Jitterbug Perfume

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"ORDER IN! Hi, Ricki. I'd like. ."

“Nine Fantasy Islands, six steel-belted radials, one Aztec ceremony with obsidian swizzle stick, twelve makes-you-invincibles, and an emergency landing with a cherry.”

“Whoa! You're in a good mood tonight.”

Ricki leaned across the mahogany, resting her arms on the chrome rails that separated the waitress station from the rest of the bar. It was a fine, old bar, long and curved like a tusk and so solid that the entire membership of the Fraternal Order of Belligerent Drunks of America could not make it budge. Ricki's bare arms, damp and rather hairy, seemed frail against the monolithic bar, but her smile more than held its own.

“Good mood? Honey, my antlers are in the treetops. And yours are gonna be there, too, when you hear the news.”

Priscilla set down her tray. “What news?” she asked.

“Two pieces of news, actually. The first is that the Daughters of the Daily Special are meeting Monday. And I have it on good authority they're gonna approve your grant.”

The brickload of fatigue that Priscilla was carrying suddenly turned into brick soufflé. “You're kidding.”

“Nope.”

Hummingbird soufflé. Cobweb soufflé. “How much? Do you know?”

“Twenty-five hundred is the figure I've heard.”

Nitrous oxide soufflé. “No lie?!” Priscilla didn't require a pocket calculator to determine that twenty-five hundred dollars would purchase three ounces of prime jasmine oil and leave enough to support her for a couple of months while she devoted all her time to identifying, and perhaps acquiring, that enigmatic base note. It would also mean that she wouldn't have to rely on her stepmother for assistance. “God Almighty, that's wonderful!”

“I thought you'd be pleased. Gimme your order and I'll tell you the rest of the news.”

“Three Carta Blancas and a 'rita is all.”

Ricki began to mix the margarita. “That's a 'rita and three Carta Blancas, Pris,” said Ricki sternly, reminding her of the hierarchy of ordering.

“Sorry.” Priscilla sighed. “I'm just excited,” she explained, knowing full well that this was destined to be a shift like any other, complete with dropped menus, spilled cocktails, botched orders, undercharges, overcharges, pinches from the lecherous and insults from the chaste. Ah, but there was relief in sight. A twenty-five-hundred-dollar rainbow with perfume at one end and, who knows, maybe the perfect taco at the other.

“Now,” said Ricki, uncapping the beers and placing them on Priscilla's tray, “the crowning mojo is, the clinic says my infection is totally cleared up. So you and I can stay together tomorrow night.”

Priscilla labored to fake a smile. “Gee, that's great, Rick. But you do remember that I have something going tomorrow night. It's that dinner party at the Last Laugh Foundation.”

“You mean you're actually gonna go to that?”

“Well, yeah. It's got my curiosity up.”

“Okay, if you wanna waste your time, go ahead. Bunch of druggy weirdos putting on the ritz for some big scientist who's probably also a druggy weirdo, if the truth be known. It's not my cup of cake.”

“Well, I've decided to go.”

“All right. I'll meet you afterward.”

“It might be late.”

“So what? I'll wait up for you.”

Priscilla shrugged with resignation. It looks like it's just my destiny to turn queer, she thought. Why fight it? To Ricki she said, “Your place or mine?” not caring that two other waitresses were lined up behind her, impatient to place their orders but savoring every word.

“Yours is closer.”

“It's a mess.”

“It's always a mess.”

“I guess it is. How come your place is always so neat? How do you do it? With mirrors?”

Ricki shook her head. “My lunar sign is in Virgo,” she said. “Every month when the moon is full, I'm driven to balance my checkbook and straighten up my apartment. I can't help myself. Instead of a werewolf, I turn into an accountant.”

“Who can only be killed with a silver dildo,” called Priscilla, walking away with her drinks while her fellow employees, now four deep in front of the waitress station, looked on in disgust and bewilderment.

She completed the Saturday shift with no more than the usual mishaps. There was a birthday party at one of her tables, which meant that she had to deliver a complimentary cake with lighted candle and sing “Happy Birthday” to the recipient, a chore that she always despised. She felt better, however, when she overheard another customer, a famous young fashion photographer from Madrid, who was being treated to El Papa Muerta's Uncle Ben paella by some Seattle department store executives, proclaim, “How embarrassing, how gauche! In Europe such vulgarity would never happen. A birthday is a private affair. Only in America would it be a cheap public display.” The last thing she did before she went off duty was to order a birthday cake sent to the photographer at his table.

On the way out, she gave Ricki her spare key so that the bartender could let herself in to wait for her on Sunday night. “See you after the party,” Pris said. “Thanks for the good news.”

“I'm sure you'll find a way to repay me,” said Ricki. She winked.

Priscilla bicycled home, where, relieved by the absence of beet at her door and bolstered by the prospect of financial aid, she allowed herself the rare luxury of going straight to bed. In her dreams, however, she mixed fragrances continuously, awakening the next morning, still in uniform, feeling almost as tired as if she had worked through the night.

Having slept with her tips in her pocket, she found red welts the size of quarters on her thigh when she showered. “Marked by the Beast!” she exclaimed. “Well, there's one thing to be said for money. It can make you rich.”

