Joy For Beginners (22 page)

At first, Ava had approached her job as a good if uninspired foot soldier, spraying samples on thin, pointed strips of white paper, waving them three times to disperse the top notes before handing them to customers and dutifully ringing up and wrapping their purchases. No opinions, no comments, the perfumes passing by, mute as car parts on an assembly line.

It was the woman with the auburn hair who changed things. Ava had seen her before, lean and graceful, running her shining red Irish setter around the lake, the two of them mirror images of each other. But here the woman stood in front of Ava at the department store counter, holding a giant white poodle of a perfume, the essence of roses and lilacs thick in the bottle in her hand.

Why was it, thought Ava, suppressing a sudden surge of irritation, that people could so effortlessly, unintentionally, choose dogs that looked exactly like them, and yet be so inept when selecting a scent that would be welcomed by their own skin? How many gentle, kind men had passed her wearing a bullhorn message of musk and engine oil; how many strong, beautiful women had come to her counter swaddled in the essence of talcum powder or lost in a forest of sandalwood?

“No,” Ava had said, taking the bottle from the woman with the auburn hair standing in front of her. “Not that one.”

“What?” The woman looked up in surprise.

“That’s not you.”

“What do you mean?” The woman seemed intrigued rather than annoyed, which helped.

“You aren’t flowers.” Ava started off tentatively, but then gathered assurance. “You are golds and oranges, not purples and pink.” When the woman looked a little confused, Ava instinctively grabbed a bottle from behind her.

“Smell this.” Ava sprayed the perfume, not on the tester strip but on the woman’s left wrist. “You want it on the arm that’s nearest your heart, where it’s warmest. Now wait a minute for the top notes to pull back before you smell.” The assurance in her voice startled her. When was the last time she had felt that confident?

They stood, the scent in the air about them evoking images of red maple trees, yellow-tinged bamboo, a whisper of black tea floating through rice-paper walls. Ava watched as the woman’s shoulders relaxed.

“Yes,” she said simply, raising her wrist to her face.

“You should let it interact with your skin a bit before you make your decision.”

“I already know,” the woman said.

As Ava rang up the purchase, she could smell the perfume settling into the woman in front of her, becoming a part of her.

“Thank you,” the woman said, resting her left hand for just a moment on Ava’s shoulder. Ava breathed in, cinnamon and fall leaves, and felt her nose awaken.

 

AFTER THAT, Ava could feel the awful weight of gravity lessening, inhalation by inhalation, each breath increasing the space between earth and sky, colors and tastes and thoughts slipping in along with the smells, as loving and longed for as old friends walking into her arms. She found herself stopping on the porch in the mornings when the air was straight off the lake, fresh and cool and green, to breathe in slowly and gratefully. As she rode the bus home at the end of her workday, she found herself noticing the perfumes about her—how some created a small quiet oasis around their people and others were more aggressive, jostling against one another like elbows, claiming territory. Sometimes she would sense a perfume from one side of the bus reaching toward another, mingling, the wearers unknowing, looking out their respective windows, and she would spend her bus ride wondering what it would take for them to turn around and see each other.

At work she became bolder with her opinions, her confidence reinforced each time she saw a scent nestle into the skin of its wearer, whose eyes would widen in recognition. Her growing reputation for matching clients to scents traveled through the department store with an efficiency usually reserved for gossip regarding upper management.

“It’s getting a little ridiculous,” Kate commented. “I overheard the women in Evening Wear calling you the Perfume Whisperer.” But Kate didn’t mind, wasn’t sad that there was no equivalent title for her in the shoe department; she was happy to see her friend emerging from the sterile world in which she had submerged herself. The new Ava swam in her rediscovered sense of smell with relief and joy, and it was all Kate could do to stop her from accosting people on the street and offering suggestions on how to improve their olfactory reality.

 

AVA AND KATE WENT to the local university together that fall, Kate studying economics and public relations, while Ava bushwhacked her way through the bureaucratic system to create her own major—a combination of history, literature, biology and chemistry that she called simply Sensing Smell. Her studies made her an interesting, if occasionally annoying, roommate.

“Did you know,” Ava would say, looking up from her book, “that measles smell like plucked chicken feathers?”

“Thank you for that,” Kate answered steadily from her chosen position at the kitchen table. “I’m sure I’ll find that information helpful in my career.”

But in fact, for Ava it all was. When she left college it was to work with a perfume atelier in Los Angeles, where she quickly gained a following among the more powerful figures in the business and entertainment industry. There was the curly-haired method actor who wanted a cologne to help him inhabit the role of the moment; the museum curator looking to tint exhibit brochures with the fragrance of leather and stewing apples of seventeenth-century Jamestown or the sunflowers of southern France; the best-selling romance author who wanted different smells—sometimes perfume but more often simple domestic scents like cut apples or Emmental cheese—to evoke the characters in the book she was currently writing; the professional wife who would bring in a shirt from the man she wanted to marry next and have Ava select a perfume for her that would complement his smell.

Ava’s clients could instinctively recognize a match between a fragrance and a person or place when it was presented to them, that elusive connection, the subliminal joining of scent and soul; they could see the effect the right fragrance had on others (Ava always smiled at how the slightest hint of vanilla and chocolate, that faint hope of home-baked cookies, had helped tip a board’s decision to hire one of her clients as the CEO of the major home decor chain). But her clients could not create the match themselves, which made Ava’s career choice a lucrative one. And while she had the occasional Seattle client, it was in Los Angeles, with its twin idols of money and all things feng shui, that her job security was guaranteed.

