by Tom Robbins
She had worried the entire time her assistant was gone. When the telegram came asking her to meet V'lu's flight, she grew as edgy as a thirty-dollar diamond. But there V'lu was, waltzing through the terminal looking as pretty and composed as Miss Tanzania on a TV beauty pageant, and smiling like the catastrophe that swallowed the Canary Islands. And every time Madame attempted to question her about the trip, she just smiled in that smug but guilty fashion and said, “Ah powerful hungry, ma'am. We talks 'bout it after Ah eats.”
Of course, V'lu wasn't threatened by starvation, it was just that she didn't fancy anything hot and nasty rubbing up against her—unless it belonged to Marcel LeFever. Or maybe Bingo Pajama. By the time the first ounce of rib sauce had slid down her gullet, the beast was slinking away, and she felt safe enough to elucidate. “Dee troof is, ma'am, to answer yo question, no, Ah didn't see her.”
Madame was incredulous. “You didn't see Priscilla?! Wasn't she at the party?!”
“Yes, ma'am, she wuz.”
“Well . . .”
“But Ah wuzn't.”
Lily Devalier would have been beside herself except that there wasn't enough room at the table. (Madame D. was carrying more tonnage than any woman to dock in Buster's since Velma Middleton, or maybe Bessie Smith.) “What in God's name are you talking about, child?! You didn't go to the party?!”
“No, ma'am.”
“Sacrebleu!” Lily pulled a handkerchief out of her old-fashioned black purse and mopped her brow. The hankie was scented with something—Bingo Pajama jasmine? Jazz powders? Or worse?—that caused several dark heads to look up knowingly from their beans and rice. “Well, what happened? What went wrong?” She was entertaining visions of V'lu getting lost in Seattle, failing to find this “Last Laughing” place, or being barred at its door.
“Nuffin. Nuffin went wrong.” She let her lips stretch into that infuriatingly mysterious and self-satisfied smile. “Sompin' went right.”
“Merde,” snapped Madame Devalier, who would never permit herself to swear in English. “You better get out with it, right now—out with it!—what is going on?!”
V'lu let the words slide slowly through barbecue-colored saliva and perfect teeth: “Ah gots dee bottle.”
There was scarcely any response from Madame Devalier. She merely blinked once or twice and looked dumb, or stunned, like a baby whale washed ashore on a fashionable beach.
“Ah gots dee bottle,” said V'lu again.
Clearly confused, Madame blinked a few more times. She seemed almost senile. “But that is Pris's bottle,” she protested weakly.
“Not any mo, it ain't!”
“You stole it from her?”
“Ah libberated it,” said V'lu. “Dat bottle belong to our shop, it nebber wuz Miz Priscilla's, you know dat as good as me.”
Madame was uncertain if she knew that or not. Having paid scant attention to the bottle, the circumstances surrounding its arrival and departure were vague to her. She squeezed her eyes shut and sniffed at her hankie, trying to remember.
Yes, it was after Pris's marriage to that old tango-wango fell apart, after her daddy died. Pris had announced, with a certain pathetic bravado, that she was going to become a perfumer after all. Nothing could have pleased Lily more. But the girl didn't want to apprentice in her stepmother's floundering shop, oh, no, she intended to enter college to study chemistry. She had a settlement from Effecto Partido and was going to use it to learn modern fragrance manufacturing. None of that old-fashioned, small-potatoes, storefront Devalier perfumery for her. Lily was a little hurt, but she was aware that times had changed and that to a younger generation her ways were quaint, if not obsolete. In the end, she sent Pris off to Vanderbilt University with her blessings.
