Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Eve was flattered by the ring and wore it proudly. She hadn’t technically said yes to George’s suggestion they marry, but she was going to take some time to think about it. For now, she was going to come stay at the bookstore to see what it was like to live with George.

  That week, Eve moved into the upstairs apartment. She and George started going to movies together, holding hands at dinner, and generally behaving like love-struck children.

  “Dude, this is so Harold and Maude,” Kurt said when George returned with a semi-crumpled bouquet of carnations for Eve.

  Though it was tempting to be critical of George for seducing a woman nearly seven decades his junior, I saw a poetic side to the romance. He wasn’t doing it for sex or for status; he was doing it because he genuinely loved Eve. Having lived such an extraordinary life and having run such an extraordinary bookstore, wasn’t he entitled to one last extraordinary love affair?

  George had always believed in love. His first was a woman named Gwen. They’d been members of the same Communist cell in Berkeley and fell for each other at first glance. Gwen’s mother disliked George and he could only see Gwen by hiding outside her house and whistling a secret code. They decided to travel to Mexico together and arranged to meet in a town close to the border, but while hopping trains on the way down, George was picked up by police for being a suspicious person and was actually in jail the day of their rendezvous. Once freed, he tracked Gwen down to a restaurant where she’d found a job as a waitress and their adventure began—on foot through the Sonoran Desert.

  George remembers them walking at night to avoid the hot sun and then arriving at the estate of a rich Mexican near the Yaqui River. The young couple were given a room and the Mexican even offered George a magnificent gift. An old boat had sunk in the river, and if George dredged it up and repaired it, the man said, he and Gwen could continue their journey by water. A few weeks later, they were drifting down the river together.

  They were eventually separated, first when George made a trip home, then by the war. The last George heard, Gwen had returned to Mexico and married. She’d had several children but hadn’t been happy. It seemed her husband followed the tradition of keeping a wife to raise his family, while mistresses sated other appetites. On certain days, George would even say he should have married Gwen, one of the great what ifs of his life.

  There had been other women, too. Laura de Los Rios, a classmate of his sister’s who’d fallen in love with George after reading the letters he sent home from Panama and of whom he wrote, “Among the visions which my memories trace/There is one brightest star, one face.” The Russian woman who took him to Saint Petersburg but got angry when all he wanted to do was stay home and read the Russian books in her library. His fiancées Josette and Colette. The shadowy Anaïs Nin. His ex-wife.

  These were the important women in George’s life, and he rarely pursued the temporary indulgences that his bookstore offered. If he’d wanted, he could have had a new girlfriend every week, but instead, he kept on falling in love.

  “I wasn’t like Henry Miller and the rest of them, running around, doing their things,” George explained. “I liked being in love with my girlfriend. I liked writing her love letters up here at my desk and giving her presents that made her cry. I guess I’m a bit old-fashioned that way.”

  Still, it was tempting to replace the word old-fashioned with childlike when describing George’s approach to love. He was eternally captured by his romantic visions, and in all his years he was never able to build a mature relationship. Perhaps it was because of his lingering anger toward his mother, but when it came to women, George was a Peter Pan, his spirit forever that of a young boy.

  It was also difficult to judge George, as my own behavior was far from exemplary. With Nadia gone and my heart splintered, I gorged on the sugar high of Shakespeare and Company romance.

  With so many young men and women eager to explore the world and press their limits, and with Paris’s reputation for romance, the bookstore was a bastion of sexual indulgence. In the four months I’d seen Kurt at the bookstore, I would have needed to use my fingers and toes to count his various girlfriends, and from what Luke told me, one could always find a Kurt or two around the store. Newly single at Shakespeare and Company, for the first time in my life I was actually refusing offers of intimate companionship, and this had turned my sexual psychology upside down. Previously, I’d been somewhat typical male, conditioned to believe I should have an insatiable sexual appetite and bed dozens of women if I were to be a proper man. Even when I reached my twenties and had plenty of lovely girlfriends and sex became more easily accessible, I always felt lacking, as if I wasn’t living up to the sexual conquests expected of a man of the Details generation. With this doubt, I often made poor decisions, partaking of intimacy for no other reason than the intimacy itself.

