Base Notes, page 28
I watched as she packed things into place, efficient as an IKEA designer. With each stack of bills that disappeared, I lost another moment. But I didn’t know how to say what needed to be said. She was zipping up before I gathered my wits.
“Last time we spoke . . .” She looked up. I looked away. “I was rude.”
A lesser woman, a woman better trained to accept what the world expected of her, would have apologized for pressing me too hard. Jane just nodded.
“Jonathan is . . . difficult,” I said.
She laughed. “Difficult? Difficult? Fuck you, Vic. I know difficult.”
And she did. A woman only comfortable when she dictated her own terms, even to her detriment. Photography wouldn’t pay the bills? Fine, she dropped it, and not because anyone told her to. Big tipper was a creep? She would put up with him as long as she could. No offers of help accepted. I thought of my hand on Giovanni’s arm, restraining him when he rose to her defense. I thought I had understood.
But I had put her in an intolerable position. She had reached the end of her rope and had not known what to do; I had swooped in, seen all her problems, provided a fix and the means to enact it. I had encouraged—entrapped?—her into murder for my sake. And now that she had the money, she still had to ask my advice on how to use it safely.
She had been drawn fully into my territory and had no frame of reference, no firm place to stand. I held all the power here.
It was what I had wanted, I thought, when I killed Jonathan. It was what nearly crushed me once he was gone. Unstoppable forces and immovable objects are uninteresting on their own. And now I had stopped Jane. We were no longer equals.
“I want to fix this,” I said.
In the blue dusk-light her gray eyes were almost clear, like empty glasses. I thought of the scent I had made for her, also clear, an evocation of absence. I didn’t want to lose her, but I had come so close to making her disappear.
“I’ll tell you anything,” I said. “I’ll even tell you about him.”
Her pupils bloomed, pooling in the translucence of her eyes like ink poured into a well. “Fine,” she said. “How did he die?”
Naked. Smelling of sex. Streetlights through the rain-streaked windows, projecting rivulets onto the floor. “Is that what you want to know about him?”
“No,” she said. “It’s what I want to know about you.”
What did she hope to learn about me, from this moment in my past? She asked how Jonathan had died, but what she really meant was, Why had I killed him? She didn’t care about the method. She cared about the motive, about the antecedent.
And I, as the storyteller, controlled what she would hear, what she would see. So what did I want her to know? It would not be fair to lie. To her, or to me. If I was going to share this with her, I would share it all. But . . . what did I hope she would take away from this?
What had I taken away from it?
Nothing useful, at the time. Only short-lived triumph and a lingering, complicated regret I regularly quashed with flimsy self-affirmation. I did not want Jane to wake from this reverie with the feeling that I had made a colossal mistake. I did not want her to know how badly I had failed to live up to the idea of myself that I had back then. Instead, I wanted her to see how much I had grown. I had become, in some ways, like her: I had made ugly compromises and learned to live with them.
But now I was tired of compromising. And it looked like I might have the means to set my own terms. At least for a while.
None of my Jonathan perfumes preserved the moment she had asked me to re-create. I had never needed to remind myself: every moment of that night was burned as cleanly into my memory as if my mind had been coated in silver nitrate and the whole scene bathed in blazing light.
Though I have become adept at premeditation in the intervening years, this incident was impulsive, born out of a storm of sadness and anger, passion and thwarted ambition. The act of it passed quickly, though not as quickly as you might think, and not as quickly as I expected. It was surprisingly intimate. Not sexually, but physically, and in other ways less easy to qualify. It was the closest I had ever been to Jonathan Bright, if only because I finally had some power over him.
It was easy to remember what notes the story contained but difficult to imagine how Jane would interpret them, how she would take them and run. I would have to tell her such a version of the story that there was no bending it, no flights of fancy. The details would be crisp, precise, specific. I would be objective. She could interpret the undercurrents however she wanted, but the idea she would see anything other than the stark silent film that played in my head when I thought back to that night . . .
It would need a wet cement accord: rain in the city, running in the gutters of SoHo. Scotch, of course—specifically a particular independent bottling of Ardbeg, impossible to find now. Black pepper, vanilla, the rum-raisin sweetness of sherry, all of it wreathed in the oily peat smoke of an Islay. Wet wool. We had not had umbrellas, and the rain caught us between taxi and apartment building. The smell of his deodorant—vetiver, chemicals—and his perfume. It was an unnamed blend, nothing he had ever released for sale. It had taken me a long time to copy it, and once I had I didn’t release it either. I didn’t want to risk catching a hint of it on the person in front of me at the coffee shop, the commuter swaying at my side.
The mushroomy, metallic scent of spit on skin. Tide pool pear tree semen-scent. The warmer, sharper smell of my own arousal. The faintest soapy trace of detergent on his sheets—he used unscented, but even that leaves a footprint, toasted in the heat of the dryer until it sets between the threads. The radiators had a smell too: hot iron and burning dust.
This would be a good scent. An art-house horror movie, a Shirley Jackson novel. The top notes were sophisticated, the middle cozy. The base bodily, sexual and abject, but also stark. The shock of seeing someone nude and debauched in an abandoned house.
