The Book of Salt (5 page)

Miss Toklas likes the wind in her face.

It takes Miss Toklas nearly two days, interrupted only by their mutual desire to eat, to cut off GertrudeStein's hair. As each lock is slipped between the blades of her scissors, Miss Toklas smiles, and says, "Oh, this is so Spanish!" That is her highest compliment for any situation. Spain, Miss Toklas thinks, is where her soul first emerged, fully formed. Spain is where she first experienced Passion, without GertrudeStein. Every town has at least one house, marked by the sign of a cross, in which she could meet Her. Her flirtation, her lover, her Virgin. On their first visit to Àvila, she begs GertrudeStein to stay, to linger in the shadows of the city's cloistered walls. GertrudeStein suspects that on Spanish soil, Miss Toklas would become another's devotee. GertrudeStein could not bear such disgraceful competition. Paris, she knows, has its share of seductions, but those are at least corporeal in form. Miss Toklas is moved by the sight of GertrudeStein's shoulders as they are being eased into a shawl of newly clipped hair, lacelike, covering and revealing all at once. Miss Toklas keeps on cutting, remembering the monks who wound through the streets of Valencia, a slow-moving, deliberate act. She keeps on cutting, losing herself in GertrudeStein's conversion. After her two-day sitting, GertrudeStein is left with a patch of closely cropped hair that stops just at her earlobes, a mantle intended to be demure but instead alludes to the skin, bare and lurking below. She holds Miss Toklas in her arms, placing thank-you kisses in her palms. Miss Toklas remembers the children in Burgos who mistook GertrudeStein for a bishop and begged to kiss her ring.

Wiping her hands off on her apron, Miss Toklas would have walked down the hallway toward the studio door. She would have passed by her Lovey sitting deep within the shadows of yet another detective story. GertrudeStein is very democratic in her
reading choices. She delights in the clipped prose, the breakneck speed at which she turns the pages, the steamy mix of petty crimes and bad love affairs. She is especially addicted to the flagrant use of a distinctly American English, a language that she thinks ignites these stories with their vigor and vim. Over two decades in Paris, and yet with each day GertrudeStein believes that she is growing more intimate with the language of her birth. Now that it is no longer applicable to the subjects of everyday life, no longer wasted on the price of petrol, the weather, the health of other people's children, it has become for her a language reserved for genius and creation, for love and devotion. As she is destined now to see it more often than to hear it, GertrudeStein has also grown to appreciate its contours and curvatures, captured and held steady on the pages of the books and letters that cross her lap. The words provoke the scientific in her, remind her of her days in medical school, dissecting something live and electric, removing vital organs from a living animal and watching the chaos that ensues.

Miss Toklas likes the smell of fresh ink on fingertips.

She types and proofs all of GertrudeStein's writings. The intimacy that she has with these written words cannot be had, she thinks, by merely reading the finished, typewritten pages. She longs for the scrawl, the dark, dark lines where her Lovey has pressed firmly, deliberately. She recognizes each break in the flow of the ink, sometimes in midword, pauses for her pleasure. Not until she cries out "Mercy, please have mercy!" does the ink resume its flow. When Miss Toklas first moved into 27 rue de Fleurus, there were other women typing and proofing for GertrudeStein. Miss Toklas immediately recognized the familiarity that such acts bestow. She did not want to see the unfamiliar pairs of white kid gloves lying on the table, a shed serpent skin, fingers poised for the cool touch of the typewriter keys. She thought she smelled their sweat corrupting the ink on the pages. She needed to know that this was not so. Miss Toklas has long since made herself indispensable to GertrudeStein. She is as much a guardian of their temple as the solid door to the studio. She is the first line of defense, the official taster of the King's food, the mother hen. Miss Toklas throws open the studio door with a single flick of her wrist, a revelation in the strength of her hands. She sees my face, and says, "I am Alice B. Toklas, and who are you?"

"
THIN BIN
," says GertrudeStein, merrily mispronouncing my name, rhyming it instead with an English word that she claims describes my most distinctive feature, declining to share with me what that feature would be. I have learned that my Madame, while not cruel, is full of mischief. She never fails to greet me with a smile and a hearty American salutation: "Well, hello, Thin Bin!" She then walks on by, leaving me to speculate again on what this "thin" could be.

Short, I think, is the most obvious answer.

