***
Every Saturday, I wait. My presence, just inside the entrance to my Mesdames' kitchen, ensures that all the cups are steaming and that the tea table stays covered with marzipan and butter-cream-frosted cakes. Always discreet, almost invisible, I imagine that when the guests look my way they see, well, they see a floor lamp or a footstool. I have become just that.
"Hardly! You're not nearly as bright or useful."
Thank you, Old Man, for showing me the error of my ways.
At the edge of a crowded room, held in place by the weight of my shoes, thick-soled and cracked by the cold, I wait. The heat of so many bodies crowded together but not touching keeps the studio at a comfortable temperature, but the feeling of cold is, for me, a relative thing. Every Saturday, I search this gathering for Sweet Sunday Man's face and catch only glimpses of his back. But today, I tell myself not to be afraid. I will not be cast adrift. It is not only a matter of time. I do not need a reflection in a mirror, red on the blade of a knife, proofs that this body of mine harbors a life. I have my Madame and Madame. As long as I am with them, I have shelter. I am in the center of a hive, and it is Sweet Sunday Man who is the persistent bee. The honey that he craves is the story that he knows only I can tell. Last Sunday when I told him about the cupboard and what my Mesdames have stored inside, his breath left him. Sweet Sunday Man wanted to know the exact number of notebooks. He wanted to know the order of the typewritten pages. He wanted to know the exact words that GertrudeStein had written and that Miss Toklas had dutifully typed. I shook my head and shrugged my shoulders. In his excited state, Sweet Sunday Man forgot that the English language is to me a locked door. His breath left him again. He sat down at his desk, and I took that as a sign to begin preparing our evening meal. For the rest of the day, the usual rhythm of our routine prevailed. I cooked and he read. I caught him stealing glances, though. Admiringly, I thought. A sea change, I hoped.
But today's tea is like all the others. At 27 rue de Fleurus, even the furniture attracts more attention than I do. That cupboard is getting glances from all directions. Light from some unseen source is licking at its dark wood, sticking to it like wet varnish. Being at the center of attention can make anything glow, I think. Ah, I should have known. Sweet Sunday Man liked my story about the cupboard. He liked it so much that he repeated it. To everyone in the studio, from what I can see. Sweet Sunday Man, there is a fire at 27 rue de Fleurus. When you and the other guests show up for Saturday tea and see the flames, do you rush in to save my Mesdames, the contents of their cupboard, or their cook? The correct answer is Basket and Pépé. My Madame and Madame, as everyone knows, can take care of themselves. The cupboard also needs no assistance because Miss Toklas would run back into the burning apartment until every sheet of paper touched by GertrudeStein was safe in her arms. As for the cook, the assembled guests would scratch their heads and ask, "The Steins have a cook?"
Sweet Sunday Man, I did not consider my stories about my Mesdames then or now in terms of a barter and trade but as an added allure, a bit of assurance. With my continued "curiosity," I knew that I could offer you something no other man could. With my eyes opened, sensitive to these Mesdames of mine, my value to you I thought would surely increase, double and sustain itself. Value, I have heard, is how it all begins. From there, it can deepen into worth, flow into affection, and artery its way toward the muscles of the heart. My mistake, always my mistake, is believing that someone like you will, for me, open up red, the color of a revelation, of a steady flame. I long for the red of your lips, the red of your life laid bare in my mouth. But I forget that you, Sweet Sunday Man, are flawed like me. You are a dubious construction, delicate but not in a fine-boned way. Delicate in the way that poor craftsmanship and the uncertainty resulting from it can render a house or a body uninhabitable. Dubious, indeed. I hide my body in the back rooms of every house that I have ever been in. You hide away inside your own. Yours is a near replica of your father's, and you are grateful for what it allows you to do, unmolested, for where it allows you to go, undetected. This you tell yourself is the definition of freedom. As for your mother's blood, you are careful not to let it show. You live a life in which you have severed the links between blood and body, scraped away at what binds the two together. As a doctor, you should know, blood keeps a body alive.
