Base Notes, page 3
Eyes on her work, she nodded. In between her thumb and forefinger, an orange peel flexed before a match, spitting oil that caught in a burst of aromatic flames.
“She took some of the photos she framed for me.”
Jane made a face. “You didn’t pay me shit for them either.”
“You didn’t ask me to!”
“You’re a photographer?” I asked.
“Not anymore.” My drink landed in front of me, without any of the finesse I had come to expect from her performance. Still, she didn’t spill it. “I’m in school now.”
“For?”
“Radiology. Associates degree.” No wonder she looked tired. She slammed the top half into her shaker and preempted further conversation with a racket of ice on metal, ice on glass.
Giovanni caught my eye and shook his head. Jane pretended not to notice.
“How’s Beau?” he asked when she put his glass down—more gently than she had placed mine. “Picked a date yet?”
Her finger was bare, but I imagined she wouldn’t wear a ring on the job—apt to scratch or lose it, and tips would be better if she looked single. “No way we’re getting married until I’m out of school. We can’t afford it.”
“There’s always city hall,” I said. She shot a glare at me and I retreated to my lowball, touching my nose to the ice. It was more to hide my grin than show my shame—I always appreciated people who would fight me and draw blood.
The door opened and a group of men in suits came in, already laughing. Jane looked up from carbonating a bottle of some house-made mixer.
“Shit,” she said, and all the combative energy drained from the set of her shoulders. The circles under her eyes seemed to darken.
“What?” asked Giovanni. “Them?”
The group of men settled at the opposite end of the bar, around one corner. Their ringleader was obvious: slightly better dressed, obviously going to pay. He was the focal point for all his toadies, who may as well have been panting, or giving him a hand job.
“Reg,” said Jane, and looked down at her shoes. When she managed to lift her head again, she had pasted a smile across lips bright with smudge-proof lipstick. “What can I get you?” she asked, and made her way down the bar.
“You’re smiling!” said the ringleader, eating Jane with his eyes. Reg, at a guess. “She never smiles, guys. Is it me? Gotta be me. I don’t see anybody else in here worth smiling over. No offense.” He clapped a jovial hand on one of his confederates’ shoulders, and the other man smiled and laughed, at ease with the insult and grateful for the favor of the touch.
Jane tried and failed not to look back at Giovanni, less like a plea than an apology.
“That guy?” Reg snorted. “Babe, come on.”
Giovanni almost stood from his barstool. I put a hand out to stop him because this seemed like a familiar scene, a problem Jane could deal with even if she didn’t want to. Besides, he looked like a big tipper.
“What can I get you to drink?” she asked firmly, smile cemented in place.
He ordered a whisky—they all ordered whisky. Boring Speyside labels too, and overpriced. Reg’s hungry eyes followed Jane from bar to bottle to glasses, and she knew it. Her expression was a flat mask worn in the face of humiliation.
When her back was turned, he flipped the lid of the caddy that held slices of lemon and lime, sticky globes of cherries. He picked one of these up by the stem and flipped the lid closed just before she turned to catch him. Too late to stop the crime, she only narrowed her eyes.
He smiled and put the cherry in his mouth, pulling it out slowly so it emerged, obscene, from between his lips. His toadies stilled, watching him in fascination.
With a smile like a workbench vise, Jane approached with a tray of glasses. One by one she set them down. She could have tried to avoid what was coming, sneaked by quickly, risked spilling Reg’s drink and spoiling his plans and turning the whole scene into a painful amateur farce.
But she knew exactly how this was going to play out, and she leaned into it. She plunged into it, because like a barbed arrowhead buried deeply in muscle, the only way out was through.
When she leaned forward to place his glass on a coaster in front of him, Reg dropped the spit-slick cherry squarely between her breasts.
His toadies howled and slapped his back. Jane stared at him a moment, then turned away and came back down the bar. A stippling of pink marked the skin of her décolletage. Discreetly, she untucked the tail of her T-shirt from her apron. The cherry fell to the floor.
