Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  After an appropriately royal greeting, Tuee rummaged among the stacks to show off her wares. There was chicken, fish, Camembert, fake crab, and, of course, the omnipresent jambon fromage. Though all the meat was a hue or two from normal and there was the occasional speck of blue-green mold on the bread, it was only twenty francs for a pair of foot-long sandwiches and a canned beverage of choice.

  “You can go a whole day on this,” Kurt advised as we tried to gauge which sandwiches were the closest to being bacteria-free. “Eat one now for lunch and the other later for dinner and you’re set.”

  Sitting under the cherry trees with our sandwiches, Kurt wondered if I’d met the new arrival. As he told it, a young woman had been browsing through the books that morning and Kurt had struck up a conversation about the marvels of Shakespeare and Company. An hour or so later, the woman had returned with a suitcase in hand and asked George for a bed.

  “I told her she should read Tropic of Cancer and she bought a copy,” Kurt said, grinning.

  Kurt was a notorious flirt and kept watch over the many attractive young women who passed through the store. He believed that if a woman bought a book by either Henry Miller or Anaïs Nin, she was interested in immediate sexual intercourse, and in hopes of testing this theory, he constantly hovered around the fiction section. Apparently, an unsuspecting subject had just stumbled into his laboratory.

  “I think you’ll like her,” he said with a coy wink.

  Unsure of how fit Kurt was to judge such things, I concentrated on my egg and tomato sandwich. The bread was stale enough to make for rigorous jaw exercise, but otherwise it made for a filling meal. Once again, I was obliged to thank Kurt for his teachings.

  That evening, there was a reading at the bookstore, so after closing the antiquarian room, I found a seat among the crowd. An Irish woman was going to recite Joyce and Wilde while performing an erotic dance routine, and the room was brimming with curious eyes.

  Readings have been organized at the bookstore since the doors first opened and everyone from William Saroyan to William Styron has held literary court in the upstairs library. Shakespeare and Company’s reputation for attracting quality readers and discerning ears was once so great that in Mordecai Richler’s Barney’s Version, a young writer is humiliated when he fails to impress the bookstore audience. But as this Irish woman careened lewdly around the library, screeching lines from Finnegans Wake, I suspected there might have been an easing of standards since the hallowed days when Ginsberg and Corso performed regularly at the store.

  After an uncomfortable moment where the audience sat unsure whether to applaud, the show was declared over. The room quickly cleared, but a woman with long braids and olive complexion stayed behind and sat with Ablimit near the window. She had dark hollows for eyes, and I found myself wondering where the line was between her pupil and iris.

  Ablimit helpfully introduced us, which somewhat made up for my gaping. The woman smiled hello, but my tongue was jelly. Slurring some excuse about a bathroom and a book, I fled the room. This was Nadia, the newest resident of Shakespeare and Company.

  The following day was market day, and I had the pleasure of accompanying George on his rounds. Every morning of the week, open-air markets operate in different parts of Paris, selling fruit, vegetables, fish, cheese, and most everything else considerably cheaper than at the grocery stores. While the most celebrated of these markets was at Bastille, there were less expensive and more unruly versions at Belleville, La Chapelle, and place d’Aligre. We at Shakespeare and Company were fortunate enough to have a small market just down the street at place Maubert.

  Three times a week, George roved the stalls, haggling for an extra pound of zucchini, negotiating down the price of carrots when the stalls were about to close, asking for an extra onion to be slipped into his bag. The great secret was that once the market shut at the end of the morning, all the produce that wouldn’t make it through another day was thrown into empty crates and left behind. With a minor amount of scavenging, one could find most anything, and there was an entire community who waited for the markets to close so they could begin their shopping. That day, along with the vegetables we’d purchased, we found half a bag of apples suitable for stewing, some barely bruised eggplants, and, nestled alone in the gutter, a blessed potato.

  Toting the bags back to the bookstore, I decided it was an opportune time to ask about Nadia. George only looked at me suspiciously.

  “Her biography was very good,” he said. “Why, do you like her?”

  “Of course not,” I replied in my most sincere voice. “I’m simply interested in the newest member of our little family.” The matter so dropped, we carried the groceries upstairs to the third-floor apartment and George began preparing lunch. He was making the dumplings to go along with the vegetable stew when he suddenly slapped his hand to his head.

  “I forgot the salt downstairs in the office. Will you get it?”

  There was a fine-looking box of salt on the shelf in front of him, but George insisted this wasn’t the right kind, so I hurried downstairs. It was easy enough to find the second box of salt in the miniature kitchen, but what really caught my eye was a piece of paper on George’s desk. It was Nadia’s biography.

  Nadia was born in Romania under the horrors of the Ceauescu regime. Though only a girl at the time, she remembers when much of Bucharest’s historic downtown was leveled to build “the People’s House,” the dictator’s warped Communist lingo for his presidential palace that would become the second-largest building in the world after the Pentagon. When Ceauescu was overthrown in 1989, Nadia’s parents managed to get visas for the United States and settled in Arizona. Nadia was in junior high school at the time and the move was a complete culture shock—a new language, a material decadence, a general optimism, and a brightness foreign to Eastern Europe.

