The perfumist of paris, p.7
The Perfumist of Paris, page 7
I realize I’m still standing, my news about the Olympia project dying in my throat.
“Maman, ici,” Asha orders, and pats the chair next to her. I think she’s going to grow up to be the bossy one. Ever since she could walk, instead of carrying her Bella doll like a baby, she has always lugged it around by the hair, like a caveman.
“Asha, that’s my chair!” Shanti, whose ponytail Florence was straightening, slides out of her grandmother’s reach to reclaim her seat. Florence is about to reprimand Shanti when I cross my arms across Shanti’s chest to hug her from behind. I bend down to whisper in her ear, “Why don’t you ask Mathilde if you can take her chair so you can sit on the other side of me?”
She looks anxiously at Mathilde, who says, “As you wish, chérie! Now I can sit next to Pierre and steal his papadum.”
“Only if I can steal your samosa, you voleuse!” Pierre teases as he starts passing around the dishes.
I take my place between the girls and spoon creamy spinach and paneer on their plates.
“Now that we are all seated, tell us about your tea with Delphine,” Mathilde says.
I would have preferred to tell Pierre alone. I steal a glance at him. He’s not smiling. But I can hardly contain my excitement. I tell them about Manet’s painting, my lead role on the new fragrance project.
Mathilde screams delightedly, then claps her hands. “Félicitations! À ton santé aussi, ma puce! Soon, you’ll have your name on a bottle of parfum!” She raises her glass. Agnes flashes a tentative smile, not sure what we’re celebrating. The girls clap their hands. Mathilde’s enthusiasm is infectious, so they know the occasion is significant. Pierre has put a small amount of wine in their water, enough to give it a pink color, and they extend their glasses in the air.
I’m scared to look at Pierre again. When I do, his expression tells me I’ve just grown three heads. Pierre and his mother are the last to raise their glasses.
“To the woman who can do it all!” Mathilde says.
Florence looks at me. “Everything except hire a nanny.”
I look guiltily at Pierre, who is refilling his glass, deliberately avoiding my eyes. His expression is grim.
Florence digs in deeper. “Mathilde wasn’t aware you were looking for one.”
My saas has called me out on my lie. I keep a fixed smile on my face. “Non?” I glance at Mathilde, who shrugs and rolls her eyes.
Pierre’s mother shakes her head. “Pierre, you know you can always call me—”
Agnes says, “Mathilde has a good nanny.” She looks at her daughter. “What is her name again, chérie?”
Mathilde pinks with embarrassment. “I haven’t had a nanny since I was eight, Maman.”
“Oh?” Agnes frowns. “I must be thinking of my daughter’s nanny.” Mathilde is an only child. I throw a sympathetic glance at Mathilde; her mother is getting more confused by the day.
Mathilde is determined to enjoy herself. She raises her glass again and urges the girls to do the same. “To nannies!”
The girls giggle. The adults chuckle. It’s difficult for me to swallow my food. A promotion for Pierre means more business trips. He’ll be home less than he is now. Where does that leave me? I look at Florence, who is discussing the way she makes crepes with Agnes. I listen to the girls tell me about the advent calendar Florence is going to give them this year.
That night, after Mathilde, Agnes and Florence leave and I put the girls to bed, I slip into bed and turn to Pierre to talk to him about his career and mine and where we want to go, but he’s already snoring. During dinner, I noticed he opened two bottles of wine. He and Mathilde drank most of the second. Mathilde can hold her liquor; Pierre can’t.
I’m coming to terms with what I’ve been hoping wasn’t true: my marriage has boundaries, my husband isn’t happy and my moment of triumph isn’t shared.
The citrus oil used in fragrances comes from the mist that stings our eyes when we peel the skin of the fruit, not from the juice of the fruit.
Paris
November 1974
“If only she could talk,” a voice behind me says.
I turn away from Manet’s Olympia to see a gardien de musée of the Jeu de Paume limping toward me.
“She was a painter, too, you know,” the guard says with a smile.
