Jitterbug Perfume Page 13

  Within two hours, he was not so much supporting as dragging her. She was babbling about sandalwood groves, and marketplaces where crumbs of jasmine flower blew about the streets like music. Although his fingers were numb, he sensed them losing their grip on her.

  “Please hold on. Kudra, please hold on. Please, Kudra, please, Kudra, please.”

  The trail was descending again, but if his calculations were correct, they were yet two days from the foothills. Three days, if the weather didn't break. An eternity, if she couldn't get back on her feet.

  “Please, Kudra. It won't be long. . . .” He bit his blue lip against the falsehood. “It won't be long until we reach the caves.”

  She wailed. The cry was so similar to the wails of the widow on the cremation fire that a huge horror seized him, a horror shot through with adrenaline, and he picked her up in his arms and began to run with her.

  The horror changed into a kind of giddiness. This must look ridiculous, he thought, though to whom it looked ridiculous he failed to name. He must have meant Death, for in a minute he conceded, “Death has trapped us, that's for sure, but he shall not take us sitting still.” And, as the pageant of his life, no less ridiculous than this mad dash in the snow, flashed before him, he laughed and laughed.

  Almost immediately the wind fell quiet, like a drunk who has passed out in the middle of a rage. The sun burned through and set about boiling clouds into dumplings, then into gravy.

  With Kudra somewhat revived, they made the foothills in little more than a day. It was practically on their hands and knees that they covered the final mile. But nobody greeted them. The caves of the Bandaloop were empty and bare.

  Alobar gathered wood and built a fire. In the process of drying their damp clothing, they slipped into unconsciousness and did not awake for hours. When his eyes did open, Alobar arose and remade the fire. He recognized some herbs not far from the caves, picked them and steeped a strong, green beverage in his bowl. After taking tea, they went to sleep again. This sequence was repeated numerous times, until upon a sunny morning, perhaps four days hence, they found themselves sitting in a cave mouth, wide awake and reasonably nourished.

  Concluding his account of how he had swept her up and run with her, Alobar ventured the opinion that they had survived because he reached a point where he did not take his desire to live seriously. “My desire was no less than before, you understand, but I no longer identified with the desire. Perhaps that is why desire causes men calamity. By identifying with our desires and taking them too seriously, we not only increase our susceptibility to disappointment, we actually create a climate inhospitable to the free and easy fulfillment of those desires.”

  “Maybe,” mumbled Kudra, stretching her sun-warmed muscles until the elastic shuddered pleasurably and a mindless animal happiness collected in a pool at the base of her skull. Alobar is a glorious man, she thought lazily, but this constant prattle about the meaning of things can make a person tired.

  Mistaking her reticence for incredulity, Alobar said, “I suppose you think I made it all up. About the Bandaloop, I mean.”

  In tandem, they turned their heads to stare into the cave, where rock was as raw as a lump in the throat and bats orbited the dead star of a dank ether.

  “I believe you.”

  “You do?”

  “Much incense has been burned in these caves. The traces are faint, but I can smell it.”

  “I cannot tell you how happy it makes me to hear you say that. But where—”

  “It no longer matters,” Kudra said firmly. She retrieved a pine bough and, favoring her sore knee, began to sweep the entrance way. “The immortals are gone. Now we are the immortals.”

  That night they made love on a bed of bhabar grass, the twisting of her hips nearly weaving it into rope. She progressed from orgasm into dream without skipping a beat, but Alobar did not so quickly sleep. His arms pillowing his head, he lay beneath the echo circles of the bats and wondered about the former occupants of the caves. In certain ways, he was relieved that they were missing, yet in the velvet shadows of his heart, he sensed that he must someday deal with them, or others equally disturbing: infinity, apparently, did not travel safe highways or join in polite company. But those strange, strange words of Fosco's, what could they possibly have meant?

  Fosco, the plump little poem painter, had looked into Alobar's uncomprehending eyes and said:

  “The next time you encounter Bandaloop, it will be a dance craze sweeping Argentina in 1986.”

