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By Root 347 0

The Book of Salt. I know what those words mean now, Lattimore. I copied them from your thank-you-but-no-thank-you note onto a clean sheet of paper and gave it to the concierge. While the concierge had no sentimental attachments toward my Mesdames, he did have dreams of America and was learning English in preparation for the day when his dreams would come true. Until then, he intended to practice his English with Basket and Pépé. He translated the words into French for me, and then he asked whether it was the title of a cookbook. "No," I answered, "a book about a cook." The concierge seemed impressed anyway.

Salt, I thought. GertrudeStein, what kind? Kitchen, sweat, tears, or the sea. Madame, they are not all the same. Their stings, their smarts, their strengths, the distinctions among them are fine. Do you know, GertrudeStein, which ones I have tasted on my tongue? A story is a gift, Madame, and you are welcome.

GertrudeStein, unflappable, unrepentant, unbowed, stares back at me and smiles. This photograph of her and Miss Toklas, the second of two that I have of that day, was taken on the deck of the SS Champlain. It captures my Mesdames perfectly. I am over there, the one with my back turned to the camera. I am not bowing at GertrudeStein's feet. I am sewing the button back onto her right shoe. The button had come loose in the excitement of coming aboard ship. When I saw this one printed in the newspaper alongside the photograph taken at the Gare du Nord, I cut them both out, and I have kept them with me ever since. My Mesdames, I know, have them as well, carefully pressed in their green leather album, bulging by now with family photographs of only the public kind. I am partial to the one of them at the train station. GertrudeStein and Miss Toklas are perched on the bench ahead of me. My Madame and Madame are posing for a small group of photographers who have gathered for the occasion. GertrudeStein looks almost girlish. The folds of a smile are tucked into her ample cheeks. Miss Toklas looks pleased but as always somewhat irritated, an oyster with sand in its lips, a woman whose corset bites into her hips. We are waiting in the Gare du Nord surrounded by the sounds of trains—their arrivals a jubilant clanging, their departures dirgelike, spent sorrows and last-minute sentiments caught underneath their accelerating wheels. My eyes are closed because thinking, for me, is sometimes aided by the dark. I see there the waters off Le Havre. I see there how that body is so receptive to the light of a full October moon. I feel there my body growing limp in that soft light. "What keeps you here?" I hear a voice asking. Your question, just your desire to know my answer, keeps me, is my response. In the dark, I see you smile. I look up instinctually, as if someone has called out my name.

* * *

MONIQUE TRUONG was born in Saigon in 1968 and moved to the United States at age six. She graduated from Yale University and the Columbia University School of Law, going on to specialize in intellectual property. Truong coedited the anthology Watermark: Vietnamese American Poetry and Prose. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, a national bestseller, has been awarded the 2003 Bard Fiction Prize and the Stonewall Book Award–Barbara Gittings Literature Award, among other honors. Granting Truong an Award of Excellence, the Vietnamese American Studies Center at San Francisco State University called her "a pioneer in the field, as an academic, an advocate, and an artist." She now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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