This story was first published in The Feathertale Review No.14
Behold the extraordinary Jennifer Lawrence, an Oscar winner with indie cred, a critic beguiler with rom-com sparkle.
— Vanity Fair
Life is a feast and its last stop is your bowels.
— Gregory Lawrence (allegedly)
***
Jennifer Lawrence was a movie star before the stink started.
She’d won a Best Actress Oscar, two Golden Globes, four or five Critics’ Choice Awards. Even captured an Emmy for that NBC miniseries about an Irish nun who teaches crippled children to jazz dance.
Of course, even famous Jennifer Lawrence knew about unpleasant odours. You couldn’t grow up in Kentucky without gagging once or twice. Her mother’s breath had reeked of MGD until Winter’s Bone debuted at Sundance. Then the smell became Hennessy, Patrón, Dom Pérignon. The finest liquor a black Amex could buy.
Her brother’s smell was Old Spice. Swear to God, Gregory applied that shit with a firehose. Two minutes in his presence and you’d be wiping away tears. Even in her childhood memories — coed minor league, skinny-dipping in Jackson Pond — Jennifer’s big brother smelled like a dying pine tree.
Still, Jennifer never imagined that body odour could ruin her glamorous life.
“The unfortunate result of an overstimulated apocrine gland,” explained an internist from the Valley who specialized in celebrity patients. The doctor was a bald man who smelled like disinfectant wipes.
You lucky bastard, Jennifer had thought. Getting to smell clean all the time.
***
“You’ve had a remarkable career,” the studio head from Sony said over brunch at the Ivy. Brunch! At the Ivy! “But your perfume isn’t masking that odour anymore.”
Jennifer picked at scrambled eggs. “I heard Anne Hathaway complained.”
“Have you tried that thing Miley did? What was it, paleo?”
“A six-week cleanse,” answered the Disney VP. “Used to have awful sweats, smelled like an old gym bag, and now she’s killing it at the Grammys.”
“I’ll try harder,” Jennifer said, the studio heads nodding in approval.
Nobody panicked at first. They talked more about international earnings and wooing the Chinese market than the tangy odour leaching from Jennifer’s pores. Sony kept dropping names: Scorsese, Tarantino, McQueen. The smell was probably a drug thing. Sobriety and a diet would clear her right up.
Instead, the strange scent grew stronger. Brunches at the Ivy morphed into private tête-à-têtes where studio heads talked about “facing facts.” Sony started mentioning new names: Michael Bay, Edward Burns, Justin Timberlake’s directorial debut.
On her agent’s advice, Jennifer took a series of supporting roles in mediocre flops. She tried a Montreal indie that Harvey Weinstein edited down to eighty-two minutes, followed that with a low-budget drama where her stunt double flashed her vagina.
Suddenly Jennifer Lawrence was thirty. Her career had stalled.
And that odour, half-sour and half-sweet, like root beer mixed with birch bark, kept getting worse.
***
“B.O. isn’t a real problem,” her mother said from Louisville. “You only care about yourself.”
Jennifer hung up the phone and poured a highball. Started drinking at lunch, at breakfast, in the shower. She made a series of bad decisions: Slept with a paparazzo, joined Russell Crowe’s band. She spent a lost weekend in Marseille with Leonardo, drinking vodka and listening to his dream of building a cloning machine for Victoria’s Secret models.
“There’s so little beauty in the world, Jen.” Tears welled in Leo’s A-list eyes. “So little beauty yet so much pain.”
Months passed without an offer. She pissed herself during a first-class flight, and Lainey Gossip ran it as a blind item. Her boyfriend, a music video director with a bad-boy reputation and a wife, called her “a stink bomb” in Variety.
“How could you say that?” Jennifer asked, slurring. “I’ll never forgive you.”
“We’re artists. Truth first, last and always.”
“You’re D-list. I was Katniss Everdeen, the girl on fire.”
“You were.” He nodded. “Now you’re the girl who smells funny.”
***
Breaking: Jennifer Lawrence, former Oscar winner, one-time box-office queen, has fled California.
