The French Revolution (26 page)

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 Bushman 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.”

“How much they paying?” Esmerelda asked, eyeing the stack of overdue bills on the counter.

“Zero,” she lied. “Just a résumé builder.”

“Sounds like slave labor to me,” Esmerelda noted. “Dead wrong and unfair and exploitative. Tell you what, I’ll print up some pamphlets and we’ll shellac the place, protest, start a movement: ‘Pay child workers!’ Can you see it?” She framed her hands into a chubby square. “They’ll eat that stuff up around here.”

“I’ll go,” Marat mumbled through a mouthful of meat. He was listening to fifteen reggae albums a day holed up in his room, sucking on spliffs and staring blank-eyed at the heavy shadows traipsing across the wall while the ocean of noise floated around him. It was a schedule, he sometimes noted, which alarmingly mirrored his grandmother’s diet of gin and soap operas.

Robespierre reached into her purse. “Thursday matinee. I got you front-row seats,” she said and pushed an envelope across the table.

Esmerelda pulled out the tickets and ran her fingers over the particulars, 1 PM on a nonholiday. “During work? Crap, honey, I’m the boss. You know how Slippy is with punctuality and everything, that leading-by-example stuff.”

“I’ll go,” Marat repeated, stuffing fries in his mouth like he was packing a bowl.

“Could you throw in some free smoothies?” Esmerelda whined. “That way I can write it off as a business lunch.”

But the last time Esmerelda came by BlastOff, she’d demanded free samples of all fifteen varieties, then listed the failings of each flavor at top volume, laughing so hard at the amateurish Carrot-Coconut Moonshot smoothie’s ridiculous cinnamon overtones that she sprayed snot-foam out her nose and onto a team of undercover food critics. “I really can’t, mom.”

“I’ll buy them for you,” Marat said, just to shut her up.

“Well, at least one of you turned out polite,” Esmerelda retorted, crumpling her chicken burger bun into a gelatinous ball and chomping off an edge. “It will be my pleasure.”

They arrived after the play started, noisily filing into the front row, Esmerelda slurping on her smoothie sampler and Marat grooving with the last remnants of bud warming his lungs. It took a little while for them to place Robespierre working behind the bar; she seemed lankier and older, empowered and alone. She nailed the constant motion of service industry jobs, Esmerelda observed, changing the channel on the TV and running off to answer the phone, pawing change from the register, slicing lemons, greeting newcomers, whipping out the rag tied to her belt to mop up spillage and polish highball glasses, astonishingly deft with alcohol. About time she picked up a few shifts at CopySmart, Esmerelda decided, help pay down the family deficit while permitting Esmerelda to expand her social calendar with more cultured long lunches like this one.

Marat observed as close as he could through throbbing, arid eyeballs. He could pull off the role better, he thought; Robespierre had all the right ingredients but lacked honesty, the depth that pulled it all together. Artless, pinched; she behaved as if she didn’t know drugs, as if she could never understand how they made you into someone sloppy and different and beautifully bad. Even surrounded by people, with all her smiling spasms and
hitting off the checklist of poses and giggles and dangerous little mouth moves, she looked distanced up there. False. As if this didn’t matter. Which it didn’t.

“That’s not what happened! I swear to God!” a skier exclaimed, half frightened and half excited, making the least of a juicy adulterer role.

Robespierre slapped him, openhanded. “Fucker,” she hocked, and let him have another one with the backside.

“Hey,” the actor squealed, shying back a half step and hiding behind stick forearms.

“Nice one!” Esmerelda hooted.

“You pathetic leech!” Robespierre vented, her sultry barmaid voice frazzled with static. “Take your little ding-dong and get out of here!”

“Damn!” Esmerelda called, clapping her hands over her head.

“I’m sorry,” the actor shuddered, an amateur half smile forming on his mouth.

“Go!” Robespierre shouted, and threw a plastic cup full of beer into the audience on a trajectory dead set for Esmerelda’s nose, dousing her eyes and screwing with her breathing and forcing out seven or eight mucus loads onto the floor in front of her.

Marat laughed more deeply than he had in forever, long irrepressible strokes that lasted well past the moment and on into the next scene, past where Robespierre stormed off the stage at the end of a decidedly noncomedic sequence, past anything remotely resembling reasonable. The delight of fucked-up justice, the absurdity of a world that rewarded childishness and good aim and doing the wrong thing. How amazing this public shaming was, even better than smoking up to mind-crushing bass lines and pissing out the window and never leaving his room. His mother glared at the stage with openmouthed hatred, a hideous deceptive head made for mounting over an alpine fireplace. How easy it would be to punch her out, whack her with a pool cue, shove her down some stairs. He wanted to try it, was
winding up the courage, when he felt a troubled silence, the show out of sync, the house lights coming up, the shushes hitting him from twenty directions.

“OK!” he said, rising to leave. “I’ll go!” But he hyucked it up the whole way out, faster and louder, a thousand monkeys yeeping for their lives.

When he fell out into the street he was laughing his hardest, his pitch climbing and tapering, his lungs bleeding vapors. Yet beneath the outward manisfestation of cheer he recognized that somehow his sister had made this happen. He’d been discredited in some subtle way. She knew everything important and how to use it and win.

Ice coated his neck; he felt pickpocketed, exposed. She’d turned out to be a far better actor than he’d been led to believe, and at that realization the chortling finally rolled out and died, replaced by a mile-wide tidepool of seething coral-green jealousy.

When they got home, Marat was reclined in Fanny’s old chair, his shirt a wet rag, his eyes salted and stained lime green. A thick gray haze hung at his ears, an ivory pipe carved with gargoyles balanced on his belt. “How’d the play end?” he asked.

“Like crap,” Esmerelda said. “It finished with a stupid class reunion where everybody got in a fight and went home angry. No jokes and no sex. I’ve had more fun at the podiatrist’s.”

“Do they chuck beer in your face at the podiatrist’s?” Marat asked.

“It was an accident,” Robespierre interjected, “I apologized.”

“You guys have always sucked at sports,” Esmerelda confirmed. “I can’t get mad when a throw goes off-base.”

Marat’s face was unresponsive, a stone wall with a loose brick in the corner, a vital step short of completion. “Marat,” Robespierre said, “are you OK?”

“Blow off,” he said, and lifted a Bic from his lap, set flame to
his pipe, and sucked in nice and slow until Esmerelda’s eight-ring keychain crashed against his knee. He dropped his pipe and wheeled up in a blue coughing fit.