North of Boston (7 page)

“No. I figured he just wanted a change.”

“Yeah. That was it.” Johnny starts shaving wood off a stick with the knife. “What about Thomasina? Did Ned talk to her much about his work?”

“I don't think so. Nothing she ever told me about anyway.”

Johnny nods slowly, bent over his creation. A slice of the knife, and a splinter comes away, revealing tender white pulp.

I peer at a birdhouse on a shelf above his work area. A little arched entrance opens to an airy living room. There's a second floor, too—tiny slanted ceilings. Maybe an in-law suite. I do a double take, look closer. Someone painted a braided rug on the floor. Delicate, painstaking work that must have been done with the world's smallest brush. I start to get a creepy feeling. The mind that made these is not completely sane.

“You must spend a lot of time on these. When do you do them?” I ask.

“I get up at four. Don't sleep very well.”

“Oh, yeah? Funny, I was up at four this morning, too. With me, it's stress. How about you?” I'm not sure I want to get this personal, but I'm curious. There's some kind of weird disconnect between the Johnny I knew and the one I'm talking to. For starters, the Johnny I knew wouldn't be so cozy with the term
hit-and-run.

“Probably that. Don't know.” He puffs out his chest, rolls his shoulders to work out the kinks. He squeezes glue from a tiny tube onto a Q-tip, examines the drop in the light. “Can't use too much. Smears, and then you have to chip it off.”

There's yelling coming from the house. Stomping, a slammed door. “You know, I could fucking kill those little bastards sometimes. You're not supposed to feel that way about your kids. But sometimes I just want to bolt. How'd I get here anyway? Married, four kids. Nothing but bills everywhere I go. Sometimes I feel all fucked-up.” He places the Q-tip carefully on a piece of newspaper, screws the top on the tube of glue. “I didn't like that guy at the pub. Him pretending to be a friend of Ned's. If he calls you, let me know.”

“Why, what are you going to do?”

“Nothing, darlin'. Nothing at all.”

Now I get the look, the eyes along my body that rise slowly to my face. “You look great, by the way. Always have.” His voice gets softer, deeper. “My wife's so busy with the kids these days. I have a lot of freedom, lot of time to myself. I could take you out on my boat sometime.”

“I'm not big on boats anymore.”

He blinks slowly, not sure where to go with that. Am I declining the offer, or do I simply need a different vehicle of seduction? “Maybe a beer, then. Don't say no right away; think about it first. You seem lonely, Pirio. Always a loner, complicated. I never figured you out. But I know you must be hurting, and I always want to be there for you, lamb.”

The endearment is disgusting for three reasons. First, because it's an endearment. Second, because his wife's inside the house, feeding hungry mouths and wiping sticky fingers. Third, because long ago Johnny used to call me
goat
and I used to call him
monkey.
The terms were not without their wisdom. A
lamb
I never was.

“I'll pass on that kind offer, ape.”

He nods as if he expected nothing more.

I walk through the open garage door onto the smooth black-tar driveway. I pass a shiny red Lexus, get in my old car and pull away from the curb, thinking that, if nothing else, I'm off the hook with Milosa: Johnny did the Sam Spade thing, so I don't have to. It's a relief, sort of.

On the highway I'm stuck in rush-hour traffic. I play my favorite jazz pianist, Akiko Grace, and try to relax. But for once the beautiful music doesn't take my mind off my problems. As Sister Corita's painted gas tanks come into view, I flash on a vivid image of a guy in a crappy bar, throwing back his boilermaker and laughing like an idiot. So pleased with himself and his sterling career. Thinking he got away with leaving a little fishing boat in splinters and the human beings inside it to bob on the waves in terror until they sank. My hands grip the wheel so tightly that my knuckles whiten. It probably didn't occur to him that anyone would survive.

N
othing's out of place; nothing's been moved. The last rays of sun slant through the vertical blinds the way they usually do on a September evening—long, honey-gold beams latticing the rug and coffee table. And yet. Something's off. A subtle scent hangs in the air. Just the merest whiff. A woody smell, but sour. An olfactory note foreign to my apartment.

Every home has its smell—a unique aromatic blend of male and female occupants, carpets, dirty and clean clothes, and the kinds of food the family tends to eat over and over again. Even the grass and trees outside the windows lend their influence. Children know this better than anyone. A child could pick out her own home by nothing but smell if she had to. This sensitivity is blunted in time. She stops trusting her nose, eventually stops using it. Eyes and ears take over, while smell, our most primitive sense, is relegated to the animals. That is, unless your mother was a perfumer who taught you that everything has a special smell as well as a look, sound, and feel—and that of all the senses, smell is the least likely to deceive.

