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movement, the flapping and fanning of many colored wings. We stand looking at
each other, waiting for my response. I am here to inquire about the position as a cook, I want to say, but lacking the finer components, I offer instead, "I am the cook you are looking for." Her eyes flicker with recognition and respond with an implicit "Of course."
    ***
    I have been behind the temple door longer now than any other in this city. I have been given my own set of keys. I know the arrangement of the rooms that the door once concealed. I have been given a room to call my own. I have slept soundly, dreamed deeply, inside it. I can walk through the others with my eyes closed. I can walk through them without being seen. I have heard all the stories that inhabit them, know the colorful faces that line their walls. I can imagine my Mesdames waiting here for me from the very beginning. Life at 27 rue de Fleurus, believe me, has the ebb and flow of the sea, predictable, with reassuring periods of calm.
    I had arrived on a Sunday afternoon, after all. Miss Toklas would have been nowhere else but firmly planted in the kitchen. Enrobed in thick woolen socks, secured underneath the leather straps of her sandals, her feet would have stood slightly apart as she peeled the tart green apples that would later that night soothe GertrudeStein's periodic hankering for her childhood in America. Miss Toklas always stands when she is in the kitchen. Cooking, she thinks, is not a leisure activity. But for her, it has become just that, and she is keenly aware of it. She keeps a cardboard box filled with recipes, like other women keep love letters from their youth. She is afraid that she will forget the passion. She now cooks for GertrudeStein only on Sundays. In their household, like others in Paris, the cooks are granted Sundays off. At the end of each week, Miss Toklas by necessity and by desire steps back into the kitchen, gets butter and flour underneath her fingernails, breathes in the smell of cinnamon, burns her tongue, and is comforted. They never dine out on Sundays. No exceptions. No visitors at the studio door with letters of introduction. No requests granted for a viewing of the paintings. On
Sundays my Madame and Madame are safely settled in their dining room with their memories of their America heaped onto large plates. Of course, Miss Toklas can reach far beyond the foods of her childhood. She is a cook who puts absinthe in her salad dressing and rose petals in her vinegar. Her menus can map the world. But lately the two of them have shared a taste for the foods that fortified them in their youth. Neither of them seems to notice that Miss Toklas's "apple pie" is now filled with an applesauce-flavored custard and frosted with buttercream or that her "meat loaf harbors the zest of an orange and is bathed in white wine. GertrudeStein thinks it is unfathomably erotic that the food she is about to eat has been washed, pared, kneaded, touched, by the hands of her lover. She is overwhelmed by desire when she finds the faint impressions of Miss Toklas's fingerprints decorating the crimped edges of a pie crust. Miss Toklas believes that these nights are her reward. She is a pagan who secretly yearns for High Mass. To her, there is something of both in their Sunday nights that lets her spirit soar.
    "Pussy, there is someone at the studio door," GertrudeStein would have called out from her chintz-covered armchair.
    There are two of these armchairs at 27 rue de Fleurus, and both of them are located in the studio. They were made-to-order and therefore could accommodate both the fullness of GertrudeStein's girth and the conciseness of Miss Toklas's stature.
    "Lovey, I am
tired
of dangling my feet in the air. A woman of my age should be able to sit down without having to look like a misbehaving child," Miss Toklas must have declared.
    "All right, Pussy, all right," GertrudeStein must have agreed.
    And their debate about the costly armchairs must have ended