The Bourgeois Empire (6 page)

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.

“What should we do?” You were surprised by your own voice. But speaking seemed the far better option, if quietly speculating on how to say something was at all unhealthy for your souring ulcer-prone gut.

“I don’t know yet. Wait, I’d say.” Nadine was thinking, loosening Bern’s collar.

“Take it off.”

“Yeah, I suppose, it just seems strange.” Nadine was hesitating and taking her time the way we do when we are doing anything at all for the last time. She was a person who cared about this kind of thing, she would wear Richard’s wedding ring, moving it down the line of fingers, from the left hand to the right, year after year, until one year it disappeared, you didn’t ask where. Likewise she couldn’t stand to look at the auto dealership that had your first family car for sale on its lawn, after the ends finally met and you could upgrade to an Alfa Romeo. (What a machine. Weren’t you the man in those days?) And, because it was Bern, you appreciated the time it took to get the collar off.

“He’ll be more comfortable,” someone said. And on you went with this kind of small talk, frozen in your furious grief.

There was an hour or two of this and then Nadine decided to drag the turntable and a stack of
LP
s into the room and you convinced her to smoke cigarettes, a marital
coup d’état
which now allowed you to chain smoke with impunity.

It wasn’t a sexual thing, lying on the floor (with the dog dying between you), smoking, changing the album when you remembered a better one. It wasn’t sexual; it was life during wartime. Everything of value is eventually hunted down and stolen or killed. This was the great truth of the human experience. Bern was lucky, what you had thought of as a flaw in the evolutionary process was, as revealed to you now, a fortunate failure in acquiring the biological rights to access consciousness: the unparalleled buffer. You reached in your pocket and found your own luck, offered Nadine her own Lorazapam, which she took, with a “Christ” or “Give it here.” Either way you both relaxed a bit and benefited from the flattering special effects of twilight—when everyone looks better.

IT WASN’T SEXUAL:
this was your wife, your home, your dying dog. But as I said, the lighting, the night. . . . Death—that maudlin slut—she got you every time. All the fear and anxiety and mother seeking—you always went to Nadine in these times. It’d just been a while, and so you rolled over Bern and lay on her stomach.

“You have great tits.”

“You’re stoned, Jules.”

She wasn’t annoyed, just maybe overtaxed, almost amused, brushing your hair back like she did with Alistair.

“I’m the same as always. I’m just commenting on your rack, which is nearly perfect, is all.” It didn’t need poetic shit directed at it either, it was the real deal and you said so.

“What’s wrong, Jules?”

“This whole thing.” You swallowed an oxy for your hand with the help of Nadine’s bottle of wine. “It’s bullshit. Bern? That’s not going to be easy to live with. But everything else. . . . Everything. Is this how you wanted everything to be?”

“I don’t know. No, probably not. I guess. You know I wanted to be a mother and to have a house and a yard and friends and a dog. Is that what you’re asking?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“What did you want?” Nadine had a way of laughing that was kind and surprising and sometimes made you feel like a self-indulgent dick.

“I don’t know. Something different. Not really better, just something else.” With this, the chemicals, ebbing toward blood-poisoning, were launching a malfunction in your genitals and sending you to sleep. If you had told Nadine you loved her and made a play for her breasts it would have been half booze, twenty-five percent narcotic and a few parts male vehemence and legitimate sentiment. In any case it was the first time you’d lay down to sleep beside your wife in a few years. If she had let you have a brief go at her bra, it was her own
coup de grâce
, the final hit you needed before sleep.

The benefits of your opulent Victorian renovation were many: the remarkable amount of unnecessary space, for example, allowed for endless privacy. The shutters, draperies, doors and your penchant for soundproofing materials also made it easy to skulk and sneak up on people—even when you weren’t trying to, when you were just going for cereal. It was especially easy to surprise half-sober middle-aged people.

At
9
a.m. your daughters and son were already looking down at you.

“Mom?”

They seemed frightened, shaken. You seemed to feel like you should be feeling guilty, ashamed. They seemed to believe in some perverse “goodness,” as though you should have turned into a eunuch after their births. Children are the absolute, unsurpassed royalty of the self-righteous kingdom.

“What’s going on? Why are you in here?”

It was the first time they’d seen the two of you together in the morning for . . . maybe forever. Rigor settling into Bern, dead soldiers lining the vacant stone fireplace, ashtrays overflowing on the dado rails. Albums, a beautifully crumpled Harry Rosen jacket and slacks, pill bottles and your good hand down the front of your boxers—all of these things may have contributed to the disgust and pity directed at you from above.