"Stupid," the Old Man insists.

Handsome, I venture, is the better guess.

All my employers provide me with a new moniker, whether they know it or not. None of them—and this I do not exaggerate—has called me by my given name. Their mispronunciations are endless, an epic poem all their own. GertrudeStein's just happens to rhyme. Every time she says my name, I say it as well. Hearing it said correctly, if only in my head, is a desire that I cannot shake. I readjust and realign the tones that are missing or are sadly out of place. I am lonesome all the same for another voice to say my name, punctuated with a note of anticipation, a sigh of relief, a warm breath of affection.

"Thin Bin," says GertrudeStein, "how would
you
define 'love'?"

While my Madame begins her question with what I have to come to accept as my American name, she has to deliver the rest of it, the meat of it, to me in French. It is, after all, the only language that we have in common. And GertrudeStein's French is, believe me, common. It is a shoe falling down a stairwell. The rhythm is all wrong. The closer it gets, the louder and more discordant it sounds. Her broad American accent, though, pleases her to no end. She considers it a necessary ornamentation, like one of the imposing mosaic brooches that she is so fond of wearing. She uses it freely on her daily stroll around the neighborhood with Basket pulling at her by a red rope leash. GertrudeStein never walks the Chihuahua. Pépé does not perform well when there is dirt or stone underneath his stiletto paws. First he shakes and then he passes gas. For a dog the size of a guinea hen, he passes more than can be imagined. GertrudeStein prefers the goat-sized poodle. Basket's cape, she believes, gives him a sensible air. Together these two ample ambassadors of American goodwill canvass the streets of the Left Bank, engaging the shopkeepers in their doorways, the old men walking their tiny dogs, the kind that, like Pépé, shiver all year round. It is always surprising for me to see Basket strolling with GertrudeStein. For all of His Highness's haughtiness when he is home alone with me, the poodle Basket on the streets of this city is reduced to yet another tongue-lolling, rear-end-sniffing, pee-spraying object of undue affection. I am not the jealous type. It is just that dogs, or rather Madame and Madame's love relationships with them, are more foreign to me than their language could ever be. As Anh Minh would say, "Only the rich can afford
not
to eat their animals."

GertrudeStein is fully versed in the language of canine appreciation. She uses it and Basket, panting and pink, to befriend even the surly butcher on the boulevard Edgar-Quinet, a man with one glass eye constantly trained on the rows of small stripped carcasses hanging in his shop windows. She uses it and Basket to sweet-talk the long-lashed Gypsy girl on the rue de la
Gaîté who hawks bundles of rosemary or violets, depending on the season, when Basket bounds over and licks her hands and sniffs underneath her skirts. My Madame uses it and Basket because her French, like mine, has its limits. It denies her. It forces her to be short if not precise. In French, GertrudeStein finds herself wholly dependent on simple sentences. She compensates with the tone of her voice and the warmth of her eyes. She handles it with stunning grace. When I hear her speak it, I am filled with something very close to joy. I admire its roughness, its un-apologetic swagger. I think it a companion to my own. I think we will exchange one-word condolences and communicate the rest with our eyes. I think
this
we have in common.

GertrudeStein has, in turn, taken an interest in my, well, interpretation of the French language. She is affirmed by my use of negatives and repetitions. She is inspired by witnessing such an elemental, bare-knuckled breakdown of a language. She is a coconspirator. She would, of course, enjoy the show. I remember that on the day that I was hired GertrudeStein was present for my first discussion with Miss Toklas about the menus for the coming week. That conversation took place then, as it does now, in the kitchen. GertrudeStein, I now know, never goes into the kitchen. She must have sensed the potential in me from the very beginning. I wanted that afternoon to ask Miss Toklas whether the household budget would allow for the purchase of two pineapples for a dinner to which my Mesdames had invited two guests. I wanted to tell her that I would cut the first pineapple into paper-thin rounds and sauté them with shallots and slices of beef; that the sugar in the pineapple would caramelize during cooking, imparting a faint smokiness that is addictive; that the dish is a refined variation on my mother's favorite. I wanted to tell her that I would cut the second pineapple into bite-sized pieces, soak them in kirsch, make them into a drunken bed for spoonfuls of tangerine sorbet; that I would pipe unsweetened cream around the edges, a ring of ivory-colored rosettes. And because I am vain and want nothing more than to hear the eruption of praises that I can provoke, I wanted to tell her that I
would scatter on top the petals of candied violets, their sugar crystals sparkling.

