“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse, a spring shut up, a fountain sealed.”

—Song of Solomon

“I’ll be buried in white,” she said, with her hands folded in resignation on the glitter-flecked Formica tabletop, “because I’ll die in the same condition I was born in—I’ll die a virgin.”

The heady, Far East-inspired exoticism of Shalimar would seem to make it an unlikely fragrance for a virginal, seventy-something auntie. But that’s what my Great-Aunt Lorraine was when she confided the above to my mother and I one afternoon a decade ago, and what she still is, except that now she is eighty-something. And Shalimar is what she has always worn.

Shalimar is Sanskrit for “temple of love.” Jacques Guerlain named the perfume after the Garden of Shalimar in Lahore, India, which the emperor Shah Jehan built for his favorite wife. Lorraine might have worn mild White Shoulders or prim L’air du Temps, both of which she gifted me with during my adolescence. Instead she went for lush, appetizing Shalimar, which seems to contain a bazaar’s worth of dreamy delectables. White Shoulders and L’air du Temps would have been suitable as her real life scents. But she always wore the perfume of her dream life.

Still, Shalimar suited her when she chose it as a teen in 1940, when she was a nubile daughter of not the Far but the Middle East, with a Lebanese father and a Lebanese mother. She had black hair, enormous chocolate eyes, dusky olive skin, and a nose of refreshingly unrefined proportions, a nose of the sort that few would leave unaltered today.

Having come from a long line of grocers, it’s easy to see how she would have found Shalimar’s slightly gourmand, spice-and-vanilla scent appealing. Her father, like all eight of his brothers, ran his own market, where she spent countless hours as a girl. It was full of fresh pink meats marbled with pearlescent webs of fat; fruits like jewels oozing their sugared, shimmery juices; fishes with silver mermaid scales and frozen eyes like miniature marbles; vegetables of gold, orange and green that made a delicious snapping sound when she bent and broke them, just for the pleasure of it; brown barrels of cellophane-wrapped candies that she sneaked into her palms alongside her barely-older brother; tins of loose-leaf Earl Grey tea that smelled glowingly of bergamot; glass jars of every possible preserve, like plasticine cherries suspended in dark rose-red syrup, and strong, sour cucumbers pickled in vinegar and dill; and, lining the shelf behind the cash register, small jars of spices, all kinds of spices, strange, shaved and slivered, threads of golden saffron, and russet ground anise, and long, brown vanilla beans, which looked wise and professorial, and shriveled black tonka beans, which were like little old men, and fragments of flowers, bark, and leaves, all of them redolent of soil, skin, blossoms, and of things she had never seen or known.

She never ventured far from the market her father ran, or from the family home nearby on Heliotrope Street. That was the way she was raised. Her mother surrounded the house in flowers, which bloomed year-round in the Mediterranean climate of Orange County. There was night blooming jasmine climbing the trellis near the front door, rows of roses in all colors, and peach trees heavy with furred fruit. When Lorraine was a girl, her mother sculpted her thick hair into long banana curls à la Mary Pickford, and called her “Rainie.” As a pair, they worked together in the lush garden and especially in the kitchen, and from her mother, a genius cook, Rainie learned to be a kind of white witch therein. She conjured cookies out of persimmons, rolled cinnamon-sprinkled ground lamb into briney, soft grapevine leaves, drizzled rosewater onto pistachios before enveloping them between papery sheets of transparent dough to make baklava, and enclosed ripe, explosive fruits within the carefully woven lattice cages of pie crusts. Surrounded as she was by the smells of flowers and spices, and by the vanillic warmth of daily baking, it seems natural that she chose Shalimar as her signature scent when she grew old enough.

And, brought up as she was in an atmosphere of such foody and flowery fecundity, it seems equally natural that she would have become the fertile head of her own household, cooking intricate meals for the family that she bore, a life-giving empress with Middle Eastern mysteries in her blood. That was what she wanted, what she dreamed.

Her teens passed, and her twenties did, too. She worked as a secretary at Cherry Rivet, a company that made special metal rivets for airplanes during World War II. She was impeccably groomed, always turned out in the latest forties fashions, her hair cropped and set, her skin exquisitely perfumed with her Shalimar. She was unfailingly well mannered, efficient, capable. She played in her bowling league once a week. She went home every night to her mother and father. No emperor came to make her the empress of her own abode, to give her a bevy of babies to lavish with Shalimar-scented caresses. She was pleasant, intelligent, fastidiously clean, impeccably groomed, and a lady. But there was nobody. Maybe it was her unconventional beauty, the unrefined shape of her nose. On the outside, she was composed and uncomplaining. On the inside, naturally, she dreamed.

Sometimes she visualized herself abstractly as two parallel lines made of the fine threads with which her mother had taught her to sew: one thread was her real life as she lived it, and the other was her dream life. They ran alongside each other, close but always separate, and she was waiting for them to merge, to twist together into one beautiful, thick piece of floss. Sometimes it was merely her body, her shell, that walked along the thread of her real life, while her mind and heart and soul—the very sap of her—followed the second thread of her dream life. So she waited. She brought coffee to her boss, and bowled, and baked. And finally, when she was well into her thirties, Bill appeared. He was the one she loved.

She loved him because he was vital and fun, funny and smart, and a bit older than her, so that he was able to inspire her absolute comfort and trust, and to draw out her dormant vivacity. She loved that he was already a father, because she was so fond of children, and he even wanted to have more. She loved the way he respected her while they sat in his parked 1956 Skylark in front of her parents’ house, sometimes for hours, when he delivered her home every night. Especially she loved the warm melting sensation that suffused her when she was near him, and the way her Shalimar grew slightly stronger in his presence.

He loved her cloistered voluptuousness, her bold, unrefined nose, which seemed to him to betray her sensuality and substance, and her Song-of-Solomon scent, Shalimar, which—with its bergamot and lemons, its roses and jasmine, its anise and vanilla and tonka—seemed to encompass all the garden delights of that Old Testament poem. They went out on dates, to eat and to dance. When he held her close he sensed all the goodness running through her, and foresaw all the goodness that would come out of her. He wanted to marry her. He told her so one night as they sat in his parked car outside her parents’ house with fingers intertwined, while the peaches ripened on the trees and the jasmine shone up at the moon. Rainie saw the two parallel threads of her real life and her dream life about to twist together, and she was filled with urgency and excitement, like the hot berries bubbling up within her caged pies.

She kissed him goodnight and walked inside. In the intimacy of the warm fragrant kitchen she told her mother and father everything. They sat in their bathrobes around the glitter-flecked Formica table and drank fizzy sodas while she fairly effervesced with the contents of her heart. They asked her many questions about Bill and she answered them all with the guilelessness and honesty of a loyal daughter. That was the way she was raised. And she went to bed and tried to sleep so she could be alert at Cherry Rivet the next day, but she couldn’t; she kept seeing the faces of her future children, and thinking happily that they would have so many cousins to play with, because her brother, though he was only one year older than her, already had a big family of five children.

The next evening after work Rainie noticed her mother was quiet while they prepared dinner together in the kitchen. She seemed to step more softly and slowly than usual, and the food slipped right out of her uncharacteristically tentative hands. Once her mother looked at her like she was about to say something, but she just swallowed. She finally spoke when she dropped a string bean on the kitchen floor. “There will be another,” she said, and Rainie thought that was strange to say, because of course there was a whole bowl overflowing with the long, bendy beans tipped so touchingly with their fine, curling tendrils—more than the three of them could ever eat in one night.

But at dinner she understood. Her father explained that she could not marry Bill. She could not marry a man who was not a Catholic. She could not marry a man who had already been married and divorced. And she could not marry a man who already had children of his own. It wasn’t right for her, he said.

There were things her father did not say, but that she knew. Her parents had not chosen each other because of how melty they made each other feel; they were first cousins and their marriage had been arranged for them. Rainie thought of her brother with his five beautiful children and his wife. Her parents had been disappointed when he married an Irish-American girl of sixteen with blonde braids instead of the Lebanese cousin they had picked for him. When they found out years later that the Irish wife had been adopted and her bloodlines consequently untraceable, her father disowned her brother. Her brother and his big family still came to the house on Heliotrope every week for the obligatory Sunday dinner, but he and his father never spoke to each other, and everyone pretended not to notice the loneliness in the space between the two men. It was the loneliness of a disownment.

The next night, Bill came to pick her up for their date. Instead of driving anywhere they sat once again in his parked car in front of her parents’ house while she explained. After a long time she left the Skylark and walked up the drive, past the blown roses and the bruised, fallen peaches, and stepped back into her parents’ house, and that was where she spent every single night of the rest of her life.

Years came and went. Her father sold his market. She stopped bowling after her mother died; there was too much to be done around the house. But she still had her hair set every week, and dressed in the latest looks, and sprayed herself moderately with Shalimar. She bought extravagant gifts for each of her brother’s children on every holiday and birthday, and cooked them dinner every Sunday when they came to visit. In 1979 she retired from Cherry Rivet. Her coworkers threw her a big party with a cake and presented her with the last in a series of gold lapel pins.

