The French Revolution

by Matt Stewart

  At the encouragement of his marketing team he was coaxed out of his ragged attire and into an identical getup, different only in terms of cleanliness and number of Nike insignias. A sponsorship agreement, his agent informed him, had been reached. Something was done about his hair, crusted up into the fez for who knew how long, shaped like a thimble except harder, the sweat and filth of decades compressing it to stone. They hacked it all off and shaved him down to skin, then rubbed lotion onto his scalp and lined his neck with cologne. He liked how his new shiny skull felt in the shower, the texture of rain suddenly violent and striking, how the Marriott pillows nestled gently around his skull and comforted his anguished brain. Onstage he wore a black Nike toque to keep comfortable against the rusted car hood, the tight synthetic fibers making him feel catlike and sleek, finally worthy of the spotlight.

  On the day of Robespierre’s release, he waited in his uniform outside the Hall of Justice, leaning against a railing and smelling the sea air again. He sang her name across the morning, over camera crews taping her release, the press of microphones, supporters, curious bystanders, three rows of demonstrators. J. Malcolm Fletcher gave her a tap, then a nudge, then put his hands on her waist and swiveled her toward the face from lost photographs, the face on magazine covers, the face that surged from memory in the depths of her dreams.

  Reason froze her; here was her absent, fair-weather father buying his way out. He didn’t deserve instant affection, a spot on her victory platform—a rotary saw and a barrel of hydrochloric acid and three days in a Kansas basement felt far more appropriate—but she shoved the urge down a steep and rickety staircase, because she knew hokey make-up crap won votes, and she’d already bought in big herself.

  When they collapsed into one space everything else fell away. Jasper sniffed the hair he’d always loved and hummed an old lullaby, cradling his daughter like a soft-boiled egg. The supervisor-elect clung to him, rubbing his shoulder blades with her fingers and head-butting his chest, gravity diving through her skin, foam rising in her chest.

  “Werewolf?” Robespierre asked. “Dad?”

  “Yeah,” sniffed Jasper.

  “I have all the songs on my iPod,” she mumbled.

  “He’s quite popular,” Fletcher concluded. He pushed back into the crowd and watched in respectful silence as Jasper and Robespierre held their hug in the November morning’s dry light, a plank over an abyss twenty years deep, the restoration of history within shouting distance.

  Four elected years of change. On the official trips to Iran, Robespierre toured devastated villages and squalid refugee camps, visited cheerless classes held in bombed-out buildings, slipped booze and cigarettes to wounded soldiers, penned sizzling editorials and endured nights of total black. Returned to San Francisco, she battled federal jurisdiction, tried to cut off U.S. government offices from city services, proposed boycotts of national holidays, passed strongly worded resolutions calling for cease-fires and withdrawals, whatever she could think of to somehow stop the war. When the 6.9 earthquake hit in November 2013, she was out in her pajamas with flashlights and crowbars, directing firefighters and passing out coffee. Nights wordsmithing legislation over takeout, reviewing the latest fashion and cosmetics catalogs for max appeal. She went for a public jog every morning at six, with a standing invite for constituents to come along and talk shop, so long as they could keep up on the hills.

  Men came and went. A hippie investment banker, a nonprofit director, a local comedian, the Giants’ utility infielder. Wonderful, well-meaning men who couldn’t fill the empty white space that separated her cells. She tried sleeping with women, taking her Hayek-like former intern to a seven-course meal at Fleur De Lys and a suite at the Clift, then the peculiar fate of emotion fleeing her body when clothes came off. Not full or hungry—the absence of appetite entirely. She refrained from physical contact when she was out of the public eye, turning her shoulder into hugs with friends and serving up a limp-dick handshake to her board colleagues and, as much as possible, employing a quick finger wave by way of greeting. She didn’t mind; she was mostly happy; her nonstop days were filled with productivity and piled-up accomplishments and satisfying career progress.

