Body

I have been battling on E-Bay for the last three weeks. All I want is an unopened bottle of my perfume and a reasonable shipping cost.

The reason I have spent three weeks bidding and bidding and bidding on E-Bay is because I cannot afford my perfume at its regular costs. Forty-eight dollars is a lot of money to me, and I'd rather use those dollars for things like mojitos and chicken wings.

Finally, finally, finally, I was able to get a bottle of my perfume. It arrived the other day, and I immediately sprayed it in the middle of the kitchen. The next morning when I woke up and shuffled out to grade papers I was hit with its smell, and it smelled good.

I wear Body by Victoria, and how I got hooked on it was sort of an accident. When I moved to Minnesota my perfume was a dark, woodsy smelling bottle that sold for $12 at drugstores. I wore it all through my first semester. I wore it over exam week, over Christmas break, and that was it. When I came back to Minnesota for my second semester, my old perfume and I parted ways.

The Wily Republican and I had started something—although I couldn't really define what it was—right before I left for New York, and when I came back we picked up where we'd left off. Suddenly I was kicking through snowdrifts to get to his apartment at night. I was wearing pajamas and praying that none of my students, who likely lived in the same apartment complex, would look out their windows and see their composition instructor smoothing the snowflakes out of her hair before she knocked on their neighbor's door. I was watching him write biology papers, history papers, and English papers while I graded my own stacks of papers. Sometimes he would ask me a question—something like, "Does it sound right for me to say this?" and—I can't help it—I found that to be so charming and sexy that I'd moon about it for the next four days. After all, I was eating snacks and grading papers in the same room with a really cute, really tall boy who stopped every now and again to ask my opinion on the structure of his sentences. It was everything I hoped I'd have when I moved to Minnesota for graduate school. Well, it was a lot of the things I hoped I'd have when I moved to Minnesota for graduate school. I didn't bank on some of the WR's more wily points, but I took them anyway. I took them like he took mine.

Before I could go over to his house at night, though, there was a routine. My roommate Megan would stand in the archway to my room and watch as I paraded several different pajama choices in front of her. Then she would sit on my bed as I fixed my makeup, my hair, the dark circles under my eyes that were there because—let's face it—I wasn't getting a lot of regular sleep that semester.

One night while I fussed over my lip gloss, Megan showed up in my room with a black velvet box from Victoria's Secret. In it was a trial version of each of their Angel perfumes and several others. She told me I should try one, test it out, see what brought me good luck. I sniffed my way through the Angel vials but thought they smelled suspiciously like something my grandmother and her pinochle-playing friends might wear. The last bottle in the box was simple frosted glass. I uncapped it and inhaled. There it was: everything I wanted to smell like.

Victoria's Secret says Body is supposed to have freesia and vanilla undertones, but I think a better description of it is this: it smells like spring. It smells like transitional spring-snow—gray and rocky—that has melted away and left a silt through which crocuses and tulips and daffodils are ready to unfurl. It smells like warm sun and fresh-cut grass. It smells fresh and good and new. Which is exactly how I wanted to smell, because I was convinced that the Wily Republican should think I was fresh and good and new.

Megan watched as I sprayed Body on my neck and wrists. She smiled and told me I looked great, smelled perfect. She told me it was all going to be exactly the way I wanted it to be and that I was going to get everything I wanted.

Five minutes later, when I walked into the Wily Republican's room, he looked up and smelled the air. I sat down on his bed. I sat next to him. He picked up my wrist, held it between his nose and mouth. He inhaled deeply, and then there was a noise in the back of his throat, and then he was kissing my wrist, his lips on that warm spot where veins were jumping with blood.

It did good things for me that night, it went on to do more good things for me with the Wily Republican, and it went on to do good things for me with other boys. They love it. They love it. They can't get enough of it.

Katy likes it, too, although she tells me I smell like a stripper when I wear it. She tells me that must be why men have such a visceral reaction to it. They recognize that smell, and it's all tied up in their heads with sex and nakedness. I don't think that's true, though. I don't think Katy has proper perspective. After all, this is the girl who, after getting a dance from one swingy small-town Midwestern strippers, told her she smelled so, so good. She asked what she wore, and the stripper told her. Now she owns that perfume. Hers is darker. Hers smells like fire and the color maroon. Mine is decidedly cheerier. More wholesome. I think that's why boys like my perfume. I think it's the perfume a good girl wears, and I'd like to think that, really, deep-down, that's what they all want, even if they do choose to go after girls who play with their hearts, stomp their dreams, and play them until they're all played out.

Regardless, I love my perfume. I am hooked. I have a certain always-there panic that it's going to be discontinued, that Victoria's Secret is going to shrug off the scent in favor of the more matronly Angel lines. Sometimes I go into Victoria's Secret just to make sure that Body is still there. Just to make sure it's still getting a top billing. I like to uncap it and smell its superiority to all the other VS scents—but sometimes it just doesn't smell right. It doesn't smell as crisp and lush and fluid. This might be because hundreds of noses have pressed against this bottle in order to test its fragrance, but, really, I like to believe it's something more that's skewing the smell. I like to think that it has something to do with me—that the perfume smells better on me, mixed with my hormones and heat, than it does in the tester bottle or on anyone else. I like to think that when the boys are smelling my wrist or my neck, or when they are putting their hands in my hair and whispering You smell so good it has less to do with the perfume on its own and more with the way that we work together, the way that we match, the way that it makes me feel prettier than I actually am.