Base Notes, page 8
The bar Beau took us to was walking distance, behind a discreet door and up an elevator that might have led to the loft apartments above. It looked alarmingly like Jonathan’s threshold, and I’m afraid I closed my eyes after the chime rang, just before the doors opened. I don’t know what I worried I would see: An empty loft? A dark shape sprawled across a mattress on the floor, the curve of my own naked spine as I knelt above him? Or worse: the man alive, and disappointed.
I promise that I’m made of sterner stuff—you’ll see what I mean later—but it had been a harrowing evening already. I was somewhat out of sorts.
I recollected myself swiftly at a slight pressure on the small of my back—Beau, I thought. Giovanni wasn’t the casually touching type. And the movement inside the confined space of the elevator gave me a breath of the scent he wore: black pepper and the burning, sticky smell of hot asphalt.
Sure enough, I opened my eyes as he propelled me out of the elevator toward Giovanni, who held his coat over one arm and his hat in his hand.
The loft’s narrow length extended into dusty darkness, cut with the occasional bare low-wattage bulb. I could make out a few people in banquettes separated by salvaged doors, though not well enough to count how many. Chet Baker sang to himself on low: “The Thrill Is Gone.” The mirror behind the bottles of liquor was blooming with black age spots. Like the salvaged doors, it was no doubt a rescue from some venerable townhouse destined for demolition. Ancient pulley-powered fans hung from exposed beams, their blades lazily turning.
“Izzy,” said Beau, giving me a push toward the bar. “Let’s get this motherfucker a drink.”
The bartender, a petite person with a bleached flattop and pierced septum, looked up from their beaker and spoon. “Beau? Haven’t seen you in a minute. How’s Jane?”
“Prickly as ever, but I like to get poked. You know Giovanni?”
Izzy looked him up and down. “We’ve probably met. But in case we haven’t.” They put their hand across the copper bar top and shook. “Who are we getting a drink for?”
“Izzy, this is Vic. Vic, this is Izzy. Used to work with Jane up in the Village.”
“Don’t remind me. That place was a fucking mess. Nice to meet you, Vic.” We shared an assessing look, and I seemed to pass muster. “What do you drink?”
“Islays, usually. But—”
“Shit, one second. These guys have been riding my ass all night.” Izzy disappeared down the bar, where one of the other patrons had a hand raised and an unhappy look on her face.
“It’s not usually so crowded,” said Beau.
Giovanni looked skeptical. “It’s half-empty.”
“Industry bar. It doesn’t really start up until eleven. It’s hopping by two, if you’re ever in the neighborhood. I used to meet Jane here after work all the time.”
“Sorry about that.” Izzy came back with a bottle in one hand. “You like Islays? Let me know what you think of this. A rep brought it by earlier, and I can’t tell if I like it or it’s gross.” They dropped three glasses by the bottle, admonished us not to drink it all, and disappeared down the bar again before any of us could reply.
Beau poured. It was some kind of upstate effort to imitate the Old World: heavy handed and still young. But I was hardly in a state to complain.
“All right,” said Giovanni, after we’d all toasted. “What’s up with that guy from the party?”
I had been thinking, on the walk over, what information I could afford to part with, what would be most likely to inspire empathy without giving away anything too unsavory if either of them should turn to Google.
Eisner’s father had died in a nursing home of what seemed like natural causes and had a closed-casket funeral. Pearson’s old college rival was assumed to have been a suicide by drowning, body never found. Caroline Yates had been an isolated misanthrope and so far—six months in—nobody seemed to have noticed she was gone. Except whoever had hired Miles. But I couldn’t bear to think of that just now.
I could have managed it better, I suppose. I had assumed no one would remark upon her retiring from what little public life she led. I had been assured she interacted even with her own son but rarely. Assumptions, though . . . there was that pesky adage. Given the opportunity I would finesse things more precisely in the future. Or, as I planned to this time: outsource them.
To that end: “His name is Joseph Eisner. And he has me under the gun.”
