We women are impressed by men who know about food, but that is something that doesn’t work in reverse. A man who cooks is sexy, a woman isn’t; maybe it’s too reminiscent of domestic archetypes. Contrast and surprise are erotic. A girl dressed like a gang member and straddling a motorcycle can be exciting; in contrast, a man in the same posture is merely a ridiculous macho. I never admit that I know how to cook; that’s fatal. My friend Hannah, who composes that New Age music you hear in beauty spas and dentist’s offices, and her last husband are a good example of my thesis. During a brief period as a single woman between her second divorce and her third husband, Hannah answered one of those personal ads in the classified section of the newspaper. Over the phone, the man who was looking for a partner sounded perfect: he earned his living training dogs for the blind and had gone as a volunteer to build schools in Guatemala, where a stray bullet had blown away one ear. My friend, inexperienced in personal ads and not a little desperate, invited him to dinner before she had ever seen him. (Don’t even think of it! Blind dates are really dangerous. Most appropriate in such cases is a brief meeting in a neutral place from which either can escape with dignity, never a solitary meal that can turn into an endless martyrdom.) She was expecting a mature version of Che Guevara, but the person who showed up was a replica of Vincent van Gogh. She has nothing against Impressionist painting, even though she prefers astrological motifs for her walls, but that stranger with the carrot-colored hair and crazy eyes was a disappointment. She was sorry the minute she saw him. Oh, well, he was there, and she couldn’t shut the door in his face over a matter of an ear, more or less.

  My friend was in no position to be fussy about trifles—however, this pipsqueak was worse than anything she had imagined in her solitary nightmares. She had planned candlelight and a few slow sambas from Brazil, but she was afraid to provoke any unwanted moves on her guest’s part, so she turned on all the lights and put on one of her musical compositions of wind blowing and coyotes howling, which usually produce a hypnotic lethargy. She skipped the preliminary glass of wine and other obligatory courtesies and led the man straight to the kitchen, planning instead to prepare some last-minute spaghetti, feed him in a hurry, and send him on his way before dessert. He followed her tamely, showing no sign of disenchantment, like someone all too accustomed to receiving rather rude treatment.

  Once in the kitchen, however, something about him changed; he took a deep breath, puffed out his chest, stiffened his spine, as his rabbity eyes scouted the lay of the land, taking command of the terrain, conquering it. Allow me, he said, and without giving Hannah the opportunity to protest, he gently removed the apron from her hands, tied it around his own waist, and sat her down in a chair to watch. Let’s see what we have here, he reflected, and started rescuing from the refrigerator the ingredients she had decided to keep for the next day, as well as some she hadn’t thought of. This Van Gogh started wielding pots and skillets as if he had been born within those four walls. With unexpected grace and dexterity, his knives flashed as they danced over vegetables and shellfish he then lightly sautéed in olive oil; he hurled spaghetti into the boiling water and in a thrice had prepared a translucent cilantro-and-lemon sauce, all the while telling my friend about his adventures in Central America. Within a few moments, the pathetic little rabbit was transformed: his clown’s mop vibrated with the virile strength of a lion’s mane, and his castaway’s bearing turned into an air of serene concentration—an irresistible combination for a woman like Hannah.

  As aromas billowed from the skillet and water bubbled in the deep pot, my friend was aware of a growing anticipation; her blouse was clammy from the sweat trickling down her backbone, her thighs were steamy, and her mouth was watering—all as she was noticing for the first time, to her utter amazement, the elegant hands and broad shoulders of the man standing before her. His heroic anecdotes about Guatemala and about the dogs for the blind filled her eyes with tears; the lopped-off ear began to take on the cachet of a medal, and an irrepressible desire to caress the scar shook her from head to toes. When Van Gogh set before her a platter with steaming spaghetti à la pescatore, which was his name for the dish, she sighed in surrender. From its hiding place, she took the wine she had planned to keep for another, more deserving candidate, turned out the light, lit the candles, and put the slow samba from Brazil on the player. Wait just a minute, she purred, like a kitten, I want to slip into something more comfortable. And returned in her black leather suit and dominatrix’s boots.

