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By Root 398 0

at hand was the heart, so she was certain that there was something terribly wrong with the circulation of her blood, a condition she thought chronic if not fatal. She could no longer take deep breaths. She woke up during the night to find the hair on her head, in the folds of her underarms, in the V that parts her thighs, all matted with sweat. The peculiar smells of her own odors rising, a steam coming off her, nauseated her and aroused her to the presence of her body. During those nights, she did not so much sleep but close her eyes and wish the night away. During those mornings after, she swore that there had been butterflies, that they had landed one by one on her eyelids and along the empty clotheslines of her lips. She thought it was surely a condition to be treated, if not conquered, by medical science.

Gertrude "Gertie" Stein, twenty-nine and almost two hundred pounds, was in love, and she mistook it for a disease. She, like the chauffeur, believed in the power of strenuous exercise and a modified diet. She stopped having afternoon teas at the home of her beloved and started boxing with a welterweight, a man who no longer had any hope of glory and made up for it by making this fat young lady jab and swing. Lips red with strawberry jam, skin like slowly pouring cream, hair the color of properly brewed tea, all this was what she was giving up. She thought boxing would make her breathe again. She was wrong and that infuriated her. This loving thing is brutal, she thought, especially when there are three. Three is an unlucky number when it comes to love, especially when she was the third, the last to arrive upon the site of a fallen honey hive, still sweet but already claimed and jealously guarded. She wanted to be the only one. She would always want to be the only one.

"Obstetrics failed me," Gertrude wrote to her brother Leo. "Obstetrics has freed me, unlike my counterparts," she added. It was actually the other way around. She had failed Obstetrics. She had failed the class by such a great margin, with such fanfare, that everyone in the university had heard about it. "This young lady is taking and, worse, wasting valuable resources," declared the faculty of the school of medicine in one united, disapproving voice. A woman in medical school means one less man in medical school, these learned men reasoned. That, however, was what they had had to accept in exchange for a generous endowment from two phlegmatic spinster sisters, who had grown tired of disrobing before learned men whom they never, never intended to marry. The medical school took the spinsters' money and admitted women into their program of studies, but when Leo Stein's sister became the first among her sex to, well, show no interest whatsoever in female reproduction, she became a symbol, a very large living one at that, of how the natural order of things had been violated by the spinsters and their money. The repercussion was felt throughout the university. The male students smirked at her, and the female students shunned her for compounding their already heavy burden. In the end, there was for this young lady no other way except out. She could voluntarily take a leave of absence or she could stay on and suffer a formal expulsion. Without much hesitation, she dove into the Atlantic and backstroked her way toward the Old World, which her brother Leo had assured her was now really the New.

At 27 rue de Fleurus, Leo was the painter and his sister was the writer. His métier was a conscious decision, and hers was somewhat of a default. She had to do something with the pieces of her heart, a solidly built thing, dropped by the fluttering hands of a woman named for the fifth month of an unbearable year. She thought it best to set it down on paper, but there on the blankness that was hers to fill she placed her broken heart inside the body of a man. Unrequited love for a woman, the story that she found herself telling, remained otherwise unchanged. At 27 rue de Fleurus, she sought and found comfort in the tangle of her prose, in the thick nest of her hair, in