The Bourgeois Empire (2 page)

A GIRL IS A GIRL.
You’ve almost always known that. And it’s not simply spiteful machismo—you haven’t used the word “cunt” since fifth grade—it’s just that most girls really are the same. That need to be your first anything: Is this the first time you’ve seen
White Christmas
with a babysitter? Buttoned a nurse’s blouse with one hand? Fed a landlady’s fish? Tucked in a teacher’s sheets, hotel-style?

Of everything a girl had over a guy, it was honesty, predominantly, that kept the growing gap between the sexes growing. You’d just never come close to a girl on that one. A girl once told you, very plainly, that you were not handsome—that was the best advice you’ve ever been given, because it was true. Girls can be trusted to give it to you straight—they’ve grown cold-blooded from the scalding-hot truths that busted their darling little-girl egos long ago. The great ones have, at least.

And it
was
advice. Certain facts carry with them obvious choices and, delivered in any tone, force a particular option to present itself. This broad was saying, “You are not handsome, but I sleep with you. You have some kind of
it
.” She had something there. As with any
it
one always needed more, and now you had more. You had close to everything. And Charlie.

Without Charlie you really had everything.

But sometimes a girl isn’t just a girl. Charlie ignited in you a mugger’s eye for swag, the jailbird’s delusions of freedom. She was also a charming little nerve-wracking cunt who threatened the peace and quiet of your relentlessly rock-steady life.

It wasn’t her fault, she said. During her conception, a major American city was being destroyed. Six feet of it under water, and what remained was in flames or being pillaged. Media coverage blossomed in
SUV
s at the outskirts; police hovered in fat black helicopters, fearing the locals more than the weather.

The world would not be remembering a beloved sitcom star, syndicated
TV
legend Charlie Hughes, as it might have had he had the good fortune of foresight, and blown his brains out a few days—maybe a week—earlier. No, they would be earnestly shock-peddling, volunteering, doing community activism-ish things.

None of this
explains
anything about Charlie’s seeding, her beginnings. People weren’t having more sex, huddling together in the dark as they do after terrorist attacks. Or maybe they were, but that is not what I’m getting at. Nine months later (people always say nine but it is more like ten) a city was being rebuilt—celebrities and politicians were cutting things, lighting things, raising hands. Some had written songs, catchy death jingles. And then—you see where I’m going with this—baby Charlie is born. A woman named Leah Love gives birth under white-hot lights and a cocktail of narcotics. The baby comes into the world sleepy like her mother. Leah looks to the pink fingernail-perforated headlines on the
People
clutched in her left hand and whispers
Charlie baby
. She leaves in the night, taking her bag, the sheets, towels and whatever Demerol she can find in the room under a lighter’s guidance. She also finds her roommate’s morphine relatively easy to pack. She hasn’t left instructions for the nurses who scoff and knot together around the baby, who decide that there is no use trying with some people. And so it is written on the birth certificate,
Charlie Baby Love
.

Don’t infer that Charlie was a catastrophe since day one. Yes, she was a stunning example of society’s valuing physical beauty over character. She was also, however, reasonably well read and an absolute triumph over her inbreeding. It was her birthright, after all, to enroll in
NA, AA
—any of the A’s really—before her twentieth and to lose two babies to the Children’s Aid Society. Still, she was the finest kisser you’ve ever met, which brands you no less masculine. If anything it makes you even more manly. That thing about kissing, it’s spot on.

It’s Charlie’s fifteenth birthday. You’ll have to forget about e-mailing her for now. Block Sender actually—close your laptop and find matching socks for your on-the-mend garden-party bullshit.

TO FIND SOCKS, OR ANYTHING ELSE
you might want to wear, it would be absolutely necessary to leave your bathroom, your office, your room. You must go downstairs. Usually, in the early morning, it was safe. You could get your coffee and, when you could smoke without being hassled, a pack of cigarettes and some strike-anywheres from above the laundry cupboard. This was not morning, though; it was most definitely early afternoon. Therefore it could not be considered safe. “The family” had become a single, homogenous unit, occupying the same space in your mind—in the world, quite possibly. When distressing occasions of unplanned proximity occurred there was not much to say. You always said
something
though. You were not someone who ignored your family the way some guys do. If you could walk through the house as the invisible man, life would be closer to comfortable. But the younger girl-child always heard you or the sounds your more aggressive habits make.

