The Book of Salt (24 page)

Miss Toklas's approach to knitting is the same as her approach to cooking. Take lamb à la Toklas, for instance. (This is my name for the dish, not hers. Too immodest a gesture, she would think.) In the early spring, American dinner guests at 27 rue de Fleurus are often served lamb. Only the Americans. Miss Toklas thinks that French lamb is wasted on the French. They have grown up with it, have come to expect it. But the Americans, they come to her table in ignorance, and it is they who will depart her table in bliss. On these occasions, Miss Toklas insists on
pré-salé
lamb, roasted simply in a disappearing swath of butter and served without sauce, condiment, or even a sprig of mint. Just a hunk of perfectly browned meat placed in the middle of an oval platter. The stark presentation is met with polite words of praise. Hypocrites, Miss Toklas thinks. She finds it most distressing that the world is so filled with people who flatter and eulogize before ever tasting. Miss Toklas would never waste her words in this way. Admire the china pattern, the crystal wine goblets, the hothouse blooms, but never compliment the food on sight alone. Wait until it has reached your tongue. After all, the tongue is an organ of truth. It cannot pretend to find flavors where there are none. Nor can it ignore the slip-slime of undercooked chicken, the aggressive tang of soured milk, burnt sugar's pervasive iron fumes. Miss Toklas is no fool. She knows and she expects that the lamb on sight alone will be sure to disappoint, raise invisible eyebrows about her supposed culinary skills. Ah, but then the lamb is carved and it is eaten and it is never forgotten.

Pré-salé
lambs are named for the salt marshes along the northern coast of France where they graze. Saltwater overflows onto flat stretches of land and leaves behind a sweet mix of herbs and flora. Elemental and tender,
pré-salé
lambs are salted and seasoned from the raw beginning. Now
that,
Miss Toklas thinks, is forethought. The first bite is a revelation of flavors, infused and deep. The second bite is a reminder of why we kill and eat the young. The third allows the brain back into the fray to ask, But how is it possible? Not a visible grind of pepper, a milky grain of salt, not even the faintest traces of rosemary, wild
fennel, or thyme, and yet the lamb gives all this and more. Yes, intrigue is what my Madame aspires to in all of her creations.

GertrudeStein's waiting kit consists of a stack of blank notebooks, lined and margined for schoolchildren to use, and a box of sharpened pencils. Ink is absolutely out of the question. Even when she is sitting at a proper table, ink runs from her fingertips to her face and through her hair. Ink always finds her sleeves and too often the front of her shirt. Miss Toklas tells GertrudeStein that she should replace brown—the color that gives her Lovey's wardrobe its distinctly uniform-like quality—with the even more practical black. Not only would it hide dirt, which is the only reason Miss Toklas can imagine for wearing the color brown, but black would also hide the ink. GertrudeStein thinks it is an excellent idea until she sees the slyness, a green snake below the water's surface, in Miss Toklas's eyes. GertrudeStein rumbles and Miss Toklas smirks. And it is in this manner, with their waiting kits in hand, that my Mesdames are so often found by the side of the road. Miss Toklas never panics. Her heart keeps its steady beat. She understands that this tableau that she and GertrudeStein present to passersby is universally seen as a beacon for help. Miss Toklas knows from all the cowboy stories that GertrudeStein has insisted on reading aloud to her (whenever the detective stories are set aside) that there is nothing more foreboding within the landscape of rocky mountain ranges and a blue blanket sky than the sight of a saddled but riderless horse. In the French countryside, a manless car is a saddled but riderless horse, a sure sign that something has gone awry. Miss Toklas knows that their peaceful scene will, therefore, trigger an irritatingly similar albeit helpful response. GertrudeStein thinks that it is her winning American smile, an open- faced roast beef sandwich of a smile, and Miss Toklas's jaunty hats that flag down the many offers of help.

