Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  “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.”

  “What is it?”

  “A list of agents.”

  “Agents?”

  “Selected employees of our main competitors. France. New York. Germany. Plus a few people situated with small perfumeries, certain promising shops off the beaten track where something might develop that the big boys have overlooked.”

  “Spies?”

  “If that's what you choose to call them. Let's just say that if Marcel should go astray, we will still have access to blue-chip recipes. And if one of the little perfumeries should strike gold. . . . You have objections?”

  A bit sheepishly Claude shook his head. “I suppose not. So long as it's just a failsafe, a backup. You see, I'm confident that the cuckoo is going to stay put in Bunny's clock. He won't do anything rash.” Luc shot him a disbelieving look. “Well, nothing so rash as to endanger the firm and justify extralegal activities. But, you know, the way he wanders around on foggy evenings like this without a topcoat, it wouldn't hurt to have something up our sleeves in the event that he catches a fatal chill in his liver. I mean, those things happen.”

  Luc expelled such a geyser of smoke that had it come from a derailed tank car, the authorities would have immediately evacuated the neighborhood. Under certain conditions, Luc's exhalation could have forced hundreds of people to spend the night in church basements and high-school gymnasiums. “It's not his liver I'm concerned about. Nor mine. I've always been a prime physical specimen, I expected to live a century, but the doctors have pulled the rug out from under that idea. All right, I can accept it, I'm no sissy hippie about death. What worries me is: what if Marcel should outlive you? Can you imagine Marcel in charge?”

  “Papa!”

  “Jesus. This building. He'd probably rent out the top twenty-three stories and operate a little perfumerie in the basement, like the monks had seven hundred years ago, or that little Kudra shop that was next-door when our ancestors bought the business in 1666.”

  “Papa! How ridiculous. In the first place, I'm in better health than Bunny. In the second place, the articles of incorporation would prohibit him from doing anything like that, even if he wanted to. Third, this is the best way for a person to raise his blood pressure, worrying about things like longevity, which you have no control over.”

  Another column of smoke erupted from the tank car of compressed mangel-wurzel, delaying any hopes the neighbors might have had of returning to their homes. “But what if someone does have control?” Luc asked.

  “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “This. I'm talking about this. A few days ago, Marcel received an invitation to visit the Last Laugh Foundation.”

  “In America?”

  “You idiot. Of course, in America.”

  “Why Marcel? Surely he isn't going?”

  “His secretary says he accepted. Today.”

  Claude furrowed his brow. He tugged at the ax blade of his beard. “But what's this all about?”

  “I wish to hell I knew. That's what I w
ant you to find out. It may be a spinoff from that ridiculous speech he gave at the perfumers' convention, or it may be something else.”

  After cautioning his father to take his medication, Claude left him. On the way to the elevator, he peeked into Marcel's office. Marcel wasn't there. Everything seemed normal, except, of course, for the beet on the silver tray.

  Claude rode to the ground floor. Through the plate glass windows, the foggy streets looked like Frankenstein's idea of Club Med. Claude had a hunch that before he went outside he ought to lock Luc's “agent” file in his attaché case. As he was about to put it in, he flipped rapidly through it. The name V'lu Jackson caught his eye.

  Part

  III

  PROMISE

  HER

  ANYTHING

  BUT

  GIVE

  HER

  K23

  THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

  The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the analysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a passion.

  Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married. Descartes, architect of the Age of Reason, fled Paris, the City of Romance, in 1628 to “escape its distractions.” He settled in Holland, where, surrounded by disciples and supported by patrons, he studied and wrote about mathematics and logic. Late in the year of 1649, he was invited to visit Stockholm to instruct Queen Christina in philosophy. Descartes accepted at once. Perhaps the pay was good. There would have been a reason.

  Queen Christina took her lessons lying down. Frequently she was nude. That is hardly the worst of it. The court of Sweden, like everyplace else in seventeenth-century Europe, was infested with fleas. Christina had had her craftsmen fashion for her a tiny cannon of silver and gold. As she lay about on her cushions, she fired the little cannon at the fleas on her body. That was why she was nude. It is said she was a fair to good shot.

  The daily sight of Her Majesty thus amusing herself, while he, Descartes, in dark Dutch britches, undertook to explain the underlying perfection of an indubitable sphere of Being, was more than his rational bias could bear. He grew rapidly nervous and pale. On February 11, 1650, only a few months after his arrival in Stockholm, Descartes, fifty-four, fell dead. Christina lived thirty-nine years longer and knocked off a good many more fleas.

  In 1666—little harm love could do him then—Descartes's body was taken to Paris for reburial. At the funeral, a disagreeable odor filled the churchyard. “It was as if a goatherd had driven his flock through our midst,” said one of Descartes's followers. No logical explanation was offered.

  The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of sexual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

  The quarrel of Kudra and Alobar lasted far into the night. Jarred by their words, things fell apart in the flat: flowerpots tottered on the windowsills, feathers flew out of pillows, and the teapot sang, though there was no fire beneath it and it was not a cozy song. As if it had long fingernails, their argument reached out into the street and scratched the cobblestones, the chestnut blossoms, the blackboard of the sky.

  “A pox on squabbling lovers,” muttered Pan. Pan needed to get to sleep. He'd been in bed for hours, but instead of dreams, what came to him were harsh voices through the wall. Pan tossed and turned and cursed a bit, although the irony of the situation (gods have ears for irony) was not lost on him: Alobar and Kudra were fighting over immortality, whereas Pan was craving sleep because he planned to get up early to attend a funeral.

