Scented

by Laurence Fearnley

  Though my sexual relationships steadily dropped by the wayside, those Aro Valley years were memorable for the number of perfumes I accrued: Shalimar by Guerlain, Christian Dior’s Dune, Calyx from Prescriptives, Lancôme’s Magie Noire and Calvin Klein’s Obsession. Later, during long periods of unemployment, I had no spare income and was reduced to wearing my own concoctions or a syrupy fragrant oil sourced from an ethnic market stall that I think may have been a blend of patchouli oil and ylang ylang. It was sweet, a little grassy, with a smell that brought to mind over ripe bananas. It was called something like Rainsong and left brown stains on my skin, collars and cuffs.

  In the early nineties I was lucky enough to be offered a ticket to a Nina Simone concert, which was part of the arts festival taking place in the city. I spent hours preparing for the event by playing my flatmate’s copy of ‘My Baby Just Cares for Me’. I didn’t particularly like the song, but it had suddenly become a hit in the late eighties and had made its way into all my friends’ music collections. It wasn’t until later that I discovered the reason for its sudden revival. It had been featured in a commercial for Chanel No. 5 and, as a result, had climbed to the top of the charts in Britain and Europe. Anyway, the song was upbeat and helped get me in the mood for going out. To my disappointment, the concert was anything but upbeat. The atmosphere on stage struck me as tense, and it seemed to me that Simone would have preferred to be anywhere in the world but Wellington.

  As the lights came up at the end of the concert the audience stood to applaud and cheer and right up at the front, standing tall, was Alice Walker, also in town as part of the festival. As the clapping continued, Walker raised her fist in a black power salute and Simone signalled that she had seen the salute – a private show of strength between two formidable women. Next to Walker, her head lowered as if in prayer, was Thora.

  When I saw Thora later I asked her what it had been like sitting next to Alice Walker all evening. I didn’t imagine that she would have asked for Walker’s autograph, but I thought she might have acknowledged the writer during the moments before the house lights dimmed. After all, Thora was a huge fan.

  ‘I said “Hello”,’ said Thora, ‘but I don’t think she heard me.’

  Not long afterwards I blended a perfume for Thora. In my head and on paper I had it all figured out. I would take the concept of thunder and lightning from Thora’s name and link it to Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, one of her favourite books. In short, it would be the scent of a night garden following a storm. I decided to build the perfume around boronia. I’d only recently discovered the plant, having spotted the reddish-brown flowering bush in the botanic gardens one Sunday afternoon. The smell was sticky sweet like aged raspberry jam but with a tart, dusty base. It was the latter that gave the scent its edge. It seemed a perfect fit for Thora with her white-streaked black hair and slash of red lipstick.

  Because I wanted to keep the perfume simple I added carrot seed oil for its smell of damp dug-over earth, ambrette for a hint of spicy sweetness and frankincense because I had a large unopened bottle handy and I thought it would add a nice incense-like smokiness to the drydown. The component that eluded me was petrichor, the mineral, flinty smell associated with rain falling on warm, bone-dry earth.

  The perfume oil I made wasn’t a bad scent – in fact it was nice – but I was disappointed that it had failed to capture my intention. It would never cause the wearer to breathe deeply and smile with pleasure or wonder. I needed something to lift it out of the ordinary, but nothing I tried worked. For some reason it remained a tad murky, like a pot of soup reheated once too often.

  It was then that I thought of my grandmother’s uranium bottle. I found it in my jewellery box and placed it on the table next to the boronia blend. I hadn’t looked closely at the bottle since Lange’s speech and I’d forgotten how lovely it was. The strange yellow-green glass was faceted, designed to resemble the surface of a scallop, though its overall shape was more like a flattened pine cone. It was more beautiful than I remembered and I spent a few minutes holding it up to the sun, tilting it this way and that to capture the light. Where the sun hit the bottle the glass was pale yellow, but where it was thickest it was the colour of unripe lemons. It was the only thing I owned from my grandmother and I’d kept it with me whenever I’d moved flats or cities. The brown gunk was still in the bottom of the bowl and I enjoyed it for one last time before carefully transferring the juice of Thora’s perfume blend from its plain, dark-brown, screw-capped bottle to the rare green bottle in my hand.

  I carefully carried Thora’s perfume around in my pocket for two weeks before I saw her again. I grew used to the feel of its cool ribbed glass against my fingers every time I reached for my hanky or change. The perfume had started to develop in the short time since I’d created it. The individual oils were becoming less harsh and more rounded as they settled into one another. The ambrette, which had threatened to overpower the boronia, had slipped into the background, and the boronia itself was becoming more jam-like, its berry richness edging towards damask rose.

  I can’t recollect what I said to Thora when I handed her the perfume. I know she was very reluctant to accept my gift because she felt it was too valuable, too precious, and I had to work hard to convince her to take the bottle. I remember that I could feel my heart beating hard in my chest and that I could smell her L’Eau d’Issey, and that I took an unexpected, sudden dislike to the perfume that has stayed with me ever since. I recall the hollow, sickening sense of loss that gripped me as I comprehended the irrevocability of what I had done. More than anything, I remember how empty my pocket felt on the slow walk home.

