The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  Robespierre cried through the whole presentation. Marat stood still as glass and didn’t speak, a plaintive ganja-blessed cool, making his only movements with his eyes, zipping between his mother and her easel, assessing the amount and density of the bullshit she was shoveling.

  “ . . . and so to minimize the impact, so you weren’t, you know, messed up because of all this, I fudged a few things.” Esmerelda rapped her pointer against her thigh and flipped to the last page of her presentation: a recent photograph of the family enjoying a ham dinner, Marat throwing peas at Esmerelda, Robespierre curled in laughter. “So you guys would be OK. So we could be together and not get stuck on all those bad things from earlier on. I just wanted us to get on with life.”

  “Why?” Robespierre said.

  “Why what?” Esmerelda asked.

  “Why did you want us to get on with life? What bad things are you talking about?”

  “Oh, there were just some problems that were going on.”

  “What problems? What are you talking about?” Robespierre asked.

  “Was it monsters?” asked Marat.

  “No,” said Esmerelda, “you’ll just have to believe me that it was a bad situation, and I did what I had to do to protect my children.” But already Marat saw the one-armed monster barreling into his bedroom, the naked group wrestling match in the living room. Saw it for what it was.

  “It was wrong,” Robespierre said. “We have a right to know about our father.”

  “Robespierre, please,” Esmerelda said, “you’re missing the point.”

  She looked up and saw them standing next to each other, fraternal twins but still close in body type, a little misshapen, with matching big butts and skin of an unclassified brownish-ocher tint. Identical chubby lips planted on their faces, the same gnashing teeth and irritated eyes and overheated foreheads flashing purple. “Point is,” she continued, “things happened and Jasper was there, but it’s not like he was my top choice or anything. Or my second choice or thirtieth choice or whatever. Life, you know, foists these things on you. One second you’re on top of the world, the next you’re working in a copy shop.”

  Her children started backing away from her nice and easy, like she smelled funny, like she was wearing a bomb, like she was the dirtiest scariest beast hell ever shat out. “It’s not something I wanted,” she added. “I’d take it all back if I could.”

  The children receded to the far end of her sight line, beyond the hallway and the front door and the short, weed-plugged driveway, hanging out past the swirling cold Pacific waters on the edge of the horizon. Where breaching whales collided with the setting sun; where her father departed the world. Esmerelda knew she was close to losing them for good, and she tried to capture the moment in her memory: hands flexing at their sides, slack cheeks and tough tomato noses, thick knees bent slightly, seething bodies primed for vengeance, smacked with adulthood but for a last moment still hers, unsmiling but hers, unbelieving but hers, irreparable but hers, two mirrored figures of flinty resolve that dipped down into night like burned-out stars.

  Switched to snarls, attacks, spittle-soaked tongue-lashings, leaps and slashes like demonic monkeys, slanderous names and nauseating accusations and the deep-down brutal truth. Followed by pitiless distance, the silence that never heals.

  “Mom,” Robespierre rasped, “we want to meet our dad.”

  Esmerelda stirred her glass of water and sipped it until there was none left to sip. She yawned and stretched her arms and rearranged her presentation a few times on the easel.

  “You heard her, mom,” Marat said. “Where is he?”

  Esmerelda shuffled her cue cards, then carefully rolled up her charts and graphs and slid them into cardboard tubes. She was far more attractive as a thin woman, with plush lips and a needle nose and even a bit of a figure, but tightness pulled long her wrinkles, deepened her forehead’s perennial folds, clawed the corners of her eyes.

  “Answer,” Marat hissed.

  Esmerelda rattled a spoon against her empty glass. “I don’t know where he is,” she stated.

  “Where do you think he might be?” Robespierre asked. “Where would he work?”

  Esmerelda closed her eyes and set her head solid, barely lifting her lips: “No idea, guys, honest. I was young, you know, puppy love and all that. My mind’s kinda cloudy over the whole period; I wouldn’t know where to start.”

