The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  Her secret was simple: butter and lots of it, the high-fat unsalted stuff from Jamison’s Milk & Dairy up in Cotati, where three Jerseys worked exclusively for her in a barn she paid for out of her own pocket, eating vitamin-infused feed, drinking purified water, getting daily rubdowns and baths twice a week, and milked solely by hand while manager, lead milker, and deliveryman Camden Jamison played country tunes on his harmonica and listened to baseball on the radio. The butter arrived in San Francisco in a shade of light blue with the consistency of wet clay, until you warmed it up or used it for baking.

  Then—zap! Within months of Esmerelda’s hiring, Incognito was swarmed. Most diners skipped dinner entirely and ordered three or four twenty-dollar desserts with accompanying elaborate specialty coffees, lounging for hours amid politicos, socialites, and awestruck out-of-towners while the butterfat absorbed in their bloodstream. Incognito raised prices, expanded the seating area, paved a new patio with heat lamps and abstract sculptures, but it was still impossible to secure a reservation with less than three months’ notice. Movie stars got turned down at the door, a cabal of reservation specialists was dismissed for accepting bribes—even the president was forced to wait without calling ahead, though he was thrilled with the cookies speed-delivered to him at the bar. The place was burning hot, a national keep-sake, a pastry Mecca and investor cash cow, and Esmerelda received a correspondingly ludicrous raise.

  She was apotheosized in Gourmet, Bon Appétit, The New Yorker, The New York Times, the fawning articles accompanied by large photographs of Esmerelda in the kitchen modeling evocative silk blouses and short skirts without pantyhose, chestnut hair strewn lazily over her apron like unraveled extension cords, seductive flour splashes on her cheeks. For a six-month period she was a mainstay of second-tier tabloid features, her string of flings with reality-show contestants and pro hockey players raised to sizzle level by a trail of trashed hotel rooms. Proposals flooded in to launch her own restaurant, join a national morning show, license her desserts to a prominent grocery chain, even go on a world tour. And the three Jerseys in Cotati barreled ahead with the world’s most sublime butter, the exact location of Esmerelda’s barn a secret to everyone except Camden Jamison, who was paid handsomely and was incomparable in his ability to ditch jealous rival restaurateur tails on his ride back to the farm on Highway 101, that hefty milk truck of his surprisingly nimble on the open road.

  Esmerelda, at the age of twenty-two, was an enormous star.

  She mulled her options, met with handlers, consulted astrologers, flipped coins. After eight nickels in a row rolled off the table and bounced off her sneakers, she decided to go for a run to clear her head. Outfitted in a plum-colored Lycra bodysuit and matching sneakers, she sneaked out the restaurant’s back door and cut west through the tree-lined lanes of Jackson Square, up the hill through a warren of Chinatown alleys, hooking left for the Stockton Street tunnel straight to Union Square. She swept past the towering department stores and swung onto Market, cantering over the even terrain and through the city’s needle-ridden gut, coasting past the homeless festival permanently parked outside the library, eluding the shaky stream of a man urinating into a trash can, and speeding up significantly when a pair of swarthy pantsless banditos gave floppy chase for half a block. She accelerated through dead blocks and slight rises, drove through the Castro’s bobbing gay boogie. When she saw Twin Peaks Boulevard she turned onto it, why not, she was on top of the world and had earned a spectacular view; there was metaphysical poetry here. Halfway up she thought she heard a quiet clinking noise behind her, but her sideways glance detected only the typical line of turista rental cars puttering uphill at half the speed limit.

  She ascended through the residential area and beyond the tree line, the road breaking out into a spectacular view of San Francisco and all the Bay Area, bleached buildings and fairylandgreen crags and iron cruxes across the bay connecting kingdoms, the panorama held to just less than perfect by the bracing gale pounding in from the sea. Needling through a few final turns, she fired out into the flat summit, the planet hanging on either side of her, the wind wild across the city’s canopy. As she sped into the overlook she heard the noise again, a series of clicks and a light hiss, and found a lithe little cyclist pulling in behind her outfitted in a spotless banker-white uniform complete with a long teardrop-shaped helmet and aerodynamic shoe covers, his bicycle shaped like an intergalactic phaser.

