Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

After a brief investigation, I concluded Scott had made the critical mistake of becoming too friendly with Sophie. Though he insisted it was just friendship, Scott spent untold hours at her side while she was working at the bookstore desk and had even begun using his Watson Fellowship money to invite Sophie to expensive dinners.

  It was hard to blame Scott for his fascination; along with Nick the Street Hustler, there was a handful of admirers who regularly visited the store to court the young English actress. But the others who had lost their hearts to Sophie didn’t live at Shakespeare and Company, and I discovered that for residents of the bookstore, becoming involved with a clerk was something of a taboo.

  George kept a close watch over the string of beautiful women who worked at the store, and he didn’t appreciate any of the residents paying them too close attention. Part of it was a paternal gesture, as he wanted to protect his wards from the emotional ravages of bookstore romance. Many times, true love has bloomed at Shakespeare and Company, as evidenced by George’s running count of the marriages between people who’d met at the store. But many more times, bookstore affairs ended in ruin. Once, I sat for a tea with George and a lovely Korean woman who’d come back to visit the store a decade after she had worked the front desk. With her was a beautiful young girl, the product of a bookstore romance with a writer who’d long since disappeared.

  Yet there was something more to George’s protective instinct. He was also the aging wolf, trying to mark his territory in the face of bounding cubs. For fifty years, he’d been the center of attention at the bookstore and he was at times reluctant to share the spotlight. Sophie and Scott hadn’t taken any measures to conceal their friendship and the fact that it was platonic didn’t really matter.

  When I asked George if he was angry, he only grumbled that Scott was preventing Sophie from getting any work done by entertaining her at the desk all day. I interpreted this as a warning and told Scott that he should avoid being seen with Sophie.

  It was as if I’d passed another of George’s misty tests by suffering through his preference for Scott and still returning to his side. We ate dinner together again, we once more conspired about the future of the store, we conducted another raft of changes to his booklet. He even took me aside and said it wasn’t everyone who could endure his peccadilloes.

  The strength of our friendship was proven the day I got into a nasty fight with a new resident. It was one of George’s greatest talents to judge the hearts of people in a brief moment and protect Shakespeare and Company from bad seeds. Considering more than forty thousand people had slept among the books, there had been relatively few violent or fanatic incidents. Though, of course, there were the occasional lapses in judgment.

  George once told me of the murderer who’d stayed at the store in the 1990s. He’d pegged the fellow for an unusual sort at first sight but gave him the benefit of the doubt. Then one day, George heard screaming from the third-floor apartment and ran upstairs to find the man strangling a young woman who was staying at the store. George had to threaten the man with a wine bottle before he would let the woman go.

  “He didn’t want to rape her, just kill her,” he told me. “His eyes were filled with the worst hatred I’ve ever seen.”

  Years later, an English police detective came through Paris and stopped by the bookstore. He had a photograph and asked if George recognized the face. George explained what had happened when the man stayed at Shakespeare and Company and the detective nodded grimly. It turned out this man had stalked and killed a woman in London the year before and the police had tracked him all the way to Russia to make the arrest. The detective was vacationing in Paris and, remembering that the murderer had spoken fondly of George, thought he’d pass on the news.

  “I was really surprised by that one,” George admitted.

  In the case of this new resident, a Sri Lankan woman from Cambridge, it wasn’t that she was an attempted murderess, just that she was so damn aloof. She was studying for exams and had written George in advance to ask to stay. For once, George had been organized enough to send off a postcard of confirmation and the woman arrived one sunny morning in late April.

  The two of us were immediately on the wrong foot. George had agreed to let her stay in the third-floor apartment so she could have peace to read and revise. The Sri Lankan woman had brought two heavy suitcases and demanded that I carry them upstairs for her. Taken aback, I nonetheless hefted the bags.

  During the woman’s first week, she never once helped out in the store. Not in the morning to open the doors, not at night to take in the books, not when there was a major delivery in a pouring rainstorm and the customers helped run boxes inside. She even had the gall to beg out of Sunday chores, and I just didn’t get it. How could she ignore the store’s traditions? Why wasn’t she doing her part? I finally confronted the woman, and after harsh words became reckless screaming, she ran upstairs in tears.

  Afterward, I worried George would be angry with me for losing my temper, but instead he took me into his office and explained how sometimes we have to give the least deserving people the greatest allowances.

  “I’ve always agreed with what Walt Whitman said, that there’s a touch of genius in everyone, that everyone can be special,” George said. “It’s not too late for her. We can help her. It’s the people like this we need to win over.”

  Huddling close to the gas heater one cold night, we were fantasizing about the tropical humidity we’d enjoy at Luke’s Cuban bookstore, when the door banged open. Just as we were about to curse the cold, Kurt burst in. He was wearing the same gray overcoat he always wore, but he had a crisp tan and a bright blue head scarf in the tradition of Maghrebian nomads.

  “I’m back,” he announced with arms spread.