While GertrudeStein has little interest in how her automobile works or more often in how it does not, she believes that there exists between the two of them a bond, sinewy and organic. She feels that bond with motorized beasts of burden of all kinds, really. If it was up to her, she and Miss Toklas would be driving a truck. Every time she sits behind the wheel, she is certain that it helps her creativity to flow, that it encourages her words to find their otherwise reluctant mates. GertrudeStein thinks it is the rumbling motor, the bouncing seats, or maybe just the rolling promise of speed. Miss Toklas wonders whether it is the fumes. Petrol and motor oil may promote the release of genius, Miss Toklas thinks. GertrudeStein dismisses that as being highly unlikely. She refuses to assign such prowess to her sense of smell. Her nose, she thinks, is a dismal failure. She blames it for her inability to examine patients and her inability to cook. Miss Toklas thinks it is inappropriate and possibly grotesque for her Lovey to lump these two tasks together in this way. GertrudeStein reminds Miss Toklas that her first experience with a live patient in medical school was also her last. To be a good doctor, GertrudeStein has since concluded, one must possess a keen sense of smell in order to identify and, more importantly, to distinguish among the odors emitted from the body during its varying stages of decay. The breath, for example, unfortunately tells all. Honey could mean diabetes. Vinegar, an ulcerous stomach. The urine is also instructive. It can stink of turnips and cabbages, indicating a diet starved for meats. It can bloom with alcohol when the liver is drowning and has forgotten its function. There is also the oniony burn of unbathed sweat, the sweet sausage smell of a festering wound. Miss Toklas puts an end to GertrudeStein's line of comparison with a look that says, Proceed with caution! GertrudeStein heeds the warning but continues to claim that her nose had failed her because it could not bear the onslaught and retaliated by combining all of her patient's beastly odors into a solid wall of filth and stink, a wall that she was absolutely unwilling to breach. GertrudeStein's reluctant nose is, as she claims, also accountable for her absolute unwillingness to cook. Miss Toklas does not have to be reminded that an inquisitive sense of smell is of utmost importance in the domestic science, and that GertrudeStein would
rather drink a glass of spoiled milk than bother to smell it beforehand.

GertrudeStein has to admit, though not to Miss Toklas, that in this instance she may be right. No place reeks of an automobile more than a garage, and she was in a garage the first time she became aware of the relationship between her creativity and her automobile. GertrudeStein was sitting inside someone else's equally temperamental vehicle, waiting for her own to be taken apart and reassembled with new spark plugs and a cigarette lighter for the dashboard, the latter a surprise for Miss Toklas. GertrudeStein was accompanied that afternoon only by a book, as Miss Toklas insisted that ladies do not frequent garages. The constant revving of the engines, the newly resuscitated automobiles tossing around their woolly balls of exhaust, were oddly riveting, GertrudeStein thought. The aggressive unmistakable smells of inanimate things coming to life, heat-blasted metals coming into contact with the musk of sweat, the smell of man ardently courting machine, were even more distracting. In the way that Miss Toklas in a corset is distracting, thought GertrudeStein. She looked down at the book on her lap, and she saw the printed words fighting for her attention, their confrontations disrupting order and meaning. To amuse her, to vie for her gaze, they allied themselves in provocative ways. They formed poems and plays, essays and the beginnings of very long short stories. They promised her the words to an opera and the history of everyone who has ever lived. GertrudeStein rummaged through the pockets of her jacket. Anything, a pin to prick some of her own red ink would be fine at a moment like this, she thought. Instead, her fingers found and pushed aside wrapped pieces of cinnamon candy that Miss Toklas had placed in her pockets in order to delay the faint fluttery feeling just prior to hunger, a feeling that she knew GertrudeStein deplores. Forethought is indeed Miss Toklas's hallmark, but forethought is never a match for a whim. This lapse in an otherwise spotless record of devoted anticipation left GertrudeStein in a rare predicament.

Recalling that it takes energy to fend for herself, GertrudeStein popped a red lozenge into her mouth and waited for the burn of cinnamon to wake her tongue. She then called out to the garage clerk and told him to hand her the pencil tucked behind his ear. For the next several hours, GertrudeStein steadily covered the book on her lap with her own writing. She found room inside the front cover, inside the back, in the margins, the cleansing expanses of white at the beginning of each chapter. The lines of text were printed too closely together, otherwise she would have written between them as well. When GertrudeStein returned to 27 rue de Fleurus, she presented the book to Miss Toklas, who promptly began to transcribe. Miss Toklas typed three complete copies and spent the remainder of the week carefully proofing each one. She then erased GertrudeStein's scribbles, turning the book pages gray. When she returned it to the lending library, both of their memberships were revoked. When Miss Toklas asked, GertrudeStein proudly identified their automobile as the mechanized muse. Every person and everything has its own throb and rhythm. The automobile, according to GertrudeStein, just helps to amplify them as it zooms on by. Now that she can so easily hear them, she told Miss Toklas, she would know exactly when to devote a sentence or a paragraph to any passing person or thing. Sentences can be hundreds of lines long. Paragraphs can be one word or two. Length has nothing to do with it. GertrudeStein does not eyeball a paragraph or a sentence. She hears it as her automobile zooms on by.

