"No, no, his hearing is fine. He's not deaf, just dumb," the Old Man screams in my ear.
Thanks for the clarification, Old Man, but I am afraid my Madame and Madame cannot hear you. I am the only one present who suffers in this way.
"Thin Bin, we assume this is you?" GertrudeStein asks for the third time.
I look down at the envelope and nod out the rhythm of a universal "yes." GertrudeStein, I know my name looks very different there from how it sounds. Tonal languages often do. Imagine capturing the lilt of my mother's voice, the grace note of her sighs, with the letters of your alphabet. Do not bother, GertrudeStein, a French Jesuit already did it many centuries ago. He is responsible for the discrepancy that lies before us now. Though I can assure you that that is the name that my mother gave to me on the day of my birth. And that in the corner, that is the name of my oldest brother, the sous chef in the Governor-General's house in Saigon.
At the sight of Anh Minh's angular hand, I shiver with the cold that lives in the center of all of our bones, that is registered by the brain as the sensation of being very much alone. I have not thought about him for months, not since my Mesdames came home with chestnuts stuffed in their coat pockets and heaped onto the back seat of their automobile. Anh Minh believes that chestnuts are the dainty crumbs from the mouth of God. A French god, of course. Or maybe just a god with a French chef. Either way, no one would have enjoyed that bounty more than he, I thought. Anh Minh is the only one. I did not have to see his name on the envelope to know. No one else on that or any other side of the globe would have written to me but he. I had sent him a letter years ago, almost five to be exact. It was full of rambling observations, biased accountings, and drunken confessions written in the cigarette haze of a crowded café. I would have preferred someplace more quiet, but the bodies all around me kept that establishment heated and warm. Outside, the city that night was celebrating the birth of the son of their god. Inside, the celebration was, as the Old Man would say, godless.
Blame it on the chauffeur, Old Man. He was the one who first told me about these places. The chauffeur's cautionary tales, a travelogue of all the establishments that he claims never to have visited, have been for me a necessary road map to this city. When there is change in my pocket, as there was on that Christmas Eve, I would buy a glass of something strong and sip it slowly. When there is nothing in my pockets but my hands, I would wait by the door for someone lonelier than I to walk by. That night I wrote to Anh Minh that I was sitting at a marble-topped table in a small but elegant salon de thé. I lied because I did not want him to throw my first letter home away. When months passed without a response, then years, I had to remind myself that Anh Minh is a man of few words. He would never waste them on things that have remained exactly the same. Why would he write? I said to myself, when nothing, absolutely nothing back home would ever change. He is Minh Still the Sous Chef. Anh Hoàng toils in second-class even now. Anh Tùng every day swallows the taste of printer's ink. The Old Man, well, he prefers communion wine with a chaser of rum.
"It is time for you to come home to Việt-Nam," Anh Minh writes. "No matter what he may have said to you, he is our father, and he is going to die."
My brother goes on to say that the Old Man has had a stroke, that he has lost all movement on his right side and is now confined to his bed. So it is true, I think, the Old Man's god can strike a man down. But from the sound of it, his god has yet to slay him. Yes, I am afraid, the Old Man is still very much alive. Forgive me if it has been easier for me to think of him as deceased. Since my first night on the Niobe, I can sleep only after I have eased his coffin into the sucking clay, after I have pushed Father Vincente aside to deliver my own version of the last rites. Otherwise, how could I leave her behind? Imagine brushing my lips along my mother's cheeks. Imagine her telling me to go if I must but for her sake "Don't look back." Then imagine him still breathing in the very next room. Forgive me if I am unable.
"He is our father," I read Anh Minh's words over again. Liar, I think. Whose version of this story should I believe? That my dear mother had a lover, who was her scholar-prince if only for a short while, who gave her shadow-graced embraces, who left her with me, her last son. Or that the Old Man is my father and that in spite of that fact he stood in front of his house, one that I will never again see, and he lied to me so that he could see me dead inside. As they say, Old Man, blood is thicker than water. But in our case, you have mired the seas with so much refuse and malice that no ship, Old Man, can navigate those waters and bring me back to you again. When your day comes and goes, believe me, I will not be wearing white.
