Anna and Antoine de St. Exupéry
It’s comin’ on Christmas,
They’re cutting’ down trees,
They’re puttin’ up reindeer,
Singin’ songs of joy and peace.
O, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on.
--Joni Mitchell
Joni sums it up very well. To be more succinct, I hate Christmas. My family’s bitter version of the holiday was no way to grow up with Christmas, but I believe it doesn’t matter-I would have ended up feeling the same anyway. To me, gift giving should be spontaneous, and appropriate, and not tied to a date on a calendar. The way it happens with me is I’m sitting on a beach, walking along an interesting street, looking out the window of a train to New York, wherever. Suddenly, comes a thought, sometimes a brilliant idea, and the perfect (i.e., appropriate) gift results. But I cannot sit around the office on December 20, and force myself to come up with gift ideas, even for people I love, and especially not for those I don’t like.
So imagine my dilemma in 1968. I was madly in love with Anna, (who may or may not have felt the same way), I was stony broke, and feeling that awful Christmas gift pressure. To make matters worse, people had started asking me what I was going to give Anna for Christmas. What business did anyone have asking me a question like that? Even Elaine, the infamous and annoyimg Gypsy Queen, had to get her nose into it. “What are you going to give Anna for Christmas, Stephen? It couldn’t be as nice as what’s waiting for you at my place.” It would have been easy to dismiss Elaine had she not been so awfully pretty and-let’s face it-sexy. But it would have meant the end for me and Anna, so I demurred. Instead I started a tour of the shops that sold about the only gifts I could afford-the many Montreal used-book stores. I didn’t have a lot of hope.
So, enter Auntie Ginny. Around the middle of December, Auntie sent me a brief letter in which she managed to express her disappointment with just about everyone. My parents, my brothers, my sister, Richard Nixon…nobody escaped. Except me. Why me? Who knows-perhaps because I had made it a point to always thank Auntie for those Christmas and birthday twenty-dollar bills? Perhaps because I had made it a point to send at least two letters a year, little updates on the course of my existence? I had also been conscientious about visiting once every summer, after returning to the States for summer jobs (I wasn’t allowed to work in Canada). I could stand it for about an hour, but that seemed to be enough to convince Auntie that I valued family connections. I didn’t really value my family much, but keeping up a show of respect was enough. After the tirade, Ginny went on about how proud she was that I was the first family member in well over a hundred years to go to college. My great-grandfather, a Canadian sea captain, had gone to university in his home province of Nova Scotia. It doesn’t seem to have done him a hell of a lot of good: he died at sea in the eighteen-nineties somewhere in the East Indies. “So how fitting it is,” crowed Auntie, “that, three generations later, a young man from our family should return to a Canadian university.” Huh? I knew well that Virginia didn’t give a rat’s ass about the Canadian connection; perhaps she was growing sentimental in her old age? I had never told Anna of my Canadian antecedents: I was saving that story for ammunition to use when she launched into one of her “ignorant Americans” rants. In the end it was worth my time to wade through Auntie’s diatribe. She had enclosed the usual Christmas check. I was on my way to the bank anyway to deposit my pittance from the Veterans Administration, but it wasn’t until I got to the teller’s window that I looked closely at Auntie’s check. Then I looked again. Three hundred dollars. American dollars. I must have gasped loudly enough to surprise the teller.
“Un problème, Monsieur?”
“Err, non, non, rien de tout…seulment une surprise,” in my miserable French.
Surprise, indeed! Almost immediately, I had a cunning plan for Christmas. In spite of her strong feminist beliefs, Anna had never renounced femininity. She was impeccably groomed, she dressed well (if awfully conservatively; I mean, A-line skirts and prim little blouses, and always a slip), and she smelled delicious at all times. I had no idea what those aromas were, but I did know where they came from. Anna had mentioned a shop somewhere downtown, pretentiously named something like Parfumerie de Paris as her source of smells.
I was not going to walk into someplace with a name like that without advance prep, so I got myself to the wonderful Redpath Library and dug up a couple of books on perfume, one of them in French. There wasn’t enough time for me to delve too deeply, but I did learn the difference between perfume and cologne. This was all well and good, but I still hadn’t a clue of what I could get for Anna. On the way out, I walked up to a gaggle of librarians, and dropped the question. I put on my best bashful-lover face and wondered aloud if any of them might know anything about perfume, as in, “What are you ladies wearing these days?” I was so shy at the time that I must have been blushing; it was almost as bad as asking about underwear. I got a lot of laughter and teasing. College librarians know all, and see all that’s happening on campus, and Anna and I were no exception.
“Aha! Pour la déesse polonaise, eh? O, la la!” Oh, my God…they knew everything.
“Yes, yes, for the Polish Goddess. It’s Christmas, and well…you know…”
After a few more chuckles, the librarians got down to business. Guerlain. It must be Guerlain, the best perfumes from France. “Mais, ils sont trés cher.”
“Yeah, I know, it’s expensive, but this year is special.”
“Special? Peut-être une proposition de mariage?” Gales of laughter. Why was all of this in French? My French was and is miserable.
“Marriage? No, I don’t think so. Just Christmas.”
