Jitterbug Perfume Part 3

"Hmmm. I never thought of that," said Alobar. "But certainly for the likes of you there is no shortage of believers." Despite Pan's bedraggled curls and matted wool, despite the drool in the goatee and the manure on his hooves, he was by far the most impressive being Alobar had ever met.

"Ha! Where hath thou spent thy life, Alobar? In a pumpkin? Did thou just fall off a turnip cart?"

"I am an eater of beets," proclaimed Alobar proudly.

"How could such an ignoramus ever hath been a king? Doth thy people reside so far back in the sticks that they never heard the famous voice crying out over the wine-dark sea, 'Great Pan is dead, Great Pan is dead'? Of course, that was nearly a millennium ago and as even a lout such as thou can see, I am still kicking. Nevertheless, with the birth of Christ, belief in me dwindled, and I have been scrambling for my life ever since."

"Yes, now that you mention it, the priest in our church did often refer to you as one of the false deities. In fact, the way he described the devil-the silly man believes there is but one G.o.d and one demon-he could be your twin."

"Thou art Christian?" Part p.r.o.nounced the word with such contempt that the flock stopped dancing and glared at Alobar, the bees buzzed angrily at him, and a pa.s.sing b.u.t.terfly shat upon him with remarkable accuracy.

"Oh, no, no," said Alobar hurriedly, wiping the green b.u.t.terfly p.o.o.p from the corner of his eye. "Not really. I merely played along with my neighbors to a.s.suage their suspicions. This fellow Christ is a bit namby-pamby for my taste. And now that I hear what he's done to you, why, I like him the less, even if he did favor individualism."

"Thou ninny,"

"Sir, I will not have you calling me a nanny!"

"Ninny, not nanny! Doth thou think I would call thee after one of the things I love best?" Pan's heavy lids drooped momentarily as his thoughts strayed to other pastures on other days, days when the petal-pink genitals of the she-goats drew him down from the crags.

"Just the same ..." Alobar's fist was about his knife.

"If thou wouldst outdistance death, don't blow thy slender lead by challenging a G.o.d, neither Christ, who is not here to defend himself, nor I, who art much closer than I need be to smite a prideful gnat such as thee." With a disagreeable thump, Alobar landed on his chin again. Pan had not moved a muscle. "Namby-pamby, huh? Christ said that illumination is found only by putting everything one has in jeopardy. Thou, of all humans, should understand the courage that is required to reject the secure blessings of society in order to woo the unpredictable ecstasies of the solitary soul. It is true that Christ had little enthusiasm for dance or copulation, that he took 'right' and 'wrong' too seriously and set himself apart from the natural world, but for all his shortcomings, he was much superior to thou mortals who hath embraced him to further thine own ends."

Although Alobar was no more fond of criticism than of being flung to the ground like a peach pit, he had learned from the shaman that the path to the marvelous is sometimes cleared by a sharp tongue, and when Pan began to move away, intimating that their conversation was done, Alobar hastened to draw him back. "Tell me, Horned One," he called, "why do you defend Christ if he is threatening your hide?"

The G.o.d paused, a.s.suming a haunchy stance, like a woman in high heels. Instead of replying, however, he produced reed pipes and blew through them in a manner that caused the sheep to skip again and the little clouds to wiggle in the sky. The music was high-pitched and playful, a frail, tremulous, silvery sound that unfurled in lazy spirals without a care in the world. So immense was the contrast between this lighthearted piping and Pan's demeanor, his crude, simian features, and great sad eyes, that Alobar was moved in spite of himself, and when at last the music ceased, he knocked away a tear with his knuckles and said, "For you, sir, may the jaws of death have cotton teeth."

"For thee, as well," answered Pan. "But how can we toast without strong wine to lift? And thou did announce thy hunger so emphatically that even the deaf roots took note. I'll wager thou be h.o.r.n.y, into the bargain. Come with me, Alobar, for while we must go forever in despair, let us also go forever in the enjoyment of the world."

