technique fell out of favor for many hundreds of years, reemerging in the eighteenth century, when aromatics and herbals returned to fashion. Because what I seek is relaxation more than mummification, my masseuse will blend lavender, neroli, and sandalwood in a sweet almond-oil base and massage my body from head to toe in windblown patterns that concentrate on the lymph system. I am not to shower afterwards, because the oils massaged into circulation need time to penetrate and soothe. Starting at the calves, she massages in fan shapes, rolling, circular, roaming, always returning to the point of origin, then veering off again in symmetrical arcs or ripples. The fragrance—musky, heavy, Mideastern—seems to roll up my body. After the legs, she does the rump; then the back, pausing to apply pressure at certain stations down each side of the spine. She skates across the shoulder blades, probing, then smoothing. The treatment’s effect comes in part, she quietly explains, from the “energy flow” created between the two bodies. A veil of scent rises around my neck, collars me in pungent mist; her hands keep revolving, heating the oils. Unexpectedly, my mind begins to drift to when I was a child and my father drove us to Florida all the way from Illinois for a brief summer vacation. The journey from outside Chicago to Florida was long, and my mother packed a cold chest of sandwiches and Hawaiian Fruit Punch, awicker basket of our favorite toys and some new comic and activity books. I picture the trip in such surprising detail: the “yup-yup leaves” that fairies in one of the comics harvested, the Spanish moss on the trees we passed, my mother, who loved to sing in the car, sitting in a gray dress patterned with large, mauve, cabbagey roses. She wore her straight brown hair Ava Gardner style. Sometimes, when she was silent, her left index finger would move sharply in a way that intrigued me. I was too young to understand that she was probably talking to herself. Why have I remembered that time? I was eight. My mother had me when she was thirty. I am now the age she was then, and she had two children. This vivid memory stays with me and fills me with a thick, warm lager. Then the masseuse swaddles me in a pale-blue blanket. The light-blue walls of the room have a small woodblock print: thousands of brown chevrons. Above each one floats a pair of gray quotation marks angled like those at the end of an utterance.
CLEOPATRA’S HEIRS
Masters of aromatics, the Egyptians had many uses for cedarwood: in mummification, as incense, and to protect papyruses from the assaults of insects. Cleopatra’s cedarwood ship, on which she received Antony, had perfumed sails; incense burners ringed her throne, and she herself was scented from head to toe. I return to her now because she was the quintessential devotee of perfume. She anointed her hands with
kyphi
, which contained oil of roses, crocus, and violets; she scented her feet with
aegyptium
, a lotion of almond oil, honey, cinnamon, orange blossoms, and henna. The walls were an aviary of roses secured by nets, and her regally perfumed presence arrived before her, like a kind of calling card in the scent-drenched wind. As Shakespeare imagines the scene: “From the barge/ A strange invisible perfume hits the sense/ Of the adjacent wharfs.” Romans became famous for their spa-like grandeur, but they actually borrowed the bath from the sybaritic Egyptians.
In the ancient world, royal architecture itself was often aromatic. Potentates built whole palaces of cedarwood, in part because of itssweet, resiny scent, and in part because it was a natural insect repellent. In the Nanmu Hall at the imperial summer palace of the Manchu emperors at Ch’eng-te, the beams and paneling, all of cedarwood, were lacquerless and paintless, so that the fragrance of the wood could influence the air. Builders of mosques used to mix rose water and musk into mortar; the noon sun would heat it and bring out the
CLEOPATRA’S HEIRS
Masters of aromatics, the Egyptians had many uses for cedarwood: in mummification, as incense, and to protect papyruses from the assaults of insects. Cleopatra’s cedarwood ship, on which she received Antony, had perfumed sails; incense burners ringed her throne, and she herself was scented from head to toe. I return to her now because she was the quintessential devotee of perfume. She anointed her hands with
kyphi
, which contained oil of roses, crocus, and violets; she scented her feet with
aegyptium
, a lotion of almond oil, honey, cinnamon, orange blossoms, and henna. The walls were an aviary of roses secured by nets, and her regally perfumed presence arrived before her, like a kind of calling card in the scent-drenched wind. As Shakespeare imagines the scene: “From the barge/ A strange invisible perfume hits the sense/ Of the adjacent wharfs.” Romans became famous for their spa-like grandeur, but they actually borrowed the bath from the sybaritic Egyptians.
In the ancient world, royal architecture itself was often aromatic. Potentates built whole palaces of cedarwood, in part because of itssweet, resiny scent, and in part because it was a natural insect repellent. In the Nanmu Hall at the imperial summer palace of the Manchu emperors at Ch’eng-te, the beams and paneling, all of cedarwood, were lacquerless and paintless, so that the fragrance of the wood could influence the air. Builders of mosques used to mix rose water and musk into mortar; the noon sun would heat it and bring out the
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