Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen by Kate Taylor Read Free Book Online Page A

canvas often enough before, but perhaps the keepers have moved it toa new location or cleaned it and that is why it caught my eye in particular today. The fortune teller is a common peasant woman with a ruddy round face, but her client, who extends his hand and eyes her a little warily, is clearly a nobleman, with fancy clothes and fine features.
    I had never noticed before how much he looks like Marcel. The nose is long and straight, with the slightest bump or arching just below the bridge. The eyes are deeply set, with a pronounced line across the middle of the lid that separates the flesh of the lid proper from the flesh of the brow, as though the skin itself was carved from stone. The cheeks are flushed and the lips full and red. Well, people often remark that Marcel’s look is Italian. His darkness is actually Semitic—he inherits it from his grandfather Weil—but to be sure, there is something of the young and noble Florentine about him. Apart from the hair—the fortune teller’s client has the most lovely curly locks—and the skin—Marcel’s is less olive in shade—they are very close. Oh, but he is beautiful.
    I will not bore Marcel with a mother’s indulgent comparisons. He is already all puffed up with his hostesses fawning over him.
    I SAW MAX IN THE library today. He was behind the reserve desk, where the clerks load returned manuscripts onto their carts and wheel them back into the stacks. He had his back to me and was pushing a cart in the opposite direction, towards the glass door that leads to the unseen vaults, but surely it was him. I recognized the way his curls clingto the back of his head, and his gait, light, springy, and tentative somehow, as though he did not entirely belong to this earth. Only the cart seemed to anchor him to the floor. The library overalls, a one-piece affair in faded blue, looked too large on his small frame, and I can imagine he complains that they don’t fit properly and make him look shrunken or insignificant.
    He was always a bit vain. In the old days, walking along St. Catherine Street together, I would sometimes catch him spying on his own reflection in the shop windows, checking that he was really as beautiful as he wanted to be. This morning, I want to rise from my desk to follow him, to catch up with him and see his face, but a certain lightness in my stomach gives me pause.
    Fear and desire have begun a swift little ballet in my gut. Five years since he left Montreal, left for good, and his image still unsettles me, the idea of being in his presence, even a great room’s length away, fills me with fluttering hopes, all false, I know, and impossible little dreams. Can one call it love, this attenuated longing stretched over months and months until they become years? I both yearn for him and dread him, wondering sometimes if it is not simply the habit of heartache that has ensnared me. In moments of reason, I see that I am miles away from the real Max and wonder if I could actually love whoever it is he is now. And yet here he stands, all too familiar and infinitely desirable. I see him clearly, if at a distance, hovering at the end of the room. I am unable to rise and go to greet him; I am too certain this apparition will prove to be only a chimera.
    I return my eyes to the desk. I am allowing some fantasy to distract me from the task at hand. Mme Proust is tireless and I must work faster if I am ever going to get through thenotebooks. I’ll just skip ahead a few months here: I am determined to finish this one today, and move on to 1893.
P ARIS . T HURSDAY , S EPTEMBER 8, 1892.
    Great excitement yesterday because Marcel went off for his first sitting with M. Blanche. He returned in good form, filled with awe at the spectacle of the studio, with its huge north-facing windows and a young model who was hurriedly reclothing herself when he entered! Well, that sounds odd, but I do believe this M. Blanche is really perfectly respectable. He seemed very pleasant when