Season to Taste (19 page)

Herz walked in a few minutes later. She has devoted a huge swath of her career to the relationship between smell and psychology. I asked her up front: I could smell more, and better, when I felt happy. Why? “The connection between smell and emotion is unique and entirely extreme,” Herz said. And then she told me about her theory, which she calls the “depression-olfaction loop” and first wrote about in
The Scent of Desire
. Already it has been found in numerous studies that patients who have been diagnosed with depression have a lessened ability to smell. Those with anosmia, as I knew all too well, were often depressed. So there is a correlation between the two states. “I decided that there is a feedback system there,” she told me.

When someone loses the sense of smell, she explained, depression can set in because the input from the nose that once went regularly through the amygdala is gone. This has both a physical and emotional effect and can become worse and worse with time. Duke University’s Susan Schiffman, for example, found that with age and the resulting loss of ability to smell, many become depressive, and even suffer from malnutrition.

On the other side, Herz continued, when one is depressed, the amygdala is not functioning normally. Because the connection in the architecture of the brain is so intense, then, this can affect the operation of the olfactory system. After all, German scientist Bettina Pause found in 2001 that a group of participants diagnosed with depression had a severely dampened olfactory sensitivity in comparison to a group of healthy participants. After successful treatment, however, the once-depressed group scored significantly higher on the odor tests. The connection between the amygdala and the olfactory system, she believes, are striking. “It is thus assumed that a dysfunctional state of the main olfactory bulb in depressive patients could account for a lowered olfactory sensitivity and moreover, for an intensified experience of sadness and fear, via a disinhibition of the amygdala,” Pause wrote in the study paper, “Reduced Olfactory Performance in Patients with Major Depression.”

“It’s just a theory,” Herz said. “Purely speculative.” But she has seen people who have lost the sense of smell fall into a deep depression. She has seen those who are depressed lose their ability to smell. There must be some kind of loop, she says.

It made sense to me.

IN SEPTEMBER,
Matt and I strolled through Prospect Park in Brooklyn, navigating among the kids flying bright red kites, the scent of charcoal wafting off the grills. In October, we drove to West Point, the military academy fifty miles up the Hudson River where Matt went to college, for his five-year reunion. There, we watched cadets parade with crisp uniforms and serious faces. We drank pale ale in the stands of the football stadium, cheering Army vs. Tulane until the sun went down. In November we took the bus to Boston, where he joined my family for a champagne toast to Thanksgiving, my home thick with the satiating scents of roast turkey and pumpkin pie.

In December, Matt and I strolled through downtown Manhattan on a Monday night—arm in arm, our noses red with cold. The sun was fading and lights were beginning to glow from shop windows in every nook and cranny of the West Village. We stepped into a specialty coffee shop on Christopher Street. The bronzed wood store was filled with burlap sacks, glass containers of loose tea, and coffee beans that were so fresh they shone. It smelled thickly of cocoa and cafés. The scent was rich; a flick of my finger, perhaps, would indent the air.

“You must love coming into work every day,” Matt said to the man behind the counter as he inhaled. “It smells so good.”

The coffee-purveyor smiled as he ground us a pound of beans.

“We do love it, but not because of the scent. We can’t smell it anymore,” he said. “You get used to anything. One week here and the smell is gone.”

We left and took a turn down Bleecker Street. On the corner a man in a thick brown coat was wrapping a naked Christmas tree in mesh for a couple to take home. We walked by the forestlike stack of pine festooned with red ribbons. I took a deep breath. A new scent.

“Can you smell that?” Matt asked, sticking his face near the pile of branch.

“Yes,” I said, smiling. “It’s Christmas.”

Our relationship grew slowly, carefully over the crusty edges of pizza in Brooklyn, hot dogs slathered in mustard outside a movie theater in Times Square, supermarket sushi on the steps of the school. He didn’t know me “before.” He didn’t know me broken, unable to tell the difference between fresh and spoiled milk.

