The Heart Note

The soft points of the honeybee’s six legs shifting on Kray’s naked shoulder tickled more than she expected. She knew them to be innocuous, as everyone did, and the thought of being stung shouldn’t have crossed her mind, but Kray couldn’t keep her muscles from tensing when it landed on her, though she didn’t try to remove it. Kray worked quickly among the branches of her orange tree, a tree she spent the last year painstakingly covering, fertilizing, and pruning to survive the New York winter. She was competing with the honeybees, floating from bloom to bloom in the low morning sunlight of early April, for the tree's few orange blossoms. Kray had an encompassing view of her backyard. A mass of Jasmine flowers, white as moonlight, wrapped down the iron trellis which rested against the back of her house, greeting the orderly rows of mint beneath with their heady fragrance. The yard was awash with every aromatic flower to be grown in New York’s temperate climate, meticulously planted in a grid, one foot between each. The sourness of fresh mulch and soil, almost fecal, mixed on a breeze with the flowers’ cloying sweetness, was carried to adjacent yards. Kray considered the smell a gift to her neighbors; they did not. This variety of high maintenance foliage was not merely a point of vanity, it supplied Kray with a bank of scents to utilize for creating perfumes, her trade of ten years. Kray reached for another blossom, pinching it at the base then plucking and laying it in a basket with the others before descending the eight wooden rungs resting against the trunk of the orange tree. Kray thought of her father, buried next to her mother behind a quaint Presbyterian church in the blue ridge mountains of Virginia, and the trees she helped him prune on their farm by stabilizing the base of his extendable aluminum ladder. Her left foot was the first to touch the ground. Before the right could catch up, a car horn from beyond the fence surrounding her backyard threw her off balance. She stumbled backward as two flowers fell from her basket into the dewed grass.

Kray moved to Saratoga Springs earlier this year, into a small Tudor style house on a verdant suburban street miles from downtown. She became accustomed to quiet days and was easily startled by sounds once part of her daily life in New York City. She bought the house outright with profits from a lucrative perfume formula sale, her first sale to a major designer. She grew tired of the stuffy streets and balmy summers in Brooklyn, the lack of control she had over her communal surroundings. She set her sights on upstate New York, the vision of privacy and her own garden, while remaining close enough to the city to meet with buyers, was irresistible. Saratoga Springs proved to be exactly what she expected, and Kray frequently reminded herself of the numerous benefits of isolation, how living alone in a house with a job that presented little opportunity for socialization was actually the best thing for her, the best thing for her work. Despite this, each night while drinking hibiscus tea and watching period dramas, she grew more tempted by the idea of someone to share in her new, curated life. She had a date set up for late this afternoon, a high school teacher named Jonathan. They agreed to meet at Stone Hill winery near Ballston Lake, a twenty minute drive south.

Inside the house, Kray moved quickly past her unadorned walls and practical furniture, to the basement where she kept her distilling equipment. Every second off the stem, fragrant components were lost from flowers as they dried out. Kray set her basket on a pristine slate workbench next to two round glass containers, connected at the top by a glass tube. The first container was used for boiling water, generating steam to pass through the tube to the second container holding plant material, extracting the aromatic oils. Kray began to transfer the orange blossoms from her basket into the second container. The scent of orange blossoms reminded her of fruity cereal, evoking a memory from childhood of her mother placing a full bowl in front of her before school. Both of Kray’s parents were warm, friendly people, but optimistic and careless, and they allowed their family’s farm to foreclose years ago. An occasional late payment became a bounced check, became a tobacco harvester unrepaired before their busy season, became the bank posting notices on their front door. They would tell Kray not to worry, that whatever is meant to happen, will. They were evicted a year after Kray moved out. The burden of twenty years’ unresolved problems unable to be delayed further, they moved to Roanoke where a fourth floor walk-up was their honorable mention for a lifetime of work.

Kray had been commissioned for another perfume, and the orange blossoms were an essential component of the formulation. Kray created 51 iterations of the perfume so far, none good enough to turn in. She was missing the right heart note, the note that would give the perfume depth and mystery beyond fleeting beauty, that would garner interest past the first spray. If she couldn’t find the note and begin the extraction by tomorrow, she would need to extend the deadline, cutting her payout by half. Kray planned to cancel the date today. With all options from the ground exhausted, she could use the extra time to research synthetic components to complete the perfume. She finished loading the orange blossoms into the second container then walked upstairs to check the time on the oven clock. 11 AM. Three hours before the date. Kray caught her reflection in the plastic door of the microwave above the oven, foreshadowing a lonely night of T.V. dinners and masterclass theater that awaited her. Resolving to change a part of her life she deemed unsatisfactory, Kray moved to her bedroom to get ready for the date.

