Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  When Lily Devalier maneuvered her midget submarine of a nose along dockside of the concentration crock, oh!, a nocturnal warmth enveloped her brain, washing her in star waters, translucent cherub sperms, and the midnight blue syrups that tropical moths lick. The devouring delicacy of this jasmine swept her away, but she was not so smitten that she failed to detect a slight overcooked sensation and a faint, lingering off-note of solvent. It was then and there that she decided to resort to enfleurage, the old process, the method her Papa had used. In enfleurage, petals are laid out on trays of fat, where they are allowed to remain until the fat has absorbed most of the fragrance. When the flowers are exhausted, fresh ones are substituted. In time, the fat becomes saturated with the floral aromatic, which may then be sponged off the fat with baths of alcohol. It's all done by hand, and it's painstaking and slow; far, far too slow for the corporations of Paris and New York, but it would produce a truly superior oil, an essence worthy of the naked night creature that the Jamaican had captured for her, and worthy, too, of the rare base note that Madame had sworn to find to support it.

  “It will be hard work, but we are going to go Papa's fat. Are you with me?”

  “You right.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Ah wif you, ma'am. All dee way.”

  The fan of Madame Devalier suddenly paused, as if her swollen, braceleted wrist had imagined it had heard the quitting whistle, then, poorer of some hopes but freer of some illusions, it resumed its hammering. “Let us have a bowl of gazpacho, cher. Then we shall nap for a couple of hours. By ten, it should be cool enough to resume our work in the lab.”

  “Ah sure wish you git dee upstairs air-conkditioned.”

  “Why, V'lu, a hardy plantation girl like you, you know you don't require air conditioning to sleep.”

  “Ah not talking 'bout no sleep, ma'am. Ah be talking 'bout vegables. Vegables flying in through dee winda and landing on mah bed.”

  “Oh, poof! Just some buck trying to attract your attention and not suave enough to send roses. Probably that crazy Jamaican.”

  “Oh, no, ma'am. Bingo Pajama smell nice.”

  “What do you mean, cher?”

  “Nebber mind. Ah be dishing up dee cold soup now.”

  “Merci. Thank you. Let us dine down here in the shop, it might be less oppressive.”

  Hips swaying like mandolins on a gypsy wagon wall, V'lu climbed the narrow stairs, leaving her employer to fend off with her fan the lewd breath of Louisiana, as she awaited the seven o'clock news and yet another ominous view of the blacking out of Paris.

  From the top step, V'lu called, “If Miz Priscilla not be doing nothin' wif dat bottle, how come she at dee perfumers' convention?”

  There was no reply, but V'lu could tell somehow that the fanning had stopped.

  PARIS

  THE CARROT SYMBOLIZES financial success; a promised, often illusory reward. A carrot is a wish, a lie, a dream. In that sense, it has something in common with perfume. A beet, however . . . a beet is proletarian, immediate, and, in a thoroughly unglamorous way, morbid. What is the message a beet bears to a perfumer? That his chic, elitist ways are doomed? That he might profit from a more natural, earthy, straightforward approach? This beet, this ember, this miner's bloodshot eye, this apple that an owl has pierced, is it a warning or friendly advice?

  Those were the thoughts of Marcel LeFever as he stood staring out of his office window on the twenty-third floor. Marcel had been standing at the window for hours. Ever since the eclipse.

  Claude LeFever, Marcel's cousin and lookalike, had watched the eclipse from his own office window. A practical man, Claude nevertheless had been moved. Paris is given to the dramatic at any time, yet, as daylight began ever more quickly to fade that morning and the great shadow rode out of the west, the city seemed to turn into a stage set, an eerily lit backdrop before which a drama surpassing even the talents of the French was about to unfold. As the strange twilight gathered, bands of alternating light and shadow began to ripple along the facade of the cathedral across the street, and when Claude glanced at the sky, he saw that the text of Les Miserables had been painted over by Salvador Dali. The sun was so round and glossy and black that had it a figure eight on it, well, it would have validated a lot of long-standing philosophical and theological complaints, underlining once and for all just where we earthlings sit on the cosmic pool table. A silver glow, like a blaze of molten escargot tongs, erupted from behind the ebony corona, and Claude felt himself trembling with a sort of euphoria.