  SEATTLE

  HERE IT COMES, across the stars, eating worlds, sucking the energy out of atoms and suns; here it comes, bullets can't kill it, dogs can't bite it, it refuses to listen to reason; here it comes, it just ate a hydrogen bomb. Oh, my Lord, here it comes, heading our way! nightmare asteroid, maniac vacuum, transcosmic pig-out; can't stop it, drunk on photons, burping pizzas of poisoned plutonium. It wants our oil, it wants our beautiful lumps of coal, it wants Air Force One, Graceland, and the wash on the line; it will slurp every erg, gnaw every volt, unless. . . . It trashed our magnetic laser net, barbed wire is useless, napalm a treat, can't evade it, can't divert it, only this little boy can stop it; big blue eyes, mustard on his T-shirt, this adorable towhead with the discount dirt bike and the horny mom; only Jeffrey Joshua and his fuzzy teddy bear, Mr. Bundy, stands between us and galactic oblivion; can he . . . ?

  Priscilla was watching a TV movie in the bar at El Papa Muerta. She and several other waitresses had completed the setups in the dining room and were awaiting the 5:00 P.M. opening (Seattleites dined early). Ricki was behind the bar, having been promoted recently to assistant bartender.

  Priscilla was watching the movie and not watching the movie. Ricki noticed the part that was not watching and came over. “Have a hard night in the lab?”

  “Matter of fact. There's gonna be nothin' but hard nights until I can afford the stuff I need.” The “stuff” Priscilla needed was high-quality jasmine oil. It came from France and cost six hundred dollars an ounce. Priscilla figured she needed a minimum of three ounces, to begin with. That would take care of the middle. Then there would still be the matter of matching the base note. What was that goddamned base? Sometimes she wished she had left that bottle where she found it.

  “Go ahead, tell me your troubles,” said Ricki. “As a novice bartender, I need the practice.”

  Priscilla sighed. She watched a swoosh of rocket exhaust. The TV color needed adjusting, and the rocket blast was as pink as a nursery. She could have used a jet assist herself, even a soft pastel one. “Ricki,” she said, wearily, “do you ever pray?”

  “Pray?”

  “Yeah, pray.”

  “Sure I do, honey. I pray all the time.”

  “Well, when you talk to God, does he answer?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “What does God say?”

  Ricki glanced around her. The bar was starting to fill up with customers waiting for the dining room to open. “Have you noticed,” she said, “that you and I are the only Mexicans in this place?”

  “I'm Irish and you're Italian. Ricki, be serious. What does God say?”

  “God says the check is in the mail,” answered Ricki, moving to the waitress station where the cocktail girl stood gargling a mouthful of orders.

  In a busy restaurant bar, a waitress must order from a bartender in a particular sequence: neats, rocks, waters, sodas, Sevens, tonics, collins, Cokes, miscellaneous mixes, juices, sour blended, creamy blended, beer, and wine. This was partly to aid memory, partly to facilitate arrangement of glassware, mainly to prevent the mix from one drink from tasting in the next (should a bit of 7-Up spill, in the rapid firing of the bar gun, into a collins, it wouldn't be detected, whereas Coke would definitely intrude).

  “Jack/soda, tall; four 'ritas, a sunrise, a Dos Equis, and a Bud.”

  A bartender's beauty is in his moves. Like a lover's, like a matador's. The finished product means little: a spent orgasm, a dead bull. Satiation and string
y beef. To be sure, there are drinks of fine workmanship and drinks of poor; there are coherent ramos fizzes and incoherent; there are martinis in which the gin is autonomous and martinis where integration and harmony of ingredients prevail; bloody marys can suffer high blood pressure or low. Yet Priscilla had never heard a customer complain of a drink, unless it was to impress a companion, unless there wasn't enough booze therein, and at El Papa Muerta, at least, there was always enough booze.

