The Bourgeois Empire (3 page)

A SON IS SOMETHING DIFFERENT ENTIRELY.
Imagine it—you hadn’t—someone like you, in a way, only enhanced, someone who usurped and made redundant, obsolete, your every move and breath. This is the natural history of the son. The rest? Categorically storybook, ball-throwing-and-catching bullshit. Alistair developed from a toddler into a man in a matter of moments. Your corporate years were measured like this: one year equalled five of other people’s years. Your people’s lives happening, in lightning-bolt episodes, at some distance.

So Alistair had grown into a man. He was “male” in the decent sense of the word— strong, lean, a perfect mix of Wasp and Semitic bone and blood and hair. Smart, funny, and probably “caring and supportive.” One of those guys, you imagined. He was never any trouble—meaning, Nadine never bothered you with anything about him in the evening. He was always busy and active, as though he were your mirror opposite, if such a thing existed, as though everything he did was a tyrannical blow thumping you in the chest and making you sweaty and nauseous and sad. His polite wave as he went out the door; his cheerful
See you there
that night could only be met with a
mm-hmm
, something that embarrassed you, and yet how could you help it? You hadn’t been sleeping, you weren’t yourself, and something (everything) about him bothered you. You didn’t want to go, remember? You didn’t want to go.

Of course you remember, you remember it almost every day.

A school fundraiser? The details were not clear. Something like this was going on, a variety show is what they used to call them, a talent show. Alistair would read from his naive and, according to everyone, otherwise pretty good short story; a fat Ruskie kid dances (they are not called
Ruskies
, says Nadine); a mildly entertaining stand-up act that includes a lot of material that upsets the crowd, the faculty, the exchange students and the mascot. The mascot overheats and passes out during the cheer that explodes after the many
PC
apologies. A group of desperately obese and ill-clothed teachers and some choice look-alikes from the student body perform a hopelessly pathetic version of a popular hip-hop song. The level of activity, how agile these people are, mesmerizes you. Will they be hurt, you remember wondering. Will they be hurting later tonight, pointed quietly at an episode of
Millionaire
, over Lean Cuisine dinners followed by a whole low-fat cake, something sticky and processed and demoralizing? After the next act your memory becomes a queasy mash-up: listening to a one-man play about bullying, the one man looking incredibly bully-able, driving home, almost hitting a dog or a child near your driveway, going out to smoke and giving Nadine some tax files. The dead end and the girl. And the high wire.

No one does the tightrope circus spiel anymore, except maybe high-grade specialist strippers. But the most extraordinary thing about the highwire act, aside from the many safety violations that had to be occurring with each step, was the lack of overt stripper-esque sexuality. A girl with brown hair hanging to her shoulders, longish bangs over her eyes, a blue T-shirt and boyish flood-ready jeans, bare feet, not looking particularly focused, not looking as though she has any real need to get across the rope. At one point you are certain she will walk back the way she came and sit down on the ladder until everyone leaves, but she was merely going back for her gun. A pearl-handled sidearm like the one holstered in buckskin with jade studs on her other hip. In the middle of the rope she fixes her hair, continues, takes a pronounced bow then exits stage right, pointing her gun at whoever was waiting for her. Why had she even needed the guns? She had it, raw power (you) in the palm of her hand.
What a theatrical little bitch
, you think now as you remember it once more.

It would be a lie to say that night was the first time you’d driven your Audi to the dead end of the cul-du-sac to jerk off in private. It was just that particular hour of the evening, a muffled drone of familial activity, distractions. Even the faintest sound would blow your five minutes of manly behaviour. The street was dark and lush, the interior leather coolish and uncomfortable. For the next week you eyed the gearshift and dash for evidence of your happiness while a woman, wife or daughter, spoke about something next to you.

