Perfume
Going Through Old Notebooks Part 16: I am in Italy, at eighteen, and I am traveling alone along the Ligurian coast.
Not long after moving to Paris, I became something of a perfume hunter. I loved the smell of perfumes on other people as they passed me in the street. I strolled through department stores and niche boutiques, collecting samples. I liked, when standing near strangers on the Metro, or taking a seat beside someone on a museum bench, if I caught a whiff of something woodsy, spicy, resinous, floral. There was the strong oud I smelled on young North African men, and the Champagne-like aldehydes enveloping older women dressed in Chanel.
Sometimes, I could recognize and name of the perfume, while others I could not. My own mother had owned a bottle of Joy by Patou when I was a small child, bought for her as a present from my father, as well as a luxurious-looking body powder with a large puff, in a black and sienna canister, decorated with gilded leaves, and scented with the perfume Opium by Yves Saint Laurent.
My first encounter with a perfume that I wanted for myself came when I was about eleven or twelve years old. A friend’s mother had given me a sample bottle of Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel. I put it in the front pocket of my gray hooded sweatshirt, but then I got caught in the rain. When I arrived home, without thinking, I threw the sweatshirt in the dryer, forgetting the little bottle of perfume inside.
Later, when I took it out of the dryer, this sweatshirt had been saturated with a scent like nothing I had ever smelled before. Things had been difficult of late—a divorce, a change of schools, a new group of peers who made fun of my clothes—and it smelled like a better life; like order and safety and hot flowers; like hyacinth and happiness and possibility; like a house that was always clean, always warm, where no one ever cried, or yelled, or slammed doors.
Of course, our taste in scent is linked to memory and emotion. The olfactory lens opens and closes, like an eye, transporting us as surely as any time machine. Segments of dreams, transparently thin, are arrayed upon the glass of a microscope. The years flutter apart like pages of an unbound manuscript, scattered across the grass, and in no particular order.
For example:
