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the streets of Valencia, a slow-moving, deliberate act. She keeps on cutting, losing herself in GertrudeStein's conversion. After her two-day sitting, GertrudeStein is left with a patch of closely cropped hair that stops just at her earlobes, a mantle intended to be demure but instead alludes to the skin, bare and lurking below. She holds Miss Toklas in her arms, placing thank-you kisses in her palms. Miss Toklas remembers the children in Burgos who mistook GertrudeStein for a bishop and begged to kiss her ring.
    Wiping her hands off on her apron, Miss Toklas would have walked down the hallway toward the studio door. She would have passed by her Lovey sitting deep within the shadows of yet another detective story. GertrudeStein is very democratic in her
reading choices. She delights in the clipped prose, the breakneck speed at which she turns the pages, the steamy mix of petty crimes and bad love affairs. She is especially addicted to the flagrant use of a distinctly American English, a language that she thinks ignites these stories with their vigor and vim. Over two decades in Paris, and yet with each day GertrudeStein believes that she is growing more intimate with the language of her birth. Now that it is no longer applicable to the subjects of everyday life, no longer wasted on the price of petrol, the weather, the health of other people's children, it has become for her a language reserved for genius and creation, for love and devotion. As she is destined now to see it more often than to hear it, GertrudeStein has also grown to appreciate its contours and curvatures, captured and held steady on the pages of the books and letters that cross her lap. The words provoke the scientific in her, remind her of her days in medical school, dissecting something live and electric, removing vital organs from a living animal and watching the chaos that ensues.
    Miss Toklas likes the smell of fresh ink on fingertips.
    She types and proofs all of GertrudeStein's writings. The intimacy that she has with these written words cannot be had, she thinks, by merely reading the finished, typewritten pages. She longs for the scrawl, the dark, dark lines where her Lovey has pressed firmly, deliberately. She recognizes each break in the flow of the ink, sometimes in midword, pauses for her pleasure. Not until she cries out "Mercy, please have mercy!" does the ink resume its flow. When Miss Toklas first moved into 27 rue de Fleurus, there were other women typing and proofing for GertrudeStein. Miss Toklas immediately recognized the familiarity that such acts bestow. She did not want to see the unfamiliar pairs of white kid gloves lying on the table, a shed serpent skin, fingers poised for the cool touch of the typewriter keys. She thought she smelled their sweat corrupting the ink on the pages. She needed to know that this was not so. Miss Toklas has long since made herself indispensable to GertrudeStein. She is as much a guardian of their temple as the solid door to the studio. She is the first line of defense, the official taster of the King's food, the mother hen. Miss Toklas throws open the studio door with a single flick of her wrist, a revelation in the strength of her hands. She sees my face, and says, "I am Alice B. Toklas, and who are you?"

4
    " THIN BIN ," says GertrudeStein, merrily mispronouncing my name, rhyming it instead with an English word that she claims describes my most distinctive feature, declining to share with me what that feature would be. I have learned that my Madame, while not cruel, is full of mischief. She never fails to greet me with a smile and a hearty American salutation: "Well, hello, Thin Bin!" She then walks on by, leaving me to speculate again on what this "thin" could be.
    Short, I think, is the most obvious answer.
    "Stupid," the Old Man insists.
    Handsome, I venture, is the better guess.
    All my employers provide me with a new moniker, whether they know it or not. None of them—and this I do not