I could make it. It was, in some ways, what I had been working toward since I started smelling samples in that little shop on the South Bank. The aesthetic was mine. The memory was mine. The blood was on my hands.
And now, it would be on Jane’s.
29
Notes de Tête: Grapefruit and Geraniums
Notes de Cœur: Lilacs, Cantaloupe, and Grappa
Notes de Fond: The Sea
You know how jealously I hoard my memories of Jonathan. You likely didn’t realize what a privilege it was, early in this process, to be allowed a glimpse of him in an unguarded moment. Or . . . a moment alone. I’m not convinced he ever let his guard down. Perhaps he had no guard at all; perhaps he showed the world his petrified core, stripped of all softness that might require protection.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. I couldn’t tell the difference with Jane either.
“Is this . . . this is him?” She pinched the slender glass sampler I gave her between thumb and forefinger. Cap still in place—I did not want her to smell it until I was ready. Until she was.
I nodded. “It doesn’t smell good.”
“Is that why you killed him?” she asked archly. “He smelled bad?”
“Jonathan Bright,” I said, “was not a very nice man.”
“I’m not very nice either,” said Jane. “Maybe you have a type.”
I did.
“Why did you like him?” she asked. The unspoken question: Why do you like me? Or maybe, Will you kill me too?
I could have said, Oh, he was handsome. Haughty. A force to be reckoned with. He lit a fire in me to do better, and moved the benchmark every time I hoped to succeed. He was a challenge. He surprised me. I was drawn to him for every reason I was drawn to her.
Or I could have said: I didn’t like him at all. But I understood him, or wanted to. The way I want to understand you. Like I hope you’ll understand me.
Instead, I took the sample delicately from her grasp and popped its tiny plastic cap. No spritzer, this, but something to be tipped and smeared against your skin. A trace of it touched my fingers as I worked the plastic free. That small streak of his scent was enough to strand me in my past for a moment. I curled my hand into the open collar of my shirt and lifted it to breathe through the fabric, where it smelled of soap and my own skin. Jonathan’s ghost lay back down.
“Imagine you have spent years of your life hounded by a half memory.” I spoke into my lifted collar, eyes downcast. This was already more than I wanted to part with—the idea that I had had a life before. But I had chosen this. To explain Jonathan to Jane, I would have to explain myself.
“Imagine it has made the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end, kept you awake into the wee hours, driven you half-mad with almost remembering. And then along comes someone who raises the veil, who clarifies the thing that lurks in the mist at the edge of your awareness. How could that person not make an impression? Liking has nothing to do with it. Do you understand what I mean?”
She bit her lip: a thought welling up like blood in a wound. “Like . . . when you can’t remember the next line in a song. And you just loop the same verse over and over again.”
I wanted to kiss the pale depression left by her teeth, but even as I watched, it blushed pink and disappeared.
“Cantaloupes did this to me, for years. I knew the smell reminded me of something, but I couldn’t have told you what.”
I half expected her to say “honeydew,” like every idiot who thought one melon smelled like another. But Jane remained silent, listening. She recognized the gravity of what I was saying. Or maybe she was just being polite.
“Not long after I met Jonathan,” I said, “I mentioned this fixation. And then, like it was nothing—and it was, to him—he said: ‘Of course. The sea.’”
I watched the flick of her eyes as she searched a mental catalog, the comparison of one scent impression to the other. The parting of her lips in surprise, the faint gleam of her tongue between her teeth.
“I had only been once, when I was very young. But he was right.” Jonathan had delivered revelations like a king casting coins in front of a beggar. As I told Jane this story, I knew the worth of everything I parted with, to the penny. I hoped she did too. “Though he didn’t mean to, he taught me something about his art. I had to learn everything from him like that.”
“What?” she asked.
“People love aquatics because they’re clean, and fruit because it’s sweet. But that thing they share? That ghost of salt and musk? That isn’t sweet or clean at all. It’s vital, bodily. The sea is full of life and death. Fruit is a womb, and its seeds grow as it rots.” My next sentiment was an echo of Jonathan, as Jane would come to know if her experimental perfume panned out. But it was a lesson I had learned long before I met him. “People think they know what they want; they’re usually wrong.”
“What, and he was right?”
“Most of the time,” I said. “Yes.” I capped the sampler and gave it back to her.
She turned it in her hands, watching the dark liquid inside. “But I never met him.”
“You will.”
She shook her head. Her hair had grown, and swished across her face like grass whipped in the wind. It made the same dry sound. I wanted to lie down in it and stare up at the sky. “But you told me. You said that isn’t how it works.”
“I said I didn’t know how it works. You gave me the idea. I made a perfume that fulfilled Eisner’s fantasy. Took the scents he might have smelled and built a moment he imagined. Now I want to know if I can use the smells you would have smelled, if you had been there, and show you a moment that I lived.”
“So I’m a guinea pig.”
“No,” I said, sharp as a slap. It startled her, and she closed her fist on the tiny vial. There was the answer I wanted, even if she hadn’t meant to give it. “You’re not a guinea pig.”
