Jitterbug Perfume Part 9

With his fingertips, Luc slowly twirled the cigar. He examined its ash. The higher the quality of the cigar, the longer the ash it will produce. Eventually, however, every ash must drop. And the drop usually is as sudden as it is final. Did Luc detect a metaphor in the cigar ash? Might he muse philosophically about the nature of the Eternal Ashtray? Might we?

"No," he said, after a puff or two. "I must confess to having experienced a twinge of temptation, knowing Morgenstern as I do. But in the end"-he sighed-"immortality is not for me. Did I make a pun, there? No? Good. In any case, dying is a tradition, and I am simply not the type of fellow who defies tradition."

"Unless there is profit in it."

"Eh?"

"You've always been willing to break with tradition if there was a profit in it. That's the secret of your success in business."

"Um. That may be. But I see no profit in struggling to live beyond one's natural limits. There's something greedy about that, and I've taught you to distinguish between the profit motive and greed. Sooner or later, the greedy lose their profits. Profiteering is honorable and healthy, greed is degrading, perverse."

"Life's not the same as money."

"Thank G.o.d! Life ebbs away, but money, properly managed, grows and continues to grow, lifetime after lifetime. Life is transitory, money is eternal. Or it could be, if the d.a.m.ned Americans would lower their interest rates." Luc picked up the whale mask and blew a stream of blue smoke through its eyeholes. "This small talk about death, money, and, last but not least, perversity, cannot help but bring us back to him."

"Christ?"

"No, you idiot, not Christ. Your cousin. Marcel."

Claude frowned. "Papa, if you're going to jump on Bunny's back again, forget it. You know how I feel about him."

"Indeed, I do, and there's something perverse about that, too. You spend more time with that bedbug than you do with your wife."

"Yes, well, Bunny is more entertaining than my wife. And he makes us more money."

"Your wife doesn't ridicule you in public. And if wearing a cardboard fish head is your idea of entertainment ..."

"A whale is not a fish."

"So what?"

"I'm willing to accept his ridicule, and his peculiarities. And, ultimately, Papa, so are you. Without Bunny, where would this firm be?"

"That's a contingency for which I have been preparing."

"What do you mean?"

Luc propped his cigar against the rim of an alabaster ashtray. The cigar looked like some kind of vegetable, a root crop, related, perhaps, to the mangel-wurzel. The vegetable was on fire. Arson was suspected.

"I mean that Marcel is unstable." Luc retrieved the cigar and with it, tapped the whale mask. Ash sifted onto the jaws. The cigar burned on. Fireman, fireman, save my vegetable! "I mean that any day Marcel might up and decide to swim to Tahiti. Look at the way he's abandoned New Wave, attacking it as if it were some sort of dangerous political movement, rather than a highly promising perfume in which we've invested millions, and which he, himself, developed. Now he's talking about making scent from seaweed. He thinks women will pay a thousand francs an ounce to smell like low tide. I thought most women bought perfume to avoid smelling like the mouth of the Amazon."

"But-"

"Listen, I still trust Marcel. He's also beginning to show new interest in natural jasmines, which might be a sound idea. He's the best nose in the business, and he's been correct too many times for me to sour on him now. Nevertheless, he is unpredictable, and therefore a risk. So, while you've been taking out insurance policies on him and filling his kitchen with a.s.sistants, not one of whom, unfortunately, could come close to filling his shoes, I've been taking other precautions." Luc removed a folder from a desk drawer. "After the scare the doctors put into me today, I decided I should go ahead and turn this over to you."

"What is it?"

"A list of agents."

"Agents?"

"Selected employees of our main compet.i.tors. France. New York. Germany. Plus a few people situated with small perfumeries, certain promising shops off the beaten track where something might develop that the big boys have overlooked."

"Spies?"

"If that's what you choose to call them. Let's just say that if Marcel should go astray, we will still have access to blue-chip recipes. And if one of the little perfumeries should strike gold. . . . You have objections?"

A bit sheepishly Claude shook his head. "I suppose not. So long as it's just a failsafe, a backup. You see, I'm confident that the cuckoo is going to stay put in Bunny's clock. He won't do anything rash." Luc shot him a disbelieving look. "Well, nothing so rash as to endanger the firm and justify extralegal activities. But, you know, the way he wanders around on foggy evenings like this without a topcoat, it wouldn't hurt to have something up our sleeves in the event that he catches a fatal chill in his liver. I mean, those things happen."

