Cannibals in Love

by Mike Roberts

  “You fixed your wrist,” she said, taking the whole thing into her hands. She turned the cast over, where Lane had written Peloton Breaks Bones in big rock-and-roll letters. He had wanted to write Quitter, but I told him no.

  “What can I say? I guess it finally started to hurt.”

  The truth was I’d left Lane’s after waking up on the roof and went home to call my parents. I told them some vague story about possibly, maybe having broken my wrist. They were sympathetic and urged me to go to the doctor. They offered to pay, and I begrudgingly accepted, even though it was the whole reason for calling.

  It had been fifty-eight days since I’d jumped off the upstairs porch with Lane. I had broken the navicular bone in my left wrist, and a doctor had set it with a cast. He told me I was lucky he wasn’t going to rebreak the bone, and strangely, I felt lucky then.

  Lauren smiled and said that she was happy for me. I held my stare too long, and we turned away to face the stage, where the band was setting up.

  “So what do you think of Tworek?” she asked expectantly.

  “I dunno. They have good hair?”

  “Oh, ha-ha. Why aren’t you in the band, anyway?”

  “Wasn’t asked,” I said, failing to mask this edge of hostility.

  “Uh-oh, trouble in paradise?”

  “I don’t know,” I said flatly.

  “Well, maybe it’s because you have a broken arm. You know?” she offered kindly. “Besides, you were never exactly some sort of mind-blowing guitarist.”

  “Ha-ha-ha,” I said. “That doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Lane should’ve asked me to be in the band no matter what.”

  “Does Lane even make decisions in Tworek? I heard they were trying to kick him out.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” I said.

  Lauren softened. “Don’t you think you’re being a little passive-aggressive?”

  “I’ll stop being passive-aggressive when Lane stops being nonconfrontational.”

  Lauren laughed. “Okay, then. Good.”

  I turned back to face her, feeling suddenly overwhelmed with how much I was missing her. Just having Lauren here, in front of me, at this moment, I was never going to push her away again.

  “Do you want to get out of here?” I asked, wearing it all over my face. “Do you want to leave? We can go somewhere else, anywhere. It doesn’t matter to me.”

  “Oh,” Lauren said. “I should probably stay. I came here with Patrick.” I looked up and saw Patrick Serf standing across the room. “Sorry.”

  “No, it’s fine. I’ll just go home, then, maybe. I can read a book or something. Lane discourages that type of behavior.”

  Lauren nodded and we turned to face the stage. As Tworek’s drummers finally started the show, I looked around the room one more time, and I left.

  * * *

  Lane and I reconciled again a few days later, after a brief spell in which he actually was kicked out of Tworek. We both thought that was hilarious.

  There ended up being only one more Tworek show that summer, though. It was at a house party on the Fourth of July, and it was a spectacular disaster. Lane got somebody to drive him out to Virginia, and he came back with a case of Sparks, a pocketful of pills, and a hundred dollars’ worth of illegal fireworks. He was excited, to say the least.

  It had already been such a strange day, all around. It was cool but somehow muggy still. The afternoon had been marred by a series of blowout thunderstorms that forced everyone off the streets. There was flash flooding in our backyard as the alley plugged and dumped a dirty torrent down the steps and into our basement. My roommates and I spent over an hour, barefoot and bare-chested, bailing water into hundred-pound garbage cans.

  After the rain let up, I went over to see how Lane and Hannah had fared, but no one was around. I didn’t see Lane again until I got to the party. By that time he had made it halfway through the Sparks and all the way through the pills, and it was clear that there would be no Tworek show this night. There were too many people at the party, besides. Bodies had begun to rub, and everyone was getting skittish. They really did want to see Tworek play, too. But Lane had been punched in the face by one of the band’s drummers, and he was refusing to tell them where he’d hidden the keys to the van.

  If that weren’t enough, Lane was setting fireworks off inside the house. Nothing major, but enough to rile a crowd, and smoke out a room, and maybe even singe somebody if they weren’t quick. The entire day seemed to coil up around this moment. Everyone was getting pissed off at Lane.

