The Book of Salt (20 page)

First, my Madame pushes in GertrudeStein's chair and gathers the papers and notebooks knocked off the table by her Lovey's hands. When I first saw them I thought of overgrown knobs of ginger or sage sausages pushing against their casings. Either way, assertive and unmistakable, I thought. Next, Miss
Toklas wipes away the ink from the fountain pen, replaces the tip that GertrudeStein has flattened like the top of a volcano, and returns the instrument to its red lacquer box. Opening up a nearby cupboard, Miss Toklas places the box inside and takes out a typewriting machine. She sits herself down at the dining table, not in GertrudeStein's chair but in the one to the right of it, and begins to type. The piece of paper, strapped to the machine, flails up and down as each key comes in for a slap or a kick and always looks to me as if it is resisting.

Before meeting you, Sweet Sunday Man, I never thought twice about Miss Toklas's typing. I thought of it as a typical act of overindulgence, like the careful cutting of meat into bite-sized pieces for a child who is no longer one in age, or a singular act of pampering, like the donning of a new pair of shoes in order to soften their leather for the tender feet of a lover. Miss Toklas is capable of doing both. After hearing your predictions about my Mesdames' purported fame, Sweet Sunday Man, I must admit that I am more curious about the cupboard with the heavy black typewriting machine and the red lacquer box lying inside, like the skeletal remains of a once heftier machine and its elongated heart. Who knows what else this cupboard may hold? I think. My curiosity, which is the term that we in the servant trade prefer, tends to peak on Mondays, and, conveniently, Mondays are also when my Mesdames are absent from the rue de Fleurus for the good part of the day.

At the beginning of everyone else's workweek, my Madame and Madame take a leisurely drive around the city, often followed by a chorus of horns, to attend to their errands and occasionally to their friends. Today is no different. I watch from the kitchen window as GertrudeStein lugs a large satchel of books to their automobile. Miss Toklas follows with two
pâtés en croûte,
one perched in each hand. The "meat loaf," as Miss Toklas calls these pastry-wrapped beauties, are going to the homes of two of their friends. "One who is in poor health and another who is just poor," Miss Toklas said. "Skip the truffles in both," she told me. "It is the meat that they need, not the fuss." Miss Toklas has a
judicious approach toward extravagances, culinary and otherwise. Waiting inside the kitchen for tonight's supper is a third
pâté en croûte
with three times the usual amount of "fuss." After all, Miss Toklas
is
a sorceress: an act of charity and self-indulgence combined into one. Lucky GertrudeStein is always the intended recipient of truffles and other reserved luxuries. Outside, GertrudeStein is sounding like a race car driver and she knows it. Miss Toklas knows it too and places her hands over her ears. The repeated revolutions of the motor, the sounds of petrol pushed into an unwilling machine, wake the concierge, and he leans out of his window and shakes his fist. "Crazy Americans!" he grumbles. GertrudeStein waves back and smiles, assuming that the concierge must have said something to the jovial tune of "
Bon voyage!
"

My Mesdames are too trusting. They never assume the worst about those around them. Though, sometimes, I think they are just careless about what they care about. Either way, it is an unusual trait in an employer of domestic servants. I once worked for a Monsieur and Madame who placed a chain around the icebox before they went to bed at night. You can keep the damn cold, I thought. I had another Madame who padlocked the door to the toilets before she left the house. The nearby café, as I was forced to discover, required the price of a drink with every flush. Madame, your kitchen sink will have to do when my bladder is too full and my pocket is too dry, she should have heard me thinking. The worst, though, was a Monsieur who locked up the kitchen knives at night and wore the key around his waist. They are the instruments of my trade, for goodness sake! You, Monsieur, do not trust me with your life, but you trust me with your meals? Absurd,
n'est-ce pas?
All of this is to say that I was anticipating a security measure or two with my Madame and Madame as well, but their cupboard opens quietly, easily.

I see table linens, bundles of tea-stained cloth tied with mustardy strings, a sort of graveyard for ruined tablecloths, napkins, and runners. I am not surprised that Miss Toklas would save such things. Odd, though, that she would store them in this
cupboard, I think. But what was at first glance undeniably cloth turns into reams and reams of paper, as my eyes adjust to the sight, to the ivoried remains of what must be decades' worth of GertrudeStein's one-quarter of an hour. What
you
would have given to see this, I think. Opportunity presents itself to me so rarely. I am amazed that I still recognized it. Yes, I think, what would you give? Endless Sundays drenched in cathedral bells, the left side of your bed, a good-night kiss instead of a good-bye one, a drawer for my razor and comb, your eyes warm on my face when I am serving you tea in my Mesdames' studio, your desire for me worn there like a red bloom in your lapel.

***

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.

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 speech 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.