Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Part of this was her cavern eyes; part of it was her feisty spirit, that had punctured Kurt’s advances so cleanly; part of it was her genius with words that day we sold stories. And, it must be said, a final part of it was that like desperate men the world over, I sought salvation in a woman’s arms.

  Despite the kindness I’d received from George, I still hadn’t worked out any of my problems. I hadn’t pursued any real job, I hadn’t made any actual plans for my future, I hadn’t asked myself why I’d made the sort of life decisions that led to death threats and police investigations. But with the exotic and beautiful Nadia before me, I suddenly didn’t have to think about any of the nasty business I’d left behind. After all, I would woo her, win her, love her, and then we would pass blissful lives together before dying entwined in each other’s arms at the age of 102.

  I was sure the only thing that was keeping this from happening was the fact that I smelled liked a rotting moose carcass. It’d been close to three weeks since I’d left the hotel near Porte de Clignancourt and moved into the bookstore and it’d been just as long since I’d had a decent shower. There’d been a few quick scrubs in the Panis bathroom but nothing else. My nails were dark with dirt, my hair hung in oily strings, and I was painfully aware of the ripe odor emitting from my crotch and armpits.

  Cleaning up would have been easy enough, except for Shakespeare and Company’s bathroom. For those living in the main part of the bookstore, there was only a cold-water sink on the first floor and the aforementioned cramped toilet on the communal stairway that was so rank with urine it made one’s eyes water just to step inside. There was the small tub in the third-floor apartment, but this, alas, was reserved for George and the more established guests who were invited to stay upstairs.

  All this meant getting creative in one’s bathing, and according to Kurt, there were two solutions. Many of the visitors who came to the store were sympathetic to the residents’ plight and often showers or bathtubs were offered. Kurt himself was a frequent beneficiary of such luck. One night, we’d been sitting by the cash desk, arguing over the Bukowski books. Luke kept the store’s expensive Black Sparrow editions of Bukowski’s Ham on Rye and Post Office high on a top shelf to prevent mucky fingers from cracking their spines and soiling their pages. Kurt was nonetheless trying to wheedle a copy to read, when a young woman walked in and agreed Bukowski was a fine poet. Sensing an opportunity, Kurt donned the air of impoverished poet and in less than half an hour was invited back to the woman’s hotel for room service and a long, hot bath. Another time, the offer was from a very pretty red-haired girl. But to my surprise, Kurt tactfully declined this invitation.

  “Dude, she was fifteen years old!” he explained. “I don’t want to pull a Polanski!”

  The alternative to these intimate bathing opportunities was the public showers. Since the only girl on my mind was staying at Shakespeare and Company, I chose the latter route.

  Paris has an admirable array of services for the homeless, or the SDF—sans domicile fixe—as they’re referred to in France. Each arrondissement features official soup kitchens along with a network of charities that provide meals and operate roving vans that dispense food and supplies to street people. There are also government-run shelters with clean beds, state-subsidized apartments, and a great emergency room at the Hôtel Dieu hospital.

  Of all of the services, the most pertinent for those living at Shakespeare and Company were the public showers. Scattered throughout Paris are more than a dozen city-run bathhouses, each with dozens of meticulously kept shower stalls free to the general public. The bathhouse closest to the bookstore was part of a grim concrete sports complex on rue du Renard, almost directly behind the Centre Pompidou. The rainy afternoon I walked there, I felt a twinge of embarrassment: Never before had I availed myself of social welfare of any kind, and now I was just another filthy body without a centime to his name and in dire need of a wash.

  As luck had it, the bathhouse was staffed by two of the warmest people I’d come across in Paris. One half of the tandem was an enormous Senagalese woman who kept exploding in laughter when she heard my mutilated French; the other was a short Algerian man who made a determined effort to remain serious. Seeing how anxious I was about my visit, the woman immediately began teasing me about my dirty hair. As the man pushed my shower ticket toward me, he waved his finger at me, “You wash well.”

