Jitterbug Perfume (49 page)

Alobar excused himself and went to his bath.

"He seems sad," said Priscilla.

"He is not used to being old."

"Even after a thousand years?"

"During most of that time he was a man in the prime of life. He is amazing. He is stronger than he was a month ago. Younger, also. But, you see, Mademoiselle Pris, he needs a woman if he is to recover his youth. Perhaps every man does." Marcel closed his eyes. Priscilla could tell that he was thinking of V'lu. "Ah, yes, but Alobar cannot get a woman because he is too old. The double bind, they call it. You are correct, he is sad."

Feeling even more despondent after his soak-and-cool, Alobar elected to forgo the parade, sending Priscilla and Marcel downtown alone. On Monday, he complained that the continuous beating of drums and frequent drunken whoops had kept him awake all night, and he might have remained in the flat again were it not for two unexpected events.

"The Krewe of Pan is parading today," said Priscilla. "I'd forgotten there was a Krewe of Pan."

"With so many krewes, it is only fair," said Marcel.

"It'll be a sham," said Alobar. "A desecration, in fact. But I suppose I ought to go."

While they were studying a map of the parade route, deciding exactly where they should station themselves for the most auspicious view, a United Parcel Service delivery van pulled up outside, and its driver rang their bell. Priscilla signed for the package. It was from Seattle. From Wiggs Dannyboy.

The note inside was handwritten in red ink. It resembled something Noog the necromancer might have scratched into the lungs of a hen. Marcel and Alobar were baffled. "Let me have a peek," said Priscilla, wondering if an addled land crab had not deposited its string of eggs upon the page.

"Here are your . . . Mardi Gras . . . costumes," she read.

They unfolded the three piles of green satin, crimson velvet, and chicken wire and held them at arm's length, looking from one to the other in a manner both a-and be-mused.

Beet suits.

The three beets made their way through the French Quarter, seeking to root themselves at the intersection of Royal and Canal, where the Quarter met the business district. It was slow going. For blocks, they would be swept along by the throng, only to have the tide reverse itself so that they were forced to fight the current and barely moved at all.

Through eyeholes in their stems, the beets were bombarded by garish colors and flashes of light popping from sunlit sequins, rhinestones, and glass. They passed among the swaying and bobbing fronds of a forest of feathers, overshadowed at times by towering headdresses that must, each one, have left a hundred birds shivering in their birthday suits, and at other times were caressed or tickled by wayward ostrich plumes. The muffled echo of an ocean of mythology welled up around them; a surf of Orientalism broke over them, spraying them with sultans and caliphs, prophets and potentates, gladiators and porters, harem girls and dragons, licentious Babylonians and passive Buddhas. This strange Asia shimmered in the sun, and the river of gods and monsters overflowed its banks, knocking the pinnings from under tourists and photographers.

Countless pictures were snapped of the three beets, countless hands waved at them, countless lips smiled. Who among the thousands might have guessed that inside the ambulatory vegetables were a genius waitress, the world's finest perfumer, and a man older than the first mosquito to preen its proboscis in the fever marsh that was once New Orleans? But, then, who could guess the identity of any of the costumed or the masked? And wasn't that—and not the lust and the gluttony—the true beauty of Mardi Gras? A mask has but one expression, frozen and eternal, yet it is always and ever the
essential
expression, and to hide one's telltale flesh behind the external skeleton of the mask is to display the universal identity of the inner being in place of the outer identity that is transitory and corrupt. The freedom of the masked is not the vulgar political freedom of the successful revolutionary, but the magical freedom of the Divine, beyond politics and beyond success. A mask, any mask, whether horned like a beast or feathered like an angel, is the face of immortality. Meet me in Cognito, baby. In Cognito, we'll have nothing to hide.

