Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  The hearings in Baton Rouge lasted ten days. Hardly a session passed in which the two suspended policemen did not protest that the jasmine bouquet that the late Mr. Pajama pointed in their direction could have concealed a gun.

  “Yes, it could,” the panel chairman finally agreed. “And the blind man's cane could hide a sword, and the wife's chicken and dumplings could be laced with razor blades, and the lunch boxes of school children could be ticking with bombs.”

  It was the panel's recommendation that the cops stand trial, although as a compromise, they would be charged not with murder but manslaughter. When news of the compromise reached New Orleans, it did not exactly turn the Mississippi River into diet soda.

  Roosters were heard to squawk at midnight in Central City storefronts.

  A cross was burned in front of Parfumerie Devalier, blackening its show window and charring its door.

  The bees, which except for a daily fly-by of the Times-Picayune offices had been little seen of late, attacked in a single afternoon six policemen, five politicians, four whiplash lawyers, three used-car salesmen, and two fast-talking disc jockeys—and put the fear of Beelzebub the Bug God into an agnostic from Dallas.

  It was decided by the court that the trial should be conducted in Baton Rouge. The judge scheduled it for the middle of February. Concerned by the cross-burning, he ruled that Madame Devalier and V'lu Jackson be kept in protective custody until after the trial.

  With difficulty, Priscilla resigned herself to a wait. Yet she did not stand still. Having exhausted the Mexican restaurants of New Orleans as a potential source of gainful employment, she suddenly spun on her dais of habit and set off in a relatively new direction. Abandoning her long-standing obsession to the same fate as the cottage cheese she'd left in her refrigerator in Seattle, she accepted a job in a coffeehouse near Tulane University, where the clientele played chess, wrote poetry, and debated matters of cosmic import (subjects forbidden to “mature” intellectuals unless they first sign an oath to be dry and dispassionate). Inclined to insert her own opinions, especially when a discussion broached issues of life and death, Priscilla rapidly revived her reputation as a genius waitress. For example, she dazzled a party of students one evening by declaring, “To be or not to be isn't the question. The question is how to prolong being."Next thing you know, I'll be drumming on my eyelid with an espresso spoon, she thought.

  And she almost believed it.

  Since the spirit of Wiggs Dannyboy was upon her, and since Wiggs contended that longing for the future was as antilife as dwelling in the past ("nostalgia and hope stand equally in the way of authentic experience"), Priscilla decided that she must de-emphasize the role in her life of the perfume bottle and its promise of future financial bliss. She refused, however, to relegate her ambition for wealth to the back of the fridge where she'd shoved the allegedly perfect taco. After all, it was Wiggs who once said, “I love the rich.”

  Actually, his statement in its entirety was, “The rich are the most discriminated-against minority in the world. Openly or covertly, everybody hates the rich because, openly or covertly, everybody envies the rich. Me, I love the rich. Somebody has to love them. Sure, a lot o' rich people are assholes, but believe me, a lot o' poor people are assholes, too, and an asshole with money can at least pay for his own drinks.”

  Priscilla was forced to admit that she missed such pronouncements. The radium-tongued rascal has contaminated me, she thought.

  The radium-tongued rascal who had contaminated her, the windy cyclops who had brought both tornado and calm, fog and clear sky into her life, the defrocked anthropologist whom everybody, including Priscilla, suspected of having a bit too much fun, was on a collision course with death and tragedy.

  Disaster struck while he was high above the world and its cares, relaxing aboard a Boeing 747 in the company of Marcel LeFever and King Alobar. Sometime during that flight, as the fields and peaks soaked up sweet darkness beneath them, the crowd outside the Last Laugh Foundation in Seattle went mad.

  Somebody had supplied beer, cases of it, and many in the crowd had lost their reason in it. About seven o'clock, as much of Seattle was finishing its dinner, a dense, hot, rustic odor swept through the street, and as if it had one mind, one nose, the crowd spontaneously panicked. Something snapped in it, and it rushed the gate, tearing it from its hinges and throwing the guards aside.

