The Bourgeois Empire

by Evie Christie

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Yellow Brick, Goodbye

  HOME WAS MOST ASSUREDLY SWEET. Bern sat nonchalantly in the garden. The bed was fresh and the phone did not ring incessantly. Nobody knew you were here—nobody cared. Your hand was shit but well wrapped with much unwanted attention by a busty nurse tipping the scales at, let’s say, two-fifty. Nothing wrong with that; just not your thing. A niche fuck. Your preferences are vague and varied but did not include overt come-ons, bright-light television makeup or perfumes. It didn’t include women whose only strong suit was cleavage, at least not for anything past a two-night stand. Home was sweetened by the echo of empty halls—but there were still problems, right?

  Insomnia. Like many of your problems: untreatable. You never took your useful meds; they worried you, even though you’d, on occasion, down handfuls of unnamed pills from beautiful glossy little bags on girls’ nightstands. You weren’t sleeping. You were waiting. Waiting was a verb, a foul little secret, your laptop volume dial turned up to a level that made anything that wasn’t what you wanted so mind-shatteringly annoying, each IM ding would take minutes off your already short life.

  You saved your history with Charlie, knowing no one else ever opened this laptop. In fact, it was almost always with you—as close as possible at any rate. The messages and photos were a reprieve from the heartache, the gut-rot. Where are you, my girl? Doing bumps off bank cards in some business-casual’s Merc? In bed, dreaming horrible little girl dreams? Tied up and gagged in a Yonge-and-Steeles basement?

  What happened to our girl?

  You’d never asked before now. Love had gone off beam and was, in its every molecule, barbed and twisted in your memory into loathing and a bottomless self-pity. This’d be how a guy ended up breaking a girl’s neck, or stabbing her twenty-seven times (hesitation wounds excluded), or just laying on the floor of an empty two-point-five-million-dollar home. (The latter option requiring a little less from you in the way of physical exertion.) You called the housekeeper and told her to fuck off for the week (with pay), an act that required the raw power of all of your faculties operating at full force. This created more time for laying around on the immaculate hardwood, listening to Elton John albums, and weeping—that was the only word for it—becoming younger, better-looking the less you ate, and more determined and more deranged the less you slept. This was your renaissance, you told yourself as you unfolded, light into more light, and you were screwing it up. A physical impossibility, like water to wine, our girl Charlie, not even sweet sixteen, ward of the state, misappropriated-refugee-allowance-benefactor and the best thing to happen to you since the Mulroney-Regan Alliance with its celebrated channelling of Free Trade cash which you would never admit to under any oath. She had brought you to your knees, and if only briefly, raised you from vagueness and ambiguity into preciseness, authenticity, back to yourself or whoever it was you were supposed to become after you were grunted into existence. It had happened, was happening—and now, static, nothingness and painkillers.

  When the single malt ran out, you crawled on hands and knees in a more determined manner to the library. Searching in drawers and then beneath, behind books, up the staircase. The stairs took time, but your need was great and required such stick-to-it-iveness. Pills, they answered questions. Booze only asked why, how did this happen and do you love me? Pills replied with a pretty smile, a glossy kiss, a powdery happy softness. The wonderful muted fear, the knowledge, the anxiety and starvation and slaughter just far enough from the perverse, an itch at most. That was the chemical. They answered; yes, they answered, it’s okay; and something that sounded like “I love you” too.

  Your older daughter, Beth—the one you thought of as the fat one, though she hadn’t been fat for five years—had only bennies, jennies, laxatives and diuretics which were of no help. The stuff Nadine usually swept for—maybe she had missed the obvious sock rolls and sanitary pad boxes. But she wasn’t one of you, was she? Thank fuck for scrips. You closed your eyes and picked the left hand, took a few of those. Anything red, pink, white or blue was in play. Dying was about the only thing of importance you could get around to doing this afternoon. Goodbye little darlings. And you heard their sweet goodbye. It may have been Elton, but let’s agree that someone, somewhere, answered. That no one was asking, and that’s all you cared about.