  He gave her a rectangular smile framed by a ferrety Fu Manchu mustache. “Good evening,” he said, his eyes basting her with cool blue.

  Esmerelda spat viciously in his direction, then headed over to the water fountain for a long gulp.

  The cyclist climbed atop the rock wall surrounding the overlook and waved his pinched fingers over the view like a symphony conductor. “Do you hear it?” he called, swaying on his toes. “Nature’s music! The wind, the sun, the streets, the cars, even the fog out over the ocean. All unified, working as one.”

  He smiled victoriously at the sun, then turned back to find Esmerelda sprinting out of the parking lot, heading downhill.

  The clinking followed her descent, accompanied by a faint whiff of confectioner’s sugar. The cyclist raised a finger to his helmet, bounced his butt on the saddle. “Madam, I must know: who is your chemist?”

  “My what now?” she coughed, eyes fixed to the road and scanning for sticks, scraps of paper, anything to throw in this nincompoop’s gears.

  “Your laboratory, I must know. Also, your spiritual advisor: what is her name? Superlative work from top to bottom. Continuity, synergy, strength.” His white-gloved finger drew a circle in the air. “In my younger days I would have guessed Taoism, but I have learned not to presume when it comes to matters of the soul.”

  Esmerelda broke stride and stopped, then doled out the most intimidating hot-bitch glare in her repertoire. “Look, I don’t care where you get your kicks, so long as it’s not me. I’m trying to work some stuff out here, so why don’t you take your psycho-babble sweet talk to someone who might fall for it and leave me the hell alone?”

  The cyclist swung off his fiberglass weapon, undid the buckles and snaps on his helmet. “Madam, apologies, please. These days I do not approach strangers frequently. My conduct may not fit proper decorum.” He tucked his helmet under his arm and offered a Gore-Tex-wrapped hand. “Bruce Zoogman, cakemaker.”

  “Bruce Zoogman? Like Zoogman’s Zoog?” Blackness encompassed her, prompting heavy breathing and paralysis and a quantum dose of nausea. From the leaky boat of memory sprang her culinary school professor and his access to the most famous cake in California, one bite of which had slam-dunked her into incoherency for just over three months while he fucked her like a warthog and her grades flatlined and her personal relationships soiled and all she could think about was another bite of that ambrosial meal-ender, Zoogman’s Zoog.

  “Yes,” he said flatly, straight factual acknowledgment.

  “I heard you lived in a bunker and never came out,” Esmerelda spouted. “And that you’re retired, out of the game.”

  “With baking in your blood, can you ever truly quit?” Seriousness stiffened his face, the hard humorless sheen of the devout, the crazy. “I seek perfection. Harmony. Wonderment. The exact blend of ingredients and emotion and craftsmanship that changes the course of lives.”

  Esmerelda stared and marveled, love lighting behind her eyes, realizing this was the culinary equivalent of finding Christ under her pillow.

  “I have sampled your desserts. You have promise.” He paused to blot a lone drop of perspiration hanging on his temple. “I ask for your help.”

  “My help?” she burped, the vista of San Francisco spinning between pink and yellow.

  “Be my disciple. Carry my teachings. Add and elaborate, contribute your knowledge. I have only one goal,” he said, elevating a rubberized finger: “To seek the divine.”

  System chatter overwhelmed her, nervous flashes and respiratory schisms and digestive crunches, a scathing
case of heartburn, her internal temperature fluctuating like the Dow Jones industrials. “Where do I sign up?” Esmerelda stammered, her lunch leaping up her throat.

  “Meet me at sunrise at the summit of Mt. Tamalpais. You may bring one bag. Tell no one.”

  “Tell no one what?”

  “Precisely.” With an understanding eyebrow hitch, Bruce swung onto his bicycle and glided down the hill, a sleek, colorless missile diving straight into the city center.

  Esmerelda took off after him, speeding down hump after hump until the view was erased by houses and trees, cars pulling up hills, the usual jangly crowd, none of which she noticed through her mescaline trance. She bottomed out in Cole Valley and caught the bus home, poured her favorite aprons and underwear into her great wool bag, slipped a toothbrush in her pocket, and knocked on her mother’s bedroom door.