  It was no surprise she didn’t fit into small-town American life, and after an unhappy bout with high school, Nadia resolved to get away. Her escape came when she won a scholarship to study fine arts at Columbia University. Surrounded by the chaos and diversity of New York, things started to make sense again and she felt something akin to happiness. Though her professors admired her work, her scholarship wasn’t renewed and Nadia was forced to transfer. Seething, her art became darker, her outlook cynical, and suddenly she was looking for another place to go.

  That was when she thought of Paris. She moved to France to write and paint and hopefully just be. Her first step was a hotel near the place de la République and a plan to find some sort of under-the-table job to pay for the room. Instead, work wasn’t forthcoming, and the money was running out when she passed through the bookstore and Kurt told her of George’s generosity.

  When I later saw her with a collection of Kafka’s short stories, I pounced on the opportunity for conversation.

  “I thought you were reading Henry Miller,” I said, hoping she wouldn’t notice the tremble in my voice.

  “Who told you that?” she demanded.

  Flustered, I mumbled something about Kurt having suggested the book to her. Nadia only gave a sarcastic laugh.

  “He pushed Tropic of Cancer on me, for God’s sake,” she said. “I only bought the stupid book because I needed a place to stay and I thought it might help me get into the bookstore.”

  Afraid of incurring further wrath, I left her to “A Hunger Artist” and sulked away.

  Visiting Café Panis for bathrooming the following morning, Kurt asked what I thought of the new resident. “Beautiful and smart,” I answered, “but definitely a tad corrosive.”

  “You think so, too?” Kurt snapped. “She cuts down everything I say. You have to be careful with women, they’ll tear you up.”

  Everyone has a good heartache story and it was clear that Kurt was no different. As we sat and nursed our coffees, he shared the real reason he had decided to leave New York.

  It’d been his first love, back when he was still in Florida. From Kurt’s telling, she was incredi
bly wild, incredibly beautiful, and had worked as a model before they’d met. Together, they became small-town restless and left for New York to make their way. Kurt’s dreams collided painfully with big-city reality as his script for Videowrangler stalled and he was forced to work two jobs to pay the rent. Day by painful day their love became infected by his malaise.

  His girlfriend’s odd hours made Kurt suspicious. He began trailing her when she left the apartment, and one day he followed her to the lobby of a hotel, where another man rose to meet her. They kissed like familiar lovers, and she followed him to the elevator. Kurt was devastated but tried to play the scene with class. He went up to the front desk. He calmly asked for the room number. He sent up a tray of strawberries and champagne with a signed card. And then he left.

  It was a good story and I could’ve sworn there was a trace of a tear in Kurt’s eye when he finished. Still, I was somewhat unsettled when he squared his thumb and forefingers to frame the imaginary shot of him walking out of the hotel.

  “Just like a Cary Grant movie,” he insisted.

  21.

  For a lifelong Communist, George had a canny business sense. His first foray into the world of commerce came when he was a boy in his hometown of Salem. The man who lived across the street from the Whitmans was a gregarious alcoholic who worked shifts at a local bottling factory. At the time, rare was the house that kept a bottle of wine in the cupboard, so the drunkard was a neighborhood curiosity, and young George inevitably struck up a friendship with such a character. One particularly hot summer, the two came to an arrangement where George bought cases of orange, lemon, and sarsaparilla soda at a discount from the man’s factory and then sold individual bottles on street corners. Later, George switched to selling Health-O products door-to-door in his neighborhood, but this enterprise was also abandoned when he decided to enter agriculture and filled his parents’ basement with manure to start a mushroom farm.

  In high school, George started his first genuine business, the Whitman Multiple Products Company, and his letterhead announced the sale of “office supplies, novelties, boats, gliders, radios, household appliances, motorcycles, books, toys, printing and all general merchandise.” As an adult, George was drawn to the book business. He ended his military service during World War II by working nights at an army hospital in Taunton, Massachusetts, and during his spare time he opened the short-lived Taunton Book Lounge, a combination bookstore and reading room. Later, before departing for Europe, George started a mail-order book company, The Lost Phoebe, based in Salem. And when he arrived in Paris, before discovering the cherished spot across from Notre Dame, he first tried his hand at an English bookstore on boulevard de Courcelles, near Parc de Monceau.

  Bookselling isn’t the surest road to riches, and George needed every morsel of his business acumen to keep Shakespeare and Company alive. He printed postcards to sell to tourists, he bought secondhand books for cheap prices at church sales and then marked them up substantially for resale, he sneaked decent-looking used novels among the full-priced new editions, he kept the doors open until midnight to eke out every last sale. When all this wasn’t enough, George actually went selling door-to-door. His greatest boon was when Tropic of Cancer was banned in the United States. George visited the residences of the American students in Paris and offered to sell them the licentious book. He seldom failed to make a sale.

