Life with Helen the past 10 years has been pretty good. It wasn’t always easy, and I’m not proud to admit that I had to beat her occasionally in the beginning. Of course, we both understood that I only beat her because I loved her and wanted her to be the best woman she could be. And I’m pleased to say that she’s been a fantastic wife ever since: she keeps a spotless house, she always has a hot dinner cooked for me when I get home from work, and she always makes an effort to look good when we’re in public together (which required the liberal use of concealer at times in the early days!). I haven’t had to raise a hand to her in years. She’s also a fantastic mother to my 8-year-old son, Isaac, although he has developed a weird facial tic and the school counsellor says he’s too scared to use the bathroom by himself. I’m not worried - It’s nothing a bit of schoolyard bullying won’t fix eventually.
Lately I’ve noticed several worrying trends in Helen’s behaviour. She's been spending too much time on her iPad and I think it’s exposing her to some dangerous ideas. Some days when I get home the house isn’t as neat as it used to be, and last month she seemed less enthusiastic about performing her scheduled “wifely duties” (every second Friday night, when I get home from after-work drinks with the boys) . The other day I walked in and caught her watching Modern Family. She quickly turned the TV off, but we both knew.
Salvation came last week when I found a copy of Cory Bernardi’s new book, The Conservative Revolution, lying in the gutter next to a train station. Now, I’m not usually much of a reader, but phwoooaar! What a book! It is no stretch to say that The Conservative Revolution is a literary masterpiece, easily on par with “The Meaning of Luck: Stories of Learning, Leadership and Love” by Steve Waugh. It confirmed everything that I already knew about the world as well as some things that I suspected: The “gold standard” for raising children is a marriage between a man and a woman; abortion is a “death industry”; being gay or Islamic is simply wrong. Bernardi seduces the reader with tales of a simpler time, when Australia was uniformly white and women possessed neither the skills nor the social status to survive without a male breadwinner. The 1950s were indeed a golden age and the natural end-point of societal evolution, with all subsequent change being a perversion of the utopian ideal. If only Helen understood this as clearly as Bernardi and me, then she would know her place once again.
Last Saturday night, after Helen had gone to bed, I had an idea. I put my copy of The Conservative Revolution on the coffee table, positioning it carefully where I knew she’d see it when she got up to make me breakfast before church.
I awoke on Sunday with a frisson of anticipation, but upon going downstairs saw that something was wrong. Helen was sitting on the couch playing with her iPad. The book was in the exact place I’d left it. She wasn’t even wearing a Sunday dress.
“What the hell are you wearing?” I asked.
“My new jeans. I got them online last week. You like them?”
“But you always wear a nice dress for church…”
“I’m not sure I really feel like going to church today, honey.”
My mind was reeling and confused. “Wha… what did you make for breakfast?” I stammered.
“Oh, I’ve had some cornflakes already. I thought we could make our own breakfasts this morning.”
With unthinking masculine instinct, I grabbed Bernardi’s book from the coffee table and smacked her across the face with it, hard as I could. Knocked her clean off the couch. Thankfully, Bernardi’s manifesto is in paperback form and comes in at a concise 176 pages, so the damage wasn’t too bad. Still, she had a nice bruise coming up around her left eye. I noticed Isaac peeping in from the hallway, wide-eyed with fear. “Go to your room,” I snarled.
After a few moments, Helen stopped whimpering and looked up at me from the floor. “I’m… I’m sorry, darling” she said. “I’ll put a nice dress on and make you breakfast.”
“You might want to do something about your face. can’t take you to church looking like that.”
She smiled wanly. “I’ll get the concealer.”