  “Ma, I need a ride.”

  “Esmerelda? Why are you not at work?”

  “Can you drive me to Marin? Early?”

  “What for?”

  “Camping trip.”

  “Since when have you ever gone camping?”

  Busted. “Thought I’d try it. You know, get back with nature, clean out the head.”

  “Then you can start out with a hike from here.”

  A minute later Esmerelda slammed the front door so hard that four paintings fell to the floor, a hinge popped loose, and a tiny but menacing crack appeared in a stucco wall.

  Up to something, Fanny Van Twinkle thought as she dug out her tool kit from the utility closet. She knew that behind her daughter’s hard legs and outwardly sunny disposition was the girl who’d grown up in her home, the pushy, bossy kid who ignored rules and curfews, who ordered her mother around as if she were a paid servant, who never did dishes (despised getting her hands wet, actually), and only took over the cooking when her father’s disappearance into the sea locked Fanny in her bedroom for an entire year. Even in those days Esmerelda got by with the minimum at work, never cross-pollinated with other top chefs, gave up on new recipes if they failed the first time, took several coffee breaks each day even though caffeine gave her hives, and liked to spend her days off dozing on the sofa. Everything was way too easy.

  But at least she seemed happy, Fanny realized, and celebrated her small parenting victory with a triple-snifter of the finest New Jersey gin she could find in the cupboard.

  The taxi dropped Esmerelda at the Mt. Tam visitor center as a soft purple glow swept the horizon. She slung her bag over her shoulder and bumbled up the spiraling narrow path, clanging against boulders and stumps, stubbing both big toes and bruising a shin. When she limped out at the summit a cool ocean blue shimmered off the eastern mountains, the rippled landscapes emerging with vicious clarity. Wind slashed through her apron—she had come dressed to work—and her bones ached with the beauty of it.

  After a few minutes gaping at the new day, her zeroed sensors detected a shift. There was no sound other than rustling wind, no visible motion besides the rising sun, no new smell in the vicinity. Instead she felt a minute change in barometric pressure, a slight drop in humidity, spotted some twigs a few inches out of place, the clues pulled into conclusion by an innate sense of phase completion—take the papaya pie out of the oven, enough blowtorch on the buttercup crème brûlée—fully developed among only the best of chefs.

  “Bruce?” she queried.

  “Shh!” She followed the noise to a massive stalagmite, jutting from the earth like a dinosaur incisor. On top Bruce sat Indian-style dressed in simple white pajamas, his eyes heavy-lidded in concentration. “Silence,” he hissed.

  “Nice morning for a séance,” she joked. He noiselessly bared a set of lupine teeth, nostrils darting in precise angles. She wondered if this was Tai Chi or yoga, possibly a pagan ritual, then settled on a cult, as it also explained his permanent hermitizing, the secrecy, the devotion to perfection, the unreal ultraclean getups, everything about the guy pretty freaky. She was about to vamoose when the sun exploded into the sky, a miraculous supernova haloed with fire, the intensity and scale combining for a grand, triumphant vision that reminded Esmerelda of Apocalypse and Revelation, the end of the beginning—not a bad way to start.

  “Wow,” she said when Bruce climbed down, “color me inspired.”

  “Stop right there,” he replied. “The first thing you must learn is how to keep your enormous fucking mouth shut.” A pilot light flared, nuclei fused. Bruce held out his open hand, intimating violence, but already Esmerelda was launched and roaring, leveling her shoulder into his chest and slamming him into a boulder.

  “My way of saying I ain’t going,” she shouted, raining saliva into his eyes. “Go find another protégé to pick on. Just know I’ll be right behind you with a megaphone and baseball bat.”

  With an abundantly insincere smile Bruce wound himself upright, brushed dirt off his pajama tops, and limped back to his precipice. Suspecting a counterattack, Esmerelda made use of the interlude to compile an arsenal of rocks, dozens of light stones fingered for long- and mid-range attacks and a pile of big boys in reserve to finish the job. She loaded the ammunition into her apron pockets, then scooped up a discarded Snapple bottle and a handful of gravel and moved carefully toward the path back down.

