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Scent of Darkness

Book by Margot Berwin · 17 quotes · New Orleans, Blue, Interior Design

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Scent of Darkness Quotes

“I stood under the arch and absorbed the image. Rose and blue and ancient oriental rugs held pale pink loveseats with curved arms and perfectly faded silk upholstery. Sheer white-winged angels floated on a ceiling of baby-blue sky with clouds of spun gold. And eastern-facing windows of blue stained glass held paler blue stained-glass crosses in the middle. Daylight and streetlamps were obliterated by thick velvet curtains with gold tasseled ropes, and a small, dusty beam of faded light managed to seep past the heavy drapes, making it look like the tail end of the day instead of the early part of the afternoon. His home was lavish and seductive, and I thought it rare that a man living alone could create a thing of such intensity. For the second time in two days I found myself having to adjust my opinion of Michael Bon Chance. It was a marble fountain that ended my reverie and brought me back down to earth. It was the true centerpiece of the room, with water slowly seeping from a cracked jug and dripping over a statue of a nude couple, bathing. I cringed at the sound. Michael looked at me. "Something wrong?" "It's the dripping." He went over to the bar and poured me a glass of wine. "You're tense. Maybe this will help." I took a sip from the glass and put it down on the fireplace mantel. I caught a glimpse of Michael and myself in the mirror above the fire and felt trapped by how beautiful we looked in the rose glow of the dragon's-head lamps with pale pink bulbs.”

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“The scent of my blood was mesmerizing in its intensity, a luscious, potent, ethereal haze that clung to the walls of the bathroom. It was far more intense than the opening of the vial itself. It was like a thousand ruby red vials. A million. It filled the room like an actual presence, and it dawned on us both at the same time that my blood not only contained the scent, but was the scent itself. Leather, like warm Egyptian incense, like a dark library in an old city. Jasmine, like the sweet, sweet scent of decay. Fire, like hot darkness. And red velvet rose, like a sheath of light and lilting femininity.”

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“He opened the door to the freezer and picked up the ice-cube tray that Louise had used to make the bloodsicles so many years ago, now melted red and watery. He held up the bloody washcloth that she had saved and put next to the ice tray when I was ten years old and I immediately touched the scar on my forehead where I had cut it open sleepwalking. "When we left for New Orleans they turned off the electricity in the house. The ice cubes thawed out in the freezer and that's what I smelled when I came into the house. I knew the truth about you then. The truth was in your plasma and your cells, your escinophils, neutrophils, and platelets. It was in your blood. Louise didn't make the scent, she only collected it and then gave it back to you inside the ruby vial." "She took it from me when I was just a little girl," I said. "A healer on the bayou told me, in her own way.”

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“The cab pulled up to our building on St. Louis between Decatur and Chartres Streets, a three-story cement stucco town house in the old creole style. It was painted pale pink and covered with delicate ironwork like a lace veil. It had an arched opening with a wrought-iron gate and an old metal lock. Inside, the ground-floor hallway had high, rounded ceilings and a dark caramel tiled floor leading to a garden in the back. It was drippy and heavy with the scent of jasmine, just like me. Wisteria rolled down from the top-floor balconies all the way to the garden below and curled around the legs of the iron tables and chairs like beautiful prison shackles. Everything about the building looked like it was from another century, and having never been to New Orleans I did not yet know that everything was.”

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“Michael's house was on Magazine Street across from a little diner called Johnny River. It was a local, homemade-looking place with a screen door and dishes that didn't match. The kind of place tourists never find unless they're visiting a friend in New Orleans who happens to live in the neighborhood. The eggs came three on a plate, over easy but still hot in the center, perfectly done, with two biscuits, gravy, sausage, grits, and hot sauce on the side, and because of them I liked Michael just a little bit more after breakfast than I had before. I walked across the street listening to the screen door slam behind me. His house was the second in from the corner. A narrow Victorian painted lilac on the outside with cream-colored steps, chipped and sunken in the middle from who knows how many years and how many footsteps.”

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“The scent had left a red mark on my neck like a boy had been sucking there. He put his finger on the mark. "Does it hurt?" It didn't, but I felt the liquid inside of me as if I'd drunk it down instead of putting it on my skin. Warmth spread through my limbs like the poison might from a scorpion's tail, branching and branching until it was trapped against the edges of my body, pooling in my fingertips and my toes, with nowhere to go. As the moments passed a definite scent came up through my pores. It began slowly. First from the inside of my arms, and then from my palms. It rose from my legs and then my thighs and then my breasts. Yes. It was coming from everywhere. Fire and jasmine, leather and rose. I was a repository for Louise's life's work, alive, and inside of me. "Can you smell it?" I asked Gabriel. He put his face so close to my body I could feel the moisture from his breath. "I can." Gabriel and I faced each other on the bed. We sat there for hours, I had no idea either of us possessed that kind of patience. Slow as time the scent ripened and deepened, growing more remote and strange with each passing minute. Hot and dark and sweet, my fragrance was as mesmerizing as looking up and seeing a fire on the moon. It was not like any type of perfume that I knew but like nature itself, organically beautiful, as if the scent had been made from the inside of my body and hadn't come from the vial at all. As if it had been sitting inside me for years, a wine that had finally found its perfect moment. Gabriel breathed in this new part of me. He seemed unfocused and unable to stand up or let go of my hands. "What's it like for you?" I asked him. He leaned closer, closed his eyes and inhaled. "Like sweetness," he said, "with a little bit of poison that makes the sweetness, sweeter.”

