The French Revolution (2 page)

Once seated, Esmerelda drove the short distance to the cash register, put on her headset, and plugged into the telephone system. Next she counted and tabulated Slippy’s money from the bank, filed the bills in the cash register, reviewed inventory, and consumed a small snack: a half-dozen donuts. She often used her last minutes of quiet to take care of some company bookkeeping, calculating tax withholdings and overtime pay and looking for suspiciously long lunch breaks and late punch-outs that didn’t jibe with her dead-on memory of who was working when.

Seven o’clock. Lakshmi sprayed air freshener over Esmerelda’s station, plugged in the buzzing neon OPEN sign, and turned over the lock. There was usually a burst of door-busters first thing: rip-snorting executives dropping off financial reports to be copied ASAP, teachers running off the day’s worksheets, haggard college students putting the finishing touches on term papers, insomniacs of all stripes. A number of early-morning regulars combined their trip to CopySmart with a workout at the gym next door, depositing their projects with Esmerelda in shorts and T-shirts and returning to pick up the finished products in suits and wet hair, their sweet-smelling body products papering over Esmerelda’s rising odor just as the air freshener started to fade.

But even with the executive, academic, student, and gym traffic, Esmerelda’s fingers didn’t really start dancing until after nine, when the secretaries arrived. Even after five years, the sheer volume of secretarial traffic continued to astound her, flooding the store with shoulder-padded blouses and the aroma of cheap coffee. Esmerelda’s question: where did they come from? If one took a stroll around the neighborhood, even a long one—as Jasper did every day and reported back on in detail—
stumbling upon any sort of obvious office that employed secretaries was close to impossible. On her own commute through the area in the special services van, Esmerelda noted only typical San Francisco restaurants, bars, gyms, newsstands, laundromats, fashion boutiques, head shops, and many traditional Victorian-style homes—some of which, Esmerelda realized, may have been converted into commercial operations that required administrative support, but nothing resembling the façade of an assistant-intensive office building. Still, from the ornately painted Edwardian woodwork they came, smiling politely and enduring the inevitable copy machine meltdowns with deep patience, because at least someone else was dealing with the technical problems for once.

On a Tuesday morning in the fall of George Bush the First’s inaugural year in office, Jasper Winslow walked into the CopySmart flagship store as the initial tide of secretaries began to ebb, whistling a butt-kicking rock song he’d just heard on the radio and twirling a box wrapped in tissue paper and knotted with twine. He waited by the greeting card rack as Esmerelda finished up with a customer, then trotted over and set the box on the counter.

“Happy Birthday, Ezzie!” he cried. As usual, Jasper’s radio-whine voice projected too far, attracting fearful glances from a band of beggars edging into the store.

“Quiet, Jasper! This is a business.”

“Nonsense, Ezzie, it’s your big day. Loud and proud, I’ll let the whole world know!” Jasper ran out to the sidewalk and delivered the squeaky observation that it was the birthday of his greatest friend in the world and everybody better celebrate hard if they knew what was good for them. He jogged back to the counter with the ruddy remnants of thrill on his face.

“Are you done?”

“Open your present.”

“Not now, dummy. I’m working.” Esmerelda took her work very seriously, Jasper knew, and her slit-eyed glare indicated she had reclassified their conversation at a few pegs below friendly.

He lowered his voice to a breathy fizz: “Come on, it’s from Zoogman’s. Now open it quick and see for yourself.”

Zoogman’s was firmly at the top in the pantheon of San Francisco bakeries, with an unmatched tradition of lights-out delicious baked goods and pastries that still outweighed Esmerelda’s largely repressed bad memories concerning the institution. Seeing as it
was
her birthday after all, Ezzie dug out her sapphire-encrusted scissors from the giant wool bag and snipped the twine and tissue paper and scotch tape locking down the lid to find her favorite dessert in the whole wide universe inside: triple chocolate truffle swirl cheesecake, with Heath bar crumbs and caramel roses on top.

“Holy heck!” She drew a quick anxious breath; her pulse sprinted and stopped; her eyes dilated a quarter inch; a coat of perspiration gelled to her face like bubble wrap. She’d never told Jasper of her lust for Zoogman’s masterpiece, a recipe so dangerously addictive it was kept under lock and key and unavailable to the public unless you could talk a chef out of retirement and had five hundred bucks to pay for ingredients.