Her father sat silently in his wheelchair. He could not speak after his strokes, or walk, or do anything for himself at all. Rainie cooked for him, fed him, bathed him, dressed him, lifted him out of his chair into bed and bathtub and back again. She refused to hire a nurse to help. He was, she said, “her dad.” She cared for him, kept the house polished to a near-blinding shine, and allowed not one stray leaf to blemish the orderly garden. She did all the shopping, and remembered everything that needed remembering—the bedpans, the laundry, the dishes, the dusting.

To everyone she was Auntie Rainie. She was, it was said, the person in the family who always did everything right, who never judged or complained or had a bad word to say about anyone. As her nieces and nephews grew older they came in their fast cars to visit her in the house on Heliotrope. They sat around the old glitter-flecked Formica table in the kitchen and drank sodas that fizzed with the exuberance and activity of their modern lives. They had boyfriends and girlfriends who came and went, and babies out of wedlock; they married drug dealers, and got divorces. She might have thought to herself how much the family had changed since she was young, but she never said so.

She walked straight along the taut thread that was her real life. But always, there was the other, running invisibly right alongside it—the dream life. Sometimes she stood in the small kitchen mashing potatoes to a milky pulp, or mixing a lemon-drenched tabbouli salad with her mother’s favorite spoon, and her Shalimar came alive with her warmth, and, using that scented key, which could only be smelled but never held, she was granted entry into her dream life. She opened a door and stepped onto that other, shimmering thread.

There, the man’s body she knew so thoroughly was not her father’s ailing, broken one but her husband’s, and it had a heart inside of it that was always open to her. The voices of children playing in neighbor’s yards were the shouts of her own brood, and the food she was mixing was meant to grow their bones and nourish their blood, which had come from her bones and her blood. Her own body, which was always so tense and weary in her real life, became supple as the garden roses, blooming open, a “temple of love,” inviting affection and bestowing beauty on everyone. She could meander along that thread for hours, for days.

Even though she never strayed far from the house on Heliotrope, or took a vacation, or even spent a night away, she did a lot of traveling. She traveled between her real life and her dream life. If she mourned the latter’s unreality and was resentful of her circumstances, she didn’t show it. Even when she confided in my mother and I that afternoon that she would be buried in white, she was matter of fact, almost chipper, rather than sad. That was the way she was raised. Still, when I hugged her goodbye that day, I could smell it—the smell of her truest, secret self, the smell of everything she really was, and of all that was not.

Issey Miyake wanted his eponymous fragrance to smell like water, but to me it will always smell like a very specific type of water: the salt-tinged sort that streams from eyes in times of sorrow.

One night I was upset and did what one should never do in a tearful condition: grabbed my purse and jumped behind the wheel of my car. There should be a law against Driving While Crying; a broken heart does not a decent driver make.

Unbeknownst to me, a tiny sample vial of L’Eau d’Issey (translation: Issey’s water) eau de parfum, which I had obtained two days earlier, was tucked among the contents of my purse, and leaking out little drops therein while big ones streaked my cheeks.

For a few confused moments, I thought my tears were exuding an odor like flower-infused water. It was vaguely sweet, slightly sharp, clean and clear but with a faintly harsh undertone like a ragged sob, and at its bottom there was a warm musky essence of soaking wet driftwood, which was like the languid, cuddly, unclogged calm that comes after a good cry. I was befuddled, but figured that since I was shedding a whole new type of tears, they must be seeping a whole new kind of scent. Then I detected the odor’s origination from my purse, and realized it was the L’Eau d’Issey, oozing. Still, the two will always overlap in my mind—Issey water and eye water.

A short while later, I became the owner of an enormous quantity of L’Eau d’Issey. It had been presented to me as a concilatory gift by the one who had ascertained my interest in it when I’d obtained the sample a few days before—the one who had also inspired my tears. I tried to wear the perfume a dozen times, but ultimately I could not because of what it reminded me of,  so I sold it on eBay.  I did not want that many tears.

Grandpa presented her with her first bottle in 1953. Now, at eighty-one, my grandma is still going around with Dew dabbed on her wrists.

Prior to receiving the bottle from Grandpa, she had never worn any perfume at all. A photo of them taken on a date at a supper club just before they married shows her for the fresh-faced, fragrance-free, fifteen-year-old that she was: no makeup, Noxema-clean cheeks, hair pulled off of her face, white eyelet cotton dress.

But she wore the Youth Dew that Grandpa brought home for her. She always adhered to the bath oil, which was the form in which the Estee Lauder fragrance first debuted, rather than the actual perfume, which came out later and which she considered too strong. And so the slightly viscous, boozy-hued attar joined the other fixed elements of her lifelong grooming ritual: in the morning, there was a scrubbing with strong soap in the shower followed by a generous allover dusting of baby powder and a few drops of Youth Dew bath oil drizzled onto either wrist; at night, there was a slathering of Noxema applied and rinsed over the bathroom sink followed by a generous smearing of Oil of Olay. Her Oil of Olay was pink and came in a squatty jar with a black lid that unscrewed. I dabbed the cloudy cream on own my face for years, because as a youngster all my own grooming habits came straight from Grandma, who had stood my skinny, shivery, babyish, post-bath body atop the closed lid of the toilet and patted me head to toe and nook to cranny in baby powder too many times to count.

Once she had incorporated Youth Dew into her beauty routine it seemed she could never let it go, even though she let Grandpa go twenty-five years into the marriage. After she left, he sat at the dining room table every night, bent his head toward the unread newspaper that lay spread before him, and wetted it with tears. He did that for seven years. Then he gave up and married somebody else. And she married somebody else. But she never stopped wearing the Youth Dew.

“I’ve been wearing it fifty years, since Carl got me started on it,” she often says. “It’s not expensive, and people always compliment the way I smell. They say, ‘Anne, you always smell so good.’” One person who isn’t fond of Grandma’s signature scent, interestingly, is her own daughter, who is also my mother. I suspect it is the indolic nature of Youth Dew that Mom finds objectionable. For my part, I cannot really establish any sort of opinion of the fragrance. When I consider its notes, I think it sounds like a gorgeous concoction, an ancient balm fit for a goddess. But I cannot approach it in the manner that I do other fragrances, because for me isn’t even a fragrance; it’s a person. Even trying it on is problematic.

A few years ago, I visited Grandma at the apartment complex for self-sufficient seniors where she lives. After she went to sleep, watched over by the framed photographs of each of her children that embellish the wall in her bedroom, I tiptoed into the bathroom and unscrewed the little gold cap of what must have been her 700^th bottle of Youth Dew bath oil. Strangely, though I had adopted (and eventually outgrown) Grandma’s Oil of Olay and baby powder routines, I had never so much as tried on her fragrance. And so, for the very first time in my life, I anointed my wrists with the dark, spicy bouquet, which I imagine, with its vaguely biblical notes, approximates the stuff Mary Magdalene carried in her alabaster perfume jar. Then I retired to my bed and prepared to snuggle into a enchanting haze of cloves, roses, ylang ylang, jasmine, cinnamon, frankincense, oakmoss, vanilla patchouli, and other precious essences with which I was sure I would fall in love as I smelled them emanating from my own flesh. Instead, to my disappointment, I found that the scent felt completely wrong—or, more specifically, that I felt completely wrong wearing something that is so intimately, eternally her. There was no fragrance to consider, there was only Grandma, warmed by my pulse. It was hard to fall asleep with the feeling that I’d sneakily slipped into someone else’s skin.

After that, I left her bottle of Youth Dew bath oil undisturbed, but I took pleasure in its design even if I couldn’t indulge in its contents. The bath oil bottle does not sport the cutesy pleats, nipped-in waist and tidy, golden bow of the Youth Dew perfume bottle, which has the silhouette of a modest midcentury housewife who was born to please. Instead, it is flatter, smoother, and looks and feels something like a flask, which is appropriate considering that: 1. Grandma is noisy, used to race cars, and was never really the housewifey type; and 2. the fluid inside is liquor brown. Anymore, its rare to see a fragrance with this dark of a color. Youth Dew is the same shade as certain types of whiskey—which arguably may be the true dew of youth, or at least the elixir of youthful husbands and wives in the fifties.

Once, when Grandpa and Grandma were young, they walked from their little house in Los Angeles down the street to the neighbors’ abode where they ate and capital-D Drank. And Grandma, being a breathless and breastless child bride who weighed no more than ninety pounds when she was married at sixteen, was not sizable enough to handle much alcohol. When she and Grandpa left the neighbors, she, in her inebriated state, proceeded to peel off her suddenly unbearable dress, shoes, stockings, and all the rest, so that by the time they reached their own front door she was stark naked. I can see her, adolescent and laughing, loud and gorgeous in the moonlight, with her moon-yellow curls, with the baby powder glistening off of her like Los Angeles stardust, with the Youth Dew throbbing off of her wrists to join the symphony of gardenias, orange blossoms and jasmine that scented and still scent the Los Angeles nights.