“Hi, hey.” She says something of this nature.

Why not say the same kind of thing back?

Why not say something else?

“What’s this?”

Don’t close your eyes and make an expression that can only be read as anguish—cut and run, there’s still time.

And just as you swivel and begin to walk away, imagining she had not heard you, she answers: “I’m doing paint-by-number. It’s my own thing; I draw something and section it out with a black ballpoint pen and then I randomly add the numbers. See?”

She motions toward the patterned sketch that threatens the cherry-stained table beneath.

Does she want an answer? Is this an okay time to opt out of further discussion? Better be safe.

“Good stuff.”

“Yeah. So I insert the numbers arbitrarily and then I add colour depending on this number and colour legend I made.” She’s pointing to the bottom of the paper, at what looks like the legend on the early world map hanging above the highboy.

For Christ’s sake, that’s both so dull and irrational it demands a follow-up.

“Why?”

“It looks cool,” she almost whispers, deep in concentration, without looking up from the lacklustre, mostly water watercolour.

“But you are the one who
made
the picture. You
must
know, even subconsciously, the variables in the colour-number scheme. What’s the point?”

She looks vaguely confused. “It looks nice, right?”

And now you see there really is no point continuing. “Tell your mother I’m working all afternoon.”

You slip away. If it were not for the aging soles of your beaded leather slippers (which are not yuppie exoticism, as native art by definition cannot really be deemed “exotic”—besides you’ve had them since your terrible twenties) scratching at the hardwood, it would have been a classic invisible man maneuver. You think about turning back to say something more. That particular piece of furniture was given to you, to both of you, as a wedding gift. It is irreplaceable.

Who gave it to you, you wonder as you slip up the staircase, a heavily burdened man in a pilled robe and moccasins?

UPSTAIRS
. The closest to thing to asylum you can attain. Not John List solitude—people may still be moving, making noises below. But there is a comforting degree of sound- proofing and a rather handy vestige of the previous and, if workmanship is any indication, unequivocally superior, century, in a functioning key-lock door. Unsafe in an inferno, they say, but safer for everyone, really, fire-safety aside. It wasn’t as though you were doing horrible things; it was simply a matter of etiquette. You were extending privacy to the entire household, a gesture that kept everything running A-okay. There are lines you do not cross: needles, bestiality, hugs, kissing untidy girls, relations with relations (no matter how close or distant they may be).

Staying within the lines had become increasingly less difficult, as the lines were ever-changing. Age, for instance, mattered less and less. It started with pay sites, those uninspired pros working old, hard cocks to grey death. And then, the evolution: the unfathomable scope of torrents unfolded, click after melodious click. Who were these girls? You never asked. But how old? Yeah, maybe you asked that—it just wasn’t clear. It became meaningless, the lines had blurred. Was
barely legal
25
or
16
? As their moral guidelines altered so did yours. It was a mutually beneficial relationship, right? This dialogue you had was all right: “Find me someone I’d like to fuck”—and, blip!

A curiously weak blip at that.

That served your needs mostly. But there were times when you’d like to talk to someone about something, the commissioner of pornography, someone who knew the whole deal. Especially today, you’ve taken the time to search for amateur porn, you don’t have all the fucking time in the world and yet you don’t have the stomach for 14
y o has sex with older brother
and maybe that’s your problem. Makes you think there needs to be some kind of advisory board for what passes as amateur. This clearly was not it. The couple moves from place to place, unrehearsed? You guess it was possible. When did your sex life become so static? It seemed to start and end in the same location lately—lately being the last ten years. Perhaps it was unrealistic to believe a man could be at the top of his game after so much time, so many years with the confinements of refinement—the wife, the silk ties, the furniture, the things you didn’t want to damage, things you were careful with.

