The French Revolution (39 page)

“What is this?” Joel held up the
Chronicle
, LUMPKIN LAMBASTED stenciled across the front page.

“Smart move,” Marat said. “Gotta hand it to them.”

“Did you know about this?” Joel retorted.

“No,” Marat replied automatically, slipping into his hard army face, facts and data only.

Joel’s jaw reset, eyes jerking in circles, indicating that he was well past enraged and pushing psychotic. “I want to triple our media buy. And we’re going to do a new ad, something meaner.”

“Hang on,” Marat cautioned. “Don’t stoop to her level.”

Joel folded the newspaper into a taut rectangle and flung it at the window. “Tried that. Not working.”

“It will,” Marat said, his voice cold, omniscient truth.

Joel pounded Marat’s keyboard with both hands. “Then it’s on you, adman. Put together something that’ll work.” He tossed his bagel in the garbage. “Another thing: since your mom quit, something’s wrong with the bagels. They’re not New York; they’re shit.”

They filmed the new commercial on Fisherman’s Wharf, Joel in a banker’s suit and skinny black tie strolling past beggars and street performers, trinkets on blankets, spray-paint artists, ramshackle one-man bands. In the distance sea lions wrestled on wooden rafts. The sky smelled of diesel fuel and dirty salt.

“San Francisco is a city of experiences,” Joel said to the camera as he walked along a dock. “I want to make the San Francisco experience better for our residents and businesses, to make important neighborhoods like Fisherman’s Wharf thrive. Building one of the most successful companies in the state has given me unique perspective on how to build a winning organization.” He stopped in front of a tourist shop, racks of cheap sweatshirts pulled onto the sidewalk. “As founder of Home Safe, a national nonprofit, I’ve helped thousands of foster kids grow up safe.” The camera panned down the wharf, fat tourists and bad restaurants, the only Hooters in town. “Join me, Joel Lumpkin, to help San Francisco grow up safe.”

“You’ve got my vote,” Marat told him from off camera, still amazed that Joel didn’t know Fisherman’s Wharf was strictly for visitors, the black sheep of San Francisco, faker than a four-titted
whore; not to mention the ad’s tagline, implying childishness and frivolity, insulting as a comparison to San Diego.

“That was good,” Joel admitted. He kicked a fluttering bus schedule off the dock into the bay and raised his arms in victory.

They played the shit out of the spot, five times during every local newscast for two months, during all the primetime sitcoms and NASCAR broadcasts, every ten minutes on the giant television screen on Market Street, right after the hourly station ID on the rap radio stations. They sponsored monster truck rallies and chili cook-offs, Joel outfitted in a silver-and-green vinyl jumpsuit and taking questions from a Harley sidecar; they sponsored a blimp to drift over the city with Joel’s name in cloud-gray across its envelope. FOX signed on for a reality television show,
On the Trail with Joel Lumpkin
, which, despite the 1 AM timeslot, pulled decent ratings because Joel swore a lot, got around in a helicopter, and took the camera crew along on his paid dates with supermodels.

Gradually Joel Lumpkin, Independent candidate for mayor, crept up to 12 percent in the polls, in sole possession of third place.

“I did some math on the plane,” Joel told Marat upon his return from a quick trip to Bahrain, where a subsidiary was constructing the tallest building in the world. “At twenty million dollars for approximately seventy thousand votes, that comes out to 285 dollars per vote. For the pleasure of getting my ass kicked.”

“If you don’t like my work, fire me,” said Marat, his response prepared months ago. “I’m an ad guy, not a campaign manager. Your problem is the issues. You’re an outsider, and you haven’t told anybody where you stand. What do you expect?”

“For 285 dollars a vote, I expect to win.”

“People want to know why you’re putting so much effort in to this. Why do you want the job?”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

Marat knew he was in it for uncreative reasons, wealth and
power on a colossal scale, his obsession with erecting huge buildings and lots of little ones too. Nouveau riche going for nouveau richer. “You need a real answer,” he said. “Even the biggest ad campaign in city history isn’t gonna win San Francisco by itself.”

Silence over the phone line, Marat cocked up in his chair. “I want dirt,” Joel huffed, trying to sound pissed but underneath pretty pleased he’d smashed an advertising record or two. “Info, skeletons, shit; everything she’s fucked, I wanna know. Everything your parents fucked up on, that too. I’ll pay you twenty million dollars.”

The number bounced around Marat’s head, the limitless untamed future of fortune. “Why should I believe you’ll pay me?” he asked.

“I’ll put it in escrow. Arrange it with Ankra.”

Marat spun his chair toward his office window, the tinted light marking the edge of the day. “You know about the thing in Iran,” he squeaked.

“Let me think about it. Army jack-off threatens to kill his pathetic, sloppy, communist sister in the middle of a war zone, proceeds to get his ass beat. Rewarded with cushy job by Mayoral Candidate Me. Not helpful.”

Marat nodded to no one in particular. His parents had been pathetic and sloppy, his whole life had been pathetic and sloppy—and here, at last, was a way to get clean.

“I’ll find something,” he snapped, and hung up before Joel could change his mind.

She would be content just relaxing, she told him. Maybe she could garden, or learn Japanese. He kissed her and said he’d do anything for her, honest, so why waste her life on bullshit when her heart was firm on desserts? She was still good at it, her gorging instincts all burned off, the city tiring of Element’s dominance and ready for a change of scenery. As for Zoogman, Jasper’d heard on the T.V. that he’d been thrown in the slammer
for drunk driving and tax evasion, his mug shot described as a more metallic Frankenstein. If pastries were still her thing, Jasper’d fund it, do it right.