“Where did you get this?”

“Why, I bought it at Bruce Zoogman’s bakery. I know a guy, and I saved up some money. It’s not every day that my babycakes turns twenty-nine.” Jasper lifted a slice from the box and placed it on her tray. “Here, have some.”

“Oh . . . what about the customers?”

“Don’t worry bout that, Ezzie. There’s nobody here.”

Esmerelda consulted her surveillance cameras. Aside from the team of filthy street dwellers copying food stamps and cash on the self-service machine by the door, the store was empty.

“Just a taste. It looks real, real good.”

“I hope so. Bruce told me it was one of his best ever.”

Esmerelda reacted instantly, scooping huge handfuls of cake with her bare hands and shoveling it into her mouth, swallowing without chewing, sucking frosting off her fingertips, ten fingers crammed in at once. Her blood shot off on a roller-coaster ride
through her coronary system, loop-de-looping through her legs and corkscrewing through her heart while the outside world turned colorless, her heart beat in her pupils. After another three bites, her blood was pumping so hard that even the cobwebbed capillaries of Esmerelda’s pelvis were penetrated, her supercharged plasma shooting through mounds of fat and overdeveloped muscle tissue, snaking around fragile tendons and between aching bones and down into a dime-sized spot in a bodily zone she was professionally conditioned to ignore until just before bedtime: BOOM—it was ambushed, floored, decapitated. Esmerelda dropped her fork and her training, urinating on the Gargantuan and collapsing into glorious postorgasmic sleep.

She awoke covered in chlorinated water, propped up against a concrete step.

“Hello, Ezzie.”

Jasper stood next to her in a large municipal pool. Esmerelda had never seen him naked before, and even drowsy and discombobulated she found a way to laugh at his penis.

“Forget pencil dick—you’ve got eraser dick, Jasper.”

“Just wait,” he said. “Even eraser-sized, I can shoot lead.”

He parted her underwater legs, shimmied between them, and began to convulse like a bad salsa dancer. Esmerelda was cackling too hard to react at first, but after a time she recognized the lengths Jasper had gone to acquire the cake and hijack her out of work and transport her over and into the pool, not to mention his consistently friendly disposition and thoughtfulness, his smiley profile waving both hands at her through the CopySmart plateglass window, his daily observation that she was looking better than a pecan pie at Thanksgiving dinner; hardly the worst man in the world and not bad looking either. Also it was her birthday, and she hadn’t gotten a piece in years. Gently she led him out of the flab fold he’d been screwing and down into her rarely seen nether regions.

Even in the right hole, the lovemaking didn’t do much for Esmerelda, as she had difficulty distinguishing between Jasper’s
pelvic thrusts, stabbing fingers, knee bumps, and kicks. Instead she focused on dislodging a chunk of Zoog she discovered jammed between her teeth, which turned the encounter into more of a race, for her at least—her tongue versus Jasper’s palsied spasms. As Jasper churned a frothy whirlpool in the shallow end, Esmerelda’s oral swashbuckling grew more furious in parallel, her wide tongue lashing and digging at dental crevasses to free the stuck cake. They were both sweating freely when loudspeakers announced they had five minutes left on the private pool party, with Jasper issuing louder and more profanity-intensive exclamations, Esmerelda rumbling her assent, the slip-slap of colliding wet limbs, Jasper’s face puckering, his back straight as a flagpole, the hard splash of pool water onto the deck, rolling motion beneath Esmerelda’s cheeks, her teeth clicking, steam rising off the water and turning the air hot and dangerous, until a tortured shriek burst from Jasper’s lungs and he collapsed into Esmerelda’s pillowy chest. In the same instant, Esmerelda’s tongue ripped the Zoogman’s debris from her molars and cast it down her pulsating throat, bringing back that heavenly, urination-inducing feeling—not all the way to incontinence, but enough to turn her face the color of a radish, send a series of long gleeful shivers across her titanic figure, and reorganize her mouth into the faintest hint of a smile. This sudden decompression was so closely synchronized with Jasper’s ejaculation, in terms of timing, that afterward they both released earnest, melodious sighs in appreciation of their seemingly perfect pool fuck.

