The Book of Salt (21 page)

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 other 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.

Alice Babette Toklas arrived in Paris with a trunk filled with brocade jackets, Chinatown red; one fur coat, silver fox; a corset, cherry bright; and armloads of batik and silk dresses in colors that brought out the evergreen in her eyes. Tucked into her purse was a handkerchief trimmed with lace, one of the thirty-one she kept inside a balsam box, one for each day of even the longest months. She arrived with fingernails freshly manicured, each rose-watered digit topped with an arching white bower. She arrived wearing the scent of freesias and honey on her bare skin. The latter, GertrudeStein could not help but notice.

The earth underneath Miss Toklas's feet had lost its steady composure, had collapsed in a fit of hysteria, and she took it as a sign. An earthquake had transformed San Francisco into a biblical city. Floods emerged from the swollen tributaries of burst water mains. Fires lapped at the open wounds of cracked gas pipes. Unseasonable blooms flowered in the wake of the fires' insistent heat. Sections of the city were suddenly deserted, the inhabitants forced out in their nightgowns and bathrobes to face the strange calm of a cloudless sky. Miss Toklas's father slept through the quake. Five-thirteen in the morning was too early for him to rise. Miss Toklas walked into the garden, dug a hole, and filled it with the family's silver, an act she afterward could not remember performing, a preservation instinct that would always serve her well. In the days after the quake, she craved cigarettes, a hot bath, and a host of other things, which she
could not yet identify. She took it all as a sign. A year later, as September was disappearing into October, Miss Toklas knocked on the door of 27 rue de Fleurus. As she stood outside the studio waiting for an answer, she heard the sounds of leaves batting against the autumn winds. She thought she was hearing GertrudeStein's laughter. Many years later, standing outside the same door, I thought I was hearing my father's voice. She had left hers behind. I had unfortunately overpacked.

When Miss Toklas first met GertrudeStein, her countenance was steady. Calm, though, would be overstating it. Miss Toklas's expression, I imagine, was the same as the one that she wears now in all of her photographs: her eyes looking up, partially veiled by their heavy lids; her lips, fuller than one would expect, pressing together to ask silently, Well? Why must you stare? This is her expression in all of her photographs except for one. Taken in the year of the earthquake, a year before she would leave her father's house with no intention of returning, it is the only one displayed at 27 rue de Fleurus that shows Miss Toklas alone. Miss Toklas does not like to be photographed without GertrudeStein. The vice versa she knows is not true. The photograph shows her head and the upper part of her torso. Her head is turned sideways, and her gaze is directed down toward the lower, left-hand corner of the photograph. For those who do not know her, the pose says that she is shy, averting her eyes, modest even. She is standing in front of a fabric backdrop, which is slightly blurred. A ripple is running through it, as if someone had just left the room, closing the door firmly behind her, displacing a current of air, an invisible thing that animates for an instant the unfinished piece of cloth tacked to the wall. The sudden movement, caught by the camera's lens, is now an interloper, an unknown face in the background of an otherwise carefully composed tableau. Miss Toklas is wearing a Chinese long robe with soft rounded shoulders, silk with a heavily detailed border. She feels seduced, or so she imagines that seduction would feel this way, every time she slips it over her skin and lets its loose shape, its generous cut, cover her. The garment is pure theater, with long sleeves ending in bell-shaped openings that could make even the portliest of arms appear spindly. Hers are slender, glowing with youth, accentuated by the photographer's lights. Her face and arms shine white, hot. Her arms are crossed in front of her, the hands holding onto their opposing forearms. Settling just inside the sleeves, her hands are barely visible. The camera is curious and follows them into the shadows. I suspect that this is why she chose the robe, wanted to memorialize herself in it. its sleeves, ample and suggestive, serve as a proxy for an open neckline, bared shoulders, nipples arched against the swirling patterns embedded in the silk. A proxy, I imagine, for her desire to expose her body to light, a compulsion to wake it. This we have in common, I know.