There was a sense of excitement about everything, analogous to your early years when a female cousin showed up at a party and then ended up spending the night, a cousin you never knew you had and never knew you wanted to fuck until she walked in the door, then for the rest of your visit you were consumed with only that—there was only so much time. But more than that, the girl had something. She looked like a girl who could roll a perfect cigarette, who would teach you how to concoct the perfect speedball, who would read in bed for half the day and smoke the other half. What made you nervous about her? She was a girl after all, and weren’t girls mostly the same? She was man-cool, was that it? The women you knew had all been decidedly uncool. They were other things: smart, weird, sexy, funny—but not cool, at least not this calibre of cool. Cool had been everything to your generation, it was steadfast and definable; it was physical. What did it really take? Jeans? Good hair. Boots. Your body, in its actual, natural state. Music, parties, personality (almost any would be sufficient). Drugs. Alcohol. Now it seemed as though cool was immaterial, vague and in constant flux. It was at times the opposite of itself and made you think,
makes
you think:
How does anyone get laid on the straight anymore?
Cool was lost and the only man who ever pulled it off anymore was maybe Bruce Springsteen. Don’t even try, your mirror has often reminded you. Please don’t try. It won’t end well.

You can usually duck in through the back door, mumbling something about Bern and a raccoon, brushing at your pants, and be free, slipping away in a cloud of “I’d better get out of these clothes and back to work.” When you get to the bathroom mirror you notice your breath, unusually spirited and strong, refusing to give in to its natural enemy, you, your body, your habits. It’s all too wonderful, a good-ish feeling. Virility? Post-masturbatory hormonal contentment?

No, it was real. Could it be real?

Was she real? She was real, the girl standing over your toilet. Not standing—
straddling
. A better word for what was happening.

SHE’S THERE IN YOUR BATHROOM WHEN YOU GET HOME
, naked from the waist down. (Always a surprising way to encounter someone.) Is she shoving something in? Remembering is half the heartache: a tampon and blood, an unsurprised-looking young girl, pantless. “Hello” is the way you began, the manner in which you were, as a man, born again. “I didn’t know anyone was here.” It went something like this. It went like it did in
1982
when your friend Chris Morris was hit by a car—worse, a VW Rabbit. Fuckers. A slightly less than active man was transformed, performing something close to a back flip. Landing and then moving, almost jauntily, to the side of the road. The shock mechanism: everything inside bashing against itself, the body and the brain trading places. The body, for once in its life, taking over, rationally, beautifully, performing as one might expect it to if one still had expectations, mature as it had never been. The brain, frozen, retarded momentarily: always trying to outstrip, sending its hundred or trillion signals, protecting itself from its warden, the madman, you.

This is what Chris had said in
1982
. Or, as you remembered it, this is what was happening. Shock mechanism, meaning you didn’t cry or try to fondle the naked ass before you, close and accessible as it was. You apologized, swivelled, reached into your drawer for the Scotch, wondered if young girls drank Scotch, wondered if this was a young girl. You still did wonder that: How young?

It was her.

“I’m Charlie. Sorry for the crime scene. I found these tights in the hall cupboard.” She waits for your response, holding up the aforementioned tights with a crooked almost-smile.

“And I’m taking someone’s panties. They are cotton and bright-white-white—so I’m assuming they belong to an elderly nurse who may live on the premises.”

She smiles as though she imagined you’d need to stop yourself from breaking into laughter.

But this is where you may have potted your fate, being strong and composed and stern, something that betrayed your every male cell and was in keeping with nothing you’d done before.

“I think we both know those belong to my wife.”

“I
am
sorry.” The emphasis was more than a little insulting coming from someone grinning so hard.

Charlie was, and remains, the kind of girl who could make you viciously frustrated in a matter of moments with as little as a slight modification in her expression. Luckily. Luckily because otherwise you may have been provoked to plead with her to stay the night—the menstrual situation noted but overlooked as an undeniable yet compelling (entertaining?) snag en route to sexual intercourse. The conversation went on like this, poorly, muted. Both of you aware that you didn’t want to alert anyone else of your presence together, this private and violent intimacy. Things progressed, naturally and climactically as all great fights do. It was, the narrator seems to be saying, a shocking and unexpected bit of fun in its sheer and unrestrained aggression. The past twenty years of your life had convinced you that passive aggression was the accepted and appropriate modus operandi for humanity. Lovers and friends hadn’t been known to blacken each other’s eyes as of late, instead they administered the equivalent, modern beat-down, with costly and tedious legal proceedings. Charlie was (and continues to be) asking for a bloody lip at least twenty-five percent of the time. She offered, liberally and gladly, the promise of actual physical and emotional transactions—evidence, as it would soon and often become clear, that she was the one you wanted.