After hitting four hundred pounds, Esmerelda had pretty much written off sex for the rest of her life, so, when she foundered halfway up the concrete pool steps—leaving Jasper to raise her up in the portable winch borrowed from his longshoreman roommate, Sven—she ran her fingers between her legs to check for evidence, to make sure this was real and not some Zooginduced fantasy. The chlorinated water had washed her clean, and she couldn’t find any physical residue to speak of, but when she looked at Jasper standing next to her in a worn cotton robe,
she detected a soft pheromonal glow over his skin, which combined with his shining brown eyes and giddy lip licking for overwhelming evidence of virginity lost.

“Jasper, you devil,” Esmerelda drawled, stepping into the sail-sized tunic he held open for her. “I never knew you had it in you.” She settled into the Gargantuan with a series of heavy squishes.

“There’s a lot to me you don’t know about.”

This was true. Although she’d known Jasper for nearly four years, the first three and a half of those had been indirect, more knowing of than actually knowing. For a long while Jasper had simply been the freaky black guy pushing a wheelbarrow full of coupons who kindly halted his march up and down Market Street to let Esmerelda palpitate across the sidewalk. Even by San Francisco-weirdo standards he was an unforgettable sight, what with the clown shoes, the soda jerk cap, the extra-extra-large overalls, and the everpresent doofus smile. Music crackled steadily from the transistor radio in his front pocket, mostly rock and soul, sometimes classical early in the morning. Many of Esmerelda’s customers were put off by Jasper’s dippy uniform and grin; nobody who looked so goofy could be trusted, they groused inside the copy shop, and he was probably on drugs to boot. But Esmerelda appreciated his gentlemanly patience—most people never waited for her, just walked on by as though large people didn’t deserve eye contact—and after two years of crossing the sidewalk in front of him, she began acknowledging his deferential pause with a slight flick of her fingers. A major breakthrough occurred in the spring of 1988, when he offered, and she accepted, one of the heart-shaped balloons he attached to his wheelbarrow on Fridays. Jasper, a slow learner at best, eventually witnessed enough of Esmerelda’s hourly feeding frenzies to recognize that a woman of her dimensions enjoyed a solid meal for a good price. He started funneling her the best of his dining coupons: two plain pizza slices for the price of one, value meal upgrades, three dollars off any entrée (with pickup), free
dessert with purchase of a main course. These were much appreciated by Esmerelda, who drafted Lakshmi into buzzing up and down the Market Street corridor on her behalf, retrieving free sodas and upgraded value meals and three-dollars-off entrées, often burning through several loads of Jasper’s coupons in a week. The discounts shaved hundreds off Esmerelda’s meal budget and freed up funds for makeup and trips to the hairdresser and new muumuus for each season—little feminine touches that Jasper always noticed and commented on, thus endearing himself to Esmerelda even more.

Jasper largely did this out of his kind disposition, and there was an obvious courtship aspect as well—yet an important financial incentive was also at play: Jasper’s salary was contingent upon the number of coupons actually used, not distributed. He was hauling it in if 3 percent of his coupons were redeemed, the scanned UPC barcodes transmitted to the payroll database, tacking associated incentives on to his paycheck. With Esmerelda hitting a personal redemption rate of 82 percent, Jasper’s overall numbers jolted into the low double digits, a shift that sent his income soaring, roused the attention of his supervisors, and made him the odds-on favorite for Employee of the Year honors.

Yet despite the modest accoutrements he came to enjoy with his salary jump—a longer antenna for his radio, an assortment of rock band insignias sewn onto his overalls, heavy-duty tires for his wheelbarrow—Jasper mentioned none of this to Ezzie. Throughout their friendship and low-level flirtation, even after Jasper presented the Gargantuan to her as a gift—his sister was disabled and he had access to the mechanized wheelchair parts, cushions, and reinforced metals which his mother had used to build the thing—they had never discussed deep personal questions, relationship builders: how Esmerelda had grown so large, why Jasper had fallen into such an inane profession, their respective salary structures. Emboldened by their sexual union, Jasper strolled over to initiate this conversation as Esmerelda piloted the Gargantuan through the pool parking lot. But before he could
squeeze out two words, Esmerelda swiped the cake box from his grip and flash-gobbled another slice of Zoog, staying sober just long enough for Jasper to load the Gargantuan into his mother’s minivan and coax her onto the middle-row bench seat.