Although she earned straight A's, Priscilla had remained restless and melancholy, and upon completion of her freshman year had returned to New Orleans, claiming that she was through with college and wanted to take over Parfumerie Devalier. In the meantime, however, Madame had accepted as her assistant a young black woman from Belle Bayou, the plantation owned by a branch of the Devalier family. V'lu Jackson was eager and bright, though almost laughably countrified, and Madame had grown fond of her. She wasn't going to kick V'lu out the door in favor of Pris when Pris was liable to change her mind at any moment and go chasing after a fortune, an older man, or both. Moreover, V'lu functioned as Madame's maid as well as her shop assistant, a duty for which Priscilla would have neither instinct nor inclination. And when it came to loyalty and respect, V'lu was more like a daughter to her than Priscilla had ever been.
Madame informed Pris that she could stay for the summer, providing she earned her keep, but that come September she would have to make other arrangements. Pris was none too happy with that, but Effecto's settlement was fast dwindling and she hadn't much choice. She worked diligently, if clumsily, and minded her manners, although she often walked around with her lower lip sticking out so far she could have eaten tomatoes through a tennis racket.
It was during that summer, yes, that was when it was all right, that there arrived the bottle over which there has been such a silly commotion. Some beachcombers brought it in, Madame recalled, a retired couple. They had dug it out of the mud near the mouth of the Mississippi, and since it was obviously quite old, they thought it might be of interest to someone in the perfume trade. Having recently moved into a mobile home, they had little room for bric-a-brac, and besides, the fellow on the side of the bottle was some sort of devil whose image didn't belong in a Christian household. They were donating their find to the Parfumerie Devalier, they said, because they had purchased a small vial of scent there forty-five years earlier on their honeymoon.
Yes, yes, it was as clear to Lily now as dew on a shoelace; Pris and V'lu had been standing behind the retail counter, and Paris was saying, “College is fun and you can learn a lot of interesting stuff, but if you really want to get rich, you've got to get out in the world and start something up on your own.” Sniffing her handkerchief, Madame could hear those words as plain as if they were on Buster's menu. And it was right then, she remembered, that the beachcombers had come in with the bottle and made their little presentation.
She'd been busy at her desk, working on the books, figuring if there was any way to put the shop back on its feet, put it back to showing a profit from perfume so she wouldn't have to dabble in that . . . that other work. From the rear of the shop, she thanked the couple for their nostalgic gesture, but she didn't get up. She could tell at a distance that the bottle was too large to have held a truly fine perfume; that, in any case, there were only a few drops left in it, and time and tide had no doubt rendered those drops impotent long ago. It had a pleasing shape, all right, and its bluish tint lent it a mystic aura. What with that weird horned figure embossed on the side, it would make an excellent container for mojo lotion or moon medicine were she forced by cruel circumstances to add to the hoodoo pharamacopoeia. She would examine it at her leisure, evaluating then its possible use to her. Meanwhile, speaking of hoodoo, she had some red ink to turn black.
Her face was deep in the ledger, as it was now deep in her scented hankie, when Pris and V'lu pulled the stopper out of the bottle and began oohing and aahing over the aroma it released. What did they know, a rustic plantation pickaninny and a dropped-out college girl? She would put her professional snout to the vessel when she had a moment, but really, what olfactory excitement could there be in a virtually empty curiosity exhumed from the mud?
Having wrestled with the balance sheet until dinner, Madame had begun to nod almost upon swallowing her last spoonful of gumbo. She went to bed without ever having tested the depleted contents of the antique. And during the night, Priscilla had eloped with the bottle much as she had with Effecto Partido (only this time nobody had had to play an accordion outside her window). Well, summer was ending, anyway, so good-bye, Pris, honey, and God bless. Her exodus was probably for the best. As for the bottle, it was unimportant, although in the ensuing three years
, V'lu had found endless occasions to squawk about it.
When Lily removed the hankie from her face and snapped out of her trance, she found V'lu gnawing delicately at the corner of a rib. Diners who had been staring returned to their meals. One, with a mouthful of cornbread, whispered to his companion, “That ol' Madame D. got plant powers.” He didn't specify which plant.
“V'lu, I don't especially approve of what you've done. It was dishonest and unnecessary. That bottle obviously meant something to Priscilla, it was part of her fantasy. Little value it is to us.”
