The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  To her surprise, the ring even fit her finger.

  The wedding was held at City Hall during lunch, the groom’s side consisting of Karen Winslow; Jasper’s handicapped sister, Tina; and Sven Johanssen straight from the wharves, his hair heavy with salty Bay winds and impregnating the clerk’s office with the smell of burned oil. As for the bride’s side, Esmerelda’s mother hadn’t answered her calls, so Lakshmi handled the flowers and Slippy Sanders gave her away and three of the regular CopySmart baby-oglers/coffee-guzzlers provided tear-drenched anecdotes afterward. Marat was well behaved in the presence of awe-inspiring police officers, while Robespierre wandered off after the ceremony to be located, after a harried address over the PA, trying to sneak into the mayor’s office. This first-ever bout of misbehavior even made the paper, a whimsical story in the Examiner published largely because of Robespierre’s newsworthy name.

  “A toast!” Slippy lifted his glass at the postceremony luncheon at the Market Street Grill. “To Ezzie and Jasper, Robespierre and Marat! May your shared lives bring you happiness and prosperity!”

  “A lifetime of love,” Karen Winslow added. Again she looked shorter, Esmerelda realized, stunted by at least an inch, her newly acquired daughter-in-law surely having something to do with it. “An eternity of joy. God bless.”

  Lost in the aftermath of handshakes and marital aphorisms, way more wine than usual, a disappointingly Zoog-less dessert cart, the newlyweds slipped out to the sidewalk for a couple minutes of air. Standing ten feet apart and stupefied by the speed of improbable events, Jasper gazed back through the window at his younger sister’s neckline as Esmerelda leaned against a parking meter and computed the temporal implications of a lifetime living with and fucking this guy. Jasper was sixteen years older than she and could easily die off in the next couple of decades; standing in the street and touching strangers all day wasn’t the healthiest line of work. But she hadn’t been doing herself any favors, even if she was down to 350—all that weight dragged on her heart. All told, she realized, her sentence ranged somewhere from ten to life.

  Not even the sparkle of compressed carbon could assuage the pain induced by those overdue calculations, and by the time she returned to work she was sour and beat.

  “Why the long face?” asked Slippy. “This is the happiest day of your life, Esmerelda. You’ve got your soul mate and father of your kids locked up, a stone on your finger.”

  “It’s just a lot to . . . get used to.”

  “Overwhelmed, eh? Never thought I’d see the day.”

  A rap at the window: Jasper waving, blowing kisses. Esmerelda nodded, dumb.

  “There he goes,” Slippy observed. “A good man, a decent man. A bit silly in that outfit, I’ve always felt. But your man. Celebrate him.” He handed her an envelope. “Happy wedding day.”

  Years later, when pressed, Esmerelda agreed it was conceivable that Slippy’s unbalanced wedding gift had been an honest mistake, thrown off by an urgent phone call or a pressing personal problem that had forced him to make out the check under duress. But her far more favored theory held that the omission was intentional; a reprimand of Marat’s occasional tantrums, rudeness, and standard little-boy behavior that was occasionally frowned upon by their customer base of nitpicking mothers; an imbecile bachelor businessman figuring that financial punishment could make a little kid grow up. Either way, the “Pay to the Order of ” line of the CopySmart corporate check inside the flimsy unsigned card contained the name of just one of Esmerelda’s offspring, and it was with confused celebration that Esmerelda trudged over to the bank, opened a money market account in Robespierre’s name, and deposited the sum. She unveiled her hypothesis to Jasper after work.

  “What’s he got against Matt?” Jasper asked distractedly. “He’s just a kid. Rough around the edges, sure, but he’s kinda cute and making money for him besides.”

  “I know it, Jasper, but what are we going to do, complain? It’s a very generous gift.”

  Agitation crept into his voice: “The nurse said he’s got karma, got it in loads. Well that’s fine and good, but I bet the boy would take ten thousand bucks over karma any day. Wouldn’t you?”

  Esmerelda refrained from discussing the intricacies of karma, as her matrimonial sellout didn’t bode well in terms of just deserts. During the ensuing silence she smoothed over her muumuu and cleared wax from her ear, trying to remember the words to a punk song stuck in her head, when she noticed Jasper smiling oddly at her, an eerie absence. “Where are the kids?”