No, I didn’t ask them outright. Not then. At that point, I wasn’t yet so desperate that it made me stupid.
“We’ve been doing some work together off the books,” I said. “He knows a few things about my business I’d rather weren’t spread around, and it’s in his power to get me in a lot of trouble if he likes.”
Giovanni’s thick eyebrows went up, and if his hair hadn’t been so mercilessly styled back from his forehead, they’d have disappeared.
“I know,” I said. “I know, I shouldn’t have—”
But he was already shaking his head, and Beau said, “Let he without sin, am I right?”
“I’ve just been in such a tight spot. And he always pays for his commissions in cash, on time. But now . . .”
“What the fuck is so important to him he’s going to put you over a barrel like this?” said Beau.
“I . . .” I looked down in shame. It wasn’t counterfeit. But the story I was about to give them, or rather, the intimations I was about to make? Those were. And the conclusions that they drew would, I hoped, be equally false. I had already referenced illegality. If I could get them to believe that my entanglement with Eisner was purely prurient . . . though as I had said to Barry, I wasn’t exactly his type. But these two didn’t know that. They had never met Eisner before tonight and knew nothing about his tastes; I could construct whatever narrative I needed to. “I’d rather not say. It’s . . . complicated. And embarrassing.” I had never been a blusher under the best of circumstances, but in the right light I could make a credible effort at conjuring the idea of it.
“What’s he threatening you with?” asked Giovanni. “Could you lawyer up?”
I gave him an eloquent look. “This is blackmail, Giovanni. The point of it is that I’d rather die than breathe a word.”
“Nothing’s that bad,” said Beau, tipping the bottle over his glass. Then mine, and Giovanni’s: a somewhat sheepish afterthought. “I mean, come on. Celebrity sex tapes get leaked and they keep making movies. How the hell’s he going to ruin your career?”
“Totally,” I said. And then, to hell with it. I had them both looking at me with bated breath and glittering eyes. They were halfway on the hook, and people like a story they can speculate about. “Prison isn’t out of the question.”
“Jesus,” said Giovanni. “What did you do?”
I gave him a tight smile and glanced back down at my bad whiskey.
“Look,” said Beau, leaning in. I noticed now that there was jasmine under the asphalt stink of his perfume, and (synthetic) ambergris. The smell of the whiskey was on his breath, but if anything it was an improvement over the nose out of the glass: this gave it something meaty and urgent. “It doesn’t matter what you did. This guy’s got no right. Unless you fucked him over first.” His left eye, his only eye, regarded me with unabashed scrutiny.
“Listen,” I said, matching his lean and adding a little hostility. “I’ll fuck and get fucked in equal measure, as I please. But nothing about this situation is pleasing to me. Eisner’s out of line, and I’m up a goddamned creek.”
Anyone else would have retreated from my intensity. But Beau got a little closer, and he grinned. “Damn,” he said. “I knew I liked you.”
“How are you going to get out of it?” asked Giovanni.
“Fulfill the commission,” I said, sitting up straight. “And pray he never comes back for more.”
“You know he will.” Giovanni pointed at me, lifting a finger from his glass. “That’s how shit like this works. As long as he’s got something on you, you’re working for free.”
The ember of pleasure that had begun to smolder at my interaction with Beau crumbled into ash. Giovanni was right, of course. I was deluding myself if I thought Eisner would stop here. “We’ll see.”
“Yeah, I see enough already. You’re screwed unless that old guy bites it.”
I shrugged and said, deadpan: “Maybe I should kill him.”
Giovanni laughed, because of course it was a joke.
“This was fun,” said Beau as the elevator closed on us. “Metzger, I haven’t seen you in a dog’s age.”
“I’ve been busy. It’s not a fucking cakewalk trying to run that place.”
“Yeah, yeah. Me too.” Beau passed a hand over his beard. He had some kind of oil in it, and I realized the ambergris came from that, rather than whatever he had sprayed or rolled onto his skin.
“Come in and get that thing shaped up some time,” said Giovanni, nodding at Beau’s beard. “Who’s doing it for you now?”