That's why I'm sure someone's been in my apartment. If they'd stayed a bit longer or been there more recently, I might hazard a few guesses at their cologne's components. Right now all my nose can pick up is a few of the last, large, persistent molecules of a deep base note. I'm thinking oud wood or oak moss, which are common fragrance ingredients and don't even give me the wearer's likely gender. I close my eyes, try again. It's oud wood. Yes, I'm sure of it. Dark, soft, spicy, medicinal. The smell of South Asian religious rituals. To make oud wood oil, resin is drained from trees that have been infected with a parasitic mold—the distilled odor is legendary for its strength and longevity. You either love oud wood or hate it; and there's no confusing it with anything else.

Computer on the desk. Laptop in the closet. Everything just where I left it. What else is there to take? I go into the bedroom. My jewelry box is untouched. If it wasn't a burglary, what was it?

I'm suddenly panicked at the question of how an intruder got in. I'm on the third floor. There's a front door, a back door, and a fire escape. The back door has a chain, which is still intact. The fire escape is old and rusty and could not have been used without half the building knowing about it. Then I remember that I fiddled with the front door when I came home—thought I'd unlocked it, but it seemed to stick, so I locked and unlocked it a couple of times before I felt the bolt slide. The door must have been unlocked when I put my key in the first time. The intruder picked the lock to get in but didn't have the key to lock it when he or she left.

I go next door and ask my neighbor if she saw anyone. She's suspicious of everyone—has been known to report a car idling too long in the street. She says no. Then her eyes narrow, and her door inches a few more degrees toward closed. She's even suspicious of me.

I call the super, tell him someone was in my apartment. The baseball game's going in the background, so loud we have to shout. He tells me to call the cops. So I do. They'll send a car.

While I'm waiting, I retrace my steps, check all my valuables one more time. Nothing's missing. Maybe I'm wrong about the oud wood, but I swear I can still smell its traces in the air.

I wonder if someone was watching the apartment this afternoon and saw me leave. Maybe whoever it was is still out there. I sidle to the window. On Tappan Street cars are parallel parked along the curb. A couple strolling. A kid on a skateboard. Teenage girls with long hair and bulky scarves. Am I going to live this way now, watching everything like a hawk? I go to the back of my apartment, where the bathroom window overlooks the parking lot. Peer through the blind. Cars, the usual cars. That's all.

The cops fill the apartment with their big chests and beer guts, their snapped-shut leather holsters. Handcuffs, flashlights, nightsticks clanging in their belts. Loud, husky voices.
Hey, don't worry. It happens.
Like they've known me for years. They walk around being big and strong. Touch nothing, jot some fictitious notes. It's just another call for them.

“Didn't take anything, huh?” one of them says.

“No.”

“Sure there was someone here?”

“There was a scent,” I say. “Oud wood.”

“What?”

“I know fragrance. I can tell.”

“What wood?”

“Oud wood.”

“Uh-huh.” An exchange of glances. The memo pad's stuffed in a pocket. They're sure I'm a crackpot now. They tell me to change the locks, then leave the door wide open when they go.

—

I used to steal into my parents' room on Sunday mornings and watch my mother sleep. Milosa rose religiously at five to disappear into his life, so Isa would be alone on the king-size bed until she rose at noon or one. All week she would have been busy, coming and going, mostly going, a whirlwind of early mornings and late nights. Sunday morning was one of the few times she stayed in one place. She slept clumsily, almost aggressively, helter-skelter in the sheets.

Work and sleep, work and sleep. That was her cycle. No middle gear, no liminal time. All that changed every year in late June, on the eve of the summer solstice. It was Jaaniõhtu, a national holiday in her native Estonia, and my mother always chose that day to begin her monthlong summer vacation. In Estonia, the shops and businesses close, and people gather outside to sing, dance, and drink around bonfires that blaze all night. My mother's lonelier Americanized version of the holiday was to take me by plane to St. John's, Newfoundland, and from there by ferry and rented car up the coast of Labrador to a secluded house on the beach, close to the Hudson Strait. The house had been designed by its owner, an architect from Montreal who vacationed in it with his family every August and rented it to my mother in July. It was so far north that we wore jackets and sweaters, daytime lasted until nine or ten o'clock, and the night sky occasionally swirled with the eerie parabolas of the northern lights.

