Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  As I sat, Kurt fingered the spines of books, making it clear there was something on his mind. After the prerequisite throat clearing, he got to what was bothering him.

  “Did George really say you could sleep downstairs in the antiquarian room?”

  All I did was give a slight nod. This was the task George had given me while we ate our pepper soup. It concerned an enigmatic poet by the name of Simon. In the mid-nineties, George had offered this Simon a bed in the bookstore when the poet had no place else to go. George had expected him to stay for a week or two; instead, Simon had been holed up in the bookstore for more than five years. Now, George’s enormous reserve of goodwill had been exhausted.

  Early on, Simon had actually been a fruitful member of the bookstore family. He helped around the store, he counseled the younger writers, he gave readings of his work in the upstairs library. But George said things had changed. In the past few years, Simon had taken to bad habits: lifting from the till, refusing to unlock the door of the antiquarian room for customers, and hiding away from the world so he could stay in bed. The worst part seemed to be that he didn’t even read good books. “Detective novels,” George said, spitting the words out like putrid grapes. “He locks himself in and reads lousy detective novels.”

  Tired of this spiral, George had asked me to evict Simon in the most diplomatic of fashions and then take over the antiquarian room for my own living and writing space. He’d warned me, though, that the affair should be handled with discretion. Not being sure who knew what about the case of the strange old poet, I kept my silence.

  “I wanted that room when it came empty,” Kurt continued in a hurt voice, “It’s the perfect place to write … .”

  He shook his head and continued to fiddle with the books. Not wanting to upset my new living companion, I quickly assured him there were no set plans, that the whole situation was very mysterious and I’d only know more after I spoke to this poet myself. Kurt decided to accept the explanation and, like a swimmer shaking off a cramp, he regained his confident attitude.

  “I guess that’s just George. That’s the whole Shakespeare and Company thing. You never know what’s going to happen.”

  With the air thus cleared, he sat down beside me on the bed and we began to talk. Kurt was from Florida and his dream while growing up had been to make movies. He’d worked in video stores, watched practically every B movie ever made, and then studied film at university. A few years earlier, he’d packed up his things and gone to New York to try to catch his break. He’d been shopping a script called Videowrangler, the story of a young clerk in a Florida video store who finds a blackmail tape mistakenly slipped into the return slot one morning. But first there was no luck, then a string of decidedly bad luck, so he decided Paris might shake things up.

  The change in countries didn’t change his fortunes. There’d been a misunderstanding with the girl who he’d thought had invited him to stay with her; then he’d been mugged while taking his money from a bank machine. Making it worse Kurt had decided to take out almost all of his money on that one occasion to avoid multiple service charges.

  “I should have gone for his gun,” Kurt said ruefully. “I could tell it was a starter’s pistol, but I just froze.”

  Left with few resources and no place to stay, someone suggested Shakespeare and Company and that’s how he’d arrived at the bookstore. In such an environment, Kurt had smoothly switched aspirations and was now transforming his movie script into a novel. With the air of a determined young writer, he spent his days scrawling notes in cafés and pounding conspicuously at the typewriter in the bookstore library.

  “I want to write another version of my biography for George,” he said earnestly. “My life’s totally changed since I got here. I’m a writer now. I feel it in my blood.”

  But no matter how hard Kurt tried to adopt this now literary posture, he still reeked of his old film ways. As we talked, he quizzed me on directors and constantly compared life to scenes from movies. My arrival in Paris, he said, was just like that scene from Dead Man when Johnny Depp arrives in that frontier town and finds himself with neither job nor money. Kurt was even physically marked by his devotion to movies. On his back was an enormous tattoo of spooling film. It descended from the tip of his left shoulder blade down to the base of his spine and then rose up to his right shoulder to form a giant V. His ambition was to fill the frames with the significant events of his life so he would have a permanent self-tribute etched in skin. He showed me the frames detailing New York and Florida and confided that soon there would be an image representing Shakespeare and Company.