  Sometimes she felt she was getting close, that her successes nearly outweighed how she’d expelled Marat onto his desolate path, the subversive infighting that nearly chopped off his head. She could almost believe the excuses: he’d deserved it; somebody else would’ve screwed him anyway; in the end he turned out loaded, so it didn’t matter; the army was the best thing that ever happened to his delinquent future-felon butt.

  Almost, but not quite.

  The city lurched through recession and endless war, the sad cycle of layoffs and demonstrations. She watched the board pass regulations on leash laws and baked goods freshness and wave energy and congestion tolls and knew that the war was still what hit hardest. Her issue. The most penetrating cause that ever existed, the one that scooped outrage from quiet citizens, elicited tears and shouts and dumb quiet, imposed the bewildering feeling of powerlessness and claustrophobia and never-ending death. She saw the rambling public statements at board meetings, the prevalence of antiwar signs and bumper stickers, the massive turnout at demonstrations, how fundamental belief made people overly certain and scary and really fucking freaked. How they sought a superhero to mend the frayed ends of reason. Only in this city, where people thought beyond jobs and commutes and what to make for dinner, where idealism was a way of life. She opened every public conversation with a statement condemning the war, served up aggressive antiwar resolutions, formed political action committees and sponsored pacifist arts festivals and funded think tanks to come up with a way out. Every Sunday she brought donuts to the VA hospital and listened to the new arrivals’ stories. It was the best available way to win.

  So when she won reelection and the mayor’s office was open three years later, the hell with youth, she would conquer and reign. The executive branch reached for her like a beaten nation, needing care and righteous direction. And Robespierre Van Twinkle was positioned as the only serious contender for the job, a courageous synthesis of leadership, imagination, and community values, her heart pumping life through San Francisco’s veins.

  Esmerelda slept in her apartment with the television on mute, her graying hair circling her neck like a lagoon around an island. Outside, the night was clear and quiet except for the occasional owl bus, a rising breeze. She slept in the nude because after nearly fifteen years of working out and dieting, she finally could, undressed by her own hands, the sheets crisp against her skin, able to turn over without cracking a spring. At 1 AM Werewolf and Tiny Jake came on the television, an infomercial pushing a twelve-CD compilation set of All-Time American Hits. Jasper’s stage name appeared on the screen for two seconds and fell away, a footnote to Americana, another detail missed.

  She rose at two and pulled on her uniform: polo shirt, blue slacks, black shoes—basically a golf shop attendant. Looking out her bathroom window from a few choice positions she could make out lights from Oakland across the bay, winking promises of sunrise. She brushed her teeth and imagined a civilized schedule, not being dreary and tired eighteen hours a day, biorhythms aligned with her favorite television programming and breakfast in the morning and dinner in the evening, Wednesday and Sunday evenings cordoned off for her absolutely necessary missions to the track, picking losing ponies and pounding mint juleps with her pals the only form of therapy that’d ever worked.

  Her alarm went off again, demonic angry chops. She pounded the clock backhanded and tore the plug from the wall, then doused her face with hot water, pulled on her purple polyester jacket, and stumbled down to the garage.

  The streets in SOMA were lit with traffic and scraggly men rasping canes against the sidewalk. She drove west on Mission, bending south by the abandoned office buildings and sex clubs, then hung a right at the BART station and turned onto Valencia. It was the best time of night to find a parking spot, a half hour after closing time and b
ar-goers trickling into their cars and wobbling off, leaving whole sections of street open. Even so, it took Esmerelda three tries to parallel park, as years out of the driver’s seat had left her tentative, the angles not intuitive. Basically she’d had to relearn how to drive, and she had always been a poor student.

  “Hola,” she called as she trudged into Bagel Stop. The store was loud with Spanish hip-hop and blitzed with light, enough wattage to illuminate a football stadium, and her body needed a few minutes to adjust.

  “Buenos dias, señora,” Carlos hollered from the center of the musical maelstrom.

  “Coffee?” she squeaked.

  “Tengo agua, gracias.”

