Anton Perfume

For a few moments in the lobby of the Viking Hotel, Anton Perfume forgot that it was winter. While he was not a busy man in the colder months, he made it a point to vibrate a few times a week. It consisted of drinking a nice scotch at the bar of a hotel like the Viking. Something with character that remains mostly empty until the summer tourists return. As he sips his scotch, he sends a pulse throughout his body. Nobody would be able to see what he was doing, but he could feel it. Across the globe, an old woman grabs her heart. She feels as though she’s in a state of arrest. Anton Perfume doesn’t know about the woman. He only knows that outside it’s below freezing and he has nowhere to be for an hour to two.

The generosity of time in that instance gave him a warm feeling. Something unique from the vibration. Something that smelled of jasmine and salt. A young couple was checking in at the front desk. Anton supposed they could be getting married. Winter weddings were more du jour as summer weddings on the island had become reserved for the ultra-wealthy. Anton saw these people come into his restaurant earlier and earlier each year. Memorial Day was no longer the beginning of the season, it was the middle. Now, tourists could be found walking on the cobblestones as early as Easter. Those without children decided to celebrate as soon as they could, and why not? For them, money may be plentiful, but life is still short.

There are places, however, where the volume of life is slightly higher. Anton Perfume finds that hotels with character always resonate with him on a kind of seismic level. Before he owned a restaurant, he worked in a hotel with character. It was also in no short supply of characters. He’d take their luggage to their rooms, and if they were a woman, and traveling alone, he’d linger in doorways and wait for them to notice him. Some gave him tips. Some rolled their eyes. More than a few invited him to come back after his shift for a nightcap and some conversation. Women traveling alone always told him that he reminded them of their fathers. It didn’t matter what the women looked like or how old they were compared to Anton; to a one, they would always say that he was the spitting image of their fathers.

Looking back now, he supposed he could read a great deal of psychology into that, but instead he sips his drink. Free time wasn’t as free as it used to be, and the past was the only thing that could eat it up faster than human analysis. Still, Anton wondered which of those women from his youth were still alive. There was one that jumped to the forefront of his mind. A Nebraskan in town for her sister’s wedding. Her husband wouldn’t come along, because he said he had too much work to do at home, but the woman confessed to Anton that her husband and her sister simply didn’t get along. She was around fifty-four or fifty-five, and Anton was twenty-four.

“I’m old enough to be your mother,” she kept saying, as he poured her another glass of wine, “Don’t you know that? Don’t you know that I could be your mother?”

With her hair down, she looked somewhat medieval. Like the Lady of the Lake. Her hair spread out over the hotel pillows and down over the side of the bed. Anton stayed with her all morning, and when she left to go to the wedding, he stayed in bed so he could keep smelling her on the sheets and on the blankets. He wanted that smell to invade his skin. He wanted to smell like her forever. There was that jasmine, but no salt. Coconut. She smelled like coconut--and Shalimar. That year, his father grabbed his chest at the breakfast table and took his last breath. Anton Perfume gave the eulogy. It was not short.

A woman sits down next to him. She is around fifty-five, but that makes her around twenty years younger than Anton. She has a travel bag at her side, and she orders a negroni. Anton signals to the bartender, and he’s brought a second scotch. He has another hour or so before the meeting at the restaurant. There have always been discussions about selling to a group. Selling the name. Franchising. Consolidation of debt. Minutia like the cost of scallops rising and which server has a bad attitude. Anton used to sit in his office and wait for these kinds of meetings. He’d have to get into a zone of administration. He’d find himself rolling pens across his desk. He’d torment cuticles. He’d ask himself questions without answers.

Now, he found no reason to worry about meetings. Meetings simply led to more meetings until one day you were no longer invited to meetings you never wanted to go to in the first place. The woman sitting next to Anton Perfume clears her throat. He looks at her. She’s a beautiful woman. Her fingers showed no sign of a wedding ring, but that wouldn’t have deterred Anton. He would have started a conversation with her. He would have asked her what she was visiting from and how long she’d be in town. He would have put his hand on his chest and caught his own breath.

Instead, he took another sip of his scotch. The woman retires to her room. Anton Perfume looks over a photo on the wall behind the bartender. It’s a black and white photo from the day the hotel first opened in 1926. Everyone in the photo looks stern. It’s as though they forgot they were at a celebration. People back then were different, Anton thinks to himself, they didn’t make a show out of everything. It’s possible they thought those landmarks in time were nothing special. That there would always be something new to celebrate. That there would always be time.

Anton Perfume tastes the way the ice waters down the scotch. He doesn’t dislike the taste. He just prefers to notice it when it happens. At a restaurant across town, preparations are being made for a meeting. It’s going to be someone’s last meeting, but it’s still too early to think about all that. There’s still time for something to change.