The Scent
The scent is the luckiest thing that can happen to you. It’s nothing like the scent of a “spicy” yellow cab in August — eau de radiator fluid, body odor, and a Christmas scented car freshener. It’s invisible, undeniable, and smelled by no one, but everyone. It’s the most delicious scent perfectly tailored to what you love most. For me, it’s Mrs. Barsanti — my childhood piano teacher who smelled like amber, brioche dough, talcum powder, and partially baked chocolate chip cookies. I was not attracted to Mrs. Barsanti. She was an old Italian lady. But her smell has become my interpretation of “the scent,” meaning lust or like is near.
We all give off the scent at different moments in time. Sometimes it’s right after a spectacular meet cute, a breakup, a vacation tan, or a huge promotion that makes you walk taller. In those moments, everyone picks up on the scent — a fleeting whisper of confidence, a glow, you can’t bottle or buy. And dare I say, dare I jinx it… Great Scott, I think I’ve got it.
The scent is fleeting. It’s bestowed upon us typically when we need it most but are least expecting it. And this is where I was, mentally, when I walked out of my apartment and felt like every head was on swivel by my gravitational pull.
I want to be clear, this isn’t an Ana Rosenstein is the greatest thing since sliced bread story. Sliced bread sucks. We all get our turn at the scent. Some even get a few go arounds. But mine struck and I just knew that I smelled like Mrs. Barsanti to everyone who entered my orbit — strangers lingering a beat too long, long forgotten ghosts suddenly resurrecting.
Drinking alone looks different in the summer. I spend hours staring at the ocean with too much coffee — the kind of too much where you can hear your own heartbeat — or sitting at our bar at home with a glass of wine the moment it turns 5PM. No strangers to talk to, just the devil thoughts in my head.
This is why I didn’t notice my aura wafting until I got back to the city. Since I got back from Europe, I’ve been holed up in my dad’s den in the Hamptons, which I’ve reappropriated as a writing cave whenever he’s not using it. I avoid leaving the house on weekends — that’s when the assholes come out. A stranger once told me to go fuck myself in the Sagg Store parking lot, which sells t-shirts and rotisserie chickens to Rivian owners convinced Amber Waves’ produce is local.
After some isolation, I decided I’d had enough. I had to face the city and wrestle all my demons back down island. On one of the hottest days of the summer, I waited outside Airmail — which, preposterously, opens at 10 — until Marcus, the barista, unlocked the door at 10:03.
“You used to open at nine. What happened?”
“This is what I hear!” he said. “I don’t know what happened. And a coffee place opening at ten is crazy. There’s nowhere to get coffee around here at seven.”
Long ago we discovered we’d both grown up on the Upper West Side, bonded over the Muffins Café, and in unison mourned the death of French Roast. A man in line offered me Graydon Carter stories from the ’70s. They weren’t that interesting.
A friend wandered in — I love that the West Village is summer camp. I can’t walk a block without running into someone I like, which is rare for someone who lives for a nemesis. He was shopping for a gift, and gift giving is my superpower. We found a vintage Mahjong set, which has become the game of the summer. I love it because it’s social but silent — my favorite together.
For years my scent has predominantly attracted an older cohort (also lesbians, but less relevant), though I’d be more than happy to expand my pool — friend or otherwise. I suspect it’s also because it keeps me in another decade entirely, without admitting I’m hiding there.
Yes, there’s the patience, the lived experience, the “he uses coasters” thing. As if he’s been training his whole life to not ruin my travertine coffee table, which required me to become a licensed Portuguese importer to get it into the country.
Maybe it’s that established lives make my own complications look smaller by comparison. A preference for stasis makes my flight reflexes look leisurely. I am the anxious boulder. I get to play the role I’ve always wanted: the aging welder, wise beyond her years, smelting scraps of metal into something resembling a stove. But that’s also a pattern and prototype I’d be more than happy to upend.
It also might be why people call me an “old soul.” A human AGA. It sounds flattering — wise, elegant, patient — but it feels like putting me in a display case, prodded by kids with sticky fingers. Sometimes they tap the glass, and their parents whisper, “she used to be very popular.”
So when I got back to the city and suddenly drew the attention of people outside my typical demo, I had a hunch something about me had changed.
First, unexpectedly, the present broke in when I took myself to dinner at The Little Owl.
“Do you have a table for one by any chance?”
“Of course we do,” the host smiled, giving me the choice of two window tables.
I ordered a Tuscan white. He came back: “You wanted the Sancerre, right?”
I shook my head. “No — The Clam one.” In my head: Do you take me for a little bitch who only orders Sancerre?
I drank my wine and enjoyed my first course, the sunflower salad, which is at the tippity top of my favorite dishes in the city. The manager brought over my entree and sat down at my table in the chair across from me. “Are you from here or just visiting?” He asked, cocking his head toward the table of two tourists next to me.
“I live around the corner. I’ve actually been coming here since the year you guys opened. This is my favorite restaurant in the city.”
He high-fived me.
“Why don’t we know each other? You should have introduced yourself.”
I stuck my hand out.
“Hi, I’m Ana. It’s so nice to meet you.”
“I’m Daniel.”
He motioned one minute and walked away.
The music shifted — Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered twinkled out of the speakers.
He sat down on the window sill next to me and leaned in. “Ana, they’re playing our song.”
“Are they?” I asked.
He hesitated over the singer.