Luc expelled such a geyser of smoke that had it come from a derailed tank car, the authorities would have immediately evacuated the neighborhood. Under certain conditions, Luc's exhalation could have forced hundreds of people to spend the night in church bas.e.m.e.nts and high-school gymnasiums. "It's not his liver I'm concerned about. Nor mine. I've always been a prime physical specimen, I expected to live a century, but the doctors have pulled the rug out from under that idea. All right, I can accept it, I'm no sissy hippie about death. What worries me is: what if Marcel should outlive you? Can you imagine Marcel in charge?"

"Papa!"

"Jesus. This building. He'd probably rent out the top twenty-three stories and operate a little perfumerie in the bas.e.m.e.nt, like the monks had seven hundred years ago, or that little Kudra shop that was next-door when our ancestors bought the business in 1666."

"Papa! How ridiculous. In the first place, I'm in better health than Bunny. In the second place, the articles of incorporation would prohibit him from doing anything like that, even if he wanted to. Third, this is the best way for a person to raise his blood pressure, worrying about things like longevity, which you have no control over."

Another column of smoke erupted from the tank car of compressed mangel-wurzel, delaying any hopes the neighbors might have had of returning to their homes. "But what if someone does have control?" Luc asked.

"What on earth are you talking about?"

"This. I'm talking about this. A few days ago, Marcel received an invitation to visit the Last Laugh Foundation."

"In America?"

"You idiot. Of course, in America."

"Why Marcel? Surely he isn't going?"

"His secretary says he accepted. Today."

Claude furrowed his brow. He tugged at the ax blade of his beard. "But what's this all about?"

"I wish to h.e.l.l I knew. That's what I want you to find out. It may be a spinoff from that ridiculous speech he gave at the perfumers' convention, or it may be something else."

After cautioning his father to take his medication, Claude left him. On the way to the elevator, he peeked into Marcel's office. Marcel wasn't there. Everything seemed normal, except, of course, for the beet on the silver tray.

Claude rode to the ground floor. Through the plate gla.s.s windows, the foggy streets looked like Frankenstein's idea of Club Med. Claude had a hunch that before he went outside he ought to lock Luc's "agent" file in his attache case. As he was about to put it in, he flipped rapidly through it. The name V'lu Jackson caught his eye.

PART III.

PROMISE HER ANYTHING.

BUT GIVE HER K-23.

THE HIGHEST FUNCTION OF LOVE is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

The difference between love and logic is that in the eyes of a lover, a toad can be a prince, whereas in the a.n.a.lysis of a logistician, the lover would have to prove that the toad was a prince, an enterprise destined to dull the shine of many a pa.s.sion.

Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married. Descartes, architect of the Age of Reason, fled Paris, the City of Romance, in 1628 to "escape its distractions." He settled in Holland, where, surrounded by disciples and supported by patrons, he studied and wrote about mathematics and logic. Late in the year of 1649, he was invited to visit Stockholm to instruct Queen Christina in philosophy. Descartes accepted at once. Perhaps the pay was good. There would have been a reason.

Queen Christina took her lessons lying down. Frequently she was nude. That is hardly the worst of it. The court of Sweden, like everyplace else in seventeenth-century Europe, was infested with fleas. Christina had had her craftsmen fashion for her a tiny cannon of silver and gold. As she lay about on her cushions, she fired the little cannon at the fleas on her body. That was why she was nude. It is said she was a fair to good shot.

The daily sight of Her Majesty thus amusing herself, while he, Descartes, in dark Dutch britches, undertook to explain the underlying perfection of an indubitable sphere of Being, was more than his rational bias could bear. He grew rapidly nervous and pale. On February 11, 1650, only a few months after his arrival in Stockholm, Descartes, fifty-four, fell dead. Christina lived thirty-nine years longer and knocked off a good many more fleas.

In 1666-little harm love could do him then-Descartes's body was taken to Paris for reburial. At the funeral, a disagreeable odor filled the churchyard. "It was as if a goatherd had driven his flock through our midst," said one of Descartes's followers. No logical explanation was offered.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being. Still, lovers quarrel. Frequently, they quarrel simply to recharge the air between them, to sharpen the aliveness of their relationship. To precipitate such a quarrel, the sweaty kimono of s.e.xual jealousy is usually dragged out of the hamper, although almost any excuse will do. Only rarely is the spat rooted in the beet-deep soil of serious issue, but when it is, a special sadness attends it, for the mind is slower to heal than the heart, and such quarrels can doom a union, even one that has prospered for a very long time.

