The Bourgeois Empire

ECW Press

ECW Press

Copyright © Evie Christie,
2010

Published by ECW Press

2120
Queen Street East, Suite
200
, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M4E 1E2

416.694.3348
/ [email protected]

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

library and archives canada cataloguing in publication

Christie, Evie,
1979-

The bourgeois empire / Evie Christie.

ISBN 978-1-55022-935-6

I.
Title.

PS8605.H745B68 2010 C813'.6 C2010-901258-5

Editor for the press: Michael Holmes / a misFit book

Cover design: David Gee

Text design: Tania Craan

Typesetting: Mary Bowness

Printing: Coach House
1 2 3 4 5

The publication of The Bourgeois Empire has been generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada, by the Ontario Arts Council, by the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit, by the OMDC Book Fund, an initiative of the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.

PRINTED AND BOUND IN CANADA

For Guy

Thank you to my friends who have read and encouraged (or discouraged) me. Thank you again to my wonderful editor Michael Holmes and to ECW Press.

Thank you to my family: my parents, Karen Christie and Bill Clarke, Mark Christie and Jeanne Brown; my brother, Caleb Christie, and my sister, Rachel Christie-Nichols.

To my daughter, apple of my eye, Harper June, all of my love. To her father, Aaron Allard, my gratitude for your imperial friendship.

THE ROOM IS SPINNING OUT OF CONTROL.
No, the car, the car is spinning out of control. Wake up, you cocksucker—“cocksucker,” even in your best dreams—your life is about to end. Head tilted up between downy teenage tits, waiting for the wreck on the gorgeous flat-screen, anything but this, he slides the head of his penis over her clammy vaginal lips and onto her stomach. He doesn’t think: Who is this girl? He thinks: Please God let me wake up. Never come inside a girl who is not your wife. Never penetrate anyone but your wife.

When you met Nadine she was twenty-one and married to her father’s friend Richard. You’ll never be like Richard, no one will, Richard is the man, don’t think about Richard when you come. You were taken with her, staying up all night together doing blow off the White Album with two
TV
s on pay-per-view channels—not even sex, just that . . . just talking, and maybe sex as well, but afterwards. You talked and Nadine said she thought sex was the act of penetration—you heard her say that. And Richard, he could have been your father, a better-dressed successful father, a father that could, let’s face it, never exist. He took you under his tailored wing, introduced you to some nice ass, which at the time was forty-something mind-blowing ass usually, and an all right job with decent money. Then you cut his grass—don’t think of Richard.

And then there’s God, that antisocial fuck, who wakes you from the dream: the one act of grace in your entire God-fearing life. There is no girl and no four-hour McQueen afternoon double-bill, and in this life you always come inside the girl. You have never been in love with Nadine, it was just sex like anything else, and then a job and money—and money is good and so was Nadine. In this life you don’t even want to choose between reality and dreams, either will do, and that’s what it is, a hemorrhaging of tits and ass and gold-leaf
RSVP
s, sticky bills and place card dinner parties—the oppressive lack of love between you and Nadine that, odds on, everyone around you senses, and that’s why you have less friends sending idiotic get-well cards with silly costumed cats, or dropping in on a Saturday breakfast with their bloated children of dubious parentage. They are noticeably absent this year, they slowly fly away to vacation homes and tennis courts you’ve never even seen, buzzing a waspy hatred that really only ever reaches a passive-aggressive hum.

Either nightmare will do: you used to want to wake up as anyone else . . . a labourer in the Negev with no phone number. Jenny took you there, that aggressive lower-middle-class goddess who gave you crabs. You might have fucking murdered her if it hadn’t been for her predisposition to pinko political brilliance. She could talk and it was good, better than it should have been. But then eventually you would find a way out of the desert and back here and life would be the same except you would be worse off, having gotten used to something else, something better by any middle-class standard.

The thing to do was to get along, quietly, doing this. Paying for stuff and standing with the kids for a photo in front of a new vacation home and having sex and working and doing non-needle narcotics and having online sex that makes you feel sick for upward of an hour afterward and taking the boat out sailing with Bern the German Shepherd and reading anything long and arduous, anything ascetic enough to make reading feel utilitarian, not arty.

Everything should stay as it is, or you might lose everything, and that’s how it is for everyone.

Today was a day for getting along, liver-healing, a cocktail party and a faster wireless connection that tolerates renovated turn-of-the-century walls and allows Candy Cane (or Coconut?) to become a part of your afternoon ensuite bathroom caucus. Life is not good, but it feels good,
on occasion, baby
, is what you might type.