The Bourgeois Empire (7 page)

FOR THE SAKE OF ARGUMENT
let’s say a week passed. It may have been less—memory is always an unsatisfactory negotiation. A week of that, lying around and falling in love episodically, incessantly, gladly. Narcotic daydreaming, alcoholic nightmares, French movies, Russian books, triple-X porn and garden-variety nudity. Swimming—not steam-rooming which made you claustrophobic. The institutional tiling . . . it was a genetic response; your kind hadn’t fared well in such settings in the past. A sauna? Sometimes. But alone. It was a guy-like-you thing (you didn’t want to say it was an age thing). You had a very good time, and when Nadine was set to return you may have even considered, if only briefly, how to welcome her. You may have been eager—was that too much? But you were definitely at least kind of excited.

Nadine had already been home a few hours, however, before you even became aware of her presence. She was doing lunges with small five-pound weights to a Jane Fonda instructional workout tape.

“Remember when you used to have the Fonda workout on vinyl?” You could feel yourself grinning; it was good. Nadine was good. She wore her unstylish white Reeboks and a ballet bodysuit-and-tights combination. Guys have a way of noticing absolutely everything about a girl when they are in the infantile and obsessive stages of lust. It’s like diet-love, lighter and artificially sweeter. You noticed, but it was also what she had been wearing for the past few years—sometimes with leg warmers.

“I’ll be done in a moment. Do you need the room now?” She leaned forward toward the screen as though she were painting; concentrating on something of great magnitude, the betterment of her ass a byproduct of intense psychic labour, you supposed, or were meant to think.

“No. No, not at all.” You reached forward to touch her hair. It hung in a long ponytail, and you noticed how it had grown beyond its undemanding mothering cuts. How many years had passed since then? Say ten.

“It’s hard not to feel you up. You’re asking for it in that, you know?”

Nadine flinched as your hand moved in close—your dense, fat heart pausing, your gut dropping.

“Christ, Nadine.” You ran your hands through your still-very-there hair and thanked
DNA
, not God.

“You startled me. What’s going on, Jules?” She paused the workout tape and felt on the ledge above the speaker for the cigarette you sometimes hid for late-night syndication—reruns of something vacuous, which afforded temporary anxiety relief.

“It’s a shame I scare you so easily, Nadine. To be honest, I couldn’t wait to see you again.” You were trying to reclaim something and knowing that it was not possible made you pathetic. Yeah, you knew this.

“You’re smoking? That’s wonderful news. Fuck, I could’ve been smoking this whole time?” You made an effort at being charming, something beyond the rote civility.

Nadine sat, rested her elbows on a silk pillowcase. “Damn, are these beaded? Who did these? Ahh, Rachelle. . . . That makes sense.”

“You hate Rachelle’s decorating too? Is she using a Bedazzler now?” You managed to get a laugh this time. Things were looking up.

“What’s really going on, Jules? The kids said you were asking them for numbers to reach me. That you wanted to know where I’d be and when I’d be back?” She lit another cigarette and passed it to you, obviously not wanting you to keep pulling from hers. “Seriously.”

“I don’t know. You know? I had a good time the other night. One of the best since we’ve been married, wouldn’t you agree?”

“I had a good time. Bern died, but I had a nice evening. I woke up with a headache.” She accented the
head
and the
ache
and laughed a bit, a “let’s keep this casual” manoeuvre. You’d seen her do this before.

“Wow. You don’t love me, Nadine? Fuck. You know I never knew that?” You laughed too, not just
because
, but because it was the prevailing noise, the conversation had its own cadence and you wanted to fall in line. You kind of couldn’t believe you had said it and Nadine definitely couldn’t; she took a minute of serious smoking before responding, which was understandable.

“No, Jules. I’m not in love with you.” She really looked at you then, for the first time in let’s say a long time. She was serious and kind and intelligent.

“I didn’t think it would ever come up,” she said. She leaned in and pressed her face against yours. “I’m really sorry, Jules.”

The rest is history, you might say. When you don’t want to get into the blood and guts of things like this, a narrator needn’t drag it out.

It was over was all.

“FREEWHEELING” IS A RELATIVE TERM.
It suggests a certain degree of joy, acceptance, a carefree balls-outness. You supposed you were freewheeling now, but you’d also learned to protect your balls. You were moving without restraint now, and it was frightening. It wasn’t entirely necessary to hide everything anymore—and this proved to be a much worse situation than you could’ve expected. It left you responsible for yourself—what a dirty trick. You, left with your own thoughts, alone. “Unendurable” came to mind. Beating words into perfectly awful little thoughts was too much to bear, like a filthy joke about someone’s mom you never wanted to hear but couldn’t wait to tell, if only to get the dark matter off your freighted shoulders.

But you kept at it, thinking and remembering.

When you were a boy you asked God for a favour, just once. A Saturday afternoon, a please God kind of thing—let me be better-looking and richer than everyone in my class.