The quarrel of Kudra and Alobar lasted for into the night. Jarred by their words, things fell apart in the flat: flowerpots tottered on the windowsills, feathers flew out of pillows, and the teapot sang, though there was no fire beneath it and it was not a cozy song. As if it had long fingernails, their argument reached out into the street and scratched the cobblestones, the chestnut blossoms, the blackboard of the sky.

"A pox on squabbling lovers," muttered Pan. Pan needed to get to sleep. He'd been in bed for hours, but instead of dreams, what came to him were harsh voices through the wall. Pan tossed and turned and cursed a bit, although the irony of the situation (G.o.ds have ears for irony) was not lost on him: Alobar and Kudra were fighting over immortality, whereas Pan was craving sleep because he planned to get up early to attend a funeral.

Pan tossed and turned, turned and tossed. An eye at the keyhole would have been amazed. It would have spied a bed in turmoil, iron bedstead rattling, wool blankets thrashing, but not a soul in the covers. .

The year was 1666 and poor Pan was completely invisible.

At seven o'clock in the morning, the door of the incense shop that had been established at 21, rue Quelle Blague opened and closed, although n.o.body was seen to enter or leave. A transparent mist of musk moved slowly eastward along the left bank of the Seine. At the rue St. Jacques, the acrid cloud turned to the south, insulting every snout, human or equine, by which it floated. After about eight blocks, it began traveling eastward again, creeping up the slope of a steep hill, at the top of which sat the crumbly old Gothic abbey church of Ste. Genevieve-du-Mont.

"This temple (gasp) art as tired and (wheeze) rundown as I," panted Pan, and, indeed, though the professional virgin, Genevieve, was regarded with much paradoxical affection in the City of Romance, the church would be razed in less than a century to make way for a fine new building in the neoclas-sic style. In 1817 the well-traveled bones of Descartes would be transferred from its yard to St. Germain-des-Pres, but on this spring morning they were to be planted in the mossy cemetery where Genevieve's own saintly remains had a thousand years been lying.

In his more vital days, Descartes had included in his philosophical treatises enough scientific fact to displease the bishops, so except for the cleric whose Latin plat.i.tudes were to be rained on his deaf skull, the Church was without representation at his interment. However, among those who were obeisant to the new religion of science, which was in its husky infancy at this time, Descartes was increasingly revered, and they attended the rite in fair number. Pan rested upon a burial vault at a far end of the yard and watched their carriages arrive.

Some of the professors and physicians were rather shabby; they were men too clothed in ideas to pay much heed to grooming; Many others, however, including the provost of the University of Paris, the president of the guilds, the designer of the Observatoire, which was about to be built, and the chairman of the mathematical society were decked out in black silks and powdered wigs. The sight of those wigs gave Pan an idea. Earlier in the century, wigs had been worn exclusively by the n.o.bility, but now they had become popular with the bourgeoisie. If Alobar were to sport a wig, thought Pan, it might solve his current problem and put a stop to his bickering with Kudra. "No small blessing, that," he said. He rubbed his bleary eyes and yawned.

About then a small bra.s.s band struck up a dirgeful tune, and Pan, who fancied himself a musician, listened critically. "In all of Arkadia, there be not a single sheep who wouldst dance to such noise," he complained. But once the speech-making commenced, he was sorry the music had ended.

Aristotle had dealt Pan an enervating blow. Then, Jesus Christ had practically belted his horns off. Now, word was out that Descartes had applied the coup de grace. What little remained of Pan's ancient power was destined to evaporate in the Age of Reason, that's what the experts said. Pan, weary and indistinct, could not dispute them. When he learned of Descartes's funeral, some morbid (or goatish) curiosity drew him, sore of hoof, to Ste. Genevieve-du-Mont.

Like jugged bees, the funereal orations droned on. One intellectual honored Descartes's Discourse on Method, another convinced every moss-backed headstone in the churchyard of the departed's contribution to the theory of equations, while a third, more bombastic than the rest, rattled in its vault the untested pelvis of good Saint Genevieve with his praise of the new rationale. Just as the university provost was uncorking his monotone, the spring breeze suddenly shifted direction, and the funeral party found itself downwind from Pan.

The crowd grew inattentive. Out of the corner of his eye, the provost checked the environs for animal life. Those who owned handkerchiefs soon had them to their nostrils (a pa.s.serby might have a.s.sumed that they were weeping). Among those who had no handkerchiefs was the priest. "This is what the Almighty thinks of science," he mumbled, then immediately crossed himself, begging forgiveness for having attributed to G.o.d a scent that obviously was Satan's.

