Judith walked to the Hermès store on Wall Street, or more properly, on the corner of Broad Street and Exchange Place, facing the New York Stock Exchange. She had just left her analyst’s home office on Dutch Street, five blocks north, and noticed that there were just a few tourists before the Stock Exchange. Among them was a man in a green shell jacket taking photos with the Fearless Girl. It struck her that, in spite of her frequent walks down and around the Stock Exchange, it had taken months for her to notice the Fearless Girl. She was about four feet tall, the size of an actual girl, and her defiant, up-turned chin, permanently fixed in confrontation before the Stock Exchange, attracted many tourists. During the winter holidays, the girl was almost always cloaked with tourists, but on this Wednesday morning in February, Judith was able to see her. She felt tempted to stop and contemplate the statue, but felt she was too similar to the Girl, and that the mere act of standing too close would cause her self to collapse into absolute parity with the spirit of the thing.
That morning, she permitted herself to glance at the man who was taking a photo with the Fearless Girl, hesitating jealously at the possibility that she might, at last, take a photo herself. She slowed down a little, considering the fact of her obvious anxiety, and continued to walk towards the Hermès store. She pushed several times on the glass door, but it wouldn’t budge; perhaps it was locked, or perhaps it was simply very heavy. A large, round security guard came to unlock it, appearing very transparently from behind the glass. Perhaps she was the first customer to arrive, as the store had only been open for thirty minutes. Two senior staff members inside were absorbed in the task of visual merchandising, and moved elegantly back and forth between the store’s interior and its glass front, passing small items like ties or scarves to each other, speaking in dignified, learned tones about what they might add or swap out. Judith listened to them as she turned and stationed herself in front of the perfume shelves, glad to shop inconspicuously while the staff worked.
The salesperson who did attend to her was a young brunette, with a kind of sweet, candy-like voice. It was an absolutely American voice, a bit incongruous with the store’s old world prestige, but the girl was unobtrusive. She asked Judith how she might help, and when Judith turned down her invitation for assistance with a statement of purpose (“just smelling the perfumes”) her recession into the background of the store felt as tangible as a caress. So she went forth, free to embark on her mission of exploring the fragrances, in the solitude of someone no-longer-human, as a being who had fallen to the bottom of the sea floor and turned into a sea urchin, an organism now capable of receiving perceptions which her organs wouldn’t have been capable of receiving before. In more pedestrian terms, Judith had come to the Hermès store planted across the street from the New York Stock Exchange to become a part of the economy of luxury goods; she was aware of her own belief in the aura of a high price, and believed that commodities which present a challenge to the wallet have the license to attract. She wanted to see how it felt to become involved with such commodities, so she set down her backpack and faced the shelf of fragrances, determined to smell as many as she could handle.
Her eye first dwelled on the row of Twilly d’Hermès perfumes, in their cute square bottles in shades of pink or yellow glass, with the signature round cap, a ribbon tied around each squat “neck,” and a row of eau de colognes in tall, monochromatic, colorful bottles with the round cap in black. There were other fragrances in bottles she found less appealing, also with a gradient on the glass but a golden or silver cap and with names like un jardin à cythère, or un jardun sur le nil, and she wondered if she should smell them too, because Cythère was a word she’d learned from reading Lacan. There was a strange fragrance in a slightly off-white but otherwise colorless bottle with some illustration seemingly out of a children’s book printed on its cream label, called calèche. That fragrance, as it turned out, smelled like nothing to her; like a barely perceptible nut oil perhaps, she was confused. In any case, the Twilly fragrances were her primary, focus, then the colorful citrus and fruit-forward ones in the tall bottles: red, blue, green, and clear names, like citron noir or orange verte or rhubarbe écarlate.
