Palahniuk Chuck

Romance

You should congratulate me. My wife and I just had twins, and they seem okay. Ten fingers. Ten toes. Two little girls. But you know the feeling.... I keep waiting for something to go wrong because that’s how it is when things get too happy. 1 keep expecting to wake up from this beautiful dream.

I mean, back before I was married I had this one girlfriend who was fat. We were, both of us, fat together, so we got along. That girlfriend, she was always testing us on new diets to lose weight, like eating nothing except pineapple and vinegar, or nothing but green algae from an envelope, and she was always suggesting we take long walks together until she started to shed the pounds, her hips just melted away, and you never saw anybody so happy. Even then I knew something would wreck (continued on page 104)

it. You know the feeling: When you love somebody, you’re happy to see her happy, but I knew my girlfriend was going to dump me because now guys with careers and health insurance were getting her on their radar. I remember she was pretty and funny before, but now that she was getting so skinny it was obvious she possessed vast untapped reserves of self-control and self-discipline way out of my league, and my friends weren’t any help because they were all circling, waiting for us to call it quits so they could date her, and then it turned out it wasn’t the pineapple or the self-discipline because she found out she really had cancer, but she slimmed down to wearing a bitchin’ hot size two before she died.

That’s how I know happiness is like a ticking bomb. And how 1 met my wife is because I wasn’t going to date anybody, not anymore, no way, so I was taking the Amtrak to Seattle. It was the year of Lollapalooza in Seattle, and I’d packed my tent and wrapped my sleeping bag to protect my bong so I could camp out all weekend like a Grizzly Adams, and I walked into the bar car on the train. You know how sometimes you just need to leave the friends and sobriety behind for a few days. I walked into the bar car, and there’s this total stone-cold fox pair of green eyes looking right directly at me. And I’m not a monster. I’m not some reality-show blimp stuck in a hospital bed eating buckets of fried chicken all day, but I can understand why guys would want to work as guards in women’s prisons or concentration camps where they could date good-looking prisoners without those babes always saying, “Put a shirt on!” and asking, “Do you always have to sweat so much?” But on the train, here’s this goddess wearing a Radiohead T-shirt cut off to show her bare middle, and her jeans sag down to where there ought to be bush showing, and she’s wearing Mickey Mouse and Holly Hobbie rings around every finger, holding a beer to her beautiful lips and looking at me down the length of the clear bottle, just an ordinary MGD, not some pussy microbrew in a green bottle.

And guys like me, we know the score. Unless we’re John Belushi or John Candy, no hottie is going to put us in that kind of an eye lock, so right away I know enough to look away from her in shame. The only reason why a girl like her would talk to me is to break the news that I’m a gross fat pig and I’m blocking her entire view of the ocean. Know your limits, I always say. Aim low and you won’t be disappointed. Edging past her, I look without looking. I check her out, and she smells good, like some kind of dessert, like a baked pie, like a pumpkin pie with that red-brown spice on top. Better yet, the beer bottle in her mouth turns to follow me as I walk down the aisle to the bar and order a round, and it’s not as if we’re the last boy and girl in the whole world. A bunch of other people are drinking at the plastic tables, going to Lollapalooza from the look of their dreads and tie-dye. I walk all the way to the most faraway table from her, but this hottie watches me go all the way. You know the feeling, when somebody’s watching, you can’t take one step without stumbling, especially on a moving-around train. I go to take a drink as the train turns a corner, and I spill beer down my striped cowboy shirt. I’m pretending to watch the trees going by outside the window, but from a secret-agent angle I’m watching her reflection in the glass, and she’s still watching me. The only time she looks away is when she steps up to the bar and gives the bartender some money and he gives her another beer, and then her reflection is getting bigger and bigger until it’s life-size and she’s standing next to my table and says, “Hi,” and something else.

And I say, “What?”

And she points at my cowboy shirt, at the beer spilled there, and she says, “I like your buttons...shiny.”

I tuck my chin and look down at the pearl-colored snaps. They’re not buttons, they’re snaps, but I don’t want to scotch this moment. And right from the get-go I noticed she puts her fingers in her mouth sometimes—okay, she puts her fingers in her mouth a lot, and she uses a breathy, little-girl voice with some baby-talk words like buh-skelli instead of spaghetti and skissors in place of scissors—but for a regulation hottie that’s just textbook being sexy.

She gives me a wink and licks the tip of her tongue around her lips, and with the wet still shining on them, she says, “I’m Britney Spears.” She’s such a tease. Sure, she’s a little loaded. Impaired. By now we’re both drinking those little bottles of tequila, and it’s not as if we’re driving this train. No, she’s not Britney Spears, but she’s the same caliber of hot. It’s clear she’s pulling my pud, but in a good way. And you just need to look at her to know all you need to know.

The only chance I have is to hold on and keep flirting back and buying the drinks. She asks me where I’m headed and 1 tell her Lollapalooza. She’s walking her fingers up the front of my shirt, her fingertips stepping from snap to snap, from my belt up to my throat, then walking herself back down, and I’m hoping she can’t feel how hard that makes my heart beat.

