Chuck Palahniuk - 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.