  Finally, some punk girl with rings in her lips took matters into her own hands and tried to break a beer bottle over his head. But she missed and cracked our friend Tom instead. This was when shit went haywire. Derek caught Tom in a backpedal, before dropping him to the floor so that he could throw a punch at the girl. And suddenly everyone was swinging this way. Blood and beer were sloshing as people pushed back and forth across the room.

  But it was Lane who found a skateboard on the floor and started swinging it through the crowd like a tomahawk, cracking some gutter punk in the head. I pushed forward in Lane’s defense and bricked some poor asshole in the face with my cast. But this hurt, sending a stinger up my arm and into my shoulder.

  The kid who lived there was standing on the kitchen table, screaming at the top of his lungs, freaking out. “Get the fuck out, get the fuck out!”

  And as I looked around this madhouse, I put my cast up defensively and backed my way out of the kitchen. Past Tom, who was desperately trying to stanch his bleeding head with an American flag. Past George, who gave me a thumbs-up, as he held his ground and filmed the whole scary scene with his camera.

  I made my way out onto the street, where the cop cars were already showing up to arrest people. Lauren was standing out there on the sidewalk with her arms crossed, looking worried. But she smiled when she saw me, and it calmed me down instantly. As the police started fanning out into the yard, Lauren reached down to take my hand, pulling me away. This small antidote to chaos.

  It was still only nine thirty at night, and we could hear the fireworks starting in the distance. We climbed up a low fire escape, to the roof of an apartment building, where we could suddenly see everything. The big show down on the Mall, and the many satellite shows in the surrounding suburbs. Fireworks going off in every diminishing direction. I had never seen it happening this way before. We marveled at the fact that they staged these shows, all together, everywhere at once. It was a wonderful thing if you could see it from up on high.

  Lauren turned to me suddenly. “I’m sorry if I broke up Peloton.”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head. “Don’t apologize for that. I like it when a great band breaks up. It means that it was worth it.”

  “Yeah, fuck the Rolling Stones already,” Lauren shouted, and we laughed.

  We lay back on the roof and stared up at the irradiated sky. And when the fireworks stopped, we were left only with the rippling quiet of night and the soft fugue of insect sounds. It was the stillness that made it easy to forgive ourselves. We could erase two years without another misplaced word. Up on this rooftop, where I kissed Lauren Pinkerton again. And everything started new.

  SELF-PORTRAITS IN DISGUISE

  “Why are they together?” Lauren asked me.

  We were sitting on a bench in Washington Square Park watching an older man kiss a younger woman lightly on the lips. They pulled apart and laughed airily.

  “He’s got money,” I said.

  “She has low self-esteem,” Lauren answered.

  This was a game we were playing. It had started in the back of the Chinatown Bus, on the ride up from Washington, D.C. And it carried over now, through the Lower East Side, to this bench in the park where we were waiting for Cokie.

  “Why are they together?” I asked Lauren, pointing out a new couple. These bright young hipsters with their bleach-blond hair and their neon windbreakers. They were practically jamming their hands into each other’s pa
nts.

  “She’s got money,” Lauren said, without affect.

  “He has low self-esteem,” I answered, the same.

  We had arrived the day before on the Dragon Bus. This third-rate bus line that had been blowing tires and bursting into flames up and down I-95 for the past six months. Real deaths. Not just cheap thrills and excitements. Still, thirteen dollars got you all the way to New York City and back, and they showed you a bootlegged copy of The Matrix 2. It was a no-brainer for us.

  “Why are they together?” Lauren asked me.

  “He has an umbrella,” I answered simply.

  “Mm.” She smiled. “Lucky girl.”

  Lauren had come with me to a downtown courthouse the day before, to deal with an outstanding legal issue, which I was happy to report was mercifully and speedily resolved. This was the reason for the trip. And now we were free to do whatever we wanted here. To go to the wax museum or the top of the Empire State Building. To eat lunch at Planet Hollywood or the Hard Rock Café. We could take a ferry to the Statue of Liberty or stand on line for tickets to The Phantom of the Opera. Or whatever else it was that real New Yorkers did for fun. But Lauren just wanted to see Cokie.

