The Bourgeois Empire

by Evie Christie

  Not being her first was A-okay with you.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Health Punt

  A GIRL DOESN’T MAKE YOU INTO A MAN, surely, but her presence, the thought of her, made you want to become a man again. Charlie was a catalyst. Nadine couldn’t do this; Nadine’s wiles were diluted by an onslaught of pseudo-feministas in couture-fitted yoga wear. After Nicola, your second daughter, was born, you put out for a mom-job—the tummy tuck was all Nadine was after, but you were trying to be generous. A fine surgeon, recoup time, live-out nanny (you had your limits). Nadine had always had a great body, a killer ass as more than one of your friends had pronounced it, and good, even better than good, tits. But after the babies and the mothering, things had changed, dropped. You still noticed other men looking at her, leaning in to talk to her at parties, holding her hand a little too long after a handshake—their standards, it stood to reason, were lower; they didn’t know she’d been even better, before. Nadine was lively and energetic, she was, you remembered, a skillful young mother and housewife and she made it work, painlessly, each day, a magic trick none of your friends’ gals had ever been able to match.

  You felt guilty about the fling you had with Barbara, Peter’s wife. Barbara the Lush. She talked about Nadine while she showered, as she dressed. She smelled like (not of) dirty martinis, new car and menthol. It was the eighties after all; the affair lasted only a couple of months. But she’d gone slightly rabid when you broke it off. You might have been worried, but she seemed too drunk to properly compile her facts and present them to the involved parties. Barbara was not a careful woman and she served as an aide-mémoire about the importance of a healthy, happy wife—a good mother, a well-kept lady of the house.

  Times changed. Nadine had changed—you hadn’t. Men like you were not built this way; you had only limited options, and they never involved vegetarianism or retreats. The options were work/sex/money/leisure (the leather club-chair, tanned-and-boozy version of leisure). But things changed, yes, and maybe you were a little different—maybe you had been misled, conned; maybe you too were young and dynamic and happy, even healthy? Charlie, the catalyst, the cataclysm—the jewel in the crown of your miserably lucky existence. Maybe you were—was it possible—in love?

  Nadine was sharp, intellectual, and you would never say anything to the contrary or listen to any similar kind of slander from any woman since Barbara the Talking Bush. But Nadine had been conditioned, primed by the order of daytime television personalities. She decided against surgery and used the money you had given her to fund a macrobiotic/spiritual/holistic/earth-mother rip-off. These women were cruel and manipulative, as only women—let us be frank—can be. They stole Nadine’s contented psyche. You may be thinking that’s what Tolstoy said seven years before the revolt, the revolution. But Jules would say, maybe the peasants were happy. (What a dick you might say here.) Maybe seven years later the world wasn’t so enamoured with its happy peasants and so they were, by necessity, different people. This was the proviso, the clause built into our future. It was unfair and a dirty trick at best, but you were not cool anymore. And as for Tolstoy’s masses, their mirror was telling them different things too. And, as you know, things changed. The world told Nadine she wasn’t doing enough, that her years of study and travel were inconsequential after years of mothering and wife-ing. Mutually exclusive, these awful women convinced her. “Do more,” they admonished, “because you can”—a mantra eerily similar to the “be-more TV icon” your girls talked about on the phone after class each day. The purpose of this show, the sovereign monarchy of modern womanhood, was vague—guests brandished delightful stories of being pummelled to the perimeter of life; how they single-manicured-handedly wrestled their way back, made crazy money, wrote a book. . . . And then the close-up and the cry, a formula not unlike the porn of days gone by: the money shot the first discharge of tears; the post-lick the couch hug.

