The Smell of Every Kiss
A boy. He smelled like movie popcorn butter; not the popcorn, just the butter.
“Do you work at a movie theater?”
He shrugged. What was I supposed to do with that? What could I do but shrug back or ask why he smelled like butter or ask him not to shrug, tell him Ma always shrugged to ignore me, or I could kiss him. I chose his mouth. At least he didn’t taste like butter. His lips were chapped though, so chapped I imagined dousing them with one of those movie theater butter faucets. I imagined laying him in a dentist’s chair so I could swivel the faucet over his mouth and press the tiny red button. That butter. You know how it lubes the tips of your fingers? How it glistens even in a theater’s omni-directional half-light? We had our own movie theater lighting, with the blue light of his laptop shining on him and the lone, naked bulb in his basement switched off. The light made his oily skin glisten like that butter. The light sharpened his features too. He looked more severe than most teenagers in suburban Illinois. I liked that.
We watched a movie in his bed, not the theater, because I’m predictable. On his bed, I guess, because you can’t really be in an air mattress without blankets. The stiff creases of the plastic, how they left textured imprints on our limbs; I could feel, but not see, these indentations were red. Because I’m predictable, there was a time when I only saw boys in the dark; I say boys because we were boys, because I still thought I was a boy; in the dark because I didn’t like the shapes we drew with our furtive hands, our tangled limbs, our waiting mouths.
After, I said, “I want you to hold me.”
He said, “I’d like to,” and didn’t.
So I dressed and climbed through his basement window, which swung out at forty-five degrees. I kicked the window shut, hard, then shuffled across his freshly mowed lawn. I shuffled slow. Slow so his parents could part their curtains to see a shadow buckle its belt on the way to its car.
Another boy. He smelled like fruit snacks. He smelled like fruit snacks because he had just snacked on fruit snacks; grape, specifically. Grape: his fourth favorite flavor, second in dislike only to orange. The weird part, he told me, was that he craved the grape taste, but couldn’t bear the color. He tasted color. If he were colorblind, a rare sort of colorblind that only prevented one from distinguishing fruit snack colors, he would rank grape first. He longed for this colorblindness. Color intruded too much into his ranking of fruit snacks; everything became jumbled up, everything but orange; if he were colorblind, only orange would remain where it sat on his list. Last. Orange he hated on account of its color and taste.
He described the benefits of this colorblindness as he sorted a family size fruit snack box; or more accurately an individual size box because he never shared one, not a single one, and he would know if I snuck but one orange fruit snack under my tongue, he warned me; or more accurately an individual-size-box-if-said-individual-like-rather-obsessively-buys-sorts-and-downs-fruit-snacks-faster-than-any-second-grade-classroom. He told me about the colorblindness he wanted, which I thought was kind of fucked up, to want colorblindness, as he burst, emptied, and folded the individual plastic bags then plucked, sorted, and sealed the fruit snacks into daily pouches, kind of like how I sorted pills. He sorted by flavor or, if you prefer, by color. He preferred color. He was on his last grape pouch that day, which is why he smelled like grape. Dozens of sealed orange pouches idled in a suitcase in the corner of his room.
“But if you were colorblind like that you wouldn’t be able to sort them,” I said.
“Exactly. Anyway, where was I?” he said. “Oh, I wish they sold those fake flavors. The ones that don’t exist.”
“Like blue raspberry?”
“Yeah or green apple.”
“Green apple exists.”
“Doesn’t it feel fake though?”
He finished sorting.
I said, “So do you want to, like, watch a movie or something?”
“No. I want you to surprise me.”
He laid out five glass mixing bowls containing the rejects of his daily pouches. Some were misshapen, others looked perfectly fine. He didn’t explain his fruit snack criteria. He zipped the orange pouch suitcase closed and perched himself on it. As he blindfolded himself with four efficient strokes of the wrists, he instructed me to place fruit snacks of any flavor in his waiting mouth; I was not the first to surprise him, I could tell.
He looked like an offering to the fruit snack gods, surrounded by his color-sorted glass bowls, head angled toward the heavens; I would not have been surprised had he asked me to spill blood into each bowl for a ritual; blood drawn by a ceremonial dagger, one with a ruby-eyed serpent engraved on the hilt; his blood, my blood dripping from our clenched fists; our blood melting the fruit snacks with crackles and hisses and so much smoke. I’m not saying I would’ve done it. I’m saying I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I wanted to surprise him. With one hand, I hovered a strawberry fruit snack near his nose. With the other, I collected one of each flavor, then shook them out of my fist and into his mouth. He chewed unamused.
