The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [19]
From the other side of the street you approached holding two books in one hand and in the other, dangling from one finger, a white paper box tied with some red string. Sweets, I thought. My eyes fell into the rumpled folds of your coat, the waves of your hair. I want to be at sea again, I thought. I want to be at sea again.
Your hair looks clean and freshly washed, I thought. An important indicator of anyone's overall cleanliness. You wear it parted on the left-hand side. A personal preference of mine as well. Your tie is tucked into the V of your sweater. I too prefer a sweater's soft drape to the buttons and bulk of a vest. Your coat looks warm. I would look good in it. Your hands ... your hands? But where are your gloves? Ah, hands like yours will not stay cold for very long. Your eyes, coffee and cinnamon. An infusion to wake me from sleep.
"Well, are you coming in with me, or shall we conduct our interview here in the doorway?"
Your French was flawless but with a slowness to its delivery, unctuous and ripe. I wanted to open my mouth and taste each word. "Interview," though, slapped me in the face. The word was a sharp reminder that I was a servant who thought himself a man, that I was a fool who thought himself a king of hearts. I got up and walked with you into a stairwell paneled with sheets of sunlight, slipped one by one through the dusty window-panes. I followed you up four flights of stairs, and with each step I was a man descending into a place where I could taste my solitude, familiar and tannic.
Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate—useless, GertrudeStein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in an opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched.
5
THE LAST TIME I saw Anh Minh, we met at the back gate of the Governor-General's house. I remember looking inside the brightly lit kitchen and seeing the ceiling fans whirl, pushing hot currents of air out the windows. It was two o'clock in the morning, but the kitchen was all oven heat. Chef Blériot had fired up all four of the coal ovens and stuffed them with slender loaves, their smooth surfaces slashed at even intervals. The rest of the house was dark, except for a dim glow coming from the window of the chauffeur's room.
Years ago when I had just joined the Governor-General's household, Anh Minh told me that the chauffeur was the first son of a rich merchant, had studied in Paris, returned to Vietnam to see his father smoke away all of the family's fortune in puffs of opium, lost his automobile to a gambling debt, and spent hours now, when he was not driving Monsieur and Madame's Renault, writing poems about Madame's secretary, a slightly cross-eyed girl who was half-French and half-Vietnamese. All this, my brother said to me without a breath or a pause. He ran in a similar speed through the life stories of the others who made up the household staff of fifteen. He was motivated by a sense of duty and not by a love of gossip. He knew that I would need these facts in order to survive. That they would help me to avoid the pitfalls of those personalities who ranked higher up than I. I was told these stories so