After a breakfast of half-fresh doughnuts and canned Carnation milk, she attacked the apartment with sponge and cleanser, with mop and broom, with organizational tactics for which she'd previously exhibited little aptitude. She would not settle for less than spick-and-span. “Won't Ricki be surprised,” she said.

In the afternoon, she napped. She dreamed of her father. They were in his palace in Mexico. He was rubbing salve into the welts on her thigh. V'lu Jackson was down on all fours, scrubbing the palace floor. There was a strong odor of ammonia. The odor was still there when Priscilla awoke. For a whole minute, she did not recognize her own apartment.

The least wrinkled garment — and even it had as many folds as the waddles of a Republican president — in her closet was a green knit dress given to her by her ex-husband, the Argentine accordion ace, Effecto Partido. She hung it in the bathroom with the shower on hot and full, until the steam performed the equivalent of one of those partially successful face-lifts administered to aging actresses. The dress looked good on her. It called attention to the violet in her eyes. She applied eye shadow and lipstick and as a finishing touch, forced earring wires through the virtually grown-over holes in her lobes. The earrings were also a gift from Effecto. They were tiny accordions.

With a tingle of excitement, she decided to call for a taxi. The Last Laugh Foundation was only a dozen blocks away, but it was raining, as usual, and she just couldn't ride her bike in her best dress. She turned the latch, checking twice to ascertain that the door was tightly locked, then went downstairs to wait for the cab. “If a beet comes tonight, that carnivore Ricki can deal with it,” she said. She was chuckling softly when she climbed into the Farwest taxi.

The cab streaked through the wet streets with a noise like an asp. Alas, before Priscilla could fully enjoy the blur of neon, the crisp vinyl upholstery, the mystery crackle of the two-way radio, she was at her destination. She showed her invitation to one of a half-dozen security guards — triple the usual number — and was immediately let through the iron gate, while from the excluded crowd that spilled out front, even in the chilly drizzle that was falling there arose loud grumbles and cries of “Who the hell is she?” Her lungs filled momentarily with a sort of golden gas, that righteous helium that inflates the diaphragm of any honest person who finds himself or herself suddenly one of an elite. Slightly giddy with privilege, she stumbled along a gravel path that wound through a rhododendron garden and led to the front steps of the mansion. She was beginning to have visions of Wally Lester's Mexican palace. They ceased when she noticed a squashed slug on the steps.

The brass door-knocker was in the shape of a fairy. Little wings and wand and everything. “Hmm,” said Priscilla. She thought that she would feel silly, putting it to its intended purpose, but it was okay. She was still regarding the knocker when a girl about eight years old opened the door and admitted her. “My daddy believes in fairies,” the child said. “Hmm,” replied Priscilla.

Although the ivy-covered exterior of the Last Laugh Foundation led one to expect brown leather furniture, worn but expensive Oriental carpets, carved wood ceilings, and Flemish tapestries depicting medieval stag hunts or mythological rowdies, the interior proved to be bright and modern: chrome, smoked glass, canvas couches in bold primary hues. The floors were polished hardwood. The walls were pure white. “White as alkaloid crystals,” Wiggs Dannyboy was to say. “White as yeti dung, white as the Sabbath, white as God's own belly. Floral patterns, they're for your doomed. Your immortalist wall is a white one.” Here and there were prints by M. C. Escher, a multiplication of stiff, metamorphic images that assured the viewer that the world is a puzzle and life a loop and that is that. (Escher is sneered at by critics, but he may be one of the few artists who didn't lie to us.) Above the fireplace, in which Pres-to-logs were smoldering, was a display of headhunting equipment, probably relics of the days when Dr. Dannyboy was a working anthropologist. “Would you care for a cocktail?” the little girl asked. You bet.

Standing about the large room were approximately twenty people, none of whom seemed any more at home there than Priscilla. She thought she recognized one of the guests. He was, oddly enough, a fragrance wholesaler, the only one in the Pacific Northwest. She had made modest purchases from him. It was he who would order French jasmine oil for her, if the educated waitresses did, indeed, grant her the funds with which to buy it. She was about to approach him, gulping bourbon and ginger ale all the while, when Dr. Dannyboy fairly burst into the room, introduced himself loudly, and called the gathering to table.

The dining room was formal in character, despite the fact that its long table was made of red plastic, the chairs of chrome tubes and purple canvas. The walls here were white, as well, adorned by another Escher or two, commenting again on the poetic transformations that occur systematically, if mysteriously, in the seemingly endless loop of life. Candles blazed in a plastic candelabrum. The last chrysanthemums of autumn hung their heads apprehensively over the rim of a vase, like voyagers whose crowded boat was steaming into a strange and possibly dangerous port. The chrysanthemums were part of a centerpiece that included some beets.

