Base Notes, page 13
The workweek wore itself out, me with it. On Saturday, I had the promise of an empty lab, but I could hardly get out of bed. My sinuses felt scoured, and the small of my back protested anything other than standing straight or lying down. Too much time bent at forty-five degrees over the counter, squinting at a scale. I was exhausted.
Instead of going into work, I lay with my notebook open on my chest, my handwriting incomprehensible to anyone but me. Thank god. The sheets still smelled faintly of Jane: her sweat and her sex, the talc and white flower scent of her dry shampoo. A rectangle of pale sunlight lay across the kitchen linoleum like a patch of watercolor, swatched to test its saturation. Turning on my side, I watched its progress across the floor and doodled swirls in the margins of my notes.
I had an inkling of an idea, which was a pleasant change from my other recent forays into the experimental. But there were three problems I could foresee with the approach I was considering, each one proceeding from the next.
First, I didn’t want to commit any murders at present, owing to the interest of Pip Miles in my business affairs. I would have to use the absolutes I already had at my disposal. Which meant I would need to find someone who had a fantasy about any of the dead people I kept in bottles in my fridge. And then, without explaining what I was about, encourage them to divulge that fantasy to me in great detail.
I owned a selection of scents to choose from, but only a few of them had living associates I knew. Of those, there were even fewer I felt willing to approach. Either because I had harvested an intriguing animalic on my own time and had to conceal my involvement, or because I did not like or trust my clients. After all, they had hired me.
And again, with Miles on the periphery of my operations, I didn’t like the idea of renewing anyone’s interest in my practice.
There was one option, almost preposterously perfect.
Many people had known Jonathan Bright—and fantasized about him, no doubt. Wealth was enough to engender lust, but he had been handsome as well: a bantam rooster, glossy and well groomed, with the kind of confidence that small men cultivate to make up for some perceived shortcoming. He was a person who took up more space than conservation of mass said he was allowed. He had become, in the time we spent together, a model for my own attempt at masculinity.
Did I want to be him or to fuck him? The honest answer, when anyone asks this question of anyone else, is almost always both.
I felt a deep reluctance when I contemplated interviewing anyone about their imagined trysts with Jonathan, their ideas of how he lived and moved, of what he liked. It would all be wrong, and I would have to build a scent that underscored the wrongness, enhanced and elevated it to the realm of near-reality.
Briefly, I toyed with this initial idea of Eisner’s: the ability to give someone the true memory of a moment they had never experienced. Was there anyone with whom I would share my true memories of Jonathan? If I could share him as he truly was, what would it prove? The people who fantasized about him likely didn’t want the reality. But who would, besides me?
No, Jonathan was mine, and mine alone. Even at the risk of this commission, I would protect the integrity of his memory. My memory of him. Perhaps I could create a fantasy of him for myself, but I didn’t like that idea much either. It felt, perhaps, a little pathetic.
Of the remaining possibilities, I liked my odds best with someone who’d be dead in the next few months and hopefully wouldn’t come back to haunt me.
Eisner would be the easiest, of course. He knew that his project had me opening new avenues of research. But he was clever, and if I asked him to tell me some vividly imagined scenario featuring his father, he might extrapolate and understand that I intended to dupe him.
Gormless Reg, who missed his mother, would have suited my purposes perfectly. No doubt Connie had any number of perverse fantasies featuring his estranged wife. But both Yateses were off limits at the moment—owing, again, to Pip.
Which left me Pearson. As the Yateses’ colleague, still dangerous. But discreet, at least. He was sharper than Reg and Connie but not quite equal to Eisner. Exactly as shrewd as he had to be to get whatever it was he wanted, he was so self-absorbed that I found the scope of his desires depressing. But he had paid promptly and, unlike Eisner, left me alone afterward.