Once the laughter had died down, the ladies counseled me well. Don’t walk in there acting as though you know what you’re talking about: they’ll be able to tell after one look that you’re clueless, so admit your ignorance. Perfume stores are designed to intimidate men, so don’t jump at the first suggestion just to get away from the place. Be calm and deliberate, and ask to smell a lot of different scents before you get to the Guerlain.
OK, so we had a battle plan. I thanked the librarians profusely, and promised to keep them informed. Before setting out to be intimidated, I had another bright idea. Anna refused-and still does-to have her picture taken unless there was no escape. Canadian driver’s licenses at the time usually did not have photos, but passports did. The university had started using picture IDs, and Anna had to show hers to get into the stacks at the library. But that was all. There were no high school year book pictures of Anna. She wasn’t a joiner, and never went to demonstrations, so as far as anyone knew her picture had never been in The McGill Daily. Anna had managed to become infamous yet remain anonymous. And why would such a physically beautiful person resist the occasional snap shot? It was all part of the mystery of Anna.
My roommates from the year before had graduated and left me with a lot of furniture and house wares. And a Polaroid camera. While pretending to teach myself how to use it, I had taken a couple of surreptitious shots of Anna, one face forward, and one in profile. She made me swear that I’d destroy the pictures, but I lied. I still had them on the bureau mirror in my apartment. And I brought them with me to La Parfumerie.
“Est-ce que je peux offrir l'aide au Monsieur?” Hopefully that translated to, “May I help you?” There I was, in the lion’s den, the house of posh, and the closest anyone in Montreal would get to the Parisian experience. I was wearing my old Air Force fatigue trousers, combat boots, and a heavy cotton Air-Force-issue sweater, all under a military parka.
“Umm, yes, yes. I’d like to buy some perfume, please. For a young lady.”
“For a lady? Well, of course, Monsieur.”
It was a lot of work to stare this woman down, but so far I was holding my own. In later years, and after a few trips to Paris, I would come to realize how silly this place and its occupants really were, but for now, I was just a kid from Malden, Massachusetts, quaking in my boots.
“Yes, a lady. I believe she has been here. I have a picture, so perhaps you might remember her, and be able to recommend something.” She sighed and held out her hand for the snap shot. Her face said it all: another silly boy trying to impress a girlfriend whose nearest approach to perfume was probably at the scent counter in Woolworth’s.
One look at the picture and it was another story entirely. The eyebrows shot up and a smile took the place of the practiced sneer. “Ah, Mademoiselle W! Oh, yes, she has been here, and quite often. She has excellent taste.” And so on. Now I had to live up to Anna’s good taste, but I stuck to my strategy, and asked if perhaps Madame could suggest something new.
Without hesitating, the queen of perfume popped behind her counter and brought out a very small, classy-looking solid rectangle of glass, with a bas-relief surface that seemed to resemble an airplane propeller. “Mademoiselle has been resisting my efforts on behalf of this wonderful scent. Now is your chance, Monsieur, to win her over. It is called Vol de Nuit, and is the perfect aroma for someone like Mademoiselle W.” Perfume Lady whipped out a tiny piece of fabric, sprayed it with just a bit of this miracle liquid and held it out to me. I sniffed cautiously. It really was very good, but…”How is it perfect for her?”
“How? She is a confident woman, Monsieur. One can tell just from the way she walks that she is self-assured, and knows what it is that she wants. And desires. Now is your chance to fulfill that desire. Smell it once more…hints of bergamot and leather, strong but not at all masculine; self confident, yet feminine.”
If I had been watching a film of this encounter, I would have fallen out of my chair laughing. But by this point, I was the bird frozen in front of the cobra. “Umm, well, yes, self confident, and…”
“And astonishingly beautiful, Monsieur. You are indeed a lucky man. And Guerlain has just what you need.”
“Guerlain? It’s from Guerlain? Oh, and it has something to do with St. Exupéry?”
“Yes, yes-it signifies the meaning of faith and true love exemplified in the story Vol de Nuit.”
Oh, give me a break, lady. I just want to buy something to make my girlfriend smell even better than she already does, and I refuse to invest a tiny bottle of alcohol-macerated plant derivatives with a mystic significance. I believe that by now, Madame Parfumerie could tell that my bullshit detector was switched on, and she became suddenly very businesslike.
“So, Monsieur is interested?”
Monsieur was still interested, even after he found out that roughly 10 milliliters of constance and true love, and memories of brave French airmen was going to cost him $100 Canadian, or about $75 US. Oh, the things we do for love.
Perfume lady was kind enough to spray just a bit of the perfume onto another piece of cloth, which she then wrapped in cellophane, and inserted into the box with the bottle. That way, the beautiful young Mam’selle could test it once without opening, so that I could bring it back. “Just in case.”
This was not my idea of wise consumer behavior. But how could I comparison shop expensive perfume in the pre-internet age? There was no Perfumes ‘R’ Us back then. And anyway the choice is so idiosyncratic that there’s not a lot of basis for comparison. I was to learn all of this years later when I got into the wine business. But for now, I was puzzled, and unable to decide whether it was all worth it. My worst fear was that Anna would be delighted with the choice, yet angry at the expense, not an unlikely prospect.