The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  In April of 2012, San Francisco unleashed a rare stretch of midsummer—dry air and fogless sun, the ocean breeze watered down to nil, Esmerelda’s secretaries skipping into the shop in skirts and no jackets, prattling on about weekend trips to the beach and barbecues and baseball games. Esmerelda caught the roofless trolley down Market Street for a meeting with her book-keeper, watching office workers dining al fresco along the sidewalk, extended loitering and stoop-sitting and milling about, bicycle traffic pouring out of the bike lanes and weaving in with top-down convertibles and open-sunroof hatchbacks. She took off her cloak for the ride back, the simple act of exposing her arms in public still a significant thrill.

  The Caribbean conditions stayed high in her head for the rest of the day, nurtured by the delivery men dressed in shorts, the increased use of the vending machine by thirsty patrons, the sweat stains forming under customer armpits, the prevalence of sunglasses worn indoors, the searing glow illuminating the store’s large plate glass window. “Hey, Lakshmi,” she asked as closing time approached, “wanna grab a drink after quitting time? Maybe soak in a little sun?”

  Lakshmi let out a shriek from the back of her throat and bolted for the bathroom.

  “Worth a shot,” Esmerelda muttered as electric points surged in her brain, pushing her outside into the weird heat, unable to think, falling in with the comforting flow of pedestrians down the elevator to Muni, stepping onto a hot crowded train and gripping a steel bar until they stopped moving and a conductor shooed her out, switching to BART with a team of middle-aged women through a factory line of escalators and plastic gates, teaming up to issue a semicircle of scolding glares at perfectly healthy teens who refused to give up their dirty fabric seats. She shot under the bay, through the gasp and pull of tunnel pressure changes, rattling along the faded East Bay haze amid ancient brick warehouses and the smell of rail grease until a big clump of people got off in Berkeley, leaving her and a platoon of end-of-the-line losers sleeping against the window and staring into blank space, nobody worth being around.

  She got off at the next stop and stumbled into a vast parking lot, pavement the off-white of pine smoke, a fleet of bumbling cars and kids in khakis whacking their skateboards into benches. Hot wide space and distant buildings, a bland suburban stink-hole, more alone than ever.

  “Help,” she said to herself. She slowly sank onto her knees, but even the joy of flexing her muscles without toppling over couldn’t overcome the seismic ache in her chest.

  An old Chinese man hobbled beside her, carrying a pair of cigarette cartons. “You need ride?” he asked, releasing a stream of hot gasoline fumes, a couple bottles of rice wine plus whiskey.

  An angel. “God yes.”

  “Where you go?”

  “Home.” But to say it hurt, there was nothing there anymore. “Scratch that. Take me somewhere close, somewhere fun. Outdoors.” She checked the guy out, seven sprigs of hair twirling from the center of his grape-skin smooth brow, small pummeled eyes, a dirty tuxedo and gold pocket watch, three playing cards in his breast pocket.

  “Got it!” he spurted, then pushed his hair sprigs into his pate and hustled into the parking lot, disappearing behind a row of aged minivans.

  “Freak,” she muttered, and headed over to the pay phone. All that remained of the phonebook was a gutted plastic casing, so she guessed on the easy-to-remember repeating digits she always associated with taxi services, 999-9999, seven squared, crazy eights, connecting with pizza delivery joints and used car dealerships until she ran out of quarters. Making a note to research cellphone plans, she headed back to the BART station to make herself some change when an awooga double-honk broke through, followed by the hard screech of metal on metal.

  “Come!” the man screeched from a pop-top VW van, its front bumper freshly wrapped around a no parking sign.

  “Hell no!” she called.

  “I take you!” he yelled back, the exertion turning his face red and dialing up an extended watery cough that took a few moments to run out. He blinked and slapped his cheek, then kicked the van into reverse and knocked over a plastic blue Vespa, swung into drive, and zoomed over the curb and down the sidewalk. He stopped the van by bumping the pay phone, knocking the handset off the receiver and mashing the green glass into cobwebbed fragments.