She had been introduced to Twilly d’Hermès first through her mother, who had bought her a tiny 30 mL bottle of the line’s Tutti fragrance in Tokyo during a trip from two years ago. She had used it very sparingly, very reluctantly at first, finding its burst of lychee and other fruity and floral scents artificial and intense. But Judith realized, eventually, that it was nice to observe the fragrance taper and transform throughout the day, and she liked the design of the bottle so much as to identify with it. A cube with rounded edges, a pink gradient fading to colorless glass near the base, a round white cap with a little rounded lip at the base, a ribbon tied in a bow, with the difficult-to-parse pattern of round or rectilinear green, blue, white, pink, yellow shapes, which she would need to fact-check by looking at the bottle or a picture online. Today, she was finding the Twilly fragrances a bit too floral, too “round” and straightforwardly feminine, so she began to try the mysterious tall bottles of straightforwardly-named fruit and leaf, including, for instance, purple basil. How nice, the citron noir in the blue bottle, the rhubarbe écarlate in the red bottle. After a while, and after walking around the store to look at the saddles and the scarves, she decided to buy the scarlet rhubarb, which had grown on her, for $144.
“Let me go see if we have a box for you,” said the brunette salesgirl with the candy-like voice. Was this a tactic dictated by the company to make each and every object in the store seem scarce, or was it true that rhubarbe ècarlate was in high demand? The sample bottle had been noticeably close to being empty, but who knew if all that interest had indeed converted into sales. “I do have a box for you,” said the salesgirl as she returned.
Then she cut a brown Hermès ribbon and tied it around the box, before putting it in an orange bag. Finally, she took the print receipt and placed it in a rigid cream-colored envelope, which she added to the bag.
Before leaving the store, and while waiting for the salesgirl to return with or without a bottle, Judith noticed another shelf of fragrances, these in largely colorless bottles, one of them in the shape of a stirrup. It was a beautiful, strange, elegant, curved, angled thing, named Galop d’Hermès in serifed title caps, and the cap didn’t even cover the pump of the bottle, instead forming a hard arch around and above it. The scent was refined, sweet, and more like the word “perfume” than what she had chosen to purchase. It smelled expensive.
Judith sprayed a piece of cardstock with the Galop d’Hermès and kept it in her pocket, smelling it sporadically, even while on the street, walking to the Tribeca Whole Foods, and later to No. 7’s apartment, where she hugged and kissed him like a little child. She showed him the four little scent cards she had collected and kept.
What were the qualities of her life? What were its essential components, or, how might we describe her vibe?
For now it was red, she had bought a red bottle of rhubarbe écarlate.
Given her new source of income, she had decided to celebrate with a little gift to herself, a tall red glass bottle of an unusual, tart-smelling cologne. This would mark her, to herself, as decadent, as fin-de-siècle, as both charged and empty, but most importantly, as newly employed. And precisely because it was invisible, it made for the perfect milestone between her old life as the vaguely babyish ex-academic and her new life as the driven, isolated “independent contractor,” whose work often felt as gaseous and impermanent as a perfume.
Judith couldn’t stay in bed with No. 7 and the scent cards for long, for she had an important call to take. She leapt away shortly after he had expressed his preference for Galop d’Hermes, collecting the scent cards, and going to the bathroom to urinate. Her call was with a potential supervisor for her incipient work as a psychoanalyst-in-training, and she had contacted him simply because he was Lacanian. Since he was on vacation in a faraway state, they hadn’t been able to meet in his office. The conversation began a bit awkwardly, as she explained that since she had done a few consultations for supervision earlier, it had become increasingly less sure about what to speak about in them. He, Walter, told her that she might begin by giving him a sense of who she was.
He was the analyst of No. 17, the fellow candidate who had met her at an institute social and fallen in love with her over the course of their subsequent meetings. She had been reluctant to reach out to Walter knowing that he must have heard a great deal about her through No. 17. She was sure that whatever No. 17 had said would have had a memorable force, and that he would have described her with his characteristic conceptual incisiveness, in such a way that would be acrid and resounding, perhaps due to the acrimonious conflictual emotions that she seemed to elicit in No. 17 over the course of their near-year of on-and-off meetings.