There was a definite distance, a gulf, between those in costume and those in daily dress. In the caste system of Carnival, the unmasked were instantly relegated to a position of inferiority. They were peasants, outsiders, mere spectators no matter how energetically they attempted to participate. For example, gangs of college boys, in beer-wet T-shirts and vomit-encrusted jeans raced through the Quarter shouting "Show yer tits! Show yer tits!" and when some woman upon a balcony would oblige, pulling up her front in a gesture of mammary theater, the boys would go berserk, hooting and slobbering, scratching themselves, slapping their thighs, punching one another and rolling on the cement, like a band of baboons shorn of its baboon dignity, but although these raunchy gangs had become increasingly a dominant force in Mardi Gras, there was a sense in which they were not a part of it at all; for all their lewdness, they were unconnected to the true lewd heart of Carnival, which must beat behind a disguise, grand or grotesque, in order to be heard by the gods, for whom Mardi Gras, ultimately, is defiantly and lovingly staged.

As the beets neared Canal Street, the jostle of the multitudes grew turbulent. According to the news, it was the largest attendance in the history of New Orleans Mardi Gras. City fathers had feared that the bees might keep people away, but widespread stories of the swarm had had just the opposite effect. Thousands came to New Orleans with the expressed desire of seeing the bees. And bee costumes were the most popular, by far, that holiday. Human bees, solitary or in swarms, were everywhere. Legion were the pretty girls who were "stung" by insects six feet in height.

As for the real bees . . . well, who knew? Numerous sight-ings were reported throughout the city, but officials were unable to confirm a single one. Madame Theo, a fortuneteller on St. Philip Street, claimed that the swarm had returned to Jamaica, a prospect that relieved many people and disappointed still more.

In the all-black Zulu parade, at least one float had borne a sign, REMEMBER BINGO PAJAMA.

The beets managed to reach Royal and Canal without being pulverized or pollinated. They pushed to curbside, where the espresso brewer from the coffeehouse, with his kid brothers, had staked a narrow claim. As prearranged, the beet named Priscilla gave each of the boys ten dollars of Marcel's money, and they whooped off to buy beer and to yell, "Show yer tits!" to anyone who was suspected of legitimately possessing tits. The beets took their place at the curb.

Since the Pan krewe's parade had not yet begun to pass, the trio waited there, gaping through their stems at the intoxicated fantasy surrounding them. All at once, two vegetable cries penetrated the jazzy din. Not thirty feet from them, also on the curb, stood a beautiful black woman, less than
en costume,
yet not wholly straight. Apricot and artichoke were the colors of her gown, which clung to her like a child about to be separated from its parents, and cream was her turban, fastened with a glass jewel the size of half a peach. Aside from gown and turban, and spiky, pink, rather vaginal shoes, she wore no adornment, but she appeared as much a creature of Carnival—mysterious, alluring, fanciful—as any befeathered Sheba or she-bee in the multitudes. Perhaps it was because disguise and deception were second nature to her, or it could have been simply that she was one of those persons destined to be exotic even should they never stray from home. It was V'lu.

At the sight of her, there was an immediate and abrupt schism among the beet population of Mardi Gras. One beet ' peeled off to the left, heading for Vlu. A second beet whirled, if one could be said to whirl in so dense a congregation, and began to fight its way down Royal Street, in the direction of Parfumerie Devalier. The third beet, abandoned, stood its ground to await the passage of Pan.

Parfumerie Devalier was at the opposite end of Royal Street from the Canal intersection. It took the beet more than forty minutes to wade through the baboon boys, Dixieland high-steppers, and glittering transvestites who blocked its route to the shop. When it at last arrived, it found the shop unlocked. Madame Devalier was in the rear, seated upon the lime love seat, filling the space of two lovers, fingering rosary beads

and nodding dreamily from the effects of the first hurricane drops she'd ingested in fifteen years.

The cop trial had ended on Friday with a verdict of guilty. Seizing the opportunity, the judge issued sentence on Saturday: two years, suspended. The judge was well aware that there could be no race riot during Mardi Gras. Potential participants would be too distracted, too dispersed, too happy, too drunk. The sentencing barely made news. Without fanfare, Madame and V'lu had returned on Sunday, in time to dust off their hundreds of perfume vials and attend the Bacchus parade.