Sweet Sunday Man, I marvel at the way that you can change from room to room. I envy the way that you carry yourself when you are in the studio, surrounded by the men who think of you as one of their own. The looseness of your limbs speaks of physical exertion for sport and not for labor. Your movements, large and deliberate, signal a life that has never known inhibition. You, Sweet Sunday Man, take full advantage of the blank sheet of paper that is your skin. You introduce yourself as a writer. You tell stories about a family that you do not have, a city in which you have never lived, a life that you have never fully led. You think yourself clever, resourceful, for always using the swift lines of a pencil and never the considered stroke of the pen. You shy from the permanence of ink, a darkness that would linger on the surface of the page and the skin. You are in the end a gray sketch of a life. When you are in the studio, I see your stance, its mimicked ease and its adopted entitlements. When we are together in your garret, I recognize it as an assumption that you try to rid yourself of, shaking it free from where it clings to your body. In there, in the only rooms in this city that we in truth can share, your body becomes more like mine. And as you know, mine marks me, announces my weakness, displays it as yellow skin. It flagrantly tells my story, or a compacted, distorted version of it, to passersby curious enough to cast their eyes my way. It stunts their creativity, dictates to them the limited list of who I could be. Foreigner, asiatique, and, this being Mother France, I must be Indochinese. They do not care to discern any further, ignoring the question of whether I hail from Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos. Indochina, indeed. We all belong to the same owner, the same Monsieur and Madame. That must explain the failure to distinguish, the lapse in curiosity. To them, my body offers an exacting, predetermined life story. It cripples their imagination as it does mine. It tells them, they believe, all that they need to know about my past and, of lesser import, about the life that I now live within their present. My eyes, the passersby are quick to notice, do not shine with the brilliance of a foreign student. I have all of my limbs so I am not one of the soldiers imported from their colonies to fight in their Grande Guerre. No gamblers and whores joined to me at the hip so I am not the young Emperor or Prince of an old and mortified land. Within the few seconds that they have left to consider me before they stroll on by, they conclude that I am a laborer, the only real option left. Every day when I walk the streets of this city, I am just that. I am an Indochinese laborer, generalized and indiscriminate, easily spotted and readily identifiable all the same. It is this curious mixture of careless disregard and notoriety that makes me long to take my body into a busy Saigon marketplace and lose it in the crush. There, I tell myself, I was just a man, anonymous, and, at a passing glance, a student, a gardener, a poet, a chef, a prince, a porter, a doctor, a scholar. But in Vietnam, I tell myself, I was above all just a man.
15
GERTRUDESTEIN is up early this morning, a rare and for me an unwelcome occurrence. "She wants an omelet," says Miss Toklas, who busies herself with the plates, silverware, and tray.
Six eggs beaten with a generous pinch of salt until the mixture is thick with air, until the color lightens to the bare yellow of chamomile centers. Two large soupspoons of butter, the first melted in the pan until it sizzles, a harmonic of anticipation. The second is tucked under the puffy skin that has formed in less than a minute, if the heat is just right. A simple dish that reveals the master, exposes the novice. My omelets are well regarded and held in high esteem by all those who have partaken. Like children, gullible and full of wonder, they always ask, "What is your secret?"
Do I look like a fool? I ask myself each time. Please, Madame, do not equate my lack of spee
ch with a lack of thought. If there is a secret, Madame, I would take it with me to my unmarked grave, hide it in my bony jaw, the place where my tongue would be if it had not rotted away. Dare I say it is your ignorance, Madame, that lines my pocket, gives me entry into the lesser rooms of your house, allows my touch to enter you in the most intimate of ways. Madame, please do not forget that every morsel that slides down your dewy white throat has first rested in my two hands, coddled in the warmth of my ten fingers. What clings to them clings to you. If there is a secret, Madame, it is this—I pause for effect, a silent tribute to Bão. Nutmeg! I lie. An important disclosure, they always think. They all believe in a "secret" ingredient, a balm for their Gallic pride, a magic elixir that anyone can employ to duplicate my success. its existence downplays my skills, cheapens my worth. its very existence threatens my own. Madame, if you add a sprinkle of freshly grated nutmeg to your beaten eggs, you will have an omelet laced with the taste of hand soaps and the smell of certain bugs whose crushed bodies emit a warning odor to the others. Nutmeg is villainous when it is not sugared and creamed. Used alone in an omelet, it will not kill you, Madame, but it will certainly choke you. If there is a "secret," Madame, it is this: Repetition and routine. Servitude and subservience. Beck and call.
While you have been waking up to the aroma of coffee brewing, dressing to the hushed rhythm of other people's labor, I have been in the kitchen since I was six and in your kitchen since six this morning. In my life as a minor domestic, a bit character in your daily dramas, I have prepared thousands of omelets. You have attempted three, each effort wasted, a discarded half-moon with burnt-butter craters, a simple dish that in a stark and economical way separates you and me.