  “At my mother’s house.”

  “And Sven?” Alarms went off.

  “Out. All night.”

  “It’s quiet here. I’ve never heard it so quiet.”

  They listened to the surf roll at Baker Beach, wind easing through brush, puttering car engines. Jasper could almost hear his cock harden, bristling against his underpants, stretching out the elastic waistband.

  He slipped his arm around his new wife.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Jasper?”

  “It’s our wedding night, baby. I’m about to make me some love.”

  He said it staunchly, no room for equivocation. “How about a shot of vodka or something,” Esmerelda stalled.

  “I’ll do you one better.” He produced the same cardboard box from their critical encounter thirty-four months earlier and popped it open, revealing two-thirds of the Zoogman’s Zoog. Even freezer burned and stale, Zoog sent Esmerelda’s pulse into overdrive on sight.

  She ate the rest with her hands, breathing through her nose. She fell through the floor into lakes of warm milk and Mozart, while in a parallel galaxy Jasper shredded her muumuu and ripped off her panties with his teeth. She laughed when his penis was unsheathed, but fell mute as he felt out the right crevice and proceeded to pound. Practice made for significant improvement, she noted, and spirited moaning commenced in earnest.

  “That’s right, baby. That’s how daddy does ya. My girl. My baby.” Jasper was rotating his hips, hitting all her spots.

  “Have you been watching porn or something? I didn’t know you could do it like this. That info—unh—might have changed the equation.” She reached to squeeze his ass but settled for a tired wave instead.

  “Naw, baby, just finding my groove.” A crooked smile spread over Jasper’s mouth, his snaggletooth incisors jutting out preposterously.

  Minutes of floor-thumping passed, sweat slicking the linoleum, dishes clattering in kitchen cabinets. Esmerelda was upgrading her karmic balance sheet and considering moving into an advanced, nonmissionary receiving position, when a possible coital consequence ambled out from her brain. “Jasper,” she mumbled, “don’t let it fly down there. Two’s already more than we can handle.”

  “Unh-huh,” he said, quickening his pace, his face a stack of hard lines and concentration.

  “You hear me, bud? Don’t bring your magic potion into my house.”

  “I gotcha,” he said, and broke out wild, screwing in spin cycle, whirling with animal noises, way more motion than she’d thought possible. Not a bad ravishing, Esmerelda thought; she even felt somewhat sexy. She listened to his grunts accelerate, watched his brown neck sprout veins. It was hard to move.

  “You like that shit? Aw, yeah. Eraser dick, nothing, this the hog for you!”

  Jasper’s frame shook; his neck craned back; his eyes fluttered; his lips wrenched open. She heard the mush of his grinding teeth, forced air blasting from his mouth and nose, involuntary ecstasy. It was too much, much too much; she could accept Jasper as a husband and father but not love, not yet, and she wasn’t real comfortable with sex either. And she definitely didn’t want more kids. She kicked out reflexively, her feet meeting his thin chest and cracking through.

  “Yaaaaa!”

  She pushed on. Pain hammered Jasper’s middle. He gasped. He slipped out.

  He spurted.

  “You fucking retard!” Esmerelda hollered. “What the fuck were you trying to do? Ever heard of a jimmy hat? Cause I do
n’t have the funds or the patience to deal with more of your hell spawn.”

  Jasper opened his eyes and saw semen curdling on the floor. Confused, disgusted, in pain, and still a little turned on, the path of least resistance won out: he stopped breathing.

  “Seriously, is your brain installed? Do you own stock in abortion clinics? Christ almighty, that was a close shave. Dumbass.” She pushed him away and rolled onto her side. “I’m hitting the showers.”

  It took Esmerelda a few minutes to work her way to her knees. From her elevated vantage point she had a direct view of Jasper’s ashen face, his still chest, his bones piled lifelessly like discarded coat hangers. She heard Jasper’s body thud to the ground and looked over to find his face ashen and still, his bones in a messy pile like discarded coat hangers.

  “Oh no. Hell no.” Propelling herself forward with her toes, she slid on her belly to Jasper’s broken, nude body. “I’m not raising these kids by myself, bud,” she whispered, “not a chance.” She rolled him onto his back with a few rams of her offensive-lineman shoulders, propped back his head, pinched his nose, put her mouth onto his, and blew into her husband’s trachea and jumbo lungs.