Priscilla failed to notice the beets right away. Her gaze was concentrated upon Dr. Dannyboy. That a one-eyed man of fifty could be so handsome! Dannyboy was slender, svelte, and nimble, a tanned, athletic man with an Airstream nest of silver curls, teeth like the spots on dominoes, and more twinkle in his single eye than most men have in a pair. A high-voltage blue, the eye color was in aesthetic contrast to the patch that he wore on the right side, the patch being white vinyl with a painted green shamrock in its center. Priscilla had seen photographs of him, of course, taken both before and after he lost his eye, but they had barely hinted at the charm that spilled out of him like foam out of an ale mug.

Of his background, she knew a little. Brilliant young anthropologist who left his native Dublin to teach at Harvard, where he experimented with mind-altering chemicals beyond the call of academic duty. Lost his professorship, journeyed to the Amazon to munch vision vine with the Indians, returning to the United States as a self-styled psychedelic prophet, or “electronic shaman,” as he called himself, appearing on TV talk shows, lecturing on campuses everywhere, promoting with considerable flair the notion that certain drugs can raise consciousness and that persons with elevated consciousness are less apt to be violent, greedy, fearful, or repressed. Since it was hardly in the best national interest to relieve citizens of their violence, greed, fear, or repression, the government acted to silence Dr. Dannyboy by arresting him on a phony marijuana charge and checking him into the steel hotel. Escaped, only to be nabbed two years later on a Costa Rican orchid farm, and imprisoned again. Paroled after nearly a decade, during which time he lost an eye to a sadistic prison guard and impregnated his wife by smuggling out his semen in a dinner roll. Turned up in Seattle a couple of years back to quietly (for him) found an institution devoted to “immortality and longevity research.”

All this Priscilla knew, but it seemed to have nothing to do with the attractive man who sat at the head of the table in Irish tweeds, sipping red wine, tapping from time to time his garish eye patch with his salad fork, and holding forth on a variety of topics. “England!” she heard him bellow with distaste. “How can a country that cannot produce ice cubes in abundance be hopin' to palm itself off as a major civilization?” Moments later, he had turned his attention to grammar: “There are no such things as synonyms!” he practically shouted. “Deluge is not the same as flood!” After each of these pronouncements, he erupted with laughter, almost as if making fun of what he'd just so passionately proclaimed.

At the other end of the table, acting as hostess, was Dannyboy's young daughter, Huxley Anne. Priscilla sat to Huxley Anne's left. The place directly across from Priscilla was vacant. “There was a colored woman supposed to eat there,” volunteered Huxley Anne, “but she didn't come. Maybe she's late. She lives long away.” The place to the right of Dannyboy was likewise unoccupied. “That's Dr. Morgenstern's dish,” explained the little girl. “He'll be downstairs soon as he finishes jumping.”

“Jumping?” asked Priscilla.

“Uh-huh,” said Huxley Anne, giggling. Before she could say more, Professor Morgenstern entered the room and made to take his place. A tall, thickset German, gray-suited, bespectacled, bald as a bomb, the noted chemist might have appeared the epitome of the cold, clear-eyed, methodical, reasoning man were he not panting like a Saint Bernard on avalanche patrol. His face was as red as a Christmas sock, and his heart was pounding so hard that his bow tie was bouncing.

Despite the fact that the guest of honor was obviously and oddly out of breath, the others at table were relieved to see him. They were, for the most part, members of Seattle's scientific fraternity — department heads from the University of Washington, Boeing Aircraft physicists, research chemists at Swedish Hospital, mayoral advisers on medicine and technology — and they had been ill at ease in the company of Wiggs Dannyboy, what with his careless pronouncements and boisterous laughter. Wary of Dannyboy's reputation, the good academics probably believed their host loaded on some arcane substance, though Priscilla had been around both French Quarter trippers and Irish Channel blarneymongers long enough to recognize that this particular brand of bullshit was not artificially induced.

At any rate, the guests were visibly relieved when Dr. Morgenstern joined them, and they applauded when Wiggs lifted his much-consulted wineglass and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, let us be welcomin' to Seattle, to the Last Laugh Foundation, to our pleasant company here on this rainy November eve, the world's only double Nobel laureate, your Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern.”

As the applause died out and the chemist sat down to analyze the minestrone soup, little Huxley Anne leaned over to Pris and whispered, “Wolfgang, show us some tricks on your Nobel lariat. That's what my daddy says. Hee hee.” Priscilla laughed at that. Wiggs must have heard her laugh, because he grinned approvingly in her direction and waved at her with his soup spoon.

The salmon linguine was tasty, and Huxley Anne, who was edging toward roly-poliness, got seriously involved with it. The seat across from Priscilla remained vacant. The other guests attempted to converse with the rather taciturn Dr. Morgenstern. Most of their questions were fielded by Wiggs Dannyboy, who, after a rational sentence or two, would issue some immortalist epigram, such as, “If you can't take it with you, don't go,” or “Death is a grave mistake,” followed by a jolly roar from deep within his tweeds — and pained smiles from the polite diners. Eating in silence, Priscilla was mildly amused by it all — until she spotted the trio of raw beets in the centerpiece.

Could Dannyboy be behind the produce deposits at her doorsill? And if so, to what possible end? She sank into a swamp of spooky speculation, from which she emerged with a start when a maid inquired if she wanted chocolate mousse or apple slices for dessert. “Uh, er, beg your pardon?” mumbled Priscilla.

