by Mike Roberts
“Why would you get in his car?”
“Because he was a cop. And he’d been there the whole time. I thought he was trying to help me. What did you want me to do, walk from Northeast?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not saying that.”
The Metro stopped running at midnight, and Lauren didn’t have the money for a taxi. The cop knew this, and he offered her a ride instead. But something changed. This man who had seemed so anxious and anodyne in the hallways of the police station suddenly took on a kind of looming authority in the front seat of the cruiser. Lauren felt naïve for having flirted with him so unthinkingly. It surprised her the way that he picked up this ball and started running with it. Turning almost brazen as he put his arm behind her on the seat-back. Every gesture seemed to magnify the smallness of this space now. Lauren and the cop were alone in the moving car.
“What happened?” I couldn’t seem to stop asking this.
“Nothing happened. He just kept asking questions.”
“What questions?”
“It doesn’t matter. Everything I told him was a lie. The first thing I said to him, coming out of the theater, was a lie. I was only trying to keep Tom and Derek out of jail. I was just trying to get everybody home.”
“But I don’t understand. Did he do something to you or not?”
“No. I don’t know. It was just the way that he was looking at me. The way that he was talking.” She stopped. “He wanted me to keep driving around with him.”
“What does that mean?”
“He said his shift was ending and he wanted me to keep him company.” I could feel the blood boiling in my head. “He just kept smiling and saying it. Telling me how I could take a shower and change my clothes first, if I wanted. He said that he would come back and pick me up.”
“Fuck,” I said. “Why did you give him your phone number?”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. He asked me, and I said it. I don’t know…”
I could feel my jaw tighten as I tried to slow myself down. “You need to file charges,” I said flatly.
“Charges of what?”
“Harassment! Sexual harassment.”
Lauren practically laughed in my face. “And who am I supposed to file them with? The police? He is the police!”
“That doesn’t matter. He can’t just do whatever he wants. He needs to be punished,” I said. “Tell me his name.”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“It’s not worth it,” she said in a hollow voice. “Nothing even happened to me.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Of course it’s the point!” she shouted. “I’m not gonna file charges against a cop. I mean, give me a fucking break! Charges of what? The fact that he didn’t arrest me? Or that he stuck up for Tom and Derek? Or that he offered me a ride home when the subways stopped running? What? Tell me!”
I could feel my face growing hot with shame. I had no idea what I was supposed to say to her. All of my questions came out sounding wrong. Worse, it seemed like Lauren didn’t even trust me. “I just want to help,” I offered meekly.
“It’s fine,” she said, softening again. “It’s over now anyway.” She got up off the bed and walked toward the closet.
“What are you doing?”
“I don’t know,” she said, sounding empty. “I just want to take a shower and go to bed.”
I stood up and wrapped my arms around her. Stopping her and holding her there. I could smell the sweat under her arms. The stress and adrenaline that had been purged tonight. I felt her body tense, before releasing into me. Finally letting go.
* * *
Most of these men were harmless, most of the time, Lauren said. Everyone can’t be a murderer or a monster or a rapist. They just want a reaction from a pretty girl on the street. They just want to steal a smile if they can get away with it. Getting a woman to stop and turn her head, in traffic, is just another cheap thrill. The violence is a good wet laugh.
But I knew these men wanted something else from me. Cops and civilians alike. Everyone was daring me to react. Begging me to flash my anger back at them, in all situations. Because the truth is some people actually walk around looking for a fight, or at least the pretense for one. Knowing this, understanding it, I would always take a step back. Smiling at them with my teeth and riding away, furious.
* * *
I didn’t strike the man on the street with my U-lock. I never bashed his head open, or left him for dead. All I did was cut him off with my bicycle as he tried to run me over with his car. With the both of us flying into a rage then. Cursing and spitting and puffing ourselves up. “Fuck you, shut up, bitch, motherfucker, fuck you!” I didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know me, but we were about to get violent.
But as he roared forward like this, it was his girlfriend who caught his arm and pulled him back. Interrupting our moment of brutality before it could begin. She pushed him away and held me off with her curses. And, in this moment, I suddenly stopped. I picked my bike up off the ground and I left them there. Standing up on the pedals and pumping like crazy. Unscarred; unscathed; untouched.