She began by telling him about her background as a PhD candidate in a literature program, before speaking about her work with an autistic man as a caretaker, or “mentor,” or “direct support professional.” It had been difficult work, but she had come to some insights through it, she said. He briefly reassured her that she was unlikely to be assigned such a difficult case at the institute’s clinic, and that her training in the humanities would be useful to her clinical work. She found it a bit silly that he was reassuring her, but appreciated it anyway, the sense of kinship between she, the formerly unemployed ex-academic, and he, who she already knew had an MFA in painting, and who had thence become a bartender, and finally an analyst.
How strange, how baring it felt to introduce herself to someone who had heard so much about her. But it wasn’t quite the first time they were meeting. She, No. 17, and Walter had once stood together awkwardly after an institute open house. For No. 17, it must have been intensely strange, to have his analyst and his crush, whom he had told his analyst so much about, standing next to him. And Walter, too, must have been thinking of what No. 17 felt, maybe even what Judith felt, if he knew that she knew that he knew so much about her.
She found him surprisingly attractive, surprisingly so, since she had already seen photos of him on his website, and as No. 17 had once shown her, on his Tinder profile, and found none of these photos to her taste, but in person, he projected a vibrant, piquant, straightforward nerdiness through his pin-striped suit and the way he spoke about analysis. He had walked in late, and struck her as strikingly tall, and as having particularly yellow hair. He was unusual, vibrant colors, and had the somewhat narrow, compressed eyes of a man maybe of Nordic heritage, and a pink flush to him. When he opened his mouth he revealed a kind of controlled range of vocal pitches, which signified that while he was careful with his thoughts and words, and that he would probably crumple or stretch out easily under erotic pressure. He was probably a rather sexual man, in spite of or because of his workaholic focus, and the fact that he had worked as a bartender at Zinc, one of the best-known Jazz bars in lower Manhattan, appealed to her sense of him as a stylish, gregarious man.
He was, like her, someone who had moved from unsteady wages into his present position.
After her introductory remarks, and his kinship-based reassurance, Judith asked him a few questions. She was surprised, in spite of all the background subtext in his favor, that she was titillated by his long and somewhat eccentric and eagerly delivered responses. Nearly giggling, and very satisfied, she expressed her thanks for the conversation, which “hadn’t been like the others.” She concluded with the statement that she didn’t have anything else to ask for now, though she would later, and that she did in fact want to work with him.
But Walter still wanted to tell her something more.
“There’s this ‘opening gambit’ I use to establish the frame in a new treatment.”
“I know it makes me sound like a chess player, but I’m not. Anyway, what I do is I begin with this question, which is pretty open-ended, but it helps us out, it works to establish something, that is the patient’s desire.”
“Would you like to hear about it?” he continued.
“Yes, I’d be very curious to hear about it,” she said, feigning dry interest, since she felt satisfied enough.
He went on with the first question, which she had heard many times before, or at least on the two occasions when she had begun analysis, with her first analyst, and with her second analyst: “What brings you here?”
He then proceded to describe five additional questions.
“There are several questions I like to ask, or to address, over the course of the first five to ten sessions. I ask them, or frame them, during the first session, not expecting them to answer, necessarily, but I do ask them.”
“The first is as follows: What desire brought you into this world? In other words, why’d your parents have you?”
“The second is sort of like the initial question, what brings you here, but it’s more pointed: what is the problem in your life, the problem you’d like to work on or resolve through analytic work?”
“The third,” he said, “has to do with the patient’s relationships.”
“Your family, your romantic or sexual partners. What are your relationships like?”
“And the fourth, sexual fantasy. What turns you on? What is your relationship with porn? Masturbation?”
“The fifth question I ask: What is your ideal life?”