  The shower area was in the basement and had a main waiting room with a clean tile floor, off of which were separate wings for men and women. As I stood in line, there was a corner drunk ahead of me and a family with three children behind me. One of the boys kept tugging on his dad’s jacket and asking, “How much longer? How much longer?” Not much was the answer. There were a dozen stalls in each wing and the wait was no more than ten minutes. When my number came up, an attendant gave me a towel and led me to a stall. After showing me inside, he wrote the time in a erasable marker on the door so he would know when I’d had my allotted quarter of an hour.

  Locking behind me, I found a small bench for my clothes and a gymnasium-style shower. The only irritant was that in order to get the shower to work, you had to press a small button that only gave a minute’s worth of water at a time. Luke later told me that he specifically took a butter knife with him to the public showers to jam into the button in order to keep it depressed. But that day, I was forced to push again and again as I showered. Still, it was a minor detail. There was an abundance of almost-hot water and the grime sleeted off me. I scrubbed myself raw, basking in this luxury of clean.

  Upon returning to the bookstore, I hurried to find Nadia to see if she would notice my freshly washed self. I discovered her upstairs in the library along with Kurt, Marushkah, and a few visitors who’d been kind enough to bring a bottle of wine.

  Among the crowd was a young Mexican named Kenzo, who was in Paris working a three-month contract as a runway model. I am sure he was a fine fellow, but I immediately loathed him. Not only was he sitting next to Nadia, he was paying her courtly attention. Worse, where I was proud to be fresh from the public showers, he was coiffed and cologned and dressed in silky designer fabrics.

  “Dude, you have it bad,” Kurt said once he noticed my distress.

  24.

  Suspicions arose that I wasn’t the only one suffering from such a malady of the heart. At around this time, Eve began making more frequent visits to the store, and whenever she appeared, George immediately halted all activity. Whether he was at the desk serving a customer or up in his office working on his beloved booklet, he would leap up to embrace his little Nastasya Filippovna and then run to fetch her a cup of hot coffee or a yogurt jar of strawberry ice cream or a nub of marzipan. Once, George became so inflamed by Eve’s visit that he insisted on treating both of us to lunch.

  An old Alsatian restaurant near place St. Michel had won a place in George’s heart because it sold a large plate of sauerkraut and sausage, a glass of beer, and a slice of pie for only forty-nine francs. As if this wasn’t merry enough, throughout the meal George kept fishing into his bag for presents. For him and me, these were film canisters of hard alcohol. George loved to get drunk in restaurants but abhorred restaurant prices. Before we’d left the store, he’d filled a dozen empty film canisters with vodka and now he slipped them from his bag a pair at a time so we could flip off the lids and down quick vodka shots when the waiter wasn’t looking.

  The presents for Eve were of a more tender nature. Vials of hand cream, samples of perfume, a diary with a bronze clasp. Every time she received a present, she gave George a kiss on his cheek that left him giddy.

  “Why are you always bothering me about work?” he asked with mock rage. “Aren’t I richest man in the world? What’s worth more than the smile of a beautiful girl?”

  It’s true that right about then I would have given most anything for a decent smile from Nadia and it so happened that fate conspired to help me on this front.

  Shakespeare and Company’s Monday-night poetry
-reading series dates back to the bookstore’s days as Le Mistral, but as George’s energies waned, the schedule became less organized and instead of a Lawrence Durrell book signing, you often got an Irish woman reciting Joyce while convulsing against a shelf of books. And whereas, before, the readings had been arranged months in advance, now it was often the Thursday morning before the Monday-night reading and there was nothing planned.

  It was such a Thursday morning that Nadia admitted she was working on a short story and wondered if she might fill the slot. Even though this offer elicited dubious glances from Ablimit and Kurt, I enthusiastically seconded the idea and selflessly volunteered to help her prepare.