  It wasn’t that George was especially proud of his business intuition; he just realized there was no other choice. Until the revolution arrived, he was forced to live in a capitalist society, so his solution was to participate in the economy in the least harmful fashion. For George, one of the major problems of the profit-driven system was that people were rewarded for doing harm to their fellowman. Food companies increased sales by loading their products with sugars and salts; manufacturers lowered their costs by closing union factories and cutting health benefits; oil companies raised their stock value by paying lobbyists to block environmental legislation.

  “I’d rather have a free lending library, but I can’t escape the fact that I run a business,” George rationalized. “At least by selling books, I know I’m not hurting anybody.”

  All this business experience was about to come in very handy. Once I was settled into bookstore life, George began regularly inviting me into his office on the pretense of finishing a book order or filing papers, but usually it was just to talk. When there was something especially urgent to discuss, he would search me out and demand I immediately accompany him upstairs. But of course, George being George, this was never done in a direct manner.

  Typical was the occasion when he found me at the front desk, chatting with Pia about the Chinese New Year’s party she was organizing for the bookstore. Pia, like George, loved all things Chinese and had traveled the country extensively when she was helping her mother, a former Ford model, prepare a book on the historical quarters of Shanghai. With an eye to dealing in contemporary Chinese art, Pia was even taking Mandarin lessons from Ablimit and could maintain a rough conversation in her new language.

  That February, it was going to be year 4697 by the Chinese calendar, the Year of the Dragon, and Pia was in the midst of describing the celebration that would be held at Shakespeare and Company, when George appeared in the doorway. He listened for a while, then began shuffling books, then complained about the sorry state of the bookstore. Finally, he turned to me with a look of exasperation. “You look thirsty, comrade,” he muttered.

  The sign thus given, I bade good-bye to Pia and trudged upstairs to the office to see what he had to tell me. Once the door was closed, I learned George adhered to the philosophy of the best defense being a good offense. With the hotel baron breathing down his neck and the future of the store as murky as the Seine, he’d decided that the appropriate thing was to expand the bookstore.

  There was a vacant apartment in the Shakespeare and Company building, just across the hall from George’s beloved third-floor retreat. This apartment had the same view of Ile de la Cité, as well as large eastern windows that looked out to Ile St. Louis and beyond. George had long dreamed of turning it into an extension of the bookstore library, where conferences could be held and political activists lodged.

  “There will be doctors from Médecins Sans Frontières and aid workers from the United States staying at Shakespeare and Company on their way to Africa,” he predicted.

  Over the years, George had been scrupulous in monitoring the apartment. When the previous owner died, it was left to her children and had remained empty, but with real estate prices in Paris soaring, the apartment would be coming on the market. If George could buy it, he was certain his temple of books would be complete and he could finally feel at peace with what he had accomplished.

  “It would be the jewel of the bookstore,” George said. “Can’t you see how perfect it would be?”

  Perfectly illogical, I thought to myself, but George wasn’t one to worry about niggling issues like logic. Not at all concerned about diverting his energies, his only question was whether he could beat the French businessman to the apartment. George was confident his bid would be preferred so long as he could raise the money and get his offer in first.

  “I only need two million francs,” he declared with a broad smile.

  Now, two million francs was more than $300,000, a considerable sum, but George wasn’t daunted. He announced he was going to raise this fortune by publishing a best-selling book. Nothing too fancy, a simple accordion-style laminated leaflet with photographs and an essay on Shakespeare and Company. He thought he could sell 100,000 copies at twenty-five francs apiece and this windfall would be enough to buy him the apartment.

  It actually wasn’t as far-fetched as it sounded. George had a long history of successful publishing. In high school, he produced and edited The Reflector, a magazine that included sections like the “Poet’s Corner,” and also contained half a dozen advertisements for the Whitman Multiple Products Company. At Boston University, he was advertising dir
ector for the Boston University News and then started his own breakaway paper, The Campus Critic. Once he had the bookstore, it was publishing bedlam. In addition to the literary journals he’d supported, George started Paris Magazine in the 1970s and sold ten thousand copies of the first issue. When the fire devastated the store, he produced A Biography of a Bookstore in Pictures and Poems, and a few years later he put out Angels in Disguise, a collection of autobiographies that remains the best-selling book at the store. Even the postcards he’d printed brought in a constant tinkle of coins.

  For the current project, Luke had already been recruited to help. He’d recently bought a new computer and had downloaded pirated copies of all the latest software. Pleased to be part of the Shakespeare and Company publishing tradition, Luke had volunteered to design the booklet. If I agreed to help with the editing, that meant the only cost George would incur was the printing of the book, but he was sure he could get that done for 100,000 francs.

  Even though I was flattered to be taking part in such an auspicious venture, I couldn’t stop from brooding about the other problems at the bookstore.

  “Wouldn’t it be smarter to use that money to set up a foundation like Ferlinghetti’s?” I finally mustered the courage to ask. “Something to protect the store?”

  “What are you talking about?” George snapped back. “Whose side are you on? Do you want to help or not?”

  The answer was yes, so I held my tongue.