  Cokie was in her first year of law school at NYU. We knew that she lived in a tiny studio around the corner from here, but we had no idea where. And Cokie wasn’t answering her phone now, which was driving Lauren crazy. More to the point, she wasn’t answering her texts. This was a concession to the fact that Cokie had apparently stopped talking on her cell phone. She would listen to your voice messages and text you back, but she would not pick up your call. Cokie had already broken off our plans for dinner the night before, and I had a feeling we weren’t going to see her today, now, either.

  “Why are they together?” I asked.

  I was watching a young Hasid, in his stiff hat and his dark curls, as he whispered something into the ear of his woman. She tightened her lips and shook her head firmly, no. The man couldn’t help but smile luridly then.

  “Arranged marriage,” Lauren said.

  “True love,” I answered.

  * * *

  We were staying in SoHo with Lauren’s sister Rachel. We had other friends, other places we could go, of course, but this arrangement was nonnegotiable. It had something to do with the politics of sisters, a thing I could not fully comprehend. It had to do with old rivalries and new grudges. It had to do with sibling debts, which were to be paid out, over the course of a lifetime, in blood and tears.

  Rachel Pinkerton didn’t believe in the idea that she and Lauren should be allowed to grow apart gracefully. She nursed a fantasy of two sisters who were exactly alike. She was two years older than Lauren, and she always would be, of course. This gave her license to comment on the clothes that Lauren wore, or the way that she did her hair. She felt that it was her place to have opinions about the things that Lauren ate and the jokes that she told. Rachel couldn’t help but give off this tension in everything she did. It emanated in the way that she narrowed her eyes and nodded at the things that Lauren said. It was a pressure and an expectation that she had been cultivating over the course of a lifetime. Rachel’s was a well-traveled disappointment.

  Worse, Rachel wanted credit. She wanted attention and affection. Buried under everything was a skin-deep plea for validation. She wanted Lauren to feel jealous of her somehow. This was why she’d been so insistent that we stay with her in the first place. We were there to meet her banker boyfriend, and sleep in her posh apartment, and pay witness to the life that she had made for herself here. The whole thing was a provocation.

  But Lauren was nothing if not subdued in her reactions to all this pageantry. Answering questions blankly, as though she hadn’t even known they were meant for her. She was coy, she was aloof, she was withholding. This was the thing that was most surprising to me, really. I knew Lauren, first and foremost, as a fighter. But in Rachel’s presence she was suddenly deferential. She was vulnerable. She was noncombative.

  But this was an act, too. Lauren had done this to herself, and there was no sense in making it worse by kicking and screaming. Even before we got there, Lauren admitted her mistake. She should’ve never told her sister we were coming to New York. Rachel would’ve never even known. But it was too late for that now.

  * * *

  For the last fifteen months I had been receiving weekly letters from the FDNY, compelling me to pay a $607 bill that I had no intention of ever paying. It was impossible to say what an ambulance ride was worth to any given person, of course, but it sure as shit wasn’t worth a whole month’s rent to me. I contacted my legal counselor (Cokie Braque), and we went to work crafting an increasingly elaborate appeals letter. Cokie was having a riot with this, generating byzantine sentences like: Because I did not want, need, or request these services, I never explicitly or implicitly agreed to pay for them. In addition, the very fact of my being made to go to the hospital under such circumstances is coercive and unethical …

  Cokie finally texted me and told me to request an in-person appeal. She said that the city lacked the resources to pursue outstanding claims below a certain threshold. She figured there was a fifty-fifty chance that they would throw the whole thing out without even reading it. And if not, well, there was always another written appeal.

  I had memorized the entire letter, ready to recite it on command before His Highness, the Honorable Judge. This included the closing remark: Therefore, I respectfully request that you rectify this situation, with all speed, and reconcile your expenses, if need be, with the party that solicited these services in the first place.

