The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [62]
From behind her desk, Madame's secretary nodded her head compassionately, reached out her hands understandingly, and said, "Leave it to me, Chef Blériot. But, if I'm to help, you must leave it all to me. All to me, do you understand?"
"Yes."
I often wondered whether Blériot had waited, paused for just a second before the "yes" or whether it was immediate, a pit poised on the tip of his tongue, discarded as a matter of instinct.
Second, Madame's secretary cornered Madame, who was returning home from the club and was still dressed in her tennis whites. "Get rid of him. Immediately! I don't want such filthy lies in my home," Madame announced in a squeak even higher than usual. "I can get two of them for what I'm paying for that one. Family always breeds trouble. Unfortunately, these people are all related to one another. These people! If they're not thieves, then liars. Poor, poor Chef Blériot. The humiliation," said Madame, carefully placing the appropriate outrage upon the alleged falsehood and not upon the alleged acts. She is French, after all. Madame is a snob but not a prude. She did not care about the relations of two men, just as long as they were of the same social standing and, of course, race.
Third, Madame's secretary sent for my brother. "I don't believe it," Minh the Sous Chef lied. "I don't want to call the chauffeur a liar, but I just don't believe it. I don't believe—"
"Of course you don't," Madame's secretary interrupted. "You're not paid to believe. You're paid to cook. I'm telling you that there is no doubt. He's been spreading lies of an explicit nature about Chef Blériot. Madame does not want him in the house. Who knows what he's capable of next? He's to leave here at once. "
All of that took less than an hour from beginning to end. But Madame's secretary was not done. "A woman with a knife never cuts, she plunges it in and digs" is another of the Old Man's sayings. It became clear to me that afternoon that that was not a reference to a cooking technique. For her final act, Madame's secretary sat down at her desk and took out a small mirror and smiled into it. She used a fingernail to fix the coral edges of her lipstick, smudged in the excitement of all that swift talking. She inspected the skin around her mouth. This was her nervous tic. We in the household staff have watched her becoming more and more "nervous" over the years. She could not walk past a mirror or a shiny surface without looking and searching. It was the inevitability of it, we believed, that made her so nervous. Someday, she knew, she would find it. At first it would resemble the fine lines underneath the surface of old porcelain. Then it would deepen and set itself in, until the area around her mouth became a cracked riverbed from which the colored wax that she applied to her lips would run. In the end, she would be left with the appearance of coral radiating from her mouth.
In the end, Madame's secretary sent for me. Spite was not flowing through her veins that day, just a curiosity about desire, Chef Blériot's desire. A closer inspection, she thought, would reveal what attracted Blériot's body to mine. She wanted to see for herself, to examine anew this garde-manger, this willow b ranch, she thought, of a man. A movement, a temperament, a tilt of the head, a swing of the hips, a tint of the lips, a thing she could adopt so that she could call Blériot her own. After all, Madame's secretary knows that the Vietnamese call men like