“How do you feel about calories?” asked the maid, displaying the dessert tray.

“Well, there are more of them than there are of us,” said Pris. She selected the mousse.

Huxley Anne squealed at this, and for the second time during the meal, Wiggs wagged a utensil at Priscilla and regarded her warmly.

After coffee, the guests thinned out rapidly. They had obviously come solely to meet Wolfgang Morgenstern, and having accomplished that, to greater or lesser degrees of disappointment, they made for the exit. (Exit, not egress. There are no such things as synonyms.) “Interesting,” thought Priscilla, “these people wanting out so badly and all those others on the street wanting in.” She elected to join the small, brave group that gathered in the front room for brandy and tobacco. She thought perhaps there might be a tour of the laboratories later. Mostly she wished to inquire about those beets on the table.

“I have to go to bed now, Miz. .?”

“Partido. Miz Partido. But you can call me Priscilla.”

“I have to go to bed now, Priscilla. It's after ten and the cigar smoke makes me dizzy.”

“Goodnight, Huxley Anne. It's been totally awesome.” She shook the child's chubby hand. “Say, do you think your daddy will let us have a peek at his laboratories?”

The little girl looked puzzled. “What labbertories?” she asked.

“Hmm,” said Priscilla. “No labs? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Can you show me where you hung my raincoat? Cigar smoke makes me dizzy, too.”

She downed her cognac in a single gulp, causing evidence of alcohol trauma to roll down her cheeks as she donned her yellow vinyl slicker. She waved goodbye to the blurry figure of Huxley Anne that was ascending the stairs, and somewhat timidly, despite being three-quarters drunk, approached her host. He was stationed in front of the fireplace, pointing out some feathered skinning knives to an academic-looking couple that was trying its best to get away in order to speak to Dr. Morgenstern. “Your cannibal gourmet is partial to the palm o' the hand,” Wiggs was saying, “but his piece de résistance is the testicles. Tried them myself once. Bloody delicious!” The woman gasped.

“Excuse me, please. Dr. Dannyboy. .”

Wiggs turned to face Priscilla, his good eye, so bright with intelligence and rebellion, swinging like a beacon. The shamrock patch followed in its wake. “You're not leavin'?”

“Yep. I don't know what I'm doing here in the first place. But thanks for dinner. Bloody delicious.”

The couple fled. Dannyboy grinned. “Sure and go on with you. The likes of you is a wee bit o' delicious, as well.” O' delicious is what he said and o' delicious is probably what he meant, o' palatable, o' savory, and o' delectable being unacceptable synonyms. “Do you have to be runnin'?”

The glint in his eye! The lilt in his voice! Her estrogen level accelerated from zero to sixty in one-point-nine seconds. The gravity force was so great it snapped her pelvis back and stiffened her nipples. It was with difficulty that she replied, “I do. I have a date.”

“A date, eh? You're actin' none too happy about it. As a matter of fact, darlin', if I may say as much, you strike me as an unhappy woman overall. And I say as much even though you were the only guest here this evening with a sense o' humor. Which is to say, you were the only guest with any wisdom about you.”

Priscilla was rather taken aback. She didn't know whether to feel insulted or flattered. “I'm fine,” she said. “I've been kinda tired. You're jumping to conclusions. Besides, unhappiness is natural. I'm not one of those bubbleheads that spend all their time trying to avoid the normal misery of life.”

She moved toward the front door, but none too swiftly. He followed.

“Sure and life is a lot o' misery, all right, and death is more misery, yet. Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o' neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unacceptable end. The trick is not to take such responses too seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o' flesh by cooperatin' with misery.”

“Seems to me,” said Priscilla, snapping and unsnapping the collar of her slicker, “that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.”

“Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”

Did he think she was an audience or something? Couldn't he tell that she was an off-duty waitress full of mousse and booze, and stuck on a collision course with the lips of a pretty Italian bartender? “Jesus,” she said. “You talk like a book.”

“That's not surprisin'.”

“You mean you read too much?”

“There's no such thing. Unless it's prissy academic novels that you're readin'. No, I mean that when I was a wee lad, I used to climb into my parents' bed of a morning early, crawl in between my mum and dad, and each o' them would immediately roll over and turn a back to me, just like they were a pair o' bookends. It's only natural I grew up thinkin' I was a bloody volume.”

“Parental rejection, uh? There's a subject I know inside out. It doesn't appear to have slowed you down.”

“Would you be likin' to discuss it?”

“No,” she said. She saw her opening and went for it. “I'd be liking to discuss beets.”

A laugh went off in his throat like a rat-bomb, sending the last of the guests scurrying for their bumbershoots. His eye closed and then slowly opened, a process that took so long that by the time his iris was up to full glint, the house had been cleared of Seattle scientists and Wolfgang Morgenstern was halfway up the stairs. “Beets, you say?”

“Right! I want to know why I was invited here tonight and why the center of your dining room table bears a striking resemblance to my doorjamb.”

Her tone was so firm that he could have set his brandy on it.

