A pack of children run past us, chasing after sheets of paper that have been spun along and around by the wind. Their faces are so filthy, it seems they’ve dirtied themselves with purpose for camouflage. At first I wonder why they’re so determined to grab at all those loose Nazi leaflets, likely full of information we’d all rather not have, and then I remember that you can fashion a somewhat useful briquette from a wad of paper. Wet it down, let it dry, and it might burn just long enough to turn a cool cup of cocoa lukewarm.
My nose is running, and I’ve brought my handkerchief to my face, but I swear I can smell the peanuts that used to roast, only last winter, in front of the cafés. We pass beneath an optician’s sign, a pair of wooden spectacles the size of a bicycle, and in the creak of its chains as the wind rocks it, I can hear the voices of vendors calling out, Cacahuètes, cacahuètes, cacahuètes. Their voices would fade, along with the smell of the hot peanuts, as you wandered farther, and it was all you could do not to double back, just for the rich scent so sweet and warm in the cold air.
“I’ve been reading your books on Paris,” I say, to butter Voss up, though I’ve not glanced at them again since the skim I gave them before the fashion show. “I love all the scents you list, of course. It’s sad how many we’re missing this winter.”
“Which do you miss the most?” he says, as if he’s just another rueful Parisian.
“I’ve always looked forward to the kindling I would buy from the firewood shop,” I say. “The shop hasn’t had a stick of wood in weeks. Usually, stepping inside is like stepping into the forest. Always so damp and dark, and fragrant with pine needles.”
And at this very moment, we pass a shopwindow lined with bottles of perfume, a mirage in winter. In one of Voss’s books on Paris, he claims there are ten thousand perfume shops in the city, so if it’s true, it’s not so whimsical that we would find the perfumes of the Parfumerie Chamberry at some point in our strolling. I stop Voss and point at the window, at a display of Mûrier Blanc, the perfume he bought when he first arrived in Paris as a boy. Next to it is Feuilles de Thym, which I happen to know was the first fragrance Pascal designed when he joined his father’s company.
Voss thumbs his knuckle against the glass. “You know the owner of the Parfumerie Chamberry?” Voss says. “Monsieur Pascal? Someone told me you worked with him.”
He’s been tiptoeing around this question ever since we first met, and even now seems cautious. It’s as if he’s been circling me as I’ve been circling him. I wonder if he walked me this way just so we would pass this window.
“I sold some ideas to Pascal,” I lie.
“The man abandoned everything,” Voss says. “He’s gone. As a matter of fact, I’ve been staying in his apartments. Rifling through his accounts. It’s all rather tedious, if you want the truth. I sit at his desk, with a pen and paper, and I make note of all his pens and all his papers.”
I play along, but I’m appalled. Pascal abandoned everything? Voss is staying in his apartments? He’s counting pens? But I’m grateful too. This is the first he’s spoken of any involvement at all with Pascal’s business. “I’m dying to know what’s in Feuilles de Thym,” I say, trying to sound pleasant. “Do you know? Have you seen the accords?”
“I hoped you might tell me,” he says. “I figured you’d have some professional insights.”
“I suppose I have some ideas,” I say. “But the scent’s a little trickier than you’d think. The first scents of any perfumer tend to be overly complicated, like they fear they’ll never have the chance to design another perfume again.”
He takes the cigar back out of his pocket, but he doesn’t try to light it again. He just puts it between his teeth. Chews on the end of it. “I have business I need to do, with a distillery, outside of Paris,” he says. “And I need a day or two away from the war. I thought I’d visit Illiers. Do you know the place? A town from the childhood of Marcel Proust. He wrote about it in his novels. You’ll go with me.”
“Yes?” I say.
“Yes?” he says. I then realize his You’ll go with me was a question, not a demand.
I know this moment all too well, this mix of satisfaction and agony as you swindle and cheat. You’ve gained their confidence, but now the real work begins. And the real trouble starts. In an instant, you’ve stepped from the shallows into the depths.