  “George, he’s a great man, a great man,” he repeated as he lowered his shirt to conclude the viewing.

  Having lived at the store for the better part of a month, Kurt had discovered there was a minimum of structure. The official store hours were noon to midnight, but most days George opened earlier to accommodate the crowds. The major rule was that residents were expected to be out of bed in the morning to cart out boxes of books for the sidewalk display and sweep the floors before the customers arrived. Beyond that, George liked everyone to help out for an hour each day, whether it be sorting books, washing dishes, or performing minor carpentry chores. More idealistically, George also asked each resident to read a book a day from the library. Kurt said many chose plays and novellas to meet the quota, but he was still tackling novels. He fished out a dog-eared copy of Tropic of Cancer from his pocket to illustrate his point.

  The other important detail was the store’s closing hour. As Shakespeare and Company shut at midnight, residents were expected to be back beforehand to help bring in the boxes of books and lock the shop for the night. The closing time also served as a de facto curfew, because with the store locked, it was difficult to get back inside to one’s bed. Kurt said you could arrange to be met at the door or toss stones at the window in hopes of rousing another resident. Or, best of all, he added with a gleam in his eye, you could hold the keys to the store.

  “Right now, it’s the Gaucho who has the keys.”

  The Gaucho was another Argentinian, who’d lived at Shakespeare and Company for three months and had gradually earned George’s trust and the right to the keys. He made sure the residents kept in order, watched over the store, and occasionally helped with banking and other administrative tasks. Now this Gaucho was moving on to Italy to follow a woman, and his departure would leave a vacuum. Someone would have to fill the role of George’s top assistant, and there was great speculation as to who would be given the ring of keys associated with the position. It was obvious that Kurt wanted them badly.

  As he spoke, I fingered the keys in my pocket and wondered if they were the coveted ring. I didn’t say anything though, not wanting to damage our budding friendship or, worse, earn an enemy in my precarious new home. Even if Shakespeare and Company appeared to be a happy commune among the books, it was clear there was still some sort of social hierarchy to be climbed.

  Our talk was interrupted by a voice bellowing from below. I couldn’t make out any words, but the sound was a cross between the call of a rutting caribou and a grizzly bear with its foreleg caught in a steel trap. Whatever this noise was, Kurt jumped to his feet and made for the stairs.

  “That’s the Gaucho now,” he shouted over his shoulder. “We have to go.”

  Something about the voice made me hesitate, but still I followed, too unsure of this new world to do much else. Downstairs, there was a tall man with a goatee and a fedora tilted at a rakish angle. This, I gathered, was the Gaucho. He was leaning over and talking to a woman seated behind the clerk’s desk. Kurt informed me she was a young actress by the name of Sophie. She was taking a year away from Oxford to study at the Jacques Lecoq school of movement in Paris. Like Pia, George had given her a job at the desk one day when he’d been struck by her abundant charms.

  “Where have you been?” the Gaucho roared when he looked up and saw Kurt. “It’s time for dinner.”

  Kurt hastily a
pologized and explained I was a new resident and he’d been showing me around the store. When the Gaucho heard this, he puffed up his chest.

  “How long do you think you’re going to stay for?”

  “I’m not sure,” I replied, puzzled by the question. “A while probably.”

  “A week,” he said. “Nobody stays at the bookstore for more than a week.”

  I shrugged, uncertain. “George told me I could stay as long as I wanted.”

  The Gaucho grimaced. “Don’t listen to what George says. He’s too nice. If everybody stayed as long as they wanted, there’d be no space in the bookstore. You, you stay a week.”

  It was then that Kurt demonstrated his allegiances. After a soft cough to gain the floor, he reported that George had promised me the antiquarian room. Hearing this, the Gaucho growled and took an aggressive step toward me.

  “And what do you think you’re going to do about the poet?” he demanded, jamming his finger into my chest.

  Just as the scene began a slow descent into ugliness, the door of the bookstore creaked open. It was the man with the black hair and French-Chinese dictionary I’d seen in the library the day of the tea party.

