Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  The fatigue that had been creeping up on me now struck with its full weight. I was so tired, I could barely stand, but Esteban wasn’t ready to move. Leaving him out in front of the bookstore, I used the keys to get inside and left the door ajar behind me.

  14.

  George had always been an unpredictable sort. Spurning job offers to walk to Panama, clinging to the underside of trains with Mexican vagabundos, letting complete strangers share his home. Then there was his penchant for disappearing.

  A most memorable example of this occurred when he first arrived in Paris in 1947. He was taking the French civilization course at the Sorbonne and was also thinking of a studying psychology, having come up with a theory of personality that linked the libido and the death instinct. But mostly he became embroiled in the Paris bohemia. He circled the various literary salons, he had numerous girlfriends, he dined with Russian princes, he was invited to châteaus in the French countryside by the likes of the Countess de Godlewska. George even started writing poetry in French, such as “Poèmes écrits dans l’après-midi,” which included verses like:

  La-haut une triste pluie creve

  Cette amourette

  D’une fleur, d’une fille

  Pendant que meurt

  L’après-midi

  It was such a frenzied lifestyle that many months passed without him contacting his family. Grace Whitman became so worried that she wrote the American embassy in Paris, asking them to look for her son. The embassy secretary conducted an investigation and wrote back to say that George was “apparently in good health” and it was “suggested that he communicate with you directly.”

  Even knowing this history, it was unsettling when George up and vanished the day after the Gaucho’s party.

  “Gone?”

  “He run off after the mail came,” Ablimit answered.

  It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and while the rest of us moped groggily about the bookstore or lay prone in bed after the previous night’s indulgences, Ablimit was the sole portrait of diligence. He’d been at the library desk since eight, an F inked on his hand and grammar books spread open before him.

  “His face very strange after reading a letter,” Ablimit continued. “He said to open store without him.”

  Ablimit assured me whole days passed without George making an appearance, and once he’d even left for a month in England without telling a single person staying in his bookstore. The clerks worked their shifts, the residents cleaned the bookstore, and Ablimit kept the bookstore earnings hidden away in a file folder.

  “You must forget how to worry if you live here,” he advised, turning back to an exercise on the use of the apostrophe.

  When opening time came and we began carting out boxes of books and greeting the day’s first customers, I was struck again by the faith George had in the inherent goodness of people. Here we were, a group of virtual strangers, running the famous Shakespeare and Company. Personally, I’d known the man for forty-eight hours and yet I had the keys to both his bookstore and his bedroom in my pocket. Coming from a life of police bulletins and home security systems, such trust seemed almost folly.

  Once the store was up and running, I took my place in the antiquarian room. One of George’s prime complaints was that in recent months Simon had repeatedly locked the door during the day and refused to let customers inside. As part of our arrangement, I was to rectify this by spending the afternoons in the antiquarian room and welcoming visitors while Simon kept out of the way.

  Simon was good to his word that first morning and had left the antiquarian room both empty and relatively tidy. As I settled behind the desk, I actually felt a flicker of relief that George had disappeared. The night before, I’d thought it obvious that the poet deserved a stay of eviction; in the sober light of day, this felt more like an obvious betrayal. George had asked me one thing in return for my bed—to rid the bookstore of the poet—and I had failed. Despite the keys in my pocket and the warm resolution with Esteban, there was the creeping fear that I would be the one banished.

  At least working in the antiquarian room, there was no shortage of distractions. Every few minutes, the door swung open and there was a visiting American scholar searching for original translations of Zola, an ornithologist with a question about a rare seventeenth-century birding guide, a lost Australian physicist wondering how to get to the Panthéon so she could pay homage to the Curies. It was akin to hosting a running talk show with a never-ending series of eccentric guests, all of whom wanted to stay and talk for at least a little while. After the solitude of the hotel and my walks, I quickly embraced this social mayhem.

  There was, however, one incident that left me troubled. Midway through the afternoon, a man dressed in a dapper black suit and a black cowboy shirt came into the room. His shirt was open at the neck and revealed a tattoo of a red heart with flames jetting from the severed aorta. In his hand was an unfiltered cigarette.

  “Excuse me, sir,” he said with the utmost politeness. “Do you happen to have a light?”

  With a flick of his thumb, he demonstrated that his silver Zippo had run out of fuel. Using matches I found in the desk drawer, he lit his cigarette and thanked me, again in the most courteous of manners.

  A short time later, there was a knock on the window and the man held another cigarette in the air. He was so gentlemanly that when he also asked if he might borrow a book to read while smoking on the bench under the cherry tree, I agreed without hesitation. After selecting a hardcover volume of Shaw dating from the 1920s, the man left with a gracious handshake. A short time later, I glanced outside and the man and the book were gone.

  Now a tremble of panic set in. Not only was there my handling of the Simon dilemma to worry about, but I had also let a rare and expensive book go missing during my very first shift in the antiquarian room.

  It was well past dark by the time I locked the antiquarian room. During the day, I had entertained dozens of visitors, answered a score of tourists’ questions, and even sold three books. I felt a contributing member of the team. My only regret was that George hadn’t passed and seen me hard at work.

