Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  I put the pouch in my pocket, grateful that I would be able to do a load of laundry, buy a decent lunch, and rest easy for a few weeks. This was the first of two times that George gave me money.

  One day, Nadia came running back to the store from the local Internet café with a pleasant bit of news. A sculpture of hers had been selected for an exhibition of young artists being held at a Brooklyn gallery. It was a prestigious affair and she’d decided to push her credit card to its maximum in order to fly back for the opening.

  “This could be my break,” she said as she fluttered around the bookstore bestowing celebratory kisses on Ablimit, Kurt, and, I couldn’t help but notice, Marushkah, who happened to be keeping Pia company at the front desk.

  The sculpture was a series of hatbox-size cubes with the sides covered with a photograph of a man or woman’s body part. There were hairy backs, thin elbows, voluptuous thighs, wrinkled penises. It was a participatory work and spectators were urged to assemble a being of their own sexual creation.

  Nadia took devilish delight in such possibilities, and I was beginning to enjoy dating a woman with such a fluid idea of sexuality. The afternoon she left for New York, she gave me a kiss and a crumpled note. It read, “The man in me loves the woman in you,” and I fell a little deeper.

  It seemed everyone was off on some adventure, as Kurt announced he was going to spend seventy straight hours on a ratty bus to Morocco.

  Ever since Nadia and I had begun our intimacies, Kurt had been behaving strangely. Unhappy that the rowdy days of the boys were over, he started relentlessly flirting with the many women who came to the store, searching for a girlfriend of his own. Kurt ended up choosing a young French woman with a degree in astrophysics, a semishaven head, and a taste for body piercing.

  “She’s my Femme Nikita,” Kurt told me when he made the introduction.

  With his new girlfriend in tow, Kurt decided to take up a standing invitation from a bookstore regular to travel to the seaside city of Essaouira. Chris Cook Gilmore was an aging beach hipster who kept his gray hair long and most always wore sunglasses inside. In the 1970s, he’d made a name for himself as a writer while incarcerated at the Re-bibbia Prison in Rome for smuggling five kilos of hashish into Italy. During his seventeen months behind bars, Gilmore wrote a series of short stories, which his mother showed to a literary agent in New York. The result was a book contract and an acclaimed first novel, a rum-running adventure called Atlantic City Proof, which was made into a BBC radio play and translated into Italian.

  Since that first success, Gilmore had written twenty more books, some published, others not, and spent his time living in three countries, depending on the season. In summer and fall, he lived with his mother in Margate, a city on Absecon Island, off the coast of New Jersey. His home was a block from the beach and a few miles down from the Atlantic City casinos. Winters were spent in Essaouira, the walled city on the northwest coast of Morocco where Jimi Hendrix used to play. And for the spring, it was Paris—or more precisely, the third-floor apartment of Shakespeare and Company. When he’d been through the bookstore on his way down to Morocco in January, Chris had extended an open invitation to join him at his hotel, and now Kurt longed to join the old writer in Africa.

  “This guy used to hang out with Paul Bowles,” Kurt said, as if no further reason for the expedition was needed.

  With the Femme Nikita helpfully subsidizing the bus tickets, Kurt left for Essauoira not long after Nadia went to New York. After I saw them off from the Gallieni bus station, it struck me that life at the bookstore was suddenly extremely quiet.

  As may be obvious by my indulgences that first night in the antiquarian room with Simon and my investment in a growing operation back in Canada, I am not adverse to recreational drug use. In fact, I even credit marijuana for nudging me along the road to salvation.

  During the darkest days at the newspaper, I had taken to a troubling amount of drinking, and there was no more bitter memory of my alcoholic discontent than the night I crashed my 1977 Lincoln Continental.

  It was the dream car I’d bought as a present to myself when hired full-time at the newspaper. Baby blue with glimmering chrome and the original eight-track player, the Mighty Lincoln was longer than two economy cars put together. It had a fifty-dollar-a-week taste for gasoline, didn’t start in the rain, and was prone to expensive breakdowns, but I loved every bit of it.