  If you live through this, looking up now at the yellow Devonshire cream walls, you think about Nadine’s friend June considering, aloud, that maybe exposed brick was “over.” You let it go. After all she had electric-ish boots, a mohair-ish suit. . . . Like everything once considered cool, it no longer was, and you hadn’t renovated in a forever and ever sense, had not foreseen the end of the era. But something needed to be done about the walls, if you did in fact wake up: a phone call, a can of paint, whatever.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  All the Young Dudes

  LIKE THE ’68 COMEBACK SPECIAL, you were neither coming back nor was there anything particularly special about you. You surveyed the room, looked up at the glow of the television—Princess Di’s wedding, her suitors, smash-ups, some Jackie O and her new man footage, the aftermath, their descendants, that type of deal. Who were these new men? Other men. They were better looking than you, way better: younger looking by decades. Times were changing; you weren’t. You were still kind of fat, and death was coming for you like gangbusters. Still, it was years off, and that was all right.

  You were, after all, the sleep-it-off king. As such, this late morning was going swimmingly.

  You were alive. And that wasn’t as bad as it might seem to the people who knew you. You didn’t look half-bad after a night’s sleep. Passing the mirror you stopped—you’d be enough to keep a girl’s feet under the table, or her shoes under the bed for the night at least. You had made a few calls in haste, completely easy and not at all embarrassing with the aid of blue pill and white tablet. You’d dialed numbers from Alistair’s cell phone, left behind because it wouldn’t charge abroad. A broad was what you were looking for, a small one who wore a tuxedo T-shirt and silver tights or nothing at all. Or knee socks, or rubber boots and a hairpin and nothing else.

  There were rumours she’d been shacking up with someone young-ish in the west end. There were a few she’d been around and another possible guy downtown; and of course, some said she was with someone older. Had to be you, right? It’s not okay to steal a guy’s girl, even if you were her age, roughly, and she dropped by your place willingly. You’d done it a few times and made your peace with that. It was one of the universal immoral facts; most men of your era, epoch, could agree upon this. When it happened to you it was up to other guys or knockout women to say don’t think twice: I hated her; don’t think about her; so many shining little fish in the sea; what a slut she was. It didn’t have to be true; it was never true. You did think twice.

  You did think twice and it wasn’t all right. You thought a million times and the velocity of this cycle only became more exhausting. Being you, sitting there doing nothing at all, was becoming gruelling.

  When you finally found the key to Charlie’s place, under the potted plants on her stoop, you thought about opening the door and remembered the “crime of passion” trials you’d advised on. What dreary, drawn-out affairs they always were. You never came here, pardoning your own pun. It wasn’t risky, it was just ridiculously stupid. The daylight was broad enough that you could be seen, and as much as you tell yourself that Italian designer sunglasses block out the death wish of neighbour and foe, it was a bad time to show up unannounced at the home of a minor you wanted to murder or fuck, or both. But an amateur magician acting like a dick across the street would probably attract more attention. He was smashing his car window with a planter, which was also smashed. “Tactical ventilation!” he yelled, taking the heat off you and laughing as though it were not even a mildly embarrassing thing for a seventy-year-old man in a bathrobe to be doing. The side of his car read The Magnificent Rinaldo. You nodded and ducked your head into your collar for cover.<
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  The house felt mod bobo—almost always an indication of privilege gone wrong. Inside were a couple of guys cutting white shit with other white stuff. It looked responsible enough, baking soda and not cleansers or other home remedies. Cutting clean narcotics with dirty yellowing agents was the young thug’s best shot at ready money. These boys were suburban and heartless but wouldn’t be up on charges of negligent homicide anytime soon. Nobody thought it strange that you were walking through the pink-on-pink kitchen of the kid’s semi-detached. You were effectively invisible. It may have been the glasses; yeah, that was possible. You walked at a leisurely pace through a bright hallway labelled Warhall (you wanted to murder the prep-school fuck who did this). Girls’ faces were staggered down the length of it, and at the end you found four of Charlie. You recognized her in the negative. You kept walking and stumbled right through the fourth wall. The wall that you had so loved—you had entered into its “legal” minor monarchy, agreeing to and abiding by the terms of its contract: that it was there to protect you from your own reality. This was clear in the small print beneath your credit card number and expiry date as you signed in with the burden of the 3 a.m. hard-on. What the fuck, you might have said. But you didn’t. You spoke through the wall, from stage left:

  “Honey?”