  Pan tossed and turned, turned and tossed. An eye at the keyhole would have been amazed. It would have spied a bed in turmoil, iron bedstead rattling, wool blankets thrashing, but not a soul in the covers.

  The year was 1666 and poor Pan was completely invisible.

  At seven o'clock in the morning, the door of the incense shop that had been established at 21, rue Quelle Blague opened and closed, although nobody was seen to enter or leave. A transparent mist of musk moved slowly eastward along the left bank of the Seine. At the rue St. Jacques, the acrid cloud turned to the south, insulting every snout, human or equine, by which it floated. After about eight blocks, it began traveling eastward again, creeping up the slope of a steep hill, at the top of which sat the crumbly old Gothic abbey church of Ste. Geneviève-du-Mont.

  “This temple (gasp) art as tired and (wheeze) rundown as I,” panted Pan, and, indeed, though the professional virgin, Geneviève, was regarded with much paradoxical affection in the City of Romance, the church would be razed in less than a century to make way for a fine new building in the neoclassic style. In 1817 the well-traveled bones of Descartes would be transferred from its yard to St. Germain-des-Pres, but on this spring morning they were to be planted in the mossy cemetery where Geneviève's own saintly remains had a thousand years been lying.

  In his more vital days, Descartes had included in his philosophical treatises enough scientific fact to displease the bishops, so except for the cleric whose Latin platitudes were to be rained on his deaf skull, the Church was without representation at his interment. However, among those who were obeisant to the new religion of science, which was in its husky infancy at this time, Descartes was increasingly revered, and they attended the rite in fair number. Pan rested upon a burial vault at a far end of the yard and watched their carriages arrive.

  Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much heed to grooming. Many others, however, including the provost of the University of Paris, the president of the guilds, the designer of the Observatoire, which was about to be built, and the chairman of the mathematical society were decked out in black silks and powdered wigs. The sight of those wigs gave Pan an idea. Earlier in the century, wigs had been worn exclusively by the nobility, but now they had become popular with the bourgeoisie. If Alobar were to sport a wig, thought Pan, it might solve his current problem and put a stop to his bickering with Kudra. “No small blessing, that,” he said. He rubbed his bleary eyes and yawned.

  About then a small brass band struck up a dirgeful tune, and Pan, who fancied himself a musician, listened critically. “In all of Arkadia, there be not a single sheep who wouldst dance to such noise,” he complained. But once the speechmaking commenced, he was sorry the music had ended.

  Aristotle had dealt Pan an enervating blow. Then, Jesus Christ had practically belted his horns off. Now, word was out that Descartes had applied the coup de grace. What little remained of Pan's ancient power was destined to evaporate in the Age of Reason, that's what the experts said. Pan, weary and indistinct, could not dispute them. When he learned of Descartes's funeral, some morbid (or goatish) curiosity drew him, sore of hoof, to Ste. Geneviève-du-Mont.

  Like jugged bees, the funeral orations droned on. One intellectual honored Descartes's Discourse on Method, another convinced every moss-backed headstone in the churchyard of the departed's contribution to the theory of equations, while a third, more bombastic than the rest, rattled in its vault the untested pelvis of good Saint Geneviève with his praise of the new rationale. Just as the university provost was uncorking his monotone, the spring breeze suddenly shifted direction, and the funeral party found itself downwind from Pan.

  The crowd grew inattentive. Out of the corner of his eye, the provost checked the environs for animal life. Those who owned handkerchiefs soon had them to their nostrils (a
passerby might have assumed that they were weeping). Among those who had no handkerchiefs was the priest. “This is what the Almighty thinks of science,” he mumbled, then immediately crossed himself, begging forgiveness for having attributed to God a scent that obviously was Satan's.

  Of course, the group was lucky. Pan's reek was actually mild compared to what it had been in the good old days. Nevertheless, a certain waggish mathematician provoked some scorn and much stifled laughter when, in a stage whisper, he paraphrased Descartes's most famous dictum.

  “I stink, therefore I am,” he said, nodding toward the Swedish walnut coffin.

  “Ever thus.” Pan sighed. Where was the profit in invisibility if one's odor gave one away? He creaked to his feet and, on legs of wobbly wool, threaded through the crowd toward the stone gate. Halfway there, he remembered his idea about a wig and, in passing, snatched the hairpiece off a prominent man of learning. Assuming that the wind had taken it, other bewigged guests grabbed at their own adornments, anchoring them to their noggins. There the French intelligentsia stood, one hand to its hair, the other to its noses, as the god and the wig bobbed out of Saint Geneviève's decaying churchyard and down the hill to the Seine. It was the first fun Pan had had all week.

  Upon reaching the riverbank, Pan stopped for a breather. He uprooted a clump of turf and hid the wig beneath it so that no passing bargeman might mistake it for a relic of an aristocratic romp in the grass. An invisible learned early that his possessions and trappings did not borrow his ability, which meant that he must go always empty-handed. Pan could not even carry his pipes.

  That was a shame, because a breezy April morning such as that one was meant for a tune. On similar mornings in the old days, the golden days, Pan's mischievous piping on the outskirts of a village would be the signal for the village men to lock up their wives and daughters. Those who failed to secure their women would lose them that day to the pastures, from where they would return after dusk, tangle-haired, grass-stained, and stinking of the rut. Pan grinned at the memory. “Methinks I could pipe Maria Theresa right out of the palace,” he mused, referring to Louis XIV's young bride.