  Nadia’s story was about a young woman with a strange creature growing between her lungs that began to control her thoughts and behavior. That night, we sat on a bed in the back fiction room. Nadia read through her story several times, trying different voices, getting her mouth around her written words. It was a compelling piece but not particularly uplifting. Clearly, Kafka had gotten inside Nadia’s head.

  “You think it’s morbid?” she asked.

  “In a good way,” I insisted. “In the very best-possible way.”

  We sat close together on my narrow bed and worked together until well after midnight. When we were done, I stuttered on awkwardly while Nadia gathered up her papers to return to her bed downstairs in the Russian section. Then, as we said good night, she raised herself onto her toes and, with a mischievous smile, gave me the briefest of kisses to thank me for my help. I fell asleep in the highest of spirits.

  When the days were mild, I began accompanying Simon on his afternoon walks through the Jardin des Plantes. The park was only a fifteen-minute walk down the Seine and Simon had taken an annual membership to the small zoo tucked into the corner of the grounds. During the dark days when he feared immediate expulsion from the bookstore, he’d spent long hours with the animals and had even taken to saying they missed him when he wasn’t there to say his daily hello. Once, he actually quarreled with a mother who was letting her young son pelt stones at a glumly caged ostrich. Simon, who’d spent so much of the past five years on display in the window of the antiquarian room, empathized.

  On these walks, we’d stop at one of the garden benches and I’d listen to Simon give impromptu lectures on everything from the battle of Sebastopol to the relationship between black holes and life on earth. For decades, he’d read four or five books a week and it was only recently he’d veered toward the more pulpy genres.

  “I don’t know why George goes on about me reading detective novels,” Simon complained. “I’ve already read everything else.”

  As a result, the poet’s head was crammed with an epic assortment of information. I was learning much about the world on these excursions, though part of me wasn’t completely convinced it was wise to be getting lessons in history and sociology from such a disjointed professor.

  When finished with his deconstructions of European influence in postcolonial Africa, Simon would read his poems aloud to me. Encouraged by the Irish publisher’s interest in his manuscript, he’d begun to write again after a long dry spell. He was rapidly filling a spiral-bound notebook with scrawled verse and sketches of the cherry trees in front of the bookstore. As we sat, he would pull out this book and give me sonorous renditions of his new poems.

  “You really liked it? Really?” he’d ask over and over when he was done.

  I did. I was having poetry read to me by a wild-eyed Englishman in one of Paris’s most beautiful gardens. Like everything else then, it felt a touch enchanted.

  What with Nadia’s short story, Simon’s poetry, and Kurt’s oh-so-public efforts to finish his novel, I was feeling the urge to write again. Granted, writing the two books I’d already had published hadn’t been the most pleasant experiences. They were quick true-crime books, the type my friends joked were sold in better gas stations everywhere. The first was written during a three-week vacation from the newspaper, with workdays that began at eight o’clock in the morning and didn’t finish until well past midnight. For the second book, I took a five-week writing sabbatical, but the days were just as long and by the end it physically hurt to sit in front of the computer and churn out the pages. Still, inspired by Shakespeare and Company, I decided to try again.

  When I was alone in the antiquarian room, I began sketching out a novel about a young man who gets a death threat and is forced to reevaluate his life. Not overly concerned by my overt lack of imagination, I typed away, dreaming the same dreams of Paris literary fame that Kurt and so many others had nurtured before me. Seven published novels had been written at Shakespeare and Company and a thousand others begun. The bookstore was catnip for idealistic writers and I was succumbing to the drug.

  Whenever George found me like this, he’d stand over me and harrumph at my efforts. “What’s that about?” he’d cry, pointing at some clichéd turn of phrase. “You have to use words like cannonballs if you want to move people.”

