Love like Quinces

“ ‘Thin Bin, how would you define ‘love’?’…. I point to a table on which several quinces sit yellowing in a blue and whit china bowl. I shake my head in their direction, and I leave the room, speechless.” (36)

“Quinces are ripe, GertrudeStein, when they are the yellow of canary wings in midflight. They are ripe when their scent teases you with the snap of green apples and the perfumed embrace of coral roses. But even then quinces remain a fruit, hard and obstinate – useless, Gertrude Stein, until they are simmered, coddled for hours above a low, steady flame. Add honey and water and watch their dry, bone-colored flesh soak up the heat, coating itself in a n opulent orange, not of the sunrises that you never see but of the insides of tree-ripened papayas, a color you can taste. To answer your question, GertrudeStein, love is not a bowl of quinces yellowing in a blue and white china bowl, seen but untouched." (40)

Binh’s tactile definition of love sharply contrasts with that of the anonymous narrator from City of Night. That passive capacity to receive someone else’s love does not fit into this fruity, metaphorical concept of simmering passion that must be coaxed and nurtured into existence. The brief bursts of sexual scenes peppered throughout The Book of Salt are rarely explicit, but the passion in those scenes is more tangible than the flat, graphic pictures that City of Night’s narrator uses to illustrate his empty desire to be wanted by many people.

This quote fits into the novel in several ways. First, it demonstrates Binh’s habit of generalizing the rules of food into the rules of life. Second, it appears in the chapter where Binh describes his inability to master French, which forces him to define his world by what it is not rather than what it actually is. Just as he tells GertrudeStein that a pineapple is “not a pear,” he tells her that love is not quinces constrained to a china bowl. We are reminded that love is exactly what Binh does not have; it is “seen but untouched.”

Binh (again, much unlike City of Night’s narrator) often describes his sexual fantasies. When his brothers fantasize about the clothesline girls, he imagines their bodies melting away to reveal “just their desires, strong, pulsating” (58). This, rather than the image of heterosexual sex, is something he can relate to. Eventually his desires materialize; he has rich fantasies about men. If he knew that Miss Toklas and GertrudeStein would entertain so many beautiful men, Binh remarks, he wouldn’t have required payment for his services. He waits for his “scholar-prince.”

Despite all of the time he devotes to building these grand fantasies, Binh cannot reap the fruits of his labor for more than a few fleeting scenes. He justifies this lack of permanency by explaining that sex is not bound by time - “there is no narrative in sex, in good sex that is. There is no beginning and there is no end, just the rub, the sting, the tickle, the white light of the here and now” (63). Does this explanation that good sex is timeless – that even if it seems brief, it is full of a depth that can’t be harnessed by normal space or time – complement or contradict his definition of love as a fruit that must be “coddled for hours above a low, steady flame”? In other words: Binh says that “love is not a bowl of quinces… seen but untouched” – does he attain this love in his brief (yet endless) passionate encounters?