  Any misgivings about his headgear were washed away by my relief to see him again. After almost four months in Paris, Kurt was one of my closest friends, and I looked forward to relating all that had passed while he was away. Kurt, too, had his tales and launched into descriptions of the red deserts, a rooftop hotel room costing a few francs a night, the mosques with their calls to prayer. But he saved his highest praise for Chris Cook Gilmore, the man he now reverently called “the Captain.”

  “He’s an inspiration,” he said, brandishing his notebooks. “I’ve finally got Videowrangler done.”

  Kurt said Chris would be coming through Paris in a few days and would be staying at the bookstore. I carefully noted his arrival date. For the most part, the writers who’d stayed at Shakespeare and Company during my sojourn there were on the first steps of their ambitious journeys. It would be edifying to encounter someone who had actually published.

  I loved Nadia as much as ever, but things were becoming increasingly strained. At the time, I blamed the cramped quarters, the constant filth, the lack of any real time alone together. But really it was me. Living in a subversive old bookstore makes one feel like a ready-made bohemian, but I still had a couple of decades of middle-class upbringing in my bones. I discovered I couldn’t really handle such an unconventional young woman.

  The breaking point came one story-time evening. Ever since Kurt, Nadia, and I had spent that first intimate night by the Seine, the gatherings had become a loosely organized event. Once or twice a week, we would meet by the river with bottles of wine and people would take turns telling stories, usually feeding off a line thrown to them at random from the others.

  A woman named Claire walked into the store during the afternoon and Kurt, having dispatched of the Femme Nikita after Morocco, set upon her with voracious charm. He ended up introducing her to everyone, and when Claire met Nadia, there was instant spark. Kurt had already told of the session by the Seine planned for that evening, but when Nadia repeated the invitation, Claire immediately accepted.

  Nadia and I had been invited to the studio of a fellow Romanian artist that night, so we shared an awkward dinner in a garage filled with juggling clubs and rolls of fabric. Nadia was on edge, too quick to laugh at jokes, always wi
th an eye on the clock. On the metro ride back downtown, she raised the prospect of an open relationship for the first time. Kurt and Claire were already down by the Seine when we arrived and Claire leapt up to give Nadia an enormous hug. Once the bottles of wine were opened and passed around, Kurt took the storyteller’s position at the quay’s stone wall. Using a first line about fire, he wove a story about homeless men burning books for warmth under a bridge and coming to a copy of Don Quixote.

  As soon as Kurt left the spot, Claire flurried into place. She took a first line about love and told a choppy story about a girl’s first lesbian encounter. Though Kurt and I were breathless with titillation, the whole time she looked only at Nadia. At the peak of the story, Claire yanked off her shoe and threw it in the Seine. Nadia was so taken by the gesture, she brought her hands to her face and gasped.

  Oblivious to the undercurrents, Kurt removed his own shoe, knelt before Claire, and placed it on her stockinged foot. Very pleased with his chivalry, he stumbled back to me.

  “I think she really likes me,” he whispered, his bottle of red wine already mostly empty.

  Meanwhile, Nadia had taken the spot underneath the light. Without waiting for a first line, she burrowed into a story about a crush she’d had on an older girl in high school. Kurt kept elbowing me in the ribs to demonstrate his excitement, and when Nadia finished, she was flustered and blushing. Claire suddenly announced she had to go to the bathroom, and though Kurt rose to escort her, Nadia immediately blocked his way.

  “Get more wine,” Kurt shouted after them as they disappeared up the stairs to street level.

  It was then that I told Kurt there was a strong possibility the two weren’t coming back. At first, he refused to believe me, but after I pointed out the similarities in their stories, their rapid escape together, and the fact that Nadia had told me she was attracted to Claire, he finally seemed almost ready to accept the rejection.

  “But I gave her my shoe.”

  For the next hour or so, we stayed at the river in case the two returned, but my initial feeling of adventure was turning into a desperate sense of abandonment. I thought I loved Nadia and enjoyed having her as my girlfriend, yet as I sat on the cold river’s edge, she was in the arms of someone else. Around three in the morning, we finally gave in and returned to the bookstore. After Kurt passed out in his sleeping bag, I went back to the fiction room and found Nadia and Claire in the bed that, until that night, we had been sharing. I skulked downstairs and lay awake in the Russian section until the first light of dawn.

  32.

  Near April’s end, George received word that the cherished apartment was finally coming on the market. With this news, all the bookstore’s forces were mobilized and the expansion campaign moved into full throttle.

  George had the name of the agent who was handling the sale and decided to use one of his favorite tricks to better his chances at winning the apartment. He’d long been the type of man to run afoul of neighbors, city officials, and other authority figures and was often called upon to account for his infractions. After enough of these encounters, George discovered a clever way to soften the blows: Whenever a meeting was held to sort out problems with the store or his unruly guests, he would claim illness and send one of his employees, most always a woman of considerable beauty, to take his place. The combination of sick old man and enchanting young woman was usually more than ample to win clemency.

  For the real estate agent, George chose a variation of this technique. Sophie was to visit his office, find out when the apartment would be officially for sale, and use her skills as an actress to ensure that George got a bid in before the hotel baron. George was so confident he’d get the apartment, he asked Nadia to make blueprints for the renovations. Under his guidance, she sketched pastels of the view from the windows, the sleeping benches, and, over and over again, the bookshelves.

