Arrest us. Charge us for breaking curfew. How could we care?
From the outside, Café Roche looks shuttered and dark, and I fear it’s closed for the night. But Blue, still directing us, bumps his hip against the door, and it swings wide open for him. It’s not empty at all. The place is packed with the people of Paris, and they’re sitting in only the glow of candlelight. I suspect everyone’s gone out in the rain just so the rain could chase them into cafés and bars.
They look up from their mostly empty cups and cocktail glasses, and we keep singing Day’s song. We sing even louder, even the girls who sing the wrong words. There’s only one empty table, and it’s too small, but we all gather around it. A few girls sit on other girls’ laps. Blue pulls the bench down from the top of the piano, lifts the lid, and begins to play.
Here, with the racket of the rain muffled, we slow the song down, and we soften it up, and we sing it the way Day did. Blue waves his arms at the others in the café, and some of them join in too. When we finish and start over, more join in. We keep singing the song, over and over, and everyone in the joint’s singing along.
Madame Roche tugs on the sleeve of one of our girls, and they go to the cellar, and they come up with their arms overloaded with bottles, most of them half full at best. Some of them have only a few sips, or even just a drop. I’d even guess that a few just had a sticky lip for the licking. But it’s all her very very finest, the cognacs and liqueurs that you had to ask for, that you had to know about, that you had to pronounce correctly or she wouldn’t bring them to you. She’d pretend she had no idea what you meant.
She’d hidden what was left in her cabinets when the Nazis came. And now she was offering it all up to everyone in the house. We pass the bottles around, take what we want. Madame Roche returns to the cellar and comes up with even more. The bottles keep moving, from table to table, and we keep singing.
The beauty of the song is that it’s simple. It’s sentimental. There are no complicated notes to be reached, no clever bridges to cross. Day was such a young woman when she sang it—a girl, really—and we all heard in her sweet, innocent voice every brokenhearted sweetheart who sent her boy to fight. The tune wasn’t catchy by any means, but it was so singable, you couldn’t keep quiet once it was struck up; the singing reached inside of you and drew the song out.
And the record came out just after the War Before, only months after it ended. It was a promise, and a blown kiss, to the soldiers who fought.
Where were you when I thought of you always?
Do you sing along when our song plays?
What’d you do with the love that I sent?
Did you always know the words that I meant?
She recorded it in the only language she knew then, English, but they listened to it everywhere there were war wounded and war dead. For some folks, “Where Were You When” was the only English they ever learned. There was no way to distort the power of that song, even if it was sung by the enemy. It was about every hero who’d ever fought, whether he’d won or not. And when it played, wherever it played, men and women stood, put their arms around each other, and sang it with more heart than they’d ever sung any national anthem. They even recited the song’s first words, along with Day, a dedication that was spoken not sung: This song is for you, whoever you are.
73
After I settled in Paris a little over a decade ago, I got a few letters from M, then nothing for two years. And I’d not moved an inch. I wrote to him, and I wrote again. Certainly there’d been long stretches of silence before, a silence I might as well have begged for, foolishly, in my letters, in my efforts to be poetic, or erotic. When I don’t hear from you, I think of you constantly, I’d write. Or: You’d be easier to forget if I heard from you often. You would become a habit. An idle conversation. An easy waltz. As it is, it’s a dark emptiness I’m always calling into, always listening close for more than an echo.
Finally, I received a package—a large, fat envelope—with M’s address on the return label. Eight years ago, now.
Inside the envelope were more envelopes, a bundle of letters, tied together with a silk ribbon. Not only had M finally written me again, I thought, but he’d written letter after letter. Or, even more enticing: these were letters that had sat unsent in a desk drawer for years. I loved the idea of hearing all the things he hadn’t dared tell me.
But as I loosened the ribbon, I saw that these letters weren’t unsent. They’d been marked up by post-office stamps and cancellations. They were addressed, but not to me. They were all addressed to him, by me. He’d returned to me the many letters I’d sent him.