  Things would change again; darkness emptied into darkness no more. Your night light, your full-up pipe in a cold- cracked apartment—our girl Charlie, she inspired you. You would become a man. It would take some doing and some undoing but just looking at her bruised knees, a pictogram of the newly random universe she was letting you into, was enough to get you started, to get you fit.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Like Bridges, Burning

  THAT IT IS NOT OKAY TO KEEP YOURSELF CAGED UP in your office all day was the feeling you’d gotten from Nadine and, occasionally, one of the presumptuous and bluntly out-of-line children. When the door was forced open you didn’t bolt up, as you often imagined you would have to were such a thing to ever happen. The door was, in reality, heavy and took a moment to open, longer than they expected. You had calculated everything, knew the response time of every floorboard and bedspring and hinge in the house—and still you didn’t respond as predicted. No one expects you to sit in your office and remember shit all day, Jules. Not your family and not the reader. But no one with a heart would want to make you jump, a man in your state—oldish, hot, tired and in the throes of an impressive existential failure. The realizing, the change-making stuff. Religion, or in your case, the time-consuming consumption: narrow size six white tennis shoes for her, health food shops, omega oils, co-Q 10, Botox and cotton candy number thirty-six nail gloss. Nothing expensive really, just constant enough to be consistent, the thing any observer would conclude was that thing that kept you alive.

  You had always believed that constant movement—working, sailing, fucking, drinking, driving—could occupy you to distraction. This is you, your one life. (Unless you believe the one or so billion people in hot, dry countries that believe otherwise—tell me you don’t.)

  And this is it?

  You never answered. You just kept moving, aimlessly forward. There would never come a time when you could stop. That’s the way it was. The more days you spent in bed with Charlie, reading week-old papers, smoking cigarettes and little else, the less you moved, the harder it became to go back. What if you had to go back? Charlie was of the opinion that progress and achievement made us grow and age and die, while painting your nails and sleeping and reading and failing and falling in love were the forces that kept all the nasty parts of life somewhere out of sight. But Charlie could be young and thoughtless. She had lived very few years and all of those as Charlie. You’d lived as this guy, this dick. You advised, made deals, called people, had very little loyalty and never spent a moment thinking about it—that wasn’t what guys like you did. Every day, with the exception of a few, was just nothing. A few. A few days away from our girl amounted to memories or memories digested and reproduced in photographic image. You had suspicions that in the end it would all become clear: that a day spent sitting in your office doing fuck-all would be no more or less momentous at seventy-one or whatever your body decided was the last straw (stuck through a cherry in some girl’s drink), than a day jumping out of a plane with a parachute that almost didn’t open. If your life could write its own epitaph you imagined it might say: It hardly mattered.

  So yeah, you had spent too long by yourself in there and, yes, they did push the door open to surprise you.

  Surprise.

  And yes, this is how they found you: crying on the floor, your robe open, and Charlie’s girl-space photos on your computer screen.

  What was it, a couple of party guests? That seemed right. Nadine.

  You looked up, but you didn’t jump. That wasn’t a guy like you thing to do your body must’ve decided. The air around became so . . . altered. It smelled like bridges, burning.

  In late June of 1990-something a bunch of people walked in and saw you crying, holding (cradling?) your cock like it were a dead baby in front of a number of gorgeous and wholly inappropriate images of a fifteen-year-old girl.

  You thought about the numbers; everything became quantitative. Reasoning would get you through this crisis; numbers would protect you. You’d made a pact with them in 1975 when you gave up living as a human and became a businessman. The
numbers owed you.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dead Ringer

  IN A DRAWER INSIDE THE BAR (hidden in your deco desk) are things of value: a slim fireproof safe, a suicide note, a copy of your will and a ring you couldn’t afford in your dirty thirties when your wife had seen it in a Cartier window display. The ring was (of course) an easy decision. At roughly twenty-nine thousand bones it might be the grenade you needed to escape this fortress of relentless familiarity—out of the light and into the deep blue, bruised legs of your true love. Fuck, and fuck, you should have said. But instead, a calm—a cool trick of the psyche—pulled your shit together and you went outside.