In a flash, Pan was across the pasture, Alobar at his heels, scaling the rugged rocks, oblivious to the thickets of violent thistles. Alobar was physically fit, hardened by his peasant labor and recent travels, but he could not keep pace with the G.o.d, and soon Pan was out of sight. That was no real problem, however, for Alobar simply followed the scent, that effluvium of goat glands that hung in the air like a salty mist and drew him ever higher up the craggy vertebrae. The higher Alobar climbed, the more piercing his unease, until he was in a literal state of panic. Just when this thrilling anxiety was at its zenith, tempting him with irrational impulses to throw himself from the cliffs, he heard girlish voices and the sound of splashing water. The panic completely vaporized as the Pan odor led him into a grotto, a ferny recess in the middle of which was a pellucid pool.

Enjoying the liquid pleasures of the pool were seven or eight unusual human females: short in stature, though full in contour, their bones packed into loaves of ivory and petunia* their tangled hair hanging like ropes of seaweed, nearly to their heels; their perfect nipples as red as guinea pig eyes, their squeals the kind that leave a glow in the dark; and not one of them older than the teenage Frol he'd left in Aelfric. Sweet genital sparks flew when they looked at Alobar, and he sensed himself in company most benevolent.

Directly across the pool, in the mouth of a shallow cave, hunkered Pan, a wineskin in one fist, an erection in the other. In a rough clay bowl at his feet, dangerously close to the sizzling bulb of his member, were olives, figs, and feta cheese. With a jerk of his head, the G.o.d beckoned. Alobar was famished, but in order to reach the food and drink, he had to wade through nymph-infested waters. Summoning his nerve, he plunged in. Brunch time in Arkadia.

The remainder of the day was spent in a luxurious, pastel stupor against which Alobar's northern temperament rebelled in vain. He had expected the nymphs to be quite wild in their demonstrations, imagined them biters, scratchers, and screamers, yet neither as king nor serf had he known such delicacy, and the softness in which the pleasures of the after- noon were couched made the hero in him a bit embarra.s.sed. When he glanced about him in the pale twilight, however, he saw everywhere evidence of his partic.i.p.ation: dried s.e.m.e.n frosted the thighs of napping nymphs, clots of it floated in the shadowy waters like weavings wrenched loose from the looms of the trout, and upon the tips of bracken there glistened drops too milky to be dew. It couldn't have been Pan's output alone because Alobar's t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es were as flat and juiceless as trampled grapes. Besides, after an hour's eventful splash in the pool, Pan had crawled into the cave and fallen into a lengthy snooze from which the purring ecstasies of the nymphs were much too low to wake him.

"Pan is not well," the nymphs confided.

"I watched him scale the rocks, I watched him set four of you to coming in a row," said Alobar. "He seems fit enough to me."

The nymphs released a chorus of dreamy sighs. "You should have seen him when he was in his prime. He's like a sick dove, nowadays, compared to the goat he used to be."

"Is it Christ who is making him weak?"

"Not Christ but Christians. With every advance of Christianity, his powers recede," said one nymph.

"It started long before Christ," said a second.

"Yes, it did," agreed the first. "It began with the rise of the cities. There simply was no place in the refined temples of Attica and Sparta for a mountain goat like Pan."

A third nymph, who, with a wad of leaves, was scrubbing herself clean of caked secretions, joined in. "It was man's jealousy of woman that started it," she said. "They wanted to drive the G.o.ddesses out of Olympus and replace them with male G.o.ds."

"Is not Pan a male G.o.d?" asked Alobar.

"True, he is, but he is a.s.sociated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained l.u.s.t that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and G.o.ddesses into muses."

"And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?"

Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. "The world is changing," he said, "but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan."

"Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?"

"You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new pa.s.sion, my darlings, a pa.s.sion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners."

"We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild-into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan."

While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.

Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady a.s.sessments of purpose.

He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, pa.s.sing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he pa.s.sed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song: "I love the ground-o, ground-o A ball beneath my feet The world is round-o, round-o Just like a frigging beet."

No, he would not be remembered as bard-nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.

SEATTLE.

IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE TOWN was at odds over the solar eclipse. A lot of people were of the opinion that since in Seattle one seldom saw the sun anyhow, there was nothing very special about not seeing it again. Monday morning would be only a shade darker than usual, they reasoned. The difference, according to others, perhaps the majority, was that Monday was forecast to be clear. With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an un.o.bstructed view of one of nature's most mystical spectacles.

"Did you walk up to Volunteer Park to watch the eclipse?" was the first thing Ricki said to Priscilla when she came by her apartment Monday noon.

"Nope. Didn't make it outdoors," said Priscilla, yawning.

"You watched it on TV then?"

"No, I didn't."