She told TMZ, “I’m done with it.” Moved home to the sprawling mansion in Louisville that she’d bought for Gregory and her mother.
Jennifer’s mother, who’d once stripped at Green Light Lounge, now spent her days watching CNN and reading self-help books. Gregory, as far as Jennifer could tell, devoted his life to growing a series of increasingly inane moustaches.
Her brother was the one who first claimed Jennifer’s smell as sarsaparilla. Jennifer’s mother had laughed hard in agreement and soon never missed an opportunity to mention it. In McDonald’s, she asked if they had sarsaparilla on tap. In the liquor store, she asked cashiers if someone had spilled a soda.
By Christmas, the entire family had taken to calling Jennifer “Sassy.”
“What’s Bradley Cooper really like, Sassy?”
“I need your black Amex, Sassy.”
“Sassy, only Hollywood sluts wear that much makeup.”
***
“J-Law, what are you doing there?” shrieked her friend Anna over the phone. “Where are you? You’re living in a red state!”
Anna was a struggling actress who met Jennifer on the set of Like Crazy. One woman made twenty dollars a day as an extra. The other earned a half-million dollars for nine weeks’ work.
“Maybe I’ll get married,” Jennifer said, thinking maybe that would solve everything. Still hoping that life, which had always felt like a Disney story, had a fairy-tale ending.
“But it’s a red state,” Anna noted again.
The bedroom of Jennifer Lawrence, star of the Hunger Games trilogy, former Christian Dior model, was a cluttered room where Gregory stored his drums. Its carpet was stained in places; the walls reeked of Old Spice and depression. Wispy motes of dust and moustache hair joined forces in the corners.
On the plus side, Jennifer stopped exercising, watched TV all day, no longer found paparazzi hiding in the hedges. At night, she had a recurring nightmare of dissolving into a whiff of smoke, her famous existence amounting to nothing more than a sarsaparilla steam bath.
***
A screaming phone shook her brain awake. The bad-boy ex-boyfriend, calling from a San Diego Best Western, tugging her home.
“Let me pick you up, Jen. We’ll do a project together. I miss you.”
“You called me a stink bomb,” she said.
“I’ve apologized. Why can’t you forgive me?”
“Because I’m a stink bomb.”
“You’re cold, darling. Got ice running through that smelly heart.”
Tough talk. When Anna phoned a day later, Jennifer sobbed loudly, ten minutes without stopping. She could hear the click of Anna typing on an iPad five hundred miles away. What was the great Jennifer Lawrence doing in Louisville?
“You are too gifted to live in Kentucky,” Anna said, reading her mind. “They shoot horses there, don’t they?”
“I’m not gifted, Anna. And you’re not either.”
“I was valedictorian at Vince Vaughn’s week-long acting camp. We improvised a musical production of Wedding Crashers.”
“I can’t go back, but I’m not happy here.”
Lately her pale skin looked almost translucent. Veins the colour of Coke wiggled up her arms. Her smell, more pungent every day, of sweet sarsaparilla.
One morning Jennifer had woken to find a foggy mist of flesh where her right hand should be. Blinked, and everything turned solid again.
“You’re a superstar,” Anna assured her. “People love you.”
As a celebrity, Jennifer knew how to rip apart a man with a laugh and use his bits for entertainment. Had done it once, maybe twice. Ice in her heart? Maybe. Beating out a hundred other women for an audition and getting paid a million to wear J.Crew makes you feel invincible. Like only an act of God could strike you down.
***
“The smell is a gift,” her mother announced from the hot tub. “The Bible says to share your spoils with others.”
Jennifer Lawrence didn’t believe that but needed to get out of the house. She started wearing a baseball cap to country bars, liked the songs by George Strait but not Tim McGraw. Her hair was cut into a pixie now, her cheeks plump as pastries. People looked straight past her.
“Don’t I know you from somewhere?” a bearded jock asked at the Iron Horse, smiling, leering in a sporty way.
“I was on To Catch a Predator for a bit,” she said, and he blinked twice before easing away.
