Bergamote 22

for Irene


This is not about eating.

Most of my friends, at one time or another, have offered some variation of the question "Can you smell that?" since my surgery. I don't mind this question, though of course many of my friends do appear mortified when I just say, "no." I usually go on to ask them to describe the smell in the air at that moment: some try to do it as quickly as possible, others offer very resonant descriptions, and some even decline ("no, that's okay"). Smells (maybe more than "scents") are incredibly hard to articulate, so I understand both the problem people have in answering this question or the impulse to avoid it altogether (as if to mention smells will remind me I can't smell or will just make me feel sad -- the latter being utterly possible on a given day!). Therefore it's a rare friend who voluntarily describes what she smells when we are together.

Lucky I have rare friends. Ever since she learned about my case of anosmia, my friend Irene has become extremely thoughtful about my experience: she cooks to my condition, she is the only friend to do blind taste tests with me, and she's the person who recommended I start this blog. On Sunday, as a birthday present, she took me to a perfume shop.

Having scouted out some options in advance, she found a clerk who was interested in describing perfumes to a woman who couldn't smell but, as Irene explained, "was very precise with words." We met in New York for a birthday brunch (and spontaneous shoe-shopping), and she took me to Le Labo on Elizabeth Street. Happily, the clerk Irene had met, Isaac, was working. After introductions and a review of my situation, Isaac asked me what kinds of scents I had liked in the past, and I also interjected what I didn't like: rose, vanilla, patchouli (imagine those three scents together, and I think you have a nouvelle mud pie). He immediately led us to Bergamote 22, and then and there commenced a nearly indescribably exhilarating experience.

He began with bergamot, the scent infused in Earl Gray tea. A peculiarly pungent citrus fruit, it has the essential characteristic of an orange with a more bitter quality. This is my version of what he said. What *he* said was far more evocative, but I wasn't quite prepared for it to come so quickly so I wasn't fully focused when it did. But as I imagined the bergamot (with a brief glance of memory towards a cup of Earl Gray tea), I began to pay more attention. He moved on to vetiver, an "upright" scent, which helps to counter the bitterness of bergamot. The combination is sweet, fresh, "clean." (He later compared this to a different perfume, which he said gives you the sensation you've been rolling on the ground in a bed of flowers, whereas Bergamote 22 leaves you with the feeling that you've just stepped out of the shower. Sometimes, he said, you actually want to feel like you've rolled around in a bed of flowers. It's like the difference between shoes and sandals, he added.) He described, too, the trajectory of aromas that would develop over time. Upon the initial application, you smell a whiff of grapefruit. But within a few minutes, this settles into vetiver and orange blossom. It increasingly moves towards a sense of balance between dualities, usually sharp and sweet in this case (as Isaac said, perfumes are all about attempts towards balance -- a strong fleeting one with a subtle lasting one, so that they appear at different moments over time). Thus the third layer combines cedar and orange, and it emerges after an hour or so. The cedar's dense woody scent counters the sweetness (and, I'd say, ephemeral-ness) of orange. I began to image a cedar box containing an orange. This makes a certain sense, I think -- not just visually but aromatically.

If only I could retell Isaac's perfume narrative more perfectly! I could imagine him breathing in multiple scents, viscerally feeling olfaction. These scents are designed to be applied to the place our blood runs hottest, where our veins are closest to our skin. This is why we spray perfume on our wrists, our necks, the backs of our knees. I don't know if it's that entry point on the body that does it, but I could sense how our host felt perfume with his body and breath at once. Scents surround us, after all. I believe that they touch us. Sometimes this is quite literal. From the moment he sprayed the perfume onto my wrists, I could feel it there for fifteen minutes, a weighted layer over my skin. A tiny part of me was willing myself to smell it by some miracle, while the rest of me watched and listened to Isaac spin this tale of olfaction, my hands outstretched, feeling the heat of my own wrists as my blood warmed the perfume.