When Chuck fell in love with Camilla, it struck him at a visceral level. Maybe visceral is the wrong word. It suggests that Chuck felt his love in the gut whereas, when he examined his feelings, he discovered that he felt his love most keenly in the nose. Or (since Camilla would never allow Chuck to speak so crassly): Chuck’s feelings for Camilla stirred up olfactory associations.
From snippets Chuck had read, he assembled a vague theory of why this was the case. It involved pheromones and the biochemistry of attraction. It involved the fast absorption rates of the nasal membrane. It also involved neuropsychiatry and the way our sense of smell is linked to our most primitive mind. Chuck never shared his theory with Camilla. Instead, when they were together, he would say, “You smell wonderful.” When he breathed her in, he wanted to add: “It makes me horny.” He never said this, of course, because that would have been crude and Camilla was a genteel person; she deserved better.
Once, when they were out at a local pub, when Chuck nestled close to Camilla and filled his lungs, when Chuck confessed that it sent his mind spinning (like he had just snorted a drug), Camilla smiled and pulled a slender vial from her purse. “This is my secret,” she said. She set the vial on the table between their bottles of beer. Chuck lowered his head until his chin sat in a puddle of condensation. Eau de toilette.
“Très chic,” he said, using his most sophisticated accent. He leaned in and kissed his love on the neck, then nibbled on her earlobe.
When the beer had worked its magic, Chuck excused himself and went to the men’s room. It was in the basement at the end of a dank brick-walled corridor. There were two urinals, a sink, and a stall with a broken door. Chuck was glad he only had to pee. He stepped to the urinal on the left and stared at an ad for prophylactics. Chuck liked to think of his body as a machine. While his machine did its work down there, he occupied his mind with more erudite concerns up here. In this instance, he gave his mind a challenge. He had to come up with five euphemisms for the word condom before the last drop dribbled from his bladder. Rubber. That’s a no-brainer. Cock frock. That makes two. The dong sarong is three.
Chuck never made it to four. As his whizz splashed on the urinal puck, it jarred loose some free-floating molecules that wafted into his nostrils where they quickly lodged themselves in his nasal cavity and travelled to the olfactory receptacle at the base of his brain, what neuroscientists describe as the limbic system. He recognized that odour. He poked his head into the hallway to be sure no one was coming, then returned to the urinal and got down onto his knees. Sticking his nose as close to the puck as he dared, he inhaled the strange combination of his own urine and commercial disinfectants. The similarity was uncanny.
Upstairs at their booth, Chuck smiled at his girlfriend as he slid in beside her. He put his nose as close to her as he dared and inhaled. It was unmistakable. Camilla’s Eau de toilette was a distillation of bar urine and cleaning products. To be sure, Chuck waited until Camilla excused herself, then took up the vial of Eau de toilette, unscrewed the cap, and waved it under his nose. It was undeniable.
In situations like this, most men have the good sense to shut up and smile, but Chuck was not most men. He thought of himself as a scientist. He wasn’t actually a scientist, but he believed in the power of reason and in the importance of speaking the truth, even if speaking the truth put him in conflict with popular opinion. So when Camilla returned from the bathroom, Chuck spoke the truth to her. Chuck learned the hard way (he would call it empiricism) that women don’t always want to hear the truth, or at least not in a cold detached way that makes the truth sound like a chemistry lesson. And so that evening at the local pub, after a mild altercation, Chuck and Camilla agreed to cool things for a while. For Chuck, that meant he would send flowers and call her in a week. For Camilla, that meant she never wanted to see him again.
When Chuck called after the first week, Camilla was evasive. Being an optimist, Chuck interpreted her vague comments in a favourable way. He had hoped that their relationship could be restored. When Chuck called after the second week, Camilla was more direct. However, as with most grieving, Chuck’s began in denial; he couldn’t believe Camilla never wanted to see him again. It wasn’t possible. Not after all the time they had spent together. Not after the powerful connection they had established. But by the third week, Chuck knew it was over. Acceptance was a long way off, but the grieving had begun.
There were whole afternoons that Chuck couldn’t remember. He passed them wandering through the city streets. Sometimes he rented movies they had watched together, and sitting alone in front of his TV, he would cry himself to sleep. There on the couch, he would fall to dreaming of Camilla. Chuck was not a visual dreamer. What he recalled most from his dreams were conversations and, most powerfully, scents. He dreamt of moments when he had rested his head on Camilla’s shoulder and breathed in her lovely scent. It reminded him of how he felt when he had first fallen in love with her.
Waking suddenly from one of his dreams, Chuck saw that it was only midnight. He threw on a jacket and rushed to the local pub. He took a place at the bar where he left his jacket draped over the back of a chair and ran downstairs to the bathroom. Standing at one of the urinals, he sprayed a torrent over the puck. Even before he was done, he could smell Camilla’s scent rising into his nostrils. Without zipping up, he crouched before the urinal and pressed his nose against the plastic cover that held the puck in place.
When another patron burst into the bathroom, Chuck didn’t have time to rise to his feet, or even to turn his head. The man saw Chuck kneeling with his face stuck in the urinal and assumed he was a pervert. He hated perverts. A couple years ago, a pervert had flashed his wife. He gave Chuck a going over. Not hard. But hard enough to leave him dazed and sprawled in a puddle beneath the leaking sink.
Chuck spent the rest of the night in the emergency ward of the local hospital. He had a broken rib and a chipped tooth. A police officer questioned him about the assault, but the interview didn’t go well. For one thing, every time he used the letter “s” he made a whistling sound because of the chipped tooth. For another thing, the police officer wasn’t terribly sympathetic, especially after Chuck explained why the man had assaulted him.
“What the hell were you doing with your head stuck in a urinal?”
“I was smelling something.” Whistle, whistle. Smelling something.
It was late and they had given him Percocet for the pain in his gut. As soon as the police officer left, Chuck lay back in the hospital bed and drifted away like a boat on a river. No one ever really sleeps in an emergency ward. Not with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead and the triage nurses barking orders and the gurneys with their squeaky wheels. Chuck dozed and woke, dozed and woke.
With eyes shut, the haunting scent visited him once again. Chuck smiled. “Camilla, you’ve come to see me.” He reached to the figure beside his bed, then opening his eyes, saw that it was a squat man in hospital greens.
“I ain’t no Camilla,” the man said. “I’m the janitor.”
The man had parked his trolley next to Chuck’s bed so he could go next door to clean the toilet.