Base Notes, page 32
He has told me to make what I want, when I want it. And I want it, right now.
“Vic?” Jane’s voice shook. “Vic . . . you’re crying.”
I put my fingers to my face, which felt numb, and found my cheeks were wet. I licked my lips. “Oh. Strange.” How many times had it happened as I tested this, with no one watching to tell me?
“Jesus Christ,” she said, more to herself than me.
“It worked, then. Was it good for you?” A feeble attempt at humor, dead on arrival, belied by my stupid tears. I knuckled them away.
She lifted her hands—they were shaking—and ran them through her hair. Scraps of scent eddied in the air: Jonathan, whisky, semen, rain. “And after that, you . . . you just hosed him out? Or what? You said it was an accident.”
“It was,” I said. “The whole process was . . . I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“But how could you, after that? I’ve seen you, I’ve seen the way you work. You’re cold as fuck, Vic. You’re like those guys who clean the fish at Chelsea Market. How did you look at him, and touch him like that, and then do that?”
“I had to,” I said, helpless. It hadn’t been easy. I remembered watching my own hands in disbelief; how his wet hair clung to my forearms as I wrestled him into the tub. “I had to try, because I wanted . . . I wanted to . . .”
“Keep him,” she said.
“No.” Maybe, but not quite. I floundered until I found the words, and when I did, I would not have spoken them to anyone but Jane. “I wanted to become him. And I didn’t know how else to do it.”
“That’s fucked up,” she said.
“I know.”
I waited for her pity. But she only asked me, “Why?”
“I could see all the ways I could do it better than he could. And I have. I am better. But it doesn’t matter. I’ll never have the ease of it, the fearlessness. He just . . . didn’t have to care. He didn’t have to try. And I always will.” My eyes were stinging—this time I felt the tears building, and I shut my eyes against them so hard that my forehead ached.
“I thought I could make people pay for what I wanted to give them. But you can’t be what he was without what he had; it’s too fucking expensive. It turns out there is no purity in this game; you know that. You can’t sell the ‘clean expression’ of your own ideas; people just want their own inane shit hurled back at them. You bankroll your pet project, or you smile and take orders for money.”
In the quiet after my tirade, her pity finally came. For this naïveté, I deserved it. I pitied myself for ever having believed it.
“At least you make them pay through the nose,” she said at last. It punctured the tension as neatly as a pin and we both laughed, bitter and unsteady.
Once she caught her breath, she asked, “So, what about Eisner?” Not a non sequitur. After all, he had paid a hefty sum.
I said nothing, but the silence was very evocative.
“So that’s it.” Her words fell into an awkward pause—she had waited slightly too long for me to speak. “It’s over. Now nobody asks you for shit. You’re free.”
She sounded . . . almost hopeful, like it might be true.
“From one particular onus, yes. I still have to make money.” I was resigned to the impure fact of it these days.
“Boo fucking hoo,” she said. “So does everybody. How’s that lilac stuff selling?”
“All right, so far.” I’d seen good reviews on Fragrantica too. “You’re famous.”
She shook her head. “No. It’s the space I left behind, remember? That’s what people like.”
“Not me,” I said.
She laughed, less shaky. “You’re so fucking smooth.” Then her gaze skittered back down to the bottle. “Did you get that from him?”
I closed my hand over hers, where she still held the scent. “He would never have hired me if I wasn’t already myself. I’ve just gotten more so.”
“You were always like this?” she asked, cocking an eyebrow like she couldn’t believe it.
“Why do you think I came to New York? I certainly didn’t fit in at home.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
Now that I knew it was possible, I imagined the scent I could make to explain. Tar bubbles cooking in the sun. Corn ripening in August. Cherry-flavored disinfectant mixed with mop water. Bubblegum lip gloss. Bath and Body Works Cucumber Melon. The air-conditioning in a shopping mall—off-brand Estée Lauder. Weed smoke underneath the bleachers. The smoke of fentanyl in the cab of a truck. Spilled beer at parties I wasn’t invited to but went to anyway, sometimes. The smell of sweat. The smell of shame. Metallic, raw meat blood-stink, the way it smells coming down the back of your throat when your nose is broken and you’ve tilted back your head to stop it from staining your new Abercrombie shirt. The smell of a pretty girl’s hair. The smell of the football captain’s crotch. The smell of wanting everything you know that you don’t know to want yet. The smell of cantaloupe, which grows all around your town in the summer in flat brown fields that stretch to the yellow horizon, until you feel marooned in the middle of all that dusty monochrome. Cantaloupe, which is the smell of the sea: a metaphor you won’t understand until someone who knows all the things you want to tells you why you have felt like a castaway all your life.
They never know what they really want, Jonathan had warned me. Half the time, they’re afraid to find out. I never had been. And I didn’t think Jane would be either.
“The Midwest,” I said. “Outside Indianapolis, about an hour. West.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m from Sandusky. Neighbors.”
“Now do you want a drink?” I asked.
“God yes,” she said. “I do.”
32
Notes de Tête: Proraso, Citrus, Barbicide
Notes de Cœur: Blade Oil
Notes de Fond: Blood, Sweat, and Fear Accord
And then my pigeons came home to roost.
