The scent on his coat
There is a coat that lives on the hook by our door, and most mornings it leaves the house before I do anything useful with myself. Thành takes it down, shrugs it on, checks his pockets for keys he has already lost twice that week, and goes. I hear the door. Then the house is quiet again, and the coat is gone, and the only thing left of him in the hallway is the smell of it.
I have come to know that smell the way you know a person's footsteps. On a slow afternoon, when Nấm is napping and Kẹo is somewhere being too quiet to trust, I will pass the hook where his other jacket hangs and catch it without meaning to. Bergamot, a little citrus, something warmer underneath that I never have the right word for. It is him. Not the man at dinner or the man on the phone, but the ordinary him, the one who leaves in the morning and comes back in the evening and hangs his coat on the same hook he has used for years.
A bottle I bought him
It started as a small thing. His old bottle was nearly empty, the kind of empty he would have ignored for another month, spraying the last of it in apologetic little bursts. So one quiet afternoon I bought him the Versace Pour Homme Dylan Blue, the eau de toilette, the larger bottle so I would not have to think about it again for a long while.
I did not tell him much about it. I left it on his side of the bathroom shelf and waited. He found it the next morning, and I heard the small click of the cap, and then nothing, which from Thành is a kind of approval. When he came to kiss me before leaving, that was the smell. Bergamot and citrus at first, then the warmer thing settling in as the day went on. It stayed on the coat. It stayed on the pillow on the side where he sleeps.
It is, I have learned since, a fairly well-known scent. A lot of men wear it. I almost minded that, for a moment, the way you might mind discovering that the song you thought was only yours is on the radio. But then I decided I did not. A thing can be common and still be his. Half the kitchens in Vietnam smell of the same fish sauce, and not one of them smells like my mother's.
What it is, plainly
It is an eau de toilette, the 3.4 ounce bottle, described as a Mediterranean kind of scent, bright bergamot and grapefruit at the top with something earthier holding it down. People who know fragrances better than I do give it high marks, a little over four and a half stars across many thousands of them, and most of them say the same useful thing. It lasts. Several hours on the skin, longer on cloth. I can confirm the cloth part. The coat keeps it until I wash it, and some weeks I am slow to wash it for exactly that reason.
The one honest thing worth saying is the thing I already said. It is popular, so you will smell it on other men sometimes, in a lift or a queue, and feel a small odd pull of recognition before you remember it is not him. If you want something no one else in the room is wearing, this is not that. I find I do not mind. I would rather he smell like himself than like a secret.
The same hook, every morning
So now it is part of the morning. The coat comes down, the keys are found or refound, the door closes. The smell stays a little while in the hall, fading slow, and I go on with the day. There is a thing he said once, half asleep, when I asked why he never wears the nice cologne on weekends.
"Weekends I'm already home. Who am I trying to smell good for?"
Which I thought was the most romantic thing he has ever accidentally said. The scent is for the leaving, then. For the part of the day when he is out there in the world being someone I do not get to see. And it is what comes back through the door in the evening, on the collar, when he bends down to take off his shoes and Kẹo runs at his legs. I put my face against it without thinking. There he is. Home, and smelling of the morning.
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