Suddenly she appeared at my cubicle, the way she does sometimes when it’s quiet and Friday, when she has nothing to do and figures I shouldn’t either.

“I don’t want you to get freaked out about this,” she said to me, sitting on the edge of my desk. “But here’s the thing: There was this guy in high school, and we used to call him Downy Dave.”

I am good at moderating my responses, while I am at work. I consider it a professional skill. So while inside my head, I might have been thinking something like, Oh Jesus Christ, that’s just fantastic — they had a nickname for a dude with Down’s Syndrome, and now I remind her of him, thanks for sharing, outwardly I simply said, “Oh? Really now.”

But I must have raised an eyebrow, or maybe blinked. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

“I said don’t freak out,” she laughed. “This isn’t a bad thing.”

I tried to flatten my expression. Dead eyes, flat mouth, limp cheeks, no smile, no frown, totally neutral. Vanilla. The non-chocolate Girl Guide cookies. Apparently that is an eloquent gesture too, and she laughed more.

“Stop! Not a bad thing, I said.”

“Okay, all right, I’m sorry,” I said. I brought us back to where we began: “‘Downy Dave’, ‘high school’, you remember him, I remind you of him.”

“Right! Right. So we all knew the guy, whose name was Dave–” (I gave her a flat look again, to express that this much I had gathered on my own) “– shut the hell up, this is taking long enough already. Anyway, the thing about him was that he was a nice-enough looking guy, and he was pleasant enough to talk to, but he always smelled really, really good. Like, insanely good.”

“And I remind you of this?”

“Oh, yeah. Yes. Same exact thing. The thing about Downy Dave was just that he always smelled really clean and fresh and nice, so all the girls would end up clustered around him no matter where he was. If you had a whole cafeteria full of empty tables, and him sitting off to one side, the guy would still have everyone sitting around him. Just… inhaling.”

“Downy Dave.”

“Downy Dave,” she said. “Yes. And you’re just like that. You’ve got that same kind of thing going on.”

“You know,” I said, “I remember one time when I was working in the video store, something like that happened to me. A woman said to me, ‘Wow, you smell really quite good. What is it you’re wearing?’ And I had to sort of stand there and stare at her for a second, because I’ve never worn cologne in my whole life, and I use the most neutral kind of Herbal Essences shampoo because it bugs my eyes. It all ended up taking just that split second too long, and started to get all weird, so finally I said, ‘Uh, Right Guard? …Green?’”

“You did not.”

“I did too, because it was God’s truth. She laughed at me as though I was making fun of her for asking, which was great because it made me come off looking like a smug asshole, instead of a totally confused wad of stupid. But I get that from time to time — girlfriends will smell my neck or something and ask me what I’m wearing. ‘It must be the soap,’ they say, ‘or what you’re washing your clothes in.’ But I’m not especially loyal to any of that, it’s just kind of me.”

“Downy Dave!”

“Downy Dave,” I said. “Who knew.”

“You know,” she concluded, “There’s a study that correlates spouses who have a strong connection to their partners’ scent and longer-lasting marriages.”

“You know,” I said, “I’d probably need a wife before that would do me any good.”

“You’re the one with the pheromones, there, Downy Dave,” she told me. “It’s not up to us how you use them.”

Then she was gone again, just as suddenly as she appeared. It took me a few seconds to realize that she had taken a deep breath as she walked by.

“Junkie!” I called after her.

She laughed all the way back to her desk.