Grandpa always described his second wife as “a good woman.” But he didn’t feel the same type of fiery love for anyone that he felt for Grandma, who was his true love. He had once described to me the impression she made on him when they first met, using a term that at the time struck me as pleasantly retro: “She was a real humdinger,” he said. As often seems to be the case with married couples, one loves more ardently than the other, and in their case that one was Grandpa. He managed to get her pregnant eleven times. She lost seven of those babies: six died before they were born; one, a little girl, died in childhood.

The collection of old photos with which I am currently filling an album shows her in varying stages of fertility. In one picture, she is hugely pregnant, full of the twin boys she would carry to term and lose. In another, she has just lost the twins, and is licking an ice cream cone in an effort to keep her morale and her weight up. In one, she sits on the beach, bare feet wiggling in the sand, not yet knowing the sensation of baby in her belly. In another, she is surrounded by four of her offspring and holding the fifth in her arms, the daughter who would pass away at the age of six.

As also often seems to be the case with married couples, the loss of a child takes a toll, and in Grandma and Grandpa’s case it did, though it is hard to gauge to what extent. One person was made to feel to blame for the death. Another person was made to feel uncaring for not appearing to grieve as much as the other. And who knows what other emotional effluvia passed back and forth between the two of them. A marriage, after all, is a mystery to all who exist outside of it, and sometimes is most mysterious of all to the pair who share it. They stayed married for close to ten more years after their child died.

Some of the old photographs I’ve been sorting through were originally presented to Grandpa from Grandma back when their union was so new that the dew, so to speak, was still on it. I can tell that she gave the photos to him because she wrote messages on their backs that she addressed to him. They are short missives, dashed off in her hasty handwriting, affectionate and even a bit childish, (she inexplicably embellished the last “e” of her name with a French accent mark), and overflowing with all the hope of youth—like this one, scrawled on the back of a picture that shows her mouth opened in a delighted giggle: “You made me laugh when you took this, as you always will—down the trail of life together. We two honey will be the happiest pair alive. It was meant to be.”

“Hetty opened the door. She was surprised and concerned when she saw me. She had just washed her face with Sunlight soap—it smelled so fresh.”    —Charlie Chaplin, My Autobiography

I wish I could sniff a bar of Sunlight soap, which is what 19-year-old Londoner Charlie Chaplin smelled emanating from the clean cheeks of his young love, Hetty Kelly, a little Irish “gazelle” with a “bewitching full mouth and beautiful teeth” whom he had first spotted on stage as part of a dance troupe called the Yankee Doodle Girls.

I can’t forget reading Charlie Chaplin’s autobiography when I was twelve. That was my spongiest year, the one during which everything I read, saw and thought seemed to seep right into me and stay, never to be wrung out of my blood, bones or brain. The main reasons I can’t forget reading Charlie’s life story are the three sentences reproduced above. They alone, out of all the content that filled the 500-odd pages densely packed with delicious depictions of Old Hollywood, are what most stuck with me; once I came to them, no doubt while lying belly down behind the closed door of my purple-painted, prepubescent bedroom in the golden afterschool hours, I reread them over hundreds of times. Together, they have remained a permanently bound cluster and a fixture in my mental catalog of unforgettable sentences. This is because of the explosive, ringing gladness they caused in my developing consciousness when I first encountered them. I memorized the sentences like a poem, a sort of Anglo haiku, and was happy to find, upon checking the autobiography out of the library today, that, some eighteen years later, my memory of them has not failed me.

The sentences’ power had something to do with the very elements that comprised them— the words themselves: “sunlight,” “soap,” “smelled,” “so,” and “fresh.” And it probably also had something to do with their alliteration, a sometimes accidental stylistic device for which I have a weakness. And it especially had something to do with the sepia-tinted images the sentences caused to sprout in my imagination. I could see Hetty standing in the doorway with her freshly washed face, as if I were Charlie himself. I could almost smell her, but not quite, having never (not even to this day) come nose-to-bar with Sunlight soap. Still, just as Charlie fell in love with Hetty, so did I fall in love with the idea of the smell of that soap with which she was forever associated in his memory.

It is widely acknowledged that odor and memory cling to each other in a fierce manner not unlike that of childhood sweethearts, and that in the humid slivers of space that exist within their tight embrace the most potent of emotions flourish. Few feelings are as transportive as those born of the marriage of memory and smell.

And Charlie had managed to suffuse a few unfussy sentences with all three—memory, smell, emotion. Now, so many years after first reading those sentences, my own emotions about and memories of being a twelve-year-old girl who was just beginning to think about romantic love are inextricably tied up with Charlie’s feelings and memories of being young and in love. And all of them—my feelings and memories and his—are tied up with Sunlight soap. This is what the best artists do: entwine your own emotions and memories with theirs.

When Hetty opened the door to Charlie with her Sunlight-scrubbed face, he had already, in his boyish failure to endure the sense of suspense inherent to young love, broken her heart, being convinced she did not love him as he loved her. He had returned to her home see if he might resurrect their chaste affair, but it was too late. “She remained standing at the front door, her large eyes looking cold and objective. I could see it was hopeless.”

Still, it wasn’t altogether over, at least not in a metaphysical sense, if you consider Hetty,

who died of the flu at 25, to be a kind of archetypal predecessor to Charlie’s late-in-life-wife (he 54, she 18), the lush Irish lassie Oona O’neill, impressively fertile Oona, she of the wide mouth and libidinous teeth.

***

Does Sunlight soap really smell of sunlight? I once wore a perfume that did. It was the first perfume I wore with any regularity. In fact, I went through two bottles of it, and donned it daily for a period spanning about two years, during the ages of 18 and 19, before I knew anything about perfume except what I liked and what I did not.

I found it back in 1997 at, of all place, a chain retailer called Pier One, which in those days sold clothes, accessories, and little soaps and things in addition to furniture and home décor. The perfume was called Clementine, presumably because it was redolent of tiny Clementine oranges, which was appropriate considering my lifelong love of citrus blossoms, as well as my status as an Orange County child born and bred; I’d spent the whole of my young life in a place that had once been a veritable patchwork of citrus groves, most of which, by the time I was 18, had long since been razed to make way for tract after tract of pinkish stucco houses. Still, I romanticized the groves and gravitated toward Clementine, which seemed to capture their ghostly exudations.

Clementine was neither especially blossomy nor altogether fruity but definitely sunny. Yes, sunny and inexpensive and uncomplicated, appropriate for a temperate teen, and once, when I was freshly showered, with wet inky waterfalls of hair spilling down the back of my pea coat, cheeks flushed from washing, and neck redolent of Clementine, I stepped into the coffee shop where I worked and an unknown customer appraised me and, without any pervy undertones but with genuine delight, uttered to his friend a single sentence that gave me almost the same sort of zing I had got from Charlie’s Sunlight soap poem so many years before: “She looks and smells clean,” the man said, and that was my own Hetty Kelly moment.

Every time I spray Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare, I think of Josie smelling it, sitting in her living room and smiling, and I think of her, the water nymph in the painting that used to hang on the wall in Josie’s living room.

Josie lived in a century-old Victorian on one of Bozeman’s most arboreal streets. The house was close to the university where she was a professor of Native American Studies. When she and her partner of nearly 20 years, Ellen, moved from North Carolina, Josie’s home state, to the house in Bozeman, they filled it with enchanting and kitschy old objects that had belonged to Josie’s Southern ancestors, and painted the exterior an appalling shade of lavender. Then Ellen gave Josie some sort of ultimatum about her drinking.

When Ellen left, Josie lived in the purple house alone, except for Mina and Joe, the cats.

I fed the cats and played with them every day for a few weeks during one of Josie’s stays at a rehab facility for Native Americans called Thunderchild. She said she was the only white person there. I washed the pile of crusty dishes that had accumulated in her kitchen sink, and carefully dried the pleasantly tarnished old sterling silver spoons and forks that Josie used as everyday utensils. I read from her kaleidoscopic collection of books. I perused old falling-apart photo albums from her younger days. They showed Josie at fourteen in blue jeans, Josie at sixteen graduating early from high school, Josie smiling at college, clutching cans of beer. I wrote her a letter.

In the letter, I asked Josie, “Who or what is the greatest love of your life?” She was my professor and my graduate thesis advisor, but she was also my friend. When she returned home from Thunderchild, she commented on my letter and answered my question in person.

The greatest love of her life, she said, was not Ellen. This didn’t surprise me, as it is often the case that the great loves of people’s lives are not the ones with whom they end up spending the greatest chunk of time. Also, I had met Ellen once and noticed she had curiously dead eyes, which led me to think she was not the right person to complement Josie, with her glossy Piscean orbs and her great and otherworldly sensitivity. Josie’s blue veins were visible through the white skin of her temples and forehead. It was easy to see the blood coursing through her. She really had no armor at all.