We'd buy groceries and gas at a little Inuit settlement called Hopedale. The next part of the journey—from Hopedale to the house—sticks in my mind as the longest, possibly because it consisted of bouncing crazily on narrow, deeply rutted roads that couldn't possibly have accommodated another car, had we ever met one, and were probably impassable when it snowed. When we finally rounded the last curve and the architect's creation rose in the dusty windshield, it looked to my tired eyes as splendid and unlikely as a storybook house.

The interior of the house smelled like what lay outside the windows—pine and birch forests, smooth gray rocks, the dark blue Labrador Sea. We spent much of our time on the cedar deck, reading or talking or playing go fish, my mother usually in a wide-brimmed hat, smoking occasionally, smiling easily and often, sometimes stretching out and murmuring dreamily like a person floating on a cloud.

Within a week of our arrival, the rough-hewn kitchen table would be heaped with treasures of the natural world—berries, lichen, mosses, grasses, flowers stuck in jars of water or left to dry, clumps of dirt still hanging off their roots. Most days we'd roam outside without counting the hours, carrying wicker baskets that in my memory are always filled to the top. I remember how she would pick something, hold it, look at it, rub it between her fingers, put it to her nose. I'd follow, doing the same, not knowing anything in particular, simply putting into my basket whatever was pretty or strange, whatever gave off a scent that brought pleasure, comfort, excitement, or shock.

A local man acted as our guide, brought us to places we could never have found by ourselves, through marshes and on woody trails. He had a son a few years older than I was, with long black hair that shimmered in the sunlight when he ran. We played in an intense, wordless way. One day he laughed at me over his shoulder, so I climbed a dipping birch branch, scrambled higher, and enjoyed his anxiety when he couldn't find me. When he got close enough, I pelted him with broken-off twigs, and shimmied down the smooth trunk. And we set off again.

There were flowers everywhere. Blue flag irises dotted the fields, emitting their sweetly seductive odor. The pitcher plant, which captured insects in its thick, waxy petals, smelled old and sour.

The flower that would eventually change our lives was called Labrador tea. It grew in bogs and swampy forests and bloomed obligingly in our month of July—clusters of tiny white flowers with dark elliptical leaves fuzzy brown on the underside. When a whole field was in bloom, the plant's strong aroma hung over the area like a fog. Some people thought it had a narcotic effect, that you could fall asleep in a field and wake up with a headache. Others believed that it inspired creativity and love. Labrador tea is a slow-growing species, so we picked only a few flowers and leaves from each plant and put them in cloth bags. At home we hung them to dry, an act they seemed unwilling to perform, stubbornly emitting their brash, soporific, bright lemony fragrance, remaining moist long after other flowers had become brittle and easy to crush.

The most exotic of our treasures was ambergris, which is an oily, resinous substance that a whale either vomits or excretes into the ocean. It achieves a rich, dirty marine smell after years of floating under the sun. We found it by scouring the shores, where it occasionally washes up in black chunks that can be as small as a pebble, as big as your fist, or as huge as a piece of driftwood. I remember my mother's delight whenever we came across a piece. Though it was a rare find, there is probably no better place in the world for collecting ambergris than the area around Hopedale, whose Inuit name, Agvituk, means “place of the whales.”

Add to all this the essences my mother brought from home—jasmine, tuberose, frankincense, bergamot, sweet orange, and others I couldn't begin to name—all lining the kitchen counter in small glass vials with cork tops.
Voilà:
a perfumery. But we never called it that. The kitchen was simply my mother's happy laboratory, where she worked with intense focus and a deep calm emotion that she didn't exhibit during the other months of the year. Looking back, I realize it was joy.

At some point during these summers of my childhood, L'Amour du Nord was born. A fragrance is difficult to describe. In colors, it would be deep blues and whites, with traces of magenta and neon green. In experience, it would be setting off across snow in a warm fur coat in a musty twilight, toward the bronze light of a distant cabin. In chemicals, it is B-selinene, trans-p-mentha-1(7), 8-dien-2-ol, and other substances whose spellings are as complicated as the molecular structures they represent. In dressing, it's a woman's lace slip and her red leather glove. In love, it's
Mmmm
until it ceases to be.

Isa said L'Amour du Nord
was the smell of a place. Whenever I'm lonely or upset, I put a drop of this perfume on the inside of my wrist and let it take me home.