  “You’re here,” he said, slapping me on my arm in a most friendly fashion. “Welcome, welcome.”

  The man introduced himself as Ablimit and then turned to Kurt and the Gaucho. “We miss the best food if we don’t leave now.”

  The urgency of dinner trumped the Gaucho’s rage. He slowly removed his finger from my chest and turned away. The three of them were half out the doorway when Ablimit looked back at me.

  “Aren’t you coming to dinner?”

  I hesitated, but Ablimit smiled again and Kurt reached back to drag me along. Even the Gaucho nodded grudgingly. It seemed a temporary truce had been called.

  9.

  During the weeks of living cheaply at the hotel, I’d devised a series of maneuvers to eat with little or no expense in Paris. There was a restaurant on rue de Clignancourt that served limitless plates of free couscous and vegetables on Friday nights so long as you ordered a half glass of beer. The large American Church in the seventh arrondissement had an almost-free all-you-can-eat pizza night with a minimum of sermonizing. Then there was the constant delight of the four-franc baguette and the endless cheeses that could be had so inexpensively at the city’s supermarkets.

  A particularly sublime discovery came from a teacher at the French school I’d attended. Anne was a graceful woman who took the job as language teacher after her husband died. She thrilled in introducing neophytes to the enchantments of Paris and by chance took an interest in polishing my rather rough crime reporter self. Anne suggested operas to see, offered books to read and, most wondrously, introduced me to the nutritious world of the Paris vernissage.

  Vernissage is a derivative of the French word for varnish. In reference to the last shining coat that artists layered on their paintings the night before their shows, opening parties became known by this name. In an art-rich city like Paris, there was always some gallery launching some artist and they lured visitors with bottles of wine and plates of hors d’oeuvres. Though these pleasures were intended for the journalists and potential patrons, if one dressed correctly and knew how to behave, these events made for delicious meals.

  Anne knew the best of the Left Bank vernissage scene, and while she toured these venues in search of new artists and old friends, I somewhat crassly focused on the food. The protocol was simple: Browse the art with an attentive eye, compliment the artist, then hover by the food table for long enough to gorge on a day’s worth of calories. There was one night when a gallery on the Left Bank served hundreds of miniature spinach and salmon quiches; another time, it was sushi and rice wine on a boat moored in the Seine; my favorite was an event for a painter of Lebanese descent that featured hummus, tabbouleh, kafta, and a divine array of falafels.

  Leaving Shakespeare and Company that night, Kurt and the rest dismissed my schemes as the work of an amateur. With everyone nearly broke and no proper cooking facilities in the lower part of the bookstore, the residents had become expert scavengers. They swore they would initiate me to their ways, and the lessons were to begin that very night.

  We turned left out of the bookstore, crossed rue St. Jacques, and took rue de la Huchette. The narrow street had once been among the filthiest in Paris and home to a young Napoléon Bonaparte when he first arrived in the city. Now it was a garish tourist ghetto, filled with Greek restaurants that competed for customers with displays of skewered seafood and the scent of burning fat. Touts stood in the restaurant doorways, playing merry with the crowds and shattering cheap porcelain plates at the feet of the more promising herds.

  Shakespeare and Company residents clearly weren’t worth wasting plates over, so we negotiated the street with ease. Emerging at place St. Michel, we cut past the spouting stone lions, along the flower shops and trendy bars of rue St. André des Arts, then down boulevard St. Germain until we arrived at a dismal gray building on rue Mabillon. Two guards stood slouched at the front door, but Kurt told me to walk straight in as if I belonged. We climbed two flights of stairs and came to an enormous cafeteria with row after row of benches and a long snaking line at the food counter.

  This was a student restaurant, one of more than a dozen in Paris. Subsidized by the government, a full meal cost fifteen francs here, just two American dollars. Technically, one needed a student identification card, but the line was full of other impostors like us: a family with three small children, a couple with shaved heads and scalp studs, a drunken man with a variety of stains across his shirtfront and down his pant leg.