The great love of her life, Josie told me as we sat in ancient living room chairs covered with sunbleached and fraying upholstery, was a woman she had known during her undergraduate days named Diana. “She was the most creative person I’ve ever met,” Josie explained. She told me that Diana had made a gigantic painting of a strawberry. The strawberry was larger than life, and radiant, and ripe, and something about it so contained and reflected Diana’s own essence, and touched something in Josie so deeply, that she never forgot it. Many years had elapsed since then; when she knew Diana, Josie was just out of high school, where she’d been the thin, blonde, brainy girlfriend of the quarterback, a dutiful daughter of the South.

Josie’s Southernness wasn’t just audible in her speech. It wove through her entire being. But her Southernness was decidedly more like that of Mick Kelly, whose heart was a lonely hunter, than of Scarlett O’hara, who would never go hungry again. And Josie could spot Southernness in other people before they even opened their mouths, as was the case with one tightly wound, perfectly groomed, prim professor of English at the university. “Ugh,” said Josie, yanking up the waistband of her saggy corduroys and brushing a lank lock of hair away from her unpainted face. “She reminds me of so many of the women where I grew up.” Soon after that, the same woman, an utter stranger, hurled a sharp remark my way, and, when it decidedly twanged through the air, I realized Josie had been right. She was a Scarlett type, too. Later, the Southern Belle coaxed me into her office to apologize, with her twang dialed down to a sugar-coated drawl.

Also, in keeping with Southern tradition, Josie had outstanding cooking skills, which she had learned from her grandmother, and she prepared many an impromptu and exquisite dish for me in her kitchen. I sat at her splintery old farm table—“It’s wabi sabi,” I said, and she knew just what I meant—and scooped up delectable fare from her collection of mismatched china. She always said we were going to have a crab boil.

Despite her culinary talents Josie failed to feed herself well. She, unlike Miss O’hara, most definitely would go hungry again, and did. She was 42 years old, and she drank sodas for breakfast and ate candy bars for lunch. I thought this was because Josie had been a neglected baby, and on some level had continued to treat herself her whole life long the way she had been treated in her formative years; her mother had failed to feed her adequately as an infant, Josie explained to me, until her grandmother intervened. And Josie always seemed to be injured, too—with a busted arm cradled in a homespun sling, or a face blooming with a violet bruise. She had elaborate stories for how she incurred these injuries. And when I looked around her house—at all the furniture placed haphazardly here and there, the three-legged decoupaged tables, the mishmash of wobbly chairs, the plethora of curiosities (a 60-year-old rotary telephone, her grandmother’s scrapbook from her debutante days in the roaring twenties, wooden puppets, traditional Hopi masks, including one with a protruding schnoz whose official Hopi name was, to Josie’s endless delight, Penis Nose)—it was easy to imagine her simply bumping into things.

I was at Josie’s house a lot. Sometimes, I went there alone, just to visit her. I could talk to her about anything. She understood everything I said, especially about loneliness and feeling uncomfortable in my own skin. Other times, I was there as part of a group of grad students. She often hosted meals for us.

It was on one such occasion that I first noticed the painting. It was eight feet tall, and had no signature. It depicted a water nymph draped in diaphanous gauze and hovering beside a dusky pond. Her feet did not touch the earth. She was evidently a sensuous water nymph, because she turned her head sideways to tip her nose into a tall flower. Her luxuriant hair fell in lush caramel waves halfway down the length of her body. The painting was pre-Raphaelite in style, like something Waterhouse would have done; it was even in his palette of deep greens and blues, creams and golds and roses—all of the hues vaguely, deliciously dingy. But it was an imperfect painting, probably even the work of a beginner—one of the nymph’s arms was oddly, lumpily shaped. Still, despite or more likely because of its imperfection, I adored the painting, and I said as much every time I looked at it.

“Oh, it used to be my mother’s,” Josie said. Everything seemed to go back to Josie’s mother. “She kind of looks like you,” she added. “The girl in the painting, I mean.”

The first time I put on Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare, I went over to Josie’s house. It was winter. I was bundled up in a coat and scarf—partly as defense against the cold, and partly to mask the perfume. I was afraid that in my excitement upon receiving a small decant of the costly juice, created by the Creed perfume house in 1890, from an eBay seller, I had doused myself in too great a quantity of it. The perfume was still so new to my nose that I did not yet understand it, but when I stepped into Josie’s living room, she, ever incisive, helped me to.

“Mmm, you smell good,” she said. I was immediately self-conscious.

“Oh,” I put my hands to my scarf-wrapped throat, “do I stink? I’m afraid I put on too much. It’s this new perfume I ordered. I mean, it’s really old, from 1890, but I just got some in the mail. You know, I have this thing with perfume. I guess I put on too much.”

“No no, I really like it,” Josie said. “It’s rose.” She paused. “But it has lemon.”

In an instant, she had explained the perfume, the way she had explained so much about Native American law, culture, religion, and sovereignty. And, as always, she was right. She had identified the quality—the lemon quality—that makes Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare such a glowing rose. It is a true tea rose, an almost botanical scent, vaguely antique in its unwavering allegiance to the real thing. But the ray of lemon lifts the rose, so Victorian and so pink, up up up, and infuses it with golden brightness, so that its feet do not touch the earth.

Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare’s decidedly retro quality was appropriate for the surroundings in Josie’s house, and almost cartoonish in its rosy enormity, like Diana’s strawberry, larger than life, radiant. Incidentally, roses and strawberries are in the same family: the family Rosaceae. “It’s beautiful,” Josie said, and I began to understand that it was. It had nothing at all to do with the frigid snowy landscape outside, where any real rose would have perished, and its contrast to all that icy whiteness made it even more glowy. It had the ringing cleanliness of the tarnished old silver utensils stashed in a clanging tangle in Josie’s kitchen drawer. Reassured, I removed my coat and scarf and sat down, and we talked, as we had so many times.

Josie was a much better talker than I: she was a true storyteller. She told about her childhood and adolescent exploits. She spoke with obvious warmth about the people she loved, who were always as complicated as she was, and with comical disdain about the people she did not, who tended toward pretentious behavior that was anathema to Josie’s heart-on-sleeve modus operandi. She used expressions I had never heard but subsequently adopted into my own speech, such as “hung the moon,” as in “As far as I’m concerned, she hung the moon.” And she talked about her mother all the time: her mother locking herself in the house with a boyfriend while a tiny Josie toddled on the front lawn for hours; her mother’s penchant for rescuing stray cats; her mother the model, who towered over Josie in her high heels. I was not a talker like Josie, who told spontaneous stories that curlicued pleasantly out into all sorts of digressions and coiled back in on themselves again, ending nowhere near where I anticipated they would; but she told me I was a writer, and coming from her that declaration meant everything to me.

That winter of Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare was the same winter I asked Josie to check in with me every day over the phone. She had lately been in and out of the hospital with pancreatitis and worse ailments, and one of the Native American elders who taught at the university had prayed over her hospital bed to keep her alive. The university was taking steps to fire her because of her drinking, which process was difficult for them because she was a tenured professor, but they, to her disgust and my dismay, were pushing matters along.

Once, an officious-looking woman I’d never seen before—I think she was a dean of something—arranged a meeting with me in her office, during which she asked me how many times I, as one of Josie’s students, had noticed her to be in an intoxicated condition while she taught her classes. I calmly replied that I had not ever noticed such a thing, no matter how many times or different ways the woman asked me. She peered at me dubiously over her glasses.

The truth is, at least for the first several weeks of my enrollment in one of Josie’s classes, I didn’t realize she drank. Her shaky voice and shivery hands seemed to me the indicators of someone who simply had an excess amount of energy in her body, someone who would benefit from running miles at a time to get some of that squirrely, almost electric life force out. I had never seen alcoholism up close.

But later, when I knew that she drank, I marveled even more at Josie’s brilliance. No amount of alcohol, it seemed, could dim the lemon-brightness, the lemon-sharpness of her brain. The blue veins in her forehead pulsed with an orderly rhythm, and her words came out perfectly and precisely ordered, all of them articulate, illuminating, challenging. I didn’t mention this to the dean who was digging for dirt that day, but perhaps I should have. Maybe I should have said that, even intoxicated, Josie gave more to her students than any teacher I had encountered in 13 years of grammar school, 4 years of college, and 4 years of graduate school. And that her kindness and her mind, which worked always in tandem like some holy and organic machine, were gifts that not only existed separately from her disease, but seemed to thrive in spite of it. And that the booze was just a way for her to keep her own feet from touching the earth, because there were blue veins, I imagined, visible through the paper-thin skin of her soles.

Even if she had not been so educated—she had several degrees, including one in law, and had been a highly paid but unhappy young hotshot NYC lawyer before earning her PhD in Anthropology and becoming a professor—Josie would have been brilliant. She had natural brilliance, the kind of prismatic mind I have seen even in people who don’t even bother to finish high school. I suspect it was inherited brilliance. She always spoke of how smart her grandmother had been. “My grandmother practically raised me,” she often said. “My grandmother was the one who told my mom I wasn’t getting enough to eat when I was a baby.” And she wore her grandmother’s chunky gold class ring. I watched it leave a lemon-bright trail in the air as it moved across the chalkboards on which Josie rapidly wrote. I never saw her without it.