Reg threw back half his drink, grunted, and then said, “Gotta piss. Back in a sec.”
As he passed my stool on his way to the restroom, a wave of recognition struck me. It hadn’t been his face, his height or posture, even the sound of his voice. But his perfume: that I knew, and intimately.
You would have thought that kind of man would wear whatever Forbes prescribed. Look at him and you’d expect a sterile, bitter citrus. But this was floral, almost feminine, and certainly no mainstream brand. Beach roses, a hint of cloves. Sun-warmed earth and sand. Coppertone. Sweat and skin-scent. The opening notes had all gone, but I remembered them from mixing: seaweed, watermelon, ocean spray.
It was late autumn outside, but this boy smelled like Labor Day on a private Long Island beach.
“I know him,” I said to myself, still loudly enough that both Giovanni and Jane heard me. What I meant was, I knew that perfume. And I knew what he remembered when he wore it.
“You know Reg?” asked Jane, hostility creeping back into her manner. “How?”
“He’s a client,” I said.
The hostility wavered. “No shit.”
I nodded and finally sipped my drink. It tasted like tar and cough syrup—agreeably so. I sipped again, then looked up to see both Jane and Giovanni staring. “Or rather, his father is.”
Jane blanched. “God, his dad is a nightmare.”
Giovanni’s eyebrows rose further. “How would you know?”
Misery came down across her face like a glacier shearing. She sighed deeply. “Reg was looking for someone to do his suits and I mentioned Beau.” Here, she explained to me: “He’s a tailor.” Then, to Giovanni again: “I mean, he’s an asshole, but Beau needed the work. We needed the money. God, though, I wish I never had. It’s like he thinks a bespoke suit will take twenty pounds off. You can’t convince him it’s not the cut, and then it’s Beau’s fault for being bad at his job.”
“And he referred his dad?” asked Giovanni, incredulous.
“Worse.” Jane glanced over one shoulder to check the toadies’ glasses, and then over the other to check for Reg. Her voice dipped low when she spoke again. “His dad found out, and now he’s micromanaging everything. Like, Reg will come in, and then two days later his dad calls and demands to see the sketches or the fabric. And it’s like, Beau already cut the fucking pieces, but this guy will veto it. And then Reg will cave and do what his dad wants, and then there’s fucking wasted fabric and wasted money and Beau’s pissed for days. They pull that shit on you too?”
This last to me. “They tried.”
Now she looked impressed instead of pissed and gave me a limp salute. “You’ve got bigger balls than I do.”
I accepted this without comment and took another sip of my drink. What I did was so intensely personal that a meddling father’s wishes couldn’t be taken into account. Besides, it was unseemly to squabble over your dead wife, your son’s dead mother. Even if she had been estranged. Even if you had hired someone to trap her ghost in an atomizer for your son.
“Sorry about Jane,” said Giovanni once we’d left. “Things are kind of rough for her right now.”
I shrugged. “They are for all of us, I think. Or at least for me and you. Maybe not for Reg. Which train are you taking?”
“The PATH, at Christopher Street. I gotta get to Jersey. What’s up with you?”
It took me a moment to realize he was asking what difficulties I’d alluded to, not what train I needed. “Money, of course. An investor pulled out, no reason. Won’t even take my calls. I spend all my time plugging numbers into Excel, and everything always comes up red, no matter what. I’m wasting hours. Days. I should be in the lab, not at the computer.”
He shrugged. “That’s business.”
“It’s bullshit.” I tucked my scarf into my jacket, swept an angry hand through my freshly cut hair. “It’s not why I got into this.”
“Why did you?”
“To make the art.”
“So hire a business manager.”
“With what cash? And anyway, that’s not . . .”
“I know.” He buttoned his jacket against a sudden bitter wind. Low clouds around the apex of One World Trade caught light pollution and turned the sky the color of a jellyfish, a bruise. The scent of cold, dry concrete hung brittle in the air.
We had come to West Fourth. I caught the railing at the top of the stairs, palm tacky against drippy green paint. “This is me.”