Now, both under the influence of drops, V'lu had wandered off to view Pan, while Madame rested in the eye of the hurricane, hallucinating about Jesus, Wally Lester, a Mardi Gras baby, gris-gris, zombie butter, and the way things used to be. When the giant beet burst into the shop, she crossed herself and chanted:

"Eh, Ye Y6 Conga! Eh! Eh! Bomba Y6 Ye!"

With deliberation, the beet bustled to the rear, snatched the ancient perfume bottle from the table where Madame had been contemplating it, off and on, and before the stout woman could revive enough to shriek in protest, rushed out of the shop and into the masquerade melee.

"Eh! Eh! Bomba Ye! Hail Mary, Full of Grace! Help, police! Police!"

Cradling the precious bottle, shielding it from the flailing appendages of dancers and drunks, it took the big beet the better part of an hour to navigate the treacherous human river, but when it reached the Canal Street intersection, its fellow beets were there, one on either side of V'lu.

"Alobar! Alobar!" Priscilla cried. She held the bottle up for him to see.

Alobar blinked inside his beet stem, scarcely comprehending what he saw. More from instinct than reason, he reached out for the bottle, trembling with excitement, fear, and desire as visions of jasmine boughs, goat hooves, and lost love swam past his brain.

At that moment, Priscilla tripped, pitching forward on her velvet-and-wire encircled belly. The bottle slipped out of her stubby fingers and went rolling into the path of the parade.

Later, Priscilla swore that she'd been purposefully shoved, and she clung to that story even though Marcel insisted that no one had touched her, even though V'lu testified, "Her
always
had butterfingers and two leff feets."

Alobar was more sympathetic. Just as Pris fell, he imagined that he'd registered a strong goaty odor, and while he automatically attributed it to the nostalgic atmosphere of the float that was passing—a lofty wagon decorated with enormous plaster sheeps' heads and festooned with purple grapes' as big as cannonballs, and on whose pinnacle there pranced in pastoral splendor, attended by nymphs in filmy tunics, the living image of old Goat Foot himself—Alobar was to consider, in retrospect, that the smell had been real and had originated at curbside. Was it an invisible arm that shoved her?

The question was probably academic. What mattered was that the bottle rolled beneath the tractor wheel of the heavy float, and as the Great God Pan (to be sure, an insurance adjuster who'd once played linebacker for LSU) looked down upon the prone beet in the gutter with the clownish contempt that the ribald deity has forever held for the puny failures—and accomplishments—of humanity, it was crushed. There was a pop!, a gritty crunch, an earthy, mocking laugh from Pan above, and it was over.

Two of the beets tore off their stems and leaves and ran into the street. The third beet quickly followed, pulled by V'lu. The four of them dropped to their knees in the wake of the float, surrounding a tiny pile of ground blue glass as if it were a sacred spoor that they were worshiping.

Kudra's bottle, Pan's bottle, the K23 bottle, the bottle that three hundred years earlier had terrified an order of monks, beckoned to the Other Side, and negotiated the fishy seas, was now no more than a dust of glitter that might have sifted from a Carnival transvestite's cheeks.

But from the sparkling blue powder there wafted a marvel-ous aroma, an effuvium both sweet and bitter, a fragrance as romantic as the pollen-stained teeth of the floral Earth, the sexual planet; wafted the secret fetish and daring charm that creates a new reality for men and women, transcending and transforming nature, reason, and animal destiny.

In a matter of minutes, policemen forced the quartet back to the curb. Three of them moved reluctantly but with minimal resistance. The bottle had meant much to them, and they were in shock. The fourth, Marcel LeFevcr, to whom, on the other hand, the bottle had meant nothing, had to be dragged, kicking and screaming.

"That scent, that scent!" he exclaimed, his voice inflamed by passion. "What is that scent?
Le parfum supreme! Le parfum magnifique!"