So why did I feel so bad about it now? At home, inside the dark house, I was sweaty with panic. I was thinking of my own inaction on the street. Replaying it in my head, over and over. It made me angry that I had not cracked this man’s skull and sent him reeling to the ground. I was holding the U-lock in my hand. I felt like I might need to sit down, or vomit, even. I made a vow to stop drinking, starting right then, forever. Starting tomorrow, maybe. For a whole month, or maybe just a week. And yet I couldn’t stop feeling justified in my own instinct for violence. He was the one who’d stopped his car, right? He was the one who had threatened me. This man had it coming.
I paced the kitchen, in the dark, and I went into the bedroom, finally. I woke Lauren up, and I startled her because I was suddenly crying there on the edge of the bed. She put her hands up against my face and neck. What is it? What’s wrong? she asked me, looking scared. But I just shook my head. I had no idea what was wrong.
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 oth
er 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.” I held my palm out to her.
“Your drinking’s getting a little out of hand lately, don’t you think? I mean, what time is it right now?”
“Don’t try to domesticate me, woman,” I said, shifting characters. “I’m a man, and a man drinks ice-cold beer. I’m not asking for your permission.”
“Ho-oh, but you don’t have any money. So you must be asking for permission.”
I sat down in the armchair with a heavy sigh, losing interest in this. “Maybe I’m just stressed out and I want a beer,” I said without affect.
Lauren laughed. “What stress do you have? You don’t even work!” She was glowing now, taunting me. I’d put her into this position, of course; I’d done it to myself.
“You know what, never mind. I don’t want your money if you’re going to be such a bitch about it.” This amused Lauren.
“Aw, c’mon. Can’t I beg you to take it from me? Please.”
I just sat there, not looking at her. This is the point where a normal person gives up and cuts his losses. It’s not worth going on and on this way about trivial things. It’s not healthy. It doesn’t do anyone any good. But I didn’t care about any of that.
“You know what? You’re going to make some man a great ex-wife someday,” I said, hardly able to suppress my delight.
“Yeah, someone with some fucking money!” she shot back, but I knew I’d already stung her. It was very much on purpose. More than I wanted her five dollars, more than I wanted a beer, I wanted Lauren to pay attention to me. And I had her up on her feet now.
“And fuck you for saying that, also. You think you understand certain things, but you don’t know anything about anything.” Lauren was the product of divorce, and this was another rare sensitivity. And now we were really fighting, too, which was good.
“Why are you even asking me for money anyway? Can’t you just go into your trust fund, you little bed-wetter?”
“Ha! My trust fund! Oh, right,” I said, starting to have fun. “I wish.”
“Don’t deny it. You’re not fooling anyone. Nobody can live as poor as you live. I’m not even entirely sure how you take care of yourself.”
“Well, I’m either secretly rich or egregiously poor. Make up your mind.”
“You’re both,” she said dismissively. We held our faces straight, like a staring contest. To laugh first was to lose. This was the game. We were always returning to this sick, shared laughter.
“I could keep a job, if all I wanted was to keep a job,” I told her maddeningly.
“Liar.”
“What I want,” I went on, smiling, “is for somebody to pay me for being clever.”
Lauren didn’t even have to say anything. The scorn was written all over her face.
“A job like that would suit me just fine, I think.”
“Just admit that there’s a secret trust fund right now, and I won’t ever ask you anything about it again. I swear to god.”
“You’re paranoid. I’m just better with money than you are.”
“You know what?” Lauren said, with a new smile coming over her. “Never mind. I think I just figured out your secret. You’re a fucking spy!”
“A spy!” I guffawed. “Oh, man. Oh, man.” This was really good. I couldn’t believe she’d found a way to say that to me with a straight face. Lauren was trying desperately not to laugh, too. It was important to stay angry. She was still pissed at me for calling her an ex-wife.
“Admit it,” she said. “What are you doing in Washington, D.C., anyway? Who comes here to study literature? It’s not even a good cover.”
“Okay,” I said. “You caught me. Which side do you think I’m on? Hmm? What’s my agency?”
“Shut up,” she said, breaking down a little.
“It’s the CIA, all right? This is serious, though, Lauren,” I said with gravity. “You need to listen to me very carefully now because someday you might need this information. It might just save your life…”
“Shut up!”
“The red rooster crows at dawn. Remember that phrase, okay? I’m serious. The Indian never crosses the same stream twice.” I was almost in tears, cracking myself up with this. “Are you listening? Don’t be crazy! Write this down!”
