Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  As much as I tried to accept the general chaos and uncertainty of the store, I couldn’t escape the worry. Even as I began to help George on his quest for the apartment, I had a nagging suspicion there was something he wasn’t telling me, some reason why he hadn’t created his foundation or at least anointed a trustworthy successor. Sure enough, one afternoon, while scrounging about under George’s desk on my hands and knees, I found the answer.

  One of George’s colossal woes was that he continually misplaced his keys. Sometimes they were forgotten behind a pot of beans in the kitchen, sometimes they were left in the gap between Amis and Atwood on the fiction shelf, sometimes they slipped off the back of his desk and became wedged against the wall. This is where I was in the process of looking—and I’d already found four crumpled two-hundred-franc notes, half a baguette, three spoons, and a silk Hermès tie when I came across a postcard with an English stamp and a note written in an adolescent scrawl. It was addressed to George, but to my astonishment it started “Dad.”

  “What’s this?” I asked as I poked my head out from under the desk.

  “Give me that!” George shouted, and grabbed the card from my hand. “That’s none of your business.”

  Turning his back to me, he stared at the card for a long time, all the while sighing heavily.

  “It’s a long story,” he finally said.

  George had an heir.

  Throughout his years in Paris, there had been an abundance of young women attracted to George. He cut a dashing figure, he held romantic ideals, he lived a poet’s life, he was a handsome man. There had even been several engagements. In 1948, he wrote his parents about his fiancée Josette, a lovely woman whom he insisted, despite her tuberculosis, would become their “new daughter … the mother of your grandchildren.” More than a decade later, George again announced an engagement, this time to a woman by the name of Colette, the proprietor of an art gallery on Ile St. Louis.

  But despite such brushes with love, it wasn’t until the approach of his seventieth birthday that George took the marriage vows for the first time. He’d fallen in love with a young British woman, and even though she was twenty-eight and he was sixty-eight, they tried to make a go of it. In the very early days of his marriage, he and his wife had a baby girl. It was one of the greatest wonders in George’s long life, not to mention a remarkably virile act considering he was sixty-nine years old at the time he fathered the child.

  The daughter was born in 1981 on the first of April, the day for fools, and she was glorious with curly blond hair and George’s blue eyes. They named her Sylvia Whitman after St. Sylvia, but George soon started telling people it was in honor of the founder of the first Shakespeare and Company and even referred to the little girl as Sylvia Beach Whitman in a bookstore publication. It was an unusual life for a little girl. Living in the third-floor apartment, the family shared their home not only with thousands of books and a German shepherd named Baskerville, but also with the constant crowds of eccentric visitors who slept on the couches and attended the Sunday tea parties.

  It was a kaleidoscope existence. Sylvia grew up with authors and actresses as babysitters, and the poet Ted Joans took a special interest in her development, encouraging her to write poems and perform them aloud. Meanwhile, George was reading to her from first editions of Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh. At night and during the days, she sat on his lap while he served customers and she became something like the fairy princess of Shakespeare and Company. From the very beginning George believed Sylvia was destined to take over the bookstore.

  But then the marital problems began and the stress of living in a communal bookstore became too much for the family. When Sylvia was still a young girl, her mother decided enough was enough. First, Sylvia and her mother left the bookstore, then they left Paris altogether and moved back to England. During the years, father and daughter had drifted apart.

  There had been a card from Sylvia the previous Christmas and the postcard I’d found under the desk two years before. But George grimly explained that he hadn’t actually seen his daughter for five years.

  “Once she happened to be in Paris and put her head in the store but she ran away after five minutes,” George remembered sadly.

  Yet George still dreamed his daughter would take over Shakespeare and Company. This is why he delayed starting a foundation, this is why he didn’t join forces with City Lights, this is why he wanted to expand the bookstore.

  “She has to fall in love with this place,” George said. “Her mother wrote that Sylvia wants to become an actress. Well, Shakespeare and Company could be the greatest stage in the world.”

