Jitterbug Perfume

by Tom Robbins

  “Now, Kudra . . .”

  The beet reminded Priscilla, rather rudely, that Wiggs had managed to talk until sunup without ever explaining her connection to his obsessions. She rose, dressed (feeling pleasantly sordid as she wriggled into the green party dress), and went searching for her host.

  Had she thought clearly about it, she might have realized that it was Monday morning and Wiggs had doubtlessly taken Huxley Anne to school. There remained, however, a yard or two of mummy bandage festooning her brain, so she went about the ground floor of the house calling, none too loudly, “Wiggs.”

  Unsuccessful, she ascended the stairs and repeated the procedure. No response there, either. She did, however, hear a thumping and bumping noise emanating from the master suite and assumed that it was Wolfgang Morgenstern.

  The door to the suite, thrice her age, was graced by an old-fashioned keyhole. In secretive New Orleans, keyholes were always plugged, but this one was as open and inviting as a prostitute's kimono. She laid a bloodshot peeper to it.

  Dr. Morgenstern, fully dressed, was skipping and bounding about the suite in a kind of exaggerated, athletic polka. Every once in a while, he would stop, execute a little backward and forward jitterbug step; then, necktie flapping, an exultant yelp springing from his heaving breast, he would jump straight in the air, up and down, five times.

  Well, she'd witnessed some crazy dances during Mardi Gras and all, but this one took the cake, and the coffee, too. Actually, it looked like fun, although on a morning such as this it would surely put her in the morgue. Nervously, she spied a bit longer, then pulled away. There was an imprint upon her upper cheek that resembled an archway in a sultan's palace.

  Downstairs, slipping into her raincoat, she noticed that the beet still lay on the sofa, but now, unless her nostrils were playing games with her, there hung a vulgar odor about it, the familiar beet-delivery stink, which she was positive had not been present earlier.

  The genius waitress walked home through sunlit traffic. Puddles shrank before her eyes and she could practically hear the pavement drying. “The mountains were out,” as they said in Seattle, meaning that the overcast had lifted and snowcapped peaks were flashing flossed fangs from every quadrant, as if Seattle were the object of some cosmic plea for dental health.

  It was one of those glorious days that, had they occurred less rarely, would have led to Seattle being more populous than Tokyo or India. Gulls circled downtown skyscrapers, derelicts with faces like soup bones luxuriated on jewel-bright park benches, and out in the glittering bay, flotillas of sailboats showed off for watercolorists. Despite her bedraggled condition, or because of her bedraggled condition, men smiled at Priscilla as they passed, and she could not help smiling back.

  To be sure, she was exhausted; obviously, she was confused; but she was excited, as well. She felt that she was caught up in some chaotic but grand adventure that was lifting her out of context and placing her beyond the normal constraints of society and biology.

  The idea of a thousand-year-old convict with a dematerialized wife and Pan for a pal was difficult to swallow, and the goings-on at the Last Laugh Foundation were enough to strain the elastic on the cerebral panty hose. Ah, but then there was the bottle! In the past, the bottle had meaning to her only as a means of getting rich—of getting even—but now . . . now, she sensed that the drop or two of exquisite fragrance in that weird old vessel had greater worth than she had imagined. The bottle seemed charged with omen and portent, it had a mojo working, as Madame Devalier and her black friends used to say. That bottle was a link to something. It could melt the ice on the dog dish of destiny, and it was hers!

  She was glad that she hadn't told Wiggs about the bottle. It would give her an excuse to see him again soon. It would undoubtedly elevate her in his view, and, speaking of links, it would serve to hook them up like sausages in this Alobar adventure.

  For the first time since she learned the truth about her daddy, Priscilla felt lucky, blessed. Furthermore, unless she was misreading the symptoms, she was in love.

  A rat-bite of guilt accompanied the admission of her amorous state, and she decided that she had better call Ricki right away. To that end, she nipped into Market Time Drugs on Broadway and made for the pay phone, which, as reality would have it, was just across the aisle from the perfume counter.

  Ricki's phone rang three or four time, and then Pris heard that click and moment of artificial silence that meant she was about to be the recipient of a recorded message.

