Odi’s ghastly yellow teeth take an acquisitive chomp out of the savory mélange, the savage thrust leaving behind it an awesome wake that includes a sliver of pastrami dangling from the left corner of his mouth and a dollop of mustard smudging his left cheek.
“Ymmmm…mis samich z fugn
X
slnt!” Odi mumbles mid chew.
“Mmmmm,” Ira agrees, biting deeply into his Reuben. “I wuv cumnere.”
Odi licks a small clump of Gulden’s spicy brown mustard off his pudgy thumb, and, washing down the mouthful of lipid ambrosia with a swig of Dr. Brown’s Celray Tonic, he contorts his moist lips into a Dick Cheney sneer.
“Ira, listen up,” Odi begins, parking his sandwich on his plate and rubbing his hands together in an unctuous Uriah Heep gesture. “I been thinking about a possible new deal with Nike.”
Ira Spade’s left eye twitches furiously.
“They love your kid, y’know. So I’m gonna meet with them next week and present a whole PR program that’ll knock their socks off. We’re gonna call it ‘Operation Net Profits.’”
Ira contorts his own moist lips into a Dick Cheney sneer.
“I been thinking about this night and day, 24/7,” Odi says. “I’m sure that, with some creativity and elbow grease, we could make ourselves another sweetheart of a deal that would whip up plenty more excitement around Jack and his persona.”
Uriah rubs his hands together again.
“Fr’instance?” Ira asks.
“Fr’instance, we’ll make Jack as intimidating as possible. Their marketing people’ll love that. Dress him all in black, as we’ve discussed. Start a line of clothes we’ll call ‘Nike Black Jack Apparel.’ Start a blog called ‘Black Jack Smack.’ Maybe even design a black cape for him to wear into matches, like some heavyweight boxers do on their way to the ring?”
Odi Mondheim takes a second chomp out of his sandwich, mustard oozing from within the mass of meat and into his cup of coleslaw. Ira Spade bites into his sour pickle, salty juice squirting onto his lap.
The two men look at each other and, in unison, contort their moist lips into Dick Cheney sneers.
* * *
The four piercing dark brown eyes of Jack and Ira Spade stare directly ahead.
Mentor and protégé are seated in the cavernous living room of the Spade Palm Beach Gardens compound on a lush rust-colored couch adorned by thirteen ornately embroidered throw pillows.
Methodically positioned on the nearby glass-and-metal coffee table are $36,800 worth of knickknacks. On all four walls, and between windows looking out on many of the 20,000 acres of the estate, hang original chefs d’oeuvre by Turner, Whistler, Picasso, Klee, Mirò, and Warhol, in addition to ornately framed, blown-up black-and-white photos of Vince Lombardi, Woody Hayes, and General George S. Patton.
The four Spade eyes are trained on
Jugular
, a videotaped documentary of a day in the life of a lion family in sub-Saharan Africa that Ira had bought for Jack as one of his many object lessons.
“Looka that, willya?” Ira barks as Daddy Lion catches up to a fleeing hartebeest, digs its claws into the antelope’s haunches, and sinks his fangs deep into its hapless neck.
“Survival of the fittest!” Ira crows, “that’s what this is all about. That friggin’ lion, he’s fast and agile and smart. He’s got that long, bushy mane that is fierce and scary, and he’s been training all his life just for this moment. Look at that focus, that desire…
those eyes
!”
Jack looks.
Ira plays the last fifteen seconds in reverse, replays the pursuit and capture. “Now looka that goddam antelope. He’s just flailin’ around, no plan, no strategy, no trickery. Look at how disoriented he is. He’s just reacting out of pure fear. Man, he’s a
loser
!”
Jack nods.
“You’d think,” Ira goes on, “that these antelopes would get smart. I mean, the lion has been training since he was a little cub to track down prey and finish ’em off. D’ya think those antelopes have been training since birth to escape those lions, to come up with some tricky strategy, some plan to confuse ’em, some fancy footwork to tire ’em out?”
Jack looks up at his father with those antelope-in-the headlights eyes.
“No way!”
Ira answers himself. “These hartebeests are losers, and they’ll always be that way. Because they aren’t the fittest or the smartest, and they’re not even close to being as mentally tough as those lions.
Losers, all of ’em
!
“Now, lookee here,” Ira says as the video cuts to another day and another kill. “See that little antelope who’s sorta limping?”