“Ah doesn't wants you to say anubber word until you smells it, ma'am. You ain't nebber smelled it!”
“Well . . .”
“It gots a jasmine theme, a mighty jasmine theme, near bouts as good as our Bingo Pajama flowers. It gots a citrus top note, lak our boof gots. And it gots something else, ma'am, it gots a bottom note. It gots a base whut does dee job!”
“Just the same, Priscilla was—”
“Smell it.”
“But—”
“Smell it!”
“All right. But not in here.”
They walked out onto Burgandy Street as the sun was setting. It was late November, and there was a chill in the air, but there were people on balconies and people on stoops. They were in one of the few sections of the French Quarter where blacks still lived, most of them having been driven across the North Rampart Street boundary by escalating rents. It seemed the sleazier the Quarter got, the more it cost to live there.
Of the buildings on Burgandy, most were four-room Creole cottages that lacked the shady courtyards where, out of sight of tourists and photographers, the true social life of the Quarter transpired. Here, residents sat on their stoops instead, yet even thus exposed, they managed to protect their privacy. A stranger could watch their languid movements, hear their laughter and music, smell the spicy foods they ate, but could never expect to be a part of those things. And when they went inside and shut their doors, their habits became as unknowable as those of ancient Congolese. The historian Kolb has called New Orleans “a city that has never truly been in the mainstream of American life.” Although an indoors city to a large extent, New Orleans watches less television than any town its size in the nation. What does it do, then, behind those closed shutters? What, indeed?
If New Orleans is not fully in the mainstream of culture, neither is it fully in the mainstream of time. Lacking a well-defined present, it lives somewhere between its past and its future, as if uncertain whether to advance or to retreat. Perhaps it is its perpetual ambivalence that is its secret charm. Somewhere between Preservation Hall and the Superdome, between voodoo and cybernetics, New Orleans listens eagerly to the seductive promises of the future but keeps at least one foot firmly planted in its history, and in the end, conforms, like an artist, not to the world but to its own inner being—ever mindful of its personal style.
Turning down St. Ann Street, toward Jackson Square and the river, the two women—the older, white, painted, and bejeweled one simultaneously lumbering and waddling, as if the bear and the duck on the animated Hamms beer commercial had coupled and issued an illicit offspring; the younger black one wiggling pertly on sleek hams—were together an expression of the city's style. And it was completely in character when they stopped beside a tall wrought-iron gate, spiky with fleurs-de-lis, so that the younger could remove a bottle from her weekend bag and pass it furtively to the other.
“Let go of it, I have it,” said Madame Devalier. “Mon Dieu, you'd think it was going to run away.” She scrutinized the bottle for a while in the waning light, scowling at the devilish figure that seemed at once so mischievous and so forlorn. “Harumph,” she snorted. His image sat no easier with her Catholic sentiments than it had with the superstitions of the Southern Baptist beachcombers. “Harumph.”
“We gots to be careful. Miz Priscilla coulda call dee po-lice or somethin'. Dat's why Ah ax you to meets me at dee airpote. You thinks it okay to take it to dee shop?”
Madame didn't hear a word. She had removed the tight stopper, and her nostrils were hovering, quivering; the open bays of a mother ship beaming up cargo. Indeed, her nose, her whole head, seemed to be growing heavier, larger as she inhaled; and her pulled back hair, dyed as black as Satchmo's coronet case, was actually rippling in the Tabasco dusk.
Like a baby grand in a town without piano movers, Madame had settled firmly into place, her bulk as transfixed as a wild hog in truck lights. A jazz funeral could have marched through the gates of her corset, and she wouldn't have squirmed. To a passerby, to V'lu, perhaps, she was a dumpy old lady with her feet in black lace-ups and her nose to a bottle top, but inside her swelling head, up among the rafters of the spheno-ethmoidal recess, a music was rising, a happiness was rising; her dumpy old heart was rising, made buoyant and girlish again, a lost beach ball blown miles along a levee, illuminated by heat lightning.
