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  • I Wear It as Often as I Dare
  • E. Eastman (bio)

June 7, 2013

Tom Ford
845 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10023

Dear Mr. Ford:

Congratulations.

Italian Cypress, your warm, affable, acutely wonderful, well-constructed fragrance composition, had me at first whiff with its coniferous, resinous notes, a bit bitter in their initial seconds but melding to that mosaic of pine needles and leaves and twigs and branches and sap, the entire forest actually, its creamy, radiant woods and aromatic resins married to a vertiginous and vibrating citrus and basil and green moss, as lushly verdant as a pelt of lusty lawn. Then the rush of cool leather igniting the hefty, bittersweet heart of the fragrance, that ashy smokiness, like charred wood, almost eternal. A richly aromatic fusion of botanics integrating tradition with innovation. Designed, obviously, for the contemporary fragrance connoisseur. Vintage in the best possible way, neither sleek nor slick nor filled with artificiality, serious without being ponderous, sexy, alluring, inviting, especially in its later notes, so old-school spice with a hint of slightly stale air, candle snuff, cigarettes stubbed in metallic ashtrays, and cups of cold, dark, evaporated coffee. Modern, mysterious, sensual, laced with vestiges of dirty, of naughty, of underarms and bed hair and breathless, perspiration-rich, summer sex. It is, as one might say in Italian, un abbraccio forte y ristoratore, a robust and [End Page 77] refreshing hug from a certain gentiluomo, sapiente, bello, generoso, wise, handsome, generous, pericoloso, dangerous, arrogante, cocksure, con una brama di portarli al letto, with a hankering to take you to bed.

It’s an erotic bestseller.

“What do you think?” asked Stephen, the sales associate at Saks, a veritable altar of scent there on the northeast corner of Powell and Post, where, Mr. Ford, I imagine you’ve been on one of your promotional tours. He had been graciously working me down the line of your sexy, scintillating, eponymous perfumes in their chunky black jars with gold square caps when he handed me a rather generously spritzed strip, une bande de parfum he called it, then sniffed the atomizer’s still-wet residue and sighed.

“The cypress is just dreamy,” he said and I, now helpless myself, agreed.

I don’t know about you, Mr. Ford, but for me, smell and feelings are codependent, entangled, intertwined, adrift in my rhinencephalon, that ancient part of the cerebrum containing the olfactory structures, stirring in me, and moving me deeply, like the scent of a missing lover’s shirt, or my mother’s favorite perfume.

“Exactly how does a French whore smell?” I had asked my father when he accused me of smelling like one.

“Way too much dabbing,” he elucidated, “in all the wrong places.”

“But,” I protested.

“But nothing, Mister. I’ve been following that fucking stream of fragrance all afternoon.”

Sillage,” I helpfully substituted for the fucking stream, into which I had, admittedly, periodically, walked backwards, reintroducing myself to the perfectly fragranced cloud that I was.

“Go take a shower,” he commanded, “and lay off the perfume.”

But it was too late because I had been baptized in the font of Chanel No. 5, a luxurious gift purchased from him to her in Germany, in the early days of their romance and then through the marriage’s remainder, for birthdays, holidays, anniversaries, and the intermittent appeasement, the conciliatory rapprochement for beastly behavior until, when he passed from our lives, it became a gift from me to her, the last of which she leaves unopened on the tabernacle of her nightstand.

My earliest memories are of her in a cocktail dress, a celadon silk cage with an undercarriage of swishy pink crinoline, teetering in pumps she’d had [End Page 78] dyed to match the confection, racing to rush mascara and lipstick across her face, finishing with her shanell gnome-bruh sank, its syllables tumbling from pursed and painted lips in her high school French. Daintily, languidly, she stroked exquisitely minute islands of it along her pulse points, the base of her throat, the vale between her breasts, the lacunae behind each ear, in the crook of each elbow, in the fold of her knees, and along the...

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