With a gust...

I swear the other night I saw T, the lawyer, out with local TV weathertwink Sven Sundgaard. In an Uptown Thai restaurant I suddenly had little Madeleine moment, remembering my odd, proto-adult attempts at being a real, emotional, responsible adult. The guy was a lawyer and made me Greek lemon soup, for crying out loud! And I could barely form my mouth around the vowels of love. Oh well--it happens--especially when you are twenty-three and temping at Wells Fargo Home Mortgage. He had a Saab convertible, enjoyed good meals, and had a steady supply of skunky weed.

It is interesting that I should run into him again--the first time I've seen him around town since that one time across the crowd at a Scissor Sisters concert. At least, I am assuming it was him, leaning in over his steaming bowl of noodles to discuss with all seriousness proper jogging regimes with Sven.

There are things I remember very vividly about my brief time with T...mostly, his apartment in Uptown. We spent a very cold winter hibernating in his spacious rooms, spare, wooden floors, piles of dusty books in the corners. In the morning the ice would be gripping the glass panes of the windows, crystallized into long fangs, yet the rooms themselves were hot, snuff-box dry, almost choking with heat from the overreacting radiators. They seared the air and I'd wake up in scales, my skin pratically mummified. He had no bed; the mattress laid on the floor. They were nights and mornings of exile for me; the rooms of the lawyer made up a keep of luxurious heat, food, an open body for me.

Most of all, most pungent for me, was a scent that T would apply to his neck. He told me it came from a small bottle of oil that he purchased from a Rasta man in Washington Square Park--it was the only place you could get it. The smell of his neck was androgynous--it was unlawyerly. There was something like an oasis to the smell, Arabian. It was a bit purple, the smell--a mix of flowers but tubers as well. Of all the things he did, all his ministrations, it was the scent and the heat in the room that formed the tinder of my feelings.

When we broke up, I became obsessed with the smell--I still am. Which is weird, because I don't think of myself as a very scent-oriented guy. Sounds, songs, voices strike as important, and I never forget a face. But smell...I never think of that as a very strong sense. It's a base sense, along with taste, primitive. I assume that scents go to a different part of the brain--the archipallium, the reptilian brain deep within our cerebral cortex or something.

But that smell...for years after I could conjure it on my tongue at will. I went to Washington Square Park on four or five different occasions looking for the Rasta man but no luck. I felt like the narrator in Proust's short story "Memory," obsessed with a woman haunting his remote hotel, a woman he never sees but always smells:

In my humdrum life I was exalted one day by perfumes exhaled by a world that had been so bland. They were the troubling heralds of love. Suddenly love itself had come, with its roses and its flutes, sculpting, papering, closing, perfuming everything around it. Love had blended with the most immense breath of the thoughts themselves, the respiration that, without weakening love, had made it infinite. But what did I know about love itself? Did I, in any way, clarify its mystery, and did I know anything about it other than the fragrance of its sadness and the smell of its fragrances? Then, love went away, and the perfumes, from shattered flagons...

Though I was ashamed to ever see T again, I followed happily behind my obsession with the perfume he would apply to his neck. I haunted shops run by foreign nationals, meticulously huffed vials in hippie shops and new age sellers of crystals and incense, and interrogated waitresses who sometimes carried an air of that original smell.

It all came to a head while I was smoking a cigarette outside a hotel in Washington, D.C., a couple months ago, with the younger brother of a fellow publisher. He was twenty-four and an art student in Boston. And though I had just met him, the fact that he carried around him that smell meant I had to ask. I apologized, but said I had to know. "Umm, it's Axe," he said, rather sheepishly. "No," I replied, there's something else... "Oh, Egyptian Musk. I get it from a little Middle Eastern grocery in New Jersey. You can get it almost anywhere on the East Coast."

So I've found it. I paid that kid, cajoled him, to send me a bottle from the small shop in New Jersey near the home where he grew up. I have it now, and I apply it almost daily. It makes me feel as though I have something of that still.