"You didn't see it at all?"

"I listened to it," said Priscilla. "I listened to it on the radio. It sounded like bacon frying."

"s.h.i.t, woman. Sometimes I don't believe you're for real." Ricki looked about the room for a place to sit. The couch and the chair, the most logical contenders, were piled high with dirty clothes, clean clothes, clothes in transition, books, unopened mail, and laboratory equipment. There were also a couple of beets. Ricki elected to stand. "You'd better shift into your hurry-up offense," she said. "The meeting starts in thirty minutes."

"I can shower on first down, make up on second1, and dress on third. If I haven't put it over by then, I can always kick a field goal."

"Unless you fumble."

Priscilla slammed the bathroom door. Ricki had to steady a beaker of liquid to prevent a major spill.

The football repartee was the result of Ricki having talked Priscilla into spending the previous afternoon at the Kingdome, an outing that revealed to Priscilla what Ricki really liked about the Seahawks. It was the Seagals. "Fashions come and go, come and go," said Ricki, "but the length of the cheerleader skirt remains constant, and it is upon that abbreviated standard that I base my currency of joy."

Today (they each had Sundays and Mondays off), Ricki was taking Priscilla to a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special, an organization of waitresses with university degrees. At least in the beginning all the members had had university degrees. The group had some time ago lowered its standards to accept waitresses with only two years of college. That was when Ricki was admitted, back when it was still called Sisters of the Daily Special. "Sisters" had come to sound too political. It suggested a feminine solidarity that the waitresses, in their honesty, considered not just inaccurate but inappropriate. "We're out to grab us some gusto, not cut anybody's nuts off," was the way Ricki put it.

In Seattle, as in most other large cities, there were a fair number of women who had studied art, literature, philosophy, history, etc., only to find that their education and a dollar would buy them a gla.s.s of Perrier. True, they hadn't entered their respective fields with the idea of getting rich, but neither had they expected that a summa c.u.m laude would take them about as far from campus as the nearest dry water hole. Unable to support themselves in the work of their choice, they turned to waitressing, for there they could earn the most money for the least investment. If it wasn't possible for them to do something meaningful and fulfilling, at least they could be well compensated for a minimum of moral compromise and an even barer minimum of vocational commitment.

The Daughters of the Daily Special, once they learned that they had too many individual differences to call themselves "Sisters," had adopted a very clean and simple raison d'etre: they planned to liberate each other, one at a time. They paid relatively stiff weekly dues, and they raised additional funds with such tried and true schemes as bikini car washes. Once or twice a year, depending upon how much was in their treasury, they awarded a grant that allowed a deserving member to lay down her tray and devote some time to her true calling. For example, they got Trixie Melodian out of the Salmon House and into the dance studio, where she ch.o.r.eographed her ballet based on the eruptions of Mount St. Helens; they bought Ellen Cherry Charles six months at her easel, where she completed a series of landscapes that was later hung in a restaurant ("I escaped, my paintings didn't," she commented); and Sheila Gomez was able to quit totaling bar tabs at La Buznik and finish writing her master's thesis in mathematics, "some kind of Puerto Rican trigonometry," according to Ricki.

Ricki was an unlikely candidate for a Daily Special grant, since she had majored in physical education so that she could take lots of showers with the other coeds, but she was sure Priscilla could land one, and that was why she was sponsoring Priscilla for membership. At first, Priscilla was reluctant. She was just not a joiner. "The only organization I ever joined in my life was the Columbia Record Club," she declared, "and I had to get out of that because it was too disciplined." The more Ricki talked about those big fat juicy grants, however, the better they sounded. She felt that she was close to a breakthrough in her experiments, but she was almost too tired to continue. If the Daughters could buy her a few uninterrupted months in her lab, she'd not only sign their roster, she'd kiss their behinds. "Starting with mine," chirped Ricki.

Priscilla came out of the bathroom wearing tight jeans and a cable-knit, iguana-green pullover sweater that accentuated the red in her reddish-brown hair. For a change, she'd pinked her Cupid's bow mouth-tiny in comparison to Ricki's full Latino lips-and brushed on enough purple eye shadow to make Bela Lugosi look like a lifeguard. "Wow!" exclaimed Ricki. "You're the second most impressive thing I've seen today, the first being a total eclipse of the sun."

