The French Revolution (18 page)

Until then: anger, brutality, callousness. Shallow tirades and vituperation, frequently matched by howling. More than anything, insults—ad hominem, abstract, accurate, fantastic. The invective exploded from Fanny’s lips.

“Get off me, you brazen twat,” she said to her sobbing granddaughter. “Expect me to believe your bullshit? I have seen enough to know the games you play. Go find another fool to swindle, and take that criminal down there with you.” She kneed Marat in the chest. “Move it, leave. You have done enough, now give me my quiet.” She rolled onto her side. “That is all I have to say.”

The children ran to their mother’s bed and jumped on her mattress, trilling wretched screams. They’d seen the glint in Fanny’s eye and knew something was big-time wrong, sensed it like dogs sense narcotics and women sense fertilization. Employing
a mix of snack incentives and hysterical pleading, they got Esmerelda vertical and up the stairs, entering the bedroom as Fanny hung up the phone with her lawyer, Robespierre’s words melting like snowflakes but lingering just long enough for the changes to go through.

Esmerelda’s heaves filled the room. “Kids, get me some water! And a towel, while you’re at it.” She wiped sweat off her face with her nightgown and took three uneasy steps toward the bed. “Ma, what gives? The naked push-ups crap, all the lying around nude. For Chrissakes, ‘twat’? How’m I supposed to define that one, huh? HA-RONK! So much gin, Ma, that ain’t healthy. And our contract—shite, it’s not workin’ out for nobody. I can’t afford a three-bedroom house with Slippy’s money, you’ve seen the prices. What’s the point anyway? Our contract probably ain’t legal, and anyhow we’re gonna keep on changing, like it or not. Kids do nothin’ but change. At first I thought it might be nice, all of us holed up together, the kids getting to know their Gramma, and us, maybe, getting to know each other too, as adults. But it’s more like prison, and you’re the warden. Can’t you ratchet down the crazy bit and let life move along?”

Fanny propped herself up on her pillows and took a look at her daughter. They had the same upturned nose, and those were Harold’s bean eyes, but the rest of her was a big hill of horse manure that she wanted nothing to do with ever again. “Listen to me, fat ass. I can’t deal with your shit. You’re obese and lazy and underachieving. You’ve ruined yourself with that dead-end job, and now you’re ruining the children. And all you do is waddle around and stuff your face and blame it on your cake holiday ten years ago.” A chemical extract pooled in her mouth, and she wiped her tongue with the hem of her quilt. “Every couple years you say you’re gonna slim down, and then you backslide. Remember that Christmas you took a walk with the kids and told everyone you were gonna be a size 6 in two years? Remember how the next day you ate half a ham by yourself? Grow up, Esmerelda. And get the hell out of my room.”

For a minute no one moved. Partially because Esmerelda was exhausted, but mostly it was the unexpected venom, the rampant use of contractions, the frontal attack on Esmerelda’s constitution. How Fanny spoke the truth, a meadow tipped with frozen dew. Robespierre brought her mother a plastic cup of water and Esmerelda drained it with her eyes fixed on Fanny’s face, her slow eyes, her brindled hair, her assured chin. Then she hobbled to the door and left, the kids followed her, and Fanny was finally alone.

Marat broke into his mother’s ledger, a dusty cloth-covered tome lined with miniscule figures. Assorted accounts contained just enough to put a down payment on a three-bedroom house out in the Excelsior, not the nicest part of town but starting to gentrify, within city limits and close enough to McLaren Park to fulfill the contract requirements, with a little left over for furnishings, a housewarming party, maybe a used vehicle. “And that’s thinking conservatively, a standard thirty-year mortgage with 20 percent down,” he groused to his sister as they strategized in her room. “So many other options these days; she’s not even trying. What’s the deal?”

“Grandma’s all she’s got left that’s familiar. It’s hard to get past her.”

“Grandma’s bad.”

“Grandma’s a problem,” Robespierre decided. “She hates all this anyway. We gotta do something.” And like that it was settled that Fanny Van Twinkle’s vestigial presence would be removed like an orange highway cone, picked off the asphalt and tossed into the back of the truck. As time dripped by, the idea gestated from vague concept to firm belief to actionable plan with a timeline and budget and elaborate web of deniability, all the anticipated variables plotted out, horoscopes and travel schedules taken into consideration, crafted with elegance and care. The only thing missing was the courage to execute, the shove over
the mountaintop and into the irreversible wild, which eventually came along in the form of one of Marat’s fellow detention-goers, a spoiled Vietnamese kid named Duc who gave Marat his first dime bag and Marley’s
Legend
CD and put the kid in a place of peace.

On a midsummer afternoon in 2004, Marat took three rips from a pocket bong and tiptoed toward Fanny’s recliner. She was snoring heavily over soap opera dialogue, her face undulating with the flow of oxygen, rising and falling, a rippling circus tent, until he touched her slipper and she gurgled awake. She frowned, unaccustomed to personal contact and suspecting chicanery. “Whatcha got there, swamp water? Where’s Ezzie?”

He handed her a glass filled with brackish liquid. “Iced tea,” he said. “I made it. Robespierre took mom out shopping. Now drink up. I’ve got a surprise.”

Fanny glared at the glass shaking in her hand, growing increasingly leery of her first grandchild-delivered beverage in years. “What is it?”

“I was thinking we could go out,” Marat suggested. “Do a little sightseeing.”

“Really,” she said. “What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t know. Where would you like to go?”