  “Bullshit!” Marat exploded, green smoke streaming from his nose. “You knew exactly what you were doing! You always know!”

  “Don’t speak to me like that,” Esmerelda simpered.

  Robespierre slipped her palm on Esmerelda’s head and laced her fingers through her hair; part reassuring human touch, part head-yanking threat. “Mom,” she whispered slowly, unstoppable as the tides, “tell us about our dad.”

  Esmerelda sank into her chair as her body raced toward the sky in a glass elevator, the raging skyward thrusters pinning her flat against the floor. Her children waited in pressurized silence until the elevator braked at a penthouse suite and Esmerelda leapt back from the dead, broke her pointer over her knee, and charged out of the house in the wide-thighed fat-person duck walk she never could shake, bobbling around the corner and down two blocks to Joel’s Ale House, a brand-new dive bar housed in an old mechanic shop. She chugged three shots of vodka and put some Willie Nelson on the juke, then put her head on the bar and started to moan. A minute later, an ugly kid with a fiendishly bad haircut slid onto the stool next to her and dropped his hand on her thigh.

  The ugly kid bumped into Marat as he brewed coffee in the kitchen the next morning. “Morning,” he offered.

  Marat was a pudgy little dweeb, the ugly kid noted, one of those mixed-race Tiger Woods types, with a wide forehead that made him look stupid and the tropical tang of wake-and-bake pot-puffing. “Who are you?” Marat mumbled.

  “Joel Lumpkin. Friend of your mom’s,” the kid said. Robespierre bustled into the kitchen lugging a backpack suitable for a month-long mountaineering voyage, her blue skirt riding up over her paunchy butt as she reached for a cereal bowl and poured her cornflakes. Not hot but not bad, Joel thought; she had a look. With any luck she didn’t talk as much as her mom. Or suck dick as poorly. “You guys need a ride?” he asked.

  “How old are you?” asked Robespierre.

  “Old enough to drive.”

  “Let’s see a license.”

  “Left it at home.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said, pouring herself a mug of coffee. “I’m not retarded.”

  Marat played with the radio for most of the ride in Joel’s Mercedes, switching from commercial to commercial as fast as he could and lip-synching the words. “How about a CD,” Joel asked as he turned off of Sunset.

  “Where do you go to school?” Marat retorted.

  “I run a bar, Joel’s Ale House. It’s a couple blocks from your house.” Making for a magnificent tax hideout, heavy cash transactions in an inconvenient location, too small to be a problem, the perfect place to start.

  “What about school?”

  “Not for me,” Joel said, distracted by the lingering stench of bowling alley and old pudding, a blanket of biological secretions from his night in Esmerelda Van Twinkle’s bed.

  “Cool, a dropout,” Marat noted, possibly sarcastic but probably not.

  Joel raced through a yellow light, then stomped the brakes and swerved to the curb. He needed a long shower, a couple of Bloody Marys, never to see this idiot again. “End of the line,” he said. “Bye.”

  “You know, I’m glad you did it to my mom,” Marat said as he pushed open the door and spun out onto the sidewalk. “She’s going through a rough spot and needed the pick-me-up. But technically she’s still married, and one day you’re gonna get it.”

  But Joel was speeding off in search of his morning shower, Marat’s bogus threat lost to engine noise. Joel didn’t think about Marat again, or his saggy-titted mom, or his mule-assed sister, until a week later, just before
closing, when Marat walked into Joel’s Ale House and ordered a Captain Morgan’s and Coke loaded with maraschino cherries.

  “Out late for a school night,” Joel remarked, turning up the stereo so the bass line from Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” made beer pulse in bar glasses.

  “What’s up with the Lego igloo?” Marat thumbed over at a five-foot purple hut, complete with icicles and a chimney and little Eskimo children making snowmen out front.

  “Something I do for fun,” Joel said. He poured a Shirley Temple and pushed it across the bar. “That’ll be ten dollars.”

