Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

Marcel was standing in his window, staring out as if transfixed, and Claude elected for the moment not to infringe on his reverie. Instead, he retreated to his own office, opened the elegantly creaky door of a Louis XVI cabinet and removed a bottle of Pernod. From the executive refrigerator, his secretary procured water and ice cubes. Claude splashed himself a healthy one, noticed how the Pernod turned from clear to milky with the addition of water, and wondered if that was analogous to the way the eclipse had affected his thinking — or had it just the opposite effect? He gulped one drink, sipped another, and an hour, nearly, passed before he again called on his cousin. Marcel remained at the window, only now he was wearing his whale mask.

All afternoon Marcel stood in the window, all afternoon Claude drank. At five, when the secretaries went home, Claude took what was left of the Pernod and moved to the receptionist's desk, from where he might watch Marcel through a door left slightly ajar. Claude would have denied that he was spying. Rather, he had a protective interest in his cousin, for business as well as familial reasons. In fact, old Luc LeFever, Claude's father, Marcel's uncle, and at seventy, very much president of the firm, personally had charged Claude with the responsibility of looking out for Marcel. “He's a bedbug,” Luc had said, “but you see to it that he's a safe and contended bedbug.”

Claude wasn't entirely sure that Marcel was buggy, and he was less sure that he was content, but he would do whatever necessary to insure his safety. For a long time now, Marcel had been critical of the manner in which the LeFever company was evolving. Marcel was a perfumer. He believed in perfume. Colognes, toilet waters, and bath oils were all right with him, since they were merely diluted perfumes, and he had not objected strongly when the scents he and his assistants created had been used to enhance soaps, powders, body lotions, hand creams, and shampoos. He loathed the very word deodorant , however, and once at a board meeting tried to force a fellow officer of the company to eat the antiperspirant stick LeFever was about to market. He had had to be physically restrained. Yet, that was minor compared to his reaction to the news that LeFever was going to supply a scent to be used in the manufacturing of toilet paper. “Welcome to the aroma chemical industry,” Claude had said. “We are now a full-fledged fragrance house.” “We are a factory!” Marcel had responded, with enough contempt in his voice to wither the blubber off a bishop, and he stormed off to the Louvre, where the smell of great art calmed him down until he came upon one of those paintings by Hieronymus Bosch in which a little person is shoving a bouquet of flowers up another little person's rectum, whereupon he commenced to yell, “No used-car salesman is going to wipe his ass with my perfume!” and the museum guards threw him into the street. It wasn't long before LeFever was supplying the fragrance compounds for cleaners, disinfectants, furniture polish, textiles, stationery, rubber bands, shark repellent, and scratch-n-sniff kiddie books, and the day Claude and Luc decided to introduce “space sprays” to reodorize public buildings and subways, Marcel screamed “Muzak for the nose!” and sailed for Tahiti. In a year he was back, and they welcomed him home without question, for without their “Bunny,” they were, indeed, just a factory.

It wasn't for his sexual habits that Marcel was called Bunny. Like those pious citizens who attend church every Sunday, then cheat and lie their way through the week, Marcel visited a brothel religiously on Saturday nights, then seemed to forget sex entirely for the next six days. Except for a recent encounter at a perfumers' convention in America, he had never been carnally involved with a woman who was not a professional, and then sparingly. No, his nickname came from his nose. A rabbit has been calculated to possess one-hundred-million olfactory receptors — small wonder its little schnozz is always twitching, it is trapped in an undulating blizzard of aromatic stimuli — and Marcel “Bunny” LeFever was reputed, with some exaggeration, to be the human equivalent of Peter Cottontail. In the laboratories of LeFever, there were spectrometers, gas liquid chromatographs, nuclear magnetic scanners, and other instruments, rapid and precise, with which to analyze and test aromatic substances, but since the worth of a fragrance depends upon its effect on the nose, scientific instrumentation could never hope to replace the sniffing snout of flesh as the final arbiter of fragrance value, and, by general agreement, Marcel's nose was the finest in the business. It could determine whether the balsam gum in a shipment from Peru had had too much rain, whether unscrupulous merchants in Madagascar had been adulterating the ylang-ylang oil again, or whether there was a “wobble” in the synthetic geraniol. Its greatest talent, however, was its ability to sniff out arrangements and combinations that could result in new perfumes. It functioned as a catalytic laser, oxidizing the passion that slept unaware in a violet, releasing the trade winds bottled up in orange peel; identifying by name and number the butterflies dissolved in chips of sandalwood and marrying them off, one by one, to the wealthy sons of musk.

As a manufacturer of aroma chemicals and fragrance compounds, LeFever was among the top twenty in the world. As a maker of fine perfumes, it was in the top five, and it was Marcel the Bunny who kept them there. The same Marcel who had been staring through a square foot of window glass for seven consecutive hours. Damn it, sensitive artist or no sensitive artist, pampered bedbug or no pampered bedbug, mystical eclipse or no mystical eclipse, it was time for somebody to throw a cigar at the smoke alarm.

“Pardon, Bunny, I didn't intend to startle you, but I'm afraid you're starting to get tangled up in the drapes.”

“Drapes? You mean draperies. Drape is a verb, the noun is drapery . One drapes a window when one hangs draperies. It is impossible for one to become entangled in drapes , so I assume you were referring to draperies .”

“Oh, yes. But drapes can be a convenient abbreviation when one has had too much to drink.”

“If one can't say draperies , perhaps one shouldn't drink.”

It must have been disconcerting to receive a grammar lesson through a whale mask, but, outwardly at least, Claude took it in stride. “Be that as it may,” he said, “I have drunk and drunk plenty. The eclipse made me do it. Wasn't it derealizing? Didn't it give you shivers? Didn't it transport you to another plane? Didn't it make your brown eyes blue?”

The whale head nodded.

“Is that what you were thinking about here at the window?”

Marcel did not dare reveal that his thoughts, when interrupted, were of carrots and beets, for Claude, sloshed as he was, would surely find a way to connect verbally those vegetables to his nickname and coin some bad joke about bunny rabbits. So Marcel said, “No, I was thinking about perfume,” which, given Marcel's perpetual obsession, wasn't a very large lie. “And I was thinking about V'lu.”

“Ah-ha!” exclaimed Claude. “You know, there's not much that can be done to heal the sting of a woman. As they say in her country, it's easier to scratch your ass than your heart.”

“You misunderstood me. Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand. For the past month I have spent most of my time down in the kitchen, perfecting the scent that we are calling New Wave . You are familiar with the rationale behind New Wave . We are predicting that for many people the fascination with nostalgia — with a past reputed to be more simple, more honest, more natural than the present — will soon subside. In the cities, there is a large, affluent, professional class that has already rejected the sweet, heavy, feminine, Oriental scents that the hippies ushered into favor in the sixties, as well as the clean, wholesome, fruity and herbal scents associated with the backpacker chic of the seventies. For this avant-garde, and for those who will flock to join it, LeFever is developing New Wave , a truly modern scent — sharp, hard-edged, assertive, unisexual, urbane, unromantic, nonmysterious, cool, light, elegant, and wholly synthetic—”