The Bourgeois Empire Read Online Free Page B

changed—you hadn’t. Men like you were not built this way; you had only limited options, and they never involved vegetarianism or retreats. The options were work/sex/money/leisure (the leather club-chair, tanned-and-boozy version of leisure). But things changed, yes, and maybe you
were
a little different—maybe you had been misled, conned; maybe you too were young and dynamic and happy, even healthy? Charlie, the catalyst, the cataclysm—the jewel in the crown of your miserably lucky existence. Maybe you were—was it possible—in love?
    Nadine was sharp, intellectual, and you would never say anything to the contrary or listen to any similar kind of slander from any woman since Barbara the Talking Bush. But Nadine had been conditioned, primed by the order of daytime television personalities. She decided against surgery and used the money you had given her to fund a macrobiotic/spiritual/holistic/earth-mother rip-off. These women were cruel and manipulative, as only women—let us be frank—can be. They stole Nadine’s contented psyche. You may be thinking that’s what Tolstoy said seven years before the revolt, the revolution. But Jules would say, maybe the peasants were happy. (What a dick you might say here.) Maybe seven years later the world wasn’t so enamoured with its happy peasants and so they were, by necessity, different people. This was the proviso, the clause built into our future. It was unfair and a dirty trick at best, but you were not cool anymore. And as for Tolstoy’s masses, their mirror was telling them different things too. And, as you know, things changed. The world told Nadine she wasn’t doing enough, that her years of study and travel were inconsequential after years of mothering and wife-ing. Mutually exclusive, these awful women convinced her. “Do more,” they admonished, “because you can”—a mantra eerily similar to the “be-more TV icon” your girls talked about on the phone after class each day. The purpose of this show, the sovereign monarchy of modern womanhood, was vague—guests brandished delightful stories of being pummelled to the perimeter of life; how they single-manicured-handedly wrestled their way back, made crazy money, wrote a book. . . . And then the close-up and the cry, a formula not unlike the porn of days gone by: the money shot the first discharge of tears; the post-lick the couch hug.
    Things would change again; darkness emptied into darkness no more. Your night light, your full-up pipe in a cold- cracked apartment—our girl Charlie, she inspired you. You would become a man. It would take some doing and some undoing but just looking at her bruised knees, a pictogram of the newly random universe she was letting you into, was enough to get you started, to get you fit.

CHAPTER TEN
Like Bridges, Burning
    THAT IT IS NOT OKAY TO KEEP YOURSELF CAGED UP in your office all day was the feeling you’d gotten from Nadine and, occasionally, one of the presumptuous and bluntly out-of-line children. When the door was forced open you didn’t bolt up, as you often imagined you would have to were such a thing to ever happen. The door was, in reality, heavy and took a moment to open, longer than they expected. You had calculated everything, knew the response time of every floorboard and bedspring and hinge in the house—and still you didn’t respond as predicted. No one expects you to sit in your office and remember shit all day, Jules. Not your family and not the reader. But no one with a heart would want to make you jump, a man in your state—oldish, hot, tired and in the throes of an impressive existential failure. The realizing, the change-making stuff. Religion, or in your case, the time-consuming consumption: narrow size six white tennis shoes for her, health food shops, omega oils, co-Q 10 , Botox and cotton candy number thirty-six nail gloss. Nothing expensive really, just constant enough to be consistent, the thing any observer would conclude was that thing