  A bartender's beauty is in his moves, in the way he struts his stuff, in the field of rhythms that is set up in the orchestrated hatching of a large order of drinks. A skillful barkeep no more looks at his accoutrements than a practiced typist or pianist peers at the keys, but works with both hands simultaneously, full blast, undimmed by the usual dull requirements of routine. (Even in a lull, with only one drink to mix, he will not slacken his pace nor take a glyptic approach.) When he snatches a bottle from the well, he knows, without looking, that it is grenadine and not triple sec, and if it should prove to be triple sec, too bad, dad, the drink is already mixed. Stirring and sloshing, rinsing and wiping, pouring and garnishing, with a fry cook's retention and an acrobat's timing, he virtually dances through his shift, skating, as it were, on the chunky ice he scoops with furious delicacy into each glass. The regular at El Papa Muerta was a master of bar dance, he consumed the space around his station, he had speed, presence, and finesse; his output was huge. Ricki had a lot to learn. Her style was kinky. Ugly and odd. But Priscilla sensed that Ricki would be a good one in time. To her advantage, she was impatient with small stuff and detail, and with the fussing and adjusting that the dilettante in any field tries to substitute for inspiration and thus rescue his art. She had a capacity for the grand, and it was with some faint concept of eventual grandeur that she set about to mix the first order of drinks on that autumn evening, her arms—and her mood—arched to parallel the natural curve of flowing liquid.

  “Jack/rocks, C. C./water, vodka martini, five 'ritas, one grande, one strawberry; and a draft. That martini takes a twist.”

  It has entered our solar system. It's becoming our solar system! If that kid doesn't make contact . . . What's that? His teddybear is missing?!?!

  Priscilla closed her eyes and slipped into a crack between the bar noise and the movie noise, where, under her coffee-scented breath, she prayed; asking God, in whom she only marginally believed, what to do about the formula, what to do about Ricki's lust and love. She closed, out of habit, with an “amen,” not knowing for sure what “amen” really meant, but suspecting that when God finally ended the world his big boom-boom voice would not bellow “amen” but “Tha-tha-tha-tha-that's all, folks,” à la Porky Pig.

  Into the dining room she went, virtually limping with fatigue, screwing up her face with distaste at the diners being shown to their tables. What kind of gourmet would trust a Mexican restaurant where the entrees smelled like ketchup and the waitresses wore sailor dresses? It was a long way from the perfect taco. Five minutes later she was back in the bar, placing her first drink order.

  “Two sloe gin fizzes, two fast gin fizzes; three martinis, dry, no starch; twenty-eight shots of tequila, three beers (a Bud, a Tree Frog, and a Coors lite), seven rum separators, five coffee nudges, two Scotch and waters, five vodka and buttermilks, a zombie, a zoombie, four tequila mockingbirds, thirteen glasses of cheap white wine, a mug of mulled Burgundy, nine shots of Wild Turkey (hold the stuffing on three), one Manhattan (with eight cherries), two yellow jackets, fifteen straitjackets, thirty-seven flying dragons, nine brides of Frankenstein, and a green beret made with 7-Up instead of sweet vermouth and in place of grenadine, banana liqueur. Amen.”

  The fraud backfired. Before Priscilla had reached the end, Ricki was in full panic, and even after Pris said, “Make that two margaritas, grande; and a Carta Blanca,” Ricki just stood there, up to her elbows in glassware, looking as if she'd had the brain electricity sucked out of her by the black hole, which on the TV, had stopped eating Grand Coulee Dam and was sharing a granola bar with Jeffrey Joshua. There was at least one tear in her eye. “That was a rotten thing to do to you on your first shift alone,” Priscilla apologized. Then she whispered, “Take your break at nine-thirty, if you can. I've got a special treat for us.”

  But, of course, Ricki wanted something more than the pinch of cocaine, and Priscilla found herself, during break, in the ladies' stall with her panty hose down around her knees.

  “I'm sorry, I guess I'm pretty dry.”

  “That's okay,” said Ricki. “I'm like a cactus. I can make maximum use of minimal amounts of moisture.”

  A loud rap on the restroom door caused them both to jump.

  “Pris. Pris, are you in there?”

  Priscilla pushed Ricki away and hurried to pull up her Danskins.

  “Pris, there's a delivery for you from Federal Express.”

  It was with mixed emotions that Priscilla headed for the reservations desk. On the one hand, she was relieved to get out of Ricki's grasp; on the other, she was afraid of what that delivery might be. She had received mysteriously almost a dozen beets at her apartment. What if they started to show up at work?