  Notes of introversion, lost friendship and regret: petrichor, boronia, ambrette, frankincense and gunk.

  I stayed on at the art museum until Charles retired and then, feeling restless one day, I gave in my notice and bought a ticket to Australia. When I eventually returned, I discovered the art world had moved on without me. I took whatever part-time and contract work I could find, but my professional profile never really recovered and with every passing month I became more and more tainted by failure. With little money to my name, I had to move back home to Christchurch and, until my father’s death, I was largely dependent on my parents for support. I suppose that returning to university to begin a PhD in American literature, focusing on Louisiana women writers, was part of a last-ditch attempt to save face and restore my self-esteem.

  Not long after finishing my doctorate I moved to Auckland to take up employment in the American studies department at one of the most prestigious universities in the country. For more than thirteen years life was good, but then one day a cold dread began to seep through my world, sapping all the light from my day.

  It started when rumours of humanities department closures took on a more threatening aspect, with talks of reviews and restructuring. The vice-chancellor, known by many as the Ice Chancellor, issued press releases hinting that sluggish university departments would be revitalised and strategies would be implemented to grow the campus. ‘We see this as a positive step for the future of the university,’ she said on radio and television. ‘We have the chance to embrace an exciting new business model. Staff have already been asked for input and we are here to listen …’ Photographs of the VC in front of the new ‘gateway’ to the campus, a large stone monument, made the local front page.

  Carpetlayers moved through our department, replacing the threadbare dirty green covering with a strange purple-brown flecked carpet. The whole floor had a chemical smell, and staff who had been skulking in their offices for years were forced to open their doors to air out their rooms. Everyone felt exposed. Discussion in the staffroom began to ask whether the laying of new carpet boded well for the department. Some saw it as a vote of confidence; others of a more cynical nature regarded it as a sign that we were all to be replaced. I wasn’t sure what to think. I wanted to believe we were going to be all right, but the smell and colour of the new carpet struck
me as toxic.

  At night I lay awake trying to work out where I sat on the scale from ‘indispensable’ to ‘dispensable’. I’d been at the university for longer than many people in the department and was employed full time as a senior lecturer. But I wasn’t an associate professor or a professor, and had never been head of department. I had a great teaching record but my rise through the ranks hadn’t been as quick as that of some of my male colleagues. My publishing record was good but not as prolific or successful as that of two of my closest colleagues: Professor Archer Hall and Associate Professor Jerome Roy.

  Archer was older than me, and a real scholar. He was an expert in Early American first-person encounter narratives, those of explorers, missionaries or traders, but he also had an encyclopaedic knowledge and could have lectured on any subject from history through to religion and literature. Archer represented the institutional memory of the department, and his presence was a constant reminder of how much more valuable and flexible a well-read human brain was than a computer search engine. Jerome was younger, a career academic. He’d had great success in getting funding, and as a result had been able to buy out his teaching to further his research and publication record. As Archer once joked, Jerome was the type of guy who picked out all the dried fruit from the muesli packet. I could see Archer’s point but, apart from the odd thoughtless remark, Jerome had been respectful and discreet in his dealings with me. On the other hand, I’d never posed much of a threat to him. Anyway, he was the go-to guy for twentieth-century American literature and could talk for hours about his favourite authors, James Salter and Truman Capote, a strange mixture that somehow worked. Whereas Archer served the old-fashioned concept of academic scholarship and Jerome served twenty-first century academic careerism, I fitted somewhere in the middle, serving students.

  In the very early days I’d sometimes helped Archer with background research, such as when he co-authored a book about early Mormon missionaries to New Zealand or wrote a paper about nineteenth-century Māori and Pākehā pilgrims to the Salt Lake Temple in Utah for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. More recently I’d also taken up the slack whenever Jerome had a break from teaching. I filled in for him and also covered course advising and marking, the least glamorous part of his job. I liked teaching, but being a good teacher didn’t cut it in terms of professional development.

  On the day I progressed to senior lecturer I thought my days of filling in for others had finally come to an end. From now on I would focus on big projects, research and writing for the top journals on Southern women’s literature. I celebrated my new role by purchasing a bottle of Chanel No. 5, attracted to the story behind the fragrance. Ernest Beaux, its Russian-born French creator, based the famous aldehyde-centric perfume on memories of the time he spent stationed above the Arctic Circle during World War One. He wrote about the smells of the thawing rivers and lakes, notes released by the heat of the midnight sun. The aldehydes in Chanel No. 5 give it an abstract note, and the word that cropped up time and again in responses to the perfume was ‘radiant’. Radiant. That was to be my future. I bought the perfume, and then a place of my own, a sanctuary, my home. I was so happy I felt as though I’d stepped into the light.

  Six weeks before I lost my job I was sitting at my desk when I saw Jerome walk past my open door. He hesitated as if he might come in but then continued on without a word. Moments later he reappeared, raised his fist to tap on the doorframe but then thought better of it and suddenly looked back over his shoulder before returning the way he’d come.

