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If Madame Rapacine had taught her anything, it was that if you wanted to capture a time, a place, a feeling, you needed to make it into a perfume. Iris understood, Rapacine hadn't destroyed the home she loved--- she had bottled it.
But for those few passersby who resist the dissociation the city begs of its residents, those who are more in touch with their bodies, or sensitive to whimsy, or at the very least not in a terrible rush, they had a surreal experience. A Pilates instructor and former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey company walked by and smelled the water and was reminded of the glamorous patrons at her first professional dance gig, opening a new club called Studio 54. A Japanese chef on holiday passed by and thought it smelled like the yuzu and rosewater cake he once baked for his sister's wedding. And a small child simply thought it smelled like her mother when she was going out for the evening. The perfume that poured from the brownstone could evoke a different memory for every person in New York. But all of them were beautiful.
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