  “Come!” he said, pushing open the back door. Black dust sprinkled the sidewalk, followed by a hot smell of retirement home and road construction. The van was filled with piles of junk, cables and wires, screws, nails, bicycle spokes and a gold birdcage, mousetraps, a couple of rakes, what looked like an old stovepipe, a cluster of skeleton keys, light sockets and European electrical converters, a section of railroad track.

  “Where’m I gonna sit?” she asked.

  “Here!” He threw a tangle of extension cords to the back and pulled a flattened cardboard box onto the floor by the door, covering an explosion of silver brad fasteners. A long fall from the luxury automobiles she’d traveled in during her kitchen monarchy days, but here it was, functional transportation, eclectic if in need of cleaning, with a personable driver attached.

  She slid inside. Hot as pouring tar and just as stinky. “Easy on the gas, leadfoot,” she coughed as the man hopped into the driver’s seat and shot out of the parking lot just as the BART police car sneaking up behind them disengaged its engine. They were three blocks away before she could blink.

  “Where we headed?” she asked, deeply enjoying the opportunity for a little nonwork human conversation as well as the breeze blasting through the roof.

  “Cigarette?” he responded, and she saw he was already working on three—one in the ashtray, one in the cup holder, a red quarter filter stubbed between his teeth.

  “Where we headed?” she repeated.

  “You feel lucky!” he deduced, his sawed-off eyes popping pink in the rearview.

  “Maybe a little,” she acknowledged, hard to ignore the terrific weather or the intimate enclosed quarters with another human being.

  “Ah!” He jerked around an idling school bus, then zipped back three lanes for a right turn and jabbed his index finger in the air. “Must capitalize!” A chorus of honking consumed his skittish laughter, followed by the triple wail of en masse police pursuit.

  “Stop the car,” she decided. “Our luck’s over with.”

  “Almost there!” he responded, and floored it, flying through intersections and converting impossible toe-twisting turns, speeding through alleys and parking garages and short patches of sidewalk, cavorting through a playground, then banking under the freeway and into open space, the purple bay and a field of kites silhouetted by the blasting sun, which hovered across the Golden Gate like an alien mothership. “Nice moves,” she admitted. “Ever consider getting into the high-end butter delivery biz?”

  “Here!” he shouted, then cranked the van into a donut, head-shattering squeaks and the smell of extreme friction and the uncertain lean unique to worn tire rubber. A hard knock and another quick spin and the car stopped, the brake crunched. The door slipped open and a punch of sunlight carried her free.

  She looked around groggily. Men from another era loitered outside a white stadium entrance, decked out in tracksuits and hair grease and plain white T-shirts stained with unhealthy foods, quiet obsession hollowing their faces in what could only be madness or addiction. “I guess I’ve seen worse,” she shrugged. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Hundred dollars!” he shouted, firing up a pair of cigarettes.

  “Kinda steep,” she observed, but the temperature scrambled it, it was pushing ninety out, unreal hot for the Bay Area, mercury boiling, the point where facts became irrelevant and Esmerelda was unwilling to fight. She threw the cash at him as fast as she could dig it out.

  “Lucky day!” he hollered after her. “Bet big!”

  She limped ahead to a ticket window staffed by a wide-assed woman who smelled like old government buildings. “Where am I?” she pouted.

  The woman pointed up to the sign over
the ticket window, a horse in full gallop under drool-blue lettering: GOLDEN GATE FIELDS. “Five dollar general, ten dollar VIP.”

  “Horse racing,” Esmerelda noted, feeling her day melt into nonsense like clocks on tree branches, half expecting to see juggling penguins and flying toasters and Jay Leno dressed in drag. It was more fun than she’d had in years.

  “Five dollar general, ten dollar VIP,” the woman repeated.

  “What’s the difference?”

  “Better seating, better view, better luck.”

  “VIP,” Esmerelda decided, five bucks extra, a small price to pay for an invaluable omen of fortune.

  The VIP seats were nearly empty, a couple of blazered businessmen tipping silver flasks, an old bearded man puffing a pipe, a small group of slick-skinned teens decked out in Cal Swimming sweatshirts. She parked herself on the lowest row by the aisle, close enough to hear conversations without being too pushy, then unfolded her racing form and checked off her picks in the random scattershot manner that had characterized her standardized test-taking as a child.