Judith broke into a series of little, intense smiles as she listened. By the end of the excursus her face was fixed into a grin. She brought her right wrist to her nose to smell the rhubarb she had sprayed there at the store, and felt very Judith-like, not just from smelling the rhubarbe, but also from sinking into the leather couch No. 7 had bought off of a chic gay couple who had been in the process of moving out of his building. She fingered the curly strands of a silver Gotland sheepskin she had kept in his apartment, and felt even more coquettish.
She took the train home shortly after the call ended. Then she took a very long nap after unpackaging her eau de rhubarbe écarlate and spraying her wrists and collarbones several times. When she woke up, the odor was wonderful. She considered taking the night off from work, before attending a Zoom orientation with the intake coordinator of her institute’s clinic, the person who would be assigning her and the other two new trainees their first patients. She wondered if she might encounter any patients who did the same kind of work she did.
Would she ever tell Walter? She probably wouldn’t, she thought, as No. 17 was likely to tell him about it first.
She had bought the eau de rhubarbe on Wednesday. On Friday, she went to No. 17’s housewarming, in celebration of the fact that he had just moved into a new home office on 35th street, near Penn Station. Judith had already visited, a few weeks before, and at the time No. 17 had asked her if she wanted to have sex with him. She said no, and they cuddled a bit before she left. Coming back to No. 17’s apartment, this time with other guests around, felt like a purely affectionate act, but she was to discover that the night wouldn’t pass without the old tensions and antagonisms cropping up. Hungry to arrive at this bedrock of desire, she stayed at the party long into the night, until only two other guests remained. Then, she slept in his bed, with him.
No. 17, whom we might as well call Chris, went down for a smoke break as the conversation died down. She followed along with the two other men, but got to the elevator sooner than the other two, where Chris stood. He asked her if she might stay the night, and she said “Yes.” Enthusiastically, she wanted to stay the night.
Judith and Chris waited for the others to leave and went back into the building’s elevator. In the living room, they spoke lightly before he hugged her close, while she gave him little pecks and smooches on the face. He kissed her neck, too, and she laughed and squirmed, ticklish and sensitive to the overwhelming feeling of his touch. It was so refreshing to touch, to kiss, to cuddle, after all of their arguments, which were so verbal.
Earlier that evening, she had spoken to him about her new engagement in a “certain form of sex work,” and heard him speak both to her and to the last remaining guests, two men, about the women he had known who had worked as strippers or engaged in sugar-relationships. She had giggled upon seeing Baudrillard’s America on his bookshelves, and he had responded with a kind of eye roll, waiting for her to unveil the story behind the secretive laughter. She did tell him that the username of a regular on her cam stream was jean_baudrillard, and that she liked this user, jean_baudrillard. She had spoken to him earlier about how much she enjoyed the work, because it allowed her to act, and to fake orgasms, and that she didn’t like giving most regulars personalized attention. Chris had responded with a kind of eye roll, always eye-rolling when she boasted of her success.
Judith once again refused to have sex with Chris, as they shared the bed, and they engaged in a kind of ancient verbal sparring before going to sleep in silence, no longer touching, she rolled away, he rolled towards the other wall. The idea that he had articulated about her, in essence, was that the way she spoke about her triumphs and satisfactions felt to him like the spectacle of a very vain and intelligent and beautiful child looking at herself in the mirror. And he adored her, found her beautiful and intelligent and sweet, but found this aspect of her character “annoying.” She said she felt this was true, and said almost nothing to contest it.
“Why is it annoying?”
“I don’t get a sense of whether or not you desire me.”
That was Chris’s question, and it was spoken out loud. Judith felt it was clear that she desired him, enough to lay with him, but not to have sex with him. For Chris, this last rejection was a definite sign that she didn’t desire him at all. He believed that what she desired in him was her mere mirror reflection, the desirable certainty that he adored her, for one. Judith didn’t agree with this theory, for how could she desire what she was certain of? She certainly desired something, or she wouldn’t have tarried and stayed in his bed. But he clearly needed to feel something else, he needed proof that she was not merely using him as a mirror with which to admire herself, and that proof might come through fucking. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, Chris felt certain that that all he was was a mirror to her, and a mirror wasn’t who he really felt himself to be.
