The secondary function of a bathroom mirror is to measure murmurs in mental mud. Priscilla glanced at her “seismograph” and disliked the reading. She was as pallid as a Q-tip and as ready to unravel. Dropping the soap in the sink, she imposed a smile on her reflection. With a sudsy finger she pushed at the triangular tip of her crisp little corn chip of a nose. She winked each eye. Her eyes were equally enormous, equally violet, but the left eye winked smoothly while the right required effort and a scrunching of flesh. She tugged at her wet autumn-colored hair as if she were stopping a trolley. “You're still cute as a button,” she told herself. “Of course, I've never seen a cute button, but who am I to argue with the wisdom of the ages?” She puckered her bubble gum mouth until its exaggerated sensuality drew attention away from the blood-blue crescents beneath her eyes. “My bags may be packed, but I haven't left town. No wonder Ricki finds me irresistible. She's only human.”
Leaning her forehead against the scummy rim of the sink, Priscilla suddenly wept. She continued weeping until the heat of her tear water, the sheer velocity of its flow, finally obscured the already vague circumstances of its origins. Then, as memory after memory relinquished its sharp focus, and even fatigue and loneliness proved water soluble, she shut her tear ducts with an almost audible resolve. She blew her nose on a washcloth (she had been out of toilet tissue for a week), tossed her clammy hair, pulled on a lab coat over her underwear, and stepped into the living room cum bedroom cum laboratory where, over an assortment of burners, beakers, and bubbling glass tubing, she would toil with uncharacteristic fastidiousness until dawn.
In the life of Priscilla, the genius waitress, this night was fairly routine. It differed significantly from every other night of her year in but one respect: at what she reckoned to be about five in the morning — her clock had run down and she hadn't gotten around to winding it — there was a soft rapping at her door. Since her neighborhood, Capitol Hill, was a high-crime district and since she had no wish to be interrupted by Ricki or some man she'd once slept with out of need and then forgotten, she'd chosen not to answer. At sunup, however, just prior to retiring for her customary and inadequate six hours of rest, she cracked the door to see whether her caller had left a note. She was puzzled to find on her doorsill a solitary lump of something, which, after cautious examination, she identified as a beet.
NEW ORLEANS
“WHAT IS THE HOUR, V'LU?"
“Dee whut?”
“The hour. What is the hour?”
“Why, ma'am, dee hour is whut is on dee clock. 'Tween dee numbers.”
“V'lu!” said Madame Devalier. When Madame Devalier raised her voice, it was like Diamond Jim raising a poker pot. Even the termites in the foundation paid attention. “What time is it?”
“It three o'clock, ma'am.”
Madame Devalier clasped the overbite of her bosom in disbelief. “Three o'clock in the morning!”
“Three o'clock in dee night, ma'am. You knows dat in New Orleans it not morning 'til dee sun come up.” V'lu laughed. Her laughter resembled the tinkle of a toy xylophone. “Sometime, when dee hurricane drops be passing 'round, it not git morning all day.”
“You are correct, as usual, chérie. But let us not be speaking of hurricane drops. Nothing goes out of this shop but perfume. And what perfume! Three o'clock in the morn — in the night! This boof has made me so dizzy I have lost all sense of time.” She peeked into a vat of percolating petals. Inside the vat the scene resembled an Esther Williams water ballet filmed in the lagoons of hell. “This is the strongest jasmine I have ever smelled. It makes my head spin, V'lu. We must buy from that Jamaican again.”
The Hershey-skinned maid nodded. “Dat island nigger dee talk of dee Quarter, ma'am. He be selling flowers, he be singing songs, and all de time dose honey bees buzzing 'round he head. . ”
“That is most unusual,” Madame Devalier agreed. “Sometimes they circle him like a halo, and other times it's as if they form horns. He wears those bees like a crown, a living crown.”
“You think he wear dem bees to bed at night?”
Madame Devalier wagged a finger at the young woman. The finger was plump, wrinkled, ringed, and tipped with a crimson nail. “If you know what's good for you, you won't be concerning your pretty self with his habits in bed. Now fetch me some more alcohol, cher. We must dilute this boof before it starts a chain reaction and blows New Orleans into the Gulf. We have a jasmine Nagasaki cooking here!”
Indeed, a solitary wino weaving down Royal Street was aroused into momentary sobriety by the olfactory force of the aroma that seeped through the closed shutters of the small shop. The man, a longtime resident of the area, stared at the faded sign — Parfumerie Devalier — and crossed himself before continuing on his way.
For forty years, Madame Lily Devalier had kept the shop. Her father had kept it for fifty years before her. In its day, allegedly, some odd business had passed through its arched doorway. Moon medicine and jazz powders. Lucky root and come-together potent. Mojo cream and loa lotion. Hurricane drops, kill-me-not juice, coonass courting pomade and a special “oil of midnight” that had nothing to do with overtime at the office. Among fashionable folk in the French Quarter, Madame D. was known as the Queen of the Good Smells. There was a time when certain people in the Quarter pronounced it “Spells.” Nowadays, however, with much of the Quarter gone to seed — the shop along with it — Madame was trying to reattract some of the clientele she had lost to the large international fragrance houses, so she dealt in perfume and nothing but perfume. Or so she claimed.
Under her mistress's watchful eye, V'lu poured molasses-distilled alcohol into a crock. The crock had been collecting the essential oil as it dripped through a filter tube attached to the steeping vat. The Jamaican jasmine was so pungent, however, that the diluting agent barely dulled its edge.
“Ooh-la-la!” exclaimed Madame Devalier. She plopped down her pumpkin patch, her Spanish ballroom, her pagan idol of a body on a lime velvet love seat. “This boof may cause me to faint.”
“Ah gitting a sinful headache,” V'lu complained.
Out on Royal, following in the footsteps of the departed wino, a tall, lean black man in a greenish yellow skullcap paused before the shutters of the Parfumerie Devalier. He sniffed the air like a stag. He sniffed again. He clapped his hands in delight and cackled aloud. And shifting a bit on his head, emitting a sleepy whisper, his skullcap stirred its many little wings.
Since there were no witnesses, it is impossible to say whether that man was responsible for the single garden-variety beet that V'lu discovered on her cot — tossed in through the open second-story window, perhaps — when she went to lay herself down that night (and thanks to some medication strongly resembling hurricane drops with which her employer had treated her headache, it was still night, wasn't it, V'lu?).
PARIS
IN THE CENTER OF A MARBLE-TOP DESK, directly under a crystal chandelier, sitting alone on a silver tray, was a large, raw beet. The beet must have been out of the ground a week or more, for it had the ashen exterior of a cancer victim. Yet, when struck at a particular angle by a flicker of candlelight from the chandelier, its heart of wine-drenched velvet shone through.