 

IT HAD BEEN Ava’s idea to promote the concept of perfume parties as a way to expand the reach of the store beyond its location. By that point, Ava had lived in Los Angeles for almost ten years and she and Monica, the store’s owner, had become business partners. Business was steady but repetitive, for all that the cast of characters who entered the store were themselves flamboyant, famous or simply wanting to be. Ava found herself knowing their scents even before they opened the door. It was all too easy, like a juggler using only one pin; she wanted more in her hands.

And so, for an initially modest, and then—as the idea of perfume parties became popular, written up in local magazines and blogs—an exorbitant fee, she would go to gatherings at corporations, mansions, clothing store openings with her specially made leather case. Fifty one-ounce bottles arranged on shelves lined with cream-colored silk. She felt like a magician each time she opened the case to the sound of collective, covetous sighs. Over the years she had learned, like any good artist, to make sure the lighting was angled to reflect off the edges of the bottles, the gold and clear and pink liquids within, had learned to open the case slowly so there was no apprehension about spillage, only rising expectation.

Over the years of doing parties, she had realized the events were more successful if she let her clients explore the fragrances first, opening and inhaling one after another until finally they became overwhelmed and turned to her. She discovered a great deal watching them during that time—noting the ones who lingered over each bottle in conversation with the scent within, the ones who moved quickly from perfume to perfume on a single-minded quest for their match, like tourists racing through the Louvre wanting only to find the
Mona Lisa
. As she observed the gesture of a hand, the pitch of a voice, she was already making preliminary matches of her own.

Afterward she would sit down with them one at a time and ask them questions: where had they grown up, what foods would they eat late at night, where did they relax—beach, mountains, cities, bed—what books had reached into their souls? As they talked, she smelled salt water, biscuits, juniper, ginger, wood smoke, a blanket fresh from the dryer, dark chocolate, cherry blossoms, dried edelweiss held between the pages of a childhood paperback. As she asked her clients about their lives, she watched them relax and become expansive, their initial responses like top notes, designed for quick inhalation, leading to more reflective insights under the warmth of her attention. Ava learned to wait for the base note; it would tell her what she needed most to know. Usually it was something hidden—a sorrow, a joy, an anger or a desire to be kind. Beneath all the day-to-day maneuverings of a personality, the base note remained constant, a color upon which all the others rested but which was rarely acknowledged or perceived. Without all the layers, a perfume match was at best superficial, a name tag rather than an intimate conversation.

 

ONE EVENING IN JUNE, Ava packed her case, making sure each bottle was full, and set out for an event in Pasadena. Ava lived some twenty minutes away, in a small house she had bought years before in a somewhat questionable neighborhood, avoiding the clean and sterile high-rises she might have afforded. But she had loved the fragrance palette of her street, the scent of corn tortillas and frying oil and meat that greeted her as she turned the corner, how the smell turned into garlic and oregano and fennel as she continued up the hill, changing if she went past her house into strawberries and red wine, chanterelle mushrooms in warm butter and sherry. At the top she could smell the crisp silver scent of eucalyptus. Her hill and the winding road that led up it was an olfactory microcosm of the city she lived in, always in transition, reflecting her own feeling that she had never quite unpacked her last box, as if that made leaving an easier proposition.

She had tried to put her roots down in Los Angeles; she had bought her house and painted its walls in rich terra cottas and sage greens, filled the rooms with the scents of cumin and coriander, fresh-cut oranges and papaya and banana. There had been men over the years, the sharp marine smells of their shampoos and the muskier fragrance of their clothes, the unsweetened mint toothpaste of the outdoorsman, the shoe polish of the investment broker. The men had stayed for longer or shorter periods of time, but they always left or were asked to. For Ava, everything—even or perhaps particularly men—was its smell. She had been part of a study when she was in college, testing human sensitivity to olfactory stimuli; whether good or bad, after fifteen minutes most of the participants no longer were aware of a scent. Olfactory accustomization was a human survival trait, the study determined. Unfortunately for Ava, it seemed to work against the concept of long-term relationships; she couldn’t love what she could no longer smell.

The one constant in her life over the years had been Kate. Kate was the one Ava called when she broke up with her first boyfriend in LA, when she thought she was pregnant with the man who showed up too quickly after that, when she was choosing colors for her house, when her perfume parties got a two-page spread in a big fashion magazine. In the larger picture of Ava’s life, Kate was summer at the cabin, a long, open stretch of time to remember who you were. And when Kate got sick, Ava was as far from the cabin as she could get, for once glad of her remote location.

So Ava felt she deserved the challenge of the fund-raising walk that Kate had handed her, and the physical commitment it required was daunting enough that it seemed like a proper penance. Ava had trained steadily since Kate had given her the challenge, determined to succeed in what she saw as an understudy position, having failed utterly at a leading role in Kate’s illness. It was not going to be easy, unlike—she thought with a flash of irritation—making bread. Ava’s desire to be surrounded by only the most fascinating of culinary fragrances had kept her slim, but with the exception of an ill-fated stint of rock climbing with the outdoorsman, sweat had not been a perfume in her collection in the decades since she had moved to Los Angeles.

She had begun training for the walk on a treadmill in a gym, resigned to, even desiring the monotony of being within four walls, but over the months, as two miles had grown to three and four and five, so did her boredom with the endless fragrance loop of chlorine and sweat and expensive herbal shampoos, and she had turned to the hills behind her house, where a curiosity to find the epicenter of an elusive smell often overcame any tiredness in her legs. Over the months, as her muscles and lungs became stronger, she had tracked the aroma of chocolate cake to a child’s birthday party, discovered a group of engineering graduate students brewing beer in their garage, a neighborhood chili cook-off, complete with motorized bucking bronco. Yet even as she collected the scents in her memory, she felt as if she was waiting for something she hadn’t yet smelled.