  All the usual Sashas and Katerinas and Davids and whatshernames were there. You walked out and waited for locusts; it was too late for the first-born. You fingered the ring in your pocket, tongued an apologetic greeting, an excuse extraordinaire. And nothing at all like this happened. Something worse happened: nothing at all. Nadine smiled and patted your shoulder and one of your pals’ wives who was in the scandal suite a few moments earlier shook your hand—the one that had been holding your bag. Was she fucking oblivious?

  When you finally corner Nadine she’s smiling—not with thin lips, more of an empathy thing.

  “It’s okay, Jules. It’s okay, all right? Nobody cares.”

  You definitely heard “Nobody cares.”

  Her hand rested on your shoulder for just a moment and yet you felt it there forever(ish), for the rest of the party at least. Like the easy tone of a teenager on an answering machine the night he wraps his shitbox around a telephone post, some things are most alarming in their kind and familiar form. “Nobody cares” would be, you decided, a couple of words that would assist you in disappearing, unabashedly, deeper into your random disorder of anxiety, insomnia, infidelity and pills.

  It’s okay. Nobody cares.

  What does this mean?

  You didn’t ask; Nadine was gone. The disappearing act was her magnum opus. The magnetic woman, people orbiting her—but there was no room for you.

  There’s knowing and knowing, as you know. If a woman knew she could mess you up—your friends, family, every asshole you worked with, your files and clients—nothing could ever be safe and sound. She could write about it, were she the type; she’d call your mother, if she were alive. . . . In layman Jules-speak: she’d fuck your shit up.

  But sometimes a girl knew—an unclear idiom that kept your balls safely sacked, if only provisionally. A girl knew things weren’t right, and you weren’t right. That was something different entirely.

  What Nadine knew paid for a two-month first-class family vacation to the U.K. It picked up the bill for day trips outside of the secure, rented London-yuppie flat (quite beyond what your Rosedale digs could fetch, even with top-end maid form) to Leeds, the dirty, seedy Ottawa of Britain, as you came to see it. You were reconnecting with your family, and with Nadine and her family, who thought you to be a cock and dismissed your company lock, stock and barrel: a fact that both suited you well and freed up some time.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Angel and the Hired Hand

  AT 10:30-ISH—HARD TO BELIEVE, I KNOW—Nadine’s relatives and the rest of your family were turning in, turning down and turning out (the lights). The home? A filthy-posh five- bedroom Georgianesque reno. All the discomforts: plush white carpeting, art nouveau décor and black-lacquer-and-ivory kitchen casings. It was unusually visible from the street, hidden poorly behind a sterile Japanese garden and two older model Porsches—not classic and gauche in their late-eighties colour schemes. A complex, no, cruel, punch-button alarm system would have tripped you up, but for your lifelong affair with numbers. The side entrance was the better way to break out. The 21 bus? Nope. A taxi. What’s money for, after all, if not the perfect getaway? A compact wet Beamer—windows wound tight, heated and hot-boxed, coerced through the roundabout and twenty-odd downtown turns by Les, a half-tanked and violently cheerful sixty-year-old who asked you for directions at least twice—in between life lessons, investment advice (how shit hair cost you in the long run and made people think you were a right prat), the difference between a mate and a “fucking ponce,” and the boisterous airing of the dirtiest of family linens.

  Les was a good guy.

  And, it was worth it. You had once spent your last tenner (in Les-speak) on a cab; cigarettes and taxis kept and created continuity and, unlike work and women, didn’t offer immediate dissension. By midnight you were in Heaven. Across the street was Hell—a weak stab at a dungeon, a sad attempt at a sad trend: sex so boring it needed to be accessorized with impractical straps and chains. The whole thing reeked of D&D “outsider” affectation, but tapped into the isolated sex-offender-to-be market. Naturally, the place was packed. And you were in Heaven, in Angel—cute as a kitten and collecting for methamphetamine debts and rent via your dick with all pink-coloured and time-honored orifices in play. Angel, the name each young lady gave herself in Heaven, though you never asked, before you bent her over the spick-and-span but bitter, cold-as-a-post-communist-Bucharest-orphan’s-heart marble bathroom counter. You fell into shop talk with Nadine’s nephew Leo.