  The Federal Express envelope contained no raw vegetables, however, but a fancy, engraved invitation, requesting her presence at a dinner party honoring Wolfgang Morgenstern, the Nobel prizewinning chemist. The dinner was to be held at the Last Laugh Foundation. This was even more puzzling than the beets. Priscilla, who had completed but one year of her chemistry major, knew Dr. Morgenstern by reputation only, while, aside from the war room at Boeing Aircraft, the Last Laugh Foundation was the most exclusive turf, the most inaccessible sanctum in Seattle.

  “Why me?” she asked.

  “The Last Laugh Foundation,” mused Ricki. “That's that immortality place.”

  “I know. Ricki, do you believe in immortality?”

  “I'll try anything once.”

  The cocaine was leaning on the doorbell in Pris's tummy. She was buzzing at the same frequency as the orange auras that had begun to pulsate from the pseudo-Guadalajara wrought-iron light fixtures. Physically, at least, she was primed to return to the dinner trays, freighting what she'd sworn to one diner was “the most authentic Mexican cuisine north of Knott's Berry Farm.”

  “You aren't upset with me, are you?”

  Ricki looked her over. “No,” she said. “I realize that you're just jealous that I got the barkeep job. They couldn't have put you in there, Pris. You're too scatterbrained and too clumsy.” She turned on her flat heel and walked away.

  Priscilla made it through the shift without crying or praying, although, befuddled by the invitation and bruised by Ricki's remark, she concentrated on her duties with difficulty. So badly did she mix up orders that two tables didn't tip her. That was no way to earn three ounces of jasmine oil, let alone to earn three years of omphaloskepsis, which was what the doctor ordered (or did the doctor order the smothered burrito?).Curious, thought Priscilla, promptly pedaling over a steep curb, spilling her bike, ripping her panty hose, and scraping her leg.

  Bicycling home at midnight, she pedaled five blocks out of her way to pass the Capitol Hill townhouse in which the Last Laugh Foundation was headquartered. It was a stately old mansion, charming of cupola, angular of gable, a university's worth of ivy clawing the ivory paint from its boards, a high, stucco wall topped with broken glass protecting its grounds. As usual, there were people at its gate, trying, in one manner or another, to get past the security guards. However, whereas a month before there might have been ten people at the gate, now—in the middle of a damp November night—they were lined up to the end of the block.

  By the time she reached home, attended to her wound, shampooed, and donned her dirty lab coat, she had put both the invitation and Ricki's insult pretty much out of mind. From the bathroom cabinet, she removed a Kotex box and checked under the pads to ascertain that the bottle was still hidden there. She did not remove the bottle, however. What was the use?

 
She needed help, but God was in a meeting whenever she rang, and the Daughters of the Daily Special had postponed her grant almost as often as she had postponed going to bed with Ricki. With Ricki, her sponsor, turning hostile, Priscilla had to assume that the grant might never come through. “Well, shit,” she said. “Shit shit shit. I've got no choice but to make that call.”

  She shoved the Kotex box back in the cabinet, pulled on some stiff jeans, dipped a fistful of coins from the fishbowl, and ran down the hall, not even looking to see if she might have run over a beet. It was late, but she knew that her party had a habit of working into the night. Her finger was trembling, but she managed to dial.

  The wall phone swallowed the quarters, Priscilla swallowed her pride.

  “Hello, Stepmother,” she said.

  There was a pause. Then:

  “Where are you?”

  Madame Lily Devalier always asked “Where are you?” in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

  NEW ORLEANS

  WHEN WE ACCEPT SMALL WONDERS, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders. Thus, if we admit that an oyster—radiant, limp, succulent, and serene—can egress from a shell, we are ready to imagine Aphrodite exiting from a similar address. We might, moreover, should we have that turn of mind, imagine Aphrodite exuding her shell, constructing her studio apartment, its valves, hinges, and whorls, of her own secretions, the way an oyster does, although the average imagination, it must be said, probably would stop someplace short of that.

  “Oh, no, Miz Lily, Ah not be putting no raw oyster in mah mouf! Ah eats cold soup wif you, Ah eats libber spread wif you, made from goose libbers, but Ah not be eatin' no slime.”

  “Really, child! How inelegant.”

  Madame Devalier replaced upon its bed of rock salt and cracked ice the half-shell whose contents she had been about to slurp, and, while waiting for the word “slime” to cease its vile reverberations in her mind's ear, she poured herself another glass of champagne.