“Thanks,” he said. “For the drink.”
“Anytime. Or, anytime I come to get my hair cut.”
“Here.” He took a card from his wallet and a pen from his pen pocket and wrote a second number below the printed one. “That’s my cell.”
“What for?” I asked, suddenly wary. First “friend,” now this?
“When I lose my place and get a chair at Astor.” Rue broke his smile, made it crooked. “Or just whenever. I owe you a beer.”
“At those prices, you owe me two.”
“Maybe if you come across the river.” He lifted his hat. Because he was Giovanni, and he wore one. “Have a good night.”
“Better than last night, anyway.” Eisner’s sneering smile appeared to me as vividly as if I’d sprayed a memory of the expression onto my skin. My sigh was more a growl; I was already mad at myself for what I was about to say. “It shouldn’t be like this. It isn’t fair.”
Leaves susurrated on the pavement, curling past our feet. “I don’t know what to tell you, Vic.”
“Tell me you’re angry, at least.”
“Furious. But what am I supposed to do?”
What, indeed? I waved and descended past the piss-smelling turnstiles into the rusty, echoing underworld of the subway.
What were we supposed to do? What tools were at our disposal, arrayed against management companies and millionaires?
I chewed on this, all through the long ride uptown. Outside the window, arc lights caught the faces of MTA construction crews pressed into oubliettes to avoid the train as it passed. The car stank like shit and spilled Snapple.
When I got home, the radiators had come on, and I slept fitfully in a sweat. At three o’clock I woke to a racket of poltergeist bangs, air bubbles in the steam, and realized I had missed a vital connection.
My studio was small enough that the laptop lit it like a lamp. I filled the kettle to make a pot of tea—I had bags and bags of loose leaf, left over from a brief obsession with the scents of Assam and Lapsang and gunpowder green. We had done a release called Thé Parti not so long ago. Barry named it. I hate naming things; the scent, I feel, should speak for itself, tell its own story. But I’ve found that’s tough to market. These days, luckily, I needn’t name anything. My clients don’t often ask me to title their scents.
As the iodic steam of sencha curled toward the ceiling, I opened my browser and began to search. First I looked up Eisner and found the page for his asset-management company. Some deeply buried piece of information, previously discarded as irrelevant, had surfaced during my fitful sleep. My research now confirmed it: Conrad Yates and his son, Reginald, were partners at Eisner, Pearson, Yates & Yates.
I had dealt with Pearson too. Eisner had come to me first—found me through a boy who’d modeled for him. He was a dilettante photographer who appeared with sickening regularity in Chelsea shows, coddled by gallery owners who wanted to ensure his future patronage. You couldn’t blame them, really. But I did.
Briefly I wondered if Jane knew him, or knew of him. New York could be an awfully small town, once you started tightening the social nooses of your special interests. And god forbid you shit where you eat. I avoided most of the other perfumers in the city now, except as necessity warranted.
This model of Eisner’s had fucked another one of my special clients, heard a little bit of peculiar gossip in a moment of indiscretion, and passed it on as unbelievable but interesting. Eisner, analytical aesthete that he was, couldn’t resist the lure. That was how I hooked about half of them. Not nubile models, necessarily, but something of the kind. The other half came through direct referrals. Eisner sent me Pearson, who in turn gave me the Yateses.
I had forgotten the referrals; I rarely think of my clients after their payments clear. Unless, like Eisner, they make themselves unforgettable. Unless, like his confederates, they resurfaced from the depths of my memory like bloated corpses rising after a storm.
I had crafted memories for all four of them, undertaking all the risk and difficulty that my process entailed so that they might be rid of a nuisance and possess a treasured moment in time. And now they were fucking me over.
Reg and Connie were making life hell for Jane and her fiancé. Eisner had me stretched out on the rack and had walked away to let me wail. But it was Pearson who controlled the real-estate division of the firm. And according to publicly available records, that division owned a certain mixed-use building on Christopher Street.
Pearson was ultimately in control of Giovanni’s rent, and he was going to put my barber out of business.