Were your own parents expected to slog off a bang between breakfast and brunch? No, they were not. They weren’t even expected to know what the
Times
had to say that
week
; they were not expected to get involved in anyone else’s business but their own. And your parents had each other in their pithy existence, which was
something
. Your parents were still married the last time you saw them, not so long before their death as rumour had it. They had two children before they were twenty-five and raised them in a small village in northern Toronto, without incident. Then
you
are born, into a family who does not expect a baby, your mother being forty years old and past what she (and maybe you) considered the “child-bearing years.” You are born quietly into a quiet family. You don’t cry, they tell you—maybe because you felt it would upset someone. What you learn about silence is taken from others: getting anything done means it’s a necessity. What you learn about silence is that it isn’t about what you’re not saying at that moment, but what you’ve always wanted to say or—for a long time, probably, and at this rate—never will.

You were brought home from the hospital in an adult towel and you slept in a bed in a small room and not a crib. There was no crib available. It was probably given away a long time ago. You might ask, what is the point in remembering? As you do when a memory so crudely and violently hauls you back into that district—a panelled landing maybe, a carpeted staircase—where someone calls out telling you not to forget something that you will inevitably forget. A district where your seedy heart is threaded—with a fine but tough string—to everything else around it. (Everything, even that which it hates more than anything else.) Can you escape? You have escaped, haven’t you? You might look down now and notice, among other things, that you are not ready. And how hot the room is getting.

IF THIS ROOM DID CATCH ON FIRE,
with the computer jammed and not turning off, no matter how many times you
Ctrl-Alt-Deleted
or how firm and steadfast you are with the on/off button, would you burn with it? Do you hope your robe abides, drape yourself over the screen? Hope a testical doesn’t drop aside, remaining evermore (God help us) your younger daughter’s first sighting (you’d given up on the older) of the saddest of male anatomy, the cowardly half-formed unit of masculinity, keeper of life—the balls? Yeah, you guess so. And what would they say of your body after some lean
VFDD
kid hacked through the oak door to revive you?
There was a middle-aged man grotesquely guarding his
LCD
screen
? That’s the best-case scenario. It could be
fat old man
, or
heavy-set half-naked guy
, or
out-of-shape, middle-aged, spindle-legged . . .
There was nothing particularly
great
that could be said. Your insides, though, they must be all right, right? An occasional Scotch bender (though this was much less feasible since your surgery) and a smoke here and there, but mostly things were on the up and up—the cost of living, you know, is high: doing shit you don’t want to do, including eating things you didn’t like, exercising in ways you didn’t enjoy, and abstaining from whatever vices made you feel, momentarily, okay about the world.

You had an awfully fine naturopathic doctor ballpark it one afternoon, and she thought you could live past seventy-three. At the time you went into a ruthless depression about dying before
100
, but right now, as the room gets hotter, it seems golden, that seventy-three. Inside you should be all right. What about the heart, the stress and lack of sleep? Charlie—her legs alone! Your heart probably wasn’t anything to write home about—the word “clotted” comes to mind. That wasn’t the heart though, was it? The arteries. But the heart, still: fat, hair-trigger, coagulated, foul. These were stored adjectives; you weren’t just composing them on the fly. Once, five or ten years ago, when you were still into making it work, being a better man, your new-age psychologist asked what your heart would feel like, how it would smell and taste. You hoped it would taste gamey and you said so, but you thought others would say it was tough, overcooked, dead stock. That’s not what she’d been looking for. She wanted it to be an orange with cloves piercing its brawny myocardium, a candy apple with a tiny wormhole bored through its core. She was, I think we can all agree on this now, a
bona fide
nutcase.

Since then it’s been frank analysis, a neologism that, to you, meant ultra-clinical psychiatric treatment, and an aggressive prescription-med regimen, off and on. Most recently very
off
.

Less embarrassing than being rescued from your own office with a visible torrent storm freezing up your screen, you find yourself waking twenty minutes later, without injury, still mildly scraping at the door, the remarkably unscathed door. A mild heart attack? Possibly, but more likely a pill-less panic attack, something that could get you a new scrip, something that could, for the moment, be swept under the Persian rug.

Of course, you stupid cock, unplug the system. It should have been obvious. But you had trained yourself in the art of the ever-ready lie, the at-all-costs cover up, and you were good. Usually. The thought of being “caught” at anything, even a pale lie, was unbearable.

One crack and the walls would surely cave in.