Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

The ayes swept it, and out in the parking lot, Ricki looked at Priscilla and winked. “What's the capital of El Papa Muerta?” she asked. “ San Papa Muerta?”

Priscilla grabbed Ricki and kissed her full and wet on the mouth, right in front of a great many waitresses who were pulling out of the lot in various rusted-out VW bugs. The rusted-out VW bug is the national bird of Waitressland. It was then and there that Priscilla made up her mind to go to bed with Ricki. But while her mind was convinced, her body needed encouragement, so they went to the Virginia Inn at First and Virginia and drank a gang of discount champagne. Still, Priscilla's endocrine system was lagging a few laps behind her resolve. “My pilot light has gone out and needs to be relit,” she said. Ricki suggested a porno movie. She hoped that a double bill of Starship Eros and Garage Girls would turn up the thermostat. Priscilla hoped so, too.

Once in the theater, however, the Chianti and champagne began to get to Ricki. They were sitting up close, in the third row, and all of those colossal in-and-outs and up-and-downs made her queasy. It was a classic case of motion sickness. She held her tummy and moaned. Priscilla turned to the row of baldheaded men behind them. “Would you mind not smoking,” she said. “This woman is having a religious experience.”

“If they jiggle one more time, I'm gonna spew,” said Ricki.

Priscilla helped her to her feet and led her down the aisle. A couple of the bald boys followed them. “My friend has a chronic allergy to heterosexuality,” Priscilla told them. “We brought her here in an attempt to activate her body's natural immune system, but it didn't work.” The men laughed kind of nervously. “Don't mock the afflicted!” Priscilla screamed at them. The Don Juans returned to their seats.

It had been a while since Priscilla had driven a car. She shifted gears jerkily. Ricki groaned. They had to make three pit stops between downtown and the Ballard district, a distance so slight that octogenarian Norwegian crones had been known to walk it, their shopping bags loaded with lutefisk. At Ricki's duplex, Priscilla washed the victim's face and tucked her in. She appeared to have passed out, but as Priscilla was tiptoeing to the door, she called in a weak voice, “It was wonderful, Pris.”

“What was, honey? The meeting? The champagne?”

“The eclipse,” said Ricki. “It was probably the most real thing I've ever seen, but it was also like a dream. You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind.”

“That's how it is with dreams,” said Priscilla. “They're the perfect crime.” She thought then of the elusive exudate, the living emerald she hunted in the forests of olfactory memory, the dream she lived in her nose. She felt her laboratory pulling her like a tide, and it taxed her strength to resist.

With effort, she drove Ricki's car to the waterfront and sipped a cup of bivalve nectar at Ivar's Clam Bar (it was a walk-up, fast-fish stand where she needn't worry about being served by a waitress who might have been at the meeting that day). Then, having resolved on her last birthday to complete every task she began, she returned to the moviehouse and watched the ending of Starship Eros . Everything considered, it had been the most relaxing and entertaining two days off she'd enjoyed all year. “All work and no play makes Priscilla a dull genius,” she lectured herself on the way home.

It was after midnight when she arrived at her building. There was an odor in the hallway more funky than a cabbage pot, and on her doorsill there sat in certain firepluggian splendor, like a dropping from the eclipse, like a disembodied bulb that had been beamed to Earth from Starship Eros, another beet.

NEW ORLEANS

LOUISIANA IN SEPTEMBER was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.

The only way to hang up on the obscene caller was to install air conditioning. The Parfumerie Devalier never had been air-conditioned, however, and unless it lifted from its current economic slump, it probably never would be. As a consequence, both Madame Lily Devalier and her maid and assistant, V'lu Jackson, held old-fashioned lacquered paper fans, with which they stirred the humid respiration that Louisiana panted into the shop. They were sitting on the lime velvet love seat at the rear of the retail area, watching television and fanning away. On the six o'clock news there were scenes of a total eclipse of the sun as photographed from atop the Space Needle in Seattle and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the path of an eclipse is one hundred and sixty-seven miles wide, allowing Seattle to catch the southern edge of this one and Paris the northern edge: in New Orleans, the sun had burned on as was its habit, undimmed except by a late afternoon shower).

“Whooee!” exclaimed V'lu as she watched first Seattle and then Paris go from broad daylight to supernatural darkness in a matter of seconds. “Whooee! That done beats hurricane drops all to pieces.”

“I see it as an omen,” said Madame Devalier.

“Say whut?”

“An omen. A sign. Paris is eclipsed, New Orleans basks in light. The perfumes of Devalier have always been as good as any in France, and now they are going to be better. Parfumerie Devalier is going to prosper, and Paris — proud, arrogant, pompous Paris — is going to play second fiddle.” Madame touched the avalanche of her bosom with her fan, nodded three times, and smiled.

V'lu giggled. “Seattle, too, ma'am.”

“What about Seattle?”

“Seattle e-clipsed, too. So we don't have to worry none 'bout Seattle.”

“I wasn't worried in the least about Seattle. Why would I worry about Seattle, of all places?”

V'lu hesitated before replying. The young woman and the old woman stared at each other, fanning relentlessly. “ She in Seattle, ma'am. Last anybody heard.”

“So? What difference does it make where 'she' is? Not that I don't have feelings for her, but her whereabouts has nothing to do with our business.”

Again V'lu hesitated. Her brown eyes opened as wide as the mouths of baby birds. “She got dee bottle,” V'lu said.

“The bottle! Bah! Poof! You and that bottle. Forget that bottle, it means nothing. Rien . Even if it had value, what on earth could she do with it?” Madame's fan whirred like a sewing machine. Her fan seemed to generate static electricity. A halo of heat lightning formed around it. “Even if that bottle is all you say it is, we don't need it. We have right here in this shop the most fabulous boof of jasmine the human nose has ever tasted—”

“Bingo Pajama!”

“I beg your pardon. Is that more vulgar slang from your vulgar generation?”

“Bingo Pajama, ma'am. That he name. He be back from dee island nex week wif mo' flowers.”

“And we haven't tamed the last batch yet! Tangerine seems to work okay as the top note. It aerates rather quickly, but it rides the jasmine and doesn't sink completely into it. With a middle note of the vigor of that Bingo Pajama jasmine — my Lord in heaven, girl, is that actually his name? — what we need is a base note with a floor of iron. It can't just sit there, though, it has to rise up subtly and unite the tangerine somehow with that bodacious jasmine theme. A very special base note is what you and I must find.” Madame Devalier's fan fluttered wildly, and V'lu fanned hard to keep up with her.