  “Hello, this is Adolf Hitler. I'm out of the country right now, but I'll be happy to return your call as soon as I'm back in power. If Aryan, leave your name and number at the beep.”

  After hanging up, Priscilla entertained the notion of taking a bus over to the Ballard district for a meeting face to face. She was reasonably certain Ricki was at home. Then, the last strip of mummy wrap fell away from her brain: Hey! It was Monday, there was a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special at the 13 Coins at 11:00 A.M. Ricki would be there. Moreover, the waitresses were going to vote that very day on candidates for a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar grant.

  She looked at the drugstore clock. Jesus, Mary, and Pepto-Bismol! It was ten already.

  Priscilla had been looking forward to fishing out the bottle and, well, studying it, adoring it, consulting it or something, but she barely had time to soap away (a bit reluctantly) the dried and aromatic frosting of coital secretions, to comb her tangles, apply cosmetics, and change into sweater and jeans. As it was, she arrived at the 13 Coins twelve minutes late.

  “They're hiring at that new seafood restaurant on Lake Union,” Trixie Melodian was saying. “What's it called? Fear of Tuna.”

  “Forget it,” said Sheila Gomez. “I've seen the menu. They're serving Bermuda triangles with shark dip.”

  “So what?” countered Ellen Cherry Charles. “I caught the special yesterday at that pit where you work: 'spaghetti western.'”

  “It actually wasn't bad,” said Sheila.

  “Yeah? Well, hang 'em high, honey.”

  Priscilla surveyed the room. Ricki wasn't there yet.

  “We've got live music now, three nights a week,” said Doris Newton.

  “Improve your tips?”

  “Are you kidding? Stark Naked and the Car Thieves?! Bunch of kids look like they're dressed to invade Iwo Jima. Sound like a cat with its asshole on fire.”

  “I know that band,” said Trixie. “They're fun to dance to.”

  “Is that dancing or walking in a mine field?”

  “People can't dance and eat at the same time.”

  “Worse, people can't dance and tip at the same time.”

  “Car Thieves' fans don't tip. They garrote and strafe.”

  There were no windows in the banquet room, so Priscilla put her ear to the walnut paneling. She thought that she could hear Ricki's clunker maneuvering for a parking space.

  There was a new member present. She was skinny, bepimpled, getting rapidly drunk, and didn't look as if she'd been to college. Of course, looks can be deceiving. The girl gulped a swallow of wine large enough to drown a parakeet, then announced, “Dear Abby is a man.”

  “Pardon,” said Ellen Cherry.

  “Did you know that? Dear Abby is really a man.”

  “Yeah,” said Ellen Cherry. “Say, anybody get any tempting and entertaining propositions this week?”

  “In real life, I mean,” said the new girl.

  “Right,” said Ellen Cherry, turning her back and trying again to change the subject. “Come on, ladies. Didn't anybody get invited to spend Christmas on Christmas Island?”

  “I got invited to the Fountain of Youth,” said Priscilla. She couldn't help it, it popped right out. “A gentleman asked me to join him in achieving something more than mere animal succession, in perpetuating indefinitely the distinctive personality, the individual self. What do you all think of the idea of human beings living to be a thousand years old? What do you think about death?”


  A silence as thick as an Eskimo throw rug fell over the gathering.

  Fingering her crucifix, Sheila Gomez looked as if she wanted to comment, but the air in the banquet room was so taut she couldn't spit a word out. Finally, Ellen Cherry turned to the new girl. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you sure Dear Abby is a man.”

  The girl brightened. “Oh, yeah,” she chirped. “Bald old guy in a wheelchair. Lives in Australia or someplace.”

  “How about her sister?” asked Doris.

  “Huh?”

  “The other one. Ann Landers. The sister.”

  “Oh, Ann Landers,” said the new girl. She smiled triumphantly. “Ann Landers is a man, too.”

  Conversation skittered along for a few minutes, Doris wondering, aloud, what university might have given the girl credit for reading The National Enquirer, and Priscilla wondering, to herself, when Ricki was going to arrive. Then President Joan Meep, the driftwood poet, called the meeting to order, and they turned to the business of awarding the grant.