“Yes,” I say. This is taking me farther from Pascal’s house. And I’ll be all alone with Voss, when I probably shouldn’t be. But I can’t deny the intrigue of it. There’s something he thinks I know. I need to get inside his head to see what he thinks I have in mine.
16
I bring Zoé a perfume I’m calling Late Summer Plum simply because it’s sweet, with a tart sting. I can still taste the garden plum M somehow came to have in autumn, its flesh like candy, its skin too bitter to eat. I had the juice all down my chin and wrist after only one bite. This is why I gave it to you to begin with, M whispered as he held my hand in his. He turned up my wrist to kiss me there, then on my cheek, and lips, with gentle licks at my sticky skin.
Zoé’s apartment is cast in shadows, and she leans back deeper into them, out of the dim lamplight. She doesn’t try on the Late Summer Plum; listless and wrecked, she just sprays at the air with it. My perfume is still a signal to Lutz that Zoé and I discuss only fragrance when alone.
“Are you all right, Zoé?” I say, thinking of her at the fashion show, hiding her eyes behind her veil. “Tell me the truth.”
She says something, but I can’t hear her. “I can’t hear you,” I say.
“I can’t hear you,” she says.
The jazz on the record player doesn’t match the mood of the room—it’s frantic and brassy. You can’t even tap your toe to it; the rhythm’s all off. “Can we change the record?” I say.
She goes to the phonograph and turns it off, and that’s when I realize how loud it really was—my ears are ringing from it. “Lutz loves jazz,” she says. “The Germans can’t decide whether they want to outlaw it or fill the streets with it. One minute it’s too sinful, the next they think a little sinning keeps us all in line.”
I say, “Is Lutz hurting you?”
She keeps her back to me. And she doesn’t answer my question. “I could have any man I want,” she says. “I’ve had proposals of marriage. From rich men. Handsome men. I could be kept in a gilded cage. Anything I wanted. I could ask for it, and I’d get it.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Is this my life, then? As a little girl, I dreamed of falling in love. I would fall in love and marry. And I’d be happy forever.”
“I’ll find the diary,” I say, keeping my voice low. “I’ll get the perfumery back for you.”
She steps into the shadows and walks to her credenza, to her wooden alligator with its cigarettes. “Oh?” she says, weary, doubtful.
“I’ve spent some time with Oskar Voss,” I say.
Zoé says, “Oh?” again, but this time with a lilt to it. She’s impressed.
“I don’t know yet what he wants from me,” I say. “But I know he wants something. I’m playing along.”
She turns to look at me, and she leans back against the credenza as she smokes. There does seem to be a bruise beneath her eye, but then it skitters away, then back, as the shadows shift when she brings the cigarette to her lips. “Lutz says Oskar Voss is sickly,” she says.
“Sickly?”
“He has some kind of condition, some ailment that knocks him flat from time to time. Lutz keeps his eye on it. The Nazis don’t have much patience with people falling ill, and Voss is on borrowed time. So Lutz keeps as close as he can get, ready to step in if Voss needs help.” She raises her eyebrows at me. “Once Voss stumbles, Lutz will step on his head to push himself up in the ranks.”
Has he thought about poison? I start to say, but I don’t. But I begin to think of poison. I t
hink of M again. He was a jack-of-all-trades, M was, and poison had its place in his sentimental education.
“Voss is taking me with him to Illiers,” I say.
“Oh?” she says again. She says, “My father has a rose farm near there.”
She gives me the whole history of the Parfumerie Chamberry. The true history, a humble one. “It’s a love story,” Zoé says. The perfumery was established decades ago by Zoé’s grandfather, a barber in the Pletzl who stumbled onto perfume when experimenting with beard pomades of Irish moss and essence of rosemary. The barber’s wife, a daughter of a kosher rum distiller in London’s East End and an amateur botanist who grew herbs on her rooftop, brought some science to it. When they gave up the barbershop, they liked the idea of rhyming Chambéry with parfumerie, naming their new laboratory after the little Alpine village in southern France where they met and fell in love, when they were teenagers, when they both spent a summer killing aphids on a vineyard, spritzing poison on the grape leaves with perfume atomizers. Chambéry became Chamberry, because they failed to check it against a map.