Of. course, the group was lucky. Pan's reek was actually mild compared to what it had been in the good old days. Nevertheless, a certain waggish mathematician provoked some scorn and much stifled laughter when, in a stage whisper, he paraphrased Descartes's most famous dictum.

"I stink, therefore I am," he said, nodding toward the Swedish walnut coffin.

"Ever thus." Pan sighed. Where was the profit in invisibility if one's odor gave one away? He creaked to his feet and, on legs of wobbly wool, threaded through the crowd toward the stone gate. Halfway there, he remembered his idea about a wig and, in pa.s.sing, s.n.a.t.c.hed the hairpiece off a prominent man of learning. a.s.suming that the wind had taken it, other bewigged guests grabbed at their own adornments, anchoring them to their noggins. There the French intelligentsia stood, one hand to its hair, the other to its noses, as the G.o.d and the wig bobbed out of Saint Genevieve's decaying churchyard and down the hill to the Seine. It was the first fun Pan had had all week.

Upon reaching the riverbank, Pan stopped for a breather. He uprooted a clump of turf and hid the wig beneath it so that no pa.s.sing bargeman might mistake it for a relic of an aristocratic romp in the gra.s.s. An invisible learned early that his possessions and trappings did not borrow his ability, which meant that he must go always empty-handed. Pan could not even carry his pipes.

That was a shame, because a breezy April morning such as that one was meant for a tune. On similar mornings in the old days, the golden days, Pan's mischievous piping on the outskirts of a village would be the signal for the village men to lock up their wives and daughters. Those who failed to secure their women would lose them that day to the pastures, from where they would return after dusk, tangle-haired, gra.s.s-stained, and stinking of the rut. Pan grinned at the memory. "Methinks I could pipe Maria Theresa right out of the palace," he mused, referring to Louis XIV's young bride.

It was encouraging that he would mention a contemporary female, for Pan had begun to live in his memories, an unhealthy symptom in anyone, suggesting as it does that life has peaked. Every daydream that involves the past sports in its hatband a ticket to the grave. Yet, what did the neglected G.o.d have to look forward to? To ambrosia, to Maria Theresa, to a monthly pension, a flock of his own? No, only the ministrations of Alobar and Kudra kept him going, and as their recent quarreling intimated, the couple had other things to worry about.

As he warmed his horns on the sunny riverbank, watching the wind-torn chestnut blossoms drift by like melted nymph flesh on the tide, Pan dismissed Descartes and his prideful ambition to force nature under human control, and thought instead of Alobar and Kudra, how they had come to Arkadia, drunk on eternal knowledge, seeking him out and laughing. . . .

Presumably, their "eternal knowledge" was derived from the Bandaloop, albeit indirectly. No doc.u.ments, no artifacts, no graffiti were left behind by the Bandaloop, but as Dr. Wiggs Dannyboy of the Last Laugh Foundation has written, "Physical immortality is primarily a matter of vibration," and the caves certainly were resonant with the vibrations of their former occupants.

Alobar and Kudra lived in those caves, amidst those vibrations, for seven years, during which time they learned many of the secrets of life everlasting. Alobar believed they should have stayed longer and learned more, and this belief kept surfacing like a lungfish in the hot surf of their seventeenth-century quarrels. Way back then, however, six hundred years further back, when the cream was still thick and yellow on the magic milk and the marble egg of logic laid by the Greek philosophers had yet to hatch, Alobar was simply too happy to protest at length.

Kudra was as thrilled as he with their Bandaloop education, yet she had been yearning since childhood, since that formative merchandising trip, to go out into the wider world, and now, tingling as she was with vitality and confidence, she was impatient to plunge into far cities and countrysides. "Take me to the lands where the sun sets," she implored. "We can do our immortality work wherever we are." That was basically true, for, and here we quote Wiggs Dannyboy again, "Physical immortality is not an end result, a condition to be arrived at in the future, but an ongoing discipline, an att.i.tude, a way of life to be practiced in the present, day by day." Nevertheless, Alobar was convinced that there were serious holes in their knowledge that could best be filled in the caves of the Bandaloop. He made a sincere effort to persuade Kudra to linger; then, having failed at that, jumped with her, lighthearted and eager, into the meandering mainstream of medieval life.