  “We have three contenders,” said Joan. “There's Amaryllis Tidroe, who wants to complete her portfolio of photographs of wrestlers' wives; there's Trixie Melodian, who, by the way, was a winner year before last, and she's choreographing a ballet based upon the social habits of lemmings—”

  “Ought to have a spectacular ending,” put in Doris.

  “—and there's Elizabeth Reifstaffel, who wants to research her master's thesis on the effects of the menstrual cycle on dream content. Okay . . .”

  “Wait a minute!” shouted Priscilla. “What about my project? What about me?”

  There was a bloated pause, after which Joan said, “I'm very sorry, Pris, but Ricki Sinatra, who was your sponsor, called this morning and withdrew your nomination.”

  Priscilla wept all the way home. Pushing her bike up Olive Way, her tears threatened to refill the puddles that the unseasonal November sunshine had been evaporating. At one point, she passed a dilapidated building in front of which Tito, the famous Spanish photographer, was posing some local fashion models. “No! No!” Tito screamed at an intimidated young beauty. “Do not smile! Do not smile! Look sophisticated.” Priscilla wanted to yell “Happy Birthday, Tito"—she wanted to yell, “Are any of you girls married to wrestlers?"—but her throat was too choked with sobs.

  At the top of the hill, she stopped at a telephone booth and dialed Ricki. A few rings, then that mechanical click and the canned silence: “Hello, this is Ricki Sinatra. I've been stricken with eight varieties of virus, including the Mekong Delta chills, the Mongolian railroad flu, and the Hong Kong rubber pork chop. I'm under doctor's orders not to be disturbed. The AMA joins me in requesting that you honor . . .”

  “Screw her!” said Priscilla, slamming down the receiver. “Screw all of 'em!” Through the disappointment, the humiliation, the fatigue, and the guilt, there surged a voltage of defiance. “I have the bottle,” she said. “I don't need Ricki, I don't need her goddamned educated waitresses, I don't need Stepmother Devalier and her pickaninny. I don't need any of 'em. I have the bottle!”

  But, of course, she did not have the bottle.

  She made that devastating discovery immediately upon returning to her studio apartment, where the refrigerator made noises at night like sea cows ruminating, where the toilet sounded like the audio portion of a white-water rafting expedition, where fallout from fifty failed base-note experiments perfumed the peeling wallpaper, and where the Kotex box on the bathroom shelf was empty now, except for a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.

  Priscilla did not have the bottle, not anymore, and if she hadn't the bottle, she hadn't hope or dream, and lacking hope or dream, why would she wish to live to be a thousand? Or twenty-five? for that matter. The bottle, once a flagon of fulfillable fantasy, once the repository of ambition and purpose, was falling into the category of galloping mind-fuck—and a woman really didn't need more than one “perfect taco” in her life.Monday afternoon, November 26: Priscilla Lester Partido traveled to Seattle's Ballard district, where despite pounding, kicking, and screaming that aggravated the murmuring hearts of every old Norwegian in the neighborhood, she was denied admission to the duplex of Ricki Sinatra.

  CALENDAR OF EVENTS

  Monday evening, November 26: Priscilla contacted police, who informed her that they could not interfere without a warrant. The judge on duty refused to issue a warrant directing authorities to search for an old perfume bottle for which there was no proof of ownership, which, by the complainant's admission, contained only a few drops of perfume, and which had been concealed, prior to alleged disappearance, in a Kotex box.

  Monday night, November 26: Priscilla resisted the impulse to call Wiggs Dannyboy, for fear that he might doubt her story.

  Tuesday morning, November 27: Priscilla met with an attorney. The lawyer telephoned Ricki, who assured him that she had no perfume bottle, never wore the stuff, was unaware of the existence of the antique bottle in question (having, in numerous visits to the client's apartment, neither seen nor heard mention of such a bottle), and invited the attorney to personally search her duplex, her car, and her locker at the Ballard Athletic Club. The attorney was convinced.

  Tuesday evening, November 27: Ricki the bartender and Priscilla the waitress got into a shouting match in the cocktail lounge at El Papa Muerta, the waitress calling the bartender “a thieving, vindictive dyke” and the bartender characterizing the waitress as “a liar, a two-timer, and a clumsy slut.” They were separated by fellow employees and reprimanded by management.

