Cannibals in Love by Mike Roberts

Author:Mike Roberts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

CANNIBALS IN LOVE

Lauren announced that she was chopping off her hair. I laughed and told her she wasn’t allowed. Lauren laughed back and then we fought. Everything was a reason to fight these days. We would keep the doors open when we pissed just to keep a fight going. We were like depraved virtuosos this way. This was art.

We’d been living together for almost a year, breathing each other’s fumes. Madly in love and madly in hate. It was the claustrophobia that we refused to surrender. Lauren and I always had to be funnier. Smarter. Meaner. We needed a winner and a loser at all times, always. We knew that someone should leave the room; someone should just back down and quit; but no one ever did. I had come to understand that Lauren would eventually kill me in the way that many coupling insects go.

Lauren cut her hair off the next day, too, like I knew she would, and it gave us a reason to fight all over again. Then somewhere, in the lull of insults, I admitted I might actually like her new hair a little. She smiled and nodded, pleased. Letting me kiss her then. Letting us laugh all over again. This was the dance we did. The truth was I was devastated by how beautiful Lauren Pinkerton was with her bratty new haircut.

* * *

But the thing we were fighting about now was money. It could always come back to money. Money was this beautiful occult invention that allowed human beings to argue at heroic lengths. Money was loaded with deception and accusation and hurt feelings. It could be personal and emotional and irrational. It was really just too easy, almost.

I was writing and not working again. I told Lauren I had abandoned the idea of ever making any real money, years ago. This drove her crazy and she accused me of lying. She accused me of ego and ambition and sloth. Lauren was constantly worried about money. It was one of the few things she was genuinely neurotic about. She mismanaged her bills and debts. She accumulated late fees and penalties. She hedged credit cards against each other and overdrafted. And she despised me for cobbling together work from friends, and living hand-to-mouth the way I did. Something was always falling into my lap. I never missed a bill, ever.

But I couldn’t help smiling now, because I’d just asked to borrow five dollars.

“What do you want it for?” she asked, sitting up.

“What does it matter what it’s for? I just want it.”

“Unh-uh, no. Sorry.”

“Okay, I want a beer from the bodega. Is that all right with you?”

“Gosh, I don’t think I’m interested in making an investment in that sort of thing,” Lauren said, enjoying this.

“Hey. If you give me a little smile, sweetie pie, maybe I’ll even come back with a chocolate bar for you.”

“Oh, yeah? You’re gonna buy me a treat with my own money? You promise?”

“Yeah, sure thing. I just need the cash first.

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