  This brings to mind my mother’s favorite dog, Daisy. She is a Brittany spaniel that was bred in a puppy mill, where the owners viciously abused and starved their dogs in order to maximize the per-puppy profit. The dog managed to escape into the woods, and when she was finally found and taken to the animal shelter weeks later, she was a frail skeleton and there were still scabs on her legs from where the owners of the puppy mill had stubbed out cigarettes as punishment for misbehavior.

  Even after she had been adopted by my mother and regained her weight, it was embedded in Daisy’s mind that she was starving, so whenever there was food about, she ate. The veterinarian said if left alone with enough food, Daisy might actually eat herself to death. In fact, she tried to prove him right on several occasions, once working through the better part of a ten-pound sack of potatoes, another time devouring a box of twenty-four candles.

  Like the dog, I still had unexorcized fears of sexual starvation, and thus the bookstore could be a dangerous place. Though I wasn’t as promiscuous as Kurt, I made rash choices after Nadia left me. A particularly doomed relationship involved a German woman I’d met in the antiquarian room. One day, she invited me to the woods of the Bois de Boulogne for a picnic. She’d made a red pepper salad and there was wine and fresh bread. We found a secluded spot among the trees. She declared immediately she wouldn’t have sex with me and I agreed we shouldn’t cloud our friendship, but we decided we could kiss a little.

  It was a pleasant situation until in the middle of such a kiss, we heard the cracking of a broken tree branch. We looked up and saw a man standing about thirty feet away and masturbating fiercely. More alarming still, we noticed on the other side of the glade, perhaps eighty feet away, a second man leaning against a tree. He, too, had a busy hand in his shorts. I picked up a stick and chased the two men off.

  The German girl and I sat for a few moments, laughing nervously about what had happened. Then she started to kiss me again, this time with unstaunched passion. And then she demanded, “Cherches le préservatif.” That relationship likely would have been consummated if there hadn’t been more cracking of branches a few minutes later. This time, the main masturbator was just fifteen feet away, leaning in and leering horribly at us. There were two more men in the woods this time and they formed a triangle of self-pleasure around us. I later found out this section of the Bois de Bologne was divided into strolls for men of various interests and that the German girl and I had inadvertently ended up in the middle of a prime cruising spot.

  With the help of such episodes, it didn’t take me long to conclude I was more like George than Kurt when it came to sexual adventure. Thanks to the wondrous Chris Cook Gilmore, I met a girl I could safely fall in love with.

  With Eve moving into the bookstore, Chris and Anita were heading back to Atlantic City so that she and George could live alone in the third-floor apartment. Before he left, Gilmore gave his traditional poetry reading. During the thirty years he’d been staying at the bookstore, he’d composed an epic poem called Paris Blues and performed the ever-growing masterpiece each time he passed through.

  On the Monday night of Chris’s reading, Kurt and
I were setting up the room and inviting people upstairs. We saw a trio of beautiful women passing the store and decided they would make good guests. Babbling something about a reading and a bookstore, I led them upstairs before they could say no.

  They were all Italian and all working in Paris as au pairs. Young women from around the world come to France to watch the children of rich and upper-middle-class families, and these three all had part-time baby-sitting jobs, which gave them free apartments in Paris, pocket money, and a lot of time to experience the city.

  Soon enough, I was dating Trudie, a woman with a scorpion tattooed on her left arm which she refused to talk about. As part of her baby-sitting job, she had a small room on rue Daguerre, and this became my escape from the bookstore. After months of constant late nights and sleeping in cramped and cold beds surrounded by strangers, I was perpetually exhausted. Trudie and I would sit beside the Seine or make dinner and then she would allow me to collapse into her bed. Bliss.

  When Chris left, I thanked him for his unwitting help on this front and the old writer just laughed.