After she was finally fired, Josie said she was relieved to be done with the university, with the people in the Native American Studies department whom she said had worked against her and gotten rid of her, including the department chair, whom Josie believed had appropriated her ideas—her “intellectual property,” she called it—for a paper he had published, and especially his scheming secretary who, Josie sneered, “thinks she hung the moon.” The only people she was going to miss, she said, were her students. She began to talk about how she wanted to get back into teaching Anthropology, and about all the different schools where she would apply for teaching jobs. I heard hopefulness in her flutey voice, the girlish, deeply accented voice, the same voice, it was easy to imagine, of the fourteen-year-old girl in blue jeans in the old photo albums.

Then, one day, Josie gave me the painting of the water nymph. “I want you to take this,” she said. “I know how much you love it.” I was dumbstruck and delighted and sad. Josie had a hurt wrist, so I had to lift the painting down off the wall and into my truck on my own. The frame was covered in an inch-thick coating of dust and the shed fur of Mina and Joe.

When I brought the painting home to my dinky on-campus abode, I did what I do with so many objects—I sniffed it. I detected the faintest little distant tune of perfume, like the echo of a shout someone had called out years earlier. I told Josie about my olfactory discovery the next time I saw her. “Perfume,” I said. “The painting smells of perfume.” She was baffled. Josie, naturally, never touched the stuff.

A few days later, she reported back. “I told my mother about how you smelled the painting,” she said. “She couldn’t believe it when I told her you smelled perfume. She said she’d had it hanging in her bedroom for years, right beside her vanity, where she kept her perfume bottles all lined up.”

When Josie left town without either selling or renting her house, I wasn’t that surprised. Everything that had stuffed its ramshackle rooms—the vintage metal lunch boxes, the cassette tapes, the dream catchers—remained there, locked behind the front door—everything but Mina and Joe, whom she took with her, and the water nymph, who now hovered in my house, exuding her smells, the smells of a long ago North Carolina bedroom where a sad, smart little towheaded girl sometimes wandered in and out.

It was several months before I next caught up with Josie. She hadn’t found a new teaching job. She wasn’t working at all, in fact. She was living on a farm in Rhode Island with a rediscovered long lost friend from the past: Diana. Diana of the strawberry. The farm was Diana’s, and she had lived on it alone until Josie came along. The situation seemed idyllic. “We have chickens,” Josie told me over the phone.

Her flutey voice had lost its old quivering quality; instead, it had a steadiness that sounded almost exotic to my ears. She seemed content in the country, and sounded surprised at her own contentment. After all, she had always proclaimed herself to be a real city girl who loved New York and despised a certain set of self-satisfied, Subaru-driving, skiing, snowboarding, stroller-pushing Bozeman inhabitants, 21st century yuppies who wore costly hemp clothing and looked down their noses at those who couldn’t afford to eat exclusively organic food —“Patagonia People,” she dubbed them distastefully.

Another thing Bozeman had a lot of, besides Patagonia People, was bars. Scads of them. Everywhere. And within walking distance of Josie’s old purple house there was a closely clustered trinity of them, all dives. Locals affectionately referred to this spot as the “Barmuda Triangle.”

One day, during the winter of Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare, soon after Josie returned from Thunderchild, I was unable to find her anywhere. Finally, I spotted her ambling in her saggy corduroys and canvas shoes, impervious to the snow, in the direction of Barmuda. I watched her walk into a bar. After deliberating for a while, I followed her in. She was drinking gin. I took a seat beside her, but didn’t say anything. Josie’s embarrassment was palpable; while it was no longer any secret she drank, it was the first time I had ever seen her actually imbibing. Yes, on occasions when we’d gone out together, I’d watched her disappear into public restrooms for inordinately long periods with an inexplicable wheeled suitcase trailing behind her, but until that moment I had never witnessed her hold a drink to her lips. Josie tried to seem chipper and asked me if I wanted something, but she was devastated, and so was I.

But moments like those seemed distant now that she was all the way in Rhode Island with Diana and the chickens. Farm life suited her, it seemed. I thought Josie had found heath and happiness with the long-lost love of her life.

A few months later, I called the farm to see how she was doing. “She’s not here,” said a woman who sounded far beyond the end of her rope. It was Diana.

“I heard you once painted a strawberry,” I said.

“She’s at the bar,” she said. Her voice was clipped and tired. “I’ll give you the phone number. Just tell the bartender who you’re looking for.”

I followed Diana’s instructions and talked with Josie for a few minutes, but that conversation was too sad to remember. It was worse than the day in the Barmuda Triangle, because she was so far away. I couldn’t sit beside her. I couldn’t keep an eye on her.

A week later, she called to tell me she was sorry about the conversation we’d had while she was at the bar. She said it hadn’t worked out on the farm with Diana but didn’t say why. And when she told me that she was moving home to North Carolina to live with her mother, I worried that it was a case of an animal that hides under the porch when it knows it is ailing. Is that what you do when you suspect you have an irreparable injury? Return to the one who brought you into the world and, in her accidental way, began injuring you from the time you were an infant?

But maybe Josie is okay. That’s what I pray. For over a year, I haven’t been able to reach her. I don’t know where she is now. She feels far from the earth, a watery, slippery nymph. And I realize what, possibly, she already knew when she gave me the painting: she is the one in the painting, not me. She’s in the perfume, too, in Fleur de Thé Rose Bulgare, a fragile creation from another time with a lemon-gold ray running through it. It’s the lemon brilliance in her that I hope is holding her up, high enough that her feet don’t touch the earth, but not so high that she’s gone.

“Molecular recognition is arguably the fundamental mechanism of all life… The only variable is time.” —Chandler Burr, The Emperor of Scent

I like to read the Missed Connections ads on Craigslist. In these ads, clusters of molecules reach out to other clusters of molecules they have glimpsed, tasted, recognized, and allowed to pass them by or otherwise lost. Sometimes the ads are quietly ribald:

“I was riding my bicycle on Shaker Street on Saturday afternoon. You drove past in a minivan and nearly ran me down. Do you remember me? I’ll forgive you—if you take me for ride. Email ————.”

Or poignant:

“You were headed into the post office on Main. I was standing across the street wearing a yellow skirt. Did I see you watching me through your sunglasses? I was too shy to approach. If you see this, email… .”

Or simply crushing:

“I truly miss you. No matter how much time passes or how brokenhearted I have been, I can’t forget you. Do you still have my pearl earrings? I still have your socks.”

To me, the ads are poems—badly punctuated little poems, full of misspelled words and regret and the crazy romantic half-hope that destiny will direct that coveted person to somehow stumble upon this mysterious missive in the vast labyrinth that is cyberspace and do what each and every single one of us wants at least one human in the universe to do: come back.

And maybe, one out of every million times, the message is read, answered, and they do. Sometimes our Missed Connections return to us.

It happened to me once. I was fourteen when we met, and it was exactly fourteen years before she became mine. This is the story:

When I was fourteen, I tried on a dress. The dress was long and black with corset-style ties criss-crossing up the back, and it would have looked much better on a goth girl with blue-black hair, marmoreal skin, and breasts. I took it off.

But there was something about this dress. It sang a little song, like a song that came swirling down from the clouds and was now slumming in a dingy dressing room at the neighborhood Nordstrom. I smelled the tune as I stood before the mirror in my white socks. It was just after tennis practice, and I was still young enough and sufficiently lacking in pubescent exudation not to require a shower immediately after physical exertion. I sniffed around wolfishly for a few moments and pinpointed the exact spot from which the song emanated: the heart of the dress, the part that would be pressed against its wearer’s beating chest.

I surmised that someone else had tried on the dress—perhaps even bought, worn and returned it—and that this person had applied something between her breasts that smelled to me of heaven. And it had left its mark.

What I was smelling, though I didn’t know it at the time, was a wispy little residue left behind by the base notes of the eau de toilette concentration of a perfume now known as Classique by Jean Paul Gaultier (at that time it was called simply Jean Paul Gaultier). It had just been released that very year, 1993.

This fragrance is not well regarded by perfume snobs but has nevertheless been a longtime bestseller in France. So many of my favorite things are embraced by the French while here in the states they remain rather under the radar of Americans—things that are sort of unrefined or guileless or unapologetically corporeal or difficult to get to the bottom of, like the writing of Jim Harrison, or the nineties-era songs of Chan Marshall (pictured above), or really rank cheese. I guess I resonate to French taste. It’s good, I think, to be huge in France.

