The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [111]
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,