  Hunger voicing its needs, I climbed up to the front library to see if Ablimit and Kurt were making the trip to the student cafeteria. Finding the room empty, I crossed into the main stairwell, where I was startled to see the office door open. George was inside, leaning over his desk and peering intently at a piece of paper. When I knocked, he jumped slightly in his seat and quickly pushed this paper under a pile of invoices.

  “What do you want?” he grumbled.

  Sensing it wasn’t the time to broach a subject as sensitive as Simon, I tried to retreat into the hall, but George would have none of it.

  “I saw you downstairs. Does that mean the poet is gone?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I blundered, “but close, really close … .”

  A raised eyebrow indicated George wanted me to continue, so I explained how I’d staked out Simon and surprised him while he was shutting down the antiquarian room the night before. This drew a chuckle, so I went through the rest of the story with great flourish, though careful to avoid mention of the substances consumed. I concluded by saying that Simon knew it was time to leave the store but needed at least a few days to raise some money. Meanwhile, the two of us would share the space, with me keeping it open for customers during the day and then writing there in the early evening and Simon sleeping there at night and doing his best to avoid being seen at Shakespeare and Company. I meekly expressed the hope that George wouldn’t be too upset with the arrangement, then awaited the verdict.

  “Did he show you his poetry?” George asked after a long pause.

  During lapses between antiquarian room visitors, I’d gone through the folder Simon had given me. Though I hadn’t read much poetry in my life and Simon’s work was challenging enough that I had to read each poem at least two times, I’d admired it. There was a crispness to the images and several of his lines kept running through my
head like stray echoes.

  “Hah!” George exploded when I admitted that Simon had given me the folder. “He’s bamboozled you! I knew you’d be friends with that character. Now he’s got you under his spell and we’ll never be rid of him!”

  Shockingly, George didn’t seem too upset by this prospect. Instead, he broke into a wide smile and repeated the story of Simon’s arrival at Shakespeare and Company.

  “A week! He asked to stay at the bookstore a week and he’s stayed five years.”

  Leaning back in his chair, he looked me over as if seeing me for the first time. Then he reached under the pile of invoices for the paper he’d been reading and stood up.

  “Why don’t you come have dinner with me upstairs?”

  15.

  It was the first time I’d been up to the main apartment since the tea party. Free from the crush of Sunday visitors, the room was infinitely more serene. We were in a book-lined cocoon and the madness of the store felt much farther than just three floors away.

  The apartment had long been the retreat of Shakespeare and Company. George spent countless hours here, cooking meals, reading through old letters, leafing through his books. The rich history of the store was reflected by the walls of framed photographs, the first editions of Ulysses and Tropic of Cancer, the mementos of travels past. George often boasted that with the apartment’s grand bedroom, its lofty view of the Seine and Notre Dame, and its endless supply of great books, the best Parisian vacation could be had without ever passing beyond the door.

  This apartment was also where George lodged his distinguished guests and closest friends. It was here that Allen Ginsberg caught his breath during his voyages to and from India, that Lawrence Durrell drank during the dizzy days of the Alexandria Quartet, that Margaux Hemingway dallied about while discovering her grandfather’s Paris.

  And, as I was soon to learn, this apartment was also the setting for one of the murkier chapters of George’s personal life.

  In the kitchen, the stove could have been a great work of Surrealism. The surface had been scratched clean from decades of constant use and there was no longer any numbering or gradations around the dials. A burner could just as easily be on high or low, the oven set to bake or grill. With an expert hand, George fiddled with several knobs until a frying pan of hashed meat and onions came to life. A large pot of potatoes was already bubbling at a slow boil and I was handed a fork and given precise mashing instructions.

  “Parmentier forestiere,” explained George as the meat began to sizzle. “It’s simple but it tastes good and is nutritious.”

  The food did smell appetizing, but I was slightly distressed by the state of the kitchen. Along with the dried cockroach husks I had seen the day of the tea party, there were now several live ones scurrying among the sticky jars and empty tins.

  “Aren’t those a problem?” I worried over George’s shoulder.

  “Bahh, they’re nothing,” he scoffed, and tried to swat a roach or two into the potatoes. “More protein for us. Are you crazy? Don’t you like protein?”

  While the meal cooked, George brought out a large bottle of beer from the refrigerator. It wasn’t one of the discount high-alcohol beers I’d bought, but a Chinese brand, Tsingtao. George smiled when he caught me inspecting the label.

  “This is what I really like, but it’s more expensive,” he said as he pulled two glasses from the shelf.

  The beer was brewed not far from where George had spent his year in Nanking, and, in fact, he had a special love for most everything Chinese. The time when his father worked as a visiting professor in China was among the happiest of his childhood; then as a young man, he visited the country several more times when the freighter ships he rode docked at Chinese ports. Later, he became a keen supporter of Mao’s politics, and to this day George preaches to all who will listen that Shanghai is the city of future. There was even a surprise visit to the bookstore from Chinese government officials in the 1960s. They’d known of George’s Communist leanings and invited him to what was then Peking to open a branch of Shakespeare and Company.