Kray pulled into a spot next to a black pickup truck with an empty bed. She thought of the sort who own pickups, either for function or for the semblance of function; the latter she couldn’t stand. She pressed the brake pedal of her hatchback, stopping six inches from the stumpy wall of smooth gray stones that housed a row of short Japanese maples, partitioning the winery parking lot from the street. Kray flipped the sun visor down from the ceiling to check the mirror. Her nostrils flared, seeing that the coral lipstick she applied in her bathroom made her skin look gray in this lighting. She exhaled before stepping out and walking from the car to the front door, feeling beads of anxious sweat form in her underarms. The tension of one bead broke, coaxed down the side of her torso as she opened the door.

John sat back down at the bar after Kray walked off with the owner. She seemed distracted throughout their date, and John cut his stories short, sensing her attention dwindle at different points during the course of each anecdote. He blamed himself for conversation that was, apparently, less interesting than a glob of yeast at the bottom of an oak barrel, some fragrant wine byproduct called “lees” Kray mentioned after smelling the chardonnay, before asking to speak with the winery’s owner then following him to the cellar across the vineyard. She needed it to… balance flowers? Her explanation was sparing, told with the assumption that John had a foundational knowledge of perfume. He toured the vineyard last summer with his mom and was familiar with the landscape. Even on a Gator the trip to the cellar was an hour both ways; John was not left wondering whether Kray planned to finish the date. A second date was not an experience to which he was accustomed as the common denominator in a long history of first dates that did not lead to seconds. One of the few second dates he ever got was at this winery. Sam, he recalled her name, Sam… Darby? Dabato? They sat at this same bar eight years ago, drank from the same tasting menu. She was a redhead in the same Intro to Business class as him, and she thought he was funny. John smiled, recalling how he pretended to bite Sam’s neck, teeth tinted by zinfandel, a joke at which she wouldn’t have laughed so hard had it been earlier in the night before being softened by his company and the warmth of alcohol. Glass after glass, Kray became no more amiable towards him than when she first walked in. He found her coldness alluring, it made him want to impress her, want to convince her of himself.

John picked up his glass, swirling the pool of crimson merlot before bringing it to his lips. The merlot was his favorite, and he beamed when the bartender poured it for them. He considered bringing a bottle to his mom, who lived three blocks from his downtown apartment. She was expecting him tomorrow, expecting to hear about the date. She was familiar with the usual outcome and preferred it to one that might require his attention to deviate from her. She relied on his companionship, and John felt that in small ways; he felt it in the tone of her voice when she mentioned his estranged father, in her withdrawal whenever she was excluded from his plans, and in the sheen of her eyes every time he said goodbye, though she did her best to conceal her attachment.

It’s just as well, John thought, the cool outdoor air encasing him as he stepped out to the parking lot. He consoled himself with ideas of freedom, nobody to answer to. He thought of all the things he would do on his own this weekend, and how inconvenient it would be to bring along a city girl. She could never keep up with him on the hiking trails woven around Saratoga, would tire of paddle boarding long before he did. The consolation of independence would last only as long as each distraction. At the door to his truck, John fished around in his coat pocket for the keys, coming up short. He patted himself down before closing his eyes and remembering they fell on the floor under the bar earlier. He turned back towards the winery, grinding the gravel beneath him, looking down at the noisy chunks of rock.

“She won’t start?” John lifted his head, startled by the voice, then the sight of Kray, smiling, walking toward his truck with a bottle and his keys in either hand. “You could always call your mom to come get you,” teasing him, recalling a story John told her hours ago. John looked at her lips, orange-red and slightly feathered, they distracted him all afternoon. Although he didn’t have the words, he loved the powdery, floral scent of the lipstick, the waxy sharpness of iris tempered by soft, familiar vanilla. While Kray talked between sips, he imagined what her lips would taste like, envisioned getting drunk off the beads of wine that stuck to them. John smiled back at her, the bottle in her hand catching his eye, the label now close enough to read, “a merlot”? Kray leaned against the back of the truck, noticing the purple leaves scattered inside the bed like polka dots, “yea, the long island one,” she turned the bottle to look at the label herself, though she was sure of what it read, “I thought I could lure you back inside with it,” Kray crossed her left foot over the right, still leaning against the truck, “apologize for leaving.” John never did like paddle boarding, “you don’t need the lees?” Kray smirked at his butchered pronunciation and placed the car keys in her back pocket, “it can wait.”