  She slumped over behind the counter and crushed decaffeinated coffee beans, dumped them into the machine, and hit go. Edging onto a stool, she watched the coffeemaker drip blip swish pop until her eyes heaved shut, she sank into a heavy black goo. For three minutes she was blissfully lost to the world, whereupon Marat clapped his hands in front of her nose and smacked her back to reality.

  “Morning, Ma!” he peeped belligerently.

  “Marat,” she yawned. “Hey.”

  “Interesting supervisory strategy, Ma. Did you learn that at business school?”

  She came to like a kicked grizzly. “I know what I’m doing!” she shouted. “I used to be hot shit in the restaurant world, don’t forget. Way bigger than all this.”

  “Once upon a time.” He pulled a beer from his pocket with his good hand. “Hear about Robespierre?”

  “Not lately.” The girl never called, didn’t ask advice, didn’t take her to lunch on Mother’s Day or send flowers on her birthday, all of which Marat knew well. She thought about spilling coffee on his pants accidentally on purpose.

  His eyes refocused; noxious fumes hurried from his nose. “She’s running for mayor.”

  Esmerelda tightened her face into her trademark bristle, inured against revealing an inch of pride. Her daughter opening freeway exits and community centers, officiating major weddings in City Hall’s cupola, directing policies and barnstorming and bleeding empathy at police officers’ funerals. Much as Esmerelda’d been maligned for cockiness, it was nice to see the management knack had turned out useful. “What’s wrong with the guy we got now?” she asked.

  “Term limits and a revealing IRS audit,” Marat deadpanned.

  Esmerelda mixed her decaf with a tablespoon of cream, a squeeze of honey, a slosh of Tabasco, and four packets of sugar, her morning depth charge. “Well, good for her,” she said. “Got my vote.”

  Marat chuckled. “Does that mean you’re actually going to vote?”

  This bullshit she took. Every day with the digs and jabs and names and barbs, all of which were accurate and earned and she had to eat without complaint. “I better get moving,” she said. “Me and Carlos gotta start the machines, get the bagels into the oven. Morning veggies are due in twenty minutes.”

  “You still swimming?”

  “Three days a week, so long’s I can keep my eyes open.”

  “It’s working, Ma. You’re looking good.”

  She looked over Marat for signs of deception. He was handsome in an angry sort of way, hair attractively shaggy in intimidating Afro curls, his face long and hard like his father’s. The mangled arm from the war the one blot but still shading him with character, an honorable depth.

  She decided he was being genuine and let him kiss her on the cheek. “I gotta roll,” he said.

  “OK,” she whispered, and fell deluged with sadness.

  He put his beer back into his pocket and slipped out the door. She heard his Porsche grumble awake and peel off into the night.

  Her coffee was cold, so she threw it out and made another. Then she went to the back and helped Carlos move the bagels from the boilers to the oven, the hottest dance tracks from Ciudad Juárez unable to sweeten her mood. The door buzzed as the rest of the Sunday morning shift shrugged in: Maria the counter girl, Henry the egg man, Jacqueline the coffee lady, Geoffrey the janitor, some Chinese guy fresh off the boat Marat employed as the result of a poker night bet. They were all paid well but still moved lackadaisically, because it was agonizingly early; because the work was mind-draining and repetitive; because even being surly, slow assholes, they couldn’t lose money at that place if they were only open an hour a day.