V'lu waited patiently. She knew that it was a good sign that Madame was taking so long. She could almost feel the energy radiating from the unfashionable pleats of Madame's midnight blue chemise, she could sense it etching lines in Madame's thick rouge and collecting in the colored hollows of the gems she wore. V'lu tapped her Tootsie Roll toes and waited.
The sun had set, and St. Ann Street was in darkness by the time Lily restoppered the bottle and handed it back to V'lu. Her face was radiant, although whether from memory or expectation nobody could tell. “I wish Papa could have smelled it.” Her voice was both shaky and blissful, and for quite a while that was all she said.
They walked in silence, the old woman swinging her purse. As they reached Royal Street and turned left toward the shop, she said, “I'm proud of you, V'lu, and Pris, too. You recognized its magnificence right away. It's for the two of you that I am going to interpret that base note. Right now I am mystified as to what it might be. There's not enough liquid left in the bottle to have ti analyzed by a chemistry lab. But I shall find it, you can count on that! Lily Devalier may not be a celebrated nose like Bunny LeFever, she may have indulged in practices for which any respectable perfumer would hang their head in shame, but she knows her perfume, believe her, she knows the bricks of perfume and the mortar of perfume, and she knows each and every one of the circuits and emotions of perfume.” She paused. “I think this stuff must be Egyptian. I've been told some of their perfumes have retained their boof after three thousand years. And then the bottle!” She crossed herself, still swinging her purse. “Some sex demon out of pagan Egypt. They'd love his kind at Mardi Gras. His boof is heavenly, though. That poor little Pris. Such an amateur. She had about as much chance as a snowball in Gulfport of tracking down that base note. Right?”
“You right.”
“But I will track it down. I will recreate this great perfume—with our jasmine it will be even greater—and I will dedicate it to you and Pris.”
She lumber-waddled on down the block, her handbag whirling in an even wider arc. There were neighborhoods in the world, perhaps even in New Orleans, where she would have attracted attention, but the French Quarter was not one of them. There were in the French Quarter, after all, gay men who wore dog collars and were led around on leashes by their lovers, there were heavily tattooed women who draped themselves with snakes, Dixie mystics who sewed their eyelids shut and would tell your fortune for a beignet, and people who wore their Mardi Gras costumes three hundred and sixty-five days of the year. No, the French Quarter was hardly the neighborhood to take particular notice of an overly made-up stout woman swinging a purse. For that matter, the Quarter took no particular notice of the lanky black man wearing a strangely whirring, pulsating, undulating skullcap who stepped from the shadows and approached the stout woman, extending to her a huge bouquet of jasmine branches, wrapped in soggy newspaper.
That is, the Quarter took no particular notice until two men in suits emerged from shadows on the opposite side of the street and shot the black man dead.
PARIS
". . . NINETY MILLION YEA
RS AGO, give or take twenty million, there occurred . . ."
What was that? Was that Bunny's voice?
“. . . two events that should be of interest to all perfumers. It was then, toward the end . . .”
It was Bunny's voice.
“. . . of the Cretaceous Period, that . . .”
Who but Bunny had a large, deep, soft, hot, suffocated voice, a voice like coal being formed in the swamps of the Cretaceous Period?
“. . . the flowers wiped out the dinosaurs.”
Perhaps Bunny talked that way because, unlike the majority of Frenchmen, he refused to talk through his nose. Bunny believed the nose designed for grander things. But how could Bunny be in Luc's office? Bunny was supposed to have caught the morning flight to America.
Upon hearing his cousin's voice, Claude LeFever's hand had gone as stiff as Medusa's optometrist. Now he commanded motor function back into its fingers and slowly turned the knob. There at the presidential desk, his scow of a head thankfully relieved of its whale mask cargo, sat his father, listening to a cassette player. Luc LeFever nodded to his son and pushed the Pause Button. The cassette silenced, Claude could hear the blood singing in the old man's clogged arteries like the choir aboard the Titanic.
“Sit down, son, and listen to this. I trust your liver is strong this morning.”