"Zooms on by?" Miss Toklas repeated, demanding to know how GertrudeStein could possibly drive and write at the same time.

"No, no," said GertrudeStein, "I was parked in a garage."

Miss Toklas wondered whether GertrudeStein's logic was, here, somewhat flawed. If Lovey was sitting inside a parked automobile, in a garage of all places, then it would suggest that movement and speed had little to do with Lovey's creative gush and flow. Miss Toklas concluded, despite GertrudeStein's assertions, that it must have been the garage and possibly the fumes.
Of course it was the garage. Sweet Sunday Man, can you imagine any place more masculine, more exclusively male? Yes, there are the
pissotières,
but my Madame does not have what it takes to gain entrance there. GertrudeStein does have an automobile, and that is all she needs to be admitted into the meetinghouses of the fraternal order of mechanics, taxi drivers, freight deliverers, and chauffeurs, among whom there is rarely a lady present, except for my Madame. She enjoys the attention, the fizzy distinction of being the only one. Now,
that
is what this Madame strives for in her creations.

Miss Toklas notwithstanding, I have noticed that GertrudeStein tends to avoid the company of women. Tiresome, GertrudeStein thinks. During the Saturday teas, the door of 27 rue de Fleurus is opened to both men and women. Only the women, though, are taken for a tour of the apartment, a forced march that ends in the kitchen, Miss Tolkas's balmy lair. The same tea and cakes are served here as out in the studio, the same paper-thin china cups and saucers, the same bouquets of flowers, drooping, however, as they are unaccustomed to the oven's heat. Miss Toklas keeps the conversation rolling along. She compares and contrasts the latest trends in dresses and shoes, shares her opinions about the city's better milliners and seamstresses, and dispenses unsolicited culinary and gardening advice. The women—colleagues, collaborators, friends, and occasionally lovers of the young men who at that moment are all in the studio, oblivious to their absence—remain for the most part silent. From shock, I am sure. Sitting in the kitchen with Miss Toklas and her "Chinaman," as they inexplicably think that I am, is not where these American ladies have traveled all this way to be. Shanghaied, they must feel. Well, yes, my dear, but at least on Miss Toklas's barge, you have me to serve you tea and cake.

As the afternoon wears on, some of the women shift gears. Maybe if they amuse Miss Toklas, maybe then, they will be ushered into the glow and the hum of that other room. Their sleek heads lean into my Madame's voice and their shoulders cup her
words. As they speak, they motion their heads toward the direction of the studio, their bodies yearning to follow.

No hope of that, my dear. Why fight my Madame so? Miss Toklas, believe me, is a package worth unwrapping. An artichoke, if you know what I mean. They never do.

Miss Toklas enjoys the attention, graciously answers all of their questions, and never forgets the task at hand. As the sun sinks, as the sounds coming from the studio rise, the women become resigned to the fact that the kitchen is their final destination. The more astute among them wonder whether they are confined here at the behest of Miss Toklas or GertrudeStein.

Both, really. But for different reasons.

GertrudeStein considers these women all merely "wives." Their actual marital status does not interest her, nor their sometimes obvious sexual interest in one another. Wives are never geniuses. Geniuses are never wives. GertrudeStein, therefore, has no use for them, especially at her Saturday tea. A social occasion, yes, but above all it is the first rite for the devoted. Those who amuse her, flatter her, hand over their beating hearts to her, are rewarded with an invitation for lunch, the second station toward intimacy. The third station can only be reached via an invitation for dinner. If there are wives involved, my Madame extends the dinner invitation to them as well, out of courtesy and rarely out of interest. For GertrudeStein, who already has one, thank you very much, wives are comforting, comfortable, and often someone to be comforted. They are amusing in small doses, distracting even, especially when their shapely legs arrive at the rue de Fleurus slipped into sheer stockings, a barely present mist that GertrudeStein knows can be made to disappear with several waves of her hands. Miss Toklas knows that GertrudeStein appreciates wives in her own ways. She sees GertrudeStein following the curves snaking up their skirts. Hell, blind men can even see GertrudeStein looking. Her appreciation for the female form is difficult to ignore. When Miss Toklas first visited the rue de Fleurus, she felt GertrudeStein's "appreciation" on her like a ribbon of steel. She felt her flesh rubbing
against it, felt sweat dripping down her back, sliding down the inside of her thighs. She crossed her legs, and GertrudeStein looked at her as if she knew. Salt enhances the sweetness. Delicious, thought GertrudeStein.