“Ah. Indeed. Yes. Well, to be perfectly frank, Miss Partido, darlin', there was a ration o' beets on my table tonight because there has been beets at your very own door — but, alas, I'm not sure o' the connection myself. Except that it has something to do with the thousand-year-old janitor and his perfume.”

She looked him over pore by pore. He was slightly sloshed and terribly flaky (and cute in that daddy way that always made her heart roll over), but he wasn't surfing the psychedelic billows, she was reassured of that. Moreover, he seemed sincere. “What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Sure and what am I talkin' about, indeed. I was hopin' we could get into that tonight, but only one o' you showed up. Actually, I've known all week that Marcel LeFever wouldn't be here until next Sunday, but I really was expectin' the other—”

“Wait a minute. Marcel LeFever? The perfumer?”

“The one and the same.”

Priscilla had heard Bunny LeFever speak at a perfumers' convention. It had been quite a speech. It had, in some crazy way, changed her life. She unsnapped her slicker. “I think we need to sit down and talk,” she said.

“All right, then,” he said, helping her out of the coat. “I'll be gettin' us a splash o' something. And, say, Miss Partido, though I know it's an affront to the Virgin Mary to be mixin' business with pleasure, pleasure is my business — the extension o' pleasure, indefinitely, eternally — and my immortal soul is warmed by the loveliness o' you, you're a sight for sore eyes, so to speak" — he trapped his shamrock patch with his empty snifter—"and I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I am not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affection.”

Jesus, she thought. I bet the son of a bitch does believe in fairies. But she couldn't help herself. She kissed him.

Meanwhile, a dozen blocks away, Ricki, carrying a pound of gift-wrapped chocolate, had let herself into Priscilla's apartment. There had been no trick to that. The door wasn't locked. It had been slightly ajar, in fact. Ricki shook her head. “Where is that girl's mind at?” she wondered.

In addition, the apartment was in the worst state Ricki had ever seen it. True, no gnarled old beets were in evidence, and it smelled as if it had been recently scoured — the odor of ammonia cut right through the floral fragrances in the makeshift laboratory — but drawers were out of the dresser, the kitchenette cupboard looked as if it had been rifled by a starving ape, and possessions were scattered everywhere. There were sanitary napkins all over the bathroom, that's how bad it was.

Ricki rolled up her sweatshirt sleeves and set to putting the place in order. It took her the best of two hours — lucky it was only a studio apartment — but her Virgo exactitude finally prevailed. “Won't Pris be surprised,” she said. “It's after midnight. I hope she gets home soon.”

NEW ORLEANS

THE MINUTE YOU LAND IN NEW ORLEANS, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get the aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky filé z'herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po'boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week — yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don't eat day and night, if you don't constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological scars.

You would think that the natives would be immune, and to a certain extent they are, but even a lifelong resident of New Orleans must do his or her share of Creole consumption or suffer consequences. The cuisine is glorious, of course, and the fact that the people of New Orleans are compelled to dine out so often should not be considered a hardship in any sense other than financial. Ah, but there are underlying motives about which southern gentry will not speak. Even riffraff are hesitant to acknowledge the disgusting specter that haunts their city. They feed the loa and make the best of it.

When citizens have been out of town for a while, they know by instinct that no matter how well they may have dined on their journey, they must fend off the beast immediately upon their return. Thus, V'lu Jackson stepped off the jetliner from Seattle to find herself craving a fancy platter of Arnaud's daube panée, accompanied by a glass of Bichot Chass-Montrachet (with maybe a squirt of hurricane drops for the zoom that was in it). However, to Lily Devalier, who met her at the airport, she said, “Mmm, ah sure would lak to stop by Buster Holmes, git me a mess a ribs 'fore we goes home.”

And Madame Devalier said, “Gracious, cher, I dropped everything and spent a small fortune to dash all the way out to Moisant Field" — she still called New Orleans International by its original name—"to meet you, and now you want me to sit around that hole-in-the-wall while you slop and slather over ribs. Didn't they give you a meal on the plane?” She complained, but she ordered their taxi to Buster's because she secretly understood.

What Madame did not understand was why V'lu requested that she come to the airport. Indeed, she didn't fully understand the circumstances that had led to V'lu traveling to Seattle in the first place. She had ignored the card inviting the staff of Parfumerie Devalier to a dinner party at some Seattle place that sounded like a comedy nightclub. She suspected it was a publicity stunt for a dump where Priscilla was working. “Dr. Wolfgang Morgenstern” was probably one of those loud Jewish boys who got paid for telling dirty jokes in public. Then an envelope arrived containing a round-trip plane ticket, and a guest list that included scientists, perfumers, and, yes, Priscilla Partido. Very curious. Still, Lily refused to consider attending, but V'lu began pestering her to allow her to go, and while the idea of V'lu sitting down to dinner with gentlemen of science seemed ludicrous to her, curiosity, concern for Priscilla, indigestion or something else got the better of her, and she let that poor simple bayou girl go jetting off to make a fool of herself — and the shop — in a distant city that as far as Madame could tell was barely civilized.

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 YEARS 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.”

“If this is the speech Bunny made at the convention, I've heard it once, and that was once too often.”