  On the night in question, I was driving home, agreeably inebriated after a friend’s bachelor party, when I spotted traffic pylons in the middle of an intersection just a block from my apartment. These pylons were the traditional indication of freshly painted street lines, so without hesitation, I tore ahead. After coming to a squealing stop, I looked through my rearview mirror and noted with pride that I’d managed to smear a decent bit of paint and knock down all the pylons save one. Just as I was about to flip into reverse to complete the task, I happened to check over my shoulder. There, idling at the curb, was a patrol car.

  I sped away. The police car followed. Barreling toward my parking lot at fifty miles an hour, I swung wildly into my spot without braking. My precious Lincoln ricocheted off an oak tree and came to a stop at a drunken tilt. The police car pulled in after me with considerably more control.

  Stumbling out my car, I took two gentle steps away from the police car and then dived headfirst into a thick hedge. A dash down an alley and two jumped fences later, I arrived at the side entrance of my building. Safely inside my apartment, I hid under a pile of dirty shirts in my closet while the phone rang and rang and the door buzzer buzzed and buzzed. I didn’t emerge until the morning.

  My beloved car suffered a tragic gash along the passenger side and the beautiful chrome had been scraped to tinsel. Though the police had tracked me to my apartment a few minutes after the accident by running my licence plate, they didn’t have a search warrant to come inside. Only the technicality that required a drunk driver to be caught behind the wheel saved me from arrest and spared my good standing at my newspaper.

  And that was a rather mild night of drinking.

  I likely would have been at a loss as to how to combat this destructive tendency had it not been for a girlfriend I met while working as a crime reporter. She was a tranquil soul and a regular smoker of marijuana, and it was through her that I came to appreciate the calming effects of the drug. Before, getting high was always something I did between beers; with her, I smoked as an alternative to drinking. I was more relaxed, my appetite for alcohol shrank considerably, my evenings out were less violent.

  These revelations didn’t come as a total surprise to me. Working with the police as a reporter, I’d learned that alcohol was among their least favorite drugs, that officers universally preferred dealing with a whimsical pothead than a raving drunk. A prison warden I knew even confided that he turned a blind eye when marijuana or hash was smuggled into his jail, because it had a soothing effect on inmates. But if an illegal alcohol still was uncovered, it meant an immediate thirty days in solitary.

  The change in my personality became so great that my friends soon began referring to the eras of pre- and postmarijuana, and they unanimously preferred the latter. After all I had been through, it was an easy decision to bring marijuana into my life until I developed better coping mechanisms.

  It so happened that Dave shared my enthusiasms, though more out of a search for life’s rushes as opposed to any deep form of therapy. Together again, and with Kurt and Nadia gone, it didn’t take us long to recollect fondly about our old habits and it didn’t take much longer for us to hit the streets.

  The best open-air drug market in Paris is at Les Halles, the municipal park just north of Châtelet. It used to be an enormous fruit and vegetable market, and there is a scene in Tender Is the Night where a band of revelers rides into Les Halles on top of a carrot wagon as dawn breaks over the city. Unfortunately, in the 1960s, a property developer was allowed to dig a huge pit under the market and turn it into a sunken mall. Now, hundreds o
f clothes shops, CD stores, and reeking fast-food outlets descend beneath the earth like Dante’s rings of hell.

  Above this shopping center, the city built the park now known as Les Halles. Here, a few old men play boules, a few brave au pairs stroll with their charges, and a few dozen dealers sell a variety of products, including one-hundred- and two-hundred-franc chunks of Moroccan hash.

  Dave and I went to Les Halles early one afternoon and, using the universal language of such transactions, circled the park to see who would try to catch our eye. Two young men making such a purposeful tour were obvious clients and soon enough several dealers were vying for our attention. We stopped at a seller near the sculpture of a hand cradling a head.

  “Tu cherche?”