How to approach him? The lie was already forming, born easily out of truth. I was working on something new: perfumes that could make fantasies come true. I was approaching trusted (lie), loyal clients (truth, if only because I had no competition) to see if they’d be interested in collaboration, in helping me refine my process. Pro bono, of course! Nobody likes freebies so much as the rich.
I would not say that last to him.
If he happened to mention anything to Eisner, it would be easier to dissemble with a degree of separation, or even frame it as a part of my plan to lure Pearson to an untimely demise. Well. He was pushing seventy and probably not in excellent health, given a penchant for cigars and steak. So perhaps timelier than it might have been.
Extricating myself from the tangle of blankets, I retrieved my laptop from the bookshelf and wrote the email standing at my counter, waiting for the moka pot to perk. When it was done, and the email sent, I took my coffee back to bed and curled up with the smell of Jane, who had given me such a good idea.
Gerald Pearson was game for a chat, and insisted I meet him at the Carnegie Club.
I do not dislike tobacco as a rule—it is a delicious ingredient in many perfumes I respect and enjoy, and many I have made myself. But in the form of cigarettes and cigars, I find it noisome and annoying. It deadens taste and smell, and its own sour stench lingers for hours or days in the hair and clothes of anyone unfortunate enough to encounter the smoke in quantity.
But Pearson liked his cigars, and I needed to please Pearson, so I went.
The Carnegie Club is situated, as you might imagine, in the same part of town as the well-known Hall, and it is just as stifling and wealthy. Dark wood, high ceilings, men in boring suits, a hostess in a tight red dress. Exactly what you’d expect for the location and the price. It was almost campy, saved only by the fact that I was actually here to do business and not simply to play at it.
“Fowler,” said Pearson when he saw me following behind the hostess. “Have a seat. Yulia, will you bring around a second glass?”
She gave a practiced smile and disappeared.
“What are we drinking?” I asked. The leather squeaked when I sat down. The chair was overstuffed, the upholstery straining.
He shrugged. “Yulia recommended it. Cigar?”
“No, thank you.”
He shrugged and puffed on his own: a short and ludicrously fat campana he had smoked almost down to the ring. The bulge of another lurked in his breast pocket. Embers glowing on his current project illuminated a sheen of sweat on his face, casting deep shadows around his jowls.
Yulia returned with a glass and poured, bending low to show her décolletage to Pearson. I tasted the wine. It was not good, but a glance at the menu told me whatever it was, it had been very expensive indeed.
“So,” said Pearson, after Yulia had gone. “How can I help you with this . . . experimental work?” The way he said the words gave them subtext I would have appreciated from someone else, because it might actually have been imaginative. For Pearson, no doubt “experimental” was college coeds making out on Easter break, preferably for the camera.
“First of all,” I said, crossing my legs and leaning back in my uncomfortable chair, “thank you for taking the meeting. I know you’re very busy.”
He waved a hand, blithely unconcerned with the ashy cap on his cigar. “Not at all, not at all.” Of course. He had other people to be busy for him. “I’m flattered to be thought of. Have to ask you, though, why me?”
“Your case, Mr. Pearson, is perfectly suited for my purposes.” I saw him preen a bit, smiling to himself as he fiddled with the band on his cigar. “I already have the . . . materials I require, and I imagine you might be able to supply me with some inspiration.” I was very good at laying it on thick when I needed to.
At the mention of “materials,” he raised one wild and wiry eyebrow. No tweezers or wax for Pearson; afraid what people might say if he appeared too well groomed. I wondered if Eisner made him nervous.
“I know I outlined what I’m planning in my email,” I said, “but let me go over it a bit more thoroughly. I’m pursuing a new line of specialty scents. Similar to what we’ve worked on before, but if my theory translates, I’ll be able to create a scent that lets you experience a fantasy as if you were living it in the flesh.”
His first campana had reached the point of no return, and he took great care in removing the second from his pocket. Though he was not looking at me, I could see he had arranged his expression to reflect casual disinterest. But when he did lift his eyes, his pupils were wide. It was dark in the Carnegie Club; I’m sure my eyes were nearly black as well. But the sheen of sweat across his forehead had begun to bead.