I had been putting off the inevitable since my fitting with Beau, since he told me about Giovanni’s wavering resolve. My conversation with Jane should have galvanized me. It did the opposite. Memories of Jonathan meant memories of my own thwarted ambition. Meant empathizing just a little too much with someone who had poured everything they had into an enterprise that couldn’t give enough back, who stuck to principle even in the face of immolation.
I had put him off too long. I had put myself at risk, and Jane and Beau, to prolong the tenuous sense that we had succeeded. That despite the dangers and our bruised and strained bonds of friendship, we had pulled off what we set out to do.
If I had waited any longer, I would not even have been able to snatch my own small victory from the jaws of defeat. But I still believe that it was a worthy goal, and a worthwhile delay. It bought us all a little time, at least. The only time I have been able to treat my friends to anything.
I wasn’t sure he would turn himself in. It only seemed likely, and that from secondhand accounts and intuition. He had never actually said he would, to me or anyone. Then again, would he? He didn’t seem like a grandstander. But if so, why weren’t there cops at my door right now? Why had he hesitated? What was he waiting for? Perhaps whatever had held him back could be bent to my advantage. Perhaps it could be used to maintain the fragile state of things as they currently stood.
This is the little loop of positive self-talk that I played for myself as I prepared to go downtown.
I armed myself this time not with grappa but a stack of cash. He probably wouldn’t take a bribe, but greater men than he had weakened at the sight of green. I prepped negotiation tactics—Beau and Jane as collateral damage, and what would happen to the business he had worked so hard to build?
It was not lost on me that the success of my own business was built on his sacrifice, and that its continuance relied on his willingness to live with his guilt. Was Bright House worth more to me than Giovanni? I had thought so, not that long ago. I had to keep thinking so, or else I would not make it through this night.
Because it always pays to be prepared, I coiled a new length of clothesline in my back pocket. I didn’t want to do it. It should never have—and I hoped still wouldn’t—come to this. We were on the same side. His only problem was that he believed in the system. And if I had gamed the system to crush that belief, it was only to save him from the impact of a more permanent blow. I had done him a goddamned favor. If he made me kill him now . . .
The coiled clothesline pressed into my buttock on the long ride downtown. But at least I had been lucky enough to get a seat.
It was risky to have this confrontation in Giovanni’s shop, especially if it came to . . . the conclusion I hoped to avoid. But I didn’t know where he lived—except that it was in Jersey—and even if I had, it seemed like he was always at the shop. After hours, some nights, I had walked past on some other errand in the Village and seen him sweeping, polishing, fiddling with the register. Sometimes he was nothing more than the movement of a shadow cast by the office light across the white tile. That shop was his life.
Maybe it was fitting, if his life was going to end tonight, that it would end here, where he had poured out so much of it already.
I waited around the corner, first eating an expensive ice cream cone and then lurking in a cramped bookstore reading the first ten pages of a history of Stonewall over and over again. None of it stuck. At eight fifteen, I went back out to lurk in the mulch-scented shadows of Christopher Park until his receptionist left. And then I crossed the street and knocked on the door, which I had seen him lock behind her.
He was sweeping up, and the sound startled him. The broom jerked, scattering dark hair across the tile. He squinted, and I wondered how well he could see me, with all the lights and mirrors inside. As usual, I was all in black. If he saw anything, he saw the pale thumbprint of my face in the gloom. But he came to the door, and by that alone I knew he hadn’t recognized me. It wasn’t until he had his nose nearly to the glass that he realized who I was, and balked.
I knocked again, my knuckles rapping the space between his eyes.
“Hello,” I said, and imagined the submarine echo of it on the other side of the door. “Can I come in?”
He looked over his shoulder at the empty shop. No witnesses, no one to come to his aid. But no one to overhear anything we said either. Was he more worried about me, or about anyone else? The devil he knew, or the myriad devils he didn’t?
“Giovanni,” I said.
He bit his lip, hardened his expression, and shook his head. Only after he had turned his back did I recover from my surprise and redouble my pounding on the door. The CLOSED sign rattled against the glass with each impact.
“I will break down this door,” I hissed, unwilling to shout and draw that much more attention from any passersby. The threat would have been inaudible, but Giovanni seemed to get the message from my insistent fist. Stiff with anger, he turned on his heel and came back. The dead bolt snapped and he jerked the door open.
“Fine,” he said, already retreating.
I closed the door behind me. As I went to lock it, he snapped, “Leave it.” So I did. Was he already sensing he might need a quick exit? I stepped to the side, leaving him a clear path to the door. A measure of tension left his shoulders, but only a measure. He kept plenty back.
“What do you want?” he asked, all semblance of civility gone now that there were no clients here to see him. Had he wanted to speak so forcefully when I came by the other day?
I sat down on the leather bench where I had waited, a hundred times, for his smile and his hand, open for a shake. Where I had drunk espresso and eyed the stack of magazines I didn’t have time to read, because in five minutes Giovanni’s chair would open up and I would settle in to sit under his swiftly moving hands and emerge exactly how I had always imagined myself looking.
“I want a haircut,” I said, surprising myself. “Please.”
