Chapter Eight
Nick
A man should have a signature. That’s what I told Julie when she was twelve and asked why I always smelled the same. I stand by it.
People underestimated scent. Clients wouldn’t remember your exact words from a meeting two years ago, but they’d shake your hand in a lobby and feel, without knowing why, that things had gone well the last time.
That was the cologne working. Mine ran a hundred and ninety a bottle, I’d worn it for eleven years, and Herrera at the club once called it “the smell of a man about to be right,” which I’d repeated at three dinner parties because it deserved repeating.
So, when Davis leaned into my office, sniffed, and said, “Did something spill in here?” – I took it as a comment about the building.
“Facilities shampooed the carpets,” I said.
“Huh. It’s kind of... sharp.”
He shrugged and got to the point, which was moving our meeting, and I forgot about it until the two o’clock in the north conference room, when Priya, mid-slide, walked to the window and opened it.
Nobody opened the windows in the north conference room.
They were the old kind, painted half shut, but she worked one loose and stood by it for the rest of the presentation with her notes held slightly in front of her face.
In the men’s room afterward, I pulled my collar up over my nose and inhaled. I understood.
The cologne had turned. Not in the bottle.
In the bottle, it smelled right. I checked when I got home, sprayed a cloud, walked through it.
Fine, correct, a hundred and ninety dollars of correct.
But an hour into wearing it, something went wrong on the skin, a sourness underneath, chemical and wrong, and it clung.
I looked it up. Fragrances oxidized. Heat, light, air in the bottle, and the top notes spoiled while the base went rancid.
Eleven years of buying the same bottle, and I’d finally gotten a bad one, which fit the general theme of my month, along with the chirping, which was ongoing, and the rash, which was fading but present, neither of which I intended to get into beyond saying that a man’s home was supposed to be the place where things worked.
I threw out the bottle and bought a new one at the department store, full price, from a girl who tried to sell me something “fresher” until I explained about signatures.
The new bottle turned too. Same sourness, same one-hour delay, and this time, I caught Davis and Priya trading a look in the elevator that they didn’t think I saw.
Well, I saw. I’d built a career on seeing the looks people traded in elevators.
That look, aimed at me, over something as manageable as scent.
That look cost the department store a twenty-minute phone call in which I used the word “counterfeit” and demanded to know their supply chain, and a supervisor apologized in the way that meant nothing and offered me an exchange I didn’t take.
Because at that point I’d stopped trusting the whole line.
Storage issue at the warehouse, probably.
A bad batch, a hot truck. These things happened in waves.
The club made it worse, because the club was where reputation went to be counted.
Saturday, I played nine with Herrera and two of his partners, and at the turn, Herrera – the same Herrera of “the smell of a man about to be right” – clapped me on the shoulder, leaned in, and said, quietly, doing me a favor, “New cologne?”
“Bad bottle. It’s being handled.”
“Handle it fast,” he said, and laughed.
The laugh had witnesses, and I hit my next drive into the trees.
That night, I conducted an investigation of my own, at my bathroom counter, with the door locked, because a man spraying cologne onto index cards and sniffing them at timed intervals didn’t need his family walking in.
Fresh spray: correct. Twenty minutes: correct. Forty minutes: the first wrongness, faint, at the edges. One hour: sour.
I did it twice with both bottles, took notes on my phone under the chirp log, and sat on the edge of the tub looking at my data, which proved something was happening and explained nothing.
The bottle was fine. The skin was the variable.
Which meant it was the rash cream, or the new body wash, or the new deodorant, or the new detergent, or the new sheets.
I’d changed everything in my life in the space of three weeks, chasing the itching, and now every product I owned was a suspect, and there was no way to isolate a single one without living in a lab.
I reasoned correctly with the evidence available. What I concluded, sitting on the tub in my sanctuary of things that no longer worked, was that I was having the unluckiest month of my life.
I switched to an old backup from my travel kit and moved on, because I had bigger things that week. I had Thursday.
I’d built Thursday the way I built everything – properly.
The Wexley, booked through the corporate desk, coded to the Harrington file, because a smart man didn’t put a hotel like that on a card his wife could see, and the client work was real anyway.
I’d stacked two legitimate calls into Friday, so the trip would survive an audit.
Suite, not a room. Dinner reservation Friday, the tasting menu, a corner table I’d requested by number.
Liv got loud about tasting menus in a way that Natalie never had; Natalie evaluated food, Liv enjoyed it, and a man could go a long way on being enjoyed.