  “You know, if you’re going to be a writer, you have to love life, and there’s nowhere better to love life than Shakespeare and Company,” he told me. “You can meet just about anybody here, you can read books here, you see beautiful women here. Appreciate places like this, because there aren’t enough of them in the world.”

  It was sad to see Chris walk off to catch his train to the airport. One of the great things about the bookstore he didn’t mention was that people like him were there—writers who’d been around, who weren’t necessarily rich or famous, but who had lived sensational lives and made people like Kurt and myself believe that maybe we could, too.

  Spring was full on us and the store stumbled smoothly along. It was almost as if we were all holding our breath, holding the moment. Sophie had visited the real estate agent twice and we expected word about the apartment any day. The booklet was ready for the printers. All we could do was wait.

  We began passing the sunny afternoons in the parks, and the story times by the Seine became more popular as the nights warmed. I was happy with Trudie, I was writing my little book, and I was with incredible friends. Everyone else felt pretty much the same way. The time was so soft and good that Ablimit wasn’t even too upset when his chicken-foot exportation business proved financially unfeasible.

  One fine May day, Gayle organized a picnic to celebrate Tom’s return. Sitting in the park, enjoying the sun, the wine, and a decadent spread of lunch, nobody wanted to leave. A group of Algerian men were kicking a soccer ball around beside us and we challenged them to a game. We were a ragtag team who were mostly drunk and largely unathletic to begin with. The Algerian men passed and dashed around us, quickly taking a lead of 13 to 0. As the sun was beginning to set, we suggested that we should play next goal win, and the Algerians were confident enough to agree.

  For another ten minutes, we sprinted and slid and struggled, and amazingly the Algerians didn’t score. Then, through some spasm of coordination, I passed the ball up to Kurt, who edged it nicely between two defenders to where Luke was running at full pace toward the opponent’s net. In one fluid motion, Luke took the ball and stroked it cleanly past the diving goalkeeper. It was a moment of heart-bursting joy. Kurt and I chased Luke around the park, collapsed on him, and then hefted him onto our shoulders and carried him back to our picnic area.

  We lay panting and aching and reveling in our victory until long after the sun had set. We all agreed everything was going to have a happy ending. Maybe it was hubris.

  35.

  Within a week, Ablimit was in the hospital, the apartment was lost, Eve stopped wearing George’s ring, and a man was dead.

  It started with Ablimit. Tom appeared one day and, with the bookstore bursting with customers, suggested a beverage at Polly Magoo’s. Afternoons at the bar were a perfect place to lull away the time. The beer was cheaper in the day and just enough light filtered into the bar from the open front doors to erase any guilt one might otherwise feel at drinking the hours away inside. There was never a crowd, so there was enough space to read a newspaper or, better still, take advantage of the playing cards and chessboards stashed behind the bar. Most afternoons, there was at least one backgammon game under way, the competition a degree more than friendly, with stakes of a franc a point and doubling allowed.

  When I got back to Shakespeare and Company, Sophie was pale at the desk and Kurt slunk down in the green metal chair, drained of his usual spark.

  “Dude, Ablimit’s sick.”

  Ablimit had been at his French teacher’s home in the country that morning and his face had begun to grow numb. By afternoon, he couldn’t close his left eye or move the left side of his face. When he returned to the store, he’d gone across the street to the emergency ward at Hôtel Dieu and was now in the neurology unit at the Pitié-Salpêtrière hospital near Gare d’Austerlitz. The talk was of a stroke.

  The next day, Kurt and I formed a makeshift visiting committee and walked up to the hospital with magazines and assorted not-too-stale treats from George’s refrigerator. We attempted gaiety as we passed Simon’s animal friends in the zoo of Jardin des Plantes, but it was hollow. As much as we embraced our bohemian life, we were forced to recognize the reality of our predicament: We were all nearly penniless, mostly homeless, and without proper residence papers or health insurance in a foreign country. Though the whiteness of our skin protected us from the harassment North Africans and other more visible illegal immigrants suffered, one major accident or brush with police and our fairy-tale lives in Paris would come to an end.