You’d heard something. A snide, even sarcastic, “Okaaaay.” And you could see now that it had been a lot to ask, but come on, really? What a dick.

You wanted all of it and couldn’t leave half to belief or faith. You’d earned that half over years of work, corrupting every executive functioning atom in your frontal lobe.

Either way you had decided you were not going to ask G-O-D for any more favours. When Charlie called, besides it making you happy to have a reason to take leave of your emptying home, you needed a friend.

“Come over. Something happened,” she said. And you did. And it had.

You took a copy of Byron Ferrari’s latest for the trip and, as a kind of novelty, said goodbye to the remaining family inside as you left, then drove the Audi to Charlie’s apartment, stopping at a street-corner vendor for some colourized carnations. Why not? Wasn’t it something a guy did if he liked a girl, you thought as you tossed four two-dollar coins into the fedora.

The door was open when you got there.

“It’s open, darling,” came the little girl voice, not at all being cool or funny, and you thought twice before you went up. You left the flowers on the bottom step.

She was sitting on the side of the bed smoking. She is now smoking, or lighting a cigarette, or putting one out at all times, you realize. And it was a stretch to imagine that this was the girl you were in love with, had been hanging around with. She looked twelve. Her face was red and swollen, her makeup cried off hours earlier. Her hair was little-girl tatty, un-styled and too long.

After sitting on the edge of the bed for a while thinking about when you should pick up Bern from the crematorium, you told yourself to straighten up and wise up. You pushed Charlie toward the shower. She was easy to push, so small and light and tired. You stood smoking, counting backwards to when you’d taken your last pill, wondering if it was all right to overlap a bit more today—special circumstances were upon you.

You waited, and then put our girl’s robe on her. She lay on the bed like a damp kitten. You brushed her hair, very much like you or your wife had with Beth when she was small, not yet three, when you still had aspirations of having a normal family. You’d actually still shared a room with Nadine back then.

You fell asleep beside Charlie and didn’t dream, which was a good thing. We all need a break from ourselves. You woke up only because the room became intensely quiet. You’d slept well. Charlie was at the end of the bed with two revolvers.

Ah, yep, that’s what they were for.

“I can’t give up my whole life, Jules.”

You weren’t fully awake but you could see she was crying and dangerous. That much was very clear.

“For fuck sake Charlie, I just woke up. Relax.” You were in no mood.

“I love you Jules.”

“And I love
you
. You know that,” you’d definitely said, moving closer on the bed until you were behind her. She had a gun pointed at her abdomen from the side and another gun in her smoking hand.

“I can’t have this. This is fucking nuts Charlie. That’s crazy. Do you think you can live through that?” You were raising your voice along with her now.

“Do you even know I want to be a writer or an actor, Jules? I don’t want to be a fucking hairdresser! I don’t want to go to fucking business school! I don’t want to have those shitty mom-tits and white socks and obscene handbags.”

She yelled and cried a lot, and in between all of that it was a good argument.

“You have no idea,” you told her, “I love you and I have shitloads of money and I need to start over as it is. It’ll be fine. And I promise you I will pay your tuition at DeVry or better,” you winked. She did not find you funny. She looked like she was about to shoot you now. So you took one of the guns—the one that was sitting idly as she fumbled for her own pill. You put the muzzle against her head. “Put everything down, honey. I’ll hold your smoke, okay?” You were being kind; you’d laugh about this in a gondola someday, when the girl had bigger hips but not-at-all shittier tits.

“Jules, I’m not kidding. You shoot me if you want to, but I’m not leaving this bloody house until I am bleeding from somewhere.”

“Charlie, baby, relax. You’re upset, I know.” You put your hands on her face and looked into her eyes. She was simply young and sad, just as she ought to be.

Then she fired against your ear. (It was in that area). She seemed sorry almost instantly. She said so.

It wasn’t her fault somebody had taken it upon themselves to hatch the most successful terrorist plot in North American history on that day—it was upsetting, you know? You hadn’t heard yet. You were sleeping and showering and listening to Roxy Music’s textbook album followed by newer and not-so-bad Ferry. It was maybe the frankest time in your life; you had made a go of it, even really “tried.” You thought of Gorbachev, the man, surrounded by women in fur hats at a press conference, when Russia was a great country, the mighty
USSR
, and not just a well-armed vodka exporter, and when all the great bands were still together and not dismal solo acts playing for the highest arena bidder. It was all on the table, balls-out. Which couldn’t be such a bad thing. Could it?

YOU WERE IN WEEK THREE OF YOUR COMA.
Your deep level of unconsciousness was good for your health in many ways. Insomnia, anxiety and fear were no longer a bother. No one was troubling you with questions, and it was probably fairly true to say that everyone felt very sorry for you. On the outside, people moved around you. You seemed invisible —maybe it was the tubes and bags and curtains. Nadine was likely in and out, looking after you as she always did. You would want to know if her wedding ring was gone—but I couldn’t say.