For several weeks, I’ve been alternating my work time between the lab, the bibliothèque and the musée. I want to know as much as I can about Manet the painter and his muse, both of whom fascinate me more and more as the days go by. I arrive at the museum as early as possible before tourists flock to the galleries. Today, I’m standing directly in front of Olympia, holding one hand up to cover the right half of her face. I’d done the same with the left half of her face just a few minutes ago. In Hinduism, the left and right sides of the body carry different meanings. The left is the feminine, the right the masculine. The left is temporal and earthly, the right pure and sacred.
I hadn’t realized the guard had been watching me. “Bonjour.” I glance at his badge. Isn’t he the same museum guard Delphine was talking to when she brought me here to look at Olympia three weeks ago?
He sees me looking and does a little bow. “Gérard. Not many people come to look at the same painting as often as you have, madame.” He’s shorter than I am, perhaps just a little over five feet tall, and slight. He has a neat, close-cropped beard and wiry gray hair. His shoes are polished to a high shine. His eyes twinkle with pleasure.
I smile. “You’ve been watching me?”
“I’m watching her—Victorine Meurent.” Gérard nods at Olympia. “A hundred years ago, she was a favorite model of many Impressionist painters. She did it for food and art supplies.”
“And she was a prostitute?” I’m merely parroting what I’ve researched.
He makes a face. “Pah! That’s the menace they spread about her. Don’t believe it.” He considers me. “I’m a painter, too. The lengths we’ll go to pay for that next tube of indigo or a fresh piece of canvas to brush it on!” His eyes twinkle again. “I’ve been known to do some things I’m not too proud of.” Just then I notice paint around the cuticles of his left hand. When he sees me looking, he puts his hands behind his back. “Most likely the other Impressionist painters were jealous. Manet most certainly was. She was exhibiting at the Paris Salon years before his work was admitted.”
Goose bumps travel down my arm, and I turn to regard Olympia again. Did Manet fail to see you? Was he jealous of your talent? I hide the right side of her face with my hand. Then the left. I see it now. The left recognized what Manet did to her. The right felt what he’d done. Betrayal. There was sadness there. Resignation.
Gérard said, “A poor woman doing what those other artists had the money and means to do. They didn’t have to model. She did.”
“Manet came from wealth?”
The museum guard nods. “As did Monet. Cézanne. Pissarro. Sisley.”
I hold out my hand for the guard to shake. “I’m Radha.”
He offers me his left hand. That’s when I notice that the right hand is a claw, and that his right arm hangs at an awkward angle.
“You know my chef, Delphine Silberman? I saw you talking to her before.”
Gérard smiles and nods. “Old friends. We attend the same synagogue. Madame Delphine patronizes many museums, including this one.”
Now I seek out Gérard every time I come to the Jeu de Paume. He tells me about Victorine’s last twenty years, when she lived with a female companion. She survived to her eighties, which would have been unusual for her time. I can’t get enough. It’s as if I want to crawl inside the painting, lie on the divan as if I were posing for that painting, feeling Victorine’s devastation, her thwarted career, the jealousies damning her talent.
At my inaugural lunch with Delphine five years ago, my boss said, “When you smell your lover, you’re consuming their essence. You want to absorb some part of them. That’s what I create. Fragrances that make people want to consume some part of the wearer.” Then she’d lifted her teacup and waved it at me. “You’re going to help me do that.” She was sure I would say yes to her job offer. So was Antoine.
When I got back to work that afternoon, Antoine took one look at me and said, “Say yes.”
My eyes had filled. Did he want me to leave? Wouldn’t he miss the girls? “But—I don’t want to go. I love it here.”
Antoine walked toward me and put his hands on my shoulders. “Most people work for ten years to become a master perfumer. Delphine did it in seven. Learn from her, and I think you can do it in five.”
“But I’ve never even said I wanted to be a perfumer.”
“You didn’t have to.” The wrinkles around his eyes settled in for a smile that made me want to hug him. I did.