  Midnight, Tuesday/Wednesday, November 27/28: Priscilla found a note under her door inviting her to Thanksgiving dinner at the Last Laugh Foundation, where the celebrated French perfumer Marcel LeFever was to be feted along with Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern. The note was typed and quite formal, but was signed, in an eccentric scrawl resembling the markings made by the muddy tail of a water buffalo, “Love and Kisses, Wiggs.”

  Wednesday evening, November 28: A second heated exchange at El Papa Muerta, during which the waitress Priscilla repeatedly demanded that the bartender Ricki relinquish a purloined perfume bottle, resulted in the waitress Priscilla being fired. She was escorted from the premises and informed that she was to return her sailor dress within twenty-four hours or face prosecution. The waitress Priscilla offered to doff the uniform on the spot, but the manager, despite a twitch of prurient interest, insisted that it be laundered first, as it was badly dappled with salsa suprema. “That's ketchup and you know it,” said Priscilla.

  Wednesday night, November 28: Priscilla stopped off at Ernie Steele's Bar & Grill, where she proceeded to get intoxicated enough to forget where she had parked her bicycle (which she then abandoned), but not so intoxicated as to give in to the burning desire to call Dr. Dannyboy.

  Midnight, Wednesday/Thursday, November 28/29: Priscilla, on foot—and wobbling—returned home to find another note, this one imparting the information that Marcel LeFever, upon arrival in New York, had learned of the death of his uncle, Luc, head of LeFever Odeurs, and rushed back to Paris. Thanksgiving dinner was canceled. Wiggs added that he, nevertheless, hoped to see Pris soon. Accompanying the note was a beet. Accompanying the beet was a raunchy aroma. Priscilla hurled the beet the length of the hall. It rattled some innocent tenant's door, probably interrupting a Johnny Carson monologue.

  Thursday morning, November 29: Priscilla flopped on the sofa, flopping, further, into a drift of sooty snow; sinking into the placid nightlife of a city of wool, a subterranean Venice flooded by ink, where a language of bubbles was spoken, and misfortunes, like furniture in storage, were draped with heavy blue coverlets.

  Thursday afternoon, November 29: The dying gobble of a hundred million Thanksgiving sacrifices could not awaken her.

  Friday morning, November 30: Still sleeping.

  Friday afternoon, November 30: Ditto.

  Friday night, November 30: Priscilla was pulled to the surface by a banging at th
e door. She stood, stretched, and admitted Wiggs Dannyboy. She greeted him with a kiss. The inside of her mouth was as white as a swamp snake's. He didn't seem to mind, but, rather, prodded her coated, sluggish tongue with his fresh, lively one. He slipped off her panties and fucked her on the floor in her sailor dress. Refreshed now by forty hours of slumber and a spine-shuddering orgasm, she could scarcely believe how well she felt. She lay in his arms, purring like a Rolls-Royce that has learned it isn't going to be sold to an Arab, after all. “Tell me a story,” she said. “Sure and one time in the jungles o' Costa Rica, me voice was stolen by a parrot. For six months, durin' which time I could utter not a syllable, I beat the bushes for that bird . . .” “No,” said Priscilla, sweetly. “Tell me a story about beets.” “Very well then,” said he.

  Upon his release from Concord State Prison, Dr. Dannyboy had moved to Seattle, where eventually he leased the proper mansion and established his longevity clinic. Some eighteen months later, he traveled to New Orleans, where a perfumer's convention was about to commence. His motives were vague. “I had vowed to devote me life to immortality work,” he said, “and me conversations with Alobar had led me to believe, for some peculiar reason, that perfumery was somehow connected to the mystery o' mysteries. I mean, I knew that the sense o' smell played a role in the evolution o' consciousness, and thought perhaps . . . I'm not sure what I thought. 'Twas just a hunch. I was searchin' for clues. 'Twas intuition led me there. Intuition being the most reliable instrument in science.”

  Discouraged initially by the focus on merchandising, Wiggs was about to give up on the convention when he heard a speech delivered by Marcel LeFever.