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By Root 375 0

contradict, to say "No, that is not true," who understood the sounds that we made. The First Officer, according to Bão, knew a few words of Vietnamese, but the woman who sold them to him was from the old Imperial City of Hue. His ears were trained only to respond to her Hue cadence, with its twists and undulations, like the wringing of wet silk, regal even as she sat naked asking for the money she had just earned. The First Officer heard in our southern market banter the unfamiliar language of a lower class of whores. This is all to say that Bão and I had built a safe house, and we were its only inhabitants. We were also the fatal flaws in its design. Arms raised, palms opened, giving ourselves up to the Indian Ocean winds that carried with them traces of loneliness like airborne granules of pollen, we were its only pillars, absorbing the whole of its weight. As long as we were together, we had shelter. The day that the Niobe docked in Marseilles, Bão collected his pay and waved good-bye from a ship heading for America. "As long as we are together, we have shelter," I mouthed to him, but he was already at sea.

The woman with the face of an owl repeats her question. My memories of Bão must have been swallowing me whole. How long have I have been standing there, silent? My delay in responding, even when what is posed is simple and direct, can usually be shrugged away with a smile and a "My French is not very good." But this afternoon I cannot deliver either one. I cannot respond to any of the woman's jangly French words because I am too enthralled by her upper lip with its black hairs twitching gently as she speaks. Her mustache, I think, would be the envy of all three of my brothers, who could only aspire to such definition after weeks' worth of unfettered growth. The arc of hair, like a descended third eyebrow, is topped by a solemn monument to the god of smells. Protruding from her forehead, abruptly billowing out as it reaches her eye sockets, it is not so much a nose as an altarpiece that segregates the left side of her face from her right. Moving northward, her facial features disappear underneath a skullcap of hair, dark, absorbing the late-afternoon light. I am overwhelmed by the intrusiveness of it all until I look into her eyes. They live apart from their housing. Chasing the light that gilds this city in early autumn, her irides are two nets gently swooping over a band of butterflies. Catching the light, the circles erupt, bright with movement, the flapping and fanning of many colored wings. We stand looking at each other, waiting for my response. I am here to inquire about the position as a cook, I want to say, but lacking the finer components, I offer instead, "I am the cook you are looking for." Her eyes flicker with recognition and respond with an implicit "Of course."

***

I have been behind the temple door longer now than any other in this city. I have been given my own set of keys. I know the arrangement of the rooms that the door once concealed. I have been given a room to call my own. I have slept soundly, dreamed deeply, inside it. I can walk through the others with my eyes closed. I can walk through them without being seen. I have heard all the stories that inhabit them, know the colorful faces that line their walls. I can imagine my Mesdames waiting here for me from the very beginning. Life at 27 rue de Fleurus, believe me, has the ebb and flow of the sea, predictable, with reassuring periods of calm.

I had arrived on a Sunday afternoon, after all. Miss Toklas would have been nowhere else but firmly planted in the kitchen. Enrobed in thick woolen socks, secured underneath the leather straps of her sandals, her feet would have stood slightly apart as she peeled the tart green apples that would later that night soothe GertrudeStein's periodic hankering for her childhood in America. Miss Toklas always stands when she is in the kitchen. Cooking, she thinks, is not a leisure activity. But for her, it has become just that, and she is keenly aware of it. She keeps a cardboard box filled with recipes,