The Scent of a Man

Fahrenheit smells like a boy named S.

I knew him for a week.

It’s rare to smell it these days, a cologne tied to a decade gone by, but some people still wear it. It is rarely a scent applied with restraint or delicacy. Instead it is a dousing scent, a scent that billows from the wearer like a cloud beckoning me back to the very early ‘90s. Walking into it, I cannot help but find myself in a flat somewhere around 65th St. I am leaning against the poorly painted wooden doorframe of his bedroom – really a converted living room, connected as it was to the kitchen – and looking at the sun lazily pushing the early afternoon dust around. I am also looking at S. on his bed, S. who had hair that hung in two chestnut curtains around the squarest jaw I’d ever seen. He wore a flannel shirt that later spent far more time in my life than its original owner. But the scent of Fahrenheit outlasted both of them.

Polo smells like a boy named T.

I knew him in high school.

Everyone knows someone who wore Polo. That’s what Polo is: The scent of handsome, white, boyish ubiquity. T. was indeed handsome and white, and also wealthy. He was the new boy in town, a strapping redhead equipped with a black sports car. Our town didn’t have rich boys with fancy cars, and wherever he’d come from didn’t have girls like me. We went out, I think maybe once or twice, and wherever we started out we ended up parked near a park at night. Polo became the scent of the dark interior of his car, and of his soft, pale neck. Then later it faded into the scent of of two teenagers quietly and quickly discovering how to undress and drizzle each other’s bodies with honey, without disturbing any parents in a nearby room.

Abercrombie & Fitch Woods smells like no one, thankfully. But I can recognize it without fail.

Creed smells like a man named M.

I knew him for a few years, and then I didn’t know him at all.

Creed makes many scents. M. had a few, although I don’t remember which specifically anymore. He also had some from Penhalligon’s, but really it was the House of Creed that enveloped him. With it he could better construct the persona he carefully presented to the world. The House of Creed covered any cracks or flaws. His exterior was smooth, flawless, without hairs or blemishes, and rarely scented with his own natural aroma. The cologne had a structured masculinity, never vulgar even as it shaded the air with an undeniable sexual promise. His natural masculinity was compromised by a too-beautiful face and a sculpted body. He was a beautiful man, almost impossibly so, but he could not be at peace with that beauty. He had to tame it. Conquered, muzzled beauty. The scent of Creed.

It wasn’t until after I left and remembered the plumeria blossoms wilting slowly on his counter that I wished he had let them be his scent. Delicate flowers but full of a strong, alluring scent, so mythical it is the flower of the vampire in some legends.

The forever-young flower, forever beautiful, and like all scents, forever haunting.