“Jane,” said Beau. “So don’t say shit.”
“I’m kidding, I’m kidding.” Giovanni punched the down button again, as the elevator seemed disinclined to move. “I miss seeing you both.”
“Come over sometime,” said Beau. “We’ll cook you dinner. I’ll ask Jane when’s good.”
Tucked beneath Beau’s chin with Giovanni talking over my head, I went largely ignored, which was awkward in such a small elevator. But then Beau elbowed me and said, “You come too. Jane likes you.”
Giovanni snorted. “She said that?”
“She didn’t have to.” The elevator finally opened onto the ground floor. “After you.”
The temperature had dropped starkly. New York in the colder months always left me faintly disoriented: all the smells died until spring. People complained about the piss and rotting garbage in the heat, but they were just an element in a larger landscape: a dark shadow against the brightness of freshly mulched parks, the bite of gasoline, the smoke from restaurant kitchens. In the summer I could have walked blindfolded from that building and known exactly where I was. Tonight, I made do with my eyes.
“Where are you headed?” Beau asked me.
“Harlem.”
“Shit. Guess you won’t want to share a cab. I’m in Crown Heights.”
“Sorry.”
He shrugged. “Never hurts to check. Metzger, don’t be a stranger.” He stepped into the street and stuck up a hand. Like magic, like a movie, a yellow cab cut out of traffic. I wondered how he could afford it. “I’ll text you guys about dinner,” he said. And then he was gone.
Giovanni was already shaking his head by the time the driver slipped back into the stream of cars.
“What?” I asked.
“You know he’s trying to pick you up, right?”
I always did like to receive confirmation of a theory. “I’d be flattered. But isn’t he engaged?”
“When has that ever stopped anybody?” Giovanni checked his watch: plain but well made, the leather strap starting to wear at the lugs. “Jesus, it’s late.”
“What about Jane?”
“Honestly?” Giovanni shot his cuffs to cover his watch but didn’t look back up. When he spoke, he stared across the street, eyes roaming. “If he says she likes you, half the work he’s putting in is for her. She’s shy; it’s why she’s got this whole hard-ass thing she does. I’ve seen them work this act before. Just thought you’d want a heads-up in case it isn’t your thing.”
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
“Is it?” he asked, a little sharp. “Your thing?”
I considered the various merits of several possible answers and wondered which, if any, was least liable to get me into trouble. Was Giovanni an erstwhile lover? Did he aspire and feel jealous? Or was he simply forthright, honest, and concerned?
“Would you mind if it was?” I asked.
He gave a deceptive little shrug beneath his chesterfield—a cramped rise of the shoulders that pretended not to care. “Not as long as it doesn’t get messy.” Seeming to realize that might be construed as innuendo, he went on. “I’ve just had to mop up after some ugly scenes, sometimes. Emotionally, I mean.”
Delicately, I ventured, “But you’ve never . . .”
He burst out laughing. “God no. I can’t even keep up with one houseplant. I don’t have the time.”
I could not help noticing this was an excuse, and not a denial.
“It’s like that thing earlier tonight,” he added, like he knew what I was thinking. “Not my scene. But I’ll show up for a friend.”
“You’re too good, Giovanni.”
From his expression, he knew it wasn’t quite a compliment. “Yeah, I know. At all the wrong things.” He tipped his hat. “See you around, Vic.”
I touched a fingertip to my brow, in poor imitation of his chivalry. “See you around.”
On Saturday, when no one else was in the lab, I bought half a dozen egg-yolk buns at East Broadway and returned to Eisner’s impossible project. If only my life and livelihood weren’t at the mercy of a petty multimillionaire, I might actually be excited about the prospect of experimenting. I hadn’t had the luxury in so long. But with such stakes I could hardly take pleasure in the process.
Earlier in the week, I had attempted to create a memory from whole cloth, using the scents I remembered from the moment, and a dab of my oboist’s essence. It had gotten me nowhere, so now I tried a different tack.