  Finally, I understood.

  22.

  It was the beginning of a most industrious time at the bookstore. George was gripped with the idea of finishing his booklet before Easter so he could take advantage of the summer tourist rush and quickly raise money for the apartment. Long days were spent sifting through files in search of photographs, and George was at his desk until late at night, scratching out drafts of his essay with a dull pencil. When George came up with an idea for a page, he would mock it up using paste and scissors and then there would be endless trips to Luke’s apartment to scan in the photographs and print out sample layouts.

  With his daily whims and ever-changing instructions, George was the most demanding editor I’d ever worked for. He always wanted a picture a shade brighter or a title in a different font, or, sometimes, history altered altogether.

  There was a decades-old photograph of him sitting at the desk that he thought should be included in the booklet. After several hours of searching, the photograph was located, but to George’s dismay it included a cigarette dangling from his fingers. George had smoked for years and his old hotel room on boulevard St. Michel became known as the “Old Smokey Reading Room” because of the dense clouds emitted by George. He even admitted as much in a letter home to his father, whom he called “the Governor.” “I might as well start with the worst scandal of all and that is the fact that I pay $150 a year for cigarettes,” he wrote as part of an attempt to get his father to forward him more money. Health concerns finally convinced him to quit, and he now was an ardent antismoker, routinely lecturing bookstore residents and even crushing any stray packages of cigarettes he found around the store. To bolster his credibility, he was doing his best to erase any evidence of his own dalliance with tobacco. This meant Luke was ordered to take the damning photograph home, scan it into his computer, and then carefully eliminate the cigarette with the magic of Photoshop.

  This fervor of activity infected everyone. One morning, Simon donned an impressive suit jacket and hurried off to deliver his translation proposal to the French publisher. A friend had even given him an old cellular phone so he could wait for a response.

  “I’m a regular Richard Branson now, aren’t I?” he said while peering at the tiny buttons on the phone. “Maybe I’ll get a briefcase and start reading Le Monde Economique in the mornings.”

  Up in the library, Ablimit had pushed aside his grammar books in favor of a calculator and business plan. Having grown up in China, he was now reborn an ardent capitalist and was working to get a visa that would allow him to go to the United States. While he waited, he’d hatched a scheme he was sure would make him a minor fortune.

  In France, chicken producers cut off the birds’ feet and discarded them before processing. Chicken feet were a common foodstuff in Asia, so Ablimit was negotiating to buy several tons cheaply so he could ship them to China. He was trying to determine how many chicken feet he would have to sell to make a reasonable profit once he’d paid all the expenses and given a cut to his investors.

  “Money, it rules the world,” he insisted while breaking down the cost per cubic foot of refrigerated shipping containers.

  Kurt and I were inclined to agree. We were both almost at zero and despite the bounty of Tuee’s sandwiches, many days our stomachs weren’t entirely full. Having already thinned considerably before I
arrived at Shakespeare and Company, I was now down to 155 pounds and was forced to punch new holes in my belt with a nail and hammer so my pants would stay up. Although we tried to convince ourselves that living the poor artist’s life in Paris was romantic, it was hard to erase the lurking unease that occurs when one’s bank card stops functioning.

  Kurt had already tried a most optimistic ploy to make money. He had a collection of flattering pictures of himself, so he compiled a modeling portfolio and made the rounds of the agencies. Though he returned dejected after being told that at twenty-five he was too old, his looks did net him some plums. A young German fellow also named Kurt fell deeply in love with our Kurt about that time. This German Kurt began hanging around Shakespeare and Company, treating Bookstore Kurt to expensive lunches and even buying him a snazzy fedora similar to what the Gaucho had worn. The episode climaxed when German Kurt treated Bookstore Kurt to a weekend at an expensive Bavarian spa, plane tickets and all. Though the German Kurt had been discouraged when Bookstore Kurt refused his advances, it was a pleasant enough time.

