The French Revolution (6 page)

While Esmerelda Gargantuaned into position, Jasper slung the kids onto the sidewalk and knelt beside them, his eyes dancing mischievously. “Here’s the deal,” he said. “We got half an hour before I gotta get to work. You guys got any ideas on how to kill thirty minutes?”

“BA-WAH!” Marat cried as Robespierre applauded rowdily.

“That again?” Jasper asked coyly. “Well, I’ll see what I can do.” But there was only one activity in which Jasper ever indulged his children during the father-children bonding period from 6:50 to 7:20 AM, and a wild ride up and down the sidewalk in his wheelbarrow was it.

He fastened a pair of pillows to the wheelbarrow with duct tape and strapped the kids onto the pillows with bungee cords. With a weary yell he pushed off, slowly shoving the maroon hauler up Market Street’s gentle grade. After a quarter block, he took a turn around a fire hydrant, swerved back onto the sidewalk, spun in three tight circles, jogged backward ten steps, took a corner fast through packs of pedestrians, wove a few figure eights around manhole covers, then gently rolled six stairs down into the Muni station and suddenly yanked back up, whooping like a tickled horse. He picked up speed as he got warmed up, pinning the kids on their backs, turning them sideways, on occasion flipping them upside down. Even with the homemade baby straps it looked really dicey, and the posse of street people encamped by the Muni station’s steam grate clucked their disapproval.

But the children’s faces ran pink in the wind, the urban slalom confirming Jasper’s position as the all-time leader in pointless glee and coolness.

Esmerelda monitored the gyroscopic revelry through Copy-Smart’s storefront window, fixated on the dearth of legitimate safety devices and hollering at Jasper to slow down. Her nervousness prevented her from eating, and the unusual sight of Esmerelda forgoing a prework snack put the rest of the office on edge too. Everyone loosened up after business began, preoccupied by customers and reassured by the babies’ return to their mother’s belly and a fresh breakfast burrito on the Gargantuan’s foldable tray, though Esmerelda’s relief soon turned to resignation as she remembered how she had to deal with these annoying kids all day, and for many years thereafter. But so long as they kept out of elbow range, Esmerelda could get through her shift, and while she didn’t particularly enjoy their presence, Slippy Sanders was in love.

“See that?” her boss told her just after the twins’ second birthday, pointing at the long but quickly moving queue. Swarming secretaries conversed with Robespierre and Marat in various
baby languages; snapped photos; inquired about their haircut preferences, immunization records, bowel movements, and reading proficiency; and distributed candy and toys from their purses. Many reminisced over the days when their own children were small enough to fit in their laps, and though their stories were usually murderously boring, those teary-eyed administrative assistants left the best tips and made sure to come back to the CopySmart flagship store for all their paper-based needs.

“These kids are a gold mine,” Slippy added. “Gonna get any more?”

“I’d rather cover myself in honey and wrestle a bear,” Esmerelda snarled.

“I’m buying a playpen for the shop,” he countered. “They’re not babies anymore, and besides, you’ve earned it.”

“Oh no you don’t—my kids aren’t going to be your puppies in the window. This is no zoo; they stay here with me.”

“Suit yourself. But they’re getting bigger, and you’re getting smaller. The math isn’t hard to figure out.”

Esmerelda shook her head at the backhanded compliment—
I’m getting smaller?
—and realized that her muumuu had been a bit drafty lately, her shoes a little loose, her thirty-two-stair-and-eight-dip commute slightly less taxing. Maybe she had lost a few. Anyway, her children were growing quickly, that was undeniable, and the two of them did combine for an awful lot of weight and surface area.

She relented, with the caveat that the playpen could not be placed anywhere near the window and had to be accompanied by a DO NOT FEED CHILDREN sign. Within the first week the secretaries were making the pilgrimage to CopySmart three or four times a day, notating the children’s food intake, observing their naptimes, floating theories about their life callings. A pot of coffee was installed, and the CopySmart flagship store became a break destination, with support staff overflowing onto the sidewalk and jostling for the best kiddie view, often running off a few hundred unnecessary copies to justify their loitering. Business,
Slippy Sanders reported, was booming, and Esmerelda’s wages soared too.

Jasper Winslow tried to take advantage of the captive audience. “Free food! Who wants it?” he called, waving bunches of coupons at the secretaries. “Discounts here, pizza and beer. Why roll the dice with full price? You’re better off with half off.” Though most of the secretaries were on permanent dieting kicks or apprehensive of street promotions, some accepted his coupons, and a few even used them. Even so, Jasper’s cash cow was shrinking to naught amid a flurry of efficiently processed photocopy transactions.

“Mama,” he told Karen Winslow over morning grilled-onion-and-cheese sandwiches at the Tip Top Diner, “I’m losing it. No more 10 percent, barely even 5. Esmerelda’s eating less, though I can’t blame her. I sure did like having the money though.”

“Wake up, son. The woman’s playing you like a harpsichord. Doesn’t pay rent and gets the kids all day. Before you know it, she’ll get child support too. Better lock her up before she does you in. You gonna eat that?” Jasper passed over his crusts. “I’ll take them home for your sister, God bless her. Now why couldn’t you find yourself a nice girl like her to knock up, someone who wouldn’t ever string you along like this?”

The seeds were planted for a horrible misinterpretation, an error that Karen Winslow never would have made when she was younger, but her children were all grown up, and she sometimes made the mistake of treating them their age. Still, the relevant bit got through too, and that night, after Marat and Robespierre fell asleep curled against Esmerelda’s belly, Jasper came out from the bedroom and took a seat on the sofa, much closer to her than permitted when she was fully awake, nearly touching.

“Baby, marry me.”

Esmerelda turned her head toward the weight on the couch. Jasper wore a yolk-yellow tie and powder-blue jacket with his overalls; his face was clamped shut, hands clasped and hanging between his shivering legs. Her eyes burned from a pungent
cologne—paprika and formaldehyde teased with sweat. “You’re a sweetheart, Jasper,” she murmured, “really, you are. But I’m just not the marrying type. Come on, you don’t want me around, ruining your life.”

“Honey, you’ve been living here for two years now, and my life’s better than ever.” He almost mentioned the exception of the recent drop in coupon usage but managed to stifle it.

“Come on man, don’t fool with me. You don’t even have a ring.”

“That’s not true either.” He reached into his front overall pocket and took out a ring with a shiny diamond in it, biggest one he could find at the pawnshop.

Esmerelda fell blue-faced and quiet, then touched a chubby finger to the stone’s tip and ran it down the gold band’s cool contours, circling over the sticky patch where the price tag had been recently peeled off. “Jasper. I never—”

“There’s a lot you haven’t expected from me. Food, shelter, and love, for starters, and I got all that in boxes. Now what’s it going to be? Marry me, and I’ll make all your days bright as this here ring.” He wagged the prize in front of her, scattering the spectrum over Esmerelda’s nose.

Esmerelda felt something hard form in her intestines and imagined how much her day-to-day life would change if she signed on, hardly anything, it was just a piece of paper for legal affairs and inheritances, an outdated convention, didn’t matter to her. Jasper worked hard and took care of her, he was great with the kids, he cooked or provided heavily discounted food, washed the clothes and ironed them, even did windows; it was like getting a babysitter and butler for free. She imagined the glitter rock installed on her hand, filtering white light, a movie theater marquee announcing her preciousness. Right here in front of her, worth a couple grand easy.

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.