Esmerelda opened Luna in the Mission in the summer of 2019. Jasper arranged the financing, put his legal team on the contracts. He sang for opening night, the Buick towed in from Vegas, Tiny Jake slapping skins, unveiling a new album’s worth of material as carts covered in grapefruit soufflés and marigold muffins trundled from table to table. The buzz was sensational, the crowds voracious and forgiving. The comeback of a culinary myth: from anonymous fall to magnificent resurrection, complete with Grammy-winning soundtrack.

Luna had misted glass walls, floors stained Israeli blue, the name scripted in pink neon and flickering softly onto 15th Street. Diners entered through a dome modeled on Casablanca’s Grand Mosque, took drinks at a long maple bar salvaged from a Memphis truck stop, and rode a moving sidewalk past a graffiti remake of Guernica to their mod table constructed of industrial plastic. An open fire hissed in the center of the dining room; an old Victrola honked out jazz in the corner. Jasper’s gold records hung from the ceiling, strung up with wire and twinkling.

Entrenched in the kitchen, Esmerelda crafted plates, bullied staff, enforced quality control, and badgered suppliers over the phone, breaking periodically to parade out to the dining room and defend her desserts from uninformed critiques. During the day she devised recipes, experimenting with beakers and Bunsen burners, sampling fruits flown in from Asia and Africa, building a comprehensive collection of the world’s greatest chocolates. She planted an organic wheat field in drained marsh-land by the airport and turned the crop to flour in a mill she installed in the restaurant attic, then added yeast and desalinated ocean water, pumped in purified oxygen during the kneading process, and baked world-class bread over smoldering Scottish peat in a dedicated hillside kiln. Every day after the lunch rush she walked down to the Mission Pool and swam laps,
the chlorinated stress burn she called it, coming back rambunctious and at her most creative, hitting her peak as the big spenders rolled in. During crunch time she was indefatigable, a finger in every mixing bowl, jotting down new ideas at a hundred miles a minute, taking no breaks and still outshining her younger, friskier, and narcotics-powered staff. She attributed her stamina to the exercise regimen, her sensible diet, and a delirious trepidation that had taken root in her head: she knew how good she had it and would never again piss it away.

She invented vanilla soup, jalapeño chutney pie, baked bananas infused with pineapple reduction sauce, Fluffernutter cake layered with raspberry jam. She torched ice cream and froze fondue into popsicles, coated oranges with anise and sprinkled with gummy bears, flambéed star fruit in grappa and served hot slices on graham crackers. Out in her wheat field she caught insects, mostly flies and ladybugs, which she roasted over a mesquite flame and encased in butterscotch fudge for a dish called Cretaceous Amber. Her desserts were Petri dishes of flavors, she explained, reminding anyone who asked about inspiration that when you work in a copy shop for twenty-five years, the ideas pile up. For the old-timers who remembered her glory days at Incognito she brought back the oatmeal cookies, still fabulous and trapezoidal and topped with luscious homemade ice cream, the only tradition she allowed was worth keeping.

It took her a few weeks to understand that she was cooking for Jasper. He put the show on hiatus and stayed with her, parking himself and his gang at a long table in the back corner, sampling the first batch of every dish and telling showtime stories and signing autographs for guests. A hot handspun swagger bolstered his speech, and he came off as more put-together than the peaky voice on the radio implied. Esmerelda tracked him on the security cameras as he swigged soda through a straw and hobbled to the people-mover for a smoke on the sidewalk, his face hidden behind sunglasses the size of DVDs. She watched him nod and
smile at creaks and clanks from the kitchen, the possible sounds of his fan base rustling. Sniffing the air for her smell.

At work in the kitchen she finally fell in love with Jasper Winslow.

“Come with me,” she said a month after opening, on a night he was tapping his fingers and toes in half-time from boredom, his spirit smothered by constant fan handshakes and empty greetings, more pastries than he could digest properly, not a drop of vodka. She led him upstairs to the washroom by the wheat mill and took off all her clothes. He sat on the toilet and pulled on his earlobes.

“I believe this belongs to you,” she said, guiding a hand over her breasts.

“Well, huh, that’s not bad,” he admitted.

“This too,” she said, placing his other hand inside her thighs.

“That ain’t terrible neither.”

“And this.” She put her hand on his cheek and pressed her mouth on his rubberized lips, tasting burned firewood and aspartame. She kissed his chin and his nose, and reached for his sunglasses.

His head retreated, his hand had her wrist. “Don’t do that,” he said.

“It’s me,” she said, soft as cotton.

“Don’t matter. That ain’t for the lily-livered.”

“I want to see you,” she insisted. And by applying some elbow grease and using a toothbrush for leverage, she eventually pried the sunglasses out from behind his ears and off his head. His face was blanked with strips of scars where his eyes had been, discolored patches rolled together like overlapping coats of paint. She breathed in and kissed them like they were cool cream eggshells.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He shivered. “Me too.”

“Well, no point sitting around feeling sorry for ourselves.” She reached for his dick. “Might as well make the best of it.”

Inside a week they were tossed into family, turning up aged wedding bands and dusty pictures, sharing coffee mugs and shampoo. She moved in with him at the hotel and sold her flat in SOMA for an outrageous celebrity-enhanced profit. He held court at the restaurant; she attended all his shows. They made love constantly, gently, affectionately. Bonded solid through history and habit.