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By Root 365 0

but especially GertrudeStein, always perk right up when photographers are around. A new group of them along with the captain of the SS Champlain were on deck waiting for us, and this time GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas seem genuinely surprised by the commotion that is intent on following them back to America. I have just returned to the deck after accompanying a line of porters as they carried my Mesdames' many trunks and cases into the sitting room of their suite. I make my way past the photographers and stand next to Miss Toklas. I am thinking about the bouquets of yellow roses waiting for them in their suite and how they are larger than anything that I have ever seen at the flower market on the Île de la Cité. Miss Toklas looks over at me and mouths, "Here, take this." She slips a small sewing kit into the pocket of my coat. My Madame points with her nose to GertrudeStein's brown velvet-trimmed shoes. Lying in between them is a single pearl button leaning on its metal loop, like a toy top at rest. The strap to GertrudeStein's right shoe flaps up and down, elated to be free. The strap flies especially high every time my Madame shifts her weight from foot to foot. GertrudeStein is dancing a jig because her feet are unused to the new leather and to the extra padding of the velvet trim. Miss Toklas slides her hand out of my pocket, and she grabs onto my hand, the one closest to hers. She squeezes it twice in quick succession. "Please, Bin, sew on GertrudeStein's button. We cannot have photographs of her looking so disheveled in this way!" is what Miss Toklas intends the first palpitation to say. The second, which is thankfully not as blood-stopping as the first, is less of a command and more of a plea: "Please, Bin, sew on GertrudeStein's button. I cannot have photographs of me prostrated before her in that way."

Of course, Madame, of course.

I pull the sewing kit from my pocket, and I do my part to make sure that GertrudeStein will continue to travel in style. The SS Champlain for my Madame and Madame, I know, is just the beginning. When we boarded this ocean liner, I saw no similarities between it and the Niobe. Believe me, there is nothing about my Mesdames' suite of rooms or the boulevard-wide decks of the SS Champlain that remind me of my previous voyages at sea.

Years ago when the Niobe docked in Marseilles, I stayed in that port city for a handful of weeks until I remembered what Bão had told me: It is easier to be broke at sea than on land. I signed up for another freighter of the same class as the Niobe, and I went back to living with water beneath my feet. I jumped from freighter to freighter for the next three years. During that time, I slept on land for a total of forty some days, nonconsecutive. Looking back, I cannot say what kept me on water or what kept me from land. I do remember that the moon's reflection was hypnotic when it shimmered on a saltwater canvas and that when I looked down into that circle of light I always believed that on the next ship, at the next port of call, I would find Bão. I found men like him, but I never did see that GoodLookingBrother again. Then one night as I scrubbed the cooking pots with another kitchen boy, who was from the Chinese island of Hainan but who spoke a bit of barter-and-trade Vietnamese, I mentioned that the moon had changed its shape, that it had grown more oval and long, like an unripe mango. Without even looking over at me, the kitchen boy said, "You need to shit on land again." While I had certainly received more elegantly worded pieces of advice, I thought that there must be some truth in what this kitchen boy said. His tone was confident, almost automatic. To this day, I am still impressed by decisiveness in precisely that form. So when our freighter finished its run in Marseilles, I said so long to the Hainanese kitchen boy, who was actually a man of thirty-five and a father of three, and I went to find a job on land. Besides Marseilles and Avignon, Paris was the only other French city that I had ever thought about. Through various means that even I do