"Madame, I want to buy a pear ... not a pear."

Miss Toklas looked at me, recognition absent from her eyes.

I, yes, lost the French word for "pineapple" the moment I opened my mouth. Departing at their will, the words of this language mock me with their impromptu absences. When I am alone, they offer themselves to me, loose change in a shallow pocket, but as soon as I reach for one I spill the others. This has happened to me many times before. At least I now know what to do, I thought. I repeated my question, but this time I had my hands on top of my head, with only the bottom of my palms touching my hair. My fingers were spread like two erect, partially opened fans. Complete with my crown, I stood in front of my new Madame and Madame the embodiment of "a-pear-not-a-pear." I remember seeing GertrudeStein smile. Already, my Madame was amusing herself with my French. She was wrapping my words around her tongue, saving them for a later, more careful study of their mutations.

GertrudeStein has since made it her habit to test my skills. At first she was satisfied with my resourceful renaming of foods, animals, household objects. But as it was also her habit never to master any language but her own, she first has to compile her list in English, rummage through Miss Toklas's dictionary for the French equivalent, and then locate an illustration or physical sample for me to examine. This is an after-dinner activity for GertrudeStein. She devotes no more than half an hour to it, a diversion before she cracks open a broad-spined book for the remainder of the night. Miss Toklas is always nearby, her needlework bobbing in her hands. Recently GertrudeStein has decided that it would be more efficient if she begins with the last step of her formula. To do otherwise, she now thinks, is simply too impractical, like an artist who paints a portrait and then roams the world searching for its model. Conveniently for GertrudeStein, she already has a whole world stashed away in the rooms of 27 rue de Fleurus. Buttons, seashells, glass globes,
horseshoe nails, matchboxes, cigarette holders—the last inspired by Miss Toklas, whose voice reveals her habit—are deposited throughout the apartment. Some are grouped by types, some by years of acquisition, others by sentiment. By the time Miss Toklas moved into the rue de Fleurus, GertrudeStein had already acquired a sizable collection. Miss Toklas immediately understood. She did not have to be told that the objects of everyday life become relics and icons once they have touched GertrudeStein's hands. She already believed it.

The dinner dishes have been cleared and washed, and I have been again summoned to the studio. Surely after four years of this game, I think, there cannot be anything left in this apartment that we have not named. Last week, for instance, I had to inform GertrudeStein for the third time this year that Basket is "a-dog-not-a-friend" and that Pépé, well, Pépé is "a-dog-not-a-dog."

"Thin Bin, how would
you
define ' love'?"

Ah, I think, a classic move from the material to the spiritual. GertrudeStein, like the collectors who have preceded her, wants to see the stretch marks on my tongue. I taste a familiar drop of bitter in the back of my throat. I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and white china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room, speechless.

***

Paper-white narcissuses, one hundred bulbs in shallow pools of moistened pebbles, their roots exposed, clinging, pale anchors steadying the blooms as they angle toward the sun. The windows are never completely closed because the sweet powdery scent would be unbearable. In those corners where sunlight is an unfulfilled promise, there are bowls of varying sizes holding hydrangea clusters, dried, the color of barely brewed tea. With no water to weigh them down, the blooms rattle against their china vessels whenever a draft sidles through the garret. The petals scraping lightly against the bone-enriched walls sing the song of a rainfall. I choose to remember these things only. The rest I will discard.

I will forget that you entered 27 rue de Fleurus as a "writer" among a sea of others who opened the studio door with a letter of introduction and a face handsome with talent and promise. You stood at the front of the studio listening to a man who had his back to me. I entered the room with a tray of sugar-dusted cakes for all the young men who sit and stand, a hungry circle radiating around GertrudeStein. After years of the imposed invisibility of servitude, I am acutely aware when I am being watched, a sensitivity born from absence, a grain of salt on the tongue of a man who has tasted only bitter. As I checked the teapots to see whether they needed to be replenished, I felt a slight pressure. It was the weight of your eyes resting on my lips. I looked up, and I saw you standing next to a mirror reflecting the image of a wiry young man with deeply set, startled eyes. I looked up, and I was seeing myself beside you. I am at sea again, I thought. Waves are coursing through my veins. I am at sea again.