  It was the first time Ezzie’s lips had ever made good contact with Jasper’s, the first time he’d breathed her air and tasted her tongue. There had been other kisses, or attempts at them, the latest of which had occurred at City Hall just ten hours earlier and came off to their witnesses as more of an accidental near-brush, not even touching—but this was different; this was life.

  Jasper would never forget how a first kiss, even at the age of forty-eight, could shock the life back into a body.

  A trembling man came back to Stillwell Road. “Jasper, what happened?” Esmerelda asked, her voice tremulous, her concern genuine. She could tell he needed a calm word, an act of love, something to mollify the worm of disgust burrowing through him. But Esmerelda had done a lot of work putting out, then crawling over and saving his life, and she felt she’d earned a jab or two.

  “That’s some lethal stuff, your devil juice,” she squawked. “Do us all a favor and try not to ruin the universe with more from where that shit came from.”

  Jasper did not release another syllable, but his eyeballs spoke encyclopedias, palpitating, flooded with ferocious blood. Gone was the whiff of respectability he’d felt that afternoon while filling out the paperwork to marry the mother of his children, the calm solidness of marble pillars and laws, the comfort of establishment. Ten hours was all he got, enough time for a big lunch, a half-drunk afternoon at work, and one lonesome kiss before this inexorable torching, the scourge of her lips leaving busted ribs, a battered ego, uproarious anger, an unprecedented urge to skin kittens and sell minors into slavery.

  He grabbed at his earlobes, then walked to the door and kicked it down. “What’s the big deal? Your eyes are gonna blow,” she ventured, but by then he was gone, naked, broken breastbone and all, hobbling down the steps and into the woods, and then Esmerelda’s ears picked up the splashing sea and the undulating foghorn, and she stopped to savor the quiet.

  No children, no husband, no roommate, no kids. A girl could get used to this.

  Then she heard two small cries, pins sticking thumbs. An extreme suck of air. Shadows spiking through the woods, deleting colors and shapes. Alone in the apartment, Esmerelda washed off in the shower and sat on the couch in the dark, squeezing a blanket in her hands, knees hopping, watching for purple pits of rage embedded somewhere amid the Presidio flora.

  Her state of karma, she realized, was exactly as deserved.

  Then the special services van was honking, Karen Winslow was hauling in the kids, and teachers and CEOs were lining up for copies and binding.

  “I’m going for a croissant,” Lakshmi said at 7:30. “Jasper around? He had a 50 percent-off coupon yesterday.”

  “Not sure. You know where he should be.” Esmerelda’s face was frozen solid.

  Lakshmi was back in ten minutes, mildly annoyed at paying full price. “I walked up and down the street looking for him. The guys at the bus stop haven’t seen him. Everything cool?”

  Esmerelda scanned the empty store, wishing for a customer, a sudden electrical fire, a mild earthquake.

  “Esmerelda?”

  Lakshmi took in Esmerelda’s empty face, ice-white, motionless but for a flashing eyelid. She recalled it was the morning after her wedding night and walked quickly back to the workroom, inquiring no more.

  That night the sheets on Jasper’s bed lay empty. Esmerelda whispered invented prayers to the kids perched on her belly, running out of words after three or four lines, running from please and forgiveness to Christ fuckall and goddammit to hell and back, the curses sticking to her tongue like salt. In the morning she was up off the couch an hour early, and, with a quick-fire feeding and dressing, she managed to get to work on time. “BA-WAH!” Marat demanded as she settled in at her desk. He slipped on a discarded donut box on the floor behind the cash register and began to cry.

  “I’ve got some water right here, Marat. Hang on.”

  “BA-WAH BA-WAH BA-WAH!” The punches landed on her kneecap, but with Esmerelda’s protective flesh-jelly, they barely registered.

  “Wheelbarrow,” Robespierre explained.

  Spirals of wheelbarrows bombinated through Esmerelda’s head, spinning in paired trails like DNA helixes and awash in a blizzard of coupon confetti. A ticker-tape memorial parade; her marriage laid in state. Then two bangs in her head and she slumped, pissed, and exited the room for a few hours.