Jack nods.
“Well,
that
loser is sick,” Ira says, “which means he’s got a weakness, he’s vulnerable. And take one wild guess who’s gonna pounce on that weakness and go for the kill.”
“The lion!” Jack says to make his father happy.
“Bingo!”
Ira says as the lion on the screen pounces on the little limping antelope and makes quick work of it. “Survival of the fittest!”
As the lion gnaws on the little antelope’s neck and Ira is about to bring his lecture to a conclusion, Avis Spade walks in from the kitchen with a tray of hors d’oeuvres for the boys.
“I thought you guys would—”
“
Shhhhh!
” Ira scolds his wife. “Can’t you see we’re in the middle of something
important
?”
The boys continue to watch the kill as Avis stands transfixed, the tray of canapés shaking above her trembling hands, her mind transported elsewhere.
There’s little Avis Silver being
shhhhh
ed by her father, Karl, when she tries to ask him a question while he reads his morning
San Francisco
Chronicle
. And a few years after that, on her thirteenth birthday, there’s Avis again being
shhhhh
ed, this time by Mrs. O’Donnell when she is whispering to Frieda Trutt in math class. A scowling
shhhhh!
is directed her way by that lady with the black suit and black hat in church after she giggles at Pastor McCain when he almost chokes on his own phlegm during a particularly boring sermon.
Shhhhh!
is the reward she receives from her parents when she has the audacity to ask them a question during the climactic scene of
Gone with the Wind
. And since her marriage to Ira, he has through the years sibilated her way hundreds, maybe thousands of staccato and mean-spirited
shhhhh
s to mute her words, to break her spirit, to slam the door on human communication. All these hissing
shhhhh
s being a far cry from
her
gentle, loving
shhhhh
s, the ones she used exclusively with infant Jack to quiet his fears, to calm his stress, to add a little kindness and sweetness to his life, to coax him gently to sleep.
The
shhhhh
still reverberating in her viscera, Avis comes to just in time to watch the brutal five-second ending of the lion video. She places the tray of goodies down in front of her two men and turns her back in order to conceal the single tear that is trickling down her cheek and disappearing under her dimpled chin.
* * *
Fear.
It is emanating from the eyes of fifteen-year-old Jack Spade as he lies on his king-size bed in his king-size room in his king-size house in his king-size estate, thinking about his tennis career and his lion video and his painful workouts and his father’s endless sermons and that sad look in his mom’s eyes and Odi’s ugly, twisted face and all that Darwin crap and the nonstop need to dominate and conquer and survive and destroy and win.
Jack’s fingers grip his copy of
Winning Ugly
tight, so tight that he rips the volume in two, at the point of the spine. He is left holding half a book in each of his clenched fists, and his eyes are bloodshot and fierce, fierce with the panic of youth and confusion and dependency.
Jack Spade reaches into the left pocket of his jeans and pulls out a Xanax and lets it dissolve under his tongue, slowly, and stares out his window at the lawns and the pools and the courts and eternity.
7
Battu
“ÇA PISSE!”
IS HOW THE FRENCH PUT IT, with their typical charming linguistic gentility. In fact, it
is
pissing down rain in Paris, one of those misty, chilling, persistent drizzles that feels like it will continue to descend from the celestial Gallic bladder for, oh, a decade or so.
But even when it is raining, Paris is beautiful. Like a stunning woman who has an ugly head cold complete with hacking cough and drippy nose, a rainy Paris still somehow maintains her inner splendor, her graceful charm, her elegant poise.
It is
8 A.M.
on Saturday, May 27, 2045, two days before the start of the much-anticipated Paris Open Juniors tournament at Roland Garros.
Fifteen-year-old Ugo Bellezza, Gioconda Bellezza, and Giglio Marotti are breakfasting at Le Luxembourg, a café in the sixth arrondissement not far from their hotel, the cozy Clos Médicis on the Rue Monsieur-le-Prince. Sublimely located at the confluence of the wide and bustling Boulevard St. Michel and the sedate Rue de Médicis, the café sits proudly on the Place Edmond Rostand and just across this modest square from the charming Jardin du Luxembourg, the largest public park within the confines of the City of Paris.