From the very beginning, I knew. Miss Toklas would never be one to ask because she is a Madame who has secrets of her own. Miss Toklas places the omelet, the curved edges still humming heat, before GertrudeStein, a song of temptation falling on tone-deaf ears. GertrudeStein will not touch the food until it has dropped to the temperature of the dining room. Tepid, my Madame thinks, is best. Hot and cold are too easily discernible. Tepid is a worthy scientific investigation, a result that requires calibration and calculation. Tepid is also, for GertrudeStein, a delectable dose of revenge. Because Miss Toklas is happiest when her meals are consumed while hot, with thick tendrils of steam reaching up, catching her hair and dangling earrings. She insists on nothing less for those who sit at her table. She demands even more for GertrudeStein. When what is brought to the table simmers with passion and pride, its appearance, Miss Toklas believes, should quell all conversation, send hands reaching for forks and knives, incite lips to part in anticipation. Miss Toklas believes that with every meal she serves a part of herself, an exquisite metaphor garnishing every plate. GertrudeStein knows that for every minute that she indulges, entertains like an unwanted guest at the table, Miss Toklas suffers a little death. Worse, rejection enters the room and threatens to steal Miss Toklas's chair. GertrudeStein in this way extracts satisfaction for every indignity that she has suffered at the hands of Miss Toklas. Most recently there was the banishment of cream and lard from their diet for six miserable months. Miss Toklas's resolve ensured that the sight of GertrudeStein struggling, clumsy and oafish, to rise from her chintz-covered armchair would remain a secret only we three would share. The exile of salt, the expatriation of alcohol, the expulsion of cigarettes, these were the other brutal regimes that came and went, trampling mercilessly on my Madame's will. Retribution comes to GertrudeStein in a form so passive, potent, and cruel that it could subsist only between two lovers, between GertrudeStein and her "Sweetie," her "Queen," her "Cake," her "Cherubim," her "Baby," her "Wifie," her "Pussy."
I have heard them all. I do not have a favorite. I do not know what they mean. Though "Cake" sounds to my ears like the English name "Kate." A "Kate" who is good enough for GertrudeStein to eat is a "Cake," I say to myself and smile. Bão would be proud. "Slip your own meanings into their words," he said, a bit of advice that has saved me. Language is a house with a host of doors, and I am too often uninvited and without the keys. But when I infiltrate their words, take a stab at their meanings, I create the trapdoors that will allow me in when the night outside is too cold and dark. When I move unnoticed through the rooms of 27 rue de Fleurus, when I float in a current swift and unending, and I hear Miss Toklas offering to GertrudeStein, "Another piece of Cake?" I can catch my breath and smile.
This morning, like all others, I am expected to prepare a plate of sautéed chicken livers for Basket and Pépé, after I have fully attended to their Mesdames, of course. At 27 rue de Fleurus as elsewhere, the order of things is very important. "Pink on the inside and moist, but no blood should run when they are pressed with a fork" were Miss Toklas's precise instructions. A splash of cognac, Madame? I was tempted to but did not ask. I prepare one plate for each dog. These two are absolutely unwilling to share. I have to agree with Pépé on this point. Basket is a chronic drooler who contributes his own broth to each and every dish. A plate of liver, a pretty girl, another dog's pungent anus, it is all the same to Basket. His Highness responds to all objects of excitement with uncontrolled, uninhibited wetness, which signals that he is pleased. At first Pépé responded to the sight of his breakfast drowning by backing away and skulking onto Miss Toklas's lap. I can say one thing for these dogs. They know who favors them. Because not long after that pathetic display, I received orders to prepare for Pépé his very own plate. "My liver-stuffed dogs" is what I call Basket and Pépé when their Mesdames are not around. I say it in Vietnamese. I always speak to Basket and Pépé in Vietnamese. Believe me, "liver-stuffed dogs" sounds much lovelier in Vietnamese than in French. Anyhow, why should I disadvantage myself with a language that these dogs are more familiar with than I? "Fatten up, fatten up" is what I whisper to Basket and Pépé when I serve them their morning meals. Tasty, I always think. No wonder Basket and Pépé abhor me. They know that I would rather serve them than serve them. Basket and Pépé know what I mean, and they also know how best to punish me. Every morning Basket insists on breaking his fast underneath the very center of the dining table as opposed to his favored position by GertrudeStein's feet. He does it so that I will have to get on my knees and crawl toward him with my livers in one hand and my dignity in the other. As I emerge from beneath the table, as I stop this morning as always to marvel at the size of GertrudeStein's feet, my Madame pokes her head down and inquires, "Thin Bin, is Lattimore a Negro?"
