Base Notes, page 36
It felt like a shining blade was poised to fall between us, so brightly polished that it was as good as a mirror. I would rather end this now, and so would she: a clean wound. A sharp and sudden break between this chapter of our lives and the next, in which neither would feature in the other’s biography except as painful memories.
Or perhaps not a guillotine. Perhaps a scalpel, making a skillful cut that could heal cleanly. A graft where two separate pieces could grow together as one.
“I killed Giovanni,” I said, and let the razor edge come down.
“You motherfucker,” said Beau, like the wind had been knocked out of him. Jane would not have kept this secret from him, would she? Even now I felt a twinge of admiration that she might surprise me. But whether he had known or not—and I expect he had—hearing it aloud, stated with such calm and clarity, undid a knot of fury he had so far held taut.
“I can tell you why, if you’d like to hear.”
Jane shook her head.
“’Cause you didn’t want to go to prison, I bet,” said Beau. “Jesus Christ, I’ve known him as long as I’ve known Jane.”
“I didn’t want you to go to prison either,” I said, looking at her and not at him.
“Sure,” said Beau. “Because you give a single fuck about anyone besides yourself.”
“Beau,” said Jane. A note of pleading had entered her voice, though she didn’t raise her eyes to his. This was not the clean break she and I had wanted. And now I realized my brief hope of a surgical incision, a clean graft, was a fantasy. Perhaps foolishly, neither of us had anticipated his reaction.
“Don’t,” he said. “Just don’t.”
She had expected acquiescence, and this caught her off guard.
“You got taken in just like me,” he said. “The only difference is you’re too fucking cool to admit it. You think you’re above it all. You’ve made sacrifices nobody else would dream of making, and you’re only grubbing around down here with the rest of us because of some cosmic injustice. But you’re not special.” He was glaring at me as he spoke—I think he had forgotten Jane was lumped into his tirade. But when I glanced at her she had gone green around the lips, mouth crooked where she had dug into the inside of her lip with her teeth.
When I looked away, Beau had come closer. Nearly close enough to touch.
“We’re supposed to be in this together,” he said. “But you know what it’s like out here and you’re just as bad as them.”
“Beau,” said Jane, in a strangled voice I had never heard her use. I took my eyes off him for just a moment and caught a glimpse of her open mouth, the pink of her tongue.
I heard Beau say, “Actually, I think you’re worse.”
And from there, the bottom went out of it all.
Jane shouted his name once more when he lunged. It didn’t even give him pause. He was much bigger than me, but I had taken on big men before and won. Usually I had the element of surprise, but sometimes I lost it too early. I had learned to wrest the advantage back from all kinds of opponents.
Jane was talking, in the background. Not at volume, not after her first outburst, but a sort of panicked, monotone stream of exhortations. I caught maybe one in five words, but the tenor of it was clear. She wanted us to stop. But I wouldn’t stop unless he did, because I had come this far and damned if I was going to die here, on the same floor where I had spilled a bag of frozen peas.
He was heavy. His weight forced nearly all the air from my lungs. He had hit me several times before I got my metaphorical feet under me, and now my head was spinning and my vision had begun to go yellow. In a more rational state perhaps I could have pulled my blows, but I was halfway to unconsciousness already and not keen to complete the journey.
I got a thumb in his eye, not hard enough to puncture the sclera but hard enough he reeled back, blind and cursing. He came at me again, but clumsier, and I chopped at his neck with the back of my hand where it met the hard edge of my wrist. The sound and feeling were familiar. There was no coming back from that crunch.
He rocked onto his heels, making abortive sounds and grabbing at his throat as if it had betrayed him.
“Oh my god,” said Jane. At some point she had stood up from her chair, and now she fell to her knees and held her hands out inches from his skin, as if afraid to break him any further. “Oh my god.”
There was nothing I could do, and I didn’t know what to say. So I just sat there and watched him die.
“What did you do?” she asked, and I couldn’t tell if the question was for me or him. She was staring at her own hands, still at last, pressed into the dark curls that covered Beau’s chest. Maybe the question was for herself.
What was the last thing he had said to her? You’re just as bad as them. He hadn’t meant to—he thought he was going to win this fight. And anyway, he had been talking to me. But that wasn’t what she had heard.
I knew she wouldn’t want to hear I’m sorry. She never wanted apologies—she only wanted the problem solved. And this one couldn’t be.
“What am I supposed to do?” She closed her fists in his chest hair. I saw a glint of silver in the black. “I can’t call the police. I can’t . . . if they ask me any questions I . . .” She shook her head.
“Come with me.” I spoke before I could think. A desperate bid to stitch together what I had torn apart. A hope that our bond, whatever it was based on—hatred, anger, pheromones, aesthetic—would bridge this ever-widening gap. That the thing in me that wanted would reach out toward the thing in her that wanted too, and that this wanting would be enough to eclipse every consequence of its own greed.
She looked up at me and blinked: a camera flash, uncomprehending. “What?”
“Leave with me,” I said. “Grab the cash. Put on some clothes. I can make room in the car.”