  She watched the jockeys ride their steeds to the track. Such small men, bird heads and long muscles crammed into gaudy skintight outfits, like bullfighters or Elvis Presley. They were wrangling their horses into the gates for the first heat when the driver wandered into the grandstands, took the seat beside her, and handed her a beer. “Bet yet?” he asked.

  “Got my card filled out,” she said. “How’d you get in here?”

  He snatched the racing form from her lap and folded it into thirds, then slipped the sheet neatly into his breast pocket. “How much you bet?”

  “Oh, enough to make it interesting.”

  “Hundred dollars each bet,” he suggested. A ridiculous sum, but she was in a new world in terms of debt-free income these days, a land of first-class jet travel and designer key chains and several rings of servants requiring a union steward and a dedicated parking lot, with no one worth spending it on. Here on a sunny pseudodate with a trustworthy and strangely perceptive man. Might as well live it up.

  She paid a visit to the ATM and placed the wagers, returning with a stack of receipts and a tray of cocktails which they consumed in heavy silence as the horses began circling, toned animal bodies at the height of execution, extending their long brown beautiful muscles in rippling tides, jostling and repositioning and bobbing like perfectly balanced machines until the finish, when they came in all wrong, out of order and out of time, the atrocious results announced in incontrovertible digital numbers. Her new friend smiled, and she did too, slugging back her liquor and sighing delightedly.

  Sunlight dimmed, the temperature dropped a few degrees. The liquor globbed in her; it had been so long since she’d gone out for a drink with someone, a wonderful feeling, fibers loosening behind a soft even heat. “How bad is it?” she asked her partner, who was starting to look like a young Paul Newman after a tray of whiskey sours.

  “Very bad. Almost all gone.”

  “That’s fine,” she said, and it felt so good to say it, there was no price you could put on this.

  They watched one last heat, a lap and a half packed with nine horses, the jockeys’ neon jerseys scrumming through pitch like designer M&Ms. Whips slapped rhythmically against rumps, the chestnut animals packed and separated in soothing patterns, creating the classic, reassuring cadence of hooves pounding turf. Colored shirts cycled through the pack, interior shuffles and position jostling broken up by exotic breakaways, a worst-to-first sprint, neck and neck and neck down the stretch, the hundred-odd hardcore gamblers in the grandstands actually making a little noise. A photo finish decided it, coming down to head bobs and flared nostrils for a thrilling if muddled Hollywood ending.

  The last finger of pink left the sky, and she was ready. “OK, Mr. Magoo,” Esmerelda announced. “Let’s skedaddle.”

  He did not respond, instead running a pencil over a slip of paper and tugging at his seven hair sprigs, periodically slapping his cheek and snorting hard. “Hey!” she yelled. “Time to boogie!”

  “Soup feathers,” he murmured.

  “Never was much into the Marx Brothers,” she said, “but if you’re inviting me for a double feature, the answer’s yes.”

  He leaned forward and showed her the receipt, four numbers in a row checked off, her hundred-dollar bet. “Soup feathers,” he repeated shakily, the red veins in his eyes running hot.

  “I don’t speak Chinese,” she retorted.

  He grabbed her arm and yanked her out of her seat, something which hadn’t happened since elementary school and thus left her too floored to scream or fight back or do anything other than stumble along after his firm lead, up a short set of stairs to the ticket window, where he handed in the receipt.

  A beehived woman ticked off the numbers with a blue pen and pressed a button on her desk. “This is yours?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Esmerelda confessed.

  “You’ll have to come up to the office,” she said.

  Two slovenly rent-a-cops took her through a series of locked doors and up an elevator to an ancient press room, which stank of smoke and perspiration and was populated by slack-jawed middle-aged broadcasters hop-talking into radio headsets. They sped her into a shag-carpeted lobby and then a tall, narrow office lined in hard plastic the same blue as the sign out front, a white-haired man in a plaid suit behind an empty desk, against the wall a young woman holding a camera and a burnt-eyed black man wearing a porkpie hat.

  The white-haired man came out from behind the desk and shook her hand vigorously. “Congratulations, congratulations,” he said.

  “You’re welcome,” she responded. “So what’s the story?”