No, GertrudeStein, he is an iridologist, I want to say, but I cannot remember the word for the science that you practice. You had warned me that the questions would come. They always do, you told me. Did her spine stiffen just by a degree, did her hand retreat after only a touch of your own, did her eyes linger a moment too long on your face? But GertrudeStein is different, you assured me. She has a democratic stare. Everyone is submitted to the same close examination. She looks and looks until she sees. Once her eyes have completed their task, she possesses you. Or so you think. Her weakness, Sweet Sunday Man, lies in the sheer force of her suppositions, swiftly forming hurricanes. They make her vulnerable in unexpected ways. My Madame bellows and those around her swoon like sails. She is fortunate that she has not drowned. She believes that her ideas come into the world as edicts. It is an act accompanied by the ringing of bells, cast-iron beauties announcing their presence from darkened towers. A hallmark of genius, Miss Toklas believes. She heard them, sonorous and solemn, when she first met GertrudeStein, her "King," her "Fattuski," her "Mount Fattie," her "Hubbie," her "Lovey."
A draft is seeping through the dining room windows. Pépé trembles in Miss Toklas's lap. A knife blade of winter air is making my Madame lonely and making her long for the touch of GertrudeStein's hands on the small of her back. This morning even the width of the table, she thinks, is too great a distance between them. Was there life before I met her? Miss Toklas wonders, even though she knows that the answer would only make her jealous and wistful. Why ask whether there were oth
er hearts fluttering, racing, at 27 rue de Fleurus before she walked through the door, before she slid through the vivid red, the scarlet-curtained walls of her second birth canal? "What a silly question," GertrudeStein would surely say dismissively. That is why, for Miss Toklas, there are some things that she would never share, not even with GertrudeStein. Now that, I have learned, is Miss Toklas's most elaborate and eloquent of secrets. She appears to the world to be profoundly giving, wholly selfless, graciously volunteering. She appears to the world an empty page inviting a narrative, even if it is not her own. Miss Toklas fools the world because it is populated with fools who do not bother to look at the light in her eyes, the crisscrossing lines of steel.
There was life before GertrudeStein, but Miss Toklas had not lived it. She was thirty, and she had never heard the bells of genius, never felt their vibrations against the walls of her veins and arteries. Worse, she was beginning to forget that they could sound for her. She had to travel thousands of miles from home to escape the setting sun. She thought she was giving in to her instinct to flee, a fear so animal-like that she submitted willingly. Now she remembers it as a homing instinct, a flight toward as opposed to away. Thirty years in San Francisco, and she was beginning to fear dusk. Each day she looked up at the purple clouds and the ruby skies and saw blood vessels broken and spilling colors. She equated the setting sun with a woman's bruised face, a face that she had once glimpsed from aboard a slow-moving streetcar. Never before had she seen such a vision of violence and such a vision of open desire. She could not comprehend why the two had come together, joining forces, in that one body for her to see. Miss Toklas pressed her face against the window. She always stood this way even when there was plenty of room in the streetcar. Being near a window made her feel alert. The streetcar pulled up to a scheduled stop, and there on the sidewalk was a woman with her shirt unbuttoned, revealing the line between her breasts like a soft velvet string. A policeman had his hands around her arms. Her face was a riot of colors. As the streetcar pulled away with Miss Toklas still safely inside, she continued to look until all she could see was the back of the woman's head. She continued to look until she saw the moment when the pins gave way, when the woman's hair rivered down the back of her shirt, a sweeping stain absorbing into the fabric. Miss Toklas fainted. She fell into the arms of a stranger and had to be revived by the conductor. It was an astonishing occurrence on an otherwise routine trip from her father's house to the butcher, greengrocer, baker, fishman, and poulterer. It was a scene that should have faded long ago and would not. Miss Toklas held onto it, the broken face, the soft velvet string, as a talisman and a lure until she came to 27 rue de Fleurus.
The Book of Salt Page 16