  Disturbed and anxious, pursued by the smell, the people ripped loose the fairy door knocker and streamed into the mansion, where they raced from room to room, looking for the divine magic that had been denied them. And when they found nothing—no gurgling test tubes or sparking coils, no vials of purple elixirs or leatherbound books bursting with esoteric information, no files, even, that they might plunder; when they found merely a posh modern residence lacking so much as a hint of scientific activity and occupied only by a red-faced man who'd been skipping and leaping about in a bizarre dance, and a young girl playing with potted plants, then they truly panicked.

  They ravaged the furnishings, smashing chairs, coffeetables and lamps, defiling the white immortalist walls, hurling Escher prints through stained-glass windows. As mirrors shattered and food flew, several in the midst passed into further frenzy, went beyond the hot madness of disappointment and longing into the cold madness of fear and loathing, and seizing Papuan war clubs from above the fireplace, they bashed the skulls of Wolfgang Morgenstern and Huxley Anne Dannyboy.

  Like a fertilized condor egg, filled with blood and promise, the bald head of Dr. Morgenstern split open. He died instantly.

  Huxley Anne was not so heavily damaged, although when police arrived she was exhibiting no vital signs and was believed as dead as the professor. Nevertheless, oxygen and CPR were administered. After twenty discouraging minutes, a tiny birthday-candle flame of pulse began to flicker.

  She was taken to Swedish Hospital, a few blocks away, and by the time her father got there, physicians were venturing that she had a twenty-five-percent chance of living, although only a ten-percent chance of having escaped permanent brain damage. Should she survive, which was improbable, she would likely be, in terms most disparaging to the consciousness of beets, “no more than a vegetable.”

  Naturally, the news traveled swiftly. It involved a famous scientist and the child of an infamous heretic, it involved the “occult” (for that is the context in which the press placed immortalistic research), it involved murder, a guarded mansion, and, probably, drugs. The media snatched it up and streaked with it, galloping toward tons of pay dirt, and Priscilla knew about it almost as soon as Wiggs did.

  She heard about it at work. When it had sunk in, and that took a minute or two, she set down her tray, tables away from its destination, untied her apron, and walked out of the coffeehouse. “Where are you going?” yelled the fellow who operated the espresso machine. “Seattle,” she replied.

  Of course, she had practically no money. Within minutes, she was back at the coffeehouse, pleading with the manager for an advance on salary. He refused, but when he saw the tears breaking loose, when he recognized that they were massed in huge numbers and might be expected to march, two abreast, for hours, he allowed her to call Seattle on the office phone.

  After hacking through several thousand feet of red tape, she managed to reach Wiggs at Swedish Hospital.

  “I'll be there as quick as I can get there,” said Priscilla.

  “It isn't necessary,” said Wiggs. He spoke with hardly any accent at all. “I appreciate it, but it isn't necessary.”

  “I don't care. You'll need help.”

  “Marcel and Alobar are with me. Marcel's left an open bottle of her favorite scent by her bed. To call her back. Alobar has some ideas, too. Bandaloop stuff. I'm confident, Pris.”

  “You sound pretty good. But I'm sure I can help you.”

  “No. Huxley Anne's mum will be here by morning. She'd probably be uncomfortable if you were around.”

  “Screw her comfort! Don't you care about me?” The ins
tant she said it, she regretted it.

  “I do care. But right now my energy is totally with my daughter.”

  “I'm sorry. I understand. You can call me if you need me. Here, or else they'll take a message at the Y.”

  She hung up and after a heroic belt of the manager's bourbon, returned to duty. If Huxley Anne died, however, she'd proceed to Seattle with all possible haste, even if she had to steal the funds, because she and she alone knew that if Huxley Anne went, Wiggs would go, as well.

  At birth, we emerge from dream soup.

  At death, we sink back into dream soup.

  In between soups, there is a crossing of dry land.

  Life is a portage.