  Leo was one of the few from your extended family (any family, if you were to be honest) you could relate to. And right now that relating was nothing less than insufferable. He had debts. Gambling. Proper money, proper losses, as he put it. None of that online casino wanker and housemaid action—a real bookie who broke real fingers with a real crowbar. At least he paid someone to do it. So, while you should be in heaven, over the moon, you aren’t because Leo is an aggravating white noise. And, well, because you are in love, and love makes you sick and socially retarded. It happens to us all, for a while. Your main concern was Charlie meeting almost anyone else and running off. You didn’t have the guts to ask, “What do they have that I don’t,” because you were afraid of the answer. Things like better looking, less-married and kidded-up, more mature, adventurous, and happy all sprang to mind.

  You had to get back.

  “Leo, I have to get back. Can you get me back?” You wiped your Angel clean of your own attempt at accessorizing hell, the imprecise cum-shot on any old (but undeniably young) faultless back.

  He could, Leo said. He could do anything you were after. Except “off” someone—that was not his racket.

  In the morning, or the afternoon of sober adult time, you made your way freely—with gracious waves bye-bye from the family—to the David David club. Fitness classes, yoga studio, juice bar, co-ed saunas and a credible lounge and wet bar. Men and women smoking like it was keeping them fit and drinking reasonably stiff cocktails (unlike the pop-and-candy concoctions every kid downed their pills and rails with in the nightclubs of this city). Neat and tidy with nothing else, or nothing but ice or soda, thank Christ. Charlie had learned to drink Scotch, as stubborn as she was. You’d convinced her that it was better and more romantic than the gin and diet tonics you couldn’t stomach (or liver) after the wooing stage had ended. Had she moved on; had she got your letter? Did she fondly remember the early fondling and arguments? The break-in, the breakfast at three in the three-day weekend at the Royal York when neither of you left the room? Maybe she didn’t care to remember—in which case, what a bitch. Could it be that she had not cared the whole time?

  Leo ordered two doubles. You corrected him but he insisted. “You’ll need a double mate, all right? Two doubles and a single, love.” A large man came in, a cop or criminal—it was impossible to tell, both types looked around far too quickly, checking exits, adjusting blazers and mouths. Who else would they be here for? And yet they didn’t seem to recognize him. “Leo?” they leaned in politely so as not to disturb the other smokers from their bleeding heart-to-hearts. “Sorry. Mickey gave me forty quid for this, pal.” He said “pal” with a stutter that was very difficult not to empathize with.

  Then, out came the crowbar. A fucking crowbar! What was this, Manchester, 1975? Bradford, right now? You felt your bladder’s warm aspirations,
but you tensed up in time. Vomit? No, hold it together. Ppppppthal. Don’t interfere. Leo is a good guy and all, but this is his business. Forty pounds, etc. Don’t lose it. Don’t piss yourself.

  And then, Leo nodded. Flinched? Nope, as confusing as it was, it was most assuredly a nod, sideways. What the fuck? And then your right hand was broken; Leo’s fingers were broken. He’d been careful enough, you found out later. He’d been an okay guy about it, apologizing and patting Leo’s back afterwards.

  Was nobody outraged? No, they were not. They kept lighting and pulling and clinking, swirling ice and laughing. It was the laughter that made you vomit and the vomit that made “Love,” the waitress, throw you out. “Go on outside now, love.” So hard to be pissed at a girl like that—manners and all.

  Leo had made good on his promise. Like the reprobate he was. It took a sociopath to get you home with the respect and sympathy of Nadine’s relatives. You threw down some extra cash for an early flight. That wasn’t, thankfully, “what the whole family ought to do.” And you returned to your wonderfully empty three-level house, deep behind the maple trees, the garden, the driveway and the curtains and the walls and walls and walls. You returned to your office, to your dear laptop in your lonely heart-attack suite.