The Old Man is breathing in air. He is breathing in dirt. It does not matter much to me anymore. My mother has finally had the courage to leave him. I did not have to read it in the body of my brother's letter to know. I have known for many days now. Anh Minh's letter only confirmed the reason for my mother's nightly visits. We said our good-byes in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The city, as it did today, had covered itself in a mantle of white. She was dressed in her gray áo dài, and I was bundled into two of my sweaters and my only winter coat. We sat on a park bench and chatted about nothing in particular, like two people who have spent their entire lives together. The snow around us was just beginning to melt, and she shivered with cold. I sat with her until the rising sun took her away. The visits continued until one day I saw her, but I was wide awake. In the hopes of easing my sorrow, she had taken the form of a pigeon, a city-worn bird who was passing away. Death, believe me, never comes to us first in words.
"God has given Má wings," Anh Minh writes. Succinct as always, I think. What he means is that our mother was no longer afraid. After years of saying her rosary, she went to sleep one moonless night and saw heaven vivid on the horizon. She stepped out from under the eaves of his house with a resolve that is the truest gift of faith. Her husband, a false prophet, could never follow her to where she was going. Her four sons, well, that is up to them. With that her final thought, her body became one with the earth, and her soul rose to heaven. A flourish of white.
"Amen," writes Anh Minh.
"Amen," I read aloud.
Startled by the sound of my own voice, I look up from my brother's letter. The kitchen is empty. My Mesdames must have left it long ago. I hear voices coming from the studio. In here, there is no one but the stove and the copper pans.
22
AS USUAL, I have to let myself in. What he does with his Saturday nights, he will never tell me. He is clean, freshly shaven, and has on a pressed shirt by the time he comes back to his garret on Sundays, so I do not ask. What does it matter, I tell myself, when he is here with me now. There is then the simple exchange of greetings, the swapping of our given names, what we have waited all week to say, the ways that our bodies make up for the lost time. Sweet Sunday, for me, then officially begins. My hands this morning are shaking, and the damn keys are sticking to their locks. I have not slept all week. Anxiety and anticipation have been playing their loud music all through the nights, and my heart has been keeping time to their jazz beats. Either that, or my Mesdames' next-door neighbors have purchased a phonograph and are choosing to believe that din and ruckus, like Basket and Pépé, do not travel. It is difficult for me to say for sure. About the source of the disturbance, of course, not the status of the dogs.
Basket and Pépé, believe me, are not going anywhere soon. My Madame and Madame are attempting to lessen their guilt about it by acquiring for His Highness and the Pretender to his throne the accoutrements of travel. They bought them leather collars, two apiece, punched through with shiny metal studs, and, for Basket, a fitted coat. No trousers. Basket is a dog, after all. Dogs, even the overly pampered variety, do not seem to require coverage of their hindquarters. As for Pépé, he looks better unclothed, and my Mesdames and he know it. Luckily my Madame and Madame have been much too preoccupied with such preparations to notice my hands, trembling. They think I have been spilling their tea, breaking their china, cutting mysel
f on the flowery shards because I am unused to and, therefore, unhinged by the persistent ringing of their telephone. We at 27 rue de Fleurus finally have a telephone of our very own. GertrudeStein never answers it. Miss Toklas is the house operator. At first she followed the French convention of responding to the rings with an "Allô!" shouted into the mouthpiece. Now she just picks it up and breathes. She waits for the voice on the other end to stumble forth a salutation and an identification. If she does not like what she hears, she hangs up. No explanations, no feigned excuses, nothing of the kind. She does the same thing with her eyes when she greets people face to face, so why would she behave any differently over the telephone line? GertrudeStein laughs out loud when she hears the dull thud of the mouthpiece hitting its cradle. She and I both know that Miss Toklas signals her distaste for the caller by how loudly she lets it drop. Such a useful machine, Miss Toklas thinks.