I suppose I am a Francophile of sorts, though my only exposure to the culture happened during high school French classes, during which we students were instructed to adopt a French moniker, and I chose Colette, who might have liked the idea of a perfume diary. Once, I fell in love with an antique, art nouveau, gold Virgin Mary pendant from France that I saw in an antique shop. I cannot forget her, nor can I forgive myself for not buying her. I think always of how beautiful she would have been dangling below my throat, how much happiness she would have brought me, how right we were for each other—but unless fate places her once again in my path, which seems unlikely since she appeared to be rare if not one of a kind, I’ll never see her again. It’s a case of could’ve, should’ve, would’ve—another Missed Connection.

No, I didn’t know what I was smelling that day in the dressing room. And I didn’t have the savvy to carry the dress downstairs to the ladies at the perfume counter, hold it up to their noses and say, “For the love of God, please tell me, what is this smell?” And not only did I not know what I was smelling, I also didn’t even know if what I was smelling was a perfume at all. It might have been a lotion or a powder, a potion or a tincture—some womanly, witchy philter fourteen-year-old girls who played tennis didn’t know about. I just knew it was lovely—bird-lovely, a high, sweet song.

Of course, I bought the dress. It hung on my ectomorphic frame. I have evidence of how it hung in the form of a photograph. It was taken at my initiation into my high school’s troupe of the International Thespian Society. In the photo, I am holding a lit candle and smiling my shy, decidedly non-theatrical smile, and the dress is there, hanging, with that song of a smell still radiating from its heart some months after I bought it.

I had made a habit of stepping into my closet and sniffing the dress. I did this a thousand times, wondering about it, with that misty Missed Connection faraway gaze (again, see photo above) that comes upon the faces of those who have fallen molecularly in love with someone or thing they cannot quite get to the bottom of. I couldn’t wash the dress, couldn’t bear to make the smell disappear. I hoped that someday I would come to know what the smell was, that I would meet it again, and find out its secrets. I imagined that, whatever it was, it came in something very small—like the tiny, seashell-shaped, opaque glass perfume bottle pendant dangling from a pale pink silk cord that my mother had given to me one very sad Christmas morning several years earlier—but this was even prettier than that had been.

***

Years went by. At twenty-one, I was in a mall again. This time, I was a college girl. I was going to be a writer now, not an actress. I stood on the down escalator behind a fair-haired woman—and she was quite a woman; she seemed, in my quick but writerly apprehension of her, so seasoned, so sure of herself, so secure in her skin—everything I wasn’t. She was dressed in a tailored skirt suit of the same blushing color found on the interior of certain abalone shells. She was a blonde, as Raymond Chandler would say, “to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window.” She was also a mother. Her little son stood beside her. And as we went down down down the escalator something wafted up up up from her to me. There it was again!

Unmistakable! The same smell—this was the first and only time I had smelled it in the seven years since I had bought the black dress, which I had long since tossed in a Salvation Army donation bag after the song finally faded from its breast. This was the same high lovely bird nocturne floating over an appealing assemblage of notes I couldn’t quite get to the bottom of. I was transported. “Excuse me,” I said. I was nervous, as shy of women then as I am now, afraid she would be unfriendly or annoyed. “May I ask what you are wearing? It smells so good.” She turned with a soft half-smile and kindly replied, “Jean Paul Gaultier.”

So, now I had the name of what I believed to be the most ambrosial odor in the world. I figured out it was a perfume, and I knew where I could buy it—right in the very mall where I stood. Yet I didn’t buy a bottle for another seven years.

Why not? It was a curious case of ambivalence. Of love-hate.

It must have happened a dozen times: I approached a perfume counter, and identified the singular Jean Paul Gaultier glass bottle, which is shaped nothing like that Christmas morning opaque glass seashell, but like the torso of a woman who would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. I sprayed some of the juice on myself, and felt by turns confused, disappointed, repulsed, headachy, overwhelmed, even anxious to wash it off. There was something, I lamented, not right about it.

Scientist and perfume expert Luca Turin has dismissed the notion that the same perfume can smell differently on different bodies due to variations in personal chemistry, and I agree with him—this is a silly idea most likely invented by commission-motivated perfume counter girls to make buyers think something smells unique and better on them than everyone else; it’s just an oft-repeated notion that has grown wings, and every time I hear it I roll my eyes.

I know that the adverse reaction I had to my Missed Connection wasn’t because she simply disagreed with my very being on a chemical level. In retrospect, I understand what was happening. Perfume counters were putting out tester bottles of the eau de parfum, not the eau de toilette. And the eau de parfum of Jean Paul Gaultier is, I believe, not only a different concentration, but a significantly different—and much less pretty—formulation than the eau de toilette. I was trying on the former. Also, I was only smelling the top notes, which can be sticky in both formulations, and scrubbing it off soon after, not giving the fragrance time to develop. And, I was holding the bottle too close when I sprayed it on—something I have learned makes a big difference with this perfume.

But of course I didn’t know these things at the time. I was perturbed. Now that I was able to get my hands on her, my Missed Connection scared me. Maybe, I fretted, she wasn’t all that I had initially thought. Maybe that angel-bird-song wasn’t even real. Maybe it was a projection, something I had invented that long ago day in the dreary dressing room. Maybe, I shook my head in despair, I had fallen in love with an idea. I had been a fool. She really was too good to be true. We certainly couldn’t seem to meld. Perhaps, I thought, she was just better off with other people. And I was sad. And sometimes I wished I had never smelled her in the first place—whether I had invented her or not. She was the perfect smell and she had ruined me, in a way, for all others. I spent the next several years bouncing around, a promiscuous perfume pinball, wishing to find something that would transcend her and put my earliest impressions of her out of my mind, and then wishing that everything could just be easy and right between us, and that she could be with me.

***

Seven years later, at twenty-eight, I had managed to get more or less, but not entirely, over her. I had found a few other perfumes that kept me sort of interested, even if they were like B-movies in comparison to the classic novel that she had once seemed to be. Then I ran into her again, not at a mall this time, but at an airport of all places. She was standing on a greasy, fingerprinted counter in a duty-free store. Her tester bottle looked slightly different from the ones I was accustomed to seeing. I examined the print on her bottle’s underside and read “eau de toilette.” Hmmm. Maybe that meant something, I thought. I swallowed, sucked in a breath, and sprayed some on. Hope does, as they say, spring eternal. Maybe, I thought, this will be the time. After all, the only variable when it comes to molecular recognition—to Missed Connections re-connecting—is time…

And, as I rushed to make my way to my flight, something happened, something I almost couldn’t believe. Once I got past a few minutes of harsh, fruity, sweet intro notes, I heard a song,  and it was emanating from me. I could feel people paying close attention as we passed them by. We were love. We were beauty. We were delicious.

When my flight landed, I promptly found a mall, bought her, and brought her home. And it isn’t that we lived strictly happily ever after. That’s not how it works with Missed Connections who come back, though that’s how one cluster of molecules imagines it will be when he reaches out to another cluster of molecules via an ad on Craigslist at three o’clock in the morning—bleary, teary and blind with hope. That happily-ever-after-scenario would be bland.

It’s like this: sometimes, I admit, now that I have her, I hardly want anything to do with her at all. I see her poised—armless, legless, all breasts and behind—among my other perfumes and think, is her bottle gauche? Offensive, even, with its absence of appendages? Or, oddly, appealingly minimalist? Are her shrill top notes intolerable? Or forgivable foibles? Is her hopelessly feminine sweetness cloying and affected? Or heartfelt and touching? Was all the pining, yearning, missing, testing, longing, and waiting really worth it?

Then, on a day that I reach for her and rediscover, as if for the first time, how enchanting she is to me on a molecular level, I know what all the fuss was about. I give her a chance to let her beauty unfurl, and give myself the time to get to the bottom of her. She envelops me in an atmosphere of loveliness, and sings that same little song I smelled at the heart of a black dress when I was just a shade beyond childhood. People comment  on how good we are together, and want to be near us. She makes me so much better than I normally am. She’s even more gorgeous than she was the moment I first caught a whiff of her. And I’m so glad she’s mine.

The first real grown-up perfume of which I was ever in possession was Trésor. At twelve, I had a tiny miniature of the ridged, Deco bottle, containing at most 3 milliliters, on my dresser. It had probably been obtained by my elderly Great Aunt Lorraine at the Lancome counter as part of some gift-with-purchase set, along with a coral-colored, “works-on-everyone” (read: no one) lipstick, a teeny tube of mascara, and a chintzy compact. I imagine she found the Trésor too much a departure from her standard Shalimar (though in their mutual über-femininity the two have something in common) and handed it over to me.

A twelve-year-old’s perfume vocabulary is generally meager, as is her capacity for criticism. I couldn’t have known, much less articulated, what made Trésor any different from any other fragrance. But I dabbed it on once in a while, with an uninformed delight in its essential prettiness (ignorance really is, as they say, bliss). In my total, almost matter-of-fact acceptance of the perfume I was not unlike twelve-year-old Frankie Addams in the Carson McCullers novel The Member of the Wedding; Frankie anoints both herself and her bespectacled little cousin with something called Sweet Serenade.