Later, a bearish man in unattractive leather pants — not to be confused with attractive leather pants — claimed the stool beside her. An Old Fashioned cocktail filled each hand.
“You look like a fancy movie star,” he said as Jennifer shopped on her iPhone. “But I don’t go to the movies much. Why shell out twenty bucks when TV is free?”
“And how do you earn said bucks?”
“Louisville’s best food truck.” He looked at her carefully. “My name’s Tako. I make tacos.” The second cocktail slid her way. “The drinks here are okay as long as you don’t ask for anything normal. Order a beer and they treat you like a caveman. What’s that smell?”
Shrugging, Jennifer took a sip. There was something secretive about Tako, something desperate inside the act. A lonely misfit desperate for love. She could save him, still liked playing the heroine. “You ever hear of Jennifer Lawrence?”
“Jennifer Lawrence? Hmm.” Tako’s lips shone with whiskey. His eyes rolled back like searching for clues on the roof. “Wasn’t she in X-Men? I’ve seen that one.”
“Maybe.” She felt drunk, flirtatious. “She’s really sexy.”
“I must be thinking of someone else. Shit, last movie I saw was that cartoon, Frozen.”
“Digital animation.”
“You’ve seen it! What a great cartoon.”
“No, it’s called digital animation. Cartoons aren’t really done anymore, except maybe Family Guy and, I don’t know, The Simpsons.”
“You’re an expert, huh?” He grinned at her. She ran a finger over his leg as Tako killed his drink in a self-conscious way, like showing up every man he’d ever seen in a movie or on TV or inside a magazine. Everyone who dressed better, looked better, lived better.
“Refill?” she asked, and he leapt off the stool. Came back with two glasses, face beaming.
“They comped us the round.”
“That so?”
“Is this something or what?” he replied, and from his gesture Jennifer knew that Tako didn’t mean the bar or the city or the country. He meant life. And, letting the liquor run through her, Jennifer Lawrence wondered if Tako might be right.
***
In grade five, Gregory had teased her about being smelly. She wasn’t actually odorous at the time. Her brother started it on a whim, sniffing every time she approached and plugging his nose at the table.
“You smell like cat piss,” he repeated until eventually she responded with tears. Tears when nobody offered to be her math partner, tears when nobody sat beside her on the half-empty bus, tears when her tomato soup was too cold or her cereal milk not cold enough.
“I’m still that girl,” Jennifer told her mother over Chardonnay. Crickets chirped from the mansion’s manicured lawn.
“Your father was the same way,” came the reply. “That man loved nothing better than stewing in self-pity, God rest his soul.”
Jennifer gulped her wine. Truth was, she’d never felt like the woman on the movie screen or the People cover. Jennifer Lawrence, the movie star, was charming and elegant, equal parts glamazon and girl next door.
Jennifer Lawrence, the actress, smelled like a nineteenth-century soda and burped in her sleep.
***
“I met someone,” she told Anna, idling outside a McDonald’s drive-thru. “Tako.”
“That’s not a name, it’s a menu item. What is he, Mexican?”
“Maybe.” She sighed. “I need to stop being selfish. That’s my problem. Leo told me the best thing an actor can do is give a regular nobody a night of pleasure.”
“Not sure I’d take love advice from Jack Nicholson 2.0.”
“Tako watches TV instead of movies,” Jennifer continued. “He’s not consumed with money or fame.”
“Maybe you should be alone for a while.”
But the next night, Tako pressed Jennifer against the bumper of his food truck. His mouth smelled of salsa and fried fish. She kissed him back, softly at first, sensing that a pit of self-loathing rotted inside her heart. She’d never loved anyone. Only the great Jennifer Lawrence.
Here, though, a chance to change. Be better. Give back.
Love an ordinary man, or act like she did.
It was a role, a meaty part, so Jennifer went home with Tako, let him undress her. After, she confessed to being a major movie star, the queen who wowed them in Silver Linings Playbook.
“Never thought I’d sleep with a celebrity,” Tako said. “There’s that smell again.”
“It’s me,” she said, pulling the duvet over her waist. “I stink of sarsaparilla.”
