Alyssa Harad - Coming to My Senses: A Story of Perfume, Pleasure, and an Unlikely Bride

COMING
TO MY

COMING
TO MY

A Story of Perfume, Pleasure,
and an Unlikely Bride

ALYSSA HARAD

VIKING

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in 2012 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Copyright Alyssa Harad, 2012

All rights reserved

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Harad, Alyssa.

Coming to my senses : a story of perfume, pleasure, and an unlikely bride / Alyssa Harad.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-101-58367-8

1. FeministsUnited StatesBiography. 2. Perfumes industryUnited States. 3. PerfumeUnited States. 4. FemininityUnited States. 5. FeminismUnited States. I. Title.

HQ1413.H37A3 2012

305.42092dc23

[B] 2011046010

Printed in the United States of America

Set in Garamond Premier Pro Designed by Francesca Belanger

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic
form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted
materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity.
In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers;
however, the story, the experiences, and the words
are the authors alone.

ALWAYS LEARNING

PEARSON

To my mother, who was the beginning of it all.
And to my father, for loving both of us.

In most cases, I have changed the names and identifying details of the people I describe to protect their privacy. Occasionally, I have compressed or combined events.

I have provided the names of the perfumes featured when I felt it was crucial to the telling of this story. However, in some cases I preferred to leave the names out and keep the emphasis on the description of their scents and the emotions they evoked at the moment. Doing so allowed me to avoid recommending perfumes that may be discontinued or reformulated by the time this book is published. I invite all curious readers to visit www.alyssaharad.com where I can give you the latest, updated scoop.

PART I

P erfume tells a story on the skin. It has a beginning, a middle, andif its gooda long, lingering end. To try a new perfume is to give yourself over to this story for at least an hour or two, sometimes much longer. Its a risky endeavor. Not because there is so much bad perfume crowding the counters today. (You can always wash it off.) And not because others will accuse you of stinking up the joint. (You can always wear less, and what do they know, anyway?)

The story a new perfume tells is dangerousand excitingbecause it is unabashedly intimate. It depends on the heat of your body to give it life, and on your memories and fantasies to give it depth. To smell it, you must breathe it in, and when you move close to others, they breathe it in, too, along with your warmth and your presence. Like all scents, perfume seeps into your memories whether you want it to or not, preserving and enriching them. But it can do something far stranger: It can turn your moods and desires into a living presence, surprising you with something, or someone, you didnt know you knew. When we approach the perfume counter we are always a little bit vulnerable. We think were looking for a pleasant smell, or something sexy, maybe a bit of art or romance to grace a special day, but our dreams get into the mix. They tug us down toward the questions lurking underneath all such small decisions: Who am I? What do I want?

My affair with perfume began as a slow, secret flirtation, carried on late at night by the glow of my computer screen. Lurking in the electronic shadows, I left no comments, and I told no one in my waking life that what had begun as an occasional dalliance was growing into a daily ritual. I was a serious, Birkenstock-wearing feminist in my mid-thirties, and my sudden passion for reading about perfume left me baffled and not a little embarrassed.

But then, I was embarrassed about a lot of things in those days. My life had come to a kind of pause. When I ran into old friends or was introduced to strangers, I no longer knew how to explain myself. Id moved to Austin to get my doctorate, but there wasnt much demand for English PhDs when I began my studies, and there was even less eight years later, when I emerged, degree in hand. The most sensible of my fellow students dropped out after a few years. Those of us more adept at denial or faith kept going, hoping wed be the exception.

I told myself I was keeping my options open, and I always had a side project or two going. But I stayed too long. I grew deeply attached to my work and to teaching, and poured my heart into both. This turned out to be a mistakea serious, passionate, complicated mistake, like marrying the wrong person or moving to the wrong country. It took me several years to fully extricate myself. And during that time I wandered around like an exiled divorcestunned, brokenhearted, a stranger to the world and to myself.

Only the man who had loved me and lived with me all through graduate school and its aftermath saw me that way, though. (If he had a choice, I wouldnt be talking about him at all, so lets call him V.) Outside our home, I was always busyvery, very busyfirst, trying to create a job for myself, and then working for a small nonprofit. But the spring I turned thirty-six, something in me rebelled against all that busyness, and I quit my job. I had an ideareally, no more than a secretive wish encouraged by V.,that I wanted to write, but I had no idea how or what. For the first time in my much-scheduled life, I had no project and no plans.

I stitched together some freelance workbook reviews, copy for Web sites, standardized-test questions, and whatever else I could scare up and settled into the typical freelancers schedule of concentrated bursts of activity followed by long stretches of open space and time. By August my life had grown very slow. It was summerhigh Texas summer, with cicadas and thunderstorms and day after day after day of syrupy, bone-melting heat that makes it impossible to take anything very seriously.

It was then, late at night, in the middle of a deadline for another not very interesting freelance job, that I went clicking across the Internet and stumbled across my first perfume blog. I didnt think of myself as someone who liked perfume. But startled by the vivid prose I found there, impressed that it was written simply for the joy of it, I found myself sneaking over to read a few more reviews every few days or so. Soon enough, I was following links to other writers and reading the comments on their posts, and a lovely dreamworld populated by gentle, scent-mad sophisticates unfurled before me.