Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  We used Kurt’s army knife to open our wine and passed the bottle. Drunk on alcohol, drunk on Paris, drunk on our sudden new lives, we felt for all the world like the best of friends. And like this, we started telling our stories.

  Nadia talked of her adolescence, saying how she’d arrived in the United States scared and shy and knowing barely a word of English. She was isolated and alone in a strange American high school, all of her attempts to fit in rejected with the cruelty unique to teenage social law. At home, there was an ever-widening chasm as she tried to adapt to her new country while her parents became more and more introverted, clinging to their language and their memories.

  The tensions between daughter and parents turned the house into a tomb. Days, then weeks would pass without a word spoken. For one terrible summer, Nadia was forbidden to leave the house at all. By the end, she simply stopped talking and the family lived in silence. Nadia had been swallowed by this darkness for so long, she felt almost mute when she finally got away to New York to study art.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever understand what normal is,” she told us in a quiet voice.

  Our thoughts cast backward, Kurt also spoke of his home and his youth. In all the time I spent with him before and after, I always detected some layer of false bravado, a mask he donned to impress others or just hide away from himself. That night was the only time I knew for sure he was being absolutely honest.

  Kurt was sixteen and working for a suburban supermarket. He was gathering stray grocery carts in the parking lot one Saturday afternoon when a white sports vehicle pulled up beside him. The tinted window hummed down and inside was a woman with tears flooding her mascara. “Kurt … I’m your mother” is all she managed to say before speeding away.

  This is how Kurt discovered he was adopted. Until that instant, he thought his life ordinary, his parents true. Later that afternoon, after composing herself, his birth mother returned to the grocery store. She told him he was left behind because she was just a teenager herself when she gave birth, that there hadn’t been any other choice, that he was always in her heart.

  Kurt’s world changed that day in the parking lot and he still hadn’t fully grasped how it had affected him. He was never able to escape the sense of abandonment. Maybe this is why a man who appeared to have everything—good looks, athleticism, charm—was forever trying so hard.

  He was pale and empty standing there after he was done with his story. I was surprised he’d revealed so much, but I understood. A rainy night under a bridge in a city a long way from home is an ideal place for confession.

  I, too, had my past to contend with, a skeleton that refused to stay in its closet. When I was fifteen years old, I was arrested for assault. It was late at night and, in the grips of powerful chemicals, I broke into a house. In a state of frenzied panic, I pushed and beat the neighbor I’d awakened.

  It was a shock for everyone. I was an honorable student at high school, I had a part-time job at a local market, I had friends who were interested mostly in baseball and board games. Nobody expected something like this.

  I spent the night in a police cell and the next morning, with my mother and father in the front row of the courtroom, I was remanded to the youth wing of the local jail. By chance, a boy from my Little League team was awaiting trial for robbing a convenience store at knife point. We sat in our cell and reminisced about the year we almost made the play-offs.

  Because I didn’t fit the profile of a violent offender, I was transferred from the jail to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. There was a ward bingo game that I repeatedly won because the other patients were heavily sedated and couldn’t keep track of their numbers. I also remember petitioning the doctors to break a “no daytime television” rule to watch the first Montreal Expos game of the season on television. My father and I had a tradition of going to Olympic Stadium together for the home opener and it was the first time in a long while that we weren’t watching the game together.

  I went through a battery of tests, the most crucial of which was the urinalysis. When strong traces of methamphetamines were found, it all but assured I would be spared jail. I ended up being sentenced to community work and probation.

  The incident left me forever changed. My crime hung over my family, dark and unmentionable. Even though under the conditions of the young offender act, my name hadn’t been made public, the assault was common knowledge in our community. I was scared to look anyone in the eye, certain they knew, certain they condemned me.

  I guess this is why I was always trying to get away, to escape the past. I worked two jobs during high school and left for Australia when I was nineteen, but I ended up returning home after less than a year. I thought journalism would be my escape and I dreamed of working in Hong Kong; instead, I received that remarkable job offer from my hometown newspaper. At one point, I even volunteered to act as an unarmed bodyguard in East Timor. This meant living with the politicians and priests who were fighting for independence from Indonesia, the rationale being the militia was less likely to commit atrocities when a Westerner was present.

  It seemed something was keeping me from leaving my city until I dealt with what had happened. Acceptance came slowly. I mentioned a few minor details of the crime to a girlfriend and she didn’t reject me. At the courthouse, while covering a criminal trial, I saw the lawyer who’d defended me. It’d been a dozen years, but we recognized each other immediately. I was terrified he would give away my past or express some disgust. Instead, he congratulated me on the success I had found. Then, finally, I got the courage to phone the victim of my crime to apologize. It was the hardest phone call I have made in my life. But it made things better.

  Back then, I’m not sure I’d have described myself as broken, but it’s obvious now I was in need of some mending. I’d struggled to come to terms with my past, not always choosing the best avenues, too often relying on the distraction of my work and the anesthesia of drinking. These kinds of bad choices were part of the reason I ended up alone and scared in my apartment that December night, an angry man on the phone threatening me, my life in chaos.