  She heard the rasp of scissors. A box flexing open. A meaty swish, a sponge adjusting to altitude. Distant internal noises: liquids resettling, gases finding equilibrium, sinuses breaking impasse. A smell like Sunday morning and fresh apples and a day at the beach. Professional curiosity got the better of her, and she double-timed it back to the peak.

  He was flat on his stomach, facing her, a crimson-frosted pyramid on a gold plate by his head. Cult for sure, Esmerelda decided, and reached into her apron for a heavy-stone head cruncher. “My deepest, deepest apologies,” Bruce mewed. “I have been out of the company of people for many years. It is a skill I must rebuild. How can I cook without appreciating the harmony of humans?”

  “The real question is, how’d a rad chef like you turn into a total dickweed?” She lobbed a pebble across his bow and cleared her throat menacingly.

  He lifted his face and stared at her, his gaze even steel, cheeks constructed from sheet metal. “This is my latest cake,” he announced, his voice a clarion bell. “It is blessed with the peace of the rising sun; now, it is for you.”

  Pricks and bubbles ran across Esmerelda’s back. She shuffled toward the slice, sidestepping matador-like, the Snapple bottle raised to defend against sneak attacks. When she reached the plate, she slowly descended into a catcher’s stance and examined his offering. A marvelous mixture of scents blitzed her cells—fresh fruit mixed with the first day of vacation—shifting atomic structures and mushing her heart into a wispy, delighted haze.

  “I am infinitely sorry,” he remarked, his voice peppy and devoid of remorse.

  “Better be.” She scooped a hunk of icing with her pinky and held it under her nose. Majestic. “See you on the other side.”

  She entered an airport whirring with song. Passengers with formless faces danced across a capacious sun-streaked terminal, scatting and swinging to big band tunes. Ivory golf carts zoomed in synchronized routes, carrying cages filled with melodious songbirds and doubling as launchpads for cartwheels and somersaults and advanced tap-dancing combinations. Along the ceiling maroon fluid pumped through plastic tubes, sparkling with injections of glitter. Esmerelda pranced through the action, whirling and singing along in perfect pitch, conducting chugging flap heels and sugar brushes and rapid-fire quadruple spin moves alongside blazer-clad customer service agents, until she eventually found a diamond-shaped glass elevator with her name stenciled across the front. She pressed a large red button and the doors opened immediately. Inside, her pastry instructor from the culinary academy sat on a stool with a hand on a lever, portly and yellow skinned, his chin twitching as if poorly animated.

  “God, you again,” she said. “Haven’t you had enough?”

  “Don’t blame me,” he said, “I just driv
e.” He threw the lever and the doors screamed shut, iron bars slammed over the windows, the elevator catapulted upwards. Sensations of heaviness and weightlessness battled in her torso; her head soared like a kite, her spine drilled into the earth’s mantle. The elevator accelerated, smashing her into the floor and breaking her teeth and shaving off her apron, her body turning to oatmeal, then liquefying, a widening puddle across the elevator floor, licking her professor’s shoes. A minute later he pulled back the lever, the elevator froze, and Esmerelda was pulled from her flatland into the glorious sun.

  “How is it?” Bruce asked.

  “Trippy,” she drooled, “like a dream.”

  “A nightmare?”

  “Not really a good dream or a bad dream. A weird dream.”

  “Not acceptable.” His neck twitched three times. “I’ll reduce the argon ratio.”

  “Know what it was like? Like your dreams after late-night Indian food. You sure you didn’t put any curry in there?”

  “What?” A metal splinter rose in the center of Bruce’s forehead.

  “Kidding, kiddo.” She raised the gold plate and pawed another hunk. “Take the stick out of your ass and we might get on OK. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to finish my breakfast.” The rest of the slice went down easy as wine, and within seconds she was overcome by jazz orchestras and soft-shoe acts circling on baggage carousels.

  She awoke on a cot in a dark room, her lips caulked with sugar. “Ma?” she whined, wiping the scab from her mouth. She waited as no one rolled out of bed grousing about the electric company, no one dug out flashlights and old camping torches from the garage, no one clomped into her room suggesting it was time Esmerelda learned her own sweet way to the emergency locker or else she would be ten miles up shit creek in the event of a major shaker. Kind of nice, actually.