It wasn’t even hostility; hostility I would have understood. Enmity I could engage with. It had a pleasing symmetry, a give-and-take. If I knew that Eisner, Pearson, Yates & Yates had some vendetta against me, against Giovanni and Jane and Beau, that would have been logical, acceptable, worthy of some respect. But this was apathy, and apathy I could not stand. Especially not from people who ought to be impressed by arts of which they had no mastery. But they could barely be persuaded to pay what those arts were worth, let alone give artisans the autonomy and breathing room to work as we were wont.
Setting my cup of tea aside, I took my pink leather jewelry box out of the fridge and pulled the four applicable sample vials: small portions of properly mixed perfume retained for reference, each put aside before the final product went home with its owner.
Eisner’s was bronze in color, while Pearson’s was nearly black. Both Yates projects were pale gold with the same base, though Conrad’s floral had a greenish tinge while Reg’s was warmer, an almost orange gourmand.
Trial, error, and long years of experimentation had already taught me that smelling these would give me nothing out of the ordinary. The way my art worked, I could re-create a person’s memory, but only they could experience it when they smelled the scent.
Still, one by one I uncapped them and drew a deep breath, recalling my interviews with each man, and the memories they had gone to the utmost extreme to preserve. I knew what moments these men most wanted to remember, and the lengths to which they would go to ensure they did. It seemed to me I should be able to use this knowledge to effect a change in their behavior.
As to how . . . there, alas, I was at a loss.
3
Notes de Tête: Chai Spice, Coffee
Notes de Cœur: Cork Grease, Key Oil, Scotch
Notes de Fond: Warm Wood, Paint Dust, Asafoetida, Petrichor
“Eisner again,” said Barry when I walked in the door.
In the midst of sipping my coffee, I raised an eyebrow over my thermos.
“Voice mail’s still there, if you want to listen. No details. Just his number. Time stamp was nine thirty last night. That’s like old-man two a.m. Is he trying to booty-call you or what?”
“I don’t think I’m exactly his type.” I set my coffee aside and fell into the creaking office chair behind the desktop. Our headquarters consisted of the office proper: one resident computer, one actual desk (mine), and a landline phone. The break room functioned as an open-plan office for Barry and the two other employees, Binh and Leila. Soon it would just be Barry and Leila. And then, likely, only Barry and the coffee machine. I had seen Leila editing her résumé during her lunch hours.
Downstairs was the lab: a white concrete cube with a stainless steel utility sink, stainless Metro shelves, and a stainless island running nearly the length of the narrow room. I preferred its sterile glare to the cheap and mildewed squalor of our office.
But here I was, hauling the ugly cordless phone to my face to listen to Eisner’s latest voice mail. What could he possibly want so badly? And what had changed?
“Hello, this is Joseph Eisner calling again. I’m hoping to reach Vic Fowler. I apologize for all this phone tag, but please, if you could return my call at the earliest possible convenience, it’s a matter of some urgency.”
Goddamn it. He was going to make me ask. I don’t ask for things easily. I have tried to improve upon this character deficit, as I understand asking sometimes yields favorable results. Frankly, I have failed. I can force satisfactory results in myriad other ways.
Eisner repeated his number slowly enough that I had time to snatch a pen and write it down, though I didn’t. I had him in my contacts. His cell phone too, not his office. By this time we were what you might call “associates.”
“I’m running out for coffee,” I said.
Barry looked pointedly at my carafe.
“Fancy coffee,” I added. “From that place around the corner. What do you want?”
Judging by his expression, this offer only increased his skepticism. “You’re paying?”
“What do you want, Barry?”
“Get me that white-girl thing. Large, extra shot. With soy milk.”
I had on one occasion sampled the caramel pumpkin concoction to which he referred, and my pancreas convulsed in sympathy. “Disgusting. I’ll be back in ten. Fifteen.”
I had my phone to my face before I was out of the building. It rang, and rang, and by the time I came to the corner, I had gotten Eisner’s voice mail.