“I know,” said Luc, “but I'm looking for clues. I suspect that it was this fool speech that got Marcel invited to the Last Laugh Foundation. I'm trying to determine what it might have been they heard in it.” He pushed Rewind.

Claude didn't give a big quiche about the Last Laugh Foundation, about Bunny's visit to it, or Luc's morbid interest in it. Claude had come to his father's office to discuss the so-called agent file. He was disturbed that one V'lu Jackson was listed as a spy for their company. He wondered if Luc was aware that Bunny was mad about V'lu. Had the old man instigated their affair? Had Bunny played a role in recruiting V'lu? That seemed unlikely, yet Claude had an annoying feeling that business had been conducted behind his back. He was intent upon answers, but it appeared that he would have to wait until they'd listened, once again, to the address that had so embarrassed them when Bunny had delivered it to the Eighth International Congress of Aromatics (the biannual perfumers' convention) in New Orleans during early June.

“Do I have to sit through this? I need to talk to you about—”

“Shush.” Luc aimed his cigar as if it were a laser. Having zapped Claude's vocal cords, he pushed Pause, then Play.

The tape had rewound farther than necessary, and the first sounds to escape the transmitter were those of the chief executive of a large New York fragrance corporation concluding a talk on the future of the industry. “In selecting fine fragrances, the perfumer has the most knowledge as to what new compounds and materials are available, but I don't believe he is close enough to the marketplace or the consumer to apply this knowledge correctly. Finished goods manufacturers have begun almost exclusively to put full responsibility for fragrance selection for their products in the hands of marketing people rather than technical people or fragrance compounders. This trend has made for more commercial, and somehow more successful, fragranced products having been launched in recent years.”

Claude smiled to imagine how Bunny must have been fuming over those assertions.

“. . fragrance must be styled just as fashions are, or automobiles, or table settings, or anything else. Fragrance styles, like fashion styles, are cyclical, but new developments in chemicals, like new developments in fabrics, mean a return-with-a-difference. Thank you.”

During the applause that followed, Claude pictured Bunny clinching pale, manicured fists. In Claude's picture, his cousin was the only member of the audience not clapping. In real life, however, that was not the case. Wiggs Dannyboy had not applauded because he had heard nothing that astonished him (he had, in fact, been bored and disappointed with his introduction to perfuming). V'lu Jackson and Priscilla Partido had not applauded because they, in separate parts of the auditorium, were so close to sleep that their breathing was locked into snore-launch modes. They nodded through the introduction of “master perfumer Marcel LeFever,” twitching into wakefulness only when their respective subconscious minds were pricked, for some odd reason, by the words, “It was then, toward the end of the Cretaceous Period, that the flowers wiped out the dinosaurs.”

Oblivious to the fact that he'd shaken two attractive amateurs from the mosquito nets of drowsiness and reversed an outside observer's decision to go to the men's room for a toke of marijuana, Bunny continued: “Science knows that the disappearance of dinosaurs and the appearance of flowers occurred simultaneously, yet, strangely, it has never drawn much of a connection between the two events. It is up to perfumers to correct the oversight.

“Vegetarian dinosaurs dined on ferns, floating water plants, and the palmlike cycad. They were not very intelligent, and certainly not very French, having developed a limited, strictly specialized diet. When the great mountain building took place during the Cretaceous Period, seaways drained and swamps dried up. First the aquatic plants, then the ferns and cycads succumbed. Insufficient surface water. Some new plants had been gradually moving in, however. These plants were inconspicuous at first, and neither the dinosaurs nor the swamp plants paid them much attention. Ah, but they had plans for the future. They began to grow their roots longer and longer, sink them deeper and deeper, until they could reach the moisture trapped beneath the surface, and when their stringy little exploratory organs hit the water table — POW!” (Bunny smacked the podium; if V'lu and Priscilla hadn't been awake before, they were now.)

“POW! They exploded in a scandalous display of sexual invitation.

“The old claw-and-fang world of drab, predatory, reptilian repression had never seen anything like this. Lasciviously colored, scandalously scented blossom after blossom flaunted its genitalia openly, enticing with visual and heretofore unknown olfactory charms any who might be inclined to sample its pleasures.

“With their appalling genius for adaptability, insects responded enthusiastically to the outbreak of sensuality. So did the smaller birds. Dinosaurs, however, were repulsed. Although their reproductive equipment must have been monumental — the penis of a Brontosaurus would have been only a couple of yards shorter than the thirty-foot organ of the great blue whale — it was kept out of sight and infrequently used. The dim-witted, thin-blooded dinosaur was not a hot lover, another way in which it differed from the French.” There was a soft ripple of laughter. Very soft. “It mated once a year, barring headaches. So put off was the prudish dinosaur by the sexy smell of flowering plants that it starved to death and went extinct rather than eat them.”