To her, it was absolutely clear that this notion of him as a mirror wasn’t the case.
She was vain, but it wasn’t with him that she felt vain.
The next morning, Judith walked down Broadway with Chris until he got to 13th St where he was to host another institute open house. They parted ways with a clipped hug, and she walked further downtown to No. 7’s apartment, and then to Walker St, where she met No. 20 to go to some art galleries in Tribeca.
No. 20, or Cherry, she felt was an excellent man, someone she appreciated, but desperately wanted to give up to the many other women who might appreciate him. He was now dating another girl, and she was curious to learn more about her. What mattered most, of what she heard, was that the girl was clearly into him.
She still wasn’t sure she wanted to sleep with him, but by the end of their long excursion around Tribeca and Chinatown and the Lower East Side, she decided to take the train down to Sunset Park, wearing the same clothes she had worn the previous night in the Garment District. She spent the night, and it was the first time she was having sex in almost two weeks. While it was at moments enjoyable, it was no longer where her desires lay, it was nothing like having sex with herself in front of hundreds, even a thousand men online for money.
The next day, they spent more time together. She felt calm, satisfied, if a bit empty. The previous night, she had felt relieved, relieved to not think of the emotional situation between them, in those moments of sex. But what was the situation between them? Evidently something she didn’t like. He was making jokes about being in love with her, while she was reassuring herself that he felt like a “friend.” He still desired her, in spite of her reluctance to be with him, for reasons she could not comprehend. She hated him for this, or rather she hated herself for leading him on, each time they met, with the promise of placid, warmer waters down the road, because she was always so warm with him when they were together, because how could she not be warm?
She had become so skilled in warmth, so skilled in invitation, so skilled at getting certain men to sleep with her on the first date. And it meant nothing, ultimately, it meant nothing. Or she wished it were so. She wished each man she had adored would exist as a slain cow or lamb, laid before God, a sacrificial object… and that it was this cow with brown curly hair or that lamb of soft whiteness meant little, in the end. She hadn’t thought of God much since she began her work, but she knew it was God’s fault, in the sense of the “god” that Thomas Hardy had sometimes written into transient being, only to claim that this “god” did not, in fact, exist:
If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: ‘Thou suffering thing,
Know that they sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!’
Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die,
Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited;
Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I
Had willed and meted me the tears I shed.
But not so. How arrives it joy lies slain,
And why unblooms the best hope ever sown?
—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain,
And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . .
These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown
Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.
So who knew why she was cruelly stepping away from him, behaving kindly towards him, and then withdrawing. The same old situation, the same old grey-and-pink atmosphere of the frigid coquette. She thought of the last Thomas Hardy novel she had read, The Well-Beloved, in which the sculptor-protagonist first falls in love with his childhood friend, then a different woman, then his childhood friend’s daughter, and then his childhood friend’s granddaughter, only to enter a sexless marriage with the different woman in the end.
On Valentine’s Day, she cammed, and felt dissatisfied with her earnings, around $200 for five hours of work. She was tired, annoyed, and felt ugly. There was something rather mundane about her resolve, in any case, to work. It was the old familiar resolve, to excel at something, which had motivated her to read ravenously and carefully, which had motivated her to write academic essays and poems and fictions. She cared for no one or nothing but her freedom, her freedom from commitments, which ironically involved a commitment to work. Work involved testing out new strategies, and trying out the same strategies at different times of day. The simplest result of working was that she was tired sometimes, and simply wanted to sleep more than usual.