He shook his head, more taken aback than anything. Then his knuckles went white on the broom. “If I cut your fucking hair,” he said, “this once, will you leave me alone? I mean it. If I do it tonight, you’ll never come back here again.”
I would need another haircut next month. Who would I see then? But that was a problem for the future. And if he was offering . . .
“One more for the road,” I said, and stood from the bench, almost expecting him to shake my hand.
As I sat in front of him, I realized too late how vulnerable I was: you couldn’t ask for a more perfect position for a victim of the garrote. Or, perhaps more likely, a slashed throat and a fountain of blood. But Giovanni only set his broom aside in favor of a spray bottle. As ever, he worked silently. Conversation would be up to me.
I let him get very close to finishing before I broke the increasingly tense silence. He had set his clippers aside and begun to neaten the top, sectioning too fast and too hard so the teeth of the comb scraped my scalp. As he paused to spray me down again I said, “Beau’s making me a suit.”
Spritz, spritz.
“He measured me the other day. A black silk-linen blend. A warm black, almost brown. Good for summer.”
A smattering of hair fell into my shrouded lap.
“He said you two got a drink together. Did some catching up.”
The comb slowed, sliding up a section of hair toward Giovanni’s bloodless fingers. I said nothing else, waited for him to keep cutting. Instead, he let the comb continue into the air. My forelock fell into my face. By the time I had flipped it back, he was against the wall. I watched him in the mirror, and he watched me.
“He’s worried about you,” I said. “Jane too.”
“I’m fine.”
“They’re worried about what you might do.” I ran my hand through my hair—a little uneven on top, but otherwise mostly done. He hadn’t buzzed my neck, but that grew out so fast it hardly signified. If this was as far as we got, I could live with it. “If you turn yourself in, Giovanni, you turn them in too.”
“Yeah, and you. I know.”
“Would you do it, to hurt me, knowing you would hurt them too?”
“Jesus,” he said. “It’s all about you, isn’t it? It’s always all about you. And your problems. What you want. Did you ever stop for one second and wonder, hey, maybe I’m not the center of the fucking universe?”
“Oh,” I said, “I know I’m not the center of the universe. Things would be very different if I were.”
Giovanni put his scissor hand to his face, so the blades stuck out from his forehead like a silver horn. A unicorn: virtuous, pure, utterly unsuited to survive the guile of hunters.
I spent a lot of time in the library as a child. These images stick with you.
“It isn’t about them,” he said. “Beau and Jane. If I could do it without hurting them, I would.”
“But you will,” I said. “Hurt them. Worse than that. You’ll betray them, and someone else will hurt them, and their lives will be absolutely over, just like yours. And not because they decided they needed to be punished. Because you decided you did, and dragged them along for the ride.”
“Maybe they should have thought of that before they went all in with you!”
The cape rustled around my shoulders as I stood. Stray pieces of hair slid to the floor. “Maybe you should have thought of it too.”
“I’m thinking of it now,” he said. “I’ve been thinking about it every fucking night since . . . that one. My mind’s made up.”
“Why now?” I asked. “Why have you waited so long?”
“It isn’t easy.” His voice cracked. “I love Jane. She and Beau are my friends, Vic. I don’t want to hurt them. But what we did—what we all did—I can’t live with that. I have to tell somebody.”
“And you call me selfish.”
He flushed red. “Fuck you.”
There was no getting out of this. The escalation had happened almost without my noticing. Each step up had been the only logical next move, and now we were standing at the edge of the cliff without ever having looked to the left or the right for some other path to take.
It had been too easy to reach this point. Fleetingly, I wondered whether, if I had worked a little harder, things might have turned out differently.
Ponderous, as though in deep thought, I took a few steps to the right, so I was in between him and the unlocked door. The receptionist’s table and the coatrack made a screen. If I maneuvered him correctly, and brought him down fast, my exposure to the street through the windows would be minimal.
“Why did you let me in tonight?” I asked. “You could have kept that door locked. You told me never to come back, but you opened that door when I knocked.”
He said nothing. A muscle in his jaw jumped.
“If you wanted to suffer for your crimes, Giovanni . . .” Two long, slow steps toward him, a backward shift of my weight so he wouldn’t feel threatened: a cover as I reached into my pocket. “You only ever had to ask.”
He sneered, mostly bravado. “I’m not into that shit,” he said. “I’m not like Beau and Jane.”
“Oh,” I said, and underneath the barber’s cape, I wrapped the clothesline around each hand like a boxer wrapping tape. “That’s a different kind of punishment. You want the kind that sticks.”
Too late, he looked over my shoulder at the only exit from the shop. If they had started construction, he could have left through the back. An exit he had never asked for that might have saved him now. As it was, there was only me, and the tight green line between my hands.
The cape swirled between us, distracting him. He threw his arms up, but I unbalanced him and he fell back. His head hit the tile floor with a resonant crack that rang off the mirrors.
For half a second his face went slack, and he looked as relaxed as a man asleep. Or already dead. I caught my breath, arrested by this premonition, and didn’t twist the clothesline into place as quickly as I should have. And in that moment, Giovanni struck.