  Even in the bar’s leveling dreariness Marat appeared exceptionally mediocre, tubby with a boilerplate face, his clothes decades out of fashion, dipped in a second skin of soot and redolent of pine-tar shampoo and ash. Too exhausted to bathe, or brush his teeth, or give a shit beyond attaining a slight evening of the score, a starter base of wealth, and freedom. “You hiring?” he muttered, all the charm of a dead rat.

  “For what?” Joel asked, though he could read the code clear as mineral water, just felt like giving the kid shit.

  “Don’t know. Anything.” Money, Marat needed money, piles of it, the liberty that cash built. Joel Lumpkin was the richest person he’d met since Slippy Sanders, and even more alone than he was.

  “You scrub toilets?”

  “Yeah,” he said, stifling a burp, then scratching himself and breathing too loud and looking very much the dumb little stoner that he was. Belonged sneaking into movie theaters and trading comic books with computer friends and whacking off into tube socks, an average adolescent loser, the least suspicious guy on the block. Could do a lot of damage if applied correctly, another faceless face in the crowd.

  “What are your salary requirements?” he asked.

  “Hundred bucks an hour. Twice a week, after school.” A pittance, a fortune; a place to start.

  “Sounds pretty good,” Joel responded, a few hundred dollars a week a small price to pay for a semiambitious junior associate. Aware of the prevailing wage, clever enough to discern that running a hole of a bar won’t buy a luxury German vehicle, that there had to be well-compensated criminal behavior involved. And Joel’s operation could always use a good street-runner, a client contact guy who didn’t take too much off the top, easy enough to mail in as a patsy.

  Marat oozed over the bar, a giant tube of toothpaste squeezed. “I need a dime bag.”

  “Say what?”

  “You heard me.” Another stalling, lying fuckwad like his mother. “Give it or don’t.”

  Not that Joel was one to roll out the free-pot welcome wagon, but Marat was crying, right there, an ugly steady stream. The kid needed it, needed something. Joel went to the storeroom and plucked a pillbox out of the fridge. “Clean yourself up,” he said, rolling it across the bar, “and get out.”

  “Fucking give me a minute. Douche bag.” Matting his eyes with a napkin, the waterworks slowing down and replaced by a slow, sodden disgust.

  Muscles wriggled in Joel’s stomach, the situation spindling away, this kid smarter than he looked by a couple hundred laps and pulling away. “Come back Tuesday,” he said, “and bring your bus pass.”

  Marat took a long sniff, then ran out the door helter-skelter, arms wagging, bowlegs swiveling, tummy flab bouncing, so not cool. Clearly the kid was unpolished, Joel thought, but there was thought, but there was a fat bud of potential. Be nice to have a buddy to get rich and chase tail with, blaze up and watch the Giants game at the bar, all the beer you can drink. Worse ways to go through life, he thought, and started drawing up a list of surfers and trust fund kids for Marat’s inaugural reefer run, low margins but huge networks, the fastest way to get big.

  FOREIGN WARS

  England, Austria, Piedmont, and the lesser German states were still in arms against the Republic. The first duty of the Directory [Revolutionary French government] was, therefore, to continue the war with them and to defeat them.

  —CHARLES HAZEN,

  The French Revolution and Napoleon

  The external policy of the Directory soon evinced that passion for foreign conquest which is the unhappy characteristic of Democratic states, especially in periods of unusual fervor, and forms the true vindication of the obstinate war which was maintained against them by the European monarchs. “The [opposing] coalition,” they contended, “was less formed against France than against the principles of the Revolution.”

  —ARCHIBALD ALISON,

  History of Europe

  Robespierre decided on her life’s plan shortly after seeing Cool Hand Luke on public television. It wasn’t so much the film itself, though she found it quite good, as her mother’s swoon over Paul Newman, her inability to answer the phone or prevent the popcorn from burning while the movie was on, her repeated mentions of his handsome haircut while absentmindedly tracing of the inseam of her slacks. The next day Esmerelda filled up the shopping cart with Newman-brand salad dressing and cookies and tomato sauce at a 50 percent markup, a love-shot bloom in her eyes.