  “If I get this apartment, I’ll have done it all myself,” George said with no small pride. “I bought the bookstore. Even Ferlinghetti didn’t do that. He rented the space for City Lights and then the city bought it for him.”

  As Kurt promised, the legendary Chris Cook Gilmore arrived from Morocco and installed himself in the third-floor apartment with an elaborate hookah and a lovely lady friend named Anita. The pair built a nest upstairs, where they cooked potato and leek soup, bought a different variety of French bread each day, and regularly invited all the residents up to share their meals. It was on these nights that Chris taught me the expression “You fly, I buy,” and we spent long nights drinking beer, with either Kurt or me whisking off to the nearby grocery store when supplies waned.

  Chris was a born storyteller and he was especially gifted at recounting the extraordinary events of his own life. His father, Eddie Gilmore, had been a reporter for the Associated Press. He’d left his wife and baby Chris behind in America to take a job reporting in Moscow during the 1940s. There, he fell in love with a teenage ballerina at the Bolshoi. The two were married and then spent a decade trying to escape Stalin’s Russia, until they finally slipped out of the country on a fishing boat in the dead of night. Eddie Gilmore even wrote a book about the story, which was made into a Hollywood movie, with Clark Gable in the role of Chris’s father. But to Chris’s disappointment, he wasn’t even mentioned in the memoir, so to this day, whenever he finds a copy in a used bookstore, he inscribes it: “Dad, now I’m finally in your autobiography. Your son, Chris.”

  Chris was full of such stories: how his family tree could be traced back to the legendary Captain Cook who discovered Hawaii and was murdered by natives for being a false god; how he’d lived in Mexico with a teenage hooker and was arrested for carrying a gun; how Jimi Hendrix had helped him tune his guitar in a Moroccan hotel room back in the sixties; how he’d met George by ducking into the bookstore to escape the police and the tear gas of the May 1968 riots; how he’d had the world’s most dangerous girlfriend when he lived in Cambodia during the country’s civil war.

  Sometimes I couldn’t help but wonder if Chris wasn’t using a touch of poetic license in the telling of these incredible stories. This doubt was erased the day I discovered him in the third-floor apartment with a very powerful machine gun.

  I’d gone upstairs to fetch a bottle of beer for George and had found Chris in the kitchen. He was behaving a little unusually, a little too quick to laugh, a strange gleam of sweat on his brow. Sure enough, after a few minutes of awkward small talk, he waved me closer.

  “If you can keep a secret, I’ll show you something really neat.”

  Chris led me to the back of the apartment, and there on the master bed was a slick black machine gun set up on its tripod. Chris gleefully ran down the specifications: It was one of four hundred thousand MG42 machine guns produced by the Germans during World War II, it weighed twenty-five pounds, it was capable of firing fifteen hundred rounds a minute, it was generally considered the greatest machine gun ever constructed, and it cost just four thousand francs if you knew the right antique-gun dealer in downtown Paris. “They called it a ‘burp gun,’” he said as he passed it over so I could heft it. “That’s because it fired so fast, it made a burping sound. Burrr-burrr-burrr-burrr-burrr.”

  After that, I put more faith in Chris’s stories. When you see a man holding a machine gun, all of a sudden all his other wild tales become a little more credible.

  With the apartment now in sight, work on the booklet was in its final sprint. George found one of his favorite pictures, a black-and-white photograph of a mother and child reading a book on the store’s inside steps, which were painted with the words LIVE FOR HUMANITY. It had been taken by Pia’s mother during a trip through Paris, and for George it represented the essence of Shakespeare and Company. We fussed over the photograph for two days, making sure the tint and contrast were perfect. Once the proper font had been chosen for the text, the booklet was done.

  As happy as I was that Luke and I were on the verge of sending the files to the printer and in a few weeks would be to
uching paper, I was troubled when I saw the final copy of George’s essay. It was to be the centerpiece of the booklet, but it flitted between hopeful beauty and somber foreboding. It began:

  Looking back at half a century as a bookseller in Paris it all seems like a never ending play by William Shakespeare where the Romeos and Juliets are forever young while I have become an octogenarian who like King Lear is slowly losing his wits. Now that I am coming into my second childhood I wonder if all along I have just been playing store on one of the back alleys of history, putting obsolete books on dusty shelves … .

  I could have dismissed this as George’s modesty, but then I read what followed. After writing of how he’d meant to spend seven years walking around the world, he said it was his biggest regret not to have completed the journey. Then he intimated that he might try to finish it now:

  … I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions—just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart whose motto is, “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.

  Amitié Sincère,

  George Whitman

  When I read this, I was alarmed enough to ask George if he really was thinking about leaving Shakespeare and Company behind.

  “I don’t want to become a burden for this place,” he replied with a sigh. “I want to be able to make the bookstore nice enough so my daughter will want to run it. That would make me happy. Then maybe I really will go back on the road.”