Once upon a time, there was a fresh and pretty girl from a small town in Colorado, who did her schoolwork and her chores, earned her grades without undue effort, and climbed the ladder to college, graduate school, and the thirty-second floor offices of an august financial institution in the gap-toothed grin of Lower Manhattan. Her name was Genevieve, and she smelled like tea roses, not that she knew it, because Genevieve could not smell.

The affliction struck her when she was twelve, two years before she reached puberty. Perhaps it was something poisonous let off by the heap of smoking slag that melted its soft foundations and slipped downhill into a poisoned pool of smeltery waste twelve miles upwind from the town; heat and cold met in a thermophilic mating frenzy that released a whitish, sweet-smelling cloud of chemical sweat, which the gentle breeze carried obligingly until, in the early hours of the morning, it slipped over the town, over the sill and between the plaited curtains of Genevieve’s bedroom window. After a week of magical, god-given sunsets, coughs were developed; after a year, cancers were, too. And after precisely seventeen days, Genevieve lost her sense of smell.

A general settlement from a suit that followed the cancers went far enough to disclose by X-ray and rhinodigital prod the growths that had cut off Genevieve’s access to that nearest of the senses to memory and desire; but, as they were considered benign, and as the remainder of the funds would go somewhere towards her tuition at the well-regarded large college at which she achieved admission, Genevieve, in concert with her surviving parent, decided to leave them in place and spend the money on schooling instead. As financial decisions go, it was a wise one; and so there followed for green-eyed Genevieve eight years of schooling in sex, drugs, and political economy; and so did she learn to make her way in the world, and to have a good time. If she could scarcely taste the pizza at the late-night study sessions that so rapidly evolved into impromptu overtime delivery dinners with her colleagues in the Financial District aerie, she cared not a bit, being fully satisfied with the delicious way the searing-hot cheese flayed the skin from the roof of her mouth, just behind her straight, white upper incisors.

Though she cared as little for her missing sense of smell as she did for the boredom of her prepubertal summers, there was something missing from Genevieve’s life. For five years of steady earnings and wobbly nights out, she couldn’t put a name to it, until one day a black-haired swain named Darrow walked into the bar and off with her heart: husband. A lawyer by fate and inclination, Darrow was a man to go to bat with equal perseverance for his bond-merchant and pro-bono clients, from the black tower of his Firm’s offices in Midtown East. It was little needed in the speed of their courtship, but the air of year-in, year-out reliability he gave off was as solid as the bank-vault sound of the shutting door of a Mercedes sedan; and, guided by that strong pulse, Genevieve felt her way out of tipsiness into contentedness, assurance, and peace. Swiftly as a narrow-body jet picks up speed as its kerosene turbines fling it down the runway and into the blue on the way from Delta’s Cincinnati hub to a regional airport somewhere in Colorado, to inform a surviving parent in a dying town of wonderful, wonderful news, so did Genevieve and Darrow merge into the milk-blue of love. They moved into Darrow’s apartment, too (he had a rare space on the Upper West Side), throwing out in the process his furniture and moving Genevieve’s in (she had superior taste).

It was a love they made. For all their personal means, Genevieve and Darrow were full aware that there are things that cannot be bought, but must be built; and build they did, with as much care as a skilled mason levels the stones in a wall made to last a hundred years before maintenance would be strictly required. It was a love they made in joy: on the bed, the couch, the rug, against the fridge and the kitchen sink, and, twice, giddily, on the rooftop as the fireworks burst out the happy blatter of Independence Day. As confident of their relationship as the coasts of Spain and Morocco are of the Rock that stands proud between them, they merged their finances, and prepared for marriage. Both well-insured and, beyond that, possessing the means to see the finest specialists the nation had to offer, Genevieve, with Darrow’s circumspect approval, decided to have the growths removed that had so long robbed her of her sense of smell. Albeit content in every way, she wanted to smell the flowers at her wedding.

It would be three weeks off work from surgery to recovery, which, after their Parisian getaway, lay beyond the reach of her vacation and personal time, but such was the regard in which Genevieve’s superiors held her, and so general was the enthusiasm around the office for her happy love match — a joy that, as the wedding approached, seemed to ring in the shafts of the rising elevators themselves — that an exception was easily made through HR, time scheduled as unpaid personal leave, and a surgery booked with a team of specialists culled by Darrow’s pal Emerson and assembled specially for the purpose. So, with a see-you-soon party of pizza and cupcakes party to see her off, Genevieve went into the hospital to recover her sense of smell.

The surgery went without a hitch, and it was little time at all before Genevieve was back in her iron-framed, tempur-foam bed, the middle of her head swaddled in white gauze, reading everything from Middlemarch to Middlesex, and even O magazine. Darrow tended to her all the while: sensitive to her difficulty talking during the recovery period, he kept her Blackberry abuzz with grams of love flung like long-stemmed roses over the ether. Equally sensitive to the delicacy of her post-surgical mouth, he fed her upon special soups from Joe’s Shanghai, cooled in the spoon with his gentle breath, until, on the twenty-first of March, the wraps came off.

It was a pallid face that met the world that chill spring morning, still striped from the pressure of the bandage, in the specialist’s office on the Upper East Side. She was alone — Darrow, bound to the first hearing of a noble case, could not be there in person with her, though he kept her Blackberry buzzing reassuringly in her bag — and the first smell that met the unblocked passage between nose and mind was the antiseptic scent of a well-kept doctor’s office, but it was a smell, a smell!

On the way home, she smelled the cab, and it was marvelous the way it seated her in place and time. Here, she thought, is New York, New York by nose! She opened the apartment door to dozens of roses, sent by Darrow, and set in vases by their building’s super, and, lo, they smelled like roses, as nothing else in this world or any other does, save the smell of certain girls’ skin, skin such as Genevieve herself possessed, as she could now do with the pride that comes of self-knowledge. For hours, she went around the apartment, sniffing things: the faint bamboo of the kitchen drawer full of chopsticks from the takeout sushi they secretly fed one another by hand; the clean scent of her fresh sheets; the thrilling manufactured mint of toothpaste, the deep red odors of a glass of expensive Cabernet. Anxiously, she awaited her fiancee’s return.

And return he did, at seven o’clock sharp, kneeing open the door, another bouquet of roses under one arm, a bag full of soup dumplings from Joe’s Shanghai under the other, and a wide, calm, happy grin upon his mouth. She flung herself at him, nearly making him drop the dumplings in her fierce embrace, and then making him fully drop them when she pulled herself back. In her eyes was a horrible disappointment such as he had never before seen, and soon their green was goopy with tears. Darrow set down the roses, bracing himself for some truth he knew was about to come.

It was an hour before she could articulate it, a week before she came to grips with it, and, in a month, the wedding was off, Darrow sleeping on Emerson’s pull-out sofa while Genevieve sought new accommodation. For the truth was this: in a terrible, subtle, and inescapable way, Darrow smelled to Genevieve worse than a pile of rotten fish; and it is impossible to love someone who stinks in your own nose.