Evie Christie - The Bourgeois Empire

A GIRL DOESNT MAKE YOU INTO A MAN , surely, but her presence, the thought of her, made you want to become a man again. Charlie was a catalyst. Nadine couldnt do this; Nadines wiles were diluted by an onslaught of pseudo-feministas in couture-fitted yoga wear. After Nicola, your second daughter, was born, you put out for a mom-jobthe tummy tuck was all Nadine was after, but you were trying to be generous. A fine surgeon, recoup time, live-out nanny (you had your limits). Nadine had always had a great body, a killer ass as more than one of your friends had pronounced it, and good, even better than good, tits. But after the babies and the mothering, things had changed, dropped. You still noticed other men looking at her, leaning in to talk to her at parties, holding her hand a little too long after a handshaketheir standards, it stood to reason, were lower; they didnt know shed been even better, before. Nadine was lively and energetic, she was, you remembered, a skillful young mother and housewife and she made it work, painlessly, each day, a magic trick none of your friends gals had ever been able to match.

You felt guilty about the fling you had with Barbara, Peters wife. Barbara the Lush. She talked about Nadine while she showered, as she dressed. She smelled like (not of) dirty martinis, new car and menthol. It was the eighties after all; the affair lasted only a couple of months. But shed gone slightly rabid when you broke it off. You might have been worried, but she seemed too drunk to properly compile her facts and present them to the involved parties. Barbara was not a careful woman and she served as an aide-mmoire about the importance of a healthy, happy wifea good mother, a well-kept lady of the house.

Times changed. Nadine had changedyou hadnt. 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 differentmaybe you had been misled, conned; maybe you too were young and dynamic and happy, even healthy? Charlie, the catalyst, the cataclysmthe jewel in the crown of your miserably lucky existence. Maybe you werewas it possiblein 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 womenlet us be frankcan be. They stole Nadines contented psyche. You may be thinking thats 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 wasnt 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 Tolstoys masses, their mirror was telling them different things too. And, as you know, things changed. The world told Nadine she wasnt 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 cana 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 vagueguests 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 apartmentour 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.