A magazine left by one of your kids might be of interest too. It read
Buna or Bust!
A sexy new Canadian reality show in which young girls and guys live the lives of Holocaust victims and perpetrators. In the press photo, Young Charlie posed stoically. What a melodramatic little bitch, you would probably think. She’s the third girl in, if you’re looking for her.

When they do the Glasgow Coma Scale test they may decide there’s a chance you will come out of this—wouldn’t that be something? As it stands, everyone thinks you were suicidal. You were found in your car, in the garage, holding the gun you were shot with, heavily drugged by your own hand after having missed a thousand or so appointments with your analyst.

Your wife had said some stuff as well.

Your timelines were becoming messy, but you had a good memory’s eye for the pretty things. It’s possible you thought about other times, eras, there in your adjustable, courtesy-of-
OHIP
-and-St.-Mike’s bed—about your circumcision dreams, all the shit that went down between Nadine and you and Richard. (You had argued for years about who left whom, and who still loved each other, and maybe more importantly, who didn’t.) It was possible you’d thought about the early days with your young children and a healthy Bern. That you’d wished you could’ve been different, how you’d never lived, with them, anyway, in the goddamned moment. How it was true, yeah. You were a bastard.

Or your parents. The bike they humiliated you with when you turned thirteen, its cheap chrome and rubber gleaming as you tossed it off the Bluffs so no one would see it. The unreturned phone calls and finally promising them you would bring your first child to see them and no, you didn’t in the end, all right? Of course you’d wanted to be different, someone else, don’t we all? But what could you have done differently? You’d been manufactured this way. Anything else was simply a physical impossibility. (Blame it on God, for not being there for you.)

You probably thought again about
The Magnificent Rinaldo
, the magic act your mother took you to when you were feral and raised by the knotty spruce suburbs that could hardly be called suburbs. Where had it been? The Bathurst Community Centre? All of your boyhood friends and their mothers were there; that kid who disappeared from his bedroom (it had a mural of deer in a forest—you felt bad for saying it looked like a “dumping ground”). What was his name? Lester! Goddamn him! The rabbit and hat, silk scarf and big golden box, swords, chains. The minutes before the lights went out:
This is for the ladies; shut your eyes, boys and girls!
Rinaldo, a man—you wondered if your father and this man were the same species—with a chest and sword and hairstyle. You opened your eyes. Could your mother feel your eyelashes against her palm? Your eyes were open. Rinaldo, breaking the chains across his chest with raw power, slashed at his trademark satin-and-velveteen pirate shirt until it fell to the ground, you assumed.

And his tight black pants which buckled at the zippers (for years likely)—they were gone, somehow—a pull string? Was it supposed to be comical? No. He brought roses to the women, some in his teeth. He came toward you and you felt your mother tense. Was he that disgusting? He was. Your mother was kind and accepted, saying, “Thank you, sir.” There’s nothing
about
Rinaldo, no charisma whatsoever, nothing that justified a memory. In the car ride you’d asked your mother why she had taken a rose from the man and she told you it was because “he was sad.” You’d told Nadine this story a few times over the years, drunk in bed over a hotel phone, fucked on morphine after an operation—times you couldn’t remember—and she’d listened. It would be easy to come to any conclusion listening to such an anecdote. And it was true that fidelity was an ill-tailored sports jacket, angry at the seams. It left you flush and annoyed (mostly at parties) and you were almost never unaware of it. But you could thrash from woman to woman and never be like Rinaldo, right?

First off, you didn’t drive a domestic car. You had really, really good hair. And finally, the clown had never known anything about true love—you’d bet your Montblanc on it.

It didn’t matter what love
really
was. It could be argued that you loved your wife all along; it could also be argued that you were a beautiful child of God, no matter what. But that was just more carrying on, wasn’t it?

Carry on.

And where would death get you, anyway? Where would it get you that you couldn’t have gotten yourself? Look at you now: a little glory and a bud of pragmatism snipped in the name of the great wild wilderness, life and the world let loose for a while—upon you, against you . . . All those bodies you’d known, those slender bodies, the resistance and the pressure, the dear limbs—and oh, the young girls.
Your
girl. The rest, the mad bloom of feral, instinctual stuff you should have known—those big treacherous minds you feared, the restlessness . . . How many nights had you been torn from drunken bliss, pinned awake with timeless ultimatums: marriage; wife-leaving; accommodation and accommodating?

Your wife never cost you a minute of sleep.

Was
this
love?

The aftermath was a place you could become comfortable in—you’d lived in the surge for so long. But everything had to end. Everything. (You’d heard this; supposed it true.)

In your previous awake-life-living you were hardly awake in your living, and it would be a bit of a joke to think things would change now. You had been a dreadophile, a noteophile and a lover of the bourgeois empire. Why change now? It was too late to stop. . . .

You may have thought about any of these things, or none of them, and other things, too. But these months with our girl—your minor love story—ironically, given how things turned out, left you feeling the least sore of all. (And yes, I know the comatose cannot feel pain.)

It was the most fun you’d had in years. You’d been the best of friends for a while. It was a first-rate kind of time.