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By Root 296 0

responds to all objects of excitement with uncontrolled, uninhibited wetness, which signals that he is pleased. At first Pépé responded to the sight of his breakfast drowning by backing away and skulking onto Miss Toklas's lap. I can say one thing for these dogs. They know who favors them. Because not long after that pathetic display, I received orders to prepare for Pépé his very own plate. "My liver-stuffed dogs" is what I call Basket and Pépé when their Mesdames are not around. I say it in Vietnamese. I always speak to Basket and Pépé in Vietnamese. Believe me, "liver-stuffed dogs" sounds much lovelier in Vietnamese than in French. Anyhow, why should I disadvantage myself with a language that these dogs are more familiar with than I? "Fatten up, fatten up" is what I whisper to Basket and Pépé when I serve them their morning meals. Tasty, I always think. No wonder Basket and Pépé abhor me. They know that I would rather serve them than serve them. Basket and Pépé know what I mean, and they also know how best to punish me. Every morning Basket insists on breaking his fast underneath the very center of the dining table as opposed to his favored position by GertrudeStein's feet. He does it so that I will have to get on my knees and crawl toward him with my livers in one hand and my dignity in the other. As I emerge from beneath the table, as I stop this morning as always to marvel at the size of GertrudeStein's feet, my Madame pokes her head down and inquires, "Thin Bin, is Lattimore a Negro?"

No, GertrudeStein, he is an iridologist, I want to say, but I cannot remember the word for the science that you practice. You had warned me that the questions would come. They always do, you told me. Did her spine stiffen just by a degree, did her hand retreat after only a touch of your own, did her eyes linger a moment too long on your face? But GertrudeStein is different, you assured me. She has a democratic stare. Everyone is submitted to the same close examination. She looks and looks until she sees. Once her eyes have completed their task, she possesses you. Or so you think. Her weakness, Sweet Sunday Man, lies in the sheer force of her suppositions, swiftly forming hurricanes. They make her vulnerable in unexpected ways. My Madame bellows and those around her swoon like sails. She is fortunate that she has not drowned. She believes that her ideas come into the world as edicts. It is an act accompanied by the ringing of bells, cast-iron beauties announcing their presence from darkened towers. A hallmark of genius, Miss Toklas believes. She heard them, sonorous and solemn, when she first met GertrudeStein, her "King," her "Fattuski," her "Mount Fattie," her "Hubbie," her "Lovey."

A draft is seeping through the dining room windows. Pépé trembles in Miss Toklas's lap. A knife blade of winter air is making my Madame lonely and making her long for the touch of GertrudeStein's hands on the small of her back. This morning even the width of the table, she thinks, is too great a distance between them. Was there life before I met her? Miss Toklas wonders, even though she knows that the answer would only make her jealous and wistful. Why ask whether there were other hearts fluttering, racing, at 27 rue de Fleurus before she walked through the door, before she slid through the vivid red, the scarlet-curtained walls of her second birth canal? "What a silly question," GertrudeStein would surely say dismissively. That is why, for Miss Toklas, there are some things that she would never share, not even with GertrudeStein. Now that, I have learned, is Miss Toklas's most elaborate and eloquent of secrets. She appears to the world to be profoundly giving, wholly selfless, graciously volunteering. She appears to the world an empty page inviting a narrative, even if it is not her own. Miss Toklas fools the world because it is populated with fools who do not bother to look at the light in her eyes, the crisscrossing lines of steel.

There was life before GertrudeStein, but Miss Toklas had not lived it. She was thirty, and she had never heard the