Her first time out of the house in years. An opening. She thanked him with a slight softening of her eyes. “The Golden Gate Bridge?” she suggested. “Is it a nice day for a walk?”

“Not really,” Marat said. “It’s pretty gloomy out. The view would stink.”

“That’s too bad,” Fanny said, her words lugubrious, her fantasy exit crushed.

“But the zoo’s open today,” he said. “I haven’t been in years. Let’s do that. The zoo.”

She wanted to hate him for the brief remainder of her life. She hated him as he helped her into her overcoat and walked her down the street to the bus stop; she hated him as he paid her fare and collected her transfer, as he smiled and talked about how in
history class they were studying the French Revolution, the Jacobins and Napoleon, his namesake Jean-Paul Marat, distracting external wars, some stupid pendulum swinging back and forth between right wing and left. She hated that although it was foggy the zoo was not wet, it was not nautical, it was not architectural brilliance spanning churning teal seawater blocked off by a puny four-foot fence.

He paid her entrance fee at the zoo and took her by the hand. She hated him and recalled how Esmerelda had taken the children to the zoo many years ago on their birthday, a disaster of an outing, Esmerelda unsuited to chaperone in her hugeness, the incident at the diner across the street that they cried about for weeks. Little kids had long memories, she thought, like wives and husbands.

He took her to the monkey house. The primates sat on poles and branches, picking their teeth and sleeping. They were stocky animals, bordering on chubby, and their ridiculous hairless rumps made her feel uneasy. Marat spoke softly to her, pointing out a little guy in a tree hanging by one leg, waving at her, it looked like, when it pooped on the floor. Marat laughed and she laughed too, an unfamiliar feeling, laughter, her last laugh. She didn’t hate her grandson so much anymore. She realized she didn’t mind the monkey house smell either, no worse than a fisherman’s socks.

They looked at flightless birds, foxes, a bear, otters. A herpetologist was giving a talk by the turtle garden and they stopped to listen, the woman serious and straining when she smiled. Though her delivery was muted, it could not hide the love that coated her recitations of genus and species, the specifics of the turtle lifecycles and details about rare breeds she’d tracked in the field; her sincere affection held Fanny rapt, unanchored, almost happy. She was focused on the herpetologist’s inert description of the Aldabra giant tortoise’s mating rituals when Marat touched her arm and they walked on.

Marat didn’t say goodbye. He walked her to the edge of the
open-air lion sanctuary and said he was going to go to the bathroom, did she need anything? Some popcorn or maybe a cotton candy? She said no, thank you, she would be fine, go on ahead, she’d wait right there. He left and she turned toward the animal prowling the perimeter, humped back the color of fire, two globes of translucent jade for eyes. A vital, baronial beast. The drop from the wall to the moat surrounding the lion’s habitat was about thirty feet, and she watched the lion pad back and forth along the edge of the protective waterway, an incorruptible sentry, soundless but for a quiet and terrible purr.

This was the place. In the open air near the sea, alone, going with pure nature instead of manufactured solutions like sleeping pills or nooses or ovens. Briefly she wished for a rain shower, but when nothing materialized she took the shallow moat for good enough.

She fell with her mouth open and sucking air. There was time to watch the lion react, hurtling toward her and widening its jaws, animal instinct in all its beauty. Shrieks from other visitors, the piss-stained air stale around her head.
Why so long, Harold?
she thought.
Why so long?
And then she kissed the shallow moat and drew a lungful of water, Marat’s love and the herpetologist’s love and the lion’s primal love melting into her at once, and finally she was returned to the sky.

The cops pulled Murphy Ahn over for a broken taillight, but soon identified his driver’s license as a Chinatown knockoff, recorded the vodka spewing from his pores, found the Beretta under the driver’s seat, a half kilo of cocaine in the tire well. Fourteen years old, his very first arrest.
About time
, he thought as they threw him over the hood and clipped his hands behind his back. He needed a kick in the ass, a jump-start, a mental and physical challenge. If you weren’t rising you were stuck, he thought, and gambled his one phone call on Château Versailles.

He knew he’d made a mistake when Allen answered. Problem
was, Allen was usually high and forgot stuff, basics like the way to the bathroom and his middle name. Most nights he played board games against himself and listened to funk in the living room while the rest of the crew partied downstairs.

“H’yo?”

“Allen, it’s Murph.”

“Downtown Murphy Brown. ’Sup! ’Sup!” A slap bass solo cranked over the line.

“Cool, cool. Listen, I got pulled in by the cops an’ I need some help.”

“The cops? Shit, what they get you for?”

“Bunch of things. I only got five minutes.”

“Yeah, man, got it.”

“’S cool. Look, I need you to tell D that I’m down at Rudolph Youth Center.”

“Hold on, lemme find a pen.” Murphy watched the guard at the end of the hall scratch his balls as Allen snorted into the phone, punctuating a horn-section vamp in the background.

“What was that again? Dude somethin?”

“Rudolph. R-U-D-O-L-P-H. Like the reindeer.”

“Shit, this pen don’t work. Call back later.”

“I can’t call back. Tell Big D.”

“Tell him what, you’re at the North Pole?”

“Nah, man,
Rudolph
.”

The line cut out. “I get another call?” he asked the guard.

“One call, five minutes.”

“C’mon, I got hung up on. That don’t count.”

The guard took a step toward him, observing his ragged hair, pustule-ridden face, yellow and red eyes like the Spanish flag, the bad-milk stink of small-time failure. “You suck my dick, you get another call.”

“What the fuck?” Murphy reacted.