  We nodded and the man produced a thimble-size morsel of hash. I picked it up and was alarmed by the large sum of money demanded.

  “C’est un peu petit,” I muttered in my bastard French, then returned it in hopes of negotiating. The man proceeded to punch me in the head.

  Staggering backward, I managed to avoid another blow, while Dave had already scuttled away, his arms waving wildly in the air.

  “What are you doing haggling?” he demanded, checking over his shoulder to make sure we weren’t being followed. “We don’t know how it works here!”

  Rubbing my temple, I agreed it had been presumptuous. We made another circle of the park and this time chose a man in an Adidas jumpsuit. His hash was cut into spaghetti-thin sticks and wrapped tightly in cellophane, so we couldn’t give it a decent sniff. Still, after the previous experience, we weren’t about to complain and I walked away, feeling quite contented with my first drug transaction in Paris.

  A few days later, Dave left for a relative’s farmhouse in the Austrian hills to write his great novel, so I was left lonely again. Sitting on the bench under the cherry tree one night, I was envisioning my happy reunion with Nadia, when Simon approached, distraught with worry.

  “I think Kitty’s dead,” he said in a hoarse voice.

  Kitty was the subject of a covert tug-of-war between George and Simon. George believed Kitty should acquire a survival instinct and only fed her every second day so the cat would learn to hunt birds and mice in the nearby park. But Simon rebelled against turning a domestic animal into a savage, so he sneaked Kitty into the antiquarian room each night and discreetly fed her tins of wet food. Each man was confident his approach was the right one and each was equally confident that deep down the cat preferred him.

  Pulling me by the hand, Simon led me down rue St. Jacques to near where Tuee the Sandwich Queen had her stand. Under a truck was the stiff body of a black cat that had been struck by a car. We crouched beside the body, unsure if it was really Kitty. It had the same fur, but something seemed wrong. Finally, Simon reached out and felt the dead animal’s tail to see if it had Kitty’s telltale kink. It wasn’t there and we breathed deep with relief. Still, with the two of us sitting there hunched over a dead black cat, I couldn’t help but think it was an ominous sign.

  29.

  Since arriving at Shakespeare and Company, I’d graced a privileged rung of George’s informal hierarchy. I’d been given the keys, I’d been invited upstairs for dinner, I was his chosen confidant when he wanted to talk about buying the apartment, the future of the bookstore, or the love he had for his lost daughter. But suddenly, I was usurped.

  From the outside, Scott looked like everyone else at Shakespeare and Company. He hadn’t showered in a week, he was red-eyed from lack of sleep, he had bulging pockets of notes for his Benjamin book. But somehow, in just a few short weeks, he’d replaced me as George’s assistant of choice. It was Scott who always managed to be the first one awake to open the store, it was Scott who filled in at the desk whenever Pia or Sophie had their afternoon coffees, it was Scott who spent his free hours alphabetizing books in the fiction section.

  George watched over it all like a proud father and never missed an opportunity to herald Scott’s accomplishments. Depending on the hour of the day, George would tell visitors Scott was a distinguished scholar, a soon-to-be-famous writer, or simply an all-around swell guy. Scott soaked it up with unfailingly modest smiles.

  Something close to jealousy began to tickle inside me. I’d never really worried about my standing at Shakespeare and Company, but now doubt began to claw. I remembered Esteban and his reaction when I’d arrived. I wondered if I wasn’t feeling the same way about Scott.

  When George was preparing to travel to London for the annual book fair, I won points days before his departure when he lost his train ticket, his accreditation for the fair, and his passport. Having grown accustomed to George’s regular losing places, I was able to find the vital documents mixed in with a pile of invoices from Penguin. Proud of the feat, it stung doubly when George invited Scott to sleep in his bedroom while he was in London.

  “He’s a serious writer, he needs a quiet space to work,” George reprimanded when he saw my distress. “You rabble-rousers spend too much time drinking by the river anyway.”