“Shut up! Just stop! Shut! Up!” Lauren was screaming to drown me out.
But as I lay there, rolling on the floor, I could see that she was laughing, too. She couldn’t help herself then, letting it all go. Lauren sat down on the floor with me and we laughed, and the laughter was a reset. This was what we did for fun.
But after a while, she went back to the couch and started flipping through her magazines again, making a show of ignoring me.
“Well…” I said.
“I’m getting tired of talking to you now. Can we just have some quiet?”
“Oh, right, I’m sorry,” I said. “Would you rather have us talk about celebrity gossip or the way that jeans fit?”
Lauren looked up mischievously. “Yes. Could we?”
“No, we can’t,” I said with crossed arms.
Lauren shrugged and dropped back into her glossy pages. Lately she had become a prodigious reader of these celebrity tabloid shitrags. I knew that she was smarter than me, too, which was why it galled me so much that this was the only reading that she did anymore. Lauren refused to confirm the fact that she had a photographic memory, but I knew that it was true. I envied her for this, and felt like she was wasting it working as a secretary. I told her she was depressed, but really I was talking about the both of us.
Lauren flipped the pages sullenly, and I could feel her losing interest in fighting with me.
“Why don’t you love me?” I asked her out of nowhere.
These were always our most tedious conversations. I knew at my worst that I was needy. Lauren told me this. That was why it was necessary to be cruel sometimes. It was about trust. It all came down to some unbearable need to be loved. I was terrified of the idea that Lauren could not or would not love me back. Worse yet, she liked to say that she didn’t even believe in romantic love. She said that she couldn’t.
“I want to know,” I said. “It’s a real question.”
I was calm and earnest, which was just another way to push her buttons. We needed to shock and undermine each other, always. We needed the tension and the drama of it, because in a sick way it worked. Part of the charm of our relationship was the fact that we engaged these parts of each other’s personalities that no one wanted to touch. The ugly parts. The mean, unhappy, quarrelsome parts. The parts that are small and petty and drive normal people away. They were important to us.
Lauren stood up suddenly and put the magazine down. “Do you think you’re losing your hair?” she asked with her blankest face.
“What?” Every nerve in my scalp tightened reflexively.
“It’s not a big deal to me. I just think we should be able to talk about it like adults, if you are.” She was trying not to smile.
“I’m not,” I couldn’t help myself from saying. And I wasn’t. But it was too late then, I had already taken the hook. Lauren would do this
sometimes. Asking me about my weight or my drinking or my libido. Asking me if I thought the ways in which I behaved were somehow irregular or abnormal, maybe.
“I’m just saying that you’ve been acting different,” she said.
“Different?”
“Yeah. Ever since your hair started falling out, you’ve been acting weird.”
“Ha-ha-ha,” I said. “That’s very funny.”
“Hey, don’t get defensive. Either you’re losing your hair or you’re not. It’s not a big deal to me.” Long pause. “But if you are, I just think you should be able to talk about it with me. Your girlfriend.”
Lauren didn’t even bother masking her smirk then. I glared at her, hating her.
“Don’t look at me,” she said with feigned innocence. “Look in a mirror.”
“Why won’t you marry me?” I asked suddenly.
“You’re crazy.”
“Not now. Marry me in ten years.”
“Oh. I think I’m busy then.”
“Marry me in ten years when you’re fat and unhappy, and your youth and your looks are all used up,” I went on, smiling. “Say that you’ll marry me then.”
“I think I’m washing my hair that night,” Lauren deadpanned.
I stood there, waiting for her to crack. I was so pathetic and vulnerable. This, too, was part of the game. I would ask her to look at me, to love me, to stop all of this now and let me love her back. I smiled because I knew how uncomfortable this could make her. She found the whole act sentimental and sappy in all the worst ways. She said it was moronic to talk about our lives as a kind of love story. She said it bored the shit out of her. And yet we were both laughing again, too.
“You’re killing me, Zelda,” I said.
“You deserve it, though. You’re so boring. God. How can anyone who calls himself a writer be so bo-ring?”
“No. I guess we should all become secretaries.”
“Oh, you’d never make it as a secretary. It’s a lot of hard work. You have to show up every day.”
“Yeah, you’re a fucking working-class hero,” I said. But I was suddenly thinking about my hairline again. Involuntarily. I wanted to go look in the mirror. Just quick, just to see. Was it possible that I’d missed the fact that I was going bald?