And she’s such a flirt with her green eyes cutting from side to side or peeking up at me from under her long, fluttering eyelashes. And she must be beers and beers ahead of me because she keeps forgetting to end her sentences, and sometimes she points at something speeding by outside the window- and she shouts, “A dog!” or one time she sees a car waiting at a rail crossing and Brit screams, “Slug bug!” and clobbers my shoulder with her fistful of Hello Kitty and Mickey Mouse rings, and secretly I hope I have the bruise for the rest of my life. And we go to Lollapalooza and pitch my tent, and Brit’s so drunk that when she wakes up the next morning she’s still drunk. And no matter how much doobie I smoke I’m having trouble keeping up. And maybe it’s because Brit’s so skinny, but she seems to cop a buzz without drinking for hours, like maybe she’s getting a contact high from my secondhand smoke. Our whole Lollapalooza is like the kind of beautiful classic romance you’d pay to jerk off to on the internet, but it’s happening to me. And we’re dating for six months, all the way through Christmas, through Brit moving her stuff into my apartment, and I keep expecting Brit to wake up sober one morning, and she still hasn’t.

We go to eat Thanksgiving at my mom’s place, and I have to explain. It’s not that Brit is a finicky eater, but the reason she’s so skinny is she only likes to eat a zucchini squash cut in half lengthwise and hollowed down the middle to make a miniature Iroquois dugout canoe with knife scratches on the outside to look like Indian writing and a w hole tribe of little braves carved out of raw carrot but with green peas for their heads, lined up and rowing the war canoe across a dinner plate covered with a thick layer of chocolate syrup, and you’d be surprised how many restaurants don’t have that particular item on their regular menus. So most times Brit has to make it herself, and that takes half a day, and then she has to play with it on the living room carpet for another hour, and that’s why she never seems to gain an ounce. And my mom, she’s just stoked to see me dating again.

And nothing you can smoke or shoot will ever get you as high as you’ll feel walking down the street holding hands with a supermodel total stone-cold fox like my Brit. Guys driving down the street in their Ferrari Testarossa, guys with the six-pack abs and steroid pecs, for the first time in my life they have nothing over me. I’m walking down the street with Britney, and she’s the prize every guy’s trying so hard to win.

And the only buzzkill is how every Romeo comes to sniff a circle around her, trying to grab her in an eye lock and giving her tits his best Pepsodent toothpaste smile. And this one time, riding on the bus, a pack of Romeos stand themselves around where Brit and I are sitting in the back of the bus. Brit likes to sit on the aisle right over the back wheels so she can see to punch me first when there’s a Volkswagen, and this one big Romeo comes to stand with his crotch situated at her eye level, and when the bus hits a pothole maybe his hip brushes against her shoulder until Brit looks up at him, and talking around her fingers in her mouth Britney says, “Hello, Big Boy.” And that’s just how Brit can be: friendly. And she winks and waves her wet fingers for the Romeo to lean down, and he looks around to make sure his competition is clocking his good luck, and this

Romeo squats down to Brit’s eye level, his face all bedroom smirk. And maybe because she’s trying to make me jealous, Brit says to this Romeo, her smokin’ hot green eyes look at him and she asks, “You want to see a magic trick?” And all the other Romeos perk up with looks that prove they’re all listening, and Brit takes her fingers out of her mouth and slides them down inside the front of her pants, grinding her Fingers around inside the skintight crotch of her jeans, and the back half of our bus gets so quiet with their watching her fingers wrestle behind her stonewashed denim zipper. And you can see these Romeos swallow, their Adam’s apples going up and down with all their extra spit and their eyes bulging like horny boners.

And as fast as clobbering a slug bug Britney yanks something out of her pants and yells, “Magic trick!” She swings this thing, shouting, “Puppet show!” And swinging from her hand is something on a little string, like a tea bag only bigger. It’s like a hot dog bun smeared with ketchup swinging on a little string, and Britney screams, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” and smacks it across the cheek of the Romeo still squatting down next to her seat. And Brit chases after him, yelling and slapping his leather jacket with streaks of red. And the other Romeos are not looking at her on purpose, fixing their faces to stare down at their shoes or look out a window; she’s swinging her little string to smack them upside their heads with red smears, the whole time squealing, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” laughing ha, ha, ha, ha, ha, shouting, “Puppet show! Magic trick!” The bus is ding-ding-dinging for the next stop, and a hundred passengers get off at the 7-Eleven, pushing and stampeding off the bus like they all need to buy Slurpees and cash in their winning Powerball mega jackpot tickets. And I’m yelling after them, “It’s okay, everybody!” I’m yelling out the bus window, waving to get their attention, “She’s a performance artist!” I’m yelling, “She doesn’t mean anything by it; it’s just some political gender politics statement deal.”