* * *
My arm aches from reaching for the bottles of magnolia, bitter orange, cinnamon, pear, vanilla, ambergris and violet on my perfume organ. My hand is cramped from writing out hundreds of potential formulas over the last month. When I first started working at the House of Yves, Delphine impressed upon me that as a perfumer begins creating a new fragrance, she should forget what she personally favors and start afresh. Even the best fragrance designers can get attached to certain palettes and limit themselves without realizing it. I haven’t yet had the opportunity to develop preferences. But I’ve been experimenting, creating scents on my own, for a while now. In my second year at the House of Yves, I came in very early in the morning to test a formula I’d created. I was using a pipette to measure an essential oil when, suddenly, my nose was assaulted with the smoke from a Gitane. I froze, my hands in midair, not sure whether Delphine could tell that I was mixing a personal formula, not one she’d specified.
I dared not look at her, but I felt her eyes scanning the scent bottles on my table. She stood still. I imagined she had a sixth sense; she could catch out lab assistants who were creating their own fragrances. I held my breath. After a long minute, she said, “Tell Michel I need to see him when he comes in.” I thought I detected a smile in her voice. Then I heard the tap of her heels and the opening and closing of the lab door. When the cigarette smell receded, I exhaled. She never mentioned the incident; neither did I. That day, I finished creating my very first scent, the one I put in a vial and hung from a gold chain. The one I carry in my pocket everywhere.
The creative brief I’ve been given is vague: Develop a fragrance for Olympia. I start with a wide palette. I know Olympia needs milky, luminescent notes; her skin practically glows in the painting. What about her raw nakedness? Does it call for animalic notes like Guerlain’s Jicky—musk and ambergris? And what about heavy molecules like frankincense and myrrh? I ignore the green notes like eucalyptus, sage and cedar; Olympia is an indoor creation, not an outdoor one. Instead, looking at her embroidered shawl and satin mules, I reach for the scents of my India: cardamom, cinnamon, ginger, patchouli. Wouldn’t Maa be surprised to learn that patchouli leaves, which she inserted in the folds of her best sari to keep insects from eating the silk, had come to be such a favored ingredient in French perfumes?
Thinking of Maa makes me wonder: Would she and Pitaji be pleased with how far Jiji and I have come from our dusty village? Would Pitaji have stopped drinking if he could have seen what the future held for his daughters? My breath has become shallow. My father used to say: One man’s house burns so that another may warm himself. Perhaps Pitaji’s quest for India’s independence was not in vain, not if it resulted in rosier futures for my sister, my daughters and me.
I realize I’ve been sitting perfectly still for several minutes, with my hand over my heart. I look around the lab. Michel is busy at his station, compounding Delphine’s formulas. Over my right shoulder, through the interior glass wall, I see Ferdie talking on the phone at Celeste’s desk. Must be a personal call. Ferdie is frowning and gesturing wildly with one arm. A boyfriend canceling their date for tonight? I can’t hear what he’s saying, but I know Celeste can. Her fingers are busy at her typewriter, but she looks concerned. She keeps stealing glances at Ferdie, whose face is turning pink.
I stretch my neck. I’m tempted to visit Gérard at the museum again—I find such peace in his presence—but I stop myself. I need to concentrate. Delphine wants to see some progress and she’s coming to the lab later to check my work. There’s one way I’ve found to get myself back on track: I recite the scents on my perfume organ in alphabetical order without looking at them. When I get to clove oil, I smile, thinking of Jiji. It’s the calming oil she massaged on her ladies’ hands after the henna paste had dried and flaked off. Only a drop or two was needed to pacify an anxious client just as only a single clove in my morning chai is needed to wake me up gently. My sister also had me add fragrant ingredients to the treats we made for each patron—lemon zest in the pakoras or coconut in the burfi—ingredients that incited desire or calmed frayed nerves or bolstered inner strength. Because of Jiji, I can no longer think of a scent without also thinking of the effect it will have on the wearer.
Alors...what if I started with fresh top notes of orange blossom, lavender and bergamot? Those will be first scents the wearer will discern, but top notes only last for the first quarter hour. For the heart notes, I can see Olympia in tuberose, pink pepper and cardamom, those heady scents that entice and draw us into the wearer’s orbit. Sandalwood, a large, heavy molecule, is the base note of almost every perfume, as it will be in Olympia’s fragrance. It will last throughout the day and night. Could the model’s glowing nakedness be asking for vanilla, her indifference for amber and her sex for patchouli? What about ginger, for her unabashed stare? But even as I imagine these combinations in my mind, I know one major ingredient is missing. Liquid. Her fluid, adaptable nature. Isn’t that what’s made Victorine so easy to betray? Her forgiving femininity? Her naked vulnerability? Where is that wetness? Which scent would I have to add to bring that to the fore?
