Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  The Daughters of the Daily Special, once they learned that they had too many individual differences to call themselves “Sisters,” had adopted a very clean and simple raison d'être: they planned to liberate each other, one at a time. They paid relatively stiff weekly dues, and they raised additional funds with such tried and true schemes as bikini car washes. Once or twice a year, depending upon how much was in their treasury, they awarded a grant that allowed a deserving member to lay down her tray and devote some time to her true calling. For example, they got Trixie Melodian out of the Salmon House and into the dance studio, where she choreographed her ballet based on the eruptions of Mount St. Helens; they bought Ellen Cherry Charles six months at her easel, where she completed a series of landscapes that was later hung in a restaurant ("I escaped, my paintings didn't,” she commented); and Sheila Gomez was able to quit totalling bar tabs at La Buznik and finish writing her master's thesis in mathematics, “some kind of Puerto Rican trigonometry,” according to Ricki.

  Ricki was an unlikely candidate for a Daily Special grant, since she had majored in physical education so that she could take lots of showers with the other coeds, but she was sure Priscilla could land one, and that was why she was sponsoring Priscilla for membership. At first, Priscilla was reluctant. She was just not a joiner. “The only organization I ever joined in my life was the Columbia Record Club,” she declared, “and I had to get out of that because it was too disciplined.” The more Ricki talked about those big fat juicy grants, however, the better they sounded. She felt that she was close to a breakthrough in her experiments, but she as almost too tired to continue. If the Daughters could buy her a few uninterrupted months in her lab, she'd not only sign their roster, she'd kiss their behinds. “Starting with mine,” chirped Ricki.

  Priscilla came out of the bathroom wearing tight jeans and a cable-knit, iguana-green pullover sweater that accentuated the red in her reddish-brown hair. For a change, she'd pinked her Cupid's bow mouth—tiny in comparison to Ricki's full Latino lips—and brushed on enough purple eye shadow to make Bela Lugosi look like a lifeguard. “Wow!” exclaimed Ricki. “You're the second most impressive thing I've seen today, the first being a total eclipse of the sun.”

  “One would have thought a solar eclipse would have made a noise like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir,” said Priscilla, “but it really did sound like bacon frying.”

  “You slept through it, you asshole.”

  They drove downtown in Ricki's rusted-out VW bug. “I'm ashamed to be seen behind the wheel of this bedpan,” Ricki said. “It looks like it has a skin disease. Worse, it looks like a car you would drive.”

  “When I perfect that formula, you're gonna see me driving a BMW or a Lincoln Continental,” said Priscilla. “Maybe both at the same time.”

  “That's why we're enlisting you in the Daughters. Gonna get you out of that smelly studio and into a penthouse. I do hope you'll keep it tidier than your present digs. Which reminds me, Pris, what were those old dry beets doing in your armchair?”

  “Somebody's been leaving them outside my door. To be perfectly frank, I thought it might be you.”

  “Me? Why would I do an idiotic thing like that? I hate beets. In fact, I hate most vegetables.” She paused. “I must admit, though, that vegetarians taste better than heavy meat eaters. Smokers are the worst. You wouldn't think that you could detect it, you know, down there. But you can.” She made a face that caused the faint handlebar of hairs above her lip to bristle like the fuzz on an ostrich's cheek.

  “Since I've been working at El Papa Muerta, nothing tastes good to me anymore,” Priscilla said.

  The holocaustal effect that serving food for a living can have on one's appetite was a subject discussed at the meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special. “That's why it's preferable to wait cocktails,” somebody said. “No, that's worse,” responded Sheila Gomez. “Waiting cocktails kills your appetite for liquor.”

  The meeting was held in the Spotted Necktie Room at the Old Spaghetti Factory. There were about forty women present, twice as many as Priscilla had expected. After they finished complaining about appetite loss, they complained about the neutron bomb that working nights had dropped on their social lives. Then they really got steamed up over having to be nice to people they couldn't stand. It wasn't the men who infuriated them, not even bottom-pinching men (some waitresses, a minority, actually enjoyed having their bottoms pinched), it was the women. “The most unbearable aspect of this job is waiting on rich, crabby, drunk ladies,” said one waitress. “Right on!” said another. “Except for the rare one who might have toted trays somewhere in her sordid past, they'll pick the tips up off the table as soon as their husbands' backs are turned.”

  “How true. A wife is a waitress's public enemy number one.”

  “Beware of blue hair and T-shirts that say 'World's Best Grandma.' They expect you to tip them.”

