Jitterbug Perfume (11 page)

As a manufacturer of aroma chemicals and fragrance compounds, LeFever was among the top twenty in the world. As a maker of fine perfumes, it was in the top five, and it was Marcel the Bunny who kept them there. The same Marcel who had been staring through a square foot of window glass for seven consecutive hours. Damn it, sensitive artist or no sensitive artist, pampered bedbug or no pampered bedbug, mystical eclipse or no mystical eclipse, it was time for somebody to throw a cigar at the smoke alarm.

"Pardon, Bunny, I didn't intend to startle you, but I'm afraid you're starting to get tangled up in the drapes."

"Drapes? You mean draperies.
Drape
is a verb, the noun is
drapery.
One drapes a window when one hangs draperies. It is impossible for one to become entangled in
drapes,
so I assume you were referring to
draperies."

"Oh, yes. But
drapes
can be a convenient abbreviation when one has had too much to drink."

"If one can't say
draperies,
perhaps one shouldn't drink."

It must have been disconcerting to receive a grammar lesson through a whale mask, but, outwardly at least, Claude took it in stride. "Be that as it may," he said, "I have drunk and drunk plenty. The eclipse made me do it. Wasn't it derealizing? Didn't it give you shivers? Didn't it transport you to another plane? Didn't it make your brown eyes blue?"

The whale head nodded.

"Is that what you were thinking about here at the window?"

Marcel did not dare reveal that his thoughts, when interrupted, were of carrots and beets, for Claude, sloshed as he was, would surely find a way to connect verbally those vegetables to his nickname and coin some bad joke about bunny rabbits. So Marcel said, "No, I was thinking about perfume," which, given Marcel's perpetual obsession, wasn't a very large lie. "And I was thinking about V'lu."

"Ah-ha!" exclaimed Claude. "You know, there's not much that can be done to heal the sting of a woman. As they say in her country, it's easier to scratch your ass than your heart."

"You misunderstood me. Let me see if I can put it in words that even the inebriated might understand. For the past month I have spent most of my time down in the kitchen, perfecting the scent that we are calling
New Wave.
You are familiar with the rationale behind
New Wave.
We are predicting that for many people the fascination with nostalgia— with a past reputed to be more simple, more honest, more natural than the present—will soon subside. In the cities, there is a large, affluent, professional class that has already rejected the sweet, heavy, feminine, Oriental scents that the hippies ushered into favor in the sixties, as well as the clean, wholesome, fruity and herbal scents associated with the backpacker chic of the seventies. For this avant-garde, and for those who will flock to join it, LeFever is developing
New Wave,
a truly modern scent—sharp, hard-edged, assertive, unisexual, urbane, unromantic, nonmysterious, cool, light, elegant, and wholly synthetic—"

"I know all that, Marcel."

"Yes, but what you don't know is how boring and, ultimately, frightening I am finding this scent. I slept last night with
New Wave
on my pillowcase, and my dreams were totalitarian nightmares. The boof is not unattractive, yet when I test it, I have somehow the feeling that I am smelling the sinister vapors of fascism."

"Really, Bunny. Ha ha."

"I am not joking." Marcel removed the whale mask. His demeanor was serious, indeed. "I am not joking."

"But, surely—"

"When I smell
New Wave, I
have the sensation that I am smelling control, conformity, domination. As I have said, it has a definite appeal. ..."

"Well, then—"

"There is a comfort in conformity, a security in control, that is appealing. There is a thrill in domination, and we are all of us secretly attracted to violence."

"A violent perfume? Ha ha. Remember that U.S. aftershave, Hat
Karate?"

"Were I to add but a trace note of leather to
New Wave,
Claude, I would say that I had drawn on my canvas the olfactory silhouette of the Nazi."

The word jolted Claude. He shuddered. The LeFever twins had been small boys during the Nazi occupation of Paris, but they recalled it as an adult recalls the breaking of a bone in childhood: the sickening crack, the fear, the pain, the sadness, the sudden ooze of blood that shows itself like the black blush of fairy-tale witches. It was a wound upon their memory, a thud of monster boots in a distant sandbox.

"New Wave
is an intriguing perfume," Marcel went on, "but I am growing to loathe it, and actually to fear its implications. Therefore, I have been thinking today about raw materials. The eclipse set me to wondering about those powerful and mysterious aspects of the natural world that the perfumer has not tapped yet. We moved into synthetics as natural raw materials became less available, more expensive. But there are scores, perhaps hundreds, of raw materials in different parts of the world that we haven't examined—consider the valley of the Amazon, consider the
ocean,
for God's sake— and there is history. . . . The recent love affair with the past was with a relatively recent past. Fifty years ago, a century at the most. But what of the fragrances of five thousand years ago, were they as primitive and unrefined and fundamental as we believe? History? What about the fragrances of prehistory?"

Marcel took a seat. He sighed. He was not an athletic man, and he'd been on his feet the whole strange day. "The eclipse also caused me to think of V'lu."

"Yes, back to V'lu." Claude grinned a sloppy Pernod grin. "Let me guess. This black face of the sun reminded you of , her. Reminded you that her ancestors in the jungle used fragrances of which we know little—"

"Idiot. What I was reminded of, aside from things that are none of your business, was a remark she made. V'lu pointed out to me that the synthetics that predominate in perfumery today are practically all petroleum products. The price of crude oil is now subject to arbitrary decisions by the OPEC nations. V'lu suggested that since the Arabs are untrustworthy and since the future of the Mideast is uncertain, there is a strong possibility that petrochemicals will become even more scarce and expensive than natural materials. She suggested that we ought to be looking anew at the flowers."