  In other words, the NYPD. Har-har-har.

  But there was no judge, in the end. There was no courtroom, either. I was directed to the basement office of a harried clerk with a stack of paperwork standing two feet tall on her desk. She asked for my driver’s license and typed my name into a computer. When it came back clean she asked me to sign a piece of paper and told me I was free to go. The State now considered the matter resolved.

  “That’s it?” I asked.

  “That’s it,” she said, waiting for me to leave.

  It was only outside, on the steps of the courthouse, that I had the wherewithal to be ecstatic about this decision. I fought the law and the law gave up. But Cokie was nowhere to be found to share in my good fortune. And yet, we still had to pretend that we were hanging out with her for the benefit of Rachel, who was determined that Lauren and I should have dinner with her hedge-fund-manager boyfriend, Tad.

  I had met Tad briefly on the first afternoon. The girls had disappeared into the bedroom, leaving us to talk vaguely about sports and the weather as we waited. We could hear the sound of their strained-but-even voices through the closed door. It was important not to rise to the level of shouting yet. Rachel simply wanted to make a point of saying that it was fine that Lauren had already broken their plans for dinner. And Lauren, in turn, just needed to say how much she appreciated that Rachel cared enough to try and plan the whole weekend to within an inch of its life.

  I did my best just to nod in earnest as Tad listed off old friends who lived and worked in Washington, D.C.—congressional aides, and lobbyists, and policy lawyers—curious to see if I might know any of them.

  “Maybe, yeah. Definitely sounds familiar,” I said, trying to imagine a world in which I could possibly know a single one of Tad’s friends.

  * * *

  I had woken up in the apartment, on Saturday morning, walking on tiptoes, with a desperate desire to keep the floorboards quiet. Lauren smiled at me, from the expensive pull-out couch, announcing at full volume, “Rachel’s not here.”

  “She isn’t?”

  “No. She spent the night at Tad’s.”

  “Oh.” I straightened to my full height again. “Why aren’t we sleeping in her room, then?”

  Lauren just shook her head.

  “C’mon. I wanna do it in Rachel’s bed.”

  “Gross, no. Absolutely not.”

  “
At least let me roll around naked.” I was wriggling out of my boxers.

  “No!” Lauren laughed, as she leaped up off the couch and caught me at the door. Blocking me with her hips. The whole thing made me a little hard, and I pressed myself into her. But Lauren’s body lost its tension immediately. She was looking past me toward the door. It was never going to happen here.

  “I’m supposed to go hang out with her this afternoon,” she confessed.

  “That’s okay.”

  “Yeah, for you, maybe.”

  * * *

  “Why are they together?” We were sitting on a bench in the Canal Street station.

  “I don’t know,” Lauren answered seriously. “Because he has money and she has low self-esteem, I guess.”

  We were talking about Tad and Rachel. I was trying to figure out what it was that Lauren’s sister did here in the city, to live the way that she was living. Rachel told me she was working as a “brand consultant,” a title she seemed to be inordinately proud and haughty about. It was a thing that sounded made-up to me, or at least highly dubious. But Lauren told me it was real. Rachel had been trying to rebrand her tomboy little sister all weekend.

  “How much does she pay to rent that place?” I asked.

  “No idea,” Lauren answered, not at all convincingly. I smiled at her as she glanced away from me, before turning back, annoyed. “Fine, I’ll tell you, but you can’t tell anyone else. Rachel is sort of embarrassed about it.”

  “I swear,” I said, putting my hand to my heart.

  “Twenty-four-hundred dollars.”

  “Oh. My. God. Lauren!”

  “Yeah.”

  “A month?”

  “Yeah. It’s like all the money she makes.”

  “Your sister’s lost her fucking mind.”

  Lauren laughed. “I’m serious. Don’t tell her I told you.”

  “God,” I said, leaning back against the wall. There was something staggering about this number. It was like being punched in the stomach. It felt invigorating to me.

  “Tad basically pays for everything else. That’s how she justifies it, at least. I’m pretty sure she’s just biding her time until she moves in with him.”