"One would have thought a solar eclipse would have made a noise like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir," said Priscilla, "but it really did sound like bacon frying."

"You slept through it, you a.s.shole."

They drove downtown in Ricki's rusted-out VW bug. "I'm ashamed to be seen behind the wheel of this bedpan," Ricki said. "It looks like it has a skin disease. Worse, it looks like a car you would drive."

"When I perfect that formula, you're gonna see me driving a BMW or a Lincoln Continental," said Priscilla. "Maybe both at the same time."

"That's why we're enlisting you in the Daughters. Gonna get you out of that smelly studio and into a penthouse. I do hope you'll keep it tidier than your present digs. Which reminds me, Pris, what were those old dry beets doing in your armchair?"

"Somebody's been leaving them outside my door. To be perfectly frank, I thought it might be you."

"Me? Why would I do an idiotic thing like that? I hate beets. In fact, I hate most vegetables." She paused. "I must admit, though, that vegetarians taste better than heavy meat eaters. Smokers are the worst. You wouldn't think that you could detect it, you know, down there. But you can." She made a face that caused the faint handlebar of hairs above her lip to bristle like the fuzz on an ostrich's cheek.

"Since I've been working at El Papa Muerta, nothing tastes good to me anymore," Priscilla said.

The holocaustal effect that serving food for a living can have on one's appet.i.te was a subject discussed at the meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special. "That's why it's preferable to wait c.o.c.ktails," somebody said. "No, that's worse," responded Sheila Gomez. "Waiting c.o.c.ktails kills your appet.i.te for liquor."

The meeting was held in the Spotted Necktie Room at the Old Spaghetti Factory. There were about forty women present, twice as many as Priscilla had expected. After they finished complaining about appet.i.te loss, they complained about the neutron bomb that working nights had dropped on their social lives. Then they really got steamed up over having to be nice to people they couldn't stand. It wasn't the men who infuriated them, not even bottom-pinching men (some waitresses, a minority, actually enjoyed having their bottoms pinched), it was the women. "The most unbearable aspect of this job is waiting on rich, crabby, drunk ladies," said one waitress. "Right on!" said another. "Except for the rare one who might have toted trays somewhere in her sordid past, they'll pick the tips up off the table as soon as their husbands' backs are turned."

"How true. A wife is a waitress's public enemy number one."

"Beware of blue hair and T-shirts that say 'World's Best Grandma.' They expect you to tip them."

Next they compared notes on how much their feet hurt and the psychotic states of cooks. Evidently, all restaurant cooks were psychotic, some were just less violent than others. It was all rather depressing. But, then, they began to share stories of the odd mammoth tip they'd received the previous week, the odd offer of booze, cocaine, or a big house in the South of France; the odd, interesting customer, including local celebrities, who the celebrity dined with and what they ate; and before long, drinking Chianti all the while, they got off the subject of waitressing altogether and had a fine old time exchanging reviews and critiques of the solar eclipse.

The meeting was nearly over when they got around to considering Priscilla's application for membership. As Ricki had warned it might, it met with some opposition.

"It's irrelevant that she's had only one year of college," Ricki told the a.s.sembly. "She's a genius."

"Says who?"

"Says me."

"Ha ha."

"You don't have to be a genius to recognize one. If you did, Einstein would never have gotten invited to the White House."

"Well, how about some proof."

"Go ahead," said Ricki, "test her. Ask her a question."

"What's the capital of San Salvador?" asked Trixie Melodian.

"You call that a genius question?" Doris Newton responded. "I've seen retired air force sergeants answer harder questions than that on Tic Tac Dough."

"Besides," said Ellen Cherry Charles, "San Salvador is the capital. The country is El Salvador."

"Are you positive?" asked Trixie. "Why would the city have a longer name than the country?"

"If she's such a genius, why is she working at El Papa Muerta? Everybody knows Mexican restaurants are the pits for tips."

"El Papa Muerta is about as Mexican as Juneau."

"Does El Papa Muerta mean The Dead Potato or The Dead Pope?"

"What's the difference?"

"I resent that," said Sheila Gomez, glancing at the little crucifix that dangled its gold-skinned heels above her globes.

Priscilla cleared her throat. She spoke for the first time since the meeting began. Her voice was a trifle high and squeaky. "I've worked at five Mexican restaurants in three years. I'm searching for the perfect taco."

That stopped them. h.e.l.l, maybe she was a genius.