My Mesdames have been in a playful mood as of late. They are giddy. They have been telephoned. They have been telegrammed. Best of all, they have been photographed. GertrudeStein has not sat down to her writing table for weeks, and Miss Toklas has not once opened the cupboard to make use of the typewriting machine. I have been apprehensive all the same. Because photographers are even more curious than servants. The only difference is that photographers practice their invasive art while my Madame and Madame are still in the room. Midway through their visits, I often hear GertrudeStein sending Miss Toklas off to fetch some small souvenir of their years together in what, I imagine, must be an ongoing effort to sate the assembled crew. Miss Toklas is prouder than anyone of her life with GertrudeStein, but if it is a memento that she does not display in the studio, there is always a compelling reason why. Take "La Argentina," for instance. This past Monday, GertrudeStein sent Miss Toklas to retrieve her for the benefit of two Spanish photographers who had braved the snow to have tea with my Mesdames. La Argentina is a flamenco dancer, whose spinning skirts, red-tipped and full, wake my Mesdames up each morning and each night from where she dances high above their bed. Despite her name, my Mesdames acquired her in Madrid. The label on the back of the poster says so. The front of the poster, well, the front of the poster is a fine example of how some women can look pornographic even when they are fully clothed. If I look at La Argentina for long enough, I can almost smell her. It is no coincidence that I can see up her skirts while lying on my Mesdames' bed. This last statement is, of course, only conjecture as I would never presume to test that angle for myself.
Miss Toklas is a Madame with refined taste. She has bon goût, as the French would say. The lining of her purse is in the same color family as the lining of her coat. Matching would be overdoing it. The fragrance that she wears on the nape of her neck compliments the fragrances rising from her dinner table. Competition would be a waste, Miss Toklas thinks. GertrudeStein is a Madame with appetite, unmediated animal appetite. That means that in addition to La Argentina, GertrudeStein has cabinets full of figurines of her favorite Catholic saints made from seashells and chicken feathers, the handiwork of an order of devout but, I can only assume, profoundly blind nuns. She has shelves full of miniature fountains with pastel doves perched upon their ruffled rims, which I have seen peddled at tourist stands throughout this city. She has walls covered with paintings of women with green faces, broken noses, misshapen eyes, who often are also nude but who, unlike the flamenco dancer, would look much better clothed. Twenty-seven rue de Fleurus is filled with this and more, and it is Miss Toklas who has to winnow through it all. The paintings I have seen her move but never remove from the walls of the studio. Miss Toklas has an ostrich feather duster that she uses to sweep their nubby surfaces clean. Religiously is an apt way to describe the intensity and frequency with which she accomplishes this task. As for the molting saints and the souvenir fountains, Miss Toklas has found for them sconces along dark hallways, alcoves inside of closets, and other similarly intimate spaces within 27 rue de Fleurus. GertrudeStein never seems to notice the change in their locales. GertrudeStein, of course, never has to get up from her chintz-covered armchair to get any of these things for herself. Miss Toklas prefers to keep her that way.
Miss Toklas often will return to the studio with something entirely different from what she had been sent for, or, as in the case of La Argentina, she will return with nothing at all. Miss Toklas shrugs her shoulders and waves her empty hands, and soon the photographers depart, disappointed but apparently undeterred, as more of their profession continue to arrive at the rue de Fleurus. Without Miss Toklas around, I know that I would have much more to worry about. Left on her own, GertrudeStein would trot the photographers all through the apartment. Hell, GertrudeStein would drink tea with them while reclining on her bed, covers undone, sheets untucked, pillows unfluffed. Left on her own, I am afraid that GertrudeStein would have that cupboard wide open as well, distributing Miss Toklas's typewritten copies and her own notebook originals to all those who cared to see. And these photographers, believe me, are far too inclined to see. That is precisely why Miss Toklas is always around, for it is she who reminds GertrudeStein never to give it away for free. I can always tell when other writers have come to tea. They always leave a stack of papers behind, gratis. Miss Toklas is the first to read through them, and often she is the only one. GertrudeStein is a writer, not a reader, Miss Toklas thinks as she aims for the wastebasket. She never misses. Writers, I suspect, are in this way like cooks. We practice a craft whose value increases tenfold once its yield is shared and consumed. A notebook inside a cupboard is a cake languishing inside an oven long grown cold, unappreciated and in danger of being forgotten. If one looks at it that way, I have done nothing that GertrudeStein has not desired to do for herself. I have generously increased her readership by one.