  Later that morning he finally knocked. Jerome was young, good looking and smart. He favoured navy and grey, checked shirts buttoned to the neck, dark wool waistcoats and chinos. He was more preppy than hipster. Around his wrist was a thin silver bangle that drew attention to the thick, dark hairs sprouting on his arm. He was Canadian, from Toronto, and had a nice accent. I imagine he was loved and supported as a child as he had an air of confidence. He wanted and expected to be the next head of department.

  Always polite, Jerome asked how my day was going. I pointed to the stack of papers on my desk, marking from the Introduction to American Literature course that we shared, and answered, fine.

  ‘You going to the restructuring meeting on Friday?’

  I nodded.

  He started fiddling with the silver band around his wrist. ‘You’ve been here a long time. What do you think will happen?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I’m guessing it won’t be good.’

  ‘Scottie’s recently started kindergarten. She’s really settled in,’ he said.

  I nodded, glad that his daughter’s name was so distinctive that I easily identified who he was talking about.

  ‘Desna’s completed her Stepping Up course and is about to become a partner at Warden, Black and Maybank. She loves the lifestyle here.’

  ‘Yep, it’s a good place for a family,’ I agreed.

  ‘How long have you been here, in the department?’

  ‘Getting on for fourteen years,’ I said.

  ‘That’s a long time.’

  He hesitated, glanced past me towards the six-monthly planner on my wall. ‘You’ll find work at another university. If it comes to that.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to another university,’ I said. ‘I have an apartment here. A home I love.’

  He looked startled. ‘Yes, of course, but it’s not like you’re tied down like the rest of us …’ He stopped short of finishing the sentence and looked at the floor, embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean it to come out like that. I know you have ties to this place. Sorry.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be all right,’ I said. ‘They won’t get rid of you.’

  Notes of restructuring and redundancy: carpet glue and boxes filled with books and old paper.

  A list of potential base notes: gas, eucalyptus, soap, uranium, oakmoss, oats, rose, blood, jasmine, sewage, diesel, amber, oil paint, clay, wood shavings, boronia, ambrette, frankincense, industrial glue, dusty papers, old books.

  Base notes provide the foundation and soul of the perfume, but that doesn’t mean they are predictable and like to stay put. Like memories, they have a tendency to flare up at any time; they do more than linger in the background. They also have a way of altering and fixing the more volatile heart and top notes. There is a sense of interplay and exchange.

  You need patience to appreciate base notes. Whereas top notes burst from the bottle and heart notes develop after only twenty or thirty minutes, sometimes sooner, base notes bide their time.

  But for now, the heart notes need my attention.

  HEART NOTES

  BEFORE I HUNG MY JACKET ON THE HOOK BY THE DOOR OR placed my keys in the bowl on the side table, I always slipped off my shoes and stood with my back pressed against the exposed brick wall and inhaled. Released by the heat, the smell of wool and lanolin drew close, enfolding me in its welcome.

  Home was an open-plan loft designed around a single kitchen-living space. The original steel staircase led to the mezzanine floor where I slept; a small second bedroom and bathroom were tucked off the entrance. Before the developers took over, the building was derelict. Graffiti and tagging disfigured the brickwork, the steel-framed windows were broken and the wide floorboards were damaged and encrusted with pigeon shit. My apartment was little more than disused roof space, the topmost corner of the former city wool store.

  I took another deep breath. The air had substance, a pulse. It was rich and deep and made up of many notes beside the wool and lanolin. There were hints of fresh green grass, sun-bleached paddocks, the sweet coumarin warmth of hay, dust and shit … even human sweat, tobacco and tar. My home was a repository of past weather, seasons and years.

  I walked towards the long table in the centre of the room and placed my bag gently beside an open notebook. A shaft of light filtered through the window, creating a broad track across neat rows of carefully labelled amber bottles. From my bag I took out my latest purchases and placed them in the ga
ps, speaking their names as I arranged them: clary sage, myrrh, birch tar, geranium, nutmeg, labdanum, vanilla and ambrette.

  It was quiet in the loft. The last of the afternoon sun had slipped below the partially closed blind and the room was bathed in golden tones. The ceiling fan traced a slow circle overhead and every now and then a sound like a gentle whop, whop, whop lapped the air.

  Kate Chopin’s The Awakening lay open next to my notebook. It was one of the department’s standard texts, on the first-year reading list for as long as I could remember. For a time, it was the only novel by a woman that was required reading. When I lost my job I brought my books home. I stacked my poetry collection and novels in neat piles against the walls and placed the academic texts in numbered boxes in the spare room. I should probably have tried to sell the textbooks but I thought they might be out of date and worthless.

  It had been a long time since I’d read for pleasure. At first I wasn’t sure if I’d remember how to read without a specific purpose in mind. I guess old habits take a while to die because as I reread the story of Edna Pontellier, I copied passages and attached sticky notes whenever I came across a reference to scent. By the time I was halfway through there were fifteen blue tabs poking out from the pages.