“ Frankie sat up, licked the tears from around her mouth, and wiped off her face with her shirttail. She sat still, her nose widened, smelling herself. Then she went to her suitcase and took out a bottle of Sweet Serenade. She rubbed some on the top of her head and poured some more down inside the neck of her shirt.

‘Want some on you?’

John Henry was squatting beside the open suitcase and he gave a little shiver when she poured the perfume over him. ”

Sweet Serenade, I imagine, could only have smelled of some syrupy amalgamation of violet pastilles and baby powder, but Frankie didn’t give it a thought. Likewise, I didn’t analyze Trésor’s smell; mostly I noticed its color—a sparkling, juicy apricot shade (the perfume is said to smell of “apricot blossoms,” among other things)—and how singular, how lonesome it was on my dresser in all its jewel-brightness. In fact, it was almost exactly the same apricot hue as my goldfish, Harold (he had a beige companion named Maude), who inhabited a small glass aquarium on my nightstand. The Trésor fairly glowed in the late afternoons, when the Orange County sun shone through the window of my lonely only child’s bedroom.

No, I knew nothing about Trésor apart from the fact that Isabella Rossellini was its face. I learned this from reading the many magazines with which I passed my aforementioned lonely only childhood, sprawled on the floor of my bedroom during the after-school hours, steeped in golden light, drowning in quiet. Isabella’s visage stared dreamily from all the Trésor ads. 1990 was the year the new version of the fragrance, which first debuted in 1952, was launched, and the ads were plentiful. I admired Isabella because she had a lovely name and possessed the type of creamy complected, ravenhaired beauty—with dark eyebrows, imperfect teeth, and floral lips—that I found so heartstopping.

Also, Isabella was the love of David Lynch.

I was privy to this adult business of who loved whom thanks, again, to the magazines. David Lynch was the creator of my then-favorite TV show, Twin Peaks, which, during its premier 1990 season, was infusing the airwaves with the smell of Douglas firs, and injecting popular culture with images of dead girls, deep dark woods and the mysteries that occur therein.

I had a crush on David Lynch, as much as is possible for a twelve-year-old to have one (which is, actually, quite a lot possible, for when is sexual attraction ever as novel, or, consequently, as potent, as in childhood? I had just begun having the sensation that there was a long, invisible violin string that reached from my nose and mouth all the way down to my wee womb, and this violin string would, when faced with some person or thing that fascinated me, vibrate as though it had been plucked just once, resulting in a strange, delicious shiver…this even happened when I smelled the white waxy blossoms that sprouted from the few remaining orange trees in my neighborhood, but the significance of those narcotic treasures shall be saved for a later post…).

In magazine interviews, David Lynch seemed intensely creative, highly intelligent, and intriguingly eccentric—traits that both then and now comprise my own personal holy trinity of Attractive Male Characteristics. And his creation, Twin Peaks, of which I caught sporadic glimpses (it aired sort of late and was rather racy for a seventh grader) evinced Lynch’s at least artistic if not personal fascination with the dark shadowy corners of sex and sexual behavior, which I admittedly comprehended only on the most subconscious, intuitive, symbolic level. The show also demonstrated his appreciation for Dark Beauties in the vein of his Isabella, such as sad, pillowy Sherilyn Fenn, who played teenage siren Audrey Horne on the series, and whom Lynch had described, the magazines told me, as “five feet of heaven in a ponytail.” I hoped and prayed, as I examined my own coltish figure in the mirror, all legs and feet and sprawling hands, to grow up to be one of them: a Dark Beauty.

In those days, on the cusp of puberty, when the final, crucial touches were being applied to the sexual blueprint I would carry through my life, I was receptive to the existence of this intensely creative and strange man who seemed to have knowledge of some vaguely sinister carnal darkness; and I was receptive to the TV show he made, in which inkyhaired damsels danced slowly to a soundtrack of sultry, sleepy songs, in a place where love and death, beauty and sadness coalesced against a backdrop of deep dark woods. Twelve was a seminal year. I have changed very little or maybe not at all since then. It was the year I read, saw, thought and smelled so many of the things that sculpted me into my more or less permanent form. Also, life was smaller then; it was easier to see how everything connects.

So I unspooled an invisible thread, much like the invisible violin string that ran through me. And with the thread, I connected Twin Peaks to David Lynch to Isabella Rossellini to the tiny bottle of Trésor on my dresser. And still, when I smell Trésor today, I make the same connections with the same invisible thread, but in reverse. One sniff and I bounce through the series of associations like a smooth rock skipping over water and land at the famous line from the Twin Peaks pilot: “She’s dead. Wrapped in plastic.”

But Trésor itself has no inherent darkness. Rather, it is a soft, pretty, feminine fille to whom dark things happen. It is an Eastern European mail order bride with no bony angles in a too-tight angora sweater wearing too much eye makeup, but still lovely, sweet, girlish, tame, sexually guileless. It is a quivering, fluffy bunny with a fast heartbeat, fixing a watchful sideways gaze out of one eye. It is the scent of prey.

And so, in a way, that mini bottle of Trésor was appropriate for me in 1990, for who is more prey than a twelve-year-old girl? A girl on the threshold, whose body men start suddenly watching for signs of blossoming buds? Twelve is the age at which Frankie Addams of The Member of the Wedding is preyed upon by the sleazy soldier (“What did you say your name is, Beautiful?”), the age at which poor plastic-wrapped Laura Palmer of Twin Peaks is first preyed upon by the being named Bob who eventually does her in.

Trésor is the smell of don’t hurt me, and also the smell of who I was, sometimes still am, and alternately do and do not want to be.

Many Virgos have a penchant for keeping their persons clean and in this I am no exception. An avowed scrubber, I don rough exfoliating gloves and end up with a self-inflicted rosy head-to-toe glow at the close of every shower. With such a hygiene fetish, it naturally follows that I would have a thing for soap.

The attraction really took hold when I was eighteen, living in a wee studio apartment on Fifth Avenue in San Diego, conveniently across the street from a little shop called Mistral. The studio delighted me because it had a Murphy bed that rolled out of view into a secret chamber, and because it had windows that looked over the roof of an old movie theater where pigeons gathered in a long grey cooing rustling row every evening, and slept nestled together in dove-soft clusters every night. Mistral, the little shop, delighted me because it was manned by a French gentleman who smilingly noted my “freshness” when I wore daisies in my hair, and because it was Full of Soaps. The soaps were crafted of rich shea butter, and fragrant. I especially liked the “Linden” variety, which was redolent of lime blossoms, but, with my taste for all things milky, also swooned over “Lait.”

I spent a fair fraction of my flower shop earnings and student loan money on those big bricky bars. And in the twelve years since, I’ve dropped many a dollar on a cornucopia of cleansing confections—never, however, in liquid form; only bars, be they rectangular or round, will do. And translucent glycerin soaps for the body leave me cold—give me fatty saponified soaps that seep white buttery suds made of coconut, castile or lard. When I was flush, fifteen dollars for a bar was fair enough if the soap smelled truly of verbena, of lilac, of neroli…

I left Fifth Avenue long ago, and so, in fact, did Mistral, but there were always beauties to be found at supermarkets for the spendy set, à la Whole Foods, and at health food stores. I usually eschewed the fabric-wrapped, homespun slices of soap made in someone’s kitchen, which often sell for surprisingly steep prices despite their humble origins, in favor of the more luxe offerings. Still, as many times as I was enchanted by voluptuous soaps that creamed up deliciously and smelled of true flowers, I was also hoodwinked by impressively artful packaging into buying behemoth bars of, say, so-called tuberose soap that smelled about as appealing as the most strident laundry detergent, or your average, garish Glade Plug-In. These soap affairs were costly, risky, sometimes enchanting, sometimes disappointing; I was flighty, flip-flopping from one to another. Altogether it was an exhausting business.

Thankfully, through it all, one “99.44%-pure” creation, developed in 1879, has always been there, unassuming, unfancy, a little white mouse snoozing on a dusty bottom shelf at the local Sav-On. Through the years, its quiet charms and—at about 40 cents a bar—its price, have continually called me back; this is especially true lately now that times are decidedly tougher than they were back in those early college days, now that the student loans need to be repaid and the novel needs a publisher. Generous friends and family members do occasionally float me some funds on birthdays and holidays, while—always and without fail, in a reassuring show of reliability—my favorite soap just floats…

Ivory’s buoyancy made for a charming selling point in old-time advertisements, but it isn’t what holds me in thrall, nor is it Ivory’s perfect simplicity of shape and size, its light weight in the hand, or its slick frothy lather—though these are all commendable traits. It is the scent. Ivory exudes none of the nostril-burning harshness of the flashier, more muscular drugstore brands such as Zest, Lever 2000, or the offensive Olay. Nor does it possess that powdery, cloying quality found in Dove, which seems to have a vaguely fecal strain. Ivory is dove-like only in that it is reminiscent of the pigeons who collected on the roof of the old movie theater outside my San Diego studio all those years ago: gentle, plain, ubiquitous, snuggly.