“Let’s see what you have for us, Radha.”
I look up. Delphine is at my elbow. Michel is standing just behind her. Ferdie hangs up Celeste’s phone and walks back into the lab to join us; his face is still flushed. Today, my work is the only one being critiqued. I quickly pull together the blotters of the three variations with the most potential so far. Everyone takes a sniff, waving the blotters under their nose. I watch their reactions greedily.
Michel picks up the brief on my table and scans it. He sniffs the papers again. His blue eyes meet mine with a subtle apology. His glasses glint in the fluorescent lights as he shakes his head once, ever so slightly, at Delphine, who has been waiting for his reaction. She turns to Ferdie, who has been watching Michel’s reaction as if to take a cue from the most senior lab tech. Ferdie forces a smile on his face and nods his head at me, as if to say good effort. But he seems distracted, probably still smarting from his phone call.
Delphine says, “Keep trying,” before turning to leave the lab.
I try not to show how defeated I feel. My first fragrance assignment, and I’m failing already. Shouldn’t I at least have produced one trial that Delphine might have considered promising? I wonder if Delphine regrets having assigned the project to me. Would Michel have done a better job of it with his chemistry background?
I want to keep working, but I’m angry with myself for being no closer to discovering Olympia’s essence. And my nose is tired. Antoine told me that master perfumers never stop training their noses; they’re constantly learning new scents. That’s always easier to do in the first part of the day than the last; by day’s end, my mind is too full of fragrance. I hang up my lab coat, stuff my notebook in my bag and say goodbye to Michel and Ferdie. Without a nanny, I have to leave work earlier than I’d like to pick the girls up from school.
As I’d guessed, Pierre will be traveling more in his new position. I’ve tried to ask him how he feels about the increase in management responsibilities, which will cut into his design time, but he’s always on his way out the door or too tired to discuss it. Now, he’s in Nice for two days on a business trip. He has hardly spoken to me since I made the announcement about the Olympia project. We’ve been focusing on the girls, and he’s been busy preparing for his presentation. I’m embarrassed to admit I’m relieved every time he puts me off because I’m afraid it will only lead to another argument.
The girls and I make dinner together. I show them how I let the cumin seeds sizzle in the oil before adding the onions. When the onions are nicely browned, I ask Shanti to add two teaspoons each of turmeric and cumin powder and salt, one teaspoon each of garam masala and black pepper, the four cloves of garlic I minced, one cup of fresh cilantro and a tiny bit of red chili powder. Asha can eat spicy food but Shanti can’t. Asha stirs the spice-onion mixture. I strain the water from the plump garbanzo beans, which I left soaking overnight, before adding the beans to the pan. I ask Shanti to stir the curry, turn down the flame and cover the pan. When the rice is cooked, I ladle the steaming curried chole on top, set out the hot mango pickle for Asha and me, slices of a freshly cut tomato, and we’re ready to eat. Shanti tells us about the Tintin adventure she will be acting out with her fellow students in class tomorrow. She’s dying to act it all out for us, but I make her finish her dinner first. She’s a lively actor, and Asha and I laugh at her theatrical gestures, clapping wildly when she finishes.
I clean up the kitchen and get the girls settled in bed. I’m feeling nostalgic for home, so I read to them from Tales of Krishna, wishing Jiji were here. I haven’t spoken to her since she called me in early September. And it’s been months since I wrote her a letter; I never seem to have the time. My sister is a fastidious writer; I’m not. But I love reading her anecdotes about Malik and Nimmi and their children, wishing Shanti and Asha could grow up with them. Although they’re not related by blood, I refer to Rekha and Chullu as my daughters’ cousins. Malik has been like a brother to me ever since I first met him (was it almost twenty years ago?), so I think of his children as my nephew and niece.