  “Hot springs,” our Kurt advised afterward, strutting about with his skin freshly softened from a strawberry seed and clay facial. “They do wonders.”

  Still, this didn’t put any actual currency in Kurt’s pocket and our destitution continued. There were ways to earn money without papers in Paris: under-the-table kitchen work in restaurants, giving English lessons at an hourly rate, baby-sitting the children of the seventh arrondissement. But that must have seemed far too practical, because Kurt and I entertained more elaborate visions.

  The most tantalizing possibility involved the stream of tourists who visited Shakespeare and Company. The bookstore was listed in most every guidebook to Paris and visitors burbled into the store in happy droves. They were intoxicated by the books and the bohemian writers who lived among them, all the time spending large sums of their holiday money.

  Kurt and I began to watch these tourists like hungry jackals eyeing a herd of plump wildebeest. Many wanted to believe that every writer staying at the bookstore was another Hemingway in order to add that certain flare to their vacation. In truth, of the hundreds of poets and writers who pass through the bookstore every year, only a handful ever publish. But, with such bare pockets, Kurt and I saw no reason why we couldn’t indulge the fantasies.

  Upstairs in the library, there was an old metal typewriter and battered wooden desk with enough scars to give it character. Our plan was to set these up in front of the store and offer to sell short stories for ten francs a page. As we sat dreaming of our fortune, Nadia found us and demanded the right to join. As her contribution, she agreed to paint our sign. After a shared bottle of wine, we came up with our slogan: “Stories for Sale, 10 Francs a Page, Typos Free of Charge.”

  As the paint was drying, George wandered past. “That’s highway robbery!” he declared. Then, gesturing at Nadia, he added, “The only one worth paying for is her. She’s going to be the best writer of any of you.”

  George cackled some more while Nadia blushed a most attractive shade of pink.

  The next afternoon, we set up the desk in front of the store and erected our sign. After days of wet gray skies, the clouds were mostly white and there was even the occasional break of sun. We thought it augured well.

  Kurt volunteered for the first shift, and soon enough two Australian women who were on a tour of Europe approached and wondered what this handsome man was doing on the sidewalk with a desk and a typewriter. Kurt needed all of fifteen seconds to convince them to buy stories, then began ferociously banging out several pages of lustful Paris romance. After earning a quick sixty francs, he abandoned the desk when one of his clients offered him a beverage at a bar around the corner.

  As I took his place, I immediately began to panic. What if I froze? What kind of short story could I write on the spot? I began to hope nobody would stop, and if it hadn’t been for that ting of competitive spirit, I would have packed up altogether. As luck had it, the first person to approach was Fernanda. I hadn’t seen her since my long walk to the store, and she was delighted that George had let me stay at the bookstore.

  Fernanda insisted on buying a story and I readied myself before the typewriter. We’d bought carbon paper so we could keep track of what we’d written, and my fingers were smudged blue from the efforts to get it into the machine. I was terrified nothing would come, but then I looked across to Notre Dame and remembered Fernanda’s prayers for me. I wrote a story about a man waiting in the cathedral after eye surgery. It was the day the doctor had told him he could remove his bandages and he wanted the beauty of Notre Dame to be the first thing he saw. After Fernanda read the story, she gave me a long hug.

  It was the first time since moving into the store that I’d remembered there was life beyond Shakespeare and Company. I’d become entirely absorbed in George’s strange universe, never going much farther than Café Panis or the student cafeteria, never leaving the store for more than an hour at a time. I hadn’t even called my family to tell them my life had temporarily righted itself. Before Fernanda left, we made firm plans to meet at the Louvre later in the week to help reintroduce me to the real world.

  Faint from the exertion of this one story, I was convinced this was the hardest money I’d ever earned. Thankfully, Nadia found me then and, after mocking my decrepit state, took over the story desk with gusto. In the next two hours, she wrote nine dazzling short stories with a myriad of characters and voices, and her customers praised her efforts to no end. At one point, a distinguished gentleman who turned out to be Dr. Z, Sports Illustrated’s top football writer, bought two stories from her. For one, he even gave Nadia the first line to use, which happened to be the first line of the novel he’d always wanted to write.

