Going Through Old Notebooks Part 16: Perfume

I am in Italy, at eighteen, and I am traveling alone along the Ligurian coast.

Photograph of roses grown for Chanel No. 5, by Pari Dukovic for The New Yorker.

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:

I’m in Hawaii, at three years old, and a fresh lei of orchids and frangipani is sitting in a pool of cool water in the hotel sink.

I’m in San Francisco, at seventeen years old, climbing a street tree at night, my feet in Doc Martens finding footholds against the bark. My long, striped skirt dangles over the parking meters. My friend waits anxiously in the car parked below. This is an orange tree, flowering in late winter, with fragrant white orange blossoms emerging from bursts of shining dark leaves, damp with rain or fog. My fingers twist at the rough bark of smaller stems, stealing a bouquet of branches.

I’m in the orangerie at the Chateau de Versailles, at forty-one, in late summer. A smell like clay and beeswax wafts from the hall, now empty, for the trees are all outside. I am with a man I don’t know if I’ll stay married to. In the nearby garden, we are surrounded by orange, lemon, and pomegranate trees, planted in square, gray-green pots. Most of the citruses bear neither blossoms nor fruit, but an ancient gardenia tree, shaded by the long shadows of the palace, is covered in buttery white flowers.

In Mexico, at thirty-two, in the Yucatan, I pass a church in the evening that is preparing for a wedding. I am with a man, whom I have just fallen in love with, but will not marry. The tall wooden doors of the church are thrown open and a golden light is spilling out over the pavement. Inside, the pews have been decorated with enormous garlands of white lilies—so many, in fact, that the scent is like its own microclimate, the air around them thicker, slower, like air from another time. The walls of the church are painted with lily motifs as well, so the real, living lilies are like a host of gods taking residence in their own temple. We could still smell them from down the street as we walked back to our hostel, long after the light of the church had faded from view.

One more.

I am in Italy, at eighteen, and I am traveling alone along the Ligurian coast. There is the smell of earth and of sun on the earth; of hillsides of myrtle and juniper and basil. Sunlight is coming in through the open window of a train car, stopped at the station. A young man with the name of a mortal from Greek mythology—a native English speaker with an accent I don’t recognize—has been talking with me on the train for several hours. We have been talking about physics, and art, and whatever else we can think of. He has black hair and wears glasses, and is older than me—by how much I don’t know. He is a grad student in astronomy, headed to an observatory in the south of France. Since I want to be an artist, and he wants to be an astronomer, we probably talk about the stars.

We had changed trains together earlier that day, and he carried my backpack for me and then hoisted it up onto the wooden luggage rack above the green leather seats. Now it is late afternoon, and he is supposed to get off at this stop and take a different train, while I will continue on to meet a friend in another city.

He asks me to get off the train with him. We could have dinner, talk some more, walk around, he says. I have not yet seen the famous movie where this happens. The look on his face is open, friendly, nervous. I want to get off the train, but I have a boyfriend back home, and so I do not. I do not get off the train, and we do not exchange information. The train moves on, plunging unto tunnels and through hills like black holes before emerging back out into the landscape again, and the bright evening sun, as the hills grow increasingly blue, and then gray, as the sun falls at last behind the horizon and the night comes on, the earth turning towards the darkness of the interstellar medium.

All of this has an aroma.

For my first few years in Paris, I thought I needed to find my own “signature scent”; that I needed some magical formula that would communicate a snapshot of all these moments, all these memories; of orchids and oranges, lilies and myrtle. It would be like an olfactory riddle, a secret code, the answer to which would be—what, exactly? Something about love or travel? Or paths not taken, spoken in citrus and exotic flowers and the dry Italian hills?

I ordered a sample bottle of the original Anaïs Anaïs by Cacharel off eBay. I didn’t want to ruin the experience by smelling it straight from the bottle, so I pulled off the cap and poured a small amount onto a piece of white paper, and waited. A moment, then two. I inhaled.

A rush of emotion flooded back, and tears sprang to my eyes. It still smelled like the sweatshirt I had pulled from the dryer, in a laundry room where I would often sit atop the washing machine in the dark, reading from the light of a red clip-on book lamp. There were hyacinths, and lilies, and something else indescribable. I smelled not so much what Cacharel had made, but my sweatshirt, and that laundry room, and my twelve-year-old self, and the dreams she had had of what her life might one day contain. It had pierced me, this perfume, but was not a scent I would wear now.

I put the paper with the perfume on it inside the pages of a book, and put the book on a shelf, but the scent still haunted the room for hours. That lily note: I was standing on a street in Mexico, with a man I loved but would not marry, smelling the warm interior of a lily-flooded church. I was pulling the Hawaiian lei from the water. I was watching as my mother, young and beautiful, applied her Joy by Patou, her Opium body powder. I was with my father, standing on a tropical night, beside a bush of flowering fuchsia bougainvillea.

Was it really too late? Could I really not go back in time? To get off that train in Italy. To say the things I didn’t say. To learn the things I didn’t learn. To ask what I didn’t ask. To take the paths I hadn’t taken. Was it too late to still live the life that the smell of this ubiquitous mall perfume had once promised to a sixth grade girl?

Eventually I gave up on the idea of a signature scent. I had worn Carnal Flower by Frédéric Malle before, and then Le Temps des Rêves by Annick Goutal for a while, and then ran through a few samples of Do Son by Dyptique, and other iterations of citrus and white flowers. I fell in love with Gelsomino by Santa Maria Novella, but the scent was so fleeting, I couldn’t justify the steep price. For a few years now I have combined Chanel No. 5 L’Eau and Chanel No. 22, which has little to do with my scent memories, and which no one ever recognizes, but which makes me feel clean and put together. Safe, for some reason. An invisible armor between me and the world.

A few years ago, out of curiosity, I tried to find the astronomer from the train. With only his first name and intended profession to go on, nevertheless, with a little googling, I found him. He was just as handsome as I remembered, still wearing his glasses, and still smiling the same friendly smile. His bio said that he specialized in star formation, and the physical and chemical processes in the interstellar medium.

I sent him an email and explained who I was. I mentioned only that I believed we had once spoken for hours on a train in Italy, and where exactly, and when, but not that he had invited me to get off the train with him.

He wrote back quickly, his message friendly, and curious. He was indeed in Italy at that time, and riding trains around the region, but he didn’t recall ever meeting an eighteen-year-old girl. He asked about my writing, and said he’d like to read my work, despite not being the man I was looking for, but I never replied.

I know it was him, or at least I think I know it, even if he doesn’t remember.