“Don’t do that again, please,” he said. “Unoriginal.”
I admit that pissed me off. I admit some malice crept into my prefrontal cortex or whatever because who did he think he was? I offered to watch a movie and fuck him like a normal boy, a maybe boy, and he ordered me around not in a sexy way but in some tyrannical fruit snack way. What would Freud say? I thought. Not that Freud was right about much, but I wanted someone to prove I wasn’t the weird one here; I wasn’t the one asking for fruit snack surprises or sacrificing myself to the fruit snack gods. So what would Freud say? I grabbed handfuls of each flavor, especially orange, and scooched myself back across his carpet. Then I lobbed. I lobbed a grape fruit snack into his mouth from across the room. I have good aim. I waited for him to cough on it.
Instead, he let out one of those dorky laughs.
“Completely original,” he said. “Again!”
Another boy. The smell of his mother’s perfume.
A man. The smell of shit on his breath. You know at the club when you’re dehydrated because maybe you’re drinking maybe you’re dancing but you’re definitely not in the mood to check your own breath because maybe you’re faded maybe you’re floating maybe you’re vibrating from the requisite wall-rattling thump of that bass, that queer-club-with-a-cover good bass but you’re definitely checking out other bodies, not your own, not your own for once, so when you finally make eye contact, that prolonged eye contact that survives all the bobbing heads and flailing limbs that threaten it, when you finally approach the man with the lingering eyes and cowboy hat and wedding ring and dark dark lipstick and you say, “Hey,” but he can’t hear you, so both of you give up and make out, you realize, in his mouth, that your mouth, his mouth, everyone’s mouth smells like shit. And you don’t even mind.
The smell of a blown-out candle. My twentieth birthday cake candle. Singular candle. Not one of those number candles, just a thin line of wax left over from my little brother Felipe’s birthday. He got eighteen candles for eighteen years and a car and a check to help with college tuition. Not that I’m jealous. Felipe deserved it. He was always the smarter one. Nicer too.
Why do candles smell stronger after they die? I wanted to ask Felipe if there was a chemical explanation for that. Then I realized I hadn’t even made a wish. Felipe and Ma sat silent across from me at the kitchen table.
When we were younger, Felipe and I would shove each other’s faces into the cake. It was one of the few Mexican traditions Ma passed on to us. “Mordida!” Ma shouted every time we finished “Happy Birthday” in both languages and blew out the candles. She told us it was good luck for the birthday boy to take the first bite from deep inside the center of the cake. Even better luck if the eyes and nose left a mark. I’m pretty sure that last part wasn’t true, just something Ma or her asshole brother made up when they were kids.
For our first birthdays together, Felipe and I let our necks go slack and waited for the other to push us deep into the frosting. As we grew older, the shoves grew harder. We were always competitive, and I always took things one step too far. We engaged in no-rules wrestling matches that ended with facefulls of cake or knuckles or both. I always won. After another bloody nose ruined another vanilla cake, Ma revoked our shoving rights. She rolled up her sleeves and placed her cold, Vaseline-coated palm on the backs of our necks, then gently inclined us until our faces waded into the cake.
On my twentieth birthday, no one got up to shove me. Fine.
“No good luck for me, then, I guess,” I said. I stood, letting my chair scrape back against the cracked tile.
“C’mon, don’t be like that,” Felipe said. “Have some cake.”
“Nah,” I said. “You don’t want me here, fine. But don’t act like it.”
“Siéntate, muchacho,” Ma said.
“I’m going for a drive,” I said.
Felipe lunged for me then. He hooked his arm around my waist and pulled; I stiff-armed him with my good hand, then tried to pry his fingers off; Ma screamed at us to stop; my brother looped his arm around my neck and bent me down into a headlock; he hauled me forward, headfirst, into the cake. The checkered tablecloth slid, and the table rocked with me. The candle thrust halfway up my nose. The smell of burning reached my brain.
“I baked this for you, man,” Felipe said, panting.
I couldn’t believe he had beaten me.
I peeled myself off the candle and cake. I wiped eyeholes in the frosting with my knuckles and shook my hands out onto the floor.
While Ma leaned over to check the cake for my face, I stormed out still coated in sugar. I thought about keying the door to my brother’s car, but I had to drive it too. I got in and licked my face as much as I could. Good cake. The frosting was a bit too sweet, kind of candy-like. At least it cut the bitterness of the smoke.