  Gourmets capable of ordering from a French menu and discussing wines with the sommelier inspire respect in women, a respect that can easily be transmuted into a voracious, passionate hunger. We cannot resist men who know how to cook. I’m not talking about those clowns in histrionic caps who dub themselves experts and with great flourishes scorch a hot dog on the patio barbecue. No, I mean epicures who lovingly choose the freshest and most arousing ingredients, prepare them with art, and offer them as a gift to the senses and the soul, men who uncork a bottle with style, breathe in its aroma, and decant the wine into our goblet to taste, as they describe the juices, color, tenderness, aroma, and texture of the filet mignon in the tone we believe they will later use to refer to our own enchantments. It seems to us that all the sensibilities of a man like that must be equally refined, including his sense of humor. Who knows? Maybe he can even laugh at himself! While we watch him clean, spice, and cook the shrimp, we imagine that patience and dexterity applied to an erotic massage. If he delicately tastes a piece of fish to test whether it’s done, we tremble, anticipating a similarly knowing nibble on the neck. We suppose that if he can remember how many minutes frog legs can tolerate in the skillet, how much greater reason he will have to remember how many tickles our G spot demands. Of course, that isn’t always true; in real life he may be much more interested in the frogs’ legs than our own.

  Not long ago I got a call from Jason, one of my stepchildren. He was calling from New York to tell me he had met the woman of his life; this would be number seventeen, if I have the count right. He urgently needed instructions for his first date. His salary is as limited as his experience, so it would serve no purpose to suggest a good play, a small Moroccan restaurant, and, to top off the evening, a carriage ride through the park and a jazz session in Harlem. On the other hand, to recommend that he cook for her would be tantamount to a death sentence. Then I remembered my chocolate cake, and it seemed to me that an occasion like this justified a small deceit. It doesn’t always pay to be honest; sometimes it’s better to be creative. Making a chocolate cake is too complicated for my busy life, and that’s why when I’m expecting important visitors, I buy one at a very good pastry shop, remove all the frippery, slide it onto one of our own plates, and then skip around the dining room table a couple of times, until it looks sufficiently languid to have been baked at home. Store-bought cakes, like salon hairstyles, have the undisguisable seal of the professional hand, but with a vigorous shake or two, both are reduced to a state of homemade casualness.

  I told Jason to go out and pick up some exotic food, although nothing so exotic that it would be suspicious. Chinese cooking, for example, can’t be camouflaged. No one in his right mind would think my stepson capable of preparing wonton or lumpias, but some Arab dish, one of those that looks prechewed, could pass the test, especially if when he invites his date he tells her he’ll cook her something with aphrodisiac ingredients. Once out of the disposable container, falafel or shish kebab lose their superiority and quietly adapt to their new surroundings. I told him about Hannah and her new husband and suggested that he set a beautiful table, put on some good music, and, when his date rang the bell, open the door with a pan in one hand and a wooden cooking spoon in the other—the first impression is usually crucial—then ask her to sit down, hand her a glass of chilled wine, and to distract her as he pretends to cook ask her questions about herself. I reminded him to be sure and take off his shoes first, like a California Buddhist, and then unbutton his shirt to show off his pecs. He should get some good out of all that weight lifting.

  Unlike men, who think only of the objective, we women are inclined toward rituals and processes. I should have explained to Jason that the ceremony I have just described, although an illusionist’s act, would surely be as exciting for the girl as the subsequent erotic acrobatics. Don’t rush her, I begged him; savor with her the perfume of the candles, the delicacy of the flowers, each sip of wine and each mouthful of food. Talk very little yourself, and pretend to pay attention to everything she says. No woman is truly interested in what a man says, only what he murmurs. Dance with her—that way you can put your arms around her without resembling a gorilla in rut, and when you think that the moment has come to take her to a more comfortable place, wait. And then wait a good while longer. You can’t hurry the perfecting of a good stew. Joke with her, I told Jason, knowing that laughter is an excellent aphrodisiac, something this boy with literary aspirations tends to forget in his immoderate enthusiasm for tragedy. And if there’s a second date, remember that the shared preparation of food is a good preamble to love. It doesn’t matter too much whether or not the recipes are actually aphrodisiac—from the scientific point of view, I mean—just that the nibbles and nuzzling in the kitchen are. Make a game of bed and a game of food.