  Nadia was the star of the story desk that day and Kurt and I suffered severe ego bruising. In this state, we slunk away and felt more than justified in buying a comforting bottle of wine with our earnings.

  23.

  If this hasn’t been made clear, Shakespeare and Company is an extremely difficult place to keep clean. It begins with the simple fact of age. The bookstore is on a road that has been in continuous use since the year 400 and was officially made a street of Paris in 1202. Even the name has ancient roots, rue de la Bûcherie deriving from the word bûches, French for logs, from the time centuries ago when the area was known as “port aux bûches” and all the wood for Paris arrived by boat just feet from where the bookstore stands today.

  According to George, the Shakespeare and Company building rests on the foundations of what was a sixteenth-century monastery and he compares himself to the monks who used to live on the same spot, a frère lampier who keeps a light on to welcome strangers and cares for old books and lost folk with semisacred devotion. In the early 1700s, the monastery gave way to apartment blocks and 37 rue de la Bûcherie itself was constructed as part of a housing boom to meet the needs of a growing Paris.

  During its three hundred years, this six-story building has borne witness to many of the great dramas of Paris. Napoléon surely trod past the building when he first moved to the city as a young soldier and lived a half block away on rue de la Huchette. The Germans took residence in the quarter during the Franco-Prussian War and again, less than a century later, during World War II. And until it was razed in 1909, the annex of the Hôtel Dieu hospital was just across the street from number 37 and was used as a holding area for terminal cases. The corpses flowed out of the hospital by the hundreds, filling rue de la Bûcherie with the stink of death as they were taken around the corner to St.-Julien-le-Pauvre for burial ceremonies.

  But these same three hundred years have taken their toll on the building. The wood beams sag, the plaster crumbles, the pipes leak. It leaves the bookstore with an air of perpetual decline and this is just the start of the bookstore’s sanitary concerns. On any given week, thousands of people visit Shakespeare and Company, slamming doors, bumping shelves, tromping the pollution of Paris through the store. Then t
here’s the grime inflicted by the men and women who sweat, sleep, and eat among the books; a close inspection of any bookstore blanket will reveal a DNA bank’s worth of hair samples. Little Kitty does her part, too, with constant shedding and her habit of dragging semidecomposed birds and mice into shop corners. There was even a running rumor of bedbugs but though the residents were an itchy lot, George swore it was slander.

  “Once! Once in fifty years we had bedbugs!” he declared. “Some reporter wrote about it to spice up his story and now everybody thinks we’re infested.”

  All of this means that the bookstore weaves a thin line between romantic tumble and filthy sty, and the delicate balance is forever endangered by the fact that George’s financial modesty extends to bookstore maintenance. He uses guests with a passing knowledge of plumbing or carpentry to execute repairs, he recycles wood and shelves from the neighbors’ garbage, he shuns the rainbow of supermarket cleaning supplies in favor of cold water and old newspapers. Even on the day of the great library fire, George showed an eye for savings. In an attempt to help the cleanup efforts, the writer Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno ran to the local supermarket and bought a package of heavy-duty garbage bags. When he returned to the store, George took one look at the purchase and soundly chastised him for wasting francs.

  It was thanks to such economies that George was able to shrug off the chains of contemporary business culture, but it certainly wasn’t the most efficient method of cleaning. One respected magazine editor who’d been invited to stay in the third-floor apartment lasted all of a quarter of an hour before fleeing to the sanctuary of a hotel. The cockroach scuttling across his pillow served as an early warning; a moldy bowl of stewed apples on the counter proved to be the coup de grâce.

  Of course, I, being a sturdy young Canadian with absolutely no other options before me, would never have noticed or complained about the state of the bookstore hygiene except that I was suddenly feeling extremely self-conscious. It had to do with Nadia. It seemed I was falling in love.