After my Grandfather died, my Grandmother would sometimes wear his cologne. In my memory, it’s Aramis, but that was what my high school boyfriend wore, so it’s quite likely I’ve overlapped histories and memories to create something meaningful yet factually inaccurate. But the part about her wearing men’s cologne – her man’s cologne – after he died – this is something that has stayed with me ever since.
I loved Aramis. I also loved Halston. I liked their bottles, the way they fit in my hand. I liked both the Z-14 and 1-12. They were new and hip and popular when I was a teenager. I was a fickle fan, vacillating between the three fragrances. They hinted, caressed, swooned, magnetized, seduced my adolescent sense of scent. It’s possible I liked them so much because they were what my early real-life heartthrobs were wearing; it’s possible I liked them so much because they were engineered to be what girls would like, the way McDonalds engineers burgers to appeal to the most common denominator of food palettes. Whether it was high-brow or commonplace doesn’t matter. Those scents had power over me. Give me a good whiff of Aramis – or fresh-out-of-the-fryer fries – and my knees and my resolve weaken, I’m reduced to animalistic urges I like to think I’m above.
I remember these scents without remembering the boys who wore them.
If I could, I’d still have them in my life, but my husband doesn’t care for them. They’re too inexpensive and dated to match his sense of sophistication; he’s a Van Cleef and Arpels man. I don’t know how old he was when he started wearing it; since he prides himself on wearing only what is given to him, it’s likely some beautiful young woman gave it to him in his early development, and forever after he’s come to think of it as “his” scent.
And I do, too.
Some days, when we’ve had a bit of a disconnect, I’ll wear his cologne. It keeps me close to him when a part of me wants to push him out the door for being a lug-head. It’s far too strong a scent for me to wear, and it almost overwhelms me. But it comforts me, too. It reminds me that on a deep level, this is the scent I seek, the one I associate with my inner/outer home, the one I should not allow myself to forget just because my mind took a left turn at Righteous and I kept going. A scent signature redirecting this misguided pigeon right back home.
The scent softens over the day, mellows into my skin and under the curls at the base of my neck. By the time I’m home and I see him again, I smell more like the combination of him and me, and this, I now understand, might be why Florence wore Joe’s cologne. She must have missed him more acutely on those days, needing the intense reminder of his scent to feel him, as if he were still really here, as if she still belonged to him, rather than the unthinkable alternative. And by the end of her day, she’d have re-created the scent that came from just the two of them, the private world they created in their union. She needed a reminder not just of him, but of the person she was with him, their joint scent, to wrap around her lonely widowhood. This was the only man with whom she comingled her cologne. After his death, she remained alone. No one ever held Florence again like Joe did. No one ever buried his face in her neck and or laid his head on her bosom and breathed her in.
Every now and then Grandma Florence would open the Aramis cap, place her index finger on the opening, and then turn the bottle over. She’d dab her fingers behind her ears, on her neck, down her ample cleavage. She’d close her eyes and breathe in the sharp scent of Joe. By the time she’d go to bed, she’d smell like the two of them. Just like when he was alive and she was his and he was hers and she wore his cologne because he was right there, all the time, smelling like home.