Even as the bus pulls away with just the two of us left onboard, I’m yelling, “She’s just a free spirit.” As Brit goes up the aisle and starts flogging the driver with her tea bag thing, I’m yelling, “That’s just her zany sense of humor.”

And one night I come home from work and Brit’s naked and standing sideways to the bathroom mirror, holding her belly in both hands, and since we met on the train she’s gained a little weight, but it’s nothing that a couple weeks of pineapple and vinegar won’t fix. And Britney takes my hand and holds my fingers spread against her belly and says, “Feel.” She says, “I think I ate a baby.” And she looks at me like a puppy dog with her green hottie eyes, and I ask if she wants me to go with her to the clinic and take care of it, and she nods her head yes. So we go on my day off, and there’s the usual Sunday school teachers blocking the sidewalk. They hold a garbage bag full of nothing but broken-apart plastic baby doll arms and heads mixed together with ketchup, and Brit doesn’t hesitate. She reaches into their bag and takes a leg and licks it clean like a french fry, and that’s how cool my beautiful girlfriend is. And I open a National Geographic magazine while the nurse asks her if she’s eaten anything today and Brit says she ate a whole canoe full of Iroquois warriors the day before, but no, she hasn’t eaten anything yet today. And I haven’t finished reading this one article about ancient Egyptian mummies before there’s a scream and Britney comes running out of the back still wearing a paper dress and bare feet, like this is a big deal, like maybe she never had an abortion before, because she runs barefoot all the way back to my apartment, and to make her stop shaking and throwing up I have to ask her to marry me.

And it’s obvious my friends are insanely jealous because they throw me this bachelor party, and when Britney goes to the ladies’ room all bummed out because the chef won’t carve her a war canoe, my so-called “friends” all look at me and say, “Dude, she is the total most-hot best thing ever, but we don’t think she’s stoned....” My best friends say, “You didn’t marry her yet, did you?” And their faces don’t say Brit being knocked up is good news. And you know the feeling: You want your best friends and your fiancee to mesh, but my friends grit their teeth and look at me with their eyebrows worried tight together in the middle, and they say, “Dude, did it ever cross your mind that maybe—just maybe—Britney is mentally retarded?”

And I tell them to relax. She’s just an alcoholic. I’m pretty certain she’s a heroin junkie, too. That, and she’s a sexual compulsive, but it’s nothing so bad some talk therapy wouldn’t fix her. Look at me: I’m fat; nobody’s perfect. And maybe instead of a wedding reception we could get our two families together in a hotel conference room to surprise her with an intervention, and instead of a honeymoon we could get Britney committed to a 90-day inpatient recovery program. We’ll work through this. But no way is she retarded. She just needs some rehab.

It’s obvious they’re only bad-mouthing Britney because they are actually totally Romeo-boner, insanely jealous. The minute I looked the other way, they’d be so up in her business. They say, “Dude, don’t look now, but you fucked a retard”, and that’s how unpopular I am, that I have to settle for these shitty friends. Brit, they insist, has the intellect of a six-year-old. They think they’re doing me a favor when they tell me, “Dude, she can’t love you because she doesn’t have the capacity.”

Like the only way somebody would marry me is if she had irreparable brain damage. And I tell them, “She can’t be retarded, for crying out loud, because she wears a pink thong.” And it has to be love because every time we’re together I come so hard my stomach hurts. And it’s like I told my mom’s boyfriend at Thanksgiving, no, Britney is not a high-functioning anything. My best guess is she’s an alcoholic, glue-sniffing, dope-shooting slut, but we’re working on getting her into treatment after she has the babies. And maybe she’s a nymphomaniac, but what’s important here is she’s my nymphomaniac, and that drives my family crazy with envy. I tell them, “I’m in love with a beautiful sex-crazed slut, so why can’t you just be happy for me?”

And after all that fuss there’s a lot less people at our wedding than you’d expect.

And it could be that love makes you prejudiced, but I always thought Brit was pretty smart. You know the feeling, when you can watch TV together for a whole year and you both never argue over what shows. Seriously, if you knew how much TV we watch every week, you’d call us a happy marriage.

And now I have two little babies who smell like Thanksgiving pies. And when they’re old enough I’m going to tell my little girls that everybody looks a little crazy if you’re looking close enough, and if you can’t look that close then you don’t really love them. All the while life goes around, and it goes around. And if you keep waiting for somebody perfect you’ll never find love, because it’s how much you love them that makes them perfect. And maybe I’m the retarded one because I keep waking up expecting my happiness to run out when I should just enjoy it. Being this crazy-in-love happy simply cannot be so easy. And I can’t expect such total happiness to last the rest of my life, and there’s got to be something wrong with me if I love my wife so much, and for right now I’m driving my new family home from the hospital with my beautiful wife sitting next to me and our twin baby girls safe in the backseat, and I’m still worried how happiness this great can’t last forever when Britney screams, “Slug bug!” and her fist clobbers my shoulder so hard I almost crash us into a whole Dairy Queen.

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Palahniuk Chuck Romance