Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

That, at any rate, was what V'lu had intended to say. At precisely that moment, however, the hurricane drops hit her with full force, and, instead, she exclaimed, “Ui zeh! Ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch, ch.”

PARIS

LATE ONE FOGGY AFTERNOON in November, just as he was snapping shut his attaché case and calling it a day, Claude LeFever was summoned to the offices of his father, Luc, president of LeFever Odeurs. He arrived to find the old man wearing a whale mask.

“Papa! What in the world. .? Take that off!”

Although more accustomed to giving the orders, Luc did as he was bid. When the mask had been removed, it was easy to see why Claude reacted as strongly as he did. There are people in this world who can wear whale masks and people who cannot, and the wise know to which group they belong. A tall man, shoulders only slightly rounded by seventy years of nagging gravity; a powerfully built man, whose torso the blind might mistake for a home freezer; a handsome man, nose structurally sound enough to support what might have been the heaviest pair of horn-rimmed spectacles in Europe; a dignified man, despite a residual patch of snow-and-rust hair that resembled a wad of stuffing from a wino's mattress, Luc LeFever was so staid of bearing that on those rare occasions when he forged a smile, his body treated it as an infection, tripling its output of interferon in a frantic attempt to repulse the alien life form that had invaded it. This is not a portrait of your average whale-mask man.

(Of course, Marcel LeFever was also a distinguished-looking gentleman, sober in his selection of tailor, barber, and facial expression, but in Marcel's eyes were telltale squadrons of milkweed seeds, eager to fly to faraway places upon the first cooperative breeze; whereas Luc's gaze was sedentary, a clump of briers that scratched with severity anything careless enough to brush against it.)

“I wished to experience, for just five minutes, what it must be like being him ,” said Luc. He smoothed his hair. He lit, with a gold-plated lighter, a Romeo y Julieta Presidente, handmade in the Dominican Republic with Cameroon wrapper: a foe of socialism, Luc had long maintained a personal boycott of Havana cigars.

“I wished to experience what it must be like to be. . unstable.” He blew a smoke ring. It was square.

Claude was more than a little surprised. “What brought this on?”

“Death”

“Pardon?”

“I was examined by physicians this morning.”

“Oh, no.”

“Relax. My blood pressure has escalated, but if I submit to their damned medication, it will come back down. Other than that, I have a faint heart murmur, and a slight swelling of the big toe that could herald an attack of gout. Nothing to be alarmed about, but it underscores the fact that I'm getting to be an old, old man. I mentioned this in passing to one of the doctors, and he said, 'Nobody lives forever, Monsieur LeFever.'”

“An astute observation. For once, the medical profession has issued a statement with which I can agree.”

“Can you now? I suppose you haven't heard of the Last Laugh Foundation?”

“Yes, Papa, I have heard of the Last Laugh Foundation. What a farce. You know who operates that place? Wiggs Dannyboy, the drug addict and jailbird. Insane Irish—”

“Yes, it's true that the notorious Dr. Dannyboy founded it, but do you know who's cast his lot with him? Wolfgang Morgenstern. I attended the Sorbonne with Morgenstern, he was in my elementary chemistry classes, we knew one another. Splendid fellow. He went on to win two Nobel prizes. Two, mind you.”

“Yes, but—”

“Morgenstern wouldn't be involved if there wasn't something to it.”

“Yes, but—”

“I can tell you, Morgenstern is not the sort to join forces with a charlatan.”

“Papa, are you considering having yourself admitted to the immortality clinic?” Disapproval was as thick in Claude's voice as fog was thick in the Parisian streets.

With his fingertips, Luc slowly twirled the cigar. He examined its ash. The higher the quality of the cigar, the longer the ash it will produce. Eventually, however, ever ash must drop. And the drop usually is as sudden as it is final. Did Luc detect a metaphor in the cigar ash? Might he muse philosophically about the nature of the Eternal Ashtray? Might we?

“No,” he said, after a puff or two. “I must confess to having experienced a twinge of temptation, knowing Morgenstern as I do. But in the end" — he sighed—"immortality is not for me. Did I make a pun, there? No? Good. In any case, dying is a tradition, and I am simply not the type of fellow who defies tradition.”

“Unless there is profit in it.”

“Eh?”

“You've always been willing to break with tradition if there was a profit in it. That's the secret of your success in business.”

“Um. That may be. But I see no profit in struggling to live beyond one's natural limits. There's something greedy about that, and I've taught you to distinguish between the profit motive and greed. Sooner or later, the greedy lose their profits. Profiteering is honorable and healthy, greed is degrading, perverse.”

“Life's not the same as money.”

“Thank God! Life ebbs away, but money, properly managed, grows and continues to grow, lifetime after lifetime. Life is transitory, money is eternal. Or it could be, if the damned Americans would lower their interest rates.” Luc picked up the whale mask and blew a stream of blue smoke through its eyeholes. “This small talk about death, money, and, last but not least, perversity, cannot help but bring us back to him .”

“Christ?”

“No, you idiot, not Christ. Your cousin. Marcel.”

Claude frowned. “Papa, if you're going to jump on Bunny's back again, forget it. You know how I feel about him.”

“Indeed, I do, and there's something perverse about that, too. You spend more time with that bedbug than you do with your wife.”

“Yes, well, Bunny is more entertaining than my wife. And he makes us more money.”

“Your wife doesn't ridicule you in public. And if wearing a cardboard fish head is your idea of entertainment. .”

“A whale is not a fish.”

“So what?”

“I'm willing to accept his ridicule, and his peculiarities. And, ultimately, Papa, so are you. Without Bunny, where would this firm be?”

“That's a contingency for which I have been preparing.”

“What do you mean?”

Luc propped his cigar against the rim of an alabaster ashtray. The cigar looked like some kind of vegetable, a root crop, related, perhaps, to the mangel-wurzel . The vegetable was on fire. Arson was suspected.

“I mean that Marcel is unstable.” Luc retrieved the cigar and with it, tapped the whale mask. Ash sifted onto the jaws. The cigar burned on. Fireman, fireman, save my vegetable! “I mean that any day Marcel might up and decide to swim to Tahiti. Look at the way he's abandoned New Wave , attacking it as if it were some sort of dangerous political movement, rather than a highly promising perfume in which we've invested millions, and which he, himself, developed. Now he's talking about making scent from seaweed. He thinks women will pay a thousand francs an ounce to smell like low tide. I thought most women bought perfume to avoid smelling like the mouth of the Amazon.”

“But—”

“Listen, I still trust Marcel. He's also beginning to show new interest in natural jasmines, which might be a sound idea. He's the best nose in the business, and he's been correct too many times for me to sour on him now. Nevertheless, he is unpredictable, and therefore a risk. So, while you've been taking out insurance policies on him and filling his kitchen with assistants, not one of whom, unfortunately, could come close to filling his shoes, I've been taking other precautions.” Luc removed a folder from a desk drawer. “After the scare the doctors put into me today, I decided I should go ahead and turn this over to you.”