I knew how it looked. I’d never pretended it looked good.
But nobody watched a marriage from the inside for twenty-three years and got to be simple about it.
Natalie was an exceptional woman – one could ask anyone, me, I’d say it first – exceptional, composed, competent, the best hostess in the neighborhood.
Being married to all that competence had a cost nobody had warned me about.
Nothing that I did impressed her anymore. Nothing surprised her. She ran the house, the calendar, my shirts, our life, and somewhere in there, she started running me too, pleasantly, smoothly, the way she ran a gala. And a man could begin to feel handled. Scheduled. Solved.
Liv looked at me and saw the interesting one. That was it. That was the whole engine.
We met that week the way we always met when the schedule got tight – in the parking structure behind the medical building, third level, where nobody we knew had any reason to be.
She got into my car smelling like her own perfume, which was louder than anything Natalie would wear, and kissed me before I’d finished saying hello.
Then she pulled back with her hand still on my jacket and made a face.
“You smell different.”
“Don’t start.”
“I’m serious. That’s not your cologne. What is that?”
“It’s the travel one. The regular one turned, there’s a whole…” I sighed. “The store sold me a bad batch. Twice. It’s being handled.”
“Turned.” Liv sat back in the passenger seat and looked at me with her eyes narrowed. I watched her reach a conclusion I didn’t like. “Two bottles in a row turned.”
“Storage issue. It happens in waves.”
“Sure,” she said, and changed the subject.
She was distracted and short with me for the rest of the twenty minutes we had, and that night the texts started.
Liv: I keep thinking about the cologne thing
Nick: there is no cologne thing
Liv: men change their cologne for one reason. did someone buy you a new fragrance? someone with a signature scent of her own maybe??
Nick: you’re being insane. I’ve worn the same cologne for 11 years. ask anyone
Liv: EXACTLY. eleven years and it “goes bad” the same month you start acting weird
Nick: acting weird how?
Liv: distracted. twitchy. you keep checking your phone. you rescheduled on me twice
Nick: I rescheduled because of work. and I’m twitchy because I’ve had a rash for two weeks and there’s a noise in my office that no one else can hear. my life is currently a lot, liv
Liv: or there’s someone else
Nick: are you serious right now?
Liv: is there? just tell me. I’m risking everything, jason is basically doing forensics on my car, and you can’t even keep a story straight about cologne
Nick: the story is straight. the cologne went BAD. bottles turn
Liv: natalie would know if it smells different. has SHE said anything?
Nick: natalie doesn’t notice things like that
Which was true, and I typed it without thinking.
Only afterward, lying in the dark next to my wife, did it occur to me that I’d just used one woman’s inattention to reassure the other.
There had been a time, early, years ago, when Natalie noticed everything about me.
My haircuts, my moods, a new watch within the hour.
And I couldn’t say when that had stopped, or whether it had stopped, or whether she’d just stopped saying it out loud.
I didn’t pull at the thread further. I had Thursday to protect.
The last near miss was Wednesday night, and I handled it fine.
We kept an old tablet on the kitchen counter, synced to my account from some setup years ago, recipes and music mostly, and Liv texted while I was upstairs.
The thing lit up and chimed on the counter with Natalie standing four feet from it, drying wineglasses.
I came down for water, saw it glowing, and my stomach dropped.
Then I looked at my wife, and she was working on a glass, holding it up to the light, checking for streaks the way she did, a hundred miles away.
I picked up the tablet, angled it away, cleared the notification, and made a note to kill the sync.
Which I then forgot to do, because Natalie asked if I wanted tea, and the moment passed, filed away with all the other moments I’d gotten away with.
She hadn’t seen anything. A man could tell when a woman had seen something. There was a stillness, a flatness in her voice. A long marriage taught you the signs.
There were no signs.
Thursday morning, I put my bag in the trunk, wearing the travel cologne and a shirt that only slightly itched.
I kissed my wife goodbye in the kitchen.
She smelled like coffee and her own perfume, the quiet one.
She fixed my collar, which she’s done since our twenties, and told me to “go be brilliant”.
For a second, holding my keys, I had the strangest impulse to cancel the whole thing – the suite, the dinner, the corner table – and stay in my own kitchen with my own wife. It passed.
“Don’t wait up Sunday,” I said. “The flight situation looks ugly.”
“I never wait up,” Natalie said, smiling, and went back to her coffee.
I drove away believing, as I’d believed every single day of that entire month, that I was the smartest man on the street.