It is redolent of sweetened condensed milk, with just the littlest stab of dairy-sharpness. It is whipped cream, or cupcake frosting. It is more lait than Mistral’s “Lait.” It is definitely a fake smell, but, in the language of the senses, so synonymous with clean skin that it has come to seem like a skin smell. Wholesome in all its lactescence, it also reminds me of the fleshy tumescence of certain blonde starlets from days of yore. If the scent of Ivory was sexily bottled and impressively labeled, it would have to be named Moon or Nightbloom or Bedroom. And when a bar wears down to a paper-slim sliver, it becomes like the petal of some fanciful kind of flower, an invented bloom fashioned by poetic chemists at Procter & Gamble, a meek white blossom among the garish parrot tulips with which it shares its supermarket shelf, as unshowy as a desert primrose that opens only at sunset for its lone lover, the sphinx moth, and closes in the light of day.

I love Ivory because after I am rinsed and dried, it becomes not quite undetectable but almost, and with this whispering angelwing quality it is the ideal base layer on which to apply the kinds of perfumes I most enjoy, those with a creamy, lactonic nature—soft, round, curvaceous scents. Ivory combines so well. It is a gossamer-thin veil of milk to which I can easily add one or more of my favorite smells—a rose, or a tuberose, even a soily, loamy rose, or a few tobacco sighs. It is a mild and modest underpinning over which I can don something more suggestive, perfect for achieving that classically Virgoan, Madonna-Magdalene dynamic. And, while a pricey bar of stylish soap infused with, say, pure oil of magnolia would admittedly be pleasurable, it would likely be dissonant with perfume—would probably, in fact, negate the need for wearing it at all, and what kind of day would that be?

Catholicism is an attractive religion to the sensualist and the Romantic; at sixteen I was both, and became enchanted by Catholic churches and trappings.

In the old days, all the Lebanese ancestors on my mother’s side were Catholics, but the tradition stopped with my grandfather, who liked to pray in the privacy of his own carefully nurtured garden (fruit trees, fish pond) and was by no means a Mass-goer. After he married my grandmother, who, being equal parts Irish and Spanish, also came from Catholics, they baptized all of their kids in the Presbyterian Church—all, that is, but one, the very last one, a sickly angel baby, a curly-haired cherub called Denise, who was dead at six. Grandpa and Grandma must have been convinced by an earnest priest circa 1963 that dying Denise would remain in Limbo (a dreadful neither-here-nor-there-place somewhere between heaven and hell, a blah place, lukewarm, beige, odorless, tasteless) upon her death if she wasn’t baptized into the Holy Roman Catholic Church; so she was moistened with holy water and dotted with chrism (a mixture of olive oil and balsam) and enfolded into that ritualistic tribe.

Many years later, when I was born, it was posited by certain relatives, in a decidedly non-Catholic, non-Presbyterian espousal of the theory of reincarnation, that I was her—the one they had lost, Denise. This might explain why Mom always had a more sisterly than motherly way with me, while Grandma was very maternal. She cared for me for several months from the time I was born. Maybe this healed some of her ache for her lost, last girl.

And this—this notion that I am her, tiny laughing Denise of the fevers and curls, who was chrismd into Catholicism—might also explain my own attraction to all things Catholic, but then so might my love for Jack Kerouac. Jack Kerouac could not rewire his hopelessly Catholic heart no matter how much of the Dharma he devoured. I plowed ecstatically through all of his writings during my impressionable sixteenth year, and they fairly glow with Catholic imagery. This is true of Visions of Gerard, the story of Kerouac’s sickly, saintly baby brother’s little life and early death, and also of my favorite of his novels, Maggie Cassidy.

Maggie Cassidy is just the fictional name for Mary Carney, a real girl (pictured above) with whom Kerouac was in love as a teen, an Irish Catholic milky-soft brunette only a French-Canadian Catholic boy steeped in the sensuousness of his religion could perceive and, years later, depict in such a sweetly steamy way. Kerouac tells us of the “overpowering lavish of her kisses…” and of “the glory of the tenderness of the trembling kiss of Maggie and all love as only teenagers know it and like perfect blue ballrooms.” He gives us his Maggie with the “crucifix on her dress breast,” Maggie with the “soft rich red” mouth and “black curls” and the “snow-smooth brow.” Maggie with her hidden lush ivory thighs. Maggie the Rose.

For me, it was hard not to love a religion that at least partly inspired such a verdant and verbose art as Kerouac’s, but maybe my Catholic leanings stemmed simply from my aforementioned status as a sixteen-year-old sensualist and a capital-R Romantic in the 18^th century sense of the word. I resonated easily to Catholicism, being an abstract thinker, a poet-type who liked the language of symbols (and Catholicism speaks in symbols), a pagan and a pantheist at heart, and a  mystic; this mysticism was due in part to the experience I had at thirteen, during which I was sure I felt, while sitting alone in my bedroom, the very living hum of God that buzzed in every person and thing, even in the grains of wood in my four-poster bed frame; subsequent to that experience I believed—though I never again felt it so acutely—that God was in the veins of a leaf just as in the veins of my hand, all around, within and without.

So when I visited Catholic churches, a sixteen-year-old searcher and sniffer, it made perfect sense to me that God was in the Eucharist wafers, in the wine, in the water, in the incense, in the gold light that slices through the stained glass, in the songs, and even in such tangible objects (who has more or better accessories than the Catholics?) as the multitudinous medals of silver and gold depicting Jesus, Mary and all the saints, or pretty holy cards, or St. Joseph’s cords, scapulars, candles, crucifixes, and relics. (I am in possession of a little card, found at a thrift shop, that bears a laminated rose laminated; it reads, “This rose petal was touched to a relic of the Little Flower, Saint Therese.”) These are only inanimate objects or throwaway tangibles inasmuch as their possessor fails to see them as potential portals to the Divine. They are meant to be handled, stroked, worn, rubbed. Catholics believe that God can be experienced through the senses; they are not just a ritualistic tribe, but a sensuous one.

Catholics experience the divine through their ears, their eyes, their mouths, their noses, and their hands. They see the ornate flourishes and embellishments of their churches, they press the holy water—seasoned by countless other fingers—into their skin when they cross themselves, they hear the solemn or swirling songs, they taste the wafers and wine. Catholics hold each other’s hands when they pray; they press their palms against each other’s palms, where the essences of everyday chores—washing dishes, making food—are stored. They finger their rosary beads; in some cases they smell their rose-scented rosary beads, because some rosaries have been made of roses or at least made to smell of them—for the rosary is prayed to Mary, and Mary is associated with roses. She is an amalgamation of many old pagan goddesses remade into one “Virgin” mother, but no less enchanting for being so—she with her bare feet on the moon, her cloak of stars, and her roses, her abundance of roses.

The Virgin isn’t the only Mary associated with roses. Mary Magdalene is, too. It is natural, then, for Catholic Kerouac to extravagantly drown his own Mary, his sweetheart Mary Carney, aka Maggie Cassidy, in so many prose roses.

“Maggie has put on the best thing she has—a pink gown.  A little rose in her hair—the perfection of her moonlight magic Irish sorcery suddenly seeming out of place in Manhattan, like Ireland in the Atlantis World— ”

My own love of roses is completely entwined with Mary imagery, a result of my romance with Catholicism—and Kerouac. And this love of roses leads me to try every rose perfume I encounter. I think I favor none so well as Stella by Stella McCartney. She is the daughter of Paul McCartney, who paid tribute to his mother, yet another Mary, (where there are roses, there are Marys) in Let it Be: “When I find myself in times of trouble, mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of wisdom…”

In developing Stella, Ms. McCartney sought to create a “modern” rose perfume, one that synthesizes softness with sharpness—the softness comes, of course, from the roses, while the sharpness is said to come from the amber note that slumbers at the perfume’s base. But to me it smells like the soft-sharpness of roses dipped in milk.

Stella’s milky roses make me envision a new kind of Mass: instead of wafers and wine, there are full blown roses in various shades of deep dusty pink, and cups of milk. A communicant lets one petal dissolve on her tongue and washes it down with a swallow of the ivory fluid. This would be a Mass about Mary.

The milk needn’t be from cows. It could come from any female creature; it’s a nurturing tonic. This is why Stella Rose Absolute is like being pressed against a damp, creamy, rose-tipped breast— but that breast has no talc on it; it is clean but not cloying, for there is no powdery accord here, just roses and milk running alongside each other in two parallel lines, and the most solemn of sad songs intoning the background, like the one that goes “La-a-a-a-amb of God…” This perfume is lamb-soft, lamb-sharp, a dark lush beauty much like Kerouac’s Mary Carney, who, it is easy to imagine, probably smelled like this without even trying.

“She came in…from the cold—ineffably beautiful as never before, with dewdrops in her black hair like little stars in her eyes, and rosiness effulging from sweet laughs tinklin one after another—  She was feeling good again, beautiful and unwinnable again forever—like the dark rose.”