  A typical weekend minute: three egg sausage bagels, a pint of veggie schmear, ten dozen plain to go, Asiago cheese with sides of lox and red peppers, Thai chicken sammy, three poppy seeds toasted, plus coffee, coffee, orange juice, coffee. There was no real seating in Bagel Stop, a couple of stools and a counter, a bus stop outside with some fold-down seats, but within ninety seconds of opening every linoleum inch of the place was jammed to the walls with East Coast ex-pats and hipsters and suburban folks making the pilgrimage to the city, tourists thumbing guidebooks, legions of ornery breakfasters dumping money on Esmerelda, wondering where the napkins were, asking if they catered, how many ounces in a medium, was there any soy-based creamer, which way to the restroom, millions of stupid questions clearly answered on the menu. As the lone cashier, she sat in an elevated platform by the door and took orders as customers inched in, accepting their soiled bills and credit cards, making change, inputting orders, passing over receipts, withstanding brain-dead musings and shouted cellphone conversations, not even trying to smile. The scene drove her brain back against her skull, the same mimicked excitement from customers that today was a day they were going to eat some real New York-style bagels, not that unboiled crap down at Noah’s, this was real Manhattan hardware, ovens bought used from H&H. It was food, she wanted to scream, the same crap you had last time, the same thirty-seven menu options every day, pretty good stuff but nothing nearly as revolutionary as what she’d done at Incognito, and largely coasting on reputation. Generally speaking, the customers were pushy street scum compared to the ladies at CopySmart, never asking her how she was doing and rarely saying thanks, demanding dishes they didn’t make, complaining about parking and the fog, dressing her down with cold civility, late for work, late for church, raging hungry, push, take, and leave. By noon Esmerelda was bitched up and sassy, and she yelled at Jacqueline to take over for the rest of the day so she could go lose some money with her buddies at the track.

  “You sure ’bout dis?” Jacqueline asked. She was short and built like an icebox, naturally pushy, the kind of person who always captured a seat on the bus and wormed her way up to the front row at concerts. Fourteen years ago she’d emigrated from an unpronounceable island in the Pacific, possibly in the Philippines, and had been zealously working two or three service jobs at a time ever since.

  “Course I’m sure. I can barely move, my arthritis acting up.”

  “Ho-kay, I go. But I got phone call. Rubbapear coming by soon.”

  “Robespierre?”

  “Oh yeah! She come get some bagers, OK?”

  “Weird. Real weird.” Especially since Robespierre had never visited Bagel Stop before.

  “Relax, Miss Ezzie! I not gon make up story! What da point of dat?” Her fervent smile reminded Esmerelda that Jacqueline’s children were similarly grown up and more important than her, husband long out of the picture, her only friends a deaf aunt and her knitting group.

  “How long til she gets here?”

  “Dey say twelve firty. You know how supastars go. Whenever convenient.”

  Esmerelda put on some lipstick and a little mascara and dove back into work, filing streams of cash in the register, ripping receipts, punching orders into the computer, moving the ceaseless crowd along even faster than usual, so that the line backed up at the pickup counter and she received snotty sneers from the kitchen staff. She knew Robespierre was close when a photographer backed ass-first into the store. “Face front!” she cried, slapping her hand against the counter, “and order something or scram!”

  “Hey, Ma,” came Robespierre’s voice as she strutted into the store in a night-black half-dress half-suit, a blazer with skirt a
nd leggings, serious but kind of sexy, an emerald scarf tied to her neck, balmy lips swollen from her permanent bee sting. Her hair was an elaborate weave of highlights and styles, a fraud in Esmerelda’s opinion, these were not her genes, but she smiled anyway, because votes mattered, this was her daughter, she owed her, she had no choice.

  “Hello, hon!” she called, climbing off her perch for some half-assed hugging. “Can I get you the house special?”

  “You got it,” she said, her patronizing smile warming up. “Ma, I wanted to tell you something.”

  “I know,” Esmerelda said, “you’re making Bagel Stop the official breakfast restaurant of San Francisco.” The reporter laughed. “Always had good taste,” Esmerelda continued unconvincingly, not in the mood for palling around. “No wonder everybody loves her.”

  Robespierre took both of her mother’s hands and spoke ultraslow, as if giving directions to a European tourist: “Mom, I wanted to tell you that today I’m formally announcing my candidacy for mayor.”

  Esmerelda reacted as she had to, flurried arms and squawking and a round of free bagels for everyone, then calling friends on Robespierre’s cellphone and kissing her daughter all over. And through the hullabaloo she despised—What kind of daughter informs her mother about an important life decision on television? Why is the hardscrabble mother brought front and center only at her shameful retail job? Was cheap manipulation what it took to get votes? What about the issues? Wasn’t this against everything her bold, idealistic daughter held dear?—she knew she had to do it, and sell it.