  Great authors, from Henry Miller in his tropics to Pablo Neruda in his infinite poetic metaphors, have turned food into sexual inspiration. Think of the aged dictator in Gabriel García Márquez’s novel The Autumn of the Patriarch, I told him, how he attracted schoolgirls to the gardens of his palace to rub their erogenous zones with salad ingredients and then . . . Hey, read the book, Jason, for God’s sake! I had heard an exclamation of disgust over the line. Jason is too young for such subtleties. So I referred him to one of the forgotten texts lying around in some corner of my house, G. Legman’s Oragenitalism, in which he suggests something similar with strawberries and bananas, as well as serving sweet wine in the same location, but evidently that author never thought about itching. This kind of thing should be tested by the person who proposes it. Gallants of long ago drank champagne from courtesan’s high-top slippers, and we can always place the best mouthfuls in the valleys, mountains, and clefts of our lover’s anatomy. (Be careful about the rug and sheets, Jason, it’s hard to get the stains out.) All of this I tried to summarize in a long-distance phone call, but my stepson answered that nowadays girls wear combat boots, not slippers laced up to the ankle, and that the radiant smile my designer had suggested would look stupid on a young person.

  I don’t want to give the impression, however, that I’m one of those grandmothers who’s capable of swathing herself in an odalisque’s veils to chop onions, or of serving dinner in curly-toed Turkish babouches while rippling her navel like an exotic dancer, because that would be a dangerous lie. It could induce in other women a depression similar to the one that flattens me when I compare myself to those homemakers in magazines who use the leftover guacamole for facial masks and paint flowers on the toilet paper. If I ever did that—the belly dance, I mean—it was in my youth, maybe at the beginning of a passionate affair that I thought was transcendental at the time and today can scarcely remember, but I don’t have the same desire I had to look ridiculous, and as my mother always says, if I waste my energies in costumes, who’s going to watch the soufflé?

  The Spell of Aromas

  Woman is like a fruit which will only yield its fragrance when rubbed by the hands. Take for example the basil: unless it be warmed by the fingers, it emits no perfume. And do you know that unless amber is warmed and manipulated it retains its aroma within? The same with women: if you do not animate her with your frolics and kisses, with nibbling of her thighs and close embraces, you will not obtain what you desire: you will experience no pleasure when she shares your couch and she will feel no affection for you. —The Perfumed Garden, translated into English by Sir Richard Burton, 1886

  Where does taste end and smell begin? They are inseparable. The temptation of coffee is not born of the taste, which leaves smoky dregs in memory, but in that intense and mysterious fragrance of remote forests. With our eyes closed and nostrils pinched shut, we can’t distinguish between a raw potato and an apple, between lard and chocolate. The nose is capable of detecting more than ten thousand odors, and the brain of distinguishing among them, yet that same brain cannot distinguish between lust and love. The olfactory sense is, from the viewpoint of evolution, our oldest sense. It is precise, swift, and powerful, and it bores into our memory with persistent tenacity, hence the efficacy of perfumes. The secret is always to wear the same scent, until it becomes a personal, untransferable trademark, something that identifies us.

