My wife has no guilty pleasures
She doesn’t feel guilty about pleasure. Not usually. Now and then, some grotesque little imp will crawl inside her brain from a magazine or a TV ad to tell her she’s not enough. To slap the pain au chocolat out of her hand, to make her feel bad for wanting something that was designed purely to be wanted. Usually, she’s better than that.
Her taste in TV, by my standards, is fucking appalling. Then again, I’m one of those self-righteous assholes who doesn’t really watch TV. If it isn’t some pretentious arthouse film or David Attenborough whispering at pangolins, I’m not interested. I could go the rest of my life quite happily never watching another plucky team of detectives solve another case, or some cheesy couple buy another house. The thing is, when you work in story, it becomes very hard to enjoy other people’s stories.
But recently, I haven’t had a choice. Endless renovations of our newly acquired hundred and twenty-year-old house have forced me to confront the fact I’m not twenty-two anymore. I hurt myself. For the last week, I haven’t been able to keep solid food down, and the massive energy debt that comes from that has forced me to stay on the couch in the evening, watching the fake lives of others play out in front of our glassy storm-coloured eyes.
Enter Georgina
Or Yor-yeena, as she pronounces her name in Spanish. A woman I never heard of until Netflix told me her show, I Am Georgina, was one of the top-rated on the platform.
Whoever named the program missed an opportunity. Georgina is Mrs. Ronaldo, the wife of one of the most famous athletes in the world. She’s also a model and influencer and whatever-the-fuck else in her own right, but let’s be honest. She’s only getting a Netflix show because of who she is married to.
On screen, a young woman with the kind of hourglass figure that only exists in cartoons and the fever dreams of criminally insane plastic surgeons. A woman with lips like a life preserver and tits like two Zeppelins and an ass that follows her around from one time zone to another as she raises the kids her frankly insane husband paid nameless women to have on his behalf. On the couch, me, sprawled in my jammies and staring glassy-eyed at a life I can’t relate to in any way.
This is the part where I’m probably supposed to tear into her. To say that she’s vacuous and talentless, that she only got to where she is by appealing to the base instincts of a millionaire narcissist.
After all, you’re not supposed to like the Kardashians. You’re supposed to want them to fail. To tune in every week with hatred in your heart and a burning desire to see them fail, or to find confirmation that you’re better than them somehow. Sure, they have money and power and extravagant luxury. But they couldn’t handle that payroll software you administer at work. They wouldn’t know where to start mudding drywall. The point of these programs is for you to both hate and envy the sacrificial non-virgins they parade in front of your slowly closing eyes.
I’m not Georgina. I have no clue what it would be like to live like her. And the glossy show she’s made focuses on the glamorous parts of her life. She’s going to Paris to have a dress made for her by Jean-Paul Gaultier so she can cut a dash on the red carpet at Cannes. Next week, she’s taking all her best friends for a cruise on her yacht off the coast of Monaco.
But I have a gift for recognizing darkness. In the wide shots, there are always a couple of suited men wearing circumspect sunglasses hanging around in the background, not doing much of anything. When she goes to visit the town she grew up in, a black SUV tails her car, straddling the middle of the road to look both ahead and behind. No one is more terrified than the rich. They have the most to lose. That’s why every throne has its back to the wall.
My wife loves garbage TV
But she does n’t buy into the hate. She might judge the occasional low neck or high hemline, but she actually finds Georgina quite endearing. For a young woman in a truly unique situation, she at least seems sincere. She’s married into unbelievable wealth and the gilded cage of celebrity, but she at least tries to be down-to-earth about it.
My wife knows that pleasure is nothing to be ashamed of. The world is mostly dark water and jagged rocks and sharp teeth. You should get pleasure where you can, knowing just how rare it is.
Don’t apologize for any of it. Neither fortune or misfortune. Not your strength, and certainly not your weakness. When her face is puffy with tears, when her makeup is smudged, when she is a million miles away from the glamorous life of some millionaire Instabaddie, I love her even more. And she loves me even more on those occasions, hopefully rare, when a damaged little boy shows in my eyes. When I’m weak and vulnerable and sprawled on the couch in pain. When all I can do is watch and say nothing.
I don’t want to be Georgina. Her life seems like a prison to me. Her money and her husband’s money will take several lifetimes to spend, but Ronaldo’s garage full of supercars strikes me as nothing but a monument to pure waste.
Georgina’s celebrity husband is mostly absent from the show. She talks to him on video chat when they confer about raising the kids. In one strange scene, she runs into him unexpectedly at one of the thousand airports their lives are made of. Every few years, she uproots her family to follow him to the next city that wants him, Madrid or Turin or Manchester.
That’s who she married. A man whose ego can warp space-time. A man driven to the point of obsession to be the best in the world at what he does. A man who’s achieved more in his thirty-seven years on earth than any hundred of us will achieve in twice as long, and is still not satisfied.
And Georgina has to sit there in a designer dress with her hair slicked back and her makeup working like candlelight in front of a mirror to give her the face of another person as she tells the camera how thankful she is for everything she has. I hope she means it. I hope she believes it. Because I wouldn’t trade my shitty house and damaged body and rotting brain for anything she has. Not even close.
I felt a little better today
So I went outside to see what the sky was doing. The wind was racing the way it often does around here, pulling frail clouds into shredded napkins at the end of the party. A fistful of sparrows was racing the wind down the street. And as I watched, one sparrow turned away from the rest. Turning his head into the wind, he closed his wings and dropped rapidly, darting away from the rest of the flock until he vanished from my sight.
I’d rather be that sparrow, a frail and anonymous creature at the mercy of wind and weather, than any millionaire’s wife. If nothing else, my enforced bout of TV watching gave me that.
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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.
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From The Good Men Project on Medium
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