Another result of work was that she was sometimes very drawn to work, in its absence, even if she knew it would make her tired later. The pull of money, the idea of fragrance, the idea of an apartment that might cost a little over $2000 a month, the idea of silence, of nice pourovers, of future visits to the Hermès store, the idea of comfort in Adam’s company, the idea of talking about her first patient with Walter, the idea of speaking about her sex work with her analyst, the only woman in her life who knew about the slutty things she did on camera, about the cast of users who had appeared once or reappeared, about how many hours she worked and how much earned, all this lay on the horizon of work done well. Then she felt lonely, and thought of her need to be with someone, her ultimate need to be with someone she enjoyed being around. She told Cherry, who wanted to see her that weekend, that she didn’t want to see him, that they should break up. He asked if this meant “permanently,” and she added that she thought they should break up “permanently.” She didn’t believe in temporary breaks, though she acknowledged that permanent breaks were sometimes hard to follow.
Her spirit felt machinic, lugubrious, making the decision; far from interesting, she experienced herself as a wild beast, in other words, one would find it boring and mechanical if one lived according to its intuitive ways. Learnedness was part of this savage boredom, and was a sham as far as conversational interest was concerned, the idea of Judith as alluring on account of her intellectual training was as superficial and as lightly damaging as the PFOAs coating parchment paper. It was like being impressed that a black dog had black hairs, or that the sun was too bright to look at. But here the logic fell apart, for what was wrong with liking a black dog for its black hairs? The sin of liking someone for the wrong reasons seemed too permanent, too irrevocable, to Judith alone. She needed to be seen in ways that affirmed her distance from certain traits, traits which triggered her self-proclaimed “homophobia”: against herself as Asian, intellectual, interesting, academic, athletic, or artistic, and to be transformed, instead, into someone sluttish, wasteful, noble, religious, wealthy, silly, and even blonde.
Earler that week, her third week of camming, Judith went to a different fragrance store, in the FiDi mall, Brookfield Place. She first went to a multi-brand cosmetic store, and tried out some rather strong and luxe fragrances from Frédéric Malle and Byredo, before heading over, accidentally, in the direction of Jo Malone.
The scents were enchanting: “poppy and barley,” “english pear and sweet pea,” “mimosa and cardamom,” “blackberry and bay.” They evaporated into nothingness after what felt like seconds, and, as Judith learned, these eau de colognes were notorious for their poor performance on websites like /r/fragrances and fragrantica.
She became obsessed, for a day, with owning one of these notoriously transient fragrances, and began to re-read Joris-Karl Huysmans’s À rebours in response to her fascination with these harbingers of dissatisfaction.
“Actually,” he wrote, “perfumes are almost never produced from the flowers whose names they bear; the artist rash enough to borrow his raw material from nature alone would produce nothing but a spurious creation, without authenticity or style, since the essence obtained by distilling the flowers can furnish only a very remote, very coarse analogy with the authentic fragrance given off by the living flower growing in the ground.”
She smiled in recognition; she had just read an article on “poppy and barley,” which discussed its nature as a concoction of violet, fig, coconut, and other fragrances which had nothing directly to do with poppy or barley.
Similarly, she felt she had nothing to do with the impression, perhaps aromatic, that she gave off.
Judith’s only true act of integrity was to remain faithful to what she knew she liked, at the end of the day. After her difficult day of camming, she hopped on her bike and rode to 30 E 9th St, and hugged No. 7. It was dark, by then, and she stayed in his apartment, crying and taking a nap on the couch. As usual, he was busy with work, so the two didn’t go out together. But she loved that about him. The lack of obligation to enjoy, the lack of impetus to develop the relationship into something new or different. She loved him and he loved her.
During their year of cohabitation, they’d often visit the Aesop store, when there was nothing really necessary to do or to purchase. Eventually, No. 7, a frequent shower-taker, wanted to buy something. He bought an entire bottle of shampoo and an entire bottle of conditioner, each 500 mL bottle for $51. A few months later, he bought another bottle of shampoo, in a different flavor. This was the furthest proof of his appreciation for fragrances, though the appreciation continued in the form of transient visits to fragrance stores. Their last outing together had involved a trip to D.S. & Durga, where she had smelled a pineapple-and-tobacco fragrance that caught her attention, “black magenta.” The pineapple element all but disappeared from her wrist less than an hour later, so she continued to sniff the scent card, which seemed to retain the scent a bit better.