I began to cook more. I cooked savory meals, the kind that had scared me with their need for constant tasting. I cooked small things, slow things, never with much confidence. Sometimes they came out well—a red-wine Bolognese, which filled Matt’s studio apartment with the scent of garlic and simmering beef, for one. But the successes were much fewer and far between. One night, for example, I decided to cook chicken. A roast chicken with garbanzo beans and a bright salad of peppers. I don’t know what happened, but the flesh ended up rubbery and the beans burnt, leaving me so helpless and frustrated that we threw it all in the trash. I couldn’t make myself try to resuscitate the dish from my mistakes, I wouldn’t use the chicken to make stock, or stew. In fact, I told Matt, spitting out my words, I hated it. I hated that stupid, disgusting chicken that I probably couldn’t fully taste anyway. I stamped my feet, and Matt laughed. But then he opened the refrigerator and pulled out a small glass jar, hinged on top with a metal clasp.

“Here,” he said. “I was saving this for a special occasion.”

The jar was filled with a spread of some kind, something cloudy and light brown. He had brought it back with him from a recent trip to France, he said.

“Foie gras!” I hadn’t had the rich duck liver pâté since my days at Craigie Street, when it had opened up new layers of taste.

I pulled myself together to roast a handful of asparagus I had picked up at the market that morning, which we then ate, plucking the stalks with our hands, our fingertips glistening in olive oil. I could taste the grassy, fresh vegetable, along with the sharply salted cheese I had grated on top. I toasted thick slices of bread, which we slathered with foie gras. It was thick and sumptuous. Could I taste it all? I didn’t know. I tried not to care. After all, Matt didn’t.

With Matt, I felt calm—like I didn’t have to run, to constantly move, to keep too busy to think. I could breathe. I could smell him. I could taste him. Occasionally I worried. He and I were so different. He still simmered with the residual anger of two years spent in Iraq, at times blood-red and hot. I often retreated, emotionally impenetrable, far within myself. Was I missing something important? Were we safe from the dangers of undetected pheromones? From insubstantial odor prints or invisible signals? I had no idea. All I knew was that he smelled wonderful, like my favorite sweater combined with soap and shaving cream and the salt-airedness of his skin after a run. He tasted like mint, like caramel. I shoved my worry aside.

Early on a Monday morning in March, Matt and I rode our bikes down the West side of Manhattan. Clouds filled the sky, blocking the already dim morning light. Snow still clung to the sidewalk’s edge, and my fingers were numb beneath my too-thin red cotton gloves. We biked from Matt’s apartment, a small studio above a dry cleaning shop on La Salle Street, through Riverside Park. I could see a halo of sun rising over the Hudson. There were a few walkers out with their dogs, but no more.

We were on our way to Penn Station, where we would take a train to Long Island. We had one week off school, a still-dark and still-cold “spring break.” Though we would spend most of these ten days cocooned in the library, suffering over tattered copies of our master’s thesis, we decided forty-eight hours could be used for rest. We would go to East Hampton, a small town in the heart of a ritzy beachside community, deserted in the bleak landscape of late March. We knew we would have the streets for our bikes to ourselves.

We biked down Eighth Avenue, zipping alongside taxicabs and SUVs. We rode rapidly, though, with the wind at our backs. I followed Matt as we weaved among cars and stopped at red lights. When we passed a large truck, double-parked on the west side of the street a few blocks above Times Square, Matt turned his head toward me.

“That smells like Iraq,” he said.

I sniffed. The scent of diesel exhaust permeated the air. For me it was strong and unpleasant but exciting, too. It reminded me of the bus trips I took at school when small. The odor didn’t leave my nose for a few windswept blocks.

Iraq, Matt had told me before, smelled strongly of fuel. It smelled of fuel and of flesh, burning oil, dirt, and disease. It was hot there, flaming hot and riddled with the sharp bite of sand that frequently stormed around their heads. The heat only enhanced the stink.

All he needed, Matt told me later, on the train to Long Island, was a whiff of waste or fuel and he was right back in Kuwait, where he waited for the invasion of 2003, or in Ramadi, where he watched mortars fall for most of 2006. Burning oil. The stench of body odor long overdue. The second time he returned to war, he said, just one breath upon exiting the plane and he could remember things he had long repressed. The stink, he said, brought him right back.

I had no concept of burning oil. I could only imagine the smell of human waste baking in the sun. When I asked for more, he just shrugged.