Sometimes, adding one element to another can produce an entirely new scent, the illusion of a third element. The phantom I wanted to summon was a moment in time—if I added an element to an existing memory, could I perhaps conjure the ghost of a new one?
Scent helps us recall memories we’ve already created. But memory is flawed and fickle. It can be changed. Influenced. I wondered if I couldn’t slightly alter some memory Eisner already had to suit my purposes. And so I introduced new elements into perfumes I had already created. Could I transform tried-and-true formulations by adding one new aspect?
A bouquet of jasmine on the oboist’s bedside table. She is leaning over, naked with the sheets sliding from her waist, nose pressed into the flowers. The meager light from the courtyard shades her skin blue-green and slides over her thick black hair.
I could imagine it so clearly that I almost believed. But I knew what I had added and dismissed the thing as my own fancy. More fool I.
I tried a few more, to see if I could deduce the difference between success and my own imagination: something burning under the broiler in the cramped kitchen of a chef I had seduced and decanted several years ago. An incongruous whiff of orange blossom in the hospital room where Eisner’s elderly father had met his end.
Yes, I did make perfumes from other people’s elements, if there was absolute left over. Not as trophies, understand, but for quality control. Before assaying a commission I liked to ensure that the absolute functioned as it must.
At any rate, it was my intent to introduce these elements into the memories. But as soon as I added an extra note to a fully realized perfume, its uncanny effects became muddled. Not nullified, but not quite what I had hoped for. I couldn’t tell if I was on the right track or only ruining perfectly good perfumes with my meddling.
Filled with frustration, I crammed the last half of a cold egg-yolk bun between my teeth and put my face into my hands.
My phone vibrated at my elbow, screen alight. A group text, and not on the thread I kept with Barry and Leila for work-related issues. At first I didn’t recognize the numbers. Once I read the string of messages, I realized that one of them was Beau. By default, then, the other must be Giovanni. I had his number, I realized, on the card he had given me last week, but I had yet to enter it into my phone. And I had not yet given Beau’s number a name. I did so now, as well as adding Giovanni. When I clicked back to the thread, their names showed at the top, lending a sudden human intimacy to the series of gray bubbles below.
Brunch tomorrow? read Beau’s first text. Our place?
Then, still Beau:
tacky I know but its the only day Jane can do and she needs to get to bed early
We can shut the curtains and pretend its Friday night
No mimosas
Promise
Giovanni had not answered yet. I set the phone aside, unwilling to seem eager. Let them all think I had better things to do, or could not rearrange my schedule at such short notice.
But upon a moment’s reflection, I picked it up again and asked, What time?
We were playing different games, and mine did not require modesty or feigned disinterest. If he and Jane hoped to seduce me, fine; I had much higher hopes for them.
8
Notes de Tête: Green Olives, Citrus, Cappelletti
Notes de Cœur: Browned Butter, Sage
Notes de Fond: Coal Tar and Brandy
I tried to remember the last time I had gone to someone’s house on a social call, and failed.
Perhaps it had been Jonathan. I had a hard time framing those afternoons, evenings, and late nights as anything other than exactly what they had been. Which frankly defied framing. Time spent with Jonathan existed in a category of its own.
But I had often arrived with a bottle of wine, bought from the cramped shop on Canal where I came up from the subway. It lent a thin veneer of sociability and style to what otherwise came down to sex and talking shop. We drank so much together: the wine we’d split, sometimes with takeout, sometimes on empty stomachs. And then there was always Scotch after the sex. Jonathan’s lessons about whisky were less frustrating to follow than the knowledge he dispensed in the lab. At work, I had to watch and listen closely to catch what he was doing, and he usually only allowed a few questions before irritation overcame him. After half a bottle of wine and an orgasm, presented with his life’s second-greatest passion, he could become positively loquacious.
The bottles of wine that I bought were subject to such intense scrutiny that I grew better and better at selecting them, and even at hunting up good bottles for good prices. I eventually outgrew the shop on Canal, after amassing a body of knowledge far greater than that of the staff.
