Jitterbug Perfume (18 page)

"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?).

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.

Curious, thought Priscilla, promptly pedaling over a steep curb, spilling her bike, ripping her panty hose, and scraping her leg.

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 »vith 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, ind ran down the hall, not even looking to see if she might lave run over a beet. It was late, but she knew that her party lad 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 >ne could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

WHEN WE ACCEPT SMALL W ON D E R S
,
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.

"To Papa's fat," she said.

"We done drink to fat three time," said V'lu, raising her own glass of Nehi orange soda, to which Madame Devalier had added, under protest, even though it was a celebration, a squirt of hurricane drops.

"Very well, then. To Bingo Pajama."

"To Bingo Pajama," V1u said wistfully. "Wherever him po' soul be."

"Now, cher, you mustn't worry your pretty head about that crazy Jamaican. I am confident he can take care of himself." She sipped. She studied the circle of shellfish, each ritzy blob glistening upon the lustrous floor (or ceiling) of its own intimate architecture, the solidified geometry of its desire. The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters built their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within. She sipped again. If one could accept the exaggerated fact of the oyster, one could imagine the exaggerated fact of Bingo Pajama, who had disappeared after the policeman who attempted to arrest him for selling flowers without a permit had been stung to death by bees; one could imagine that Bingo Pajama would keep his promise to bring them still more jasmine, the laborious but successful extraction of whose essence had occasioned this little celebration on Royal Street.

The telephone rang.

"I'M get it," said Madame, somewhat surprised that the dusty phone remembered how to ring. There was an odd look on -her face as she pried her bulk from the depression in the love seat, much as the counterman at Acme's had pried open the oysters a half-hour before. When she returned to the rear of the shop five, maybe ten, minutes later, her expression was even more odd. She looked to be sad, but gay about it; or gay, but sad about it. Sad, gay, it was all the same to V'lu, whose immense brown eyes were becoming somnambulant, if not squamulous, a sure sign that the hurricane drops were beginning to take effect.

"Priscilla was a Mardi Gras baby," Lily said, out of the blue. "Have I mentioned that?"

"Yes, ma'am. You sho' 'nuf have mentioned that."

"A Mardi Gras baby." She drained her glass, regarding the oysters now with no appreciable indication of appetite. "Conceived one Mardi Gras, abandoned the next."

"Who she mama?"

"Pardon?"

"Ol' Wallet Lifter she daddy, who she mama?"

"Her mother." Maclame sighed into her empty glass. "You know, V'lu, I no longer remember her mother's real name. She was from a good Irish Catholic family, lived in a fine house in the Garden District, I know that. But the devil will bite a young girl if she gives him a spot, and he sure took a nibble of this one. She could have watched the parade from her veranda, they lived right on St. Charles, but, no, she had to come down to the Quarter, mix with the so-called artists— she loved those artists—and that is where Wally spotted her. He seduced her on the street, under the crepe paper skirts of a float that had stalled."

"Revern" Wallet Lifter."

"That's what the cynics called him, yes. The Reverend Wally Lester was what he called himself. From the Irish Channel, poor white trash, more than likely, but he wasn't dumb. I never actually heard him preach, but he must have been fairly good, he had the looks and he had the tongue. Traveled throughout Texas; Oklahoma, too, conducting revival meetings in a circus tent; overdramatizing the word of God, turning the Scriptures into a cross between German opera and a hockey game, as only a Protestant can do. Then, every year, about a week before Mardi Gras, never fail, he'd suddenly show up in the Quarter. Oh, nobody enjoyed Mardi Gras more than Wally. He'd go on a rip that lasted well into Lent. After everybody else had wound down, he'd still be bouncing off barroom walls. Next thing you knew, though, he'd be gone; he'd go down into Mexico, some said after women, some said after gold—he obviously had more luck with the women. In any case, by Easter Sunday, he would be back to preaching, setting up his plastic pulpit on top of half the prairie-dog holes in Texas. Until Mardi Gras, when he would return to the Quarter and start the whole thing all over again.
Sacrebleu."

