The Bourgeois Empire Read Online Free

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.

CHAPTER EIGHT
The Bush Era
    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