Perfume Diary: Painting Hard Lines (RS)

Choeur Des Anges, Atelier des Ors

I am writing this letter from a hotel room in Manhattan, which despite almost fifteen years of living in the city is a place I have found myself in only a handful of times. Hotel rooms make up so much of the real estate in New York City -- and for those of us who were not born here, are often part of our first interaction with it. Those of us who once made a silent pact with ourselves to do whatever we had to do to change our relationship to the city, to cross that wide chasm separating a visitor from a local, likely did so while peering out of a hotel window. We wanted to be down there, not up here. We wanted to be the gawked at, the ants scurrying below. I remember when I first moved to the city, I would delight in any opportunity to walk past one of those red double-decker buses full of tourists, pink and pickled and full of pizza. I felt their eyes casting about, scanning the sidewalk for “real” New Yorkers. So I put on a little show. I would clomp a little harder in my shoes, look a little more distracted, cast my eyes away as if yes, of course, I had somewhere more important to be. You know you really live here when you stop giving a shit about the red buses, when they mostly aggravate you because they slow down cab rides and bully pedestrians. But for a while, I noticed every single one that went by. I would smile, thinking about how all those people were going to sleep in hotel beds, and I was going to sleep in my own; how I’d somehow made my way down to street level. 

When I was in seventh grade, I came to New York City for the first time, on a school trip. I imagine it was not an easy trip for the chaperones  -- wrangling a gaggle of tweens on two plane flights from the desert Southwest, purchasing a block of nosebleed tickets for The Phantom of the Opera, assuring our parents that we wouldn’t wander off into the Hudson -- but it was, up until then, the most electric week of my life. I still remember every contour of the musty room where I bunked with three other girls, in the Hotel Edison in Times Square. The Edison, which was built in 1931 and still stands, had fallen into general disrepair during the neighborhood’s sleaziest years and never fully recovered, despite Disney pouring millions of dollars into renovating a theater right down the block. It was a fleabag then, as it is a fleabag now, but I did not care. The beds drooped in the middle like failed soufflés, the carpet was stained and bubbling, the bathroom grout was green. The place had not been glamorous since the 1950s, when a blond band leader named Gloria Parker, who looked perpetually ready to go on tour with the USO, played the marimba on a nightly national radio program that broadcast from the Edison ballroom. But it still imprinted on me the way a harbor does on a sailor. I’d landed, I’d arrived. 

Living in New York, though, is a slow process of forgetting your eagerness for it, and one way this happens is that you stop staying in hotels. Who could afford it? And who would want to? I love hotels -- one of the great benefits of writing for magazines is that sometimes I fly places and stay there overnight, and I live for the moment I can order carbonara and prosecco from the room service menu and binge the channel that seems to only show re-runs of Chopped and steal the notepads and the tiny soaps and swan around in the waffle robe and allow myself to purchase exactly one tin of cocktail nuts from the minibar -- but I have stopped longing for them when I am in New York City. Sure, you will see the inside of one every now and then: Your parents are in town. You are celebrating an anniversary. You attend a press junket. Your toilet floods and your landlord tells you getting a decent plumber will take three days. I often interview people in their hotel rooms, which means I’ve sat very primly inside nicer spaces than I will ever be able to afford: the penthouse at the Mercer, an executive suite at the Mandarin Oriental. Mostly those rooms make me uncomfortable; I know they cost several thousand dollars a night, and all I can see is the profligacy and the complimentary bucket of Moet in the corner. 

This is the first time I’ve ever booked a room just for myself. I’m finishing a project (which I should likely be working on instead of this, but hey, it is my turn, and this is already late in coming -- I know it, and I apologize). I have been trying to finish this project for much of the summer, and I realized I needed to do something a bit drastic in order to push through it  -- to lay some cash on the line, to be all alone, to put my Hotel Tonight points where my mouth is. So I’m taking two nights in two different rooms, one much nicer than the other. Budgets being what they are.

Tonight, I am at the Bryant Park Hotel, in a room with big picture windows on the twentieth floor that overlook the park and a sliver of the New York Public Library. This hotel, which started its life as the American Radiator Company in 1924, was one of the city’s first skyscrapers, and one of the several buildings that young Georgia O’Keeffe painted, when she was still attracted to straight lines. O’Keeffe herself lived in a hotel -- the Shelton Towers -- back when artists could afford to camp out long-term in buildings with amenities. The Shelton, which is now the East Side Marriott, started out as a “bachelor-only residence,” with Turkish baths and a martini bar and squash courts, but it opened up to women in less than a year (as it turns out, bachelors sometimes take wives). O’Keeffe, then in her late thirties, painted the building, where she lived with Alfred Stieglitz on a high floor, over and over and over, documenting the changing view from her window. Sometimes I think about how she was older than I was, and still somehow so much younger. She was pushing forty and itinerant, living in a room she could never claim, that came with a staff that would erase all evidence her the moment she left. How free it must have felt, to live in such a liminal accommodation, and how limiting. I sometimes wonder if she devoted her later life to largess, to the desert expanse, simply because she was trying to unravel the years she spent squatting in an efficiency. I come from New Mexico, and in every way it is the cosmic opposite of a New York hotel.

Those who remember O’Keeffe in her older years say that she always wore the same perfume; something vintage, from the twenties. It was heady, and floral, and she wore it all the time, even while shopping at the Piggly Wiggly. No one has ever been quite sure of the brand; but she might have bought it at Bloomingdale’s just up the street from the Shelton. Perhaps it was Patou Amour Amour, or Caron Pois de Senteur. Whatever it was, you can no longer buy it.

I packed a full bottle of perfume in my suitcase. It seemed like the kind of thing Georgia might do. I wanted something big, something bold, something that, if I do finish this project, will mark this week forever, and that will connect me as much to these rooms as the smell of mildew does to the Edison. I also wanted something to keep me awake. To that end, I grabbed the silliest bottle I own, a heavy crystal sunburst filled with real gold flakes (LOL), whose French name translates to “Choir of Angels” and that smells like orange crush soda in an evening gown. It’s fizzy and syrupy and citric, like runny marmalade, and it is also ridiculous. No perfume needs to contain gold, or so much osmanthus absolute that it makes you feel dizzy. But this week is also ridiculous. Hotels are ridiculous. They are up here, when I should be down there. It is so strange, being twenty floors above the street, smelling like pop rocks, in a room I’ll never return to again, in a city I call home.