"Yo oysters be gitting warm, ma'am," V'lu announced dreamily. Ignoring her, Madame-Devalier went on telling her things about the Reverend Wally Lester that she'd told a dozen times before. "Warm slime don't taste nowhere near as nice as cold slime," said V'lu. She smiled, revealing a mouthful of small, iridescent teeth. If oysters drove cars, their hood ornaments would look like V'lu's smile.

"The girl traveled with him for a season. She gave birth in his air-conditioned trailer, parked in one of those awful towns where jackrabbits hop down Main Street." Lily made a face. "I've always maintained that Priscilla got off to a bad start by not being born in New Orleans." She refilled her glass. "More champagne? Oh, I forgot. I'm sorry."

"Ah 'pose dat be Miz Priscilla on dee phone?"

"I'll never forget the day they came back. The minute they hit town, she gathered up her things and jumped on the first streetcar to the Garden District, although they managed to have
le combat
before she got away. Wally brought the baby by the shop so that I could see her, and there were claw marks on his cheek, the blood was barely dry. He rubbed the baby's bare bottom over the scratches, as if that would heal them. A few days later, he brought her by a second time and asked if I would watch her while he 'administered to those sinners who mock the true Christian meaning of Mardi Gras,' as he put it. It was a year before I saw him again. His face had healed without scarring."

"Why you?"

"Why me? Why did Wally leave her with
me?
Well, I suppose he trusted me. You see, he used to hang out at the shop—"

"He like you?"

A blush stained Madame Devalier in the way that debits color the ledgers of a failing business. "No, no, he wasn't interested in me personally. Even then I was too old and stout. I was
born
old and stout. He was interested in the 'work.' He wanted to learn the 'work,' although what an evangelist would do with it I never understood. I sold him some—some items. He was the only white man I ever sold to."

An oyster Cadillac rolled into view, V'lu Jackson incisors sparkling, leading the way. "Hee hee hee. OI' Wallet Lifter be jazzing up Jesus wif some drops."

"Romance powders and money mojo were more in his line, but that's neither here nor there. I agreed to rear his child, because . . . well, I was convinced that I would never marry, and because I thought I could use a girl in-the shop, someone to help, you see, someone to teach perfumery to. That didn't work out, of course. Priscilla always loathed the shop, and I never had the assistant I needed until—until you."

It might have been V'lu's turn to blush; whether she did or not we'll never know. She did manage a proud pursing of the lips, however, and then she asked, "Dat Miz Pris on dee line?"

"She was not a brat, you understand. In fact, she would make a sincere effort every now and again to follow in my footsteps, as it were. She was careless and messy, broke a lot of things, but she'd work hard. Then Mardi Gras would come around and, sure enough, here's Wally. He'd bring her armloads of presents: lollipops and pralines, all sorts of sweets, and dollies and stuffed animals and tricycles and, later, bikes, and the cutest clothes: little dotted-swiss dresses with ruffles and sashes. She thought her papa was rich, she believed that with all of her heart, and Wally encouraged it, the swine. When he left she'd beg him to take her with him, but-he'd tell her that he had to go south of the border to attend to his gold mines and that Mexico was no place for rich little American girls.
Man Dieu,
how it killed me to watch her fight back the tears! For months afterward she'd be moody and morose, claim that the smell of perfume made her ill."

Lily poured the last of the champagne. Briefly, she regarded the uneaten oysters, which, although beginning to look increasingly flabby, lay in perfect repose upon the remaining hemispheres of the dream houses in which they'd once enjoyed such exquisite solitude. Two strong hands and a steel blade were required to storm the privacy of the oyster's dark entrance hall. It takes a team of four horses to force the giant clam of the South Seas to yawn against its will. Every passive mollusk demonstrates the hidden vigor of introversion, the power that is contained in peace.