I searched the package for an explanation, and found a separate envelope, with no writing across it. I opened it and was relieved to read the first line: I’ve waited too long to write. But then it occurred to me that this wasn’t M’s penmanship. I turned the sheet over, to see the signature. Mrs. Oliver Somerset.
What I learned from Mrs. Oliver Somerset, in this one page of stationery, front and back, was that M had a daughter I never knew about. M had this daughter, with his mister, shortly after I left Manhattan. This daughter, this Mrs. Oliver Somerset, was married herself now, with children of her own. She had a name of her own too—Clementine. And this Clementine, wife of Oliver Somerset, mother of Wilbur Somerset (thirteen years old), and Evelyn Somerset (eleven), and Annabel Somerset (eight), was writing me on this day because I was her mother’s friend, and she was sure I’d want to know the sad news that M had passed away.
She gave no details of her mother’s death, whether it was sudden or expected, peaceful or fraught. And I sensed from the letter that her not telling me was a kind of refusal, a way to insist on the intimacy of family, to remind me that I was not part of M’s life. I was to be grateful, the letter didn’t say, that she’d bothered to write me at all. Every sentence, though polite and kind and charitable, carried with it that clipped hint of finality—I could just hear her voice, like those of the church ladies of my childhood, that gaggle of do-gooders who had only just time enough to bless you with an update on their piety, on their family’s health, on their baking, their quilting, their housewifely diligence, leaning forward, nodding fast, smiling tightly, before a So good to see you in church and a quick gathering of skirts, off to attend to the people who mattered.
Every empty sentence was only carrying the letter closer to its end. I knew, before I even finished, that Mrs. Somerset would not ask me to respond, would ask no questions about me, about my life, about my days with M, and would indicate nothing about the bundle of letters she was returning to me. She didn’t even mention them, as if they’d somehow found their way into the envelope unnoticed while she busied herself with her letter about her husband and children.
Clementine, you and I share a name! she wrote, her only acknowledgment of having given the letters half a glance.
I was sad, yes, to hear of M’s death, sad beyond belief, but in the moment, I was most distracted, and baffled, by how M, my M, could have raised someone like this. I hated Mrs. Oliver Somerset. I wanted M to have had a daughter who would long to come to Paris to meet me. I could picture that Clementine as any number of amazing women—maybe an actress, a poet, a sculptor. Maybe she’d be an aviatrix who’d pilot her own plane from her city to mine. The loss of that woman, this fictional daughter, was what tore at my heart.
In the months that followed, after reading and rereading that letter from Mrs. Somerset, I came to understand it differently. I even came to have some affection for Mrs. Somerset, and sympathy for the predicament she was in when faced with her mother’s proof of another life lived. Suddenly, out of nowhere, her mother was someone she’d never met before. But Mrs. Oliver Somerset gathered her wits and did me this kindness. And that rushing of the sentences I’d imagined before began to slow down; the sentences even seemed painstaking, the words deliberate. Oh, that sweet and sad exclamation point at the
end of you and I share a name! You and I share a name. You and I share a name. I never tired of reading it, and I could sense Clementine trying to say so much more than she could.
But those first days after receiving the letter, those eight years ago, I only felt insulted. And the only crying I could do was a kind of exasperated sputtering. Only hunger drove me out of the house. I went to Café Roche for a cup of coffee and a pale gray, wrinkled steak that I could barely saw through with Madame Roche’s toothless table knife. Usually I brought my own silverware, because not only was Madame Roche’s very feeble, but she charged a fee for its use. The food at Café Roche was never very good, even before the war.
And, wouldn’t you know, that’s the moment my grief chose to consume me. First you suspect you’ll let yourself shed a tear or two; you can always dab your damp cheeks with the cuff of your sleeve. But then your efforts to keep from crying tremble your hands, and start your knife and fork clattering against the plate. Your embarrassment provokes more tears. And when you realize there’s no stopping what you started, you give in, and once you give in, you’re done for. And you sit there shaking, and weeping, and snorting, asserting yourself into everyone’s evening, wordlessly insisting that everyone consider your condition and weigh their responsibilities to you, a stranger. And just like that, the night becomes that night when no one knew what to do for the old woman in trousers bawling her eyes out.