  As though that was her given name. But then your screen name was Rinaldo because you were professional and married, so who knew, right?

  “Busy, hun.”

  She continued masturbating robotically, aimed toward the web cam beneath the security camera and to the right of The Young and the Restless playing on the LCD monitor hung on the wall. Stucco everywhere, like it was a Mediterranean villa, or more accurately, a tiny and equally sex-fuelled Tel Aviv Bauhaus-style bedroom, all stuccoed white-on-white walls and linens and silk sheets. You thought more intensely about this until a surprisingly painful sensation gave you cause to hold your nutsack in plain view yet again.

  “Get the fuck out of here you perverted old pedo.”

  That was roughly how the whole thing went down. This young dude throwing you out, cold-speak like a scorned woman. You wanted to ask, “Christ, did you have to say old? And perverted?” But not fat, that at least was a civilized touch. Those were unkind terms, hard or at least tricky to stomach; words that would require more pills; your balls, on the other hand, were soft and would need booze and ice, in any order.

  Back on your floor things were more forgiving. You should have been (but weren’t even close to being) ashamed of yourself when you got back to find her there, after your madman P.I. search. Charlie was waiting for you like a little angel, her hair cut with a mother’s stroke—it looked cheap and youthful. Parted straight as an arrow.

  “I missed you,” you may have said, and she definitely must have said, “Where’ve you been?” “Around.” Were those part of your reunion? Yeah, they were important to you as well. What you are clear on was that you smoked your way through a carton of American cigarettes together and talked about things of no consequence. Was she back?

  “Are you back?”

  “I am,” one of you probably said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Good Morning (Little Schoolgirl)

  IT IS CLEAR ENOUGH; most guys don’t want a good thing for another guy. And even clearer, let’s say doubly true, that girls don’t want a good thing to happen to another girl—especially if she is even slightly more beautiful and her tits stand even insignificantly higher. So at this point some of you may be inclined to want something bad to happen to our girl, or better still, our main man—as though this was all just about moral order. Decent stand-up citizens know love speaks the language of vagabonds and thieves. But, the narrator might suggest here, if you speak this language too, the exchange may not be so difficult. Charlie and Jules had been speaking the language fluently, thick as felons, at ease with depravity, and it had gotten them nowhere, or at least not to where they wanted to be most, back to their beginnings, to the study, the very secure room. Decadence is always bad for a guy’s health. Your analyst, spiritual Sherpa, drug dealer, faith healer and cab driver have told you this many times: decadence was heavy, sticky and corrupted. Asceticism, that popular form of denial you tried to sell yourself time and again, wasn’t sticking. Maybe they were all wrong. Was it possible? Apparently. It seemed as though they had never woken naked, bourgeois-casual, in the arms (or between the thighs) of a young girl, then just gone back to sleep in an empty bastard of a home, without reprisal.

  If you had forgotten anything about teenage sex, you were about to be reacquainted with its wonder. Remembering you hadn’t had full-on whole-hog sex with a fifteen-year-old since you were fourteen, blow jobs and fingering had kept you blue-balling your way through frustrating nights of repression and common sleeplessness for months.

  It was what you’d expect: sickeningly perfect and abstract fucking, panties to the side, biting, hitting and laughing in the face of what should have been looming and staggering consequences.