  In his day, George had made his own efforts at fiction, receiving rejections from the likes of The New Yorker and The Nation. His oeuvre also included a collection of short stories narrated by a man who was following an alligator across the Sahara. Those manuscripts had been lost or stolen, depending on the day George told the story, but there was one published sample of his work. After the great fire that destroyed the upstairs library in 1990, a book titled Fire Readings was published to raise money for Shakespeare and Company. Included in its pages was a story George wrote in the 1940s. Entitled “Joey,” it was about a Mafia kid who ends up killing a man. “When Angelo was ten yards away I filled him with lead,” the story climaxed. “He crouched on his hands and knees and then collapsed when my last bullet spun his head around. A shooting star fell through a break in the clouds. It rattled me for a moment.”

  George even admitted that one of his great regrets in life was never having written the novel that was in his head.

  “I’m not going to tell you the story,” he said in a surprisingly serious tone. “It would be one of the greatest books ever written. You’ll just steal the idea and use it for yourself.”

  The night of Nadia’s reading arrived with much anticipation. We’d put posters up around the store and had invited all the bookstore regulars to see her read. Word had spread of her Stories for Sale accomplishments, and since George continued to boast of her talents, there was a considerable crowd eager to gauge her work for themselves.

  All this made Nadia nauseous. In the hour before her reading, she made three trips to the Panis bathroom, and it required four yogurt jars of wine before she could be persuaded not to cancel. By the time eight o’clock struck and the reading was due to commence, she was knee weak and the library was standing room only. Tom Pancake and Gayle were seated at the back, Pia and Marushkah were beside Kurt and Ablimit, even George was there, standing in the hallway with Eve, peering through the crack in the door to watch the goings-on. More unfortunately, the Mexican Model was admiring Nadia from a front-row seat.

  Though the pages trembled in her hand at first, Nadia read with an actor’s flare. The audience laughed when the black humor allowed it, cringed at the more morose passages, and erupted in applause when she came to a finish. With well-wishers milling about, she triumphantly announced she was going to Polly Magoo’s and invited all to join her. Promises of free drinks ringing in the air, Kurt and I followed, ready for a night of celebration.

  At the bar, I ended up sitting with Kurt, Tom, and Gayle. Tom was trying to convince us that it was man’s biological destiny to become breatharians. He insisted it was possible to use energy as efficiently as plants and said that one day he would be able to exist using a human form of photosynthesis, with his body extracting nutrients provided by water and the sun’s rays. Though I found his theory somewhat implausible, I could barely muster a proper rebuttal, as I was far too distracted by the events unfolding at the other end of the table.

  Nadia was perched on a stool between the Me
xican Model and Marushkah, maniacally keeping two conversations going at the same time, radiant from her postperformance high. My shower now days old, I noted again the superior cut of the Model’s suit jacket. As I watched him flirt with Nadia, the confidence bestowed by that midnight kiss melted away.

  “Don’t worry,” Kurt whispered. “You’re the John Cusack character in this one. Trust me.”

  By midnight, the festivities were on the verge of breaking up, but Nadia wasn’t ready to end her night. One of the great perks of Paris is that corner groceries sell decent bottles of red wine for less than twenty francs and with a friendly wink these bottles can be had as late as three or four o’clock in the morning. It was quickly agreed that we would pool our remaining francs for a wine run and reconvene beside the Seine. Marushkah spurned Kurt’s invitation to join us and my heart soared when the Mexican Model, debating whether he should try to get some sleep before his morning shoot, was told by Nadia to get a taxi home. It would be an intimate party of three.

  25.

  February nights by the Seine tend to be cold and damp, but these discomforts are more than compensated for by the solitude. The crowds who clog the river quays on summer evenings disappear during the gray winter months, and for those who brave the chill, vast stretches of waterside can be found blissfully deserted.

  This was the case as we descended the stone staircase to the Seine. There wasn’t another person along the river and our footsteps echoed back from the stone wall of the opposite quay. A light rain was falling, so we took shelter under the Pont-au-Double. Through the gaps in the metalwork on the underside of the bridge, the stone face of Notre Dame loomed over us, while a few feet below where we sat, the Seine rushed blackly by. For one surreal moment, hundreds of slices of baguette swept past after a restaurant upstream dumped a flotilla of stale bread at closing time.