  When she woke up in the back office—these short bouts with unconsciousness were a semiregular thing now, and Slippy Sanders knew better than to slap his prime producer off to the hospital again: “Stick her in the recovery room and have candy ready,” he’d ordered, “she’ll be a mess after missing lunch”—Marat and Robespierre climbed onto her with hot kisses, leaping onto her moonbounce belly and papering her body with their American-cheese-and-apple-juice stink. They asked long-winded questions about the nature of birds and told pointless jokes about peanuts and sang incoherent songs over terrible, rambling melodies. The wheelbarrow appeared completely forgotten.

  Maybe everything would turn out OK, she hoped.

  Beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, a man fell into a hole a decade deep.

  Sven Johanssen, Jasper’s crane-operating roommate, celebrated his wedding night exile with a case of Nordsjö Gårdsbryggeri beer on a bench by the beach. He went straight to work, endured nine hours flouncing inside a metal can, made his weekly rounds of the strip clubs, passed out in an alley for a few hours, and headed back to the docks for another shift. Reeking of cat piss and yeast, he was downright asinine by the time he got home.

  “Jasper’s gone, yah? Save deh suitcases for later,” he told Esmerelda while he hacked at a tuna with a Chinese cleaver. “Too-night is a part-y.”

  Stuffing pizza in her mouth, Esmerelda grumbled her preference for a quiet evening alone.

  “Gurl, hate to break it, but yer not on the lease. Yer vote’s not counted, and we guhn have fun. Join up, if deh spirits allow.” He salted the tuna and shoved it into the oven. “Heck if I’m not goin-a need more fishes.”

  Twenty minutes later, four lasses from Linköping rang up, bearing jars of herring and plates of butter cookies. Johan from Jönköping arrived with a tub of head cheese, then “Shark Bait” Ingemar with his left arm chewed off waded in and challenged the four lasses to an arm wrestling match, which he lost intentionally but not before cupping some premium Swedish boobs. They were followed by a parade of Malmöans and Göteborgians and Stockholmians and even a few Finns mixed in, swilling liquor and recounting recent fights and packing into the empty space created by a man lost in a hole. They downed grog, roast korv, and all kinds of large-headed fish, throwing scraps out the window for a couple of roaming dogs. Esmerelda watched wearily from the couch, a forlorn lump smothered by Roxette’s Joyride album.

  When the children were tucked away in Jasper’s old bed
room and Esmerelda appeared to be asleep, a Viking hat materialized, bottles of Svedka, Sven’s collection of Madonna-themed shot glasses. Someone suggested they all get naked. “Gustavus Adolphus commands you to consume!” cried a tall redheaded man, who, between his hair color and leadership qualities, resembled the Swedish king enough to invoke his authority. Through a newspaper bullhorn he ordered the first round of shots and disrobement, creating a heap of socks in the center of the living room. A fuzzy hour transpired. The pile of clothes rose steadily, absorbing caps, pants, socks, flannel shirts, undershirts, empty bottles, liquor-tinged pantyhose and brassieres and male thongs. A tannic glaze smelted over lips and skin, sloppy eyes reframed proportions, the feel of flesh grew significantly more scrumptious.

  Esmerelda awoke to a shaking in her belly. She generally attributed such disruptions to hunger and reached for the carton of emergency malt balls she kept under the couch. Her hand brushed a sweaty foot, then a stiff nipple; she opened her eyes. “Shark Bait” Ingemar was naked with three lasses and a lad; Johan was jamming it into what looked to be either a midget or a grossly underage girl; kitchen utensils were inserted into shaved orifices; fair hair and pale skin interlocked in a frighteningly Aryan human jungle gym. The sofa shook with their hectic movements.

  “That explains the tummy trouble,” she muttered. But somewhere south of her stomach a dime-shaped hub flickered to life.

  Sven Johanssen tiptoed around the room, sipping vodka from a sealskin flask and coaching. “Knulla! Dat’s a way to land a harpoon, yah. Open up, gurl, make it easy. De man bushed from work all day. Use deh hips, thrust forward, bang! Kjell, argh, no, no, no! No teeth, use tongue! Ay gurl, why no playfriend? Waiting for me? I finish deh bottle, I come see you. OK?”