Nadine didn’t seem to feel the same way; she was tough and wonderful with the offspring. “We’re trying to sleep. . . . The dog’s dead.” Maybe she was just extremely hungover. Either way it sweetened her pot—any girl who let a guy have a lie-in was worth her weight in clean bills.

YOU HAD OUTLIVED YOUR DOG
and the “inevitable” breakdown of your marriage—was that possible? Outliving your filthy go at reductionism: finding those little parts that make up deteriorating manhood and milking the hell out of them. You should be in the late stages of a mid-life fuck-up, a mass exodus (separation, divorce and its expensive, cliché trappings, hot and dangerous places, girls and cars). But, as luck would have it, you had been living with the symptoms of this wonderful, bountiful illness all your adult life. It seemed a shame to go into remission just as a full-blown excuse for it all appeared, a cure for your ailing reputation. But what could you do? You’d spent the night with your wife and it was good—better than it should’ve been.

You don’t ask yourself, is she real? Is this her? Do I love her? That’s not the kind of thing a guy asks about his wife—a guy can roll over and pinch his wife anytime he wants to, she’s liable to be there most of the time. She wasn’t there though. You pinched the trillion thread-count pillow casing instead. It’d been a while since you’d had the occasion (or desire) to touch your wife and you were still approximately half-tanked. Maybe she did a lot on weekends? It was possible, everything was kept so clean and orderly—it had to be, in some way, partly Nadine’s doing, right? She sure as hell had been busy in the bedroom—a stack and sprawl of classics on her bedside table, dog-eared and ringed with what smelled faintly like some kind of gypsy caravan tea.

“Nadine!” You called for her from under the duvet, one eye slightly but intensely open, as though it would help in eliciting a response.

“I’m dying. Nadine? Nadine! Can you send some water up? Water. Nadiiiiiine.”

And you fell back asleep in the midst of a dehydration crisis, thanks to a first-rate, solid Deboers bed and half a Stella (then the other half).

It wasn’t that type of sickening life-altering love-lust. It wasn’t like Charlie—this was your wife. No, it was more the “everything is all right” variety soft-news item, the quasi-passion, the status quo—a little respite of order and substance amid the anarchic gale out to get you. It was agony at times, this longstanding guilt. Handling your discretion with indiscretions—that too was wearing. It was also good and saved your ass more than once. It could also be a safe place, a safe bet, better known as your marriage, or Jules and Nadine to foreigners and friends. And it made them feel all right, too.

Hangover energy was your stand-in for general wellbeing, but it bottomed out in eight hours. Best to strike while the alcohol was still metabolizing and take two anti-anxieties to help outrun the darkness de jour trying to catch up with you. They helped a lot with any psychological state actually. You didn’t have to pick up the phone before leaving anymore, you were paying the phone bill (and every other bill), picking up the tab for everything, even editing papers occasionally, though your legalese hadn’t impressed any of the drab thirty-something grad school dropouts in the English faculty.

And you didn’t have to drive your car. You could walk, ride a bike, but you weren’t a dandy, you were a man, and so you did drive. I’m just saying you’re a man so you drive rather than ride a bike.

It wasn’t your intention to blow anything, to blow a good blow. So you kept quiet about Bern, had a nice day; you were lying now—could this relationship become redundant, another long(-ish) term relationship that would blow up like a depressed first-year-university thyroid sufferer in winter? Yeah, you guessed, if you were not careful. A guy only has one real shot at love—any girl who has ever been married to a guy who lost his shot and settled knows this. She knows this and her therapist knows this, the young man she holidays with or the boxes of cupcakes she eats in the office handicapped lavatory, her online go-to couple or her six desperately dreary fag-hag gal-pals—well, none of them “know,” but they all sense it. “Female intuition” is apparently hardy enough to survive the hormonal imbalances of the modern (or maybe current is a more apt term?) woman.

Nadine was your shot at lifelong something; order and shared accommodation, it all added up in a numbers sense. She was seven days a week and she made so many thousand dollars writing or reading or doing whatever else she found interesting and low-paying. She bore three children and killed one father and one dog (she just helped him, the pills, like morphine helped him, and you chill out about the whole thing). She had kept a five-bedroom house, alongside one housekeeper and one gardener. She was your one shot at all this. Charlie was the rest of it. Hadn’t your first real girlfriend (Helen? Brunette, no bra, excellent kisser—these details you were sure of. Or was it Carol?) said you’d wanted
both
all the time? Never choosing just one of anything, not because you had trouble with decisions, but because you were a dick. It was clear she had something; you knew she did, but it was hard to choose between that which kept you safe and that which kept you happy—and tormented. Let’s say alive. Survival and safety—according to the Maslow Hierarchy of Needs, you
needed
both. It wasn’t even something you would try to explain to a girl because they would find all kinds of bloody holes in your reasoning and their sound logic would blow the pants off yours and then you’d start gaslighting and backtracking and from there you’d never get laid. Just go along and you’ll get what you need to get along with her, that was your M.O. And so you did get along with her (Charlie), all afternoon. And took a few pills in place of the booze that was beginning to take its own toll. And slept for another few hours. Normally you could stay all weekend if you were having a good time or could find a
raison d’être
: the Kissinger logic. He had been a great influence, hadn’t he? And as such you needed to protect your balls, which were doing pretty well and not at all blue (or black) anymore, and get home to your real-life life. Charlie was sleeping. It was in your best interest to leave her with some cash and a bottle of spring water (French) and to take a couple of cigarettes (Canadian) for the ride (“German?” you could hear your dead and moderately bigoted mother scold).