“I pooped my pants on a class trip in elementary school. The whole school teased poor Tako about it.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I was seven. It was terrible, but this one beautiful teacher, Mrs. Larson, helped me to the washroom and cleaned me up. Later she drove me home and we stopped at Burger King and ordered shakes. It wasn’t until later that I realized that was the best day of my childhood.”
“What happened to her?” Jennifer’s mind was drifting, slipping into sleep, no longer paying attention.
“Left town a couple years later. Said she’d really wanted to be a poet or something.” Tako lay back and she noticed brown stubble across his chest, shoulders. He’d shaved his torso for her.
“You don’t say.” She was almost asleep, wanted to never wake up. An idea appeared: maybe enough rest would make the sarsaparilla smell disappear. It sounded promising, though that night she dreamed that God was a film critic and her body burst into smoke.
***
Jennifer Lawrence wasn’t the first choice for Winter’s Bone. Two actresses were called back in March 2008 for the final audition: Jennifer and a slender blond woman, twentysomething with a baby boy and a fourteen-year-old’s waistline.
The audition was held in a small commercial studio in Brooklyn. Jennifer arrived first. The director, a sassy woman named Debra Granik, kept asking for different versions of the “I can’t lose our house” monologue — try it tougher, more exposed, more guarded, now go full Julia Roberts mode on this one.
“We’ll be in touch,” a casting agent said at the end, and you could tell from her lips that Jennifer had blown it. “Not a fit,” that fake smile confessed. “You don’t deserve to be famous.”
Numb, Jennifer had stood outside the audition room. A meal table was laid out with muffins, snack bars, plastic-wrapped sandwiches and trays of cold cuts. Fold a salami slice three times and you can swallow it without chewing.
What now? Jennifer had wondered. College? Music? Joining the army sounded okay.
“God, I’m running so late,” sounded a voice behind her. “Can you watch Charlie for a minute?”
Jennifer stuffed her mouth full of cheddar cheese and salami, looked up to find her competitor. A cheese crumb fell from her lips. This girl’s skin had never seen a pimple. It was a sheet of flawless porcelain. Eyes wider than a Japanese sex doll. Jennifer shifted in her clothes, feeling like a bear someone stuffed into a pantsuit.
“I normally wouldn’t ask, but you’ve got a sweet face.” The woman smiled. “Tough, but sweet. I’m Sandra, by the way.”
“I can’t, I —”
But the baby was already thrust into her arms, Sandra halfway into the change room for a last-minute makeup check.
“Charlie’s an angel,” Sandra shouted. “If he cries, feed him cheese.”
This was it. The choice. The moment, and Jennifer Lawrence, future Oscar-winning actress, did not hesitate.
The water jug was empty, and the ketchup bottle jammed. A plastic Tabasco shooter stood beside the salsa, filled to the brim, so she grabbed it and squeezed. Little Charlie erupted into rich bouquet of high-pitched screams.
***
Jennifer lay on the grass. She could feel Tako’s sweat on her skin. Her mother appeared overhead, saying she’d read in a mystic book that positive thinking and prayer cured bodily ills. Jennifer did not want to listen, but the sarsaparilla was entering noxious proportions. Last week, the stink scared a Girl Guide off the front porch. The kid took one whiff, dropped her case of cookies, and split.
She smiled, acted obnoxiously happy. At night, of course, Jennifer still read Variety. Followed box-office returns. When Meryl Streep got another Best Actress nomination, it was all Jennifer could do to not sprint back to Hollywood.
Her agent called. She hadn’t been invited to the Oscars.
“That stench has to be gone,” Tako said a week later. “’Cause I can’t smell a thing.”
Tako had a subscription to Maxim. He flipped through it in bed, critiquing the women’s outfits. He also liked to read Home Cooking, loved flipping through the recipes of celebrity cookbooks. He knew a lot about spices, root vegetables, cuts of meat.
“You’re not happy here, Sassy,” Jennifer’s mother announced one morning. “You’re all alone.”
“No, I have Tako.”
