bells of genius, never felt their vibrations against the walls of her veins and arteries. Worse, she was beginning to forget that they could sound for her. She had to travel thousands of miles from home to escape the setting sun. She thought she was giving in to her instinct to flee, a fear so animal-like that she submitted willingly. Now she remembers it as a homing instinct, a flight toward as opposed to away. Thirty years in San Francisco, and she was beginning to fear dusk. Each day she looked up at the purple clouds and the ruby skies and saw blood vessels broken and spilling colors. She equated the setting sun with a woman's bruised face, a face that she had once glimpsed from aboard a slow-moving streetcar. Never before had she seen such a vision of violence and such a vision of open desire. She could not comprehend why the two had come together, joining forces, in that one body for her to see. Miss Toklas pressed her face against the window. She always stood this way even when there was plenty of room in the streetcar. Being near a window made her feel alert. The streetcar pulled up to a scheduled stop, and there on the sidewalk was a woman with her shirt unbuttoned, revealing the line between her breasts like a soft velvet string. A policeman had his hands around her arms. Her face was a riot of colors. As the streetcar pulled away with Miss Toklas still safely inside, she continued to look until all she could see was the back of the woman's head. She continued to look until she saw the moment when the pins gave way, when the woman's hair rivered down the back of her shirt, a sweeping stain absorbing into the fabric. Miss Toklas fainted. She fell into the arms of a stranger and had to be revived by the conductor. It was an astonishing occurrence on an otherwise routine trip from her father's house to the butcher, greengrocer, baker, fishman, and poulterer. It was a scene that should have faded long ago and would not. Miss Toklas held onto it, the broken face, the soft velvet string, as a talisman and a lure until she came to 27 rue de Fleurus.
Alice Babette Toklas arrived in Paris with a trunk filled with brocade jackets, Chinatown red; one fur coat, silver fox; a corset, cherry bright; and armloads of batik and silk dresses in colors that brought out the evergreen in her eyes. Tucked into her purse was a handkerchief trimmed with lace, one of the thirty-one she kept inside a balsam box, one for each day of even the longest months. She arrived with fingernails freshly manicured, each rose-watered digit topped with an arching white bower. She arrived wearing the scent of freesias and honey on her bare skin. The latter, GertrudeStein could not help but notice.
The earth underneath Miss Toklas's feet had lost its steady composure, had collapsed in a fit of hysteria, and she took it as a sign. An earthquake had transformed San Francisco into a biblical city. Floods emerged from the swollen tributaries of burst water mains. Fires lapped at the open wounds of cracked gas pipes. Unseasonable blooms flowered in the wake of the fires' insistent heat. Sections of the city were suddenly deserted, the inhabitants forced out in their nightgowns and bathrobes to face the strange calm of a cloudless sky. Miss Toklas's father slept through the quake. Five-thirteen in the morning was too early for him to rise. Miss Toklas walked into the garden, dug a hole, and filled it with the family's silver, an act she afterward could not remember performing, a preservation instinct that would always serve her well. In the days after the quake, she craved cigarettes, a hot bath, and a host of other things, which she could not yet identify. She took it all as a sign. A year later, as September was disappearing into October, Miss Toklas knocked on the door of 27 rue de Fleurus. As she stood outside the studio waiting for an answer, she heard the sounds of leaves batting against the autumn winds. She thought she was hearing GertrudeStein's laughter. Many years later, standing outside the same door, I thought I was hearing my father's voice.