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By Root 277 0

attracts more attention than I do. That cupboard is getting glances from all directions. Light from some unseen source is licking at its dark wood, sticking to it like wet varnish. Being at the center of attention can make anything glow, I think. Ah, I should have known. Sweet Sunday Man liked my story about the cupboard. He liked it so much that he repeated it. To everyone in the studio, from what I can see. Sweet Sunday Man, there is a fire at 27 rue de Fleurus. When you and the other guests show up for Saturday tea and see the flames, do you rush in to save my Mesdames, the contents of their cupboard, or their cook? The correct answer is Basket and Pépé. My Madame and Madame, as everyone knows, can take care of themselves. The cupboard also needs no assistance because Miss Toklas would run back into the burning apartment until every sheet of paper touched by GertrudeStein was safe in her arms. As for the cook, the assembled guests would scratch their heads and ask, "The Steins have a cook?"

Sweet Sunday Man, I did not consider my stories about my Mesdames then or now in terms of a barter and trade but as an added allure, a bit of assurance. With my continued "curiosity," I knew that I could offer you something no other man could. With my eyes opened, sensitive to these Mesdames of mine, my value to you I thought would surely increase, double and sustain itself. Value, I have heard, is how it all begins. From there, it can deepen into worth, flow into affection, and artery its way toward the muscles of the heart. My mistake, always my mistake, is believing that someone like you will, for me, open up red, the color of a revelation, of a steady flame. I long for the red of your lips, the red of your life laid bare in my mouth. But I forget that you, Sweet Sunday Man, are flawed like me. You are a dubious construction, delicate but not in a fine-boned way. Delicate in the way that poor craftsmanship and the uncertainty resulting from it can render a house or a body uninhabitable. Dubious, indeed. I hide my body in the back rooms of every house that I have ever been in. You hide away inside your own. Yours is a near replica of your father's, and you are grateful for what it allows you to do, unmolested, for where it allows you to go, undetected. This you tell yourself is the definition of freedom. As for your mother's blood, you are careful not to let it show. You live a life in which you have severed the links between blood and body, scraped away at what binds the two together. As a doctor, you should know, blood keeps a body alive.

Sweet Sunday Man, I marvel at the way that you can change from room to room. I envy the way that you carry yourself when you are in the studio, surrounded by the men who think of you as one of their own. The looseness of your limbs speaks of physical exertion for sport and not for labor. Your movements, large and deliberate, signal a life that has never known inhibition. You, Sweet Sunday Man, take full advantage of the blank sheet of paper that is your skin. You introduce yourself as a writer. You tell stories about a family that you do not have, a city in which you have never lived, a life that you have never fully led. You think yourself clever, resourceful, for always using the swift lines of a pencil and never the considered stroke of the pen. You shy from the permanence of ink, a darkness that would linger on the surface of the page and the skin. You are in the end a gray sketch of a life. When you are in the studio, I see your stance, its mimicked ease and its adopted entitlements. When we are together in your garret, I recognize it as an assumption that you try to rid yourself of, shaking it free from where it clings to your body. In there, in the only rooms in this city that we in truth can share, your body becomes more like mine. And as you know, mine marks me, announces my weakness, displays it as yellow skin. It flagrantly tells my story, or a compacted, distorted version of it, to passersby curious enough to cast their eyes my way. It stunts their creativity, dictates to them the