Outside, thousands of Parisians—having poured out of the nearby
métro
stops Luxembourg, Cluny/La Sorbonne, and Odéon—are scurrying to the office, dragging their feet to the lycée, slinking to a morning assignation with a lover, or entering the park for their
A.M.
jog.
Inside, Giglio and Gioconda and Ugo are savoring being in Paris and being together. The two adults are also savoring their respective crêpes, his covered with apricot preserves, hers drenched in Grand Marnier.
Ugo bites into his
pain au chocolat,
his teeth, like a forty-niner’s exploratory pickax, joyfully and unsuspectingly discovering his first embedded, priceless nugget of treasure within the flaky
pâte feuilletée
, that glorious hunk of dark mocha pay dirt, which he allows to melt slowly between his tongue and the roof of his mouth, then washes down with a gulp of his steaming hot chocolate.
Mom and coach wash down their crêpes with their
cafés au lait
.
“Sono il migliore!”
Giglio says, reading the headline in the sports page of
La Repubblica.
“I am the
greatest
!” he translates into English, mimicking with modest success Muhammad Ali’s high-pitched, blustery Louisvillian voice.
Giglio reads to Ugo and Gioconda from an interview with Jack Spade, who is spewing the words fed to him by Ira Spade and cooked up by Odi Mondheim.
Ugo laughs his little laugh, as if to say that these words come as no surprise to him, and anyway, they are basically meaningless.
“Words are cheap,” he signs from across the table, a second blob of chocolate doing its melting thing in his mouth. “But actions are treasures.”
Ugo Bellezza has learned his lessons well and looks tenderly at his two breakfast companions.
To put an exclamation point on the subject, Giglio recites by heart one of his favorite quotes about
sprezzatura
from his beloved Castiglione:
How much more pleasing and how much more praised is a gentleman whose profession is arms, and who is modest, speaking little and boasting little, than another who is forever praising himself, swearing and blustering about as if to defy the whole world…
* * *
“I am the
greatest
!” Ira Spade blurts, reading a quote from the sports page of the
International Herald Tribune
. “And you
are,
you sonuvabitch!” he says to fifteen-year-old Jack, sitting across the table from him and Odi Mondheim in the newly renovated Louis II breakfast room of the swish Hotel de la Trémoille, located in the heart of the chic eighth arrondissement and tucked among swanky streets whose names reek of privilege, royalty, and luxury—Avenue Marceau, Avenue George V, Avenue Montaigne, Rue François Ier, Avenue des Champs Élysées—and whose residents represent the upper crust of the Parisian baguette.
Odi stuffs one end of a foot-long ham-and-Gruyère-on-baguette into his gaping maw, spicy Dijon mustard dripping from the corner of his lips. He washes it down with a
demi,
a half-liter of embarrassingly putrid French beer.
“Doesn’t even come
close
to TooJays,” he mumbles. “And how the hell can they make such great beer and ale next door in Belgium, and these goddam Frenchies don’t know their ass from their elbow when it comes to suds?”
The comment is answered by dirty looks from the bilingual neighboring table.
Odi is on the verge of flipping them the bird but thinks better of it.
“Yeah, you got
that
right,” Ira agrees, ripping a hunk of his ham-and-cheese from its hull and drowning it with his own Kronenbourg.
Jack Spade smiles weakly and still hasn’t touched either his croissant or his Coke.
Time to play “Winner/Loser.”
This is a little game Ira has devised that consists of looking out the window of the breakfast room at passersby and categorizing each one as either a winner or a loser in life.
“
Loser!
” Ira barks as a glum Parisian passes by the
vitrine.
“See the look on this guy’s puss? Full of fear. Who knows why? Maybe afraid of his boss. Or his wife. Or his shadow. Look at the way his head is pointed down toward the ground. The bad posture. Plus, he’s walking slow, which means he’s not in a hurry to get where he’s going, so he’s got
zero
ambition.”
Ira rips off another hunk of his sandwich and swills down another mouthful of his headless and bodiless flat French brew.
Outside the window, a man nattily dressed in a tidy double-breasted blue blazer, impeccably laundered lilac dress shirt, paisley ascot, pleated tan corduroys, and brown leather Italian shoes strides purposefully down the Rue de la Trémoille toward François Ier. He is speaking animatedly to a soignée, drop-dead gorgeous woman in her early thirties, who hangs on his every word as she records them on her Philips XX150RZ Precision
Mûre
VoxRecorder.