  “They were going to pay for everything, but I couldn’t go. Too busy here, always too busy,” he muttered.

  When the dinner was ready, we sat at the table with our glasses of beer. George had brought a stick of butter with him, slicing off tiny pats and slipping them into his mouth as he ate. Having seen the condition of the kitchen, I was skeptical, but the meal was delicious and I quickly refilled my plate.

  Encouraged by George’s reaction to my bumbling of the Simon eviction, once the meal was done and another bottle of Tsingtao was brought forth, I dared to tell him of the man with the unfiltered cigarette and the missing volume of Shaw. Again, rather than being upset, he found the incident amusing.

  “Do you know how many books get stolen here?” he laughed. “I’d give them all away if I could.”

  George told me that during his first five years in business, so many books were taken that it actually cost him money to run the store. Then, during the sixties and seventies, he barely hung on when a handful of Left Bank bookstores were bankrupted by a notorious band of thieves. And over the decades, dozens of Paris writers stocked their libraries courtesy of Shakespeare and Company. Perhaps the worst culprit was Gregory Corso. He had an international reputation for duplicity. Lawrence Ferlinghetti still remembers the time Corso smashed the front window of City Lights at two in the morning to steal from the cash register. Ferlinghetti had a policy of never calling the police, so when he arrived at the store and found that the officers had already dusted the register and found Corso’s fingerprints, he took immediate action. After rousting Corso from bed at six that morning, Ferlinghetti recovered what money he could and then told the shamed poet to get out of town because the police were on to him. In Paris, Corso was no less audacious. He repeatedly stole books from Shakespeare and Company and then returned the next day in hopes of selling them back to George.

  “The saddest thing is most of the thieves don’t read the books they steal,” complained George. “They just go to another bookstore and sell them to make some quick money.”

  Though some people’s regard for humanity would have been shaken, George was unfazed. He took hope from the American man who’d mailed him a traveler’s check for a hundred dollars a few years earlier. It was in payment for the books he’s stolen from Shakespeare and Company while studying in Paris two decades before.

  “This fellow who took the Shaw book, he doesn’t sound so bad. At least he asked,” George said. “‘Give what you can, take what you need’—that’s what I always tell people.”

  I was instructed to keep a eye out for the man and try to find out a little more about him but otherwise not to worry. Another bottle of Chinese beer was opened, and though I prided myself on my Canadian thirst, I soon found myself struggling to keep up with a man sixty years my senior.

  “You’re drunk,” George roared as he poured two more glasses, the beer foaming up and soaking the table. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, drunk on a weeknight.”

  Perhaps I was drunk, perhaps we both were, for it was then that George pulled the letter out of his pocket and passed it across the table to me.

  “We have a lot of work ahead of us,” he said with a glimmer of conspiracy in his eyes.

  The letter was written in French and was some sort of real estate notice. Considering the beer swilling in my head and my feeble grasp of the language, all I could make out was a reference to a property at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. It turned out to be an offer to buy Shakespeare and Company.

  It was the work of a French businessman, George explained. The man already owned several apartments at 37 rue de la Bûcherie and wanted to buy the entire building and transform it into a four-star hotel. Located in the heart of the Latin Quarter and with its windows facing Notre Dame, the property promised a sure financial windfall.

  This would-be hotel baron had already contacted the other tenants in the building and had agreements
in place to buy them out at a significant profit. The only obstacle was George, the single-largest property owner in the building. He’d repeatedly turned down the man’s attempts to buy the bookstore, but that morning a new offer had arrived, this one taking advantage of a quirk in French real estate law: the acheter en vi-ager. Under this clause, the businessman offered to pay the money immediately but not take over the property until after George’s death.

  “It’s not very good, is it?” George said as he took the letter back. “We could lose the bookstore.”

  In fact, I didn’t see the problem. So long as George refused to sell, where was the trouble? The businessman couldn’t forcefully take over the bookstore, so it didn’t matter how high the offer or what clauses of French realty law the businessman invoked. The bookstore was safe, wasn’t it?

  “You don’t understand,” George muttered. He started to explain his concern that it was all out of his hands. From what he was telling me, he truly believed he could lose his precious bookstore.

  “You mean Shakespeare and Company could end up a luxury hotel?” I asked.

  George just nodded and fell into gloomy silence. The joyous beer-drinking mood had long since evaporated and now he stared off at the wall of framed pictures. The photograph of his old friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti; a picture of Richard Wright at the bookstore desk; and an almost formal portrait of George, a woman, and a young child standing in front of Shakespeare and Company.

  16.

  When I’d arrived, Shakespeare and Company appeared the answer to all my problems. A place to recuperate, time to calculate my next steps, an assortment of lost folk to camouflage my own disenchantments. Now it seemed my newfound sanctuary was in jeopardy, and with all the fervor of a new convert, I began to imagine ways of saving the bookstore.