“That man is using you. Stop being stupid.”
“Tako’s the one person who can’t smell my stink.”
“Even the garbage man can smell you, Sassy. And plugged nostrils don’t a happy union make.”
“Do you think I’m selfish?” Jennifer asked suddenly, already knowing the answer. Of course she did. Her mother had always sensed the deep, dark, wildly obvious blackness of Jennifer’s heart. Always known that Jennifer Lawrence was the sort of woman who sprayed Tabasco sauce into a baby’s eyes, the sort of woman that divine powers punished in strange and odorous ways.
***
Knocks on the door. Jennifer Lawrence paused House of Cards as her mother entered bearing two glasses of cream, a pot of white sugar and chocolate syrup. She fiddled with a spoon. “You know, your father smelled funny too.”
“What?” Jennifer sat up in bed.
“He started complaining about it a few years after you were born. It was more of a vinegar smell, though. Way worse than your stink. I got a terrible rash.”
She swallowed, afraid to ask what happened next, somehow saying those exact words.
“He pulled a boy from the river,” her mother said. “The selfish prick.”
“What?”
“Yep, dove right into the Mississippi like he was Paul Newman or something. Dragged this ten-year-old out of a sinking convertible. Mr. Action Hero. He was drying off ten minutes later when, poof, your father burst into smoke.”
“Burst into smoke?”
“You bet. The smell was punishing him for saving the kid.”
The mind reeled. Jennifer looked at her mother, gauging just how drunk this woman was. Pretty pissed but not completely plastered. Could the story be true? She spent the day debating it, veering between disbelief and rage. She walked over to TGI Friday’s for a five o’clock drink.
“I think something’s wrong with your perfume,” whispered the eighteen-year-old bartender. “I mean, unless that’s what celebrities wear now.”
***
Gregory huddled over the vanity mirror, fingers shaping his moustache, laptop blasting ZZ Top. It was a new moustachio creation: a Tom Selleck crossed with a Salvador Dali.
“How did Dad die?” she asked over the guitar riff.
Gregory hesitated, staring into the mirror. “Train accident, wasn’t it?”
Jennifer Lawrence nodded. She left the room, wondering what she’d expected him to say.
***
Tako must have typed her name into Netflix. She discovered him asleep in front of Bad Singers. It was about a woman named Veranda who dreamed of being Mariah Carey but ended up in a bitter American Idol-style competition that challenged her morals. It was a cheesy rom-com that had turned into R-rated comedy after Judd Apatow signed on. Leslie Mann got three monologues in the first forty minutes.
Tako had freeze-framed the movie at the part where Jennifer’s character pulls up her shirt and tells the judge, “Here’s your B-sharps.”
A white light flashed through her.
“Do you like this part of the movie?” she snapped. This rage was new. It made her skin pimple. “The nudity?”
“I’ve been watching them all day. Want to hear my idea for the next X-Men?”
“No.” She glared. “What the hell were you thinking, pausing it? I’m twenty minutes away. Am I not good enough? Is that who you want?
He caught her anger, froze, the defensive instincts of a possum.
“It was just a movie.”
“It’s not, and I don’t even know why we’re together. I’m famous. You drive a food truck.”
His back stiffened. His eyes turned hard. “You’re not famous anymore.” Tako reached for the remote. “You’re just the girl who smells like Coke.”
“Sarsaparilla.”
“I don’t even know what that is!”
After, Jennifer slammed the apartment door and walked to the closest grocery store. Hunted down the cooking oils aisle and twisted open a bottle of vinegar, wondering what on earth was happening to the world.
***
Sweaty, too wired to sleep, she turned on her Apple TV, flipping though movies. Discovered an old one that she’d headlined, a Gothic murder mystery called Premonition co-starring Jesse Eisenberg.
It was another Jennifer Lawrence movie-star performance: her face at once identical and completely different, her personality charming at the outset and fierce at the end.
She’d had a smell about her back then, a scent of greatness that even Jesse Eisenberg couldn’t resist. He’d been a gentle lover. The sexual equivalent of Kermit the Frog.