The garret door swings open with a slight nudge of my shoulder. It has lost its usual creak. Sweet Sunday Man must have had it oiled during the week or, maybe, it is just the change in the weather. Wood does have a tendency to expand and contract like a lung out of air when the temperature outside plunges and then soars. Never mind the door. I know by the smells. Fresh paint and fresh air can mean only one thing. Sweet Sunday Man once told me that of the five senses, the one that he most distrusts is our ability to see. It is the one most easily fooled. More often than not, he claimed, it is the heart that tells us what is and is not there.
I see a Buddha belly stove. I see a desk facing the sunlit windows. I see shelves lining the walls. I see a rug by the foot of the bed. I see a piece of paper folded in half, lying tented on the floor. I have a hair from his brush. I have a handkerchief from his coat pocket. I have the worn laces from his shoes. I have every note that he has left me. I have saved them all. Their subjects are usually about time. His anticipated lateness, his eventual return, represented by a number floating lonely on the page. Sometimes the notes contain a short list of ingredients that do not exist. Ripe figs when there is frost on the ground, lamb when all the trees have already lost their leaves, artichokes when the summer sun is fast asleep, these are the foods that he has wanted to see on his plate. But week after week, I have had to tell him, "Wait." The ground underneath us is frozen. It has been that way from the very beginning. December, January, and February are months, though, that reward a resourceful cook. So, for him, I have simmered strings of dried figs in bergamot tea. I have braised mutton with bouquets of herbs tied in ribbons of lemon rinds until their middle-aged sinews remember spring. As for the artichokes, I have discarded all the glass jars of graying hearts afloat in their vinegared baths that I found hiding inside his kitchen cabinets. Sometimes, Sweet Sunday Man, it is better to crave.
I kneel down to see what he hungers for today. A gust of air enters through the wide-open windows and sends the note tumbling across the floor. It lands on one of its sloped sides, near the bolted-down feet of the Buddha belly stove. The little tent, I see, has a blue inside. Like the cloudless sky outside, I think. All of Paris has been out under it. The change came so swiftly that it is not accura
te to say that Tuesday's sun melted Monday's snow. It evaporated it, and the inhabitants of this city rejoiced. My Mesdames were no different. They canceled all their appointments. Miss Toklas telephoned the photographers one by one and told them to come back next week. So except for the two Spanish photographers who came on Monday for tea, the rest were all turned away. Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein then went and sunned themselves at all of their favorite outdoor cafés, which had been hastily reconfigured for the happy occasion. The sun, I know, saved me. It emptied 27 rue de Fleurus. Vacant rooms are notably discreet. They keep secrets and forget indiscretions. They echo praise and absorb curses. They are themselves prone to constancy and therefore prefer the company of the familiar. This is all to say that the contents of the rue de Fleurus sat mercifully undisturbed for the majority of the past week. So by yesterday when the last of the young men departed the Saturday tea for a premature spring night, I sighed. A gamble worth taking, I thought, as my eyes rolled back into sleep for the first time in five days. The sixth had just passed without incident and without photographers. Then when this morning arrived bringing with it a lemon tart sun, I sighed again. Threatening weather is the harbinger for most dismissals. A bonny blue day, I thought, rarely produces the same ill effects.
Blue is the color of a pristine sky, the color of a placid, sleeping sea. Blue is the iridescent gleam on the scales of a fish, a color that swims deep and fares best far from shore. Blue is the last bit of beauty that this animal has left to share, before a knife finds its soft underbelly and guts it. And here in this garret of city air and lingering paint fumes, blue is the color of all that remains. Blue, I know even before my fingers can confirm it, is the receipt from Lené Studio. The thin slip of paper is attached to the inside of a note card with a small dot of paste. The adhesive has bled through and left a greasy spot around the word "Lené." Even its elegant script could not save the receipt from looking soiled and sullied. Careless, I think. Sweet Sunday Man could not even wait for the paste to dry. He must have slapped the two pieces of paper together without a moment of hesitation, ran a crease through them both, and left them for me as one inverted V. The ink on the note is probably smeared, I think. For ink to dry, it also takes time.
The Book of Salt Page 24