“Yes,” she said. “I am.”
I caught the conviction in it that time. She had not asked a question. She was telling me exactly what she had decided to be.
The problem with storytelling is that someone has to tell the story. And as I’ve said already, copy has never been my strong suit. I’ve gotten better with experience, but that night I stumbled over my sentences, doubled back, used words that weren’t quite right until I found, too late, the ones that were.
In the end, I could never be sure I did the job credibly. But Jonathan was incredible, in the strictest sense of the word, if you weren’t willing to suspend your expectations, your understanding of the way things usually worked.
Small and fastidious, Bright was under forty but grave and disdainful in the manner of a much older man. He loathed to be labeled “precocious,” going so far as to punch an older colleague for employing the epithet. He had strategically fucked his way through an influential minority of stockists and perfumers, as well as half the board of the Fragrance Foundation, in affairs ostensibly involving ball gags, role play, and rigorous documentation.
Well, I say “ostensibly.” I’ve seen the videos.
But nobody else had—to them it was merely delicious gossip. People who claimed to have been his paramours—under condition of anonymity—admitted that the quality of the sex had distracted them from the imprudence of allowing Bright to collect photographic evidence of their indiscretions.
Similarly, it was not blackmail that kept Bright in booming business and acclaim. Instead, it was one single, irrefutable fact: he was damn good at what he did. Bright was the only American who could rival—some claimed surpass—the venerable houses of Europe. Because he, unlike most Americans, wasn’t afraid to get dirty.
He was making the most interesting scents in the industry. The kind of things you would catch a whiff of on someone walking by and obsess about all day. Dank and mineral oceanics, moldy chypres, sticky gourmands. The kind of florals that reminded you their sources were sex organs. Animalics that wouldn’t let you forget.
Sometimes there were suggestions—usually half-hearted, already admitting defeat—that Bright ought to be censured, or sanctioned in some way, or perhaps reported to the police. But no such reports were made. This, despite Bright’s rude remarks, misanthropy, and general bad attitude. He had the charisma of an enfant terrible: mad, bad, and dangerous to know. I never quite matched him, there—not enough flowers to make up for my thorns. And you needed the charm, I had learned, if you wanted to behave that badly.
Did I say all of this to Jane? Maybe. What matters is I’m saying it to you, right now. And that I said enough to her that she thought she understood.
I told her the story in which he hadn’t left a tip.
“What an asshole,” she said.
I told her how he had blindfolded me and lifted Glencairn glasses to my lips, describing in exquisite detail the tasting notes, the noses, of his favorite whiskies. How I had learned the craft of perfumery from him in his moments of weakness, and had sometimes wondered if the only way he could talk about and teach the art he truly loved was in surrender. And whether that meant he thought I was his equal, or close enough that he was willing to let himself slip that vital half an inch. Maybe the only way you could learn, from someone who never knew how to explain himself and wasn’t used to trying.
After that, she was silent for a long time.
“He was good-looking,” I said. Not as an excuse, this time. Just another piece of data.
“Show me,” she said, and I realized that I had no photos of him on my phone. I had to google him.
Opting for a profile in Nez rather than his obituary, I turned my laptop so she could see his face. The photograph was monochrome and showed him standing in profile against a white background, dressed in black.
“There’s nothing for scale,” I said. “He was short, for a man. Your height, maybe. Five seven?”
She nodded, staring hard at the photograph. Jonathan’s arms were crossed over his chest and his chin was up, at an angle. His nose was large but straight, over a wide mouth given to cynical crookedness. When his lips moved, to eat or speak or sneer, they were expressive, eloquent. His hands, like the rest of him, were small and neat but so fluid in their gestures they seemed bigger. Every three weeks, he had his thick, dark hair cut in the same short back and sides. He kept clean-shaven, though when he was on a tear in the lab and forgot to go home, his stubble came in reddish.
The picture did not show these things. There was too much to tell.
But she didn’t want to know about him, did she? She wanted to know about me, and he was a means to an end. This should be enough. She knew his face, and from what I had told her she could imagine the rest.
“All right,” I said. “Go ahead.”
She uncapped the vial, and Jonathan filled the room.
“Was something supposed to happen?” she asked when she had smelled her fill.
“Not yet,” I said, though I was clutching the edge of the table. It felt like he was standing at my back, breathing into the hollow just behind my ear.
“Will something happen?” Alarm poorly disguised as skepticism.
“I just need you to know what he smelled like. A face to the name, as it were.” Her eyes flicked down to his photograph, still open on the screen. I wished, suddenly, that I had ever snapped the kind of photographs I knew he had taken of me. In the memory she wanted me to make for her, Bright was not wearing a black turtleneck.
“Take it home with you,” I said. “Keep smelling it. Look at the picture. Think about what I said, and keep thinking until you can almost see him. Almost feel him standing in the room.”
She put the vial into the front pocket of her backpack with a care that belied her attitude.
“The next step is the perfume,” I said. “The one that will show you the moment. I hope.”
“How long will that take?”
I shrugged. “It depends. I have my work at the office. And it’s never a sure thing, how long any scent takes to come together.”
