Free On Archimedes Street by Jefferson Parrish Page A

respondents were able to identify their sexual partners when asked to smell garments worn by them. In a third, people were asked to rate scent collected from the apocrine glands—can anyone tell me where the apocrine glands are located?”
    Silence again.
    “Dutch?”
    “Everywhere on the skin except the lips and the glans penis.”
    “Yes,” Honoria said, “but the glans penis has its own secretion.” Mimi looked annoyed. “At any rate, apocrine glands secrete a unique sexual scent, especially present in the armpit and groin, most strongly detected around the anus in the male and the pudendum in the female.” She had the full attention of the class now.
    “In one study, apocrine secretions from the perianal area of the male were collected and presented to female subjects….” The class was rapt. Mimi looked disgusted, and Googs Pizzalotta, star quarterback for the Redemptorist Rams, gave her an asinine leer.
    “The female subjects invariably identified as most pleasant the male scent that was most unlike their own scent. The same held true for male subjects presented with apocrine secretions collected near the pudendum of females. Can anyone tell me why this should be so? Flip?”
    A muscle in Flip’s jaw had been working visibly all through this exposition. “Genetic diversity?” he hazarded.
    “Exactly. It’s in the interest of the species to have a highly variable genetic pool, so people are attracted to those with an unfamiliar scent because that dissimilarity in scent signals that the smellees are least like the smellers genetically. Without variability, any population is more subject to extinction. Remember the Irish potato famine, where a single fungus wiped out the entire food supply of the poor, because the plantings were monocultural?”
    The class was lost.
    “At any rate,” Honoria continued, “if you want to find your true love, my advice to you is not to use deodorant. Let your true love sniff you out.”
    Stunned silence.
    “Interestingly”—Honoria was enjoying the reception her words were receiving—“the opposite is true of homosexual subjects.” The class shifted uneasily. “Homosexual men, when presented with swabs of the perianal scent of other males, preferred the scent that was most similar to their own.”
    The class writhed in discomfort.
    “Yes. Well. We have abundant historical evidence of the primacy of the sense of smell in the human experience. First, in the arena of sexual attraction, we have the evidence of Napoleon, who wrote to Josephine, ‘Je viens, ne lavez pas,’ which means…. Mimi?”
    “I’m coming, don’t wash,” hissed a pissed-off Mimi.
    “Exactly,” said Honoria.
    “The other way around,” snorted Dutch to Flip. “Don’t wash, and then I’ll come. Haw! Haw! Haw!” Dutch worked his knee up and down, as always. Flip worked his jaw some more.
    “And there is also an intimate association between the olfactory apparatus and the emotions,” continued Honoria. “A scent from long ago can evoke a distant memory, bringing a past experience into sharp, present focus. Does anyone know about Proust and the madeleine?”
    Silence. Honoria explained how the taste of a cookie had telescoped Proust into his childhood.
    “So, olfaction has the power to summon emotion and the past in immediate, urgent ways that no other sense can rival. What role, Googs,” said Honoria, “does the sense of smell play in the sense of taste?’
    Googs, the dumbest in the class, said, “A big role?”
    “A preeminent role,” said Honoria. “The taste buds,” she continued, “are specific receptors for the sense of taste and are widely but not uniformly distributed in the oral cavity. Most are located in the papillae, peg-like projections of the mucosae, on the dorsal surface of the tongue….”
     
     
    A FTER CLASS , Dutch and Flip were both headed for Sister Immaculata’s Bible as Literature class. “Wait up,” said Flip. “Gotta take a leak.” In the