Perfume Diary: Outdoor Space (HF)
I am not ready for it to be summer, but the weather doesn't care. I know it’s not quite here yet, but it’s been over 70 degrees in New York a couple times in the last two weeks and I can feel the season panting there at the starting line, lying in wait.
One of the most unfashionable things among the many unfashionable things about me is that I really still do love New York City. It may be that I have been here so long that I don't know how to do anything else. It may be that I have to live in the fantasy of it, to dig my toes into the dirt of its promises and imaginaries, because otherwise it would make me miserable. But all of these reasons are no more solid than the scent of the air. I love it because I love it, because in summer it smells like old trees and wet pavement and phantom grill smoke and other people's backyards, because someone else is always having a party while you're just walking down the street, stabbed in the heart with the immutable fact of all the parties you weren't invited to, perhaps most of all those being thrown and attended by people you've never met.
Anyway, because I love New York in this stupid dog-waiting-at-the-door-at-5pm sort of way, I am naturally suspicious of all perfumes named for places in New York, and will rarely wear or buy or even sample them - why would I need this, when I have too much of it already, why would I escape to the place where I already am? Wearing a New York themed perfume feels to me a bit like how the worst nightmares are not about monsters or catastrophes, but about normal, mundane, recognizable days in one's own life, laced with stresses indistinguishable from the ones dogging us when we're awake.
But I've made an exception for Vilhelm Perfume's awkwardly named 125th & Bloom (formerly Harlem Bloom), which I would happily wear every day. It is meant not to evoke a famous location, or some idea of distant historical glamour, but to summon up the smell of the creator's home in Harlem. The thing I find myself trying to get to each summer is for just one person one time to invite me to a party in the secret backyard of their building. New York is - pardon the nerdiness here - bigger on the inside. The longer you stay here, the more its interiors become willing to unfold. Buildings that seems dull and two-dimensional from the streets often contain gardens behind them, weird, lush, over-or-under-grown rectangular patches sprouting out from the width of the interior block. On the elevated F or G train into Brooklyn, as it emerges out of the tunnel and passes above the treetops, the inner organs of Carroll Gardens reveal themselves, laid out in rows of yards backed up into each other from opposite sides of streets, a wholly different world than the one visible from the sidewalks.
These places come alive in the summer, animated by the parties that someone else is always throwing, that someone else is always invited to, that exist in the idea of someone else's life, the parties I imagine myself attending when I imagine being better, kinder, less awkward, easier to get along with, more organized and more loved. The thing about summer is that it feels like a referendum on whether or not you have friends, and what kind of friends, and how many, and how much they love you and in what way. How many friends one actually has has no bearing on these feelings. I spend the summer thinking how if only I were better, I would have friends and be invited to backyard parties, but I also spend the summers going to backyard parties, with friends. You can have something, and still wish desperately that you had that thing, all at the exact same time. The collision of these two things - having something, and wishing you had that thing - is where summer in New York lives.
Anyway, 125th & Bloom smells like that summer, like that party, like that secret back garden opening out from the unloving cement facade of the streets. While the notes are mostly floral, the way they come together is like just-cut weedy flowers in a vase with dirt still clinging to them, hastily picked from a backyard to lopsidedly brighten a small room. It is woody and earthy and kitchen-fresh. It is the smell of cold bottles of cheap wine sweating warm in the afternoon, and cigarettes even though you don't smoke, and the green of determined grass and vines that cling to the back walls of other people's buildings, and the surprising little patches of flowers planted and loved and tended through unlikelihood into bloom by whomever lives there, the long, good waste of an afternoon in a city when the sky is the color of water and the air is tired and gentle and for a few hours the idea of the thing and the thing itself are the same. —HF