  We arrived at the hospital and continued in our roles of carefree young men, flirting with nurses, scampering through the gardens and halls of the eighteenth-century hospital. But the closer we got to the ward, the harder it became to treat this as just another Shakespeare and Company adventure. We found Ablimit alone in a hospital room, laid out on a blue bed with an IV drip and bandaging over the left side of his face. Kurt knocked on the door hopefully, and after an unnaturally long pause, Ablimit turned toward the door.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked in a slurred voice.

  Kurt grinned. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  Ablimit struggled up in bed and waved us over. With a lopsided smile, he urged us to sit down. There was a plate of uneaten hospital food beside his bed and he pushed it toward us.

  “I get as much as I want here. Eat, eat.”

  Ablimit had suffered what doctors believed was a minor stroke triggered by stress and exhaustion. The left side of his face was still partially paralyzed. The doctors said it could go away in a few days, or gradually worsen, or maybe just stay the same. Understandably, Ablimit had lost confidence in the medical profession and had begun to buttress the physical medicines with prayer.

  “A sign,” he said with effort. “A sign I should change my life.”

  It was true he’d been pushing himself hard. Since leaving China three years before, he’d traveled across Asia, worked on a kibbutz in Israel, and then moved to France. In Paris, he’d been living amid the nonstop parties and social politics of Shakespeare and Company for more than a year. Ablimit had maintained his rigorous study regime throughout and had indeed become fluent in French and English, but the efforts had caught up with him. Surprisingly, he was glad for it.

  “It’s a message from God,” Ablimit repeated. “From now on, I spend more time living, less time working. More time with friends.”

  As we relaxed in the hospital room, Ablimit told us we could use the private shower in his room if we needed. After a minor protest for the sake of decorum, I took the longest, hottest shower I’d had since moving into the bookstore. No people waiting outside the public shower stall, no girlfriend or friend standing in the next room while I was overly conscious of things like hot water tanks and electricity bills. Just an endless supply of steaming hospital water. As we got up to leave, Ablimit invited us back anytime.
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  Without Ablimit’s studious presence, the bookstore felt more frivolous, and in the next days I realized it was becoming concretely so. In Europe and North America, the university and college students were starting their summer vacations and trainloads of backpackers began to descend on Paris. Shakespeare and Company was in all the travel guides and the store began to fill up with thirty-second tourists who wanted to check the bookstore off their must-see list. A smaller number had heard of the bookstore’s residency policy, and George seldom said no to the frequent requests to stay.

  In the winter months, there were never more than seven or eight people staying at one time, and often it was just Kurt, Ablimit, and me in the main store and Simon next door. Now, it seemed every day there were two or three new faces, and one night there were so many bodies, half a dozen people had to sleep on the floor. The bookstore spilled over with dozens of young people feeling the reckless excitement of first adventures.

  Amid this chaos, I stopped writing. There was too much distraction at the bookstore, a constant buzz of people wanting to ask a question or drink wine or go to the Seine for another night of storytime. Even the relative tranquillity of the antiquarian room was becoming a rare luxury as my arrangement with Simon faltered. His status raised by his success in Ireland and with George preoccupied by Eve, he no longer feared expulsion and seldom left the room empty for me. He now declared himself the official writer in residence at the bookstore and told me he needed the space for himself.

  Whereas just a few months prior, I had been loath to leave the bookstore even for a few hours, I now sought excuses to spend time away. Tom Pancake had discovered the French game of boule and it made the perfect afternoon escape. Boule is a game of accuracy, where participants toss heavy metal balls at a smaller target ball a few feet away. Boule involves lots of standing around, interrupted by walks of no more than ten or twelve feet and it is ideally suited to warm afternoons and cold cans of beer. Gayle or Tom would make sandwiches at the embassy kitchen and we would meet in the park around the corner from the bookstore to toss boule until a security guard chased us away for not playing at an authorized city ground.