The next afternoon, the two of them went for a walk through the West Village, and stopped by the Frédéric Malle store, where they smelled five fragrances. One was sharp and green—“Synthetic Nature.” One was very much like the inside of the L.H.B. Hortorium at Cornell—“Carnal Flower.” One was like a pineapple.
Judith asked the salesperson if she might sample the pineapple fragrance—“Music for a While”—on her wrist. Then they left the store and walked a little more through the West Village before making a loop back home.
She then biked halfway to her apartment in Brooklyn, in the snow, before bailing and getting on the subway.
The pineapple accord stuck to her wrist and managed to be “heard” for hours.
At home, she read what No. 20 had written about his Valentine’s Day. It felt pungent and strong, the description of his heavy drunkenness at a bar on her side of town, surrounded by ugly or slightly attractive people. She had escaped to Manhattan, he had escaped to Church Avenue. It was less the immediate emotion of his writing which compelled her own emotional response, but the cruel abstracteness of their exchange. One person wrote an autobiographical story involving the other, and the other wrote a story back, just as she had done with No. 2 for so many years. It was like a big great sparring competition, in their minds, and on the ends of the men, they tended to display their sentimentality, the force of their sadness, while Judith displayed the sharpness, the mirrored brilliance of her polished sword, flashing endless and antisocial sword tricks.
And it seemed like a sign of health that Cherry was able to write, that he could make good use of her as nutriment for one of his poetic moods, for his urge to create. She knew this way of life well, the way of life of the lover, the troubadour, the lyric poet far more content to remain without requited love for the rest of his life, so long as he could continue to spin out his lyrics. If he really felt the potential to love her, he’d have dropped the game a while ago, seen reality, and left behind the idea of loving this cold, savage, boring wild beast.
Judith continued to smell the pineapple coming off her wrist. She too was one of them, caught in her imaginary world of perfumes and sex work, her ideas about herself as sluttish, untameable, distant, cold. She was more interested in the game than the players, in occupying the high stance of the watcher than the low stance of feeling what someone felt as he played. Deep feeling evaded her, but she was able to concentrate on scents and conversations. How nice it was to feel the chatter of her ideas enter into conversation with the chatter of pineapple, the chatter of Thomas Hardy, the chatter of J.-K. Huysmans, the chatter of Cherry.
She wanted her writing to approximate such chatter, and liked the idea of writing in installments about real objects and experiences, pertaining to perfumes, or religion, buildings in New York City. Loss and sadness struck her as incorrect causes for expression; no writer she admired or loved wrote out of sadness, she was not interested in even the most exquisite of sadnesses. Even Hardy, the great tragedian, the great novelist of loss, impressed upon her the presence of the Comic Spirit in all great works of art. She had religious convictions on the matter; melancholia was idolatry, comedy was the stuff of God. As the Commissioner, it was her duty to build a world in which trifles could be enjoyable, in which the most complex and robust molecules of emotion could be denatured and broken into little sparks of volatile pleasure. Perfumes, for instance, reduced and refracted her “commitment issues,” her “avoidant” attachment, sublimating the frown of morality into the silliness of words like “pineapple” and “poppy.” Judith observed with fascination how she had moved between quick infatuation and rapidly decaying interest to Jo Malone’s English Fields collection, and enjoyed the feeling of being bemusedly interested in the pineapple accord in the Frédéric Malle fragrance “Music for a While.”
Judith listened to the same Purcell aria after which it was named, an aria from the opera Oedipus.
Music for a while / shall all your cares beguile.
She was reminded of the concept of vanitas, expressed in Dutch still lives of fruit and dead pheasants, or in the famous Sánchez Cotán bodegón of cabbage and quince hanging from strings in a window frame, with a melon on the sill, opening onto a black vacantness. Vanitas, what a word. And pineapple, what a scent!
And how wholly she embodied it! How she would serve it till the end!