A woman. The smell of old dog: wet dirt, urine, whimpering. A dog’s ghost haunted the room, the room I agreed to rent.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” I said.
“It was my husband’s,” she said, “and it was a dog.”
The dog’s memory foam mattress on a cherry frame, the dog’s portrait above the bed, the dog’s clay pot fountain pouring into itself. The smell of overworked machinery maybe from the fountain, maybe from the ghost. The husband: a famous architect turned sculptor.
“He won’t let me touch the bed, but he’ll let you live here,” she said.
The rent: dirt cheap because ghost and because I wasn’t allowed to rearrange anything and they didn’t need the money. They needed something adult to do with the room. I was something adult. I proved that the husband accepted the death of the dog, Christopher Jakobson III; the husband, by the way, was Christopher Jakobson II. He named the dog after himself.
When the couple and their dinner guests echoed up from the high-ceiling dining room, I heard that Christopher was renting out Christopher’s room now and wasn’t that nice, how Christopher was back to work and no longer sculpting Christopher every day, no longer pacing around Christopher’s memorial in the backyard, a memorial replete with approximately eighty-nine sculptures of Christopher arranged in concentric circles; Christopher playing fetch, Christopher chewing on his Christmas sweater, Christopher burying his collar, on and on, a fucked-up immobile merry-go-round of the same dog, a dog with a human room and a human name.
I lived there two years.
The smell of plants; the air of a living room filled with plants; a living room the woman and I called the garden, our garden, because we filled it to the brim with herbs and succulents and even vegetables, full-on tomatoes, because Christopher used to devour plants and the couple was moving on now. The woman told her husband he better move on or she would move on without him. After a year had passed, she told him he better move on or there would be another Christopher in the memorial. A year was still too soon, I guess, because all she got in return was a hazy stare.
The smell of dirt and that crisp air I had thought reserved for mountaintops; the dirt and the mountains all jumbled up, and not in an unpleasant way, simply one I had never experienced before. Here, in the flat flat Midwest, there were no smells of mountaintops, only the fumes of diesel and manure and malls.
We made a life in our garden. Not one that could last, but a life. She taught me how to make a crowded room look more spacious, how to enjoy a second marriage more than a first. I taught her how to butcher pork and dodge a speeding ticket and make té de limón; I grew and raised and cut the plant and steeped the tea and served her and she said, “Oh, lemongrass?” I didn’t know it was lemongrass until then. This became our only inside joke. You wouldn’t get it.
On the last day, the woman said, “You will always have a home here.” I kissed her on the mouth and left smelling like expensive lip balm.
A person. The hollow smell of frigid air. We inaugurated their new apartment by fucking on their balcony. They didn’t even have a mattress yet, which was excuse enough for us. It was February. We both wore as much as we could. A velvet dress for me, unbuttoned jeans and shirt for them. After, I asked if they could get me a pair of pants. They tried the balcony door and found it locked. They didn’t have that key yet.
We climbed down from their fourth floor balcony. The sinister cold of the metal railing, the even more sinister breeze lapping at our dangling feet. We didn’t look anywhere but each other; we tried to laugh the whole way down. “Like we’re teenagers again,” we said. “Like the cool teenagers we never were.” As soon as we touched the ground, we doubled over in relief. A police car pulled up with flashing lights and no siren. We stopped laughing. Cops always smelled like burning to me.
This isn’t the story I wanted to tell, but every time I smell burning, I can’t help but picture the wigs my mother found under my bed when I was seventeen; the smell of hair ablaze on the stove; how I can’t help but smell that burning everywhere; how I can’t help but cook on a stove every day, every day, no matter how hard I try.
Two men. They smelled like each other. They didn’t pretend to be anything but what they were: two men looking for a third. You have seen this before. They were naturally blond, unnaturally chiseled. They met on the sailing team or the water polo team or regular polo, horse polo, or they both wore matching Polo Ralph Lauren underwear and I didn’t know, until I tugged off their pants with my teeth, that Polo Ralph Lauren even sold underwear. It was fine, mostly. We met before and after in a coffee shop, an establishment of the beanie and beard and psychedelic rock sort; we discussed how it would go, how it went. They both ordered espressos, twice; they paid for my bagel, once. Before and after I repeated that I was comfortable with everything. Before, I told them what I liked and they nodded. They told me what they liked and I pursed my lips. Unoriginal.