It broke my heart to not know what they’d buried M in. A dress, most likely. I wished I knew, at least, what the dress looked like. And then I began to cry for someone else too, someone I didn’t even know, someone named Abraham who had belonged to the club in Manhattan, our gentlemen’s club, the Brothers of the Sisterhood, whose death made the newspaper as a bit of comedy—the weird tale of how a man died, and the undertaker declared that the man had not been a man at all, never, not once, no matter what he wore and how he signed his name. This undertaker took Abraham’s whole life away from him as he lay dead on a slab, indefensible forever and ever, amen.
I’d noticed a woman sitting at the next table with three men, a beautiful woman with a complexion that was both dark and light, with orange freckles across her nose and cheeks. She wore a summery hat so big it went on for ages, the front brim popped up. She wore a dress that looked like there should be something to wear under it; it was like an apron, her naked breasts barely hidden by its lacy ruffles. And like an apron, or a dish towel, might be, it was patterned with pears and apples and walnuts.
Across her shoulders she wore a long pale blue chiffon scarf patterned with see-through stars. Her legs were crossed, most likely to show off a shoe that was a checkerboard of lime-green silk and yellow rhinestones.
Ladies and gentlemen, Day Shabillée.
When Madame Roche brought to her table a bottle of champagne on a tray, with glasses, Day rose from her chair, plucked up the bottle and two champagne coupes, and left the three men. The men groaned and objected, they begged for her return, but she ignored them and plopped down across from me. She handed me a handkerchief, then began to pull at the cork of the bottle.
“I don’t drink,” I said, in English. I knew she was American right off.
“You’ll drink this,” she said. “I made those brats order me the best bottle in the house, because they’ve insulted me.” She nearly missed the glasses as she poured from the heavy bottle with her thin wrists, splashing the wine all around. “I’m living here at the café, upstairs. My demi-pension rate only includes breakfast, so I have to dress scantily…” She paused. Looked up in thought. “Scantily and scandalously, I guess.” She shrugged. “I have to flirt for my supper. But some of the less reputable cafés around here rent their rooms by the hour, and that just confuses some of these boys.” She picked up my glass and handed it to me, so she could clink hers against mine. “I’m actually a very popular singer,” she said. “I had a song, some years ago, that everyone was singing everywhere. You couldn’t get away from it if you tried.” She picked up my fork and speared a slice of potato from my plate. Ate it, then ate another. “Why are you crying? But you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”
I knew that this was the daughter I would have preferred for M. Not Mrs. Somerset, but Day Shabillée. The daughter I wanted for M and myself. I’d longed for her, and now here she was.
Does the jeweler discover the facets of a diamond with the tip-tap of his chisel, or does he tip-tap the facets in? It’s like how the ancient Romans suggested the atom, and then centuries later, Einstein found it. You theorize, then invent your proof.
A perfumer creates a fragrance from thin air, then breathes it in.
I cleared my throat. “A man I loved has died,” I said.
Day tilted her head. “That’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said. It was melodrama, but it didn’t offend me. She asked for the handkerchief back. “Now I need that,” she said, and she did. Though the tears were real, she did perform a bit. She fluttered the hankie at her face, making sure the men at the next table saw her so overcome.
74
I’ve been giving up my life of crime for decades, my every theft my last. I got rich enough at a young-enough age that I could easily picture myself becoming someone else. But that someone else was always doing something that didn’t seem quite doable.
I’d get so frustrated by the notion of learning a new way of living that I’d fall back on what I knew all too well.
At least three or four times a year, I would commit my final crime and trumpet my retirement to the underground of snakes-in-the-grass. If you were a villain like I was, you fell in with the others, like in any other industry of corruption. We’d bump into each other in all the places we didn’t belong.