  Only once before had I told the full story of the assault to anyone. But that night beneath the bridge, feeling safe at the bookstore and among my new friends, I confessed everything. They understood because they knew we all had our demons, that we all wanted help to beat them away, and we all needed a place like Shakespeare and Company to do it.

  There is something more to this story, something that to this day makes me wonder about the line between coincidence and destiny. I said I had told this full story only once before, but I didn’t say to whom. It was to the man who sent me hurtling off to Paris by making that threatening phone call that dark December night.

  Having already betrayed him once by using his name when I shouldn’t have, I will give only the briefest details. He was a few years younger than I and grew up in what can be described as a poorer part of town. He took to crime early and developed into what police liked to describe as a “hardened criminal.” In street terms, he was “solid,” a man of his word who didn’t rat to police and was a reliable partner for thieving. He drank, he womanized, he brawled. He also sponsored foster children in Africa and slept with a rosary under his bed.

  Every so often, this man flirted with the idea of going straight, and in exchange for his help on my second book, I promised to help him register a small business. On the day we drove down to city hall, he was unusually quiet and answered my questions curtly. Finally, he confronted me.

  “There’s something I gotta ask you.”

  Okay.

  “Did you do time for a sex beef?”

  It is known that sex offenders are the most despised of criminals, and in prison settings they have to be put in protective custody to prevent beatings from other inmates. For someone solid like this man, it was considered poor form to be seen in such company. When he asked this question in the car, there was a nervous clutch in my stomach and I pulled to the side of
the road.

  “No. Absolutely not,” I said. Then, for the first time, I explained all that had happened when I was fifteen years old and how distortions and rumors had been floating around ever since.

  After listening to it all, the man looked at me carefully and then broke into a brilliant grin that will never leave my memory.

  “Jesus, why didn’t you say so before?” he exclaimed, and began pounding me ferociously on the back. “That’s okay.”

  He absolved me; he was the first person to make me feel somewhat normal about myself. And despite our problems, despite my betraying him in print and his threatening me on the phone, I will always thank him for this.

  26.

  Using my ring of keys, we slipped back into the bookstore, careful not to wake Ablimit, who was asleep in the front library. Kurt got into bed with a silent good night and without a word Nadia followed me to the fiction room where until that night I had been sleeping alone.

  After, I kissed her neck softly. We didn’t speak of the river, but I did admit that earlier in the evening I had been jealous of the Mexican Model. Nadia only looked at me oddly.

  “Him?”

  Playing with my lip, she said there was something she needed to tell me. She’d been attracted to somebody at the bar that night, but it wasn’t the Model. It’d been Marushkah. She’d found every excuse to be near her, to touch her arm.

  “You’re okay I told you that, aren’t you?” she asked.

  I laughed and said of course, and in truth I was relieved. It was considerably less of a threat to one’s ego when your rival wasn’t of the same sex. I could always save my esteem by blaming my anatomy.

  “You know, you might even be able to win her heart from Kurt,” I whispered.

  She smiled at the thought and purred like a cat in my arms. We fell asleep like that, cramped onto a narrow bookstore bed with the walls of novels around us.

  By then, hardly a day passed without George rushing toward me while wielding a hardcover like a meat cleaver. Giving me a stiff whack in the shoulder with the book of the day, he would insist it was essential reading if I wanted to understand anything about the world. Thanks to these subtle suggestions, I had already read my way through more than a dozen classic novels and another dozen books on political history and the roots of socialism.

  When working as a journalist, I’d always tried to read as much as my schedule would allow, but that wasn’t nearly enough. I managed a few pages before I fell asleep each night and found a few hours on weekends, but that was about all. Worse, I chose my books in such haphazard fashion that only random corners of the literary universe were illuminated, and thus I never grasped the fuller harmony between authors and their times.

  Now, I was almost keeping up with George’s ordinance of a book a day, and thanks to his recommendations, I gained a comprehensive overview of the history of literature. All of a sudden, my once-dark universe was being illuminated in enormous swathes and I swung between dizzy confidence at my new knowledge and doleful embarrassment that it had taken me so long to acquire it.

  My relationship with Nadia only added to the luster of my education. One afternoon, we were walking past a shop on rue Dante that featured bright cartoon postcards by Keith Haring in the window. Nadia was shocked when I admitted I’d never heard of the graffiti artist turned Warhol protégé, so she decided to give me a crash course in art appreciation. I still remember her voice ringing with passion the night she told me how Marcel Duchamp changed everything in 1914 by presenting as art a plain metal bottle rack he’d bought at a store.

  “It was the start of the ready-made movement,” she exclaimed. “Can you imagine what a genius he was? Can you imagine breaking all the old rules like he did?”

  I said yes, but frankly, I was just happy to be learning these old rules and left such dreams to her.