“Indescribable,” he said.

ALMOST TWO YEARS LATER,
sitting on a train heading from New York City to Philadelphia, I would think about that conversation with Matt. I was on my way to the Monell Chemical Senses Center for my second round of interviews. A massive earthquake had rocked Haiti the week before, and I flipped through the newspaper, looking at picture after horrifying picture of corpses littering the streets, children with broken bones and dust covering every inch of skin. Every article written about the disaster, it seemed, mentioned the stench. Later, I would read a dispatch from Arthur Brice, a reporter for CNN: “Against the smell of death, many Haitians wear masks, bandannas or even small pieces of orange peel wedged inside the tip of their nostrils. Many journalists wear masks, but the masks don’t eliminate the odors, just slow them down. You bring the smells back to your hotel room, on your clothes, your hair, your skin. You want to wash them out, especially the smell of death, but you can’t. It takes more than soap and water. The odors have soaked your memory.” I wondered what horrific images, what traumatic recollections, would be tied to that smell for Haitians and aid workers in the years to come.

There is a dark side to scent. It’s one far from Coppertone sunscreen and the beaches of youth, the velvety perfume of my mother’s goodnight kiss. Smell can carry a sinister edge, an ugly underbelly. It can be vulgar and cruel.

“Smells plug us in,” Jonathan Mueller, a neuropsychiatrist in San Francisco, told me. A friend of Oliver Sacks, Mueller has a private practice, which, according to his whimsical website that floats quotes from Nietzsche and neuroscientist Eric Kandel across the screen, deals in psychotherapy and pharmacology, disorders of anxiety and mood and pain. He works with brain injury and evaluates dementia. In addition, he works in smell. “Smells can beautify, to bring worlds of comfort and joy that are lost. They can also be emblems of death, terror, and loss of control. They can throw people days, weeks, months, or years after traumatic episode back into a horrific thing. The smell of smoke after seeing your house burn down. The smell of blood after a vehicular accident, and you wake up, taste blood in your mouth, and see your child dead by your side. They can open up cathedrals, ‘immense edifices,’ in the words of Proust, either in beauty, nobility and glory—or in torture chambers.”

When I arrived at Monell, I asked Pamela Dalton, a cognitive psychologist, about the connection between scent and trauma experience. She has worked on many experiments exploring the subject. She told me that it only takes one moment, one sniff, one experience to link a scent and a negative emotion in the brain.

Dalton did a series of studies on the subject—once purposefully matching a strong, heart-pumping sense of anxiety with a novel smell. To do this, a group of unwitting test subjects were given five minutes to prepare and then deliver a speech on an assigned topic in front of a panel of judges. Afterward, the subjects were told to count backward in set increments out loud from a very high number without the benefit of pen or paper. If they made a mistake, they had to start over from the beginning. This kind of social stress, Dalton told me, is prime fodder for a highly active autonomic nervous system: beating heart, sweaty palms. Fight or flight. And all the while, Dalton and her colleagues piped a novel scent into the room—subtle but perceptible, present but not distracting.

Three or four days later, back in the lab, the subjects sat alone in a room, told only to relax. Unbeknownst to them, that distinctive scent, light and hardly noticeable, infiltrated the room once more. The participants, the scientists found, began to show big spikes in heart rate, an increase in cortisol response. They reacted to the smell like
it
was a stressful situation.

Even though they were not consciously aware of the scent blown into the room, their bodies still knew. If the stress of public speaking could evoke a reaction, then, what about witnessing death and violence? What about pain or rape? What about war? “The phenomenon is real,” Dalton said.

Dalton herself experienced scent-triggered post-traumatic stress disorder—known to most as PTSD, an illness of intense anxiety, a reaction spun from the experience of a moment devastating to your safety (physical, sexual, mental) or that of others near you—as a college student, decades before. Then, while visiting a friend in an apartment building in New York, she was mugged by a man in the elevator. “He pulled out a knife,” she told me. “I remember struggling with him. At one point I remember trying to scream.” On the ride upstairs, which lasted only a minute and a half or less, the man grabbed her by the neck and held her prone until she gave him her wallet, her watch, the rings on her fingers.