Alobar signed on as a guard with a spice caravan, and they traveled by camel to Constantinople, humpbacking out of the sandy wings of the east onto that golden stage where Emperor Basil II was directing, under the auspices of Byzantine Christianity, a long-running drama of expansion and wealth. Suspecting that immortality might be fostered more by comfort than by asceticism, but having lived hand to mouth during all of their time together, the couple elected to settle temporarily in Constantinople and sample its luxury.

Neither of them had ever resided in a large city before, and Constantinople, a major trading center, a cosmopolitan link between East and West, a mosaic-tiled hive of commercial and religious honey, woke them daily with an excited nudge from its gilt elbow. Aided by Kudra, whose understanding of raw materials was studiously pa.s.sed on to him, Alobar rose rapidly from stevedore to manager of Basil's spice warehouses, a position whose salary afforded them a smart house overlooking the Bosporus, a silver tea service, and carpets thicker and more colorful than the ones that had disappeared from the caves with the Bandaloop. Upon those rugs (dyed in some cases with beet juice), they sipped mint tea, munched spinach pies and melons, made love in ways that emphasized the utra in Kama Sutra, and perfected the breathing techniques that apparently are indispensable to extreme longevity.

Bathing techniques also are important, and, fortunately, in Constantinople they were easy to practice. As Alobar was well aware, most of Europe's two-legged mammals thought of water as an element only slightly more suitable for external application than fire. The unpopularity of the bath was both widespread and persistent (in Louis XIV's incomparably elegant Versailles, there was not a single vessel designed for bathing, a fact that one day would lead Kudra to regard the Sun King's court a potential market for her incense; late in the twentieth century, there were still great numbers of Europeans who refused to wash their bodies lest they remove some quality-corporeal or incorporeal-deemed essential to their image of themselves). As a result of its constant intercourse with the Far East, Constantinople had acquired an appreciation of the protracted hot bath, for the purpose of which a network of stone aqueducts channeled water into the city from reservoirs in the nearby hills. So that they might bathe together, a practice forbidden in the s.e.xually segregated public baths, Alobar and Kudra tapped into the aqueduct system and built a tile-roofed, waist-deep tub at the rear of their house, between the rosebushes and the pistachio tree. Kudra spoke fluent amphibian, but Alobar, conditioned by the European aversion, frequently had to be coaxed into the tub by a reminder that ritualistic bathing enhances longevity, or by a suggestion that a soak might add some unusual slippery dimension to the coital functioning of his or his companion's organs.

"Nowhere under yon setting sun will you meet water meant for bathing in," Alobar would caution Kudra whenever she grew antsy, and if that did not lull her restlessness, he would add, "No perfumes will you meet, either."

He was correct, there was no perfume west of the Bosporus. In the modern sense, there was no perfume anywhere, for the process by which a flower's fumes are extracted and preserved using alcohol distillation was not to be discovered for another hundred years, when Avicenna, the Arabian alchemist, hit upon it while trying to isolate for Islam the soul of its holy rose. In eleventh-century Constantinople, however, aromatics were as popular as they were in Kudra's India, and, as in India, they came mostly in the form of thick resins and gooey gums. Each morning, a servant would bring Basil II a small cedar box filled with resinous frankincense and gummy myrrh, whereupon the emperor would smash the box over his own head, allowing its contents to trickle down his neck and beard. As time pa.s.sed, Basil began to act rather punchy from all the box breaking, and frequently his eyes were sealed half shut from the gum. He smelled great, though, and when he died in 1025, his successor, wishing to exude an even larger glory, took to breaking two boxes over his head every day. Perhaps it was because of their vigorous application of scent that neither of the emperors was sufficiently alert to notice that their spice manager stayed constant in appearance even as they aged-although others in Constantinople noticed well enough: in the court and in the church, gossip rustled its leathery wings.

"The emperor, the bishop, the camels at the marketplace, the olive trees on the hillsides, the ships in the harbor, every and each grow older. This Alobar and Kudra do not."

"They are always in good humor and health, yet they never attend devotion."

"They bathe together."

"They smile too much."

"She anoints herself with sweet unguents as though a man."

"n.o.body knows whence they came."

"They are often at the act of love, as their noisy demonstrations attest, but produce not a child."

"It is whispered that they eat their children as soon as they are born."

"Aye. Eating babies is what keeps them young."

"Dark, she is."

"Haughty is he."

"Nonbelievers."

"Supernatural."

"Agents of the Evil One."