Claude was particularly bothered by this part of the speech. Claude did not enjoy being reminded of whale penises and dinosaur peepees. The very thought of big dumb clumsy dinosaurs engaged in sexual intercourse was enough to flash-freeze his gonads, making him temporarily unreceptive to his wife. For that matter, Claude resented the fact that dogs and cats and chickens were allowed by nature to indulge in sexual practices not so terribly different from his own. In a perfect world, according to Claude, coitus would be the exclusive prerogative of humans. Even most humans weren't fit to participate in an activity so sacred, so personal, so sublime. Often, Claude simply could not imagine the couples he met at parties or passed on the street ever being locked in carnal embrace. It was not merely disgusting, it seemed impossible. Had they not had children, he would have been convinced that they cohabited platonically. This was especially true if the people were fat or stupid. Claude believed that only smart, attractive people had the right to fuck, and it sincerely hurt him when he discovered evidence to the contrary.

Claude was shaded by a revulsion as dark as his socks, but the tape rolled merrily along.

“I shall not ask you to believe that an evolutionary intelligence developed flowers for the specific purpose of ridding the world of dinosaurs (and incidentally, the carnivorous dinosaurs quickly joined their vegetarian relatives in oblivion, since, with the plant-eaters gone, they had nothing to dine upon), or that that intelligence was trying to teach our planet a lesson, to wit: it is better to be small, colorful, sexy, careless, and peaceful, like the flowers, than large, conservative, repressed, fearful, and aggressive, like the thunder lizards; a lesson, by the way, that the Earth has yet to learn. That is not really my point. Nor is it the point that the largest, most terrifying animals that ever lived were eradicated by fragrance.

“No, the point is that the aroma of flowers, from which we have borrowed our perfumes, while extremely powerful, has been from the beginning entirely seductive in its intentions. A rose is a rose is a rogue.

“Perfume, fundamentally, is the sexual attractant of flowers, or, in the case of civet and musk, of animals. Squeezed from the reproductive glands of plants and creatures, perfume is the smell of creation, a sign dramatically delivered to our senses of the Earth's regenerative powers — a message of hope and a message of pleasure.

“Small wonder that the Church came to equate perfume with sin, stench with holiness. It is said that certain saints so completely neglected the normal requirements of personal hygiene that Satan himself fled in terror when approaching them from downwind — thus, their reputation for sanctity. The Church periodically favored incense and oils. LeFever purchased its original perfumery from an order of Catholic monks in 1666. Fragrance has long been an important element in ceremony and ritual. Overall, however, the Church has had to oppose perfume because it could not escape the conclusion that perfume is an implicit invitation to forbidden sexual license. As perfumers, we must face up to that reality, as well.

“There is little difference between the Zulu warrior who smeared his body with lion's fat and the modern woman who dabs hers with expensive perfume. The one was trying to acquire the courage of the king of beasts, the other is attempting to acquire the irresistible sexuality of flowers. The underlying principle is the same.”

Claude shuddered. Lion's fat. Ugh. Where did Bunny come up with these things?

“What we are really talking about, then, is magic, is it not so? In the anthropological understanding of homeopathic magic, perfume is the medium by which the lady magically usurps the sexual powers of the blossom. As with the warrior's lion fat, there is also more than a little fantasizing going on, for however undetailed, a potential result of the use of the magical medium is being projected onto the wearer's screen of consciousness.

“Since the perfumer is dealing in sexual magic and romantic fantasy, he or she is operating in a realm that is both deeply primitive and highly exalted. This realm has its rhymes and reasons, and they are not quite the same, I regret to inform you, as the rhymes and reasons of the marketplace.”

The last remark was ad libbed, apparently. In spite of himself, Claude felt a tingle of pride in his cousin. He turned to Luc, shaking his head and chuckling. “That Bunny is a quick one,” he said. “And afraid of nothing.” Luc did not reply. Luc had other things on his mind. Luc had been awake most of the night. Luc had money to invest, and now that Morgenstern had hooked up with the Last Laugh Foundation. . well, it was worth investigating. Surely, the foundation needed funds. Who knew, maybe it could do something for him. Luc chewed his cigar and listened intently. Luc felt rotten. The circles under his eyes were the purple of bad meat.

“Now,” Marcel the Bunny was saying, “I wish to call your attention to yet another prehistorical event. About two hundred thousand years ago, the human brain tripled in size. Science has been unable to explain this relatively sudden enlargement, since beyond a certain size, a size that the brains of our ancestors had already reached two hundred thousand years ago, intelligence does not increase with brain volume. What evolutionary purpose was served, then, by tripling our cerebral real estate?”

Bunny paused for effect, then went on. “I submit that the brain was enlarged in order to store more memories. We have learned in recent experiments that memory is stored not in specific neural centers but, holographically, throughout the brain. As the human mammal came to live longer, and to widen the scope of its intellectual activities, it had more to remember. It needed more closet space, so to speak. But the interesting thing is, the increase in memory capacity was far beyond what was needed at the time. It was, in fact, far beyond what is needed today, although we now live on the average more than three times as long as our prehistoric ancestors, and the range of our activities has increased geometrically. Could it be that evolution was preparing us for a time in the future when we will live considerably longer than we do at present? Could the mushrooming of memory space have been long-range longevity planning? An immoralist ploy?”

