He lies awake. Occasionally he brings his nose down to the collar so he can try to smell what remains of Willem on the shirt, but with every wear, the fragrance grows fainter. This is the fourth shirt of Willem’s he has used, and he is very careful about preserving its scent. The first three shirts, ones he wore almost nightly for months, no longer smell like Willem; they smell like him. Sometimes he tries to comfort himself with the fact that his very scent is something given to him by Willem, but he is never comforted for long.
Even before they became a couple, Willem would always bring him something from wherever he’d been working, and when he came back from The Odyssey, it was with two bottles of cologne that he’d had made at a famous perfumer’s atelier in Florence. “I know this might seem kind of strange,” he’d said. “But someone”—he had smiled to himself, then, knowing Willem meant some girl—“told me about this and I thought it sounded interesting.” Willem explained how he’d had to describe him to the nose—what colors he liked, what tastes, what parts of the world—and that the perfumer had created this fragrance for him.
He had smelled it: it was green and slightly peppery, with a raw, aching finish. “Vetiver,” Willem had said. “Try it on,” and he had, dabbing it onto his hand because he didn’t let Willem see his wrists back then.
Willem had sniffed at him. “I like it,” he said, “it smells nice on you,” and they were both suddenly shy with each other.
“Thanks, Willem,” he’d said. “I love it.”
Willem had had a scent made for himself as well. His had been sandalwood-based, and he soon grew to associate the wood with him: whenever he smelled it—especially when he was far away: in India on business; in Japan; in Thailand—he would always think of Willem and would feel less alone. As the years passed, they both continued to order these scents from the Florence perfumer, and two months ago, one of the first things he did when he had the presence of mind to think of it was to order a large quantity of Willem’s custom-made cologne. He had been so relieved, so fevered, when the package had finally arrived, that his hands had tremored as he tore off its wrappings and slit open the box. Already, he could feel Willem slipping from him; already, he knew he needed to try to maintain him. But although he had sprayed—carefully; he didn’t want to use too much—the fragrance on Willem’s shirt, it hadn’t been the same. It wasn’t just the cologne after all that had made Willem’s clothes smell like Willem: it had been him, his very self-ness. That night he had laid in bed in a shirt gone sugary with sandalwood, a scent so strong that it had overwhelmed every other odor, that it had destroyed what had remained of Willem entirely. That night he had cried, for the first time in a long time, and the next day he had retired that shirt, folding it and packing it into a box in the corner of the closet so it wouldn’t contaminate Willem’s other clothes.
The cologne, the ritual with the shirt: they are two pieces of the scaffolding, rickety and fragile as it is, that he has learned to erect in order to keep moving forward, to keep living his life. Although often he feels he isn’t so much living as he is merely existing, being moved through his days rather than moving through them himself. But he doesn’t punish himself too much for this; merely existing is difficult enough.
It had taken months to figure out what worked. For a while he gorged nightly on Willem’s films, watching them until he fell asleep on the sofa, fast-forwarding to the scenes with Willem speaking. But the dialogue, the fact of Willem’s acting, made him seem farther from him, not closer, and eventually he learned it was better to simply pause on a certain image, Willem’s face trapped and staring at him, and he would look and look at it until his eyes burned. After a month of this, he realized that he had to be more vigilant about parsing out these movies, so they wouldn’t lose their potency. And so he had begun in order, with Willem’s very first film—The Girl with the Silver Hands—which he had watched obsessively, every night, stopping and starting the movie, freezing on certain images. On weekends he would watch it for hours, from when the sky was changing from night to day until long after it had turned black again. And then he realized that it was dangerous to watch these movies chronologically, because with each film, it would mean he was getting closer to Willem’s death. And so he now chose the month’s film at random, and that had proven safer.