It is said that a scent can take you back. That smell is the sense most directly connected to memory. Donna would have told you in that moment, that moment of reconnecting with her own recent past in the back seat of a cab, a cab in New York City, a cab on the way to Lincoln Center where she and her Audrey would soon be listening to Beethoven, that it is not only the most directly connected, but the most powerfully evocative. What she was experiencing was not simply a memory; it was an epiphany. Audrey had lifted her fingers from her own sweet sex, to touch Donna on the lips and the scent that invaded Donna's consciousness, the experience it evoked would have made her knees buckle had she been standing. Fortunately, she was sitting; sitting with Audrey nestled against her. Sitting. Thank god. And in that instant she knew, maybe for the first time in her life, what it meant to be utterly content.
The first time she smelled Audrey that way had been over a year ago. They had met in the modern way. Audrey was a college student not yet allowed to drink legally. Donna was a married woman in her early thirties. She loved her husband, fully, completely. But she could not resist the strange forbidden pleasure of the chat rooms. The chance to pretend. To be what she would be in real life if she'd been born with just a tiny bit more courage. Audrey had no lack of courage; what she lacked was opportunity, and the chatrooms provided plenty of that. The very first time they connected, they'd gone off in private, left a room full of lesbians, bi-curious homemakers, male pretenders, and god knows what else; spoke; eventually spoke directly about their mutual need; eventually acted on that need by masturbating together and describing to each other what they were doing. Even that first time it was beyond good. It was wonderful. They continued to meet that way, learning more and more about each other. Donna gradually revealed her desire to be with a woman, not in a chatroom, but in a real bedroom. Audrey revealed her strong need to display herself publicly. Together, they pretended to do these things. And more.
When Audrey graduated, after three years of time and a distance that grew somehow smaller with each electronic meeting, each afternoon of masturbating together, each magically warm encounter, she arranged to meet Donna somewhere far from both of their current homes. They agreed to meet in New York.
Donna had a friend who kept a flat in a seedy Bohemian residential hotel in Chelsea. The friend was away on business. The flat was available. Donna got there first, freshening the rooms with flowers, filling the kitchen with the wonderful smells of gourmet cooking. And as she prepared the appetizer, carefully slicing raw fish, placing it on seaweed-wrapped rice, dressing it with green sprigs flown to the city and brought to the Japanese market that very morning, her hands trembled. When was the last time she'd felt like this? Shaky, light-headed, so full of anticipation that time both flew and crawled? There was not enough time to get everything ready; yet, there was too much time, time moving so terribly slowly, time that had to pass before Audrey would arrive. And when Audrey finally did arrive, ringing the buzzer five stories below, Donna's voice cracked as she stammered into the intercom, "Audrey, is that you?"
