling women, literary fame. But I never fantasized, nor do I now, having great wealth. Trumpian apartments on Park Avenue, in London, Paris, Rome; my own jet plane; owning a major sports franchise or two—such acquisitions haven’t the least interest for me. So far am I from harboring such fantasies that I can scarcely imagine buying two pairs of shoes at once.
My relation to money is mundane. Mine is the small-business mind par excellence, content with the most minor advantage. Too much wealth, even if it isn’t mine, makes me slightly edgy. My hero in this regard, the man who speaks for me and my own relation to money, is Faulkner’s sewing-machine salesman V. K. Ratliff, the character that appears throughout his Snopes trilogy. At one point Ratliff, visiting in New York, is offered the gift of three neckties that would cost $75 each, a big figure in the 1940s. Ratliff says he cannot possibly accept such expensive ties, adding that so long as people lie, cheat, steal, and even kill for money, the least he can do is respect it. I vigorously second the motion.
Meanwhile, if you hear about a price under $3.99 a pound for Honey-crisp apples, please don’t fail to get in touch.
