The Scent of a Stranger

Simpson was thirty-four years old, and he had spent the better part of six years swiping through dating apps the way a man swipes through a catalog for things he cannot afford, quickly, and without much hope, and with a growing sense that he was looking in the wrong aisle entirely. He had tried them all, the big ones and the niche ones, and he had gone on a lot of first dates, and a decent number of second dates, and exactly three fourth dates, and every single time the thing that sank him was the same thing, the moment when the woman across the table stopped being a stranger and became a person with habits and smells and laundry, because that was the moment Simpson got weird about it.

Not weird in a way anyone could see, at least not right away. Weird in a way that lived in his chest and his hands and the back of his throat, a low warm hum of interest that he had learned early to keep absolutely quiet, because the one time he had mentioned it, in a college dorm room to a girl he trusted, she had looked at him like he had shown her a knife.

Here is what it was, plainly, because Simpson had eventually learned to say it plainly, though it took him years. He liked worn clothing. He liked the smell of a woman's day caught in fabric, the armpit of a blouse, the crotch of a pair of leggings, the collar of a t-shirt that had been slept in and sweated in and lived in. He liked the idea that a body left a record of itself, and he liked holding that record, and that was all, or mostly all, though thinking about it too long always made more than all.

He had not told anyone this in person, ever, after the dorm room girl. What he had done instead, somewhere around year three of the apps, on a bored Tuesday night when his matches were all dead ends and his thumbs were sore, was type something half-hopeful into a search engine, and that was how he found the forums. And oh, the forums. There were thousands of them, whole communities of people, men and women both, trading stories and photos and sometimes actual garments through the mail, and Simpson sat in his kitchen at one in the morning reading thread after thread and feeling as though he had spent his whole life thinking he was the only one who could see a color, and then walked into a room where everyone was wearing it.

So he lurked, because that was what a careful man did, and he read, and he bought nothing and sent nothing and told nobody, and the kink stayed exactly where it had always been, folded up small in the back of his head, humming.

Which brings us to the open house, on a warm Saturday in May, at a big half-furnished Victorian in a quiet suburb that Simpson had no real intention of living in.

* * *

He went to open houses the way other people went to museums. He liked old houses, empty ones especially, houses that still held the shape of the people who had left them, and he liked walking through rooms with his hands behind his back reading other lives out of the walls. The realtor was a tired-looking man in his fifties who had clearly given up on selling this particular house some months ago and was now just going through the motions, and the listing photos had promised more visitors than actually showed, so by the time Simpson arrived at two in the afternoon there was exactly one other person there.

She was standing in the front parlor looking up at the crown molding, and she was doing it with her head all the way back and her mouth slightly open, which was such an honest way to look at a house that Simpson liked her before he had seen her face. She was thirty-one, with dark hair pulled into a loose knot and a canvas tote bag slung crossways over her body, and when she heard his footsteps she turned and gave him a smile that was mostly apology, the smile of a person caught doing something private in public.

"They mixed two whites," she said, pointing up with her chin. "Look, the inner run is warmer than the outer. Somebody did that on purpose, like a hundred years ago."

"Huh," said Simpson, craning his own neck up. "I would never have noticed that."

"Most people don't, and honestly neither did I until my second year of renovating," she said, and stuck out her hand. "Lulu. Lulu Fisher. I'm not buying this house, I just come to look at old houses. That's a weird thing to admit to a stranger, sorry."

"I come to look at old houses too," said Simpson, shaking her hand and finding it warm and a little damp, which his brain logged and filed and refused to elaborate on. "Simpson. I'm also not buying this house."

"So we're both just, what, house tourists?" she laughed, and the laugh came out easy, like she wasn't a stranger yet either. "Well. There's three floors, so we won't even be in each other's way."

But they were in each other's way, sort of, or at least they kept drifting into the same rooms, and it turned out they had the same opinion of open house crowds, which was that other visitors were always breathing down your neck and asking the realtor about school districts, and it was nicer this way, nearly empty, the two of them trading quiet comments about plaster and floorboards while the tired realtor dozed in a folding chair by the door.

The third floor was where the bedrooms were, and the whole floor had the smell that old houses have, wood and dust and decades, and somewhere in the middle of it the smell of the previous owners' lives, a faint ghost of perfume and cooking and something like soap that made Simpson's chest go tight in a way he could not explain to anyone, least of all to the woman standing next to him.

They ended up in the back bedroom together, the one with the tall windows and the dusty light coming through in long yellow slabs, and Lulu ran her hand along the windowsill and said, "I love this. I love how everything in here feels used. New houses feel like nobody's ever going to touch them."

"Yeah," said Simpson, and then his mouth, which had a long history of betraying him, kept going. "That's actually, well, that's kind of the whole reason I come to these things. Spaces that feel lived in. I like, and this is going to sound strange, I like knowing people were here."

Lulu turned around from the window. "What do you mean, knowing people were here?"

And there it was, the fork in the road, the moment where a smarter man would have shrugged and said something about history, about architecture, about ghosts. Simpson stood in the dusty light with his hands in his pockets and felt the hum in his chest get louder, and he looked at this woman who had told him her name for no reason at all, and he heard himself say, "I mean I have a thing, sort of a fetish honestly, for worn things. Worn clothing especially. The smell of them. A shirt somebody slept in, a pair of leggings somebody actually lived in. The smell of a person's day. That does more for me than almost anything else, and I have no idea why I just told you that, and you can absolutely leave the room and I will never follow you to another open house again as long as I live."

The room was very quiet. The light lay on the floorboards between them in long yellow bars, and somewhere downstairs the tired realtor turned a page of his newspaper.

Lulu did not leave the room. She put her head a little to one side, the way she had looked at the crown molding, up at something old and deliberately made, and she said, "Huh. Say more of that, because I think, well. I think you might not be the only one in this room."

Lulu did not leave the room, and what she did instead was sit down right there on the dusty floorboards, cross-legged in the middle of one of the yellow bars of light, and look up at him expectantly, and so of course Simpson sat down too, because it seemed rude not to, and because his knees had gone strange.

"So the smell thing," she said, picking at a fleck of paint on the floor like they were discussing weather. "How long has that been a thing for you? Was it, I don't know, a slow discovery?"

"College, probably," said Simpson, settling beside her at what felt like a safe and respectful distance and then immediately regretting the distance. "I was the guy who always borrowed people's hoodies. I told everyone it was because I got cold. I was in my early thirties before I had the vocabulary to call it what it is, and I only got that from the internet, which, you know, tells you something."

"So, thirty-four-ish," she said, nodding like she was filing it away. "I'm thirty-one, for the record. And I don't think it's weird, or, okay, it's weird, but it's the kind of weird that makes sense to me. Houses work on me the same way. That's why I keep coming to these. And I teach yoga, by the way, part time, so I spend all day in a room full of people's, well, effort. Sweat and breath and everything. People leave their mats and their towels lying around and I am the only one who volunteers to tidy up, and I have never once told anyone why."

Simpson turned his head to look at her, and she was looking at the window and not at him, and there was a little color in her face that had not been there before, and the whole thing felt like finding a door in a wall he had walked past a hundred times.

"You tidy up on purpose," he said slowly.

"On purpose," said Lulu. "Every shift. God, I can't believe I'm telling you this, we met forty minutes ago in a stranger's front parlor."

And after that they just kept talking, the hour sliding by without either of them noticing, down on the dusty floor of that