  In exchange for a colorful meal ticket, one received two bread rolls, a thick bowl of vegetable soup, a generous slice of Brie, half a boiled egg with a squib of Dijon mayonnaise as garnish, a main plate of grilled lamb, sautéed potatoes, and green beans, a strawberry yogurt and even a slice of honey sponge cake with sliced almonds for dessert. With each morsel of food added to my tray, the more inclined I was to agree with my companions: This was the zenith of the cheap Paris meal.

  We sat at one of the long benches and while we ate, Kurt acted as spotter. Whenever a fellow diner left behind a tray with an untouched piece of cheese or a fair-size chunk of bread, Kurt raced out of his seat to grab the bounty. The objective was to collect enough abandoned food to furnish late-night snacks for the entire bookstore family.

  “Watch him well,” the Gaucho advised. “Next time, it’s your job.”

  Throughout this strange meal, Ablimit asked questions about my work at the newspaper and freedom of the press in Canada. As the dictionary I saw him with that first day suggested, he was in fact from China, but not Chinese, he stressed. He was Ughur, an ethnic minority from the northwest of the country. For more than half a decade, he’d worked as a television reporter and documentary producer, but he became frustrated by the censorship and pressure to put a positive spin on the news. Two years before, shortly after his thirtieth birthday, he’d managed to get a visa and then headed west, stopping first at a kibbutz in Israel, then moving up to Paris and Shakespeare and Company.

  “People just find themselves here,” said Ablimit, shrugging.

  As I ate, I felt bliss. Part of it was the simple pleasure of a full belly. I had always been thin of frame, consistently weighing 170 pounds for my six feet and one inch in height. But during that scant month in Paris, I’d nearly starved myself trying to conserve money, eating one meal a day instead of three, fasting entirely when I knew there was a promising vernissage that night. The week before, I’d passed a pharmacy that offered the free use of a scale and I’d availed myself of the service. The digital display read seventy-four kilograms, so the shock didn’t come until I scratched out the conversion in my notebook. It translated to just under 163 pounds. Between the forced diet and the long hours of walking, I’d lost seven pounds I could ill afford to lose. Now, thanks to the combination of George’s pepper soup and this plentiful cafeteria dinner, m
y body rejoiced in the sudden rush of salts and fats.

  I was also coasting along on my bookstore high. It was nearly miraculous that I’d found such an exotic solution to my predicament, and I felt giddy that the fear of homelessness—or worse, being forced to beg for a loan from my parents—had been lifted. Of course, if I’d rationally analyzed my situation, I would have realized it was barely better than before: I still had no money, no job, no plans for the future, and the bed in the bookstore certainly wasn’t the height of stability. But the day you move into an infamous old bookstore certainly isn’t the day for rational thought. I was eating with three intriguing and gregarious men from three very different corners of the world, we were sharing stories and laughing like friends. It was all good.

  And though I didn’t tell anyone at the table this, I took special pleasure in that cafeteria dinner because it was my birthday. I had turned twenty-nine that day, and though I’d always shunned parties and dismissed birthdays as something that should be celebrated by mothers, I was happy not to be alone. If I hadn’t found the bookstore, I would have spent the night in that dreary hotel room, looking forward to nothing more than another long walk the next day. At least at Shakespeare and Company, tomorrow offered the infinite promise of the unknown.

  When we’d finished our dinners and Kurt had a hefty sack of leftovers, we treated ourselves to cups of two-franc coffee from a machine on a lower floor of the building. The three of them discussed their plans for the night: Ablimit was giving a Chinese lesson at a nearby café, Kurt had accepted an invitation for a glass of wine from a young woman who’d been browsing in the bookstore earlier that day, and the Gaucho had errands to run in preparation for his departure for Italy. Ablimit and Kurt left first, leaving the Gaucho and me together in the entrance hall of the student cafeteria. Once we were alone, the Gaucho turned on me with the same ominous tone as before.