"That is elementary and quite sound," agreed Claude. "It is an idea with some merit, I don't have to be sober to recognize that. Fuck the Arabs, anyhow. Hang them from the drapes! And the
draperies,
too; yes, Bunny? But what I can't imagine is how this shopgirl—out of the mouths of babes, uh?—communicated this to you; I mean how could you even understand her, speaking in southern Negro dialect and all?"

Marcel looked first at his cousin, then out the window again, focusing perhaps on that same invisible celestial footprint that had held his gaze all day. "I had no problem," he said. "V'lu did not express this to me in English, you see. She spoke flawless French."

Mangel-Wurzel, Man Amour.

PART II

LOOKING UP

CHOMOLUNGMA'S DRESS

AS THE AFTERNOON PROGRESSES, OUR shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we
become
our shadows. That is as true today as then. In the old days, people were aware of it, that's all. In the old days, the whole world was religious and full of interest.

Alobar had been at the lamasery twenty years when Kudra arrived, dressed as a boy. The lamas saw through her disguise immediately but put her to work moving stones. She had worked on the wall less than an hour before Alobar, too, realized she was a woman. Her shadow fell off of her with perfect discretion. Shadows do. It was her aroma that gave her away.

They took their afternoon tea by the cold river. The lama who was overseeing the construction of the wall suggested that the workers disrobe and enjoy a dip. Alobar encouraged this idea, for it had been a long time since he had seen a naked woman. He found himself trembling.

Kudra declined to swim. The lama persisted. "Come on, boy," he said. "Everybody must bathe or else the wall will fall down." In the high mountain air, there was mischief afoot.

Finally, the "boy" dashed up to Alobar, who was just wading into the water, and whispered, "Help me, please. Don't you recognize me?"

Of course, he didn't recognize her. Naked, he would not have recognized her. She had been eight years old when he had seen her last.

"You called me by a foreign name. Wren, little Wrenna, I believe it was." Kudra smiled. "You haven't aged at all, you know."

The icy water swirling around Alobar's ankles was causing his genitals to retract. He felt ashamed and wanted to turn his back. This mischief was a mistake.

Kudra grasped his arm. "Remember? You tried to persuade me to eat a beet."

Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. Of our trees, the palm is obviously the stand-up comedian. Among fowl, the jester's cap is worn by the duck. Of our fruits and vegetables, the tomato could play Falstaff, the banana a more slapstick role. As Hamlet—or Macbeth—the beet is cast. In largely vegetarian India, the beet is rarely eaten because its color is suggestive of blood. Out, damned
mangel-wurzel.

Alobar was remembering. . . .

He had been put off from the moment he sighted smoke. On a day so sultry that he moved through it the way an inchworm might move through a mound of lye, a day so bright that it sent his eyeballs retreating into the shade of their own sockets, he simply could not conceive of any advantage in torches. Surely torches could have waited until after sunset, although upon the sweltering Ganges plain it seemed to Alobar that one's sweat poured as profusely by night as by day. As he drew nearer to the flames, he realized that they were borne by mourners gathering for a funeral—all the more reason to detour to the cheerful cool of a grove. It should come as no surprise that the traveler from the west was, in funereal matters, slightly shy.

The road, which had seen too many monsoons and forgotten too few, passed within yards of the funeral site, alas, and in the grassy savannas to the side of the road, Alobar had detected the odd hiss and slither, a persuasive inducement to stick to the well-worn path. Thus, he soon found himself in the midst of the white-clad mourners, an unwilling witness to unappetizing customs.

Not far from the river, four tall beams had been planted in the ground to form the corners of a square. They supported four thick planks firmly held by mortises. Between the beams there lay a plexus of logs, arranged in such a manner as to leave a space in the center, into which wood chips and resin had been scattered. Around and upon the log pile, dry branches of the sort that might burn quickly and brightly lay in wait. The roof of the pyre was made of planks covered with turf. The end result was a kind of tinder shack, a cottage at which no insurance agent would ever call, a studio apartment of death.

The corpse was placed in the middle of the square, upon the pile of logs. The dead man looked comfortable enough, all things considered (it bothered Alobar, philosophically, that the dead invariably seemed more self-possessed than the living), but obviously it only would be a matter of minutes before he began to char like one of those loaves the forgetful Frol was forever leaving too long on the hearth, an image that further hastened Alobar's departure. He had progressed but a few steps, however, before his path was blocked by a procession that, with great pomp, was leading a garlanded woman to the pyre.

As the procession wound around the site, Alobar inquired of a mourner if the woman might be the widow. Hardly had the stranger nodded "yes" than the female moved slowly, but without hesitation, to the "door" of the pyre. A Brahman followed her and handed her one of the torches, with which she lit each corner of the square. Then, to Alobar's horror, she lay down beside her dead husband.

It was with calm resignation, if not dim intelligence, that she at first regarded the flames that darted among the boughs like finches from hell, but when the heat grew more intense and she felt the early bites of pain, she cried out sharply and sat upright in her intended tomb. The Brahmans poked her with the long bamboo poles that they carried to funerals in case a widow should lose her enthusiasm for suicide suttee. A full panic seized her. She brushed the poles aside and made to leap from the square of fire. Using their poles, the Brahmans brought down the roof on her head, but her overheated adrenaline lent her a flash of superhuman strength, and she managed to spring from the blazing pyre and run, her sari smoking, toward the river.

The Brahmans overtook her on the bank and wrestled her back to the pyre, which was now roaring like a furnace. While the woman struggled with the priests, the crowd screamed and yelled. To his surprise, Alobar noticed that he, alone, was cheering for the woman. Under a rash impulse to intervene, he was drawing his knife when three sturdy Brahmans pried her from the earth to which she clung and flung her into the middle of the inferno. She continued to struggle for a minute, parting the heat waves with her shrieks, but by the time Alobar reached the pyre, she was as still and silent as any log in the blaze.