The Perfumer

A man came to Séverine's atelier in the autumn and asked her to reconstruct the smell of a woman who had been dead for six years.

He brought, by way of exemplar, almost nothing: a silk scarf, long since denuded of any trace by laundering and time, and a description so importunate in its detail and so useless in its substance that she nearly refused him on the spot. His late wife had smelled, he said, of her. Of mornings. Of the particular warmth at the nape of her neck. Of a happiness he had not known was perishable until it perished. Could Séverine make that?

She was a perfumer of considerable and unsentimental reputation, and she knew the request for what it was: not a commission but a bereavement wearing the costume of one. People came to her believing that scent, alone among the senses, could repatriate the dead — and they were not entirely wrong, which was the cruelty of it. Smell bypassed the discursive mind and went straight to the old limbic cellar where the earliest and rawest memories were kept; a single redolent molecule could unseal a decade in an instant. But the door it opened led only inward, to the rememberer, never outward to the remembered. She could give this man a powerful experience of his wife. She could not give him his wife. The distinction was everything, and he had come precisely in order not to hear it.

Still, something in his importunity stayed her refusal, and she agreed to try, with conditions. He would not get her. He would get an approximation — a composition built from his own descriptions, which meant from his own memory, which meant, in truth, from his own longing. What she made would be a portrait painted by a man with his eyes closed, and she told him so, and he nodded as though she had promised him the moon.

The work was the strangest of her career. She had no tincture to match against, no surviving sample to chromatograph, only a widower's adjectives, which she had to transmute into accords by a process closer to séance than to chemistry. Warm she rendered as a base of skin-musk and a whisper of orris. Mornings became green and diaphanous, a wet-garden top note that would lift and vanish the way mornings do. For the happiness she could do nothing directly, happiness having no molecule, and so she did the only honest thing available to her, which was to leave, at the heart of the composition, a deliberate lacuna — an absence the wearer's own mind would rush to fill.

When at last she gave him the vial, she watched him with a clinician's attention, because she wanted to know what she had actually made. He uncapped it. He breathed in.

And she saw, in the seismic collapse of his composure, that she had succeeded and failed in exactly the proportion she had foretold. The scent had clearly summoned something overwhelming — his face was the face of a man falling backwards through years — but it was summoning it from him, dredging it up out of his own depths, and the grief that followed half a second behind the rapture was the grief of a man who understands, in the instant of seeming reunion, that he is alone in the room. She had not resurrected his wife. She had merely built him a more eloquent door to stand outside of.

He paid her without haggling and took the vial and, she assumed, went home to a flat that would now smell, intermittently and devastatingly, of a person who was not there. She thought of him often afterward, with a compunction she could not quite dispel. She had taken his money to make him a beautiful instrument of self-laceration, and the fact that he had insisted, had begged for it, did not entirely exonerate her.

Years later a younger perfumer asked her whether scent could really bring back the dead, expecting, no doubt, a lyrical yes. Séverine considered the silk scarf she still kept, for reasons she did not examine, in a drawer of her bench.

"No," she said. "It brings back the missing of them, which we mistake for the same thing because we are built to. The dead stay dead. It is only our yearning that we can distil, and we should be careful who we sell it to." Then she closed the drawer, and the faint ghost of nothing in particular that clung to the old silk closed with it, and she returned, with relief, to the clean and answerable problems of the living.