  When, after three awe-filled minutes, a blinding diamond crust of sun emerged from the lunar umbra, Claude heard others in the building applauding, and he, too, clapped his soft, manicured hands, albeit discreetly. The sun was back on the job, but for some reason, he did not feel like returning directly to work, so he went next-door to discuss the celestial spectacle with Marcel. Marcel would understand his oddly euphoric state. If anyone might explain why an eclipse of the sun could arouse in him such a profound sense of derealization, Marcel might. There were those who claimed that if it didn't smell, Marcel LeFever had no interest in it, but Claude knew better. Besides, since it was Marcel's gift to detect odors too faint to register in others' snouts, well, who was to say if in his cousin's world all things did not have their characteristic aromas? Claude recalled a night on the beach when Marcel had stated that the sea smelled differently at full moon than at new. They were younger then, in their twenties, and if he wasn't mistaken, they had smoked a little hashish, so perhaps it was a joke. But if there were lunar smells, there might be solar, also. What if an eclipse emitted a particular olfactory vibration picked up by animals, say, and a few sensitive humans, and what if this signal could be analyzed, reproduced, amplified, and bottled? Talk about a heady perfume! Anyone who caught a whiff might become as giddy as he was now. Claude felt a pang in his temples, and he winced. His mind simply was not accustomed to this kind of high-flying fancy.

  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 reac
tion 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—”

  “I know all that, Marcel.”

  “Yes, but what you don't know is how boring and, ultimately, frightening I am finding this scent. I slept last night with New Wave on my pillowcase, and my dreams were totalitarian nightmares. The boof is not unattractive, yet when I test it, I have somehow the feeling that I am smelling the sinister vapors of fascism.”

  “Really, Bunny. Ha ha.”

  “I am not joking.” Marcel removed the whale mask. His demeanor was serious, indeed. “I am not joking.”

  “But, surely—”

  “When I smell New Wave, I have the sensation that I am smelling control, conformity, domination. As I have said, it has a definite appeal. . . .”

  “Well, then—”

  “There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all of us secretly attracted to violence.”

  “A violent perfume? Ha ha. Remember that U.S. after-shave, Hai Karate?”

  “Were I to add but a trace note of leather to New Wave, Claude, I would say that I had drawn on my canvas the olfactory silhouette of the Nazi.”

  The word jolted Claude. He shuddered. The LeFever twins had been small boys during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but they recalled it as an adult recalls the breaking of a bone in childhood: the sickening crack, the fear, the pain, the sadness, the sudden ooze of blood that shows itself like the black blush of fairy-tale witches. It was a wound upon their memory, a thud of monster boots in a distant sandbox.

  “New Wave is an intriguing perfume,” Marcel went on, “but I am growing to loathe it, and actually to fear its implications. Therefore, I have been thinking today about raw materials. The eclipse set me to wondering about those powerful and mysterious aspects of the natural world that the perfumer has not tapped yet. We moved into synthetics as natural raw materials became less available, more expensive. But there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of raw materials in different parts of the world that we haven't examined—consider the valley of the Amazon, consider the ocean, for God's sake—and there is history. . . . The recent love affair with the past was with a relatively recent past. Fifty years ago, a century at the most. But what of the fragrances of five thousand years ago, were they as primitive and unrefined and fundamental as we believe
? History? What about the fragrances of prehistory?”

  Marcel took a seat. He sighed. He was not an athletic man, and he'd been on his feet the whole strange day. “The eclipse also caused me to think of V'lu.”

  “Yes, back to V'lu.” Claude grinned a sloppy Pernod grin. “Let me guess. This black face of the sun reminded you of her. Reminded you that her ancestors in the jungle used fragrances of which we know little—”

  “Idiot. What I was reminded of, aside from things that are none of your business, was a remark she made. V'lu pointed out to me that the synthetics that predominate in perfumery today are practically all petroleum products. The price of crude oil is now subject to arbitrary decisions by the OPEC nations. V'lu suggested that since the Arabs are untrustworthy and since the future of the Mideast is uncertain, there is a strong possibility that petrochemicals will become even more scarce and expensive than natural materials. She suggested that we ought to be looking anew at the flowers.”

  “That is elementary and quite sound,” agreed Claude. “It is an idea with some merit, I don't have to be sober to recognize that. Fuck the Arabs, anyhow. Hang them from the drapes! And the draperies, too; yes, Bunny? But what I can't imagine is how this shopgirl—out of the mouths of babes, uh?—communicated this to you; I mean how could you even understand her, speaking in southern Negro dialect and all?”

  Marcel looked first at his cousin, then out the window again, focusing perhaps on that same invisible celestial footprint that had held his gaze all day. “I had no problem,” he said. “V'lu did not express this to me in English, you see. She spoke flawless French.”