“When you say ‘fantasy’ . . .”
I steepled my fingers and held his fevered gaze. “Anything you can imagine. Provided it includes the subject of your previous commission. For now. If that works, we can discuss different avenues.”
He swallowed, hard. Fiddled with his cutter and cigar. “All right,” he said, after a moment to compose himself. “I’m interested. What do you need from me?”
He kept me there through the rest of his second cigar. My mouth turned fuzzy and sour from the wine, and my stomach started to growl, but I sat and listened and took detailed notes, amazed that he would say such things aloud in public.
Then again, if you were Pearson, the world rearranged itself around your whims. Why would you be concerned about airing your petty grudges and imagined revenge in public?
His college rival was long dead, presumed drowned, and Yulia in her red dress would be discreet, if she bothered to listen at all. Maybe his shit-talking was in bad taste, but given his tastes in other things, I’m sure he didn’t care.
Outside, the weather had turned oddly temperate—one of those early December days that remind you winter doesn’t actually begin until the solstice. Emerging from the dim interior of the Carnegie Club, I took a breath of cool, damp air and headed north, toward the park.
Smoke lingered on my clothes, and would for weeks until I acquiesced to the expense of the dry cleaner. It dampened my sense of smell—but I had gotten what I wanted from the meeting. And even handicapped thus, I could still smell the carriage horses of Central Park South.
It’s one of the few places in the city where a person can sample the scent of ungulate manure. Not the reek of human excrement and piss, or the moldy-dusty funk of pigeon shit, but the true grassy smell of a barnyard. Like a well-balanced pinot grigio, the air was green and vegetal, warm with the memory of hay.
I thought of Jane, her sweet smell after sex, and stepped close to one of the great hot beasts to breathe it in.
“Careful,” said the man on the driver’s seat, not looking up from his phone. “She’s a biter.”
“I bite back,” I told the horse, and put my hand against her flank. She turned a ponderous head to look at me, blew a big sigh, and went back to her water bucket.
Pearson had given me a good starting point, and I already knew some of the specific notes I would need. One of the tricks of my art involved understanding which manifestation of a scent a client carried in their heart. When Pearson said leather, I asked him: Which kind, where? Car seat? Coat? Old armchair in a college common room?
I could follow up as needed, but I was eager to get started. A quick trip uptown from here, to pick up the necessary absolute, and then I could acquire dinner at the steamed-bun shop on my way into the lab.
It was a lot of trekking up and down, but when I got on a tear I had a tendency to cast aside practicality. After all, I was Jonathan’s apprentice, and he was renowned for his wild hairs. Woe betide interns, clients, or employees who questioned his practice or interrupted his rhythm once he got started.
It had taken a while to transition from hindrance to help, but eventually he included me in the whirlwind of his inspiration. Instead of looking on helplessly from outside, I was trapped inside with him. We spent three days alone in the lab once, door locked against intrusion, surviving on tap water, Adderall, and a box of granola bars someone else had left behind.
I wondered, then, what he would have eaten if not for those. Now I knew he had never intended to eat at all. Or rather, intent didn’t enter into it. Food had simply been beneath his notice.
It was claustrophobic and exhausting. Until it became exhilarating. And then there was no going back. Chasing the passion proved more fulfilling than even other people; see Jonathan, dead now by my hand. I missed him, but when inspiration like this drove me, there was nothing better than succumbing to the urge.
13
Notes de Tête: Charred Meat
Notes de Cœur: Butter, Oak
Notes de Fond: Dry Vermouth
Gerald Pearson’s college experience, through junior year, had been made an absolute misery by a boy one year older: Samuel Cordrey. A family friend, in some vague way. Someone important Pearson’s father told him to get close to. He had, and suffered for it until senior year.