  Toward the end of February, Tom Pancake left Paris to continue his journey east. When he’d quit the United States, he’d been aiming for Egypt and a few months before, while still down in Morocco, he’d made plans to meet friends in Cairo. At the time, he wasn’t aware he would fall in love with Gayle, so an otherwise glorious departure was tinged with sadness. Tom dallied and the trip was twice delayed, but eventually the two bid a melancholy good-bye.

  His absence meant Gayle spent more time at the bookstore. Even though she was younger than all the residents, she played big sister to Kurt, Nadia, Ablimit, and me. She would arrive almost daily with home-baked cookies and exotic sandwiches, while on special occasions she would risk inviting us to the embassy for dinner.

  Back in Auckland, Gayle had cooked her way up through various kitchens and ended up at a popular downtown bistro. When she saw the advertisement for the job of personal cook to New Zealand’s ambassador in Paris, it was a pinch-me-I’m-dreaming kind of moment. There was official skepticism about hiring somebody in her early twenties, and Gayle’s short spiked hair didn’t help the negotiations, but in the end she was hired. The job came with a plane ticket to Paris and an apartment on the top floor of the embassy. Suddenly, Gayle found herself in the glamorous world of European diplomacy.

  The embassy was in a building that France had given to New Zealand as a gift for their help in liberating France during World War II. It was off of place Victor Hugo, a few blocks from the Arc de Tri-omphe and far enough from Shakespeare and Company to make it a most strenuous walk. With no budget for the eight-franc metro tickets, this meant that whenever we received Gayle’s kind invitations, we were obliged to start stealin’ trains, as Kurt called it.

  The ease with which the metro could be hopped was another of the things that made being poor in Paris so tolerable. There were entrance doors you could pry open, low turnstiles you could jump, slow-closing gates that allowed you to sneak in behind a paying customer. Catching these free rides was made simpler because the clerks who worked in the ticket booths belonged to a different union than the metro controllers and refused to police the turnstiles out of respect for their colleagues’ job security.

  Once past the gates and into the belly of the metro, there were rare occasions when you stumbled onto a spot check, but this was never much of a problem. I started picking up a discarded ticket from the floor and chewing it for the duration of my metro ride. This saliva-damp state made the controllers reluctant to check the ticket’s validity and made for many a safe passage. But even when I was caught, it wasn’t a tragedy. When you declared you had no money, a notice of a fine was mailed to you at a later date. For those of us blessed with no fixed address, that later date never came.

  It was the 4 line to the 1 line to the 2 line to get to place Victor Hugo and then there was a strict protocol for the Shakespeare and Company crowd to follow. First, we had to loiter down the street from the embassy so as to better conceal our grubby appearances from the security cameras. Then, on a special signal from Gayle—she insisted it was the call of the kiwi bird—we would rush to the front door so she could sneak us onto New Zealand territory when the ambassador was elsewhere in the building. Finally, we hurried to the giant kitchen in the bowels of the building, a service-only area, where the masters of the house never deigned to set foot.

  Safely in the kitchen, Nadia, Kurt, Ablimit, and I would chop and grate and stir, all on Gayle’s precise orders. One time, while washing lettuce in the sink beside her, I noticed a long scar running up one arm.

  Kitchen accident?

  “Nah, back home I lost control of my motorbike. I tore into the side of a bridge. Nearly died.”

  Ahh.

  When the cooking was done, we’d take the service elevator up to her apartment on the top floor of the embassy. After eating, we would take turns using Gayle’s bathroom to wash and shave. Some nights, there were more than a half dozen bookstore refugees up there, muffling our conversation and walking without shoes so as not to disturb the building’s official residents.

  A favorite day was when Gayle prepared a reception for the New Zealand All Black rugby team. The ambas
sador’s wife was so terrified of their sporting appetites, she ordered an outrageous amount of food: mango and duck salad, roast cherry tomatoes with feta, salmon sushi, prunes in bacon, smoked trout, lamb tarts, tray after tray of calorie-rich delights. But when the players arrived, they were groggy from celebrating their victory over France the night before and left vast amounts untouched. We descended on the embassy with ravenous hunger, and there was still enough left over to take platefuls back for George.

  Luke and I were becoming closer with every page of George’s booklet. Enduring his irrational requests and fluctuating moods had brought us together like two students who suffer the same eccentric schoolteacher.

  “Monday, George wanted the picture tinted yellow, Tuesday, he wanted it tinted purple, Wednesday, he wanted it tinted orange,” Luke complained one Thursday night. “Now he wants it tinted yellow again. Can you believe it?” Of course I could. During those same four days, I’d watched George rewrite the same sentence eleven times.

  Despite these mild annoyances, Luke was becoming addicted to the project. Like everyone in the bookstore community, he was at Shakespeare and Company because he wasn’t quite sure where else he should be. Sometimes the idea of Cuba was strong in his head and he wanted to open up an English-language bookstore in Havana. Sometimes he remembered the vampire novel he’d conceived while living in Brazil and he wanted to write gory thrillers. Now, high on the thrill of the booklet, sometimes he wanted to become an underground publisher.