  Perhaps that dead black cat was bad luck. After weeks of waiting, Simon’s cellular phone finally rang, but it wasn’t the answer he needed.

  “They’re going to give the contract to somebody with more experience,” he told me glumly. “These people don’t care about art. They know I’m the best person to translate Claude Simon, but they want somebody with a reputation and a degree they can parade around their fêtes.”

  We were sitting at the Panis bar, but there was no cheer to be found in the café, either. Simon noticed that Amos was lying prone on the floor and couldn’t even get to his feet to greet us. One of the waiters said there had been blood in the dog’s feces and that the café’s owner was going to have to call a veterinarian.

  Between the sick dog and the lost translation contract, Simon was despondent, but even this dire state was trumped by his fear when he learned I’d fallen out of bookstore favor. George hadn’t mentioned Simon’s leaving Shakespeare and Company since we’d come to the arrangement to share the antiquarian room. The poet gratefully attributed this stay of eviction to my charms, and now he worried again that he might lose his home.

  “I think they’ll find my body floating in the Seine if that happens,” he muttered.

  I’d hoped for succor on Nadia’s return from New York, but things immediately went sour. The cold bookstore nights, the lack of sleep, and the careless diet had left my body vulnerable and I succumbed to a wretched bookstore virus. Reeling from flu, I barely managed to get to the airport at all, let alone get there on time. Nadia was initially upset that I was late and then completely underwhelmed by my sickly lack of enthusiasm for our reunion.

  There was also a sense of distance created by Nadia’s trip back into the real world. Though the gallery show had been a success, it reminded her how the art world hummed along on contacts. She felt numbing pressure to build her own network and questioned what she was doing living in a bookstore. Though Nadia admired the camaraderie and spirit of Shakespeare and Company, there was never space or time to be alone and actually create. I at least had the luxury of the antiquarian room during the days and evenings, while Kurt thrived in the goldfish-bowl world of writing in the bookstore. For Nadia, who needed artistic solitude, the communal life was becoming suffocating.

  Theft was a continuous problem, as George’s carelessness with money gave Shakespeare and Company a stunning reputation among neighborhood villains. Dozens of thieves came in on regular visits, searching through books for francs forgotten by George or lying in wait for him to stray from the cash register. Rare was the week when there wasn’t a successful strike.

  There were apocryphal stories of the great bookstore larcenies: a young Belgian finding thirty thousand francs behind volumes of a encyclopedia and going climbing in Nepal for a year; a pair of Spanish heroin addicts who’d supported their habit through George’s left-about money for five straight years; an American poet of marginal acclaim who hid under a table of books wh
en the store closed at night so he could hunt for the caches of francs once everyone fell asleep.

  More sadly, there was also internal theft. George not only trusted strangers to sleep in the store but also to fill in at the desk. With no accounting system and a majority of buttons on the cash register shortcircuited, the odd bill could be nipped with impunity. As one former resident put it, it was easy to stretch the meaning of George’s personal proverb, “Give what you can, take what you need.”

  And, as I discovered one terrifying night while talking books with Luke, there was occasionally theft of a more violent sort.

  Luke was in fine form, dressed in a sleek black suit and reviewing the merits of Nelson Algren’s The Man with the Golden Arm. Algren grew up in Chicago, served in World War II, had a famous affair with Simone de Beauvoir, and, most importantly, wrote dazzling prose. The Man with the Golden Arm was the first American book about hard heroin use and it depicted a violent edge to Chicago street life. According to Luke, when Hollywood turned the book into a film, the producers cast Frank Sinatra as the lead, and after Algren deemed him too soft for the role, the writer got kicked off the set for belligerence.

  In the midst of this story, Luke realized it was near closing time and went upstairs to make sure there were no customers left in the library. He’d only been gone a minute or two when four young men bulled their way into the store. One of them lifted up his shirt to reveal a knife with a long curved blade tucked into the waistband of his sweatpants. The man then pointed to the cash register and withdrew the knife.