  Next they compared notes on how much their feet hurt and the psychotic states of cooks. Evidently, all restaurant cooks were psychotic, some were just less violent than others. It was all rather depressing. But, then, they began to share stories of the odd mammoth tip they'd received the previous week, the odd offer of booze, cocaine, or a big house in the South of France; the odd, interesting customer, including local celebrities, who the celebrity dined with and what they ate; and before long, drinking Chianti all the while, they got off the subject of waitressing altogether and had a fine old time exchanging reviews and critiques of the solar eclipse.

  The meeting was nearly over when they got around to considering Priscilla's application for membership. As Ricki had warned it might, it met with some opposition.

  “It's irrelevant that she's had only one year of college,” Ricki told the assembly. “She's a genius.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says me.”

  “Ha ha.”

  “You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House.”

  “Well, how about some proof.”

  “Go ahead,” said Ricki, “test her. Ask her a question.”

  “What's the capital of San Salvador?” asked Trixie Melodian.

  “You call that a genius question?” Doris Newton responded. “I've seen retired air force sergeants answer harder questions than that on Tic Tac Dough.”

  “Besides,” said Ellen Cherry Charles, “San Salvador is the capital. The country is El Salvador.”

  “Are you positive?” asked Trixie. “Why would the city have a longer name than the country?”

  “If she's such a genius, why is she working at El Papa Muerta? Everybody knows Mexican restaurants are the pits for tips.”

  “El Papa Muerta is about as Mexican as Juneau.”

  “Does El Papa Muerta mean The Dead Potato or The Dead Pope?”

  “What's the difference?”

  “I resent that,” said Sheila Gomez, glancing at the little crucifix that dangled its gold-skinned heels above her globes.

  Priscilla cleared her throat. She spoke for the first time since the meeting began. Her voice was a trifle high and squeaky. “I've worked at five Mexican restaurants in three years. I'm searching for the perfect taco.”

  That stopped them. Hell, maybe she was a genius.

  Ricki stood again. “Little Priscilla here is a scientist. She's got her own laboratory. And is she onto something hot! I'm not at liberty to reveal what it is at this point in time, you understand, a slip of the lip can sink a ship, but when the moment comes . . . well, you're all gonna feel like a slow boat to China for hemming and hawing over taking her in. Let me remind you of something. None of the grants that the Daughters have awarded so far have generated a dime of income for the program. Nothing personal, Sheila, I know Third World algebra is important, but it didn't do dogshit at the box office; and, Joan, that little book of poems you printed about driftwood and your mama's melanoma was real pretty, it brought big whopping tears to my eyes is what it did, but, hon
estly now, the GNP was unaffected. Ditto, Trixie's harmonic tremors. I don't want to sound crass, but Priscilla here is zoned commercial. She's got a million bucks by its long green tail, and if we help her hold on and haul it in, each and every one of us is gonna soak our weary feet in Dom Perignon. This is not the time to talk about funding her scientific research, we'll come to that a ways down the road, but this smart little goose may be prepared to lay us our first golden egg. All in favor of admitting her to the club say 'aye.'”

  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 na
me?—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.

  “But let us not put the barn door before the horse.”

  “Ma'am?”

  “We require a unique base note, and we will find one, if I have to turn my trick bag inside out to find it. Remember, I came up with hurricane drops long after the darkies said the recipe had been lost forever. Right?”

  “You right.”

  “First, however, we have a problem with overcook. It's not rank, but it's rank enough. We are shooting the moon on this boof, cher; we have got the raw product to make half of France whistle Dixie, and we are not going to blow it because we are too poor to pump or flash. So you know how we are going to handle it? Papa's fat!”

  The good Madame was up to her bouffant in the backwater of boof biz. She had selected jasmine as the theme note of her comeback scent knowing that it was a blue-chip ingredient, a botanical platinum, a tried and tested floral champion whose performance in perfumery was rivaled only by the rose, yet knowing equally well that, like any prima donna, there were conditions under which it would refuse to sing. Jasmine (known in extreme cases as Jasminum officinale) simply will not tolerate the heat involved in steam distillation. Even boiling water is enough to murder the aroma principal of its flowers. Jasmine oil has to be extracted, not distilled, and efficient and effective extraction is not quite as easy as tying a loose tooth to a knob.

  One begins by gently percolating fresh petals in a solvent—purified hexane, to be precise. That was what Madame and V'lu did to Bingo Pajama's flowers, with fine results. But then the solvent has to be removed. No woman of grace wishes to dab about her body with industrial hexane, however pure. If the Parfumerie Devalier had owned a flash evaporator or a vacuum pump, the hexane stink would have been off that jasmine oil faster than a Japanese commuter off the bullet train. Alas, the little shop on Royal Street could no more afford that kind of equipment than a Third World spider could afford designer webs and flies cordon bleu. Thus, Lily and V'lu steeped their extract in a vat of below-boil water, forced it through a filter tube, distilled it with alcohol, and hoped for the best.