  “We want to hold a press conference,” the man said. “In, say—” checking his Timex “—twenty minutes.”

  “What for?” she asked, trying to decode her buddy’s code word, soup and feathers, stew and hair, chowder and fur, maybe horse names, until her eyes fixed on a Parimutuel Betting Instruction Handbook framed cover on the wall, a dirty rag-worn thing at least fifty years old, the words “exacta” and “daily double” and “superfecta” popping in cartoon thought balloons.

  “Your superfecta payout,” the black man said, and handed her a check from the land of make-believe.

  “We’ll use a larger check for the press conference, like golf tournaments,” the white-haired man said. “The director of the board will be there. The jockeys, of course. We have calls into the mayor’s office. Be sure to set your VCR!”

  She felt the hammock of alcohol collapse and take trees down with it. More money, more questions, more reasons for her daughter to screw with her and her son to hate her, neither one taking her back on the merits. “No,” she said, “I’m leaving.” She folded the check and held it delicately in her hand, a nuclear grenade.

  A clench came over the white-haired man, sudden simultaneous contractions, and then he frosted over, blue ice etching his eyes, a face riveted on survival. “We recommend that you speak with a financial advisor,” he began. “I can put you in touch with—”

  “Do you need me to sign something?” she asked, and the black man held out a clipboard and a pen.

  “A photo for our Hall of Fame,” the white-haired man pushed, waving the camerawoman into position. “Please.”

  “Blow off,” Esmerelda retorted, then held the clipboard in front of her face and barreled past the clicking camera to the retro lobby, the press room sweatbox and the dying elevator and her escort’s van parked right out front.

  He drove her home carefully, stopping cleanly at all the lights and smoking slow, thoughtful puffs. “What do I owe you?” she asked when they arrived home.

  “Already pay,” he said with a triple-drag on his cigarette.

  “Well, thanks,” she said, running back over their evening together, witnessing simple physical grace and fresh air nicely blurred with booze. Only one thing missing. “You wanna come in?” she asked, slapping her hip for friskiness.

  “Ha!�
�� he said, and tooted the horn twice before slamming around the corner back at standard ball-shredding speed.

  She thought about waving after him but decided against it, then went up to her room and unfolded the check in her hand. Locked alone in a vault with mountains of cash, the loneliness of it burying her alive.

  She deposited the money in her checking account and went back to the track twice a week, set on losing and accomplishing it through impossible combinations, the longest, dumbest bets on the books, occasionally converting a wager or two but in general achieving a pleasant burn rate. A quiet, essential pain that started scraping toward atonement. Sitting in the first row in the VIP section, eavesdropping and sipping liquor, fog and sun slashing the sky. She made friends with the ticket ladies, got to know the bartender on a first-name basis, bought rounds for the hardcore regulars and complained about their bad luck together, even made nice with the track CEO and took in the occasional heat from his box. Far more welcoming than her house had ever been, the closest thing to home she’d known.

  Peaceful, perfect afternoons flushing away a fortune while horses ran in circles, the music of their hoofbeats cleansing like cool summer showers.

  District 4 was a conservative district in the San Francisco political landscape, a fog-packed residential area with ample parking and quiet avenues, clean children, clean schools, clean parks. Violet Chin was the incumbent supervisor, a centrist, fond of power pantsuits and dangly earrings and a rapid arm-swinging walking pace, a mother and pet owner, formerly a competitive skier. She was a UC Berkeley graduate, a bit of a hippie philosophically, having gone to her share of Grateful Dead concerts back in the day, but above all a realist, a take-charge woman who appreciated that there were individuals in the world who would not snap to it and accede when a neutral third party politely requested they give up the nukes; who understood that some people were bad and needed to be spanked or at least scared to shape up; and in any event there was no reason to discuss national issues like military policy on the local level, because what the hell were they going to do about it, pass a meaningless resolution? She’d won the election four years ago on pledges to repave the potholes, improve bus service, and renovate the schools, and she’d delivered on most of her promises. Violet drove a purple Corvette, held a master’s in botany, and owned a popular flower shop on the corner of 21st and Irving. A few years back friends had tried to pin her with the nickname “Chinese Lily,” but it hadn’t stuck.