I believe her, though it’s nothing like the story the company tells about itself. The official story, like so much else about perfume, is fiction for the most part. Zoé’s grandfather does come from a long line of barbers, but the company’s history notes generations of chemists, of royal warrants from France’s queens, empresses, all sorts of approvals and distinctions. Those of us who know perfume know that such storytelling is just part of the art. Secrets and lies are what people want. They don’t want to see chemical formulas for synthetics and compounds. For cat piss and whale shit. They want to picture the perfumer bottling the dew off petals or brushing pollen from the wings of a sphinx moth.
They want perfume that links them to the bloodlines of royalty.
“Maybe I’ll just tell Lutz myself who I really am,” she says. “What difference does it make?”
I can’t bear to ask about the details of her affair with Lutz, and the pain he causes, but I beg her to keep quiet. “I’ll have something soon,” I promise. And just saying it makes me feel a little closer to the diary.
I leave Zoé with a bottle of my azalea perfume, a scent that always soothes me. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before,” I say. “Breathe it in, and it will calm you.”
“Will it drop me into a deep sleep for a hundred years?” she says. La Belle au bois dormant. Sleeping Beauty.
I almost tell her of my fanciful notions about Voss, about how his infatuation with Paris might save us all. Voss with his love for perfume, Lutz with his love for jazz—they’re enchanted, with our restaurants, our chocolate, our coffee, our wine. Maybe they’re smart enough to realize they’ll lose the Paris they love if they don’t leave us alone to cast our spells.
17
In one of his books on Paris, Voss lists the scents Marcel Proust describes in his novels: myrrh, incense, hawthorn, lilacs, varnish, soot, unbleached calico, a moldy smell like that of stale toast, the heat of the barber’s iron, the baths that other people do not take.
Blue and Day join me in my kitchen, where I’ve never cooked much, not even back when there was food at the markets. I converted it long ago to an apothecary, its cupboards stocked with bottles and jars of spices, florals, oils, extracts. I’ll impress Voss with a perfume inspired by Proust.
Day sits on the kitchen counter, her sleeves rolled, her skirt hiked up. She has volunteered all her pulse points as I experiment and approximate. I have thirteen variations on a theme. I’ve dabbed at each of Day’s temples, both sides of her jaw, her neck, her wrists, the insides of her elbows. I’m even sniffing at her ankles and the backs of her knees.
“Not enough lemon in this one,” Blue says, tapping his finger on Day’s jaw. “But a little too much of it on her right ankle.” Blue can’t volunteer his own pulse points, because perfume sometimes sparks a rash on him. Yes, my perfume apprentice is allergic to my art.
I pick up Day’s hand, turn up her wrist, lift it to just beneath my nose. I look up and off, sorting out all the elements of the scent. “I think if I just back up on the fusel oil, a tiptoe or two, then it’s definitely the left wrist.”
“All you’re going to smell in a minute is my rotting corpse,” Day says, “because I’m about one tiptoe away from freezing to death.”
“Frozen corpses don’t rot,” I say. I kiss her wrist before letting it go. Blue helps her down from the counter, and I drape her cardigan over her shoulders. And such a cardigan it is, a sweater of shaggy mohair in a shade of crème de menthe. “Reminds me of a goat’s beard I combed out,” I say, petting her shoulder. “On a farm, in Cyprus. The goats graze through the cistus shrubs, then the shepherds comb out the fur for the labdanum, which you can put in perfume for a little whiff of plum brandy.” I put on some water to boil for tea. “Oh, you know, I think the one on the back of your left knee could use just half a drip of that labdanum.”
“Do you even know what you’re trying to find?” Day says, sniffing at her wrists, front and back, considering the scents. “Have you even read any Proust?”
“Heavens, no,” I say. “It’s hundreds of pages. Thousands, maybe.” Voss arranged for a bookseller to send copies of his own guides to Paris to my shop, and with the delivery, he included all the thick volumes of Proust’s novel. “If you’re ever on a little boat, that’s when it would be good to have editions of Proust. So you have something heavy to toss into the sea if the boat starts to sink.”
