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.
“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,” V'lu 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.