  Cleopatra knew this and, like everything else she did, carried it to an extreme. In ports along the Nile, the breeze announced the impending arrival of her gilded barge hours in advance because it bore the fragrance of the roses of Damascus in which that spellbinding queen drenched her sails. During her celebrated visit to Rome, where she traveled with Caesarion, her son by Julius Caesar, the center of a formidable social and political scandal that she ignored with the natural arrogance of the pharaohs, essence of rose became the fashion, and every woman of style, except Calpurnia, the humiliated wife of Julius Caesar, used it. Sometimes that perfume lingered in the streets like an Egyptian mockery, reminding the citizens of Rome that their invincible empire could be lost in the bedsheets of a foreign woman. At the banquets of powerful Romans, slaves counted among their tasks perfuming the rooms by blowing sweet attars through ingenious silver tubes and tossing a rain of flower petals from the ceiling. The aroma of roses, as costly as liquid myrrh but much more erotic, was sprinkled upon the guests—roses everywhere: from his followers, flattery for his Egyptian queen; from his enemies, ironic obeisance for his Egyptian whore. Several centuries later in medieval castles the floor was covered with flower petals and aromatic herbs to mask the stench of garbage and excrement. Those were times when nobles and lackeys relieved themselves behind the draperies: the toilet is a much later invention. There were French monarchs who lavished liters of floral essences on themselves to conceal the fact that they never bathed. Other European nobles, who like the French were not noted for personal hygiene but did not have the famous French perfumers at hand, simply stank like a stable.

  For centuries humanity has stretched its ingenuity in searching for delicious fragrances, always with the dream of creating the scent capable of granting the user the power of absolute seduction. In his novel Perfume, Patrick Suskind treats the subject in a memorable manner. The protagonist is a man born without any body odor, a man loved by no one, not even his mother. Obsessed with discovering the balm that will make him irresistible, he learns the science of perfumers and succeeds in distilling the fragrance of the bodies of virgin girls to supplant what he is lacking. Maybe Suskind’s story is an inspired metaphor about charisma. In any case, the art of fabricating perfumes is as complex and difficult as that of distilling wines. How did humanity first discover a way to trap the subtle spirit of an aroma? Maybe it was monks or witches who discovered amber among other tree resins when they were looking for magical plants for their potions and balms. Ambergris, the secretion from the intestines of certain whales, may have been a gift from the sirens to a sailor who plied the icy seas. And it must have been one of Genghis Khan’s fearsome warriors, chasing a stag across the steppes of Asia, who accidentally cut from the animal’s carcass a gland with ineffable fragrance, never suspecting it was musk, the musk that in the hands of an alchemist would become the principal component of exquisite elixirs. Like these three, there are other substances that are mixed with flowers and spices to form the base of almost all commercial fragrances.

  A family of skunks lives in the basement of my home in California. For a couple of years we waged a heartless war against them, employing every manner of weapon short of poison and bullets—after all, we’re decent folks. We placed cages in strategic places, but when the moment came to dispose of the catch, no one wanted to go anywhere near, and faced with the task of feeding the skunks to prevent them from dying of hunger or the natural distress of being captives, we ended up paying absurd sums to an employee of the Humane Society to resolve the problem. The man appeared encased in a kind of astronaut’s gear, picked up the cages with a long hook, carried them into the garden, and from a distance opened the cage doors with a magnetized pole. The skunks staggered out, shook themselves, and raced straight back to our cellar.

  My stepson Harleigh, who was at the time a teenager with a Satanic calling who dressed completely in black leather, covered his body with sepulchral tattoos, and wore his purple hair spiked like the horns of a prehistoric animal, had seen on TV the method the North American marines had used to subdue General Noriega. (Interesting to imagine the reverse, that the Panamanian army invaded the United States to take the president prisoner and lead him off in chains to be judged in their country.) Harleigh informed us that the marines had blasted a continuous rock-music concert before the walls of the Nunciatura where General Noriega had taken refuge, until the racket forced him to come out with his hands over his ears. Everyone, including the papal nuncio and the neighbors, was going crazy. Harleigh deduced that if Noriega had preferred serving time in a high-security prison to the roar of rock, maybe the skunks would be of the same mind. He installed his record player in the foundations of the house and for twenty-four hours tortured us all with his favorite beat. It had the desired effect. The animals marched out in Indian file, tails erect, offended. But we ourselves were also ready to go . . . anywhere. The system was short-lived, because the moment the noise stopped, our guests returned. One day, months later, we discovered that the smell no longer bothered us—in fact, to the contrary, we found it exciting and started gulping it down by the mouthful. Today the skunks and my family coexist on friendly terms.