And I always wanted them to know that I wasn’t one of them. I wanted to believe in a network of misfits so everyone could take note of my disappearance from their ranks. I wanted all the most-wanted, the crooks with the biggest bounties on their heads, to envy me my new leaf. I longed to be respected for finally disrespecting my disreputable life.
But what would I do instead?
“Before I opened my shop, I never imagined I would be a perfumer,” I tell the girls. “Or that I could be.” A few of the courtesans who’ve escaped Boulette’s, and a few others from other houses, have lingered here. They just can’t bear to leave Paris. I’m teaching them the art, philosophy, and manufacture of scent. I lead them on tours of the boilers and stills in my house. Blue has set up a laboratory in what was once the dining hall of the boys’ academy, and I instruct the girls on the use of the paper cones, the heating coils, the glass plates, the flasks, the cylinders, the pots, the ladles. “Sunlight steals the scent away,” I tell them as I lead them through the academy’s shadows. “We keep our bottles away from the windows.”
But mostly I teach what can’t be taught. Inspiration can come from anywhere, I tell them, from all the senses. I once created a perfume inspired only by the very particular ticking of M’s pocket watch; not just the sound of it, but the feel of it, its tiny, tinny tip-tap against my chest as he held me close. I’ve created a perfume based on Blue’s gentle voice onstage, the first time he got a speaking part in a play, as a jilted lover who had only one line, a line delivered too soft to hear, even as we all leaned forward to listen. I heard in that pretty boy’s voice the spun-sugar scent of candy floss, and the faint ruin of an orchid corsage wilting at the end of a long night.
And though I want more than anything for Blue to let Félix go, so his heart would be up for grabs again and he could love someone else, he’s still holding on. I’ve made Blue a perfume that speaks of all the mythmaking of our everyday—so many gone, so much stolen, so many lies, so much heroism and villainy. It’s a perfume made of whispers, of secrets written in the cream of your coffee with the tip of your spoon. Codes tapped with your tongue on the roof of your mouth.
But some in my house aren’
t so interested in romance. One of the girls wants to nuzzle her nose again in the balls of a barley farmer. I help her make an elixir of bamboo extract, apple peel, burnt tobacco. Some want sweat, skin, blood. Opium, absinthe. One girl will only write on a piece of paper her request: Son sperme sentait comme le gingembre épluché. His semen smelled like peeled ginger.
Annick has invited in strays of her own. One recent afternoon, she stumbled across a teenage girl begging, and that girl had a brother, a boy of ten. Their house had been stolen, their parents dragged off. Then, only a few days after, Annick brought home another homeless child, an eleven-year-old, and the day after that, a six-year-old, all from Jewish families. I didn’t want to believe Paris was now a city of urchins, so I half suspected Annick of kidnapping. I preferred to picture her as a witch luring babies away with lollipops.
It sent a shiver up my back to think that at any given moment, you could stumble across a lost waif. In spite of all the horrors of this war, I simply couldn’t quite all-the-way believe in all these orphans.
I left America when I did because I had to, but I wanted to leave too. We left America, so many of us, to be free of its oppressions. And we were, for a while. Paris had been invented for us, inspired by our imaginations. But this city we’re now in…I never wanted to live like this.
Still, here we are. The house gets so full, our ration cards can’t keep up, and the black market’s getting skimpy too. I install locks on the cupboards so no one’ll sneak more than their share, but the children, our little Hansels and Gretels, sometimes unscrew the hinges to steal the chocolate. We’ve even resorted to reading cookbooks aloud to each other. English pheasant pie. Saddles of Kentucky mutton. Tongue au gratin. Walnut mocha cake.
Much of the time, we’re in our laboratory. Blue has carried up all my apothecary jars of spices and herbs, and my cabinets with drawers full of dried petals and powders. All the materials I’ve collected and stockpiled over the years. We have jugs and bottles and ginger pots of oils and essences.
The Perfume Thief Page 33