One, inside the other, whispered into his boyfriend’s ear from behind, “I love you.” Whispered so that I wouldn’t hear and feel left out, probably. Which proved exactly how left out I was. I slithered my hand around the whisperer’s throat and choked, hard. He came immediately.
A man. He smelled like nothing, and that should have warned me. Too late, he reminded me of something Ma used to say: In rose-tinted glasses, red flags just look like flags.
The smell of burning. There’s something I didn’t tell you: When I found my mother at the stove, her eyes aflame with the light of the wigs, I picked one up. It was my favorite, the platinum bob that once smelled like the outside of a flower shop; not one particular flower but a whole community of flowers diffused into city air. A wig that now smelled like nothing but death. I picked up the flaming wig and threw it at her. I have good aim, but it burned my hand. I missed. The wig flopped to the floor as the fire alarms shrieked to life around us. Because I didn’t hit her, she broke into motherhood. She forced my boiling hand under the coldest water I will ever touch; she took care of me before anything else; before filling a bucket and dousing the flames; before sweeping the air away from the smoke detector; before screaming at Felipe to drive us to the emergency room; before finally checking her own bare toes for burns from the wig; before telling me she loved me.
A woman. The smell of our garden.
“You came home,” she said.
Our garden remained almost exactly as I had left it. A few more lemongrass plants stood in the sunniest part of the room. The woman had quit relaxing her hair and no longer waited for her husband’s permission to reorganize the house. Her jokes about moving on weren’t jokes anymore. Some of Christopher III’s sculptures had been shipped off to museums or the highest bidders. Christopher III’s old room now served as her office.
“I can take the couch,” I said.
“Nonsense,” she said. “You know I would never let you do that. You can stay in the guest room or take my bed. My husband is away all week.”
I don’t know how to tell you this: We slept in each other’s arms. We didn’t do more than that, of course, but we stared at each other without looking away. We spoke only in hushed tones, inviting each other to lean in.
On our last night together, we stayed up talking about everything too trivial or juvenile to bring up with anyone else.
When we couldn’t sleep, we picked outfits for one another. We orbited around each other in her walk-in closet, dealing exclusively in the items she had lost or forgotten long ago. We confirmed and denied each other’s choices with quick nods and shakes. No effusive language needed. Because I’m predictable, I ended up in her worn-once velvet dress, and she ended up in some mesh thing that reeked of college parties.
We held each other until the gravel driveway churned. At that, I slipped out of her clothes and onto the couch. I greeted her husband as he walked in.
I don’t know how to say this either: If one of us had asked for more, the other would have refused, but we both wanted to ask.
A man. My brother. The smell of those car air fresheners shaped like trees. Three of them swung from his rearview mirror.
Felipe showed up at my apartment unannounced on a Sunday morning. I’d given him the address a while ago; he sent me letters every month or two from college. Three years later, I still hadn’t worked up the courage to respond.
The doorbell woke me up at 11 a.m. I answered it in my nightgown. He had gained a healthy amount of weight. He wasn’t the scrawny kid I knew.
“Hey,” he said, hands in his pockets. “I’m headed home for summer break. Been craving Smiley’s Donuts. Thought you might like some too. You want me to haul a dozen back to you?”
“Oh,” I said. “Feli, you don’t have to drive all that way just to get me donuts.”
“All right,” he said.
“You wanna come in? I can make you breakfast. Catch up.”
“No, that’s fine. I told Ma I’d be home before dark.”
“You don’t have to stay long,” I said. “You can drive there and back to bring me donuts but you can’t come in?”
“I like driving.”
“Can I join you? On the drive to Smiley’s?”
Ma used to bribe us with Smiley’s every Sunday. God would recognize our attendance at church with chocolate glazed, she said. We didn’t care. When we got older, I drove Felipe there myself after Ma had left for church.
We crossed two states only to arrive at some bullshit hipster makeover of our shop. The graffitied walls were replaced with chalkboards where you could write whatever you liked. Fake bamboo lined many of the surfaces. They didn’t even sell a non-vegan chocolate glazed.
We hunched over our donuts, grumbling about how the maple miso actually wasn’t half bad, but old Smiley’s would’ve made it better.
Felipe folded his arms. “We should visit Ma.”
“Why? Is she sick or something?”
“No. She’s fine. Pretty good actually. ’Cept she misses you.”
