“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. Hell, 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 dogshit 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 crass, 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 porno 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 classic 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 heterosexuality,” 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 passed 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.
It was after midnight when she arrived at her building. There was an odor in the hallway more funky than a cabbage pot, and on her doorsill there sat in certain firepluggian splendor, like a dropping from the eclipse, like a disembodied bulb that had been beamed to Earth from Starship Eros, another beet.
NEW ORLEANS
LOUISIANA IN SEPTEMBER was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air — moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh — felt as if it were being exhaled into one's face. Sometimes it even sounded like heavy breathing. Honeysuckle, swamp flowers, magnolia, and the mystery smell of the river scented the atmosphere, amplifying the intrusion of organic sleaze. It was aphrodisiac and repressive, soft and violent at the same time. In New Orleans, in the French Quarter, miles from the barking lungs of alligators, the air maintained this quality of breath, although here it acquired a tinge of metallic halitosis, due to fumes expelled by tourist buses, trucks delivering Dixie beer, and, on Decatur Street, a mass-transit motor coach named Desire.
The only way to hang up on the obscene caller was to install air conditioning. The Parfumerie Devalier never had been air-conditioned, however, and unless it lifted from its current economic slump, it probably never would be. As a consequence, both Madame Lily Devalier and her maid and assistant, V'lu Jackson, held old-fashioned lacquered paper fans, with which they stirred the humid respiration that Louisiana panted into the shop. They were sitting on the lime velvet love seat at the rear of the retail area, watching television and fanning away. On the six o'clock news there were scenes of a total eclipse of the sun as photographed from atop the Space Needle in Seattle and the Eiffel Tower in Paris (the path of an eclipse is one hundred and sixty-seven miles wide, allowing Seattle to catch the southern edge of this one and Paris the northern edge: in New Orleans, the sun had burned on as was its habit, undimmed except by a late afternoon shower).