When the movie ended, she killed the TV and ran a hot shower. Wiped off the mirror. Her face and body lost in the steam.
***
“I should have told you about your father,” her mother said the next morning, with what seemed like concern but was really an opening for something else. She had made green tea. “The B.O. must be hereditary.”
“You’re full of shit,” Jennifer said. Everything ordinary people said was a lie.
“I was jealous of you.” Her mother poured a cup. “That’s why I didn’t tell you earlier.”
“You’re a horrible person.”
“I know, but you are too!” She was shrieking now, green tea spilling across the table. “Stay with me. Don’t get better. Be selfish and stuck-up and true to who you are.”
“I have to go.”
***
She texted, tweeted, Facebook messaged and phoned Tako. No reply. That night, he didn’t come home. She texted and texted and then drank a six-pack and fell asleep. In the morning, she texted again. Finally, at eleven o’clock, he answered. She deleted it.
At eleven thirty, her phone rang.
“I missed you,” he said, cheerful, Mr. Energetic.
“So where were you all night?” asked Jennifer. “Forget it. We need to talk.”
“First, let me tell you my idea for the next X-Men.”
“Can you just come over here so we can talk?”
Waiting for him, she got a call from Anna.
“You stupid slut, I’ve been asking for years to make a freaky sex-tape with you.”
“What?”
“Check out the link I just sent you.”
Sure enough, there was a tastefully designed website with her headshot splashed all over it. Coming soon! Jennifer Lawrence bathes in sarsaparilla, read the web banner. At the bottom, a copyright for Taco Sunday Productions.
She stared at the page, trying not to cry. It was her fault. Jennifer hadn’t loved him enough and he had sensed it, decided to monetize now. Okay, fine, she hadn’t loved him at all, not really. But she had tried to.
He arrived bearing a whiskey bottle. It was the cheapest brand available and, if delivered by a smarter man, that might have seemed ironic. She set it on the coffee table.
“All right, I admit it,” Tako said. “I was approached by a couple partners, but I swear I planned to split the profits.”
Jennifer swallowed. Yet another betrayal. Tako wasn’t any better than her, or her ex-boyfriend, or the industry that had rejected her. Impossible that she didn’t see it earlier.
“I want to know one thing.” She paused for dramatic effect, purely from habit. “Who suggested using the sarsaparilla?”
He blinked, stunned. “None of your business.”
“It’s all my business, and you’re a liar,” she began to yell. She needed a drink. “I want the truth. I want to know. You suggested it, yes? ”
He threw the whiskey bottle on the carpet. It smashed. Her mother sprinted into the living room, freezing, eyeing the shattered glass.
“You suggested it,” Jennifer continued. “You knew me from the start. You could always smell the sarsaparilla.”
“Okay, fine.” Tako flung himself onto the couch, pounded the cushion with his fist, placed an arm up over his eyes. “But don’t act like you weren’t slumming it with me. You never saw a future for us either.”
She sat down on the piano bench, knowing on some level this was inevitable. She sensed something dark and warm moving through her, rising out of her gut. Something hot boiled inside Jennifer’s veins, flushing her pale skin, bubbling out the once-beautiful pores.
“Did you love me?”
“No. Is your name really Tako?”
“No, it’s Walter.”
“I forgive you, Walter. Tell me your idea for X-Men.”
He sat up on the sofa, looked distraught and confused. “Really?”
She let loose a sigh. Yes, here it was. All she could do. “I forgive you, so yes.”
“It’s all about your character, Mystique, the shape-shifter who’s changed so much her body has reached its limit.” He started grinning. “We open with James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender locked in a tickle fight . . .”
But she was already breaking into pieces, a billion invisible chemical bonds giving way. Solid gave way to gaseous molecules that circled up and away, towards the roof, down to the vent, circling and breaking apart. Her mother screamed. Taco or Walter or whatever his name was started to wail as Jennifer Lawrence, Oscar winner, movie star, dissolved into a glorious fart, a charismatic cloud, a timeless and eternal sarsaparilla steam.
Illustrations by Luc Bortolotto
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