I took a big bite of the chocolate raspberry.
“She still in that same old house?”
“Yep,” he said. “All by herself.”
“Don’t guilt me like that,” I said. “Was that your plan? Rope me back into her shit with some donuts? Come on. You wanna keep her company, fine. Do it yourself.”
He took the raspberry from my hand and took a bite.
“I got no plan,” he said. “Just miss my brother.”
Some wet crumbs stuck to the outer edges of his lips.
“You win ,” I said.
“It’s not about winning, man.”
“Don’t call me man. Or brother. Please.”
I explained why.
“All right,” he said. “Cool. So we gonna visit Ma?”
I grabbed a brown paper napkin and wiped the crumbs off his lips; I got up from the table and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like frosting.
A woman. My mother. The smell of old people perfume. As a kid, I thought Chanel No. 5 and channel number 5 were spelled the same. Ever since I’ve considered Chanel and the news and old people a package. Her house smelled like the package deal.
We sat in her kitchen, our old kitchen with that old tablecloth. We blew on her boiling té de limón. She always steeped it too hot.
“I know I had a temper,” I said.
Nobody said anything.
“Have,” I said.
The smell of beans simmering on the back burner.
“Did I ever tell you about the cake?” Ma said in English. “On your twentieth birthday?”
I shrugged.
“That was the clearest mark of a face I’ve ever seen. I could even see your zits and pestañas. Everything. Luck was on your side, muchacho. I thought that meant you were lucky to leave. You got your freedom. Everything you wanted.”
I looked away.
“But I was wrong, eh mijo? Your luck is waiting for you here, right here. You just have to come home.”
“I’m here, Ma,” I said.
“Bring me back the boy who left three years ago.” She was crying.
“The boy is gone, Ma. But I’m here. I’m here.”
Ma couldn’t stop sobbing. Felipe refilled everyone’s té de limón. We drank in silence.
“We should get going,” I said.
“Que Dios te bendiga, muchacho,” Ma said. “Ándale.” She kissed me on the cheek. I let her.
“Nos vemos,” I said. “Ready Feli?”
I didn’t wait for his response. I slid into the car and breathed. He joined me eventually.
“She kept it frozen for a year, you know. Had your face on it.” Felipe said. “The cake.”
I broke down at that.
A person. They didn’t smell like fruit snacks anymore; they smelled of barbecue tofu. We happened into each other at the drink station of a vegetarian and mostly Cuban Fourth of July party, of all places; neither of us were vegetarian, Cuban, or patriotic.
“Your watch is funny,” they said. That was the first thing they said to me. “It says Roman numeral IV.”
I said their name with a question mark. They told me that wasn’t their name anymore. I apologized. I told them my new name and pronouns.
“Why wouldn’t it say IV?” I said. “Isn’t it supposed to?”
“Depends on what you mean by supposed to. And I don’t know,” they said.
I waited for them to explain; I didn’t mind the waiting. I liked hearing their brain think.
“Most watches say IIII,” they sounded out every I and counted on their left hand. “I don’t know why though.”
I shrugged. I said, “This is your way of saying it’s nice to see me, right? It’s nice to see you too.”
“Quite.”
“Do you want me to make you a drink, or something?”
“No need. I have these.”
They pulled a sealed pouch of fruit snacks from their pocket: assorted flavors and colors, mixed together. When they opened it, the saccharine aroma of vodka and artificial color burst from the pouch.
“Is that green apple?” I said.
We leaned against that table side by side all afternoon; even after the glass bottles emptied and only juices remained; after a father took the juices over to the whiffle ball game; after all the parents carried their yawning kids, one by one, off the field; after the parents replaced all the kids in the batting order; after the whiffle ball was exchanged for cork and rubber, the yellow plastic bat exchanged for wood, and the high-pitched cheering exchanged for trash talk; after we made a game of who could slap the most mosquitoes out of existence and a bald man splattered four on his forehead alone; after bees invaded the fruit salad and one allergic but fearless woman reclaimed it with the plastic bat; after three failed attempts at a bonfire; after the kids woke up for another year of the same fireworks; after the fireworks; after the lull in the conversation; after even the single adults stretched their arms and said, “Guess I’ll be heading out now,” we stayed. All I could think about was that one year all the fireworks, all hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of fireworks, all forty-five minutes’ worth misfired and exploded the sky in just thirty seconds, thirty seconds of pure light and fire and smoke that smelled nothing like burning.