“What does Oskar Voss want with perfume anyway?” Day says. “He works for the intelligence agency.”
“Voss is a precious little fop,” I say. “All he talks about is perfume. He says he wants to keep Paris Paris.” I shrug. “He’s like a boy with an electric train set, building a little tin village around the tracks.”
I won’t confess that Voss’s affection for the city has made me just a touch hopeful. And now knowing that he’s got some kind of sickness, some vulnerability, I feel like I might be able to sway him this way and that. But I don’t want to seem naive or provoke any extra concern, so I don’t mention it. If I see any doubt in their eyes, it might throw me off.
The copies of the guidebooks he sent me were in English, as if for my eyes alone. I’m desperate to visit the Paris he describes, if it still exists, if ever it did, its obscure little shops hidden by their own awnings and umbrellas. Between the wars, a hole-in-the-wall chocolatier could squeak by doing little business at all, living by its pluck, by its charm and character. But even those who saved for a rainy day didn’t likely save for a rainy month or a rainy year. I’ve hardly seen any business myself, so I’m grateful for the ladies of Boulette’s and their fickle tastes that demand I return again and again.
Voss writes of a Paris that I can’t believe I’ve never visited: a shop that sells cubes of crystallized ginger so hot he hallucinated; a bistro that bottles its own pudding wine made from the juice of diseased apples. How did I ever miss the shop with the small bronze dolphin that dispensed a splash of perfume when you put your wrist to its spout?
While Blue, Day, and I wait for the water to boil, we sit in the cold room at the kitchen table, the three of us, our teeth chattering, suspicious of everything these days, suspect, as if the very air we’re breathing is foreign, depleted, a threat to our lungs. The air is so ice-cold, we worry it’s sprinkled with broken glass.
Blue says, “Félix says…” So many of Blue’s sentences begin that way these days. Félix says…Félix, the scrappy little blood donor I found Blue with in the perfume shop that night. “Félix says that the perfume, the fashion, the cabarets, the dancing”—he tiptoes his fingers across the table, making them dance and kick toward Day—“we’re all just fiddling while Rome burns.”
Day slaps at Blue’s little dancers. “Yes,” Day says, “anything touched by women is frivolous.”
Day’s mocking Blue, but she knows sh
e needs to seem frivolous indeed. She needs to be called upon to entertain the enemy, to pose herself in their lights, to stand just so to make her gown glisten just the way they like it, to be desired nightly. Every song she sings has to be approved, all the lyrics reviewed by the Nazi propaganda office, to ensure that the songs’ sentiments ring hollow enough.
Sentiment. I keep thinking about Voss’s quizzing me about my old love affairs. He appeals too much to my vanity. He listens to me, pays attention. Notices. These methods of his I know all too well; they’ve all served my own arts of persuasion.
“You think perfume and fashion can’t be political?” I ask Blue.
“I’m just telling you what Félix says.”
“Well, you tell Félix that…well, you should say…aren’t military uniforms fashion? And those shepherds in Cyprus I was just talking about. Spending all their days, even in the hottest days of summer, combing goats. That doesn’t seem like it could get political?”
The kettle whistles, and I go to it. I bring a meager tray of tea things to the table. No sugar, no cream. Just water in a pot, stained with old leaves from a tin at the back of the cupboard.
M was a tea-taster in Manhattan, testing for quality. That’s how he learned about poison too.
“Of all the lovers you’ve told me about,” I say to Day, “of all the lovers you’ve described to me for the perfumes I’ve made, who was your greatest one?” Day has never asked me this. I’ve never told her about M.
Day holds the teacup to her lips, breathing in the steam. “Guess,” she says.
I suggest the ballet dancer (the scent of talc, sweat, leather, the sharp sour-sweet of roses turning to mold), and she says no. I suggest the journalist (typewriter ribbon, a struck match, the tart ash in the bowl of a hashish pipe), and she says no to that too. “You’ll never guess,” she says. “Because I haven’t described him yet.” Ah, I think. She, too, has more to tell. Why would I have suspected anything less?
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