“Because you are in what is as good as my own fraction of this house I think I have the right to ask you to leave.”

“Oh. Okay.” Still smiling; more teeth.

“You’re an asshole.” Had you really said this? In hindsight, you were of course much cooler. Aren’t we all?

“Girls, traditionally, are not referred to as ‘assholes,’ you know. Bitch, cunt, that sort of thing is more in keeping with the normal, or modern, vernacular.”

So you
had
said it, clearly.

With this, her response, your heart was stolen, a thumping bloody mess.

Cunt
, cold and Germanic. She used it beautifully, technically, all the while remaining courteous in tone, never compromising charm for vulgarity or vice. Perhaps this is where other girls hadn’t won your loyalty or interest even. Their embarrassment with every single non-maternal or career- or lifestyle-centric thing they had done. It left a relationship lacking. And those who did not operate with shame as a motivational pal behaved in a demonstratively harsh and masculine manner. It was all so unbearably dull. Not so with our Charlie, never a moment’s rest, never a moment without the sense of a consequence approaching, just off in the distance. You feel it don’t you? The next weeks and months are the only ones worth remembering, if the
800
plus e-mails and hundred or thousand hours of instant messaging were a gauge of self-fulfillment, love, exultation. Transcendence? (That was your boyhood coming through, and it wasn’t really true.) Let’s just say it was a good time; the girl was wonderful, brilliant, really something.

THE NEXT TIME YOU WOULD BE WITH HER
was almost as awkward, after so much
IM
, e-mail and web page exchanges. After so many hours jerking off to the never-ending supply of photos. She took photographs of herself constantly, everywhere. Was it a kind of autoeroticism, or sexual sublimation? Still, it was a happy reunion. Because she was Alistair’s classmate, Charlie found it difficult to come around. She was fond of the boy, although she described him as both sad and a keener.

Being such a keener, he had occasion to organize and promote extracurricular school activities. It made your eyes roll, politely, in that it was at least a silent complaint.

Charlie made her way up to your study during act something, scene something of Shakespeare’s something or other. She stood in the doorway while you sat, busying yourself with forceful longing. She came to you—which was best, because you couldn’t get up. She sat on your lap and poured a drink for each of you. You relaxed, felt looser. Your throat was still tight, so you just drank without talking, far too aware of her ass on your crotch, wondering if it was damp—the fabric between you. You put your hand down the front of her skirt. It was very much as it had been in your adolescence—there wasn’t a clear understanding of what you were allowed to do. Her pussy was smooth, probably shaved. The young girl thing to do, apparently. She must have noticed your noticing. She said, “Did you expect something else?”

Was the kid trying to embarrass you?

“A big seventies bush? Is that what your girlfriends have?” She thought she was being very funny, waiting for the laugh riot.

“I don’t have girlfriends. No. Not at all.”

“I can grow a bush. I had one until I was thirteen. Is it a sign of virtue for men your age?”

“God no. It’s not. You’re really very mouthy in person.”

“I’m just having fun. Aren’t we having fun?”

Of course you were. You were having the best night of your life.

It was difficult to continue; she’d broken your concentration, your hard-on was losing its character, things were just not right. The position you were in, in the chair—it was solid wood, a beautiful Sam Spade kind of thing built for grown men of business—wasn’t made for fooling around. But the panties and the stockings? They were doing a fine job. So you drank more, smoked cigarettes and talked. You wouldn’t be her first time; at twelve some lucky hockey player had enjoyed that honour—a botched threesome between her best friend and her best friend’s sister’s husband. The other girl pussied out and left Charlie to her own devices: bland and mercifully short-lived factory-town fucking. She told you it was okay but not anything unique, and that “He left his hat on, which was a good focal point.”

Not being her first was A-okay with you.