“It’s Ella Fitzgerald, dear,” I told him.
He offered me dessert, then “a splash” of wine, which turned into a tidal wave. He brought me the VIP number, the one you call when the reservation book says no.
The Minetta private line is nice, but this was the pinnacle.
He asked me about some of my favorite places in the neighborhood.
“It depends if you want me to optimize for food or scene. I love the food at Bar Pitti, but on the wrong night the scene is horrid,” I told him.
We kept talking about our local haunts, our careers, how long he’d been in New York and our mutual desire to live here forever but also perennial urge to leave.
“Ana, I would love to continue this conversation. Could I ask for your number?”
“Of course, I would love that.”
I scribbled my phone number on a piece of paper in my shark patterned notebook and tore it out.
“212?!” He asked.
“I should warn you now, my 212 area code is my best character trait. It’s downhill from there.”
“I doubt it,” he answered.
Sometimes the best dates are the ones you don’t know you’re on until they’re almost over. Which is, unfortunately, also true of some of the best people.
You see, when women have the scent — not perfume, but something subtler — it’s akin to a frequency in harmony. It manifests when you’re accidentally invincible: tanner than you’d like from swimming all summer, hair wild from neglect, muscles from the laps, eyes clearer, demeanor lighter, and wearing a dress that could be “effortless chic” or “lost my luggage.” Unlike perfume, which you apply, the scent is an oozing and unfiltered signal of a person who is entirely, and accidentally, themselves. You buy perfume to smell like someone else. You switch perfumes after a breakup to rewire olfactory driven memories. The scent, however, is the universe's way of letting everyone else know you smell exactly like the most exceptional iteration of yourself.
I could feel it in the way Daniel stayed and dined with me unprompted, and mostly in the way the air tilted toward me — like it knew something I didn’t.
A few days later, I went back to Airmail. I was having an abysmal day and it was only 10AM.
“What’s up, Marcus?”
“Oh, ya know.”
“Oh, I do know,” I answered. He and I have gotten pretty close over the last few months so we often shared some of our war stories. And debated whose coffee deserved a loogie.
He told me his fiancée had left him a few days earlier.
“I too am having a shitty day. What time do you start serving wine?”
“Eleven AM,” the other barista answered.
I grinned. “Excellent, Marcus will be joining me in a glass of wine at eleven.”
“After Marcus’ shift,” he replied in perfectly timed third person.
It was the kind of trying day that demanded an anomalous and small act of rebellion.
And then, while nursing that wine, I texted Daniel from The Little Owl, whom I’d left hanging for longer than socially appropriate: I’m finally back in the city. Let’s get drinks early this week. He replied in minutes with a plan. I liked that. I have grown fond of certainty, or rather, own that I unabashedly adore conviction.
I left Airmail to change for dinner with a friend. I’m in my curly hair era. It’s something I once hated and now love — the effortlessness of leaving with sopping wet hair and letting it dry however the wind, and the scent, wants.
I changed into a long white backless dress and got in my elevator with my summer tan as my only makeup. A guy was standing in the elevator wearing sunglasses. I pulled my own sunglasses down on the bridge of my nose and smiled at him. I’ve never seen him before, I thought.
He held the elevator door open for me. Chivalrous! I thought.
I said, “thank you” in a high pitched girl’s voice and smiled again.
He walked out of my building behind me. My lobby is a hall of mirrors so I could see him watching me as I made my way toward the door. I could feel the scent trailing behind me like a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon. I thought maybe he’d speed up to walk next to me but he didn’t. Ah well, I thought.
Then I heard someone shout “hey” from behind me.
I turned around and he put his hand on my shoulder. “How long have you lived in the building? What’s your name?”
“I’m Ana,” I answered and stretched my hand out to shake his.
“David,” he answered as he shook mine back.
We chatted and walked together for about a block. He paused on the corner to figure out which way I was going.
“I’m heading north,” I said.
“Ah, I have to go south,” he said back.
“We should hang sometime,” I said in the lowest key way I could.
“We should. I will find you in the building,” he said back.
I shoved my headphones in and a song titled Gangsta Walk came on shuffle. Not my usual choice, but fuck yeah.
I had some vague “don’t shit where you eat” thoughts. But A) I was moving in the distant future B) I’d already agreed to drinks and a jazz club with the guy from The Little Owl, which really was shitting in my favorite place to eat.
But when the scent strikes, you entertain all the flies that swarm. He’d find me in the gym or swimming laps in my children’s construction goggles (they give you fewer wrinkles than regular swim goggles and I am very committed to never aging, even if it means looking like I enrolled Bob the Builder in scuba school). Or I’d ask the doormen who seem to be very invested in my love life. They only approve of the ones who bring or send flowers. The botanically empty-handed don’t meet doorman standards, though my own bar isn’t so rigid. A bottle of olive oil or a box of kosher salt is always much more appreciated anyway.
But here’s the thing — the scent never lasts. One day you walk out the door and you’re just… regular old perfume scented again. The sweatpants are no longer sexy. They’re back to their Chinese-food-stained, lumpy selves. The chopstick holding your hair in a chignon looks stolen from the same takeout bag. One day, it’s gone — passed on to someone else who needs it more. The worst part isn’t losing it. It’s remembering what you were like when you had it. I walked past Saint Theos on my way home. A guy on a date at one of the outdoor tables looked up and winked at me as I passed. Never that kind of trouble. That’s someone else’s scent.