Ricki stood again. "Little Priscilla here is a scientist. She's got her own laboratory. And is she onto something hot! I'm not at liberty to reveal what it is at this point in time, you understand, a slip of the lip can sink a ship, but when the moment comes . . . well, you're all gonna feel like a slow boat to China for hemming and hawing over taking her in. Let me remind you of something. None of the grants that the Daughters have awarded so far have generated a dime of income for the program. Nothing personal, Sheila, I know Third World algebra is important, but it didn't do dogs.h.i.t at the box office; and, Joan, that little book of poems you printed about driftwood and your mama's melanoma was real pretty, it brought big whopping tears to my eyes is what it did, but, honestly now, the GNP was unaffected. Ditto, Trixie's harmonic tremors. I don't want to sound cra.s.s, but Priscilla here is zoned commercial. She's got a million bucks by its long green tail, and if we help her hold on and haul it in, each and every one of us is gonna soak our weary feet in Dom Perignon.

This is not the time to talk about funding her scientific research, we'll come to that a ways down the road, but this smart little goose may be prepared to lay us our first golden egg. All in favor of admitting her to the club say 'aye.

The ayes swept it, and out in the parking lot, Ricki looked at Priscilla and winked. "What's the capital of El Papa Muerta?" she asked. "San Papa Muerta?"

Priscilla grabbed Ricki and kissed her full and wet on the mouth, right in front of a great many waitresses who were pulling out of the lot in various rusted-out VW bugs. The rusted-out VW bug is the national bird of Waitressland. It was then and there that Priscilla made up her mind to go to bed with Ricki. But while her mind was convinced, her body needed encouragement, so they went to the Virginia Inn at First and Virginia and drank a gang of discount champagne. Still, Priscilla's endocrine system was lagging a few laps behind her resolve. "My pilot light has gone out and needs to be relit," she said. Ricki suggested a p.o.r.no movie. She hoped that a double bill of Starship Eros and Garage Girls would turn up the thermostat. Priscilla hoped so, too.

Once in the theater, however, the Chianti and champagne began to get to Ricki. They were sitting up close, in the third row, and all of those colossal in-and-outs and up-and-downs made her queasy. It was a cla.s.sic case of motion sickness. She held her tummy and moaned. Priscilla turned to the row of baldheaded men behind them. "Would you mind not smoking, " she said. "This woman is having a religious experience."

"If they jiggle one more time, I'm gonna spew," said Ricki.

Priscilla helped her to her feet and led her down the aisle. A couple of the bald boys followed them. "My friend has a chronic allergy to heteros.e.xuality," Priscilla told them. "We brought her here in an attempt to activate her body's natural immune system, but it didn't work." The men laughed kind of nervously. "Don't mock the afflicted!" Priscilla screamed at them. The Don Juans returned to their seats.

It had been a while since Priscilla had driven a car. She shifted gears jerkily. Ricki groaned. They had to make three pit stops between downtown and the Ballard district, a distance so slight that octogenarian Norwegian crones had been known to walk it, their shopping bags loaded with lutefisk. At Ricki's duplex, Priscilla washed the victim's face and tucked her in. She appeared to have pa.s.sed out, but as Priscilla was tiptoeing to the door, she called in a weak voice, "It was wonderful, Pris."

"What was, honey? The meeting? The champagne?"

"The eclipse," said Ricki. "It was probably the most real thing I've ever seen, but it was also like a dream. You know what I mean? Real and unreal, beautiful and strange, like a dream. It got me high as a kite, but it didn't last long enough. It ended too soon and left nothing behind."

"That's how it is with dreams," said Priscilla. "They're the perfect crime." She thought then of the elusive exudate, the living emerald she Hunted in the forests of olfactory memory, the dream she lived in her nose. She felt her laboratory pulling her like a tide, and it taxed her strength to resist.

With effort, she drove Ricki's car to the waterfront and sipped a cup of bivalve nectar at Ivar's Clam Bar (it was a walk-up, fast-fish stand where she needn't worry about being served by a waitress who might have been at the meeting that day). Then, having resolved on her last birthday to complete every task she began, she returned to the moviehouse and watched the ending of Starship Eros. Everything considered, it had been the most relaxing and entertaining two days off she'd enjoyed all year. "All work and no play makes Priscilla a dull genius," she lectured herself on the way home.