Indole, n.

My perfume habit currently resides on my dresser in an antique cut-glass tray that belonged to my grandmother. The inscription on the bottom of the tray - "Waste Not Want Not" - reminds me that I used to use it for saving pennies. (Ironic.) La Niebla came over for a smell-a-thon and we hovered over the tray, passing the delicate glass bottles and vials back and forth in a state of strange, perilous bliss. When she came to my current favorite, Annick Goutal's Songes, she made a face and said, "It smells like papaya tastes: sweet and rotten."

Ah, indoles. A few weeks ago when I posted about Songes, I noted the faint odor of putrescence in its white flowers (jasmine, neroli, frangipani); that's the indolic smell. According to Chandler Burr: "Indoles . . . are molecules that smell like a trucker’s unwashed armpit. They also smell like jasmine because jasmine is heavily indolic. They also smell like rotting corpses because dead bodies generate indoles when they decompose."

I think writers from the South have long since excavated the metaphorically rich affinity between the smell of certain flowers and rotting flesh; however, the existence of a molecule that actually explains the connection is both mysterious and gratifying. If I had to guess, I'd say papaya has indoles, which is why I can't eat papaya without gagging. But somehow the slightly rotten quality of the white flowers is what makes them smell flowery to me, like something you walk past in the dark rather than something you put in your mouth.

It's hard to describe in words exactly what it is that flowers smell like, anyway: "sweet" doesn't half cover it, since only a few flowers really smell like things that taste sweet (maybe honeysuckle?). Roses don't smell sweet, or not entirely; they smell rich and planty and earthy, with cold berry-like sweetness around the edges, and an indescribable note in the middle like a violin.

Neither is jasmine "sweet," exactly, nor any of the tropical flowers that go into big white floral scents. They're heavy and languid, almost limp, and the close smell of their white velvety petals evokes a fecundity that is just outrageous. The indolic note in Songes reminds me of evening walks past magnolia trees in Houston, when the stiflingly humid air around the fleshy, bruised white blossoms seems so saturated with scent that the merest breeze can immerse you in it. It's a smell I feel I wouldn't have liked a few years ago, but right now I can't get enough of it; I want to just lie back and let it smother me like yards of white silk. Songes, take me away.