  That was the way Marcel LeFever had always looked at it. After his encounters with Dr. Dannyboy and Alobar, after the experience with little Huxley Anne, Marcel began to suspect that it might be more complex than that. He went so far as to consider that there might be more than one type of afterlife experience, that there might be several, that there could be, in fact, as many different death-styles as there were life-styles, and “dream soup” was merely one of dozens from which the dead person might actually choose.

  It was pure conjecture, of course. Moreover, he much preferred to think about fragrance. Yet, wasn't fragrance somehow involved? In the case of Huxley Anne, at least it seemed to have played a part. Alobar and Dr. Dannyboy agreed that it had, although the physicians were equally convinced that it had not.

  The physicians had no explanation of their own, however, so Marcel was prepared to attribute the miraculous recovery to fragrance, or, rather, an interaction between the powers of fragrance and the powers of human spirit. Why not?

  It was a miraculous recovery, no one would deny that. The child lay comatose for nearly a month, neither advancing nor receding, just sort of standing hip-deep in the dream soup, connected to shore by, as they say, “artificial means,” and then, toward midnight on Saint Agnes's Eve, her eyes popped open, she asked, in a completely normal voice, for SpaghettiOs and chocolate-chip cookies, and demanded to know why there was no television in her room. “Mmm, smells good in here,” she said. Within days she was walking the corridors. Were there damaged parts in her brain, they were well concealed.

  When he felt that she was strong enough, Wiggs inquired if she had felt at any time, especially during the minutes immediately following the attack, that her soul had left her body. “Oh, Daddy!” she said, “Don't you know that when you die, your soul stops leaving your body?”

  “Uh, no. What do you mean?”

  “Our souls are leaving our bodies all the time, silly. That's what all the energy is about.”

  “You mean the energy field around our bodies is the soul being broadcast out of the body?”

  “Kinda like that.”

  “And at death this transmission stops?”

  “Yes. Can I have some ice cream?”

  “In a minute, darling. When your soul stopped leaving your body, what did it feel like?”

  Huxley Anne screwed up her face. “Well, kinda like a TV set that wasn't quite off and wasn't quite on. You know, the TV had cartoons in it, but it couldn't send them out.”

  “But your, ah, TV set, it didn't go completely off?”

  “No. That would have been something different, being all the way off. I didn't want to go off without you, Daddy. I tried hard to stay on. I knew where you were because I could smell my White Shoulders, but it took a little while to get back on all the way and warmed up and everything. Can I have my ice cream now?”

  They say that February is the shortest month, but you know they could be wrong.

  Compared, calendar page against calendar page, it looks to be the shortest, all right. Spread between January and March like lard on bread, it fails to reach the crust on either slice. In its galoshes—and you'll never catch February in stocking feet—it's a full head shorter than December, although in leap years, when it has growth spurts, it comes up to April's nose.

  However more abbreviated than its cousins it may look, February feels longer than any of them. It is the meanest moon of winter, all the more cruel because it will masquerade as spring, occasionally for hours at a time, only to rip off its mask with a sadistic laugh and spit icicles into every gullible face, behavior that grows quickly old.

  February is pitiless, and it is boring. That parade of red numerals on its page adds up to zero: birthdays of politicians, a holiday reserved for rodents, what kind of celebrations are those? The only bubble in the flat champagne of February is Valentine's Day. It was no accident that our ancestors pinned Valentine's Day on February's shirt: he or she lucky enough to have a lover in frigid, antsy February has cause for celebration, indeed.

  Except to the extent that it “tints the buds and swells the leaves within,” February is as useless as the extra r in its name. It behaves like an obstacle, a wedge of slush and mud and ennui, holding both progress and contentment at bay.

  James Joyce was born in February, as was Charles Dickens and Victor Hugo, which goes to show that writers are poor at beginnings, although worse at knowing when to stop.

  If February is the color of lard on rye, its aroma is that of wet wool trousers. As for sound, it is an abstract melody played on a squeaky violin, the petty whine of a shrew with cabin fever. O February, you may be little but you're small! Were you twice your tiresome length, few of us would survive to greet the merry month of May.