When Pearson talked about Cordrey, I could sense there was something more to it than he was telling me. He knew better than to lie to me outright. It had been a problem, in the early stages of our first collaboration. I could not create an accurate memory if he was not honest about all aspects of the moment. At least he told me every scent that I required, sans embellishment. But I knew there was something in his memory of Cordrey that he wasn’t sharing.
Had I been a gambler—I am, in fact, though not with chips or ponies but rather with my business and my credit and my own sorry skin—I would have taken the odds on Pearson having some sad homoerotic obsession with Cordrey. You know, those twisted sexual yearnings that grow out of abuse and denigration and privilege and private school.
Not that I needed to know to create a facsimile of the moment he found Cordrey defeated in the men’s room, snotty and weeping.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Senior year was Pearson’s first taste of freedom from Cordrey’s reign of terror. Was it better to be free? Or did he not know what to do with himself, out from under his tormentor’s thumb?
I tried to tell him these answers were integral to my process, which was a lie—I was just nosy and could see my pushing made him uncomfortable. I liked to watch him squirm. But though he shifted and hemmed, hawed and twiddled, he kept mum on some specifics.
All I know is this: When Cordrey showed up at the reunion that year, he made a big show of congratulating all the graduating seniors of his acquaintance by inviting them to a strip club, and even extended the invitation to Pearson. Who was, in my opinion, a fool to take him up on it. I imagine that he ended up drunk onstage, stark naked, Cordrey and company pelting him with dollar bills while the strippers laughed.
I imagine that he might even have found it unexpectedly and awfully arousing, and that the state of things grew obvious to all the boys in their tacky black-and-orange jackets.
Remember, in my version of things, he isn’t wearing any clothes.
At any rate, whatever really happened, the hallowed tradition of reunions grew to be something Pearson approached with trepidation. But there was no backing out of them; it was important to remain an active alumnus, and even smile and shake hands with Cordrey when fate put them in the same place at the same time. Nepotism doesn’t come from nowhere.
Imagine Pearson’s dismay when a new job landed him on the same floor as Cordrey, both of them junior associates at a well-known mortgage firm decades before it became infamous for fucking over all America.
And then, imagine his delight when Cordrey was dismissed for repeatedly, blatantly sexually harassing their supervisor, and Pearson walked into the bathroom to find him sobbing over a urinal.
This scene he described to me in vivid detail.
The scent I originally created for Pearson wasn’t a pleasant one. You wouldn’t wear it in public. Urinal cakes and cleaning products. But there are plenty of people who treasure their perfumes as a private indulgence rather than an exhibition.
Even if that fetid memory was satisfying for Pearson to relive, it was—in his opinion—too little, come too late. It never sat well with him that revenge on his nemesis came from on high rather than his own hands.
So the fantasy Pearson imparted was this:
It is some nebulous reunion weekend—fantasy does not play well with exact dates, in my experience. It’s the concept that matters, not the chronology. Pearson knows he will be seeing Cordrey; he just doesn’t know where or when.
In this imagined version, it’s not in a bar, or in a class tent. It’s late at night. So late that, improbably, Nassau Street is nearly empty. Princeton is only forty-five minutes outside Penn by an overpriced express train, so I know the scents of Nassau Street. Pearson paid for me to know them. It was nice to spend an afternoon out of the city on someone else’s dime.
Cordrey is drunk, carrying a can of beer in a Princeton Koozie, but Pearson is not. Incredible, in the most literal sense of the word, but remember: this is fantasy. This never happened.
Oh, all right, let’s make him just a little tipsy. For verisimilitude, and Dutch courage. Otherwise, why would he dare catch Cordrey by the elbow, chum it up, tell him he’s got a flask, steer him into a shadowy patch of landscaped woods in somebody’s side yard?
For the sake of this fantasy, let’s believe that in his youth Pearson could take a man his size in a fight. He was still an intimidating specimen in his older age—the kind of fat that was at one point football muscle.