  Later on you would talk about the apartment situation—you didn’t, of course, approve of the drugs and pornography. Charlie admitted to nothing except for a photo spread in Naughty Next Door which she later included in a birthday card, a darling centerfold, wallet-sized, fitting perfectly behind your American Express card. A schoolgirl motif, the classic magazine porn shot, though it was typically carried out inaccurately, featuring a tanned-up thirty-year-old model whose gaping lower orifices you could shoot craps in. It wasn’t a stretch, Charlie said, fifteen at the shoot, to play the role of eighteen-year-old Annabelle Cherry of 234 Morning Glory Circle whose interests included babysitting and gymnastics. But no, there would definitely be no internet porn or drug industry guys you didn’t know about, she promised. That said, you didn’t feel good about where she was at. You’d get Charlie her very own quarters in the annex where she’d blend in a bit and be close by, if she liked the arrangement. She did, of course; she thought it was wonderful. You let these bits of affected affection go because they really were awfully charming.

  The two of you began to have a good time—properly. You went out openly, shopping, looking at apartments and drinking in hotel bars and hole-in-the-wall dives. Sometimes you would be needed, something would come up at work, a sex scandal involving three members of the law firm you associated with as clients number nine, seventeen and twenty-one, and as such you were needed in the office a little more. Aside from these instances of momentary real-life acquaintanceship you both managed your affair like it was the right thing to be doing. You relaxed and had brazen moments of happiness not always related to levels of toxicity or hormonal freedom and sexual release. You smiled a lot more. Neither of you were thinking about the twelve alcohol-fuelled dark days suffered by families in the northern blackout, the three charred babies of California’s wildfires, the seven kids shot down during math class in the high school not so far from Charlie’s new apartment, or the however-many starving children of Africa. (They were still starving, you assumed.) You weren’t that kind of guy right now and she wasn’t that kind of girl. You were shooting off blanks from antique revolvers in separate bedrooms, working your way through your pill stockpile and drinking from the bottle (bottle after bottle). Charlie wore eighteen pieces of candy jewelry to an art opening in the distillery district, which for some reason, or none at all, seemed to piss off the older set, the once-were-attractives who blew smoke out of their nostrils and applied lipstick persistently. You went out to a burlesque club and dined with Peter, who was desperately trying to act laid back in his stiff academic glad rags, and spent the entire evening trying to embezzle some affection from your girl, before finally tiring at about two. Neither of you seemed to notice or mind. You drank Tiki drinks from coconuts on the porch of a hostile working-class neighbourhood house party and woke up drunk in someone’s backyard. Things were going well. And when Nadine and the rest of the family returned, you hadn’t thought to greet their homecoming in any special way. You hadn’t thought of them at
all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Reaganomics

  IN AUGUST OF 1985 NADINE’S FATHER GARY BECAME ILL. His cancer had spread from lung to everywhere. To say he was pissed off would be both accurate and an understatement. He had been your go-to guy, intelligent, difficult, sophisticated and very good with people. You feared and respected him (while not agreeing with him on many issues), and quite possibly loved him—as young men sometimes do when an older, far greater man backs them. He did his best with the macabre death scenes, rolling his new wheelchair to the end of the dock without the physical capacity to get over the edge, falling on a knife and finally, and frequently, ordering you all to kill him. Gary was always fucking great at persuading people, especially ladies, to see his point. Before Nadine, with the backing of her sisters and brothers, stabbed him with a needle full of lethal morphine (which was hard for you to resist dipping into at that time) Gary said a few goodbyes and as a final point, left you all with the question, the grand au revoir: “Why does Reagan get to live when I have to die?”

  Whether this stuck with you because it was the final question from one of your very few real friends, because it was truly one the best days in your marriage or because it made you laugh wasn’t clear. But it did; it stuck. It was sticking like a rusty needle today—not life-ending stuff, but enough to make a man want to cry.

  Bern is dying was the look Nadine gave you. Fuck her. Did you mean that? Nothing was comprehensible. She was great with real life, adult life. She was good with blood and guts and phone calls, leaking faucets, taxes, adolescent “issues” and pulling the trigger, or the plug, opposite actions with equally fatal consequences. The shotgun approach seemed far less cruel, to go out in a hail of buckshot, blood and screaming; it was the physical representation, the full-colour response to the event that was taking place inside, the brutal and messy adieu. Was it fair to pull a plug, empty a vial? It was the sedentary desk-bound Mister Nobody goodbye: the big fuck you.