WHEN A GIRL WHO WAS NOT YOUR WIFE
was pissed up and pissed off you did anything in your relatively great power to un-piss her. Don’t let a girl bring you down, especially one you liked—keep the girls happy, that is Rule
Numero Dos
. And yes it was a global thing—things were about to fall (apart) as they do every so often. Gore, the kind you cared about, close to home carnage, hard news. Charlie didn’t like to wake up alone, pill-less (how had that happened?), so quickly. She was becoming dependent, almost to the degree you were dependent; it irked you, was no fun to deal with.

The only proof of this dependency was a message left on your (home) answering machine: “Alistair, it’s me, Charlie!”

So enthusiastic, you pictured a cheerleader with a sawed-off twelve gauge—and not a sexy Uzi jacked up with the hand that wasn’t holding the American cigarette by a young and perfectly jaded olive-skinned Israeli girl. No, this woman wanted to do some real damage. Probably.

“So, Chemistry? What’s with that? Anyway, call me back!”

What
was
with that, you might have asked aloud—no one was home, so it didn’t matter. And
shit!
your troubles echoed through the library, rattled around the piano, the hideously ornamented Tiffany-(un)inspired sunroom, and through the French doors where the colour scheme got calmer (because it wasn’t chosen by Rachelle, Nadine’s de facto “sister” and charitable cause, the goddamned nanny-next-door turned interior decorator thanks to a big money sexual harassment settlement). A calmer place to stop, take a fistful of pills and sit down on a garden chaise longue, Guccis in top defensive mode. You had a little girl to manage, a grenade whose pin had been pulled—the situation needed the force of your hand. It was a tight spot to be in, and you needed to be comfortable.

You hadn’t talked to Nadine—one of your daughters told you she was at a retreat, working with some kind of problem-riddled persons . . . writing stuff with them, for them? No, probably something instructional—but for shit money nonetheless.

And you hadn’t talked to Charlie, unfortunately. It would’ve kept you out of a mess. You would fix it up, she was one of the two things you did not want to choose between after all. This phone message was just her trying to drag everything into a tedious real-life almost break-up episode. Everyone watching knows it won’t happen, but it is scary at the time, isn’t it? You were wishing for an every-day-is-like-Sunday kind of moment. Charlie walks through the gate, you may have even still asked yourself, is that her? You may have. She was something, to be sure, dressed all in white, a phantom or angelic surge of youth. She looked carefree and prepubescent—more like a son’s friend than anything else.

“Hey kid, what’s the story?”

You played it cool, even if it was a stretch; we’re to be reminded here that the glasses counted for quite a lot.

“My story? I missed you. Isn’t that enough?”

She was laughing and walking . . . no, floating toward you like your own tiny angel.

“Of course it’s enough. Of course it is.” You didn’t ask why she had come to your home, or whether or not she’d known the house would be empty. You could only hope she had.

“I missed you,” one of you repeated.

She took your hand and gripped it like an excited child, pulling you off, away, somewhere, elsewhere. You were swept up. She was gorgeous and you were all too aware of yourself—a sick feeling. The pills hadn’t kicked in; the darkness was getting darker.

Fuck, did that friend of hers have to say old? And pedo?

But you were swept up, the pills would kick in soon and do their part, and you were handling your shit, insomuch as you were willing to go and have some fun or get into trouble just to keep it all
status quo . . . res erant . . . antebellum
. “Easy Does It,” as your
AA
sponsor’s van’s rear window told you every evening for two weeks when you were twenty-nine and sleeping with Annie C in the uncomfortable corrugated steel “back seat.”

Or, “tI seoD ysaE.” But you knew what it was saying: take it slow, man.

So instead you had fun. Went to the summer exhibition, didn’t touch anything (except our girl), watched the coloured lights blinking through a film of human grime and grease. You passed the time contentedly. You took care of business and it was a good business to be in—a fine post.