  Confined to its usual length, February still extracted a toll from Priscilla and New Orleans. On Groundhog Day, a carpetbagger freeze turned banana plants as black as seminary shoes, and night after night, the Mississippi exhaled Yukon breath. The small boys who tap-danced for coins on Bourbon Street were forced to compete with their own chattering teeth. Aside from tap and chatter, the Quarter was so quiet it might as well have been in Salt Lake City. Even the bees took refuge from the chill. Where, was anybody's guess.

  As for the frost on Priscilla's personal pumpkin, it was neither thick nor withering, but typically Februarian, it was a long time melting.

  Once a week, approximately, she received a letter from Wiggs: one paragraph about Huxley Anne (she appeared to be completely healed, but the doctors, “taking no chances,” were keeping her out of school); one paragraph about the restoration of the Last Laugh Foundation (Marcel made financial contributions, while Alobar, who had acquired carpentry skills over the centuries, helped with the actual work); a couple of paragraphs alluding to his new ideas about evolution; and a phrase or two of sexual innuendo. All in all, it wasn't enough to get a young woman in love through a lingering funk such as February. Nevertheless, she wrote him daily and practiced a fairly strict fidelity.

  About the time the trial began in Baton Rouge, she learned the exact whereabouts there of Madame and V'lu, but made no attempt to contact them lest she tip her hand. When they returned to New Orleans, she'd retrieve that bottle. If they had it, that is. February is a month for doubt.

  Because she was no longer up until dawn trying to make perfume, she was rested and energetic, and since meeting Wiggs, she mainly looked at life, even when it was studded with failures and misfortunes, with a subdued, irrational cheerfulness. So, though she had to battle impatience on several different fronts, and though February lay about her shoulders like a cloak of lead, Priscilla stayed afloat.

  Then came March.

  On the very first day of March, Wiggs telephoned to announce that Marcel and Alobar were heading to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Wiggs himself would be joining them in a week or ten days, whenever the doctors gave Huxley Anne the green light. “Take care of them until I get there, please, Pris. Show them the sights. Once V'lu is back in town, you won't have to worry about Marcel, but in the meantime, he and Alobar will need a place to stay and a good spot to watch the parades. You know the city. Alobar's a touch high-strung. Still holding out on the K23. If you've got that surprise for him, it might do him good.”

  “I'll do my best. When you come, will you . . . wil
l you stay with me?”

  “Huxley Anne and I.”

  “Oh. All right. Hurry.”

  A contrarian, the owner of the coffeehouse made a practice of leaving town during Mardi Gras. He had a three-bedroom flat in the Garden District, and assuming that Marcel would pay, Priscilla sublet it for the first half of March. The master bedroom she claimed for Wiggs and her. And Huxley, damn it, Anne.

  She took a bus to the airport and met the flight from Seattle. Marcel deplaned first. She recognized him from the perfumer's convention. His hair was still slicked back and parted in the middle, his suit was expensive, his cologne turned heads, his Vandyke beard shoveled the air in front of him as if he were digging in it, turning it over, searching for diamonds. Or worms. With an elegant gesture, he kissed Priscilla's hand. Then he wrinkled his sturdy nose as if he didn't quite approve of her smell.

  Alobar soon followed. Cocooned in the ill-fitting Robert Hall suit that he'd been issued upon parole from Concord Prison, he was obviously an old man—Priscilla would have guessed seventy-five—yet he revealed not a tremor of the fear or fragility that so often causes us to look with pity, or disgust, upon the old. If he was less arrogant than Marcel, he was no less self-confident. He moved through the world as if he was intimate with it, as if he belonged in it, as if there was not the remotest chance that he would fall down in it and break a hip. His manner was vague, but it was the vagueness of a mind distracted by important issues, not enervated by insufficient oxygen supply. In fact, his breathing was deep and smooth, so rhythmic as to be almost hypnotic, and when introduced to Priscilla, he drew in an especially long breath. And winked.

  They collected luggage, rented a car, and drove, bumper to bumper, into the hubbub and jubilee of Carnival.