The Book of Salt - Monique Truong [85]
While GertrudeStein has little interest in how her automobile works or more often in how it does not, she believes that there exists between the two of them a bond, sinewy and organic. She feels that bond with motorized beasts of burden of all kinds, really. If it was up to her, she and Miss Toklas would be driving a truck. Every time she sits behind the wheel, she is certain that it helps her creativity to flow, that it encourages her words to find their otherwise reluctant mates. GertrudeStein thinks it is the rumbling motor, the bouncing seats, or maybe just the rolling promise of speed. Miss Toklas wonders whether it is the fumes. Petrol and motor oil may promote the release of genius, Miss Toklas thinks. GertrudeStein dismisses that as being highly unlikely. She refuses to assign such prowess to her sense of smell. Her nose, she thinks, is a dismal failure. She blames it for her inability to examine patients and her inability to cook. Miss Toklas thinks it is inappropriate and possibly grotesque for her Lovey to lump these two tasks together in this way. GertrudeStein reminds Miss Toklas that her first experience with a live patient in medical school was also her last. To be a good doctor, GertrudeStein has since concluded, one must possess a keen sense of smell in order to identify and, more importantly, to distinguish among the odors emitted from the body during its varying stages of decay. The breath, for example, unfortunately tells all. Honey could mean diabetes. Vinegar, an ulcerous stomach. The urine is also instructive. It can stink of turnips and cabbages, indicating a diet starved for meats. It can bloom with alcohol when the liver is drowning and has forgotten its function. There is also the oniony burn of unbathed sweat, the sweet sausage smell of a festering wound. Miss Toklas puts an end to GertrudeStein's line of comparison with a look that says, Proceed with caution! GertrudeStein heeds the warning but continues to claim that her nose had failed her because it could not bear the onslaught and retaliated by combining all of her patient's beastly odors into a solid wall of filth and stink, a wall that she was absolutely unwilling to breach. GertrudeStein's reluctant nose is, as she claims, also accountable for her absolute unwillingness to cook. Miss Toklas does not have to be reminded that an inquisitive sense of smell is of utmost importance in the domestic science, and that GertrudeStein would rather drink a glass of spoiled milk than bother to smell it beforehand.
GertrudeStein has to admit, though not to Miss Toklas, that in this instance she may be right. No place reeks of an automobile more than a garage, and she was in a garage the first time she became aware of the relationship between her creativity and her automobile. GertrudeStein was sitting inside someone else's equally temperamental vehicle, waiting for her own to be taken apart and reassembled with new spark plugs and a cigarette lighter for the dashboard, the latter a surprise for Miss Toklas. GertrudeStein was accompanied that afternoon only by a book, as Miss Toklas insisted that ladies do not frequent garages. The constant revving of the engines, the newly resuscitated automobiles tossing around their woolly balls of exhaust, were oddly riveting, GertrudeStein thought. The aggressive unmistakable smells of inanimate things coming to life, heat-blasted metals coming into contact with the musk of sweat, the smell of man ardently courting machine, were even more distracting. In the way that Miss Toklas in a corset is distracting, thought GertrudeStein. She looked down at the book on her lap, and she