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“Brushing past me on his way out he smelled like musk. Like something Louise called an animalic, the scent from the gland of a male deer. He turned around in the middle of the hallway. "My name's Gabriel, I thought you should know since I've been inside of your grandmother's house." Like the archangel, I thought, the impact of Loretta's Catholicism making a rare appearance in my mind. I made a mental note to look up the angel Gabriel and see what deeds he had done to deserve his angel status. When Gabriel was gone his glandular scent, earthy and sweet, lingered in the room. I remembered Louise telling me that a good scent should not smell like a perfume, but like nature itself, including all aspects of the natural world, dark and animal as well as light and floral. "Love includes the bad as well as the good," she'd said, "the evil as well as the kind, and so should the scent that induces it.”

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“Anyway, being afraid of a human being is nothing. We're here for such a short period of time, so what does it matter, scared, not scared; what matters is that we last. That's why the blue lotus is so important." "Why?" "In legends, immortals are attracted to its scent. Vampires, werewolves, that sort of thing. That's why the ancient Egyptians called it the scent of immortality." I took Levon's card out of my pocket and rotated the Magician between my fingers. Magical words for good or bad. "Gabriel told me that you painted werewolves." "I have painted the odd rougarou from time to time." "But you don't believe in them?" "I believe in immortality in whatever form it takes. Paintings, books, music, werewolves. They're all the same- the desire to last forever. In my opinion, every artist is a vampire or a werewolf, or a thief. All we want is to live on and on through the work we do and we'll take whatever we can from the people unlucky enough to be around us- their stories, pieces of their selves, their very souls if they'll let us, which they so often do with surprising ease- in order to reach our creative goals. How is that different from a vampire?”

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“Walking around the Quarter with its horses and buggies, cobblestone streets, and kerosene lamps felt like stepping back in time, all the way back to the time when Louise was a small child living in Fayetteville. I imagined her in a linen jumper with a white collar, skipping along the cobblestones, avoiding the cracks that would break her mother's back. It was quiet outside as well as sweltering August temperatures kept tourists off the streets and residents inside their homes. The blocks felt private and sensual as Gabriel and I held hands and walked under the lush vegetation spilling from the baskets that hung off the balconies of the houses on St. Philip. I could smell the sweet olive and the jasmine and I had the pleasant sensation of knowing that they were coming from outside of my body. New Orleans was my equal in scent, and as long as it was night and the air was a degree or two cooler than in the daytime I was sure I could walk around freely without attracting any unwanted attention.”

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“I don't know. Chicken bones, frizzly hens, all that voodoo stuff gives me the creeps." He got up and put his arms around me. "How do you know about frizzly hens?" "I just do." "Strange." "Louise and Fayetteville." "Ah, yes, Louise. Well, do I give you the creeps?" "No." "That's right. And besides, there's a lot more to New Orleans than that. There's gumbo and bread pudding and fried chicken. There are old Victorian homes, music everywhere, and the friendliest, nicest people everywhere.”

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“You always carry a black tarot card with you to breakfast?" she asked. "This is the first time." "I bet. I gotta ask you though, why the Magician?" "A friend gave it to me. Why? What do you know about it?" "I know you got yourself involved with a black-back magician. That means everything is hidden, and backward. You could run into an animal that doesn't act like one. A magical animal like a rougarou. A werewolf that feasts on evil souls." I put the card in my back pocket, horizontally, so it wouldn't fall out this time. "Protect your soul, Eggs." "I'm not evil," I said, already out the door and on the way to see Michael, who seemed more normal to me at that moment than the waitress at Johnny River's. "We're all capable of it sometimes," she yelled behind me.”

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“Gabriel will give you things you never expected to receive in this lifetime. He will take you places in love that you cannot imagine. Gabriel will haunt you. Gabriel can save you. Gabriel will make you want to live forever. Gabriel will make you wish you were dead." I looked around the packed church for my Gabriel. Father Madrid continued. "Gabriel is the messenger of God and the angel of death. How can one being be both of those things? "Gabriel signifies duality, complication, perplexity; the true human condition in the form of an angel. "How many of you have acted like Gabriel in your day-to-day life? On the one hand finding a special person to love and on the other hand bringing pain and heartache to that very same person? "On the one hand loving someone new and exciting. And on the other knowing that that very love brings destruction and hurt to others, who feel abandoned by you as you live only for your new love, and brings pain to those who desire your beloved for themselves.”

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“Is he from New Orleans originally?" "Born and raised." "The people here are born below the sea level and they spend their whole lives wanting to go back to where they came from. My own theory is that everyone from here was a mermaid in another lifetime and they are all trying to swim back to the bottom of the ocean. That Michael of yours will drag you down to the depths if you let him. It's not his fault either. That's where he's most comfortable.”

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“See ya, Crab," sullen boy said to Rayanne. "Crab?" "It's my name, Rayanne Crabbe, with a double b and an e at the end. So what?" "Pull in your pincers, Rayanne," said Gabriel, opening and closing the four fingers of both hands against his thumbs. Rayanne's last name being Crabbe was the first piece of good news I had heard in a long time, and as she and Gabriel walked away I could swear she was moving sideways.”

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