It was like waiting for the gas explosion back uptown. I imagined the smell of asafoetida thickening in the air: the only tangible measure of the growing threat. It always appealed to me, that this invisible danger had been marked purposefully with scent.
Her anger, when it came, exploded out of her so forcefully it should have broken windows.
“Are you fucking crazy?” She crossed her arms over Beau’s chest, as if I would take him away from her again. “Why? Why would I? Jesus Christ.” She said it with the same emphasis he had, and I remembered meeting Beau for the first time, seeing the crook of his eyebrow that he had so obviously learned from her.
His last words lingered like the cooking smells that still stuck in the corners of the kitchen. His cruelty had not been meant for Jane, but that didn’t matter now. She had heard them, and knew at least some of them were true.
I wondered if any of the things I could say would soften the blow, or if they would only land it harder: You loved him because he made you feel like you knew what you were doing, and the responsibility was exhausting. He was right about you: you thought you were better than him. You needed that. It made you feel competent and in control.
She had made the sacrifices, yes. He was right in that. She had sacrificed everything beautiful, and chosen to live on bread alone. Beau had tried so hard to be her roses, but she had never trusted him to deliver. He had offered her the precarious chance to pursue her passion. Over and over again, he promised he could make another life possible: You don’t have to go through with this . . . I can find a job. We’ll make it work. Perhaps he truly believed they could. And every time she told him no.
Can you imagine the agony of refusing your dearest wish, daily? I would never put her in that position, because I would never offer her hope.
Hope is cheap. I wanted to believe that she had better taste.
Jane got up slowly, moving Beau’s body from her knees with effort and trying to prevent him thudding to the floor. She couldn’t, and winced. I wondered if the downstairs neighbors had woken up. I didn’t think that was why she was wincing.
I did not get up to match her, but watched her waver between several decisions—all opaque to me. I could read only the ripple of her body as her weight shifted from one foot to the other, the flicker of her silver eyes from right to left. As she moved the air moved around her, and I caught a fleeting few scraps of sun-warmed hay, horse scent, the breeze along Central Park South.
I thought for a moment I smelled lilacs.
She came down a step away, weight on her heels, and turned toward the counter. Toward the knife block. I heard the blades rattle in their wooden housing as she drew one out. Her hands must have been shaking.
“Jane,” I said, in the same way she had said Beau’s name. She refused to hear me, just as he had her.
She held the knife not like a slasher-movie villain but like a woman considering a supermarket chicken she intended to break down. Like a tool, and not a weapon. Like she was going to ask me to tear up leaves for a salad, or peel a carrot, or mix her a drink.
I didn’t see the movement coming—nothing telegraphed it, except her obvious intent. She was utterly still, staring at me, and then the knife was at my throat. I never had time to raise my arms or flinch away.
She had meant to slash me open but calculated the angle wrong—these things are always more difficult than they seem. Instead the blade bounced off a tendon and clattered across the tops of my collarbone. I stumbled back, too late, blood welling and pain following in its footsteps.
I didn’t let her land a second blow.
“I don’t want to do this,” I said. “I don’t want to.” But we all do things we don’t want to do, just to get by from day to day.
Just as I had known what she would decide, she had known what I would choose when she made her decision. She had seen my last night with Jonathan. She knew the lengths to which I would go to pursue my art. But I understood, by then, what I had lost that night. The idea of losing it again almost staid my hand. Almost.
Her smell was in my nose the whole time, pungent with the sweat of fear. Her skin was soft—I had held her throat like this in other intimacies, kissing her breathless mouth until her fingernails bit into my skin and she thrashed to be free. Then, I had let her go. Now, I could not afford to.
I knew she could kill—I had taught her how. And more than that, I had seen her follow through. There was a discipline in her that not many people had, to do the things that needed to be done. To make sacrifices nobody else would dream of making.
Jane knew how I cleaned and cured a corpse. What would she do with me? Nothing. She would call 911 when it was done, or the police, maybe. Or maybe not. Maybe she would take her cash and her coat and she would run alone. That I could almost respect. But I had made something out of my murderousness, and I refused to fall to someone who would waste that talent. Waste me.
I wondered if Jonathan had suspected in his last moments what I would make of him when he was dead. Now that Jane knew, did she hope I would do the same for her?
She tried, at one point, to scratch at my eyes—like I had done to Beau—but she was losing strength by then. Her nails left shallow cuts on my cheek. When it was all said and done, I reached up to touch the swollen welts around the broken skin. My fingers came away wet and salty, streaked with rusty pink.
The color reminded me to take my suit from the wardrobe.
EPILOGUE
There is, perhaps, a scent that’s missing from this collection: the night of my flight from New York.
The details aren’t exactly tedious—I was terrified the entire time, soaked in my own blood, certain someone would see me as I rearranged the contents of my trunk. I had told Jane I could make room in the car. It was true. Except instead of making room for a passenger, I had to clear cargo space.
The weather was too warm. The AC in the Corolla worked, but it wheezed and smelled like fish sauce. I had brought no perfumer’s alcohol with me, and the problem of how to acquire more presented a challenge. But by now you know me—I’m a problem solver.
