“Hmm,” said Priscilla. “No labs? Well, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Can you show me where you hung my raincoat? Cigar smoke makes me dizzy, too.”
She downed her cognac in a single gulp, causing evidence of alcohol trauma to roll down her cheeks as she donned her yellow vinyl slicker. She waved goodbye to the blurry figure of Huxley Anne that was ascending the stairs, and somewhat timidly, despite being three-quarters drunk, approached her host. He was stationed in front of the fireplace, pointing out some feathered skinning knives to an academic-looking couple that was trying its best to get away in order to speak to Dr. Morgenstern. “Your cannibal gourmet is partial to the palm o' the hand,” Wiggs was saying, “but his piece de résistance is the testicles. Tried them myself once. Bloody delicious!” The woman gasped.
“Excuse me, please. Dr. Dannyboy. .”
Wiggs turned to face Priscilla, his good eye, so bright with intelligence and rebellion, swinging like a beacon. The shamrock patch followed in its wake. “You're not leavin'?”
“Yep. I don't know what I'm doing here in the first place. But thanks for dinner. Bloody delicious.”
The couple fled. Dannyboy grinned. “Sure and go on with you. The likes of you is a wee bit o' delicious, as well.” O' delicious is what he said and o' delicious is probably what he meant, o' palatable, o' savory, and o' delectable being unacceptable synonyms. “Do you have to be runnin'?”
The glint in his eye! The lilt in his voice! Her estrogen level accelerated from zero to sixty in one-point-nine seconds. The gravity force was so great it snapped her pelvis back and stiffened her nipples. It was with difficulty that she replied, “I do. I have a date.”
“A date, eh? You're actin' none too happy about it. As a matter of fact, darlin', if I may say as much, you strike me as an unhappy woman overall. And I say as much even though you were the only guest here this evening with a sense o' humor. Which is to say, you were the only guest with any wisdom about you.”
Priscilla was rather taken aback. She didn't know whether to feel insulted or flattered. “I'm fine,” she said. “I've been kinda tired. You're jumping to conclusions. Besides, unhappiness is natural. I'm not one of those bubbleheads that spend all their time trying to avoid the normal misery of life.”
She moved toward the front door, but none too swiftly. He followed.
“Sure and life is a lot o' misery, all right, and death is more misery, yet. Dread, fear, anxiety, guilt, even a bit o' neurosis, are perfectly natural responses to a life that promises such an unacceptable end. The trick is not to take such responses too seriously, not to trivialize your all too short stay in your carton o' flesh by cooperatin' with misery.”
“Seems to me,” said Priscilla, snapping and unsnapping the collar of her slicker, “that the so-called happy people are the ones who are trivial. Avoiding reality and never thinking about anything important.”
“Reality is subjective, and there's an unenlightened tendency in this culture to regard something as 'important' only if 'tis sober and severe. Sure and still you're right about your Cheerful Dumb, only they're not so much happy as lobotomized. But your Gloomy Smart are just as ridiculous. When you're unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don't think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin' on himself and start payin' attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form o' self-indulgence.”
Did he think she was an audience or something? Couldn't he tell that she was an off-duty waitress full of mousse and booze, and stuck on a collision course with the lips of a pretty Italian bartender? “Jesus,” she said. “You talk like a book.”
“That's not surprisin'.”
“You mean you read too much?”
“There's no such thing. Unless it's prissy academic novels that you're readin'. No, I mean that when I was a wee lad, I used to climb into my parents' bed of a morning early, crawl in between my mum and dad, and each o' them would immediately roll over and turn a back to me, just like they were a pair o' bookends. It's only natural I grew up thinkin' I was a bloody volume.”
“Parental rejection, uh? There's a subject I know inside out. It doesn't appear to have slowed you down.”
“Would you be likin' to discuss it?”
“No,” she said. She saw her opening and went for it. “I'd be liking to discuss beets.”
A laugh went off in his throat like a rat-bomb, sending the last of the guests scurrying for their bumbershoots. His eye closed and then slowly opened, a process that took so long that by the time his iris was up to full glint, the house had been cleared of Seattle scientists and Wolfgang Morgenstern was halfway up the stairs. “Beets, you say?”
“Right! I want to know why I was invited here tonight and why the center of your dining room table bears a striking resemblance to my doorjamb.”
Her tone was so firm that he could have set his brandy on it.
“Ah. Indeed. Yes. Well, to be perfectly frank, Miss Partido, darlin', there was a ration o' beets on my table tonight because there has been beets at your very own door — but, alas, I'm not sure o' the connection myself. Except that it has something to do with the thousand-year-old janitor and his perfume.”
She looked him over pore by pore. He was slightly sloshed and terribly flaky (and cute in that daddy way that always made her heart roll over), but he wasn't surfing the psychedelic billows, she was reassured of that. Moreover, he seemed sincere. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“Sure and what am I talkin' about, indeed. I was hopin' we could get into that tonight, but only one o' you showed up. Actually, I've known all week that Marcel LeFever wouldn't be here until next Sunday, but I really was expectin' the other—”
“Wait a minute. Marcel LeFever? The perfumer?”
“The one and the same.”
Priscilla had heard Bunny LeFever speak at a perfumers' convention. It had been quite a speech. It had, in some crazy way, changed her life. She unsnapped her slicker. “I think we need to sit down and talk,” she said.
“All right, then,” he said, helping her out of the coat. “I'll be gettin' us a splash o' something. And, say, Miss Partido, though I know it's an affront to the Virgin Mary to be mixin' business with pleasure, pleasure is my business — the extension o' pleasure, indefinitely, eternally — and my immortal soul is warmed by the loveliness o' you, you're a sight for sore eyes, so to speak" — he trapped his shamrock patch with his empty snifter—"and I deserve to be chained by night in a church basement without company o' cassette player if I am not man enough to ask you for the teeniest, slightest brush of oral-muscular affection.”
Jesus, she thought. I bet the son of a bitch does believe in fairies. But she couldn't help herself. She kissed him.
Meanwhile, a dozen blocks away, Ricki, carrying a pound of gift-wrapped chocolate, had let herself into Priscilla's apartment. There had been no trick to that. The door wasn't locked. It had been slightly ajar, in fact. Ricki shook her head. “Where is that girl's mind at?” she wondered.
In addition, the apartment was in the worst state Ricki had ever seen it. True, no gnarled old beets were in evidence, and it smelled as if it had been recently scoured — the odor of ammonia cut right through the floral fragrances in the makeshift laboratory — but drawers were out of the dresser, the kitchenette cupboard looked as if it had been rifled by a starving ape, and possessions were scattered everywhere. There were sanitary napkins all over the bathroom, that's how bad it was.