Everything on the Line

by Bob Mitchell

  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 shhhhhed 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 shhhhhed, 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 shhhhhs to mute her words, to break her spirit, to slam the door on human communication. All these hissing shhhhhs being a far cry from her gentle, loving shhhhhs, 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.

  “Winner!” Odi shouts. “This guy is killer. He is an absolute shark. You can see the power, the control, the swagger in his looks, in his stride, in his aura.”

  Now it’s Jack’s turn.

  He takes a first bite out of his croissant, washes it down with the Coke, looks out the window.

  Nothing.

  Oh, wait, here comes someone. It is a mime, one of those commonly seen street performers who are most abundant at the Pompidou Center, in Montmartre, and in the sixth, near St.-Germain des Prés.

  The mime’s face is painted white, and it is by no means clear whether it is a male or a female. It is wearing a white toga and sandals, positions itself on top of a wooden box on the sidewalk, and begins to move various body parts almost imperceptibly, but just enough to let passersby know that they are looking not at a statue but at a human being pretending to be one.

  “Winner!” Jack yelps. “That guy is amazing! He is hardly moving, but he is. That must be so hard to do!”

  “Wrong again, Einstein!” Ira corrects. “This guy, well, if he’s a guy, is a real loser. First of all, d’ya see that pan by his feet? That’s the way he makes his living. He’s basically a beggar. He’ll make maybe ten, twenty bucks today, even if he stays here until the sun goes down. Second, he’s basically a poor slob actor who can’t earn a decent, honest living, so he’s asking people to support him and his wonderful talent of being able to move an inch an hour. Third, he’s pathetic. He can’t even support himself or get ahead or have a title or a staff working under him or run a division or be anyone’s boss. Got no ambition, no drive, no thirst for success!”

  Jack Spade listens patiently to his father’s rant and smiles weakly and nods his head in agreement and his father smiles back but has no clue about what is going on under the table, where Jack is clenching his left fist so tight around his hot chocolate spoon that its bowl snaps off cleanly, leaving the stem alone in his quavering hand.

  * * *

  It is Sunday, May 28, 2045, the day before the opening round of the French Open Juniors. After an invigorating two-hour hit on a rich red clay side court at Roland Garros between young superstar and coach, Giglio, Gioconda, and Ugo enjoy an inspiring walk through the Left Bank, starting from the hotel, continuing past the Odéon theater and the sixth-century church of St.-Germain des Prés—the oldest in Paris—then the Rue Bonaparte and the Rue Jacob past the charming Place du Furstembourg and through the open-air market at the Carrefour de Buci, down the Rue Dauphine to the Pont Neuf and the green Henri IV equestrian statue, along the Seine to the Musée d’Orsay, up the Rue de Bellechasse, then a right on Rue de Varenne, where they arrive, senses filled with the smells and sights of the sixth and seventh arrondissements, at their final destination, the diminutive yet awe-inspiring Musée Rodin.

  After a stroll through the immense rectangular formal gardens behind the museum, the three climb the wide, sweeping marble staircase inside, enter one of the rooms filled with sculptures, separate, mill around.

  The eyes of the fifteen-year-old light upon a white marble piece that, like the Gaudí church in Barcelona, stops him dead in his tracks.

  La Main de Dieu!

  As with the Gaudí cathedral, Ugo Bellezza says a silent prayer of thanks that he is deaf and not blind. He walks around the spectacular sculpture of God’s hand once, twice, eight times, and still he cannot believe his wide, bewildered eyes.

  As with the Gaudí cathedral, there is so much to take in, but this time it is on a much less grand, and more intimate, scale.

  Ugo gets it that this is something special. He knows nothing about Rodin’s life, his training, his art, but he is feeling something visceral, a kind of shudder that is strong and palpable. He may not be an art history major, but he gets it. Totally.

  He is looking at this amazing vertical white marble hand of God emerging from a rough, unfinished mass of marble as its base and wondering how Rodin ever got this massive hand to look so strong and yet so loving. He is looking at the back of the sculpture, at the back of God’s hand extruding smooth and gentle and yet powerful from the mass of rough marble, and wondering how Rodin ever accomplished that. He is looking at the front of the statue, at Adam and Eve in a loving caress, he in her lap and cradling her head with his hands and their lips meeting tenderly and all the while the loving, miniature couple is being cradled themselves in this amazing, oversize hand of their awesome Creator, and Ugo is wondering how the artist was ever able to make such a sensuous scene so
innocent and glorious.

  He is looking at the whole piece, at what a magnificent and sacred statement is being made from so few elements, how the very birth of humankind and of love on earth could possibly have been expressed so simply and majestically by the sculpting of a single hand and the two vest-pocket creatures cradled by it and in it. He is looking for yet a ninth time at the awesome divine hand and the embracing bodies within and suddenly Ugo Bellezza understands really and truly what a metaphor is and how powerful it can be when it simplifies and clarifies and concretizes something very abstract and otherwise nearly unfathomable, just like Giglio always told him. And he is realizing suddenly, on this day before his biggest tennis test yet, what else The Hand of God is telling him, that you can create something out of nothing in life, that you can make something smooth and beautiful and powerful out of rough, formless material. And, it finally hits him, the material Rodin is using for his sculpture is marble, but the material God is using for his beautiful creation is…clay!

  Arm in arm, Giglio and Gioconda join up with Ugo, see the love and the inspiration in his eyes. The three look at the masterpiece together, walk around it once, twice in wonderment. And as they look at one another, they all smile and, in unison, form precisely the same four syllables with their lips.

  Sprez-za-tu-ra!

  * * *

  “Loser!” Ira Spade bellows in front of the dead man’s grave.

  He and Jack have been strolling through, and getting lost in, the celebrated and labyrinthine Père-Lachaise cemetery in the eastern twentieth arrondissement and have finally reached their destination: the tomb of The Doors’ Jim Morrison.

  “That poor bastard, what a loser!” Ira repeats to his son. “First of all, he was a crazy sonuvabitch. No control, no discipline, no ambition, no goals. Second, he died, what, at twenty-seven? And in a bathtub in Paris? Whatta waste! They say he was ingesting heroin, thinking it was cocaine. And he wasn’t even buried in the good ol’ U.S. of A.! And talk about losers? Look at these other dead people, all around you! I mean, all these poets, artists, actors, musicians, writers, scientists—famous Frenchies like Apollinaire and Balzac and Bernhard and Bizet and Delacroix and Gay-Lussac and Marceau and Molière and Piaf and Proust and Seurat—and who d’ya think is by far, and I mean by far, the one dead person who gets the most visitors, the most crap thrown on his grave? Jim Morrison, an American! Losers, all of you!” Ira, whirling around 360 degrees, shouts at the collective deceased.