None of this is to the point. The additional logistics, the dawn arrival in the gravel driveway of my rural bolt-hole, the scramble to unpack everything before the sun came up . . . these I’m sure you can conjure for yourself. There is nothing personal about them that I need to convey.
The house, of course, is squalid. And still not as cheap as Iolanda’s basement. Upstate doesn’t mean cheap anymore. The only people who can afford to leave the city are people who could afford to live there to begin with.
There is no internet, no phone line. Poor service on my prepaid burner, not that I’ve used it for much. The bedroom is drafty, the kitchen and bathroom dull with indelible grime. The cellar has no running water—an inconvenience, given what was necessary when I first arrived.
I will not stay here too much longer, I don’t think. Because things will go badly in the city and my name and deeds will be dragged into the light. Or because I will need to start a new life no matter what. I cannot stay in this crumbling house forever, subsisting on processed foods from the truck stop off the highway.
I have been buying newspapers there—the sorry excuses for groceries are almost an afterthought. These newspapers are the most vivid thing in my life: their slippery heft, the sounds they make, their thirsty texture. And their smell, of course: burnt paper, cheap ink, stale air.
I never read the paper, before now. Who in my demographic does? But if I need to run, I need to know when to do it.
The relevant news items are few and far between, and their prominence depends on the publication. I wish I could get local papers from the hometowns of my dead tycoons—I’m sure for lack of stories they are devoting lots of coverage to the disappearances of their successful sons. But I make do with what I can find, and wait for it to get worse or to disappear.
In the Real Estate section of the Times last week I read a profile of the brains and money behind the development in Giovanni’s building. There was no mention of his name or shop, but there was a snapshot of the lead developer—blond and tan and not as young as he looked—sitting sidewise in a barber’s chair. My chair. The last one before the door. Behind him, tastefully blurred by a shallow depth of field, a yawning dark void where the bathroom and the office had once been. The caption identified the space as the newest outpost of a trendy chain.
I have not seen a barber in some time now. My hair has grown out badly. In some places, I have noticed threads of silver. I imagine I will let it go on growing—the shimmer of grays is appealing, and length will go a long way to disguising me when paired with a new ID, a new name. Or rather, a very old one, which I shed after dropping out of school and into which I will now squeeze, like a crustacean forcing itself into an old shell.
When the time comes—or even if it doesn’t, because I must be so very cautious now—I will disappear into a new life. I will work in a small boutique, perhaps, in a town that is just turning the corner from depressed to trendy. Or I will start an Etsy shop selling “natural essences” to women who worry about chemicals in their perfume. The kind of women who wear mineral-based powder makeup and spend seventy-five dollars on eye cream. Or I will take a menial receptionist job at a small law office or local real-estate firm, where these same women will discreetly recommend their stylists to me when they notice that I do not dye my hair.
I will never wear the suit Beau made for me. To put it on would mar the careful illusion I’ve created. My watch, which you have noticed—yellow gold, showing brass where the plating is worn away—is already too daring, too obviously out of character. But if anyone asks, I will call it a family heirloom. An antique. This is not so far from the truth.
Vic Fowler’s life is over, as surely as Jane’s, Beau’s, Giovanni’s, Jonathan’s. I—whoever I am, and no, I will not tell you that—will live this new one now. It is in no way the life I envisioned for myself, but who among us is so lucky?
I came close. That should be enough.
That, and my work. No matter what, I will always have my work. And this is my masterpiece. Eleven soliflores and a series of thirty-six scents in succession. Created not only for myself—isn’t all art created for its artist first?—but for you.
Think of it as a self-portrait, but a self-portrait from which you, the viewer, look outward. A self-portrait that re-creates the subject’s surroundings so exactly that you, inhabiting the canvas, experience my likeness entirely from context.
The mildew of a basement studio. Steaming egg-yolk buns. The searing swirl of Scotch in a Glencairn glass. Burnt coffee. Jonathan’s rain-soaked cashmere coat. Proraso and Barbicide. Ambergris. Prosecco steam curling from the surface of a zabaglione, still warm. Sweet green hay, horse sweat, dry shampoo. The smell of Jane Betjeman’s neck, just behind her ear.
For me, this collection of scents is nostalgia, reminiscence, recollection. For you, it is an experience in radical empathy, or at least an adventure in voyeurism.
But for Vic Fowler, the persona, it is a reanimation. A raising from the dead.
When I wear these perfumes, I am me again. And when you wear them, you’re me too.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are so many people to thank for this book, for so many things. Base Notes got off to a rocky start, but there were some people who saw where it was headed before I did. Diana Pho knew from a half-assed pitch that the story had legs, and Connor Goldsmith said, “You’ve captured lightning in a bottle with this one,” which gave me the idea that I might be on the right track. Caitlin McDonald saw what the half-finished manuscript wanted so badly to be, and believed in it. Her feedback convinced me there were readers who would understand exactly what this gruesome, angry book was all about.
Long before all that, John Joseph Adams and Wendy Wagner published a reprint of “The Dirty American” in Nightmare. Before that appeared The Orange Volume, an anthology my Clarion class (2012) put together to raise money for the workshop.