Luc grunted. “This must be the part,” he said. “I passed over it the first time.” He sat up in his chair. The movement made him dizzy. (Five months earlier, Wiggs Dannyboy had been pulled forward in his seat by the same remark. Wiggs had crashed the convention on a hunch, and it looked as if the hunch was paying off.)

Bunny: “We may only speculate about such matters. We do know, however, that of our five senses, the one most directly connected to memory is the sense of smell. Although man has become increasingly visual in his orientations, although his olfactory receptor has shrunk until it is no larger than an American dime, sight simply cannot compete with smell when it comes to the ability to awaken memory. Memories associated with scent are invariably more immediate and more vivid than those associated solely with visual imagery or sound. Psychiatrists have begun, in fact, to use perfume to aid the patient in recreating the suppressed memories of early childhood.”

The old man cocked his head. Bunny was speaking in English, and what with the Blood Pressure Chorale caroling in Luc's temples, he had difficulty comprehending every word. English was a language fit only for narrating animated cartoons and inciting crowds at sporting events, according to Luc.

Bunny: “Scent is the last sense to leave a dying person. After sight, hearing, and even touch are gone, the dying hold on to their sense of smell. Does that sharpen your appreciation of the arena in which we perfumers perform?

“Fragrance is a conduit for our earliest memories, on the one hand; on the other, it may accompany us as we enter the next life. In between, it creates mood, stimulates fantasy, shapes thought, and modifies behavior. It is our strongest link to the past, our closest fellow traveler to the future. Prehistory, history, and the afterworld, all are its domain. Fragrance may well be the signature of eternity.”

“That's laying it on a bit thick,” commented Claude. Luc made an effort to nod in agreement, but his head was so full of hot, noisy, polluted blood that it felt like a bistro on a weekend midnight, and he could not move it.

The tape was enjoying perfect health, however. It stuck steadfastly to its pace. “There is a long-standing argument about whether perfuming is a science or an art. The argument is irrelevant, for at the higher levels, science and art are the same. There is a point where high science transcends the technologic and enters the poetic, there is a point where high art transcends technique and enters the poetic.

“A perfumer, of course, is neither a quantum physicist nor a painter, but at his best, when his purposes are high purposes, when his imagination is liberated, his choices inspired, he, too, enters the poetic. And it is revealed to him, then, what the ancients meant when they said with conviction that the soul receives its sustenance via the sense of smell.

“I have spoken to you this afternoon of poetry and of sexual magic. Not too many years ago, the names of our perfumes bore testimony to such things. There was a popular scent called Tabu, there was Sorcery, My Sin, Vampire, Voodoo, Evening in Paris, Jungle Gardenia, Bandit, Shocking, Intimate, Love Potion, and L'Heure Bleue—The Blue Hour. Nowadays what do we find? Vanderbilt, Miss Dior, Lauren, and Armani, perfumes named after glorified tailors" — there were murmurs and gasps in the audience—"names that evoke not the poetic, the erotic, the magic, but economic status, social snobbery, and the egomania of designers. Perfumes that confuse the essence of creation with the essence of money. How much sustenance can the soul receive from a scent entitled Bill Blass?

“Vanderbilt and Bill Blass are what the 'marketing people' have given us.”

Marcel paused, as if trying to contain a coiling rage. Claude slapped the creased thigh of his expensive gray trousers. “Give them hell, Bunny,” he said, with a mixture of affection and mockery. Luc, meanwhile, had laid down his cigar so that he might employ both his hands to massage his exploding temples.

“Vanderbilt and Bill Blass, alas. But you know, you perfumers, in the deep unfolding rose of your hearts, you know that fragrance is no automobile or table setting, no insurance policy, no Preparation H. Attempts to reduce perfume to a predictable product with which cost accountants can safely deal; attempts to own it, control it, and make it happen when the mysterious spirit is not there are fated to end in crude failure and coarse farce.

“Perfuming is most unlike manufacture. And perfumers should be proud to assume our historic roles as enchanters, soul feeders, sacred pimps, and alchemists. 'Marketing people' are fine enough when it comes to peddling wares, but let us remember always that it is the perfumer, the flowermaster, the guardian of the Blue Hour, who can charm the birds and bees in the human spirit — and destroy its dinosaurs.”

Scattered applause. Shocked murmurs. Nervous laughter. Then, the white-on-white whirr of blank tape.

“That's that,” said Claude, relieved that it hadn't been worse than the first time that he heard it. “The wonderful Wizard of Oz. My guess is that Wiggs Dannyboy identified with Bunny. Someone told him about the speech, and he thought, 'Here's a man who's as big a bedbug as I am.' That must have been why Bunny was invited to that clinic.”

Luc said nothing. Like a paper snake with a white spark on its tongue, the tape hissed on.

Claude stretched and turned to look at his father. “Oh, no!” The executive was slumped over his desk, his face in the alabaster ashtray. The cigar was smoldering against Luc's cheek, burrowing like a red-hot worm into the head that was now the color and texture of one of Bunny's beets.

If Claude was slow to react, it was because the smell transported him, helplessly, to a distant summer evening when he and his young bride were strolling between the braziers of kabob hawkers grilling mutton on an Algerian beach, consumed by romance but unable to see either stars or sea because of the fatty smoke.