The Bourgeois Empire Read online

  The Bourgeois Empire

  Evie Christie

  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

  It is perfectly true that life must be understood backwards. But philosophers tend to forget that it must be lived forward, and if one thinks over that proposition it becomes clear that at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it backwards.

  — SØREN KIERKEGAARD

  I have a good heart, but I am a monster.

  — JEAN COCTEAU

  Contents

  Cover

  Imprint

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgements

  Richard, My Man

  Charlie, Baby

  Household Commerce

  CEO, T&A

  Ballpark Figure

  High as a Kite

  Bloody Heaven

  The Bush Era

  Health Punt

  Like Bridges, Burning

  Dead Ringer

  Angel and the Hired Hand

  Yellow Brick, Goodbye

  All the Young Dudes

  Good Morning (Little Schoolgirl)

  Reaganomics

  Death Blow

  The Other Half

  Precision Handling

  Get Back

  Glasnost

  The Third Girl

  Acknowledgements

  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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Richard, My Man

  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 TVs 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 RSVPs, 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.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Charlie, Baby

  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 SUVs 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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Household Commerce

  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?

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CEO, T&A

  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 wea
k 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.