  Belt and suspenders, Robespierre realized. Acting, spun off into high-profit gourmet foods, publicized by acting, made more interesting by high-profit gourmet foods. Diversification to ward off age or several bombs in a row or even a mass recall: in short, the perfect career model.

  She had starred in school theatrical productions for the past several years, though it was getting harder to deliver the saccharine performances demanded of her, she no longer had the patience. But she recognized that audiences flocked to perceived likeability and sexually suggestive ass swings, so she focused on delivering jokes and small gestures of compassion—a glance, a touch, a cold word that implied more—and pestered her guidance counselor with daily visits until she made a few calls and secured an internship at the American Conservatory Theater. For her first food-service venture, she picked smoothies because they were easy to eat on the go, tied in with the health-food trend, and projected an appealing sense of California and slenderness. When she couldn’t find any smoothie stands to manage nearby, she borrowed five grand from Slippy Sanders and started up her own.

  The smoothie stand was wedged in a quarter slot between Mama’s Sushi and Java Explosion at the Metreon food court, three feet of counter space, two blenders, and a chalkboard listing specials. The store was nameless until mid-June, when she decided on “BlastOff ”—memorable, mildly suggestive, and amenable to a kitschy outer-space theme. Aside from optional vitamin additives, the smoothies contained only milk, fruit, and ice, providing an honest, frothy taste that turned out maddeningly inconsistent. Robespierre made drinks herself the first few weeks, smiling full strength for the benefit of her dopey customers while mismeasuring ingredients and blending for the wrong duration and often running out of the daily special a half hour in. Starting a business had its moments of neck-tingling thrills, but the actual work itself was repetitive as all hell, a moron could do it—which was usually the case, she soon found out, at other mall food outlets—so to entertain herself she picked great stage characters and acted them out: Shakespeare’s Juliet rapturously mixing Banana Satellite smoothies, Albee’s Martha shooting down hoary invitations to screw in the bathroom, the Wicked Witch of the West cackling into the cash register. She knew no smoothie ever tasted the same twice, her suppliers were unreliable, the fruit often bad, the pricing inflated, she didn’t even have a logo, but she smiled and blended and practiced her lines. Eventually the customers showed, handing over money with huge corny smiles and odd timidity, teens elbowing each other, women hesitant, everyone a little uncomfortable, until one day she overheard a little girl ask her mom why the crazy lady was so quiet and she realized they were there to see her shtick. From then on she worked on her lines at full volume, reciting ballads to lonely old women and honing her stand-up comedy lines for the spiritually depressed and entertaining children with the best of Lewis Carroll, rolling her tongue over every made-up word until she was an “only in San Francisco” institution, like the World Famous Bush
man and the Tamale Lady, the gibberishgabbing smoothie loony featured in guidebooks and travel features, the only blended beverage in town worth going out of your way for.

  After an early supper at a competitor’s quick-service stand, she walked through Union Square to the theater, where she passed out programs and updated membership lists and watched the nightly performance from the orchestra pit. She stood up for the whole show to train her legs for the stage and paid close attention to actors’ small muscle movements, vocal inflections, body position, breathing. Afterward she went to the dressing rooms to deliver positive feedback and her firecracker smile, feeling out insider information about who’d sandbagged whom, who was getting coked out and half-assing it, who was smacking it out of the park and why, until they all went out drinking and she caught the last bus home. It wasn’t long until she talked a director into giving her a script.

  “I’m in a play,” she announced at a Tuesday chicken burger dinner just after Independence Day, her one night a week off from the theater.

  “Which play?” Esmerelda asked, chewing a forkful of mango salad. Marat worked silently on his second burger, viciously hungry between growth spurts and all the weed.

  “It’s a debut drama called Slopeside.” She touched her right hand to her left elbow, a new mannerism she was working on to insinuate vulnerability. “I play a ski lodge bartender. It’s only thirty lines, but there’s lots of room to show what I can do. If I nail it, I think I’ll get talked about for some leads next season.”