Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  George made it clear my absences weren’t appreciated. One day, I returned to the bookstore and found my cupboard ajar and my belongings rifled through once again. My old laptop computer was missing, along with fifty thousand words of my interrupted novel. I couldn’t believe it was a thief; the computer was an old Radio Shack word processor, more than a decade old and worth nothing. I searched the bookstore, depressed and bewildered. With no other ideas, I went to George. Though he denied knowing anything, twenty minutes later I found my laptop on a desk in the library.

  “It’s a lesson for you. You should keep your things locked away,” George muttered.

  I now had a suspicion as to the identity of the bookstore thief, and the next time George left his office, I conducted a thorough search. I found one of my shirts that had gone missing the month before, several letters addressed to Shakespeare and Company residents, and two diaries belonging to girls who’d stayed at the store.

  “I don’t know how the shirt and letters got here,” George insisted when I confronted him with my discovery.

  But the diaries?

  George blushed and heaved his shoulders in a what-can-you-do fashion. He’d once written in an essay that he thought the ideal human situation was that of a seventeen-year-old girl in Paris in the springtime, ready for her first love. It appeared he wanted to experience these situations vicariously.

  “You wouldn’t believe the time I spend searching around for the diaries of the girls who live here,” he said with a sigh. “They’re my favorite reading.”

  One Sunday morning after a pancake breakfast, George was leaving the third-floor apartment when he saw the door across the hall swing open. There was the hotel baron, grinning broadly and holding the keys to the apartment in his hand. The sale had gone ahead and the hotel baron had gotten his offer in first. Everything came crashing down.

  “He was like a troglodyte coming out from his cave,” George said, pressing his fingers to his temples. “It’s the worst feeling of my life.”

  George then locked himself in his office and didn’t reappear for three days.

  When George finally did emerge, he moped around the bookstore in a foul mood. He condemned himself for destroying Shakespeare and Company, saying if he’d been younger and more alert, he would have ensured that the apartment was his.

  Sophie didn’t understand what had happened. The agent had assured her George would be given first notice, but instead, it was the rich businessman with his millions of francs. Though George didn’t blame her outright for this, he did become increasingly short-tempered with Sophie. Several days after the apartment was lost, Sophie twisted her ankle while dancing in front of the store. She was practicing movements for an upcoming exam at the Jacques Lecoq school. George fired her for wasting time on her shift.

  Scott was especially affected by Ablimit’s hospitalization. He was proving to be something of a paranoid fellow at the best of times. One evening early in his stay, Scott had been trying to sleep, when he heard an incessant ticking. While most others would probably have assumed it was a forgotten alarm clock, Scott decided it was a bomb. Just as he was about to throw himself out the window to save his life, the Danish girl awoke, calmed him down, and insisted he spend the rest of the night in her bed to help further ease his panic.

  Such neurosis was fertile ground for hypochondria, and Scott was a textbook case. Shortly after Ablimit fell ill, Scott discovered a swelling in one of his testicles and became convinced it was cancer. He nearly sprinted over the bridge to the Hôtel de Dieu, where a nurse put him in the waiting room reserved for the less urgent cases.

  Scott spent almost eight hours at the hospital, getting various X rays and having various doctors squeeze his glands. When a doctor finally returned with the results of his probe and said there was nothing to worry about, Scott still wasn’t convinced. That night at the bookstore, he grumbled about the great history of medical misdiagnoses and insisted he would follow up with a specialist when he went back to the States.

  Not too long after Sophie was fired, Scott decided he’d had enough of life at the bookstore. Too many of George’s mood swings, too many people fighting for beds, too many microbes waiting to infect him. One fine blue-skied morning, he left for the south of France to find the mountain pass where Walter Benjamin had committed suicide. Upon leaving, he praised George and Shakespeare and Company, but there was a shimmer of disillusionment to his words.

  But the one who took the brunt of George’s despair was Eve. Though at first she had been treated with pomp, her life at the bookstore became increasingly difficult. George retired early, often before nine o’clock at night, while Eve enjoyed the late nights and social whirl of the bookstore. George grew irritated they weren’t spending more time together and resented her absences.

  What had at first seemed like a romantic lark deteriorated further as George began complaining that Eve wasn’t reading enough, that she left the upstairs apartment in chronic disarray, that she wasn’t running the tea party properly. At the root of it, George was frustrated that Eve wouldn’t commit to marriage and he was making life miserable for her.

  Crying, she came to me one day, not understanding what had happened. Eve had arrived in Paris an awkward young girl from a conservative German family. At Shakespeare and Company, she’d found a place where she felt she belonged. All of these feelings were connected to George and she did love him, but he was pressuring her to do something she really didn’t want to do.

  “I’m going to go home. I can’t take it anymore,” she said with a trace of tears in her eyes. “I can’t marry him.”

  The next day, she returned George’s ring and then packed her things and went back to Germany. A perpetual gloom descended on the bookstore. George even fell ill, coughing thick mucus and losing his appetite. I brought him fresh-roasted chickens from the butcher on rue de Seine, but he waved them off and complained he was getting too old and that he didn’t know how he could go on after these bitter disappointments.

  They were dark days. Gone were the sharp suits and haircuts, gone were the lunches in front of the store. I tried to cheer him with beer or stories, but he would have none of it.

  “Just leave me alone,” he asked. “There’s nothing to be done now.”

  36.

  It was a Monday night in May, the fifteenth to be precise. As tradition demanded, after the poetry reading at the bookstore, there was a midnight session of storytelling by the Seine. The evenings had become popular as word spread and the weather got warmer. That midnight, there were more than a dozen people sitting on the bank of the river, cans of beer and bottles of wine on the cobblestones before them.

  Kurt was there and Luke had showed up for the first time. Having been convinced to attend by our constant tales of story time, he was dressed in his black suit and porkpie hat and sat skeptically to the side. There were also a few writers who wanted to be part of a growing literary event. But the crowd was mostly inflated by young women and men passing through the bookstore, congratulating one another on how splendid it was to be young and free in Paris.

  When I surveyed this assembly by the river, I felt a bad vibe. Story times had always been a personal affair. In the intimacy of the first nights, we had all cleansed dark memories, and we did it with trust in one another and an optimistic belief we were doing something special. This night, there was an animal edge in the air, the spring pheromones driving like mad.

  The riverside was filled with strolling tourists, and many stopped, curious about such a large group of English speakers. We also attracted the attention of the various men who spent summer nights ambling along the river with hash cigarettes and cans of strong beer.

  I talked with Kurt about moving the event someplace quieter, and we began asking people to start walking down the river, closer to the Jardin des Plantes. There was a butting of heads, as some of the people were expecting friends to arrive. I bristled at the presumptuousness of these strangers who’d invited others to our night.<
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  It was at about this time that a young Algerian man approached. He was in his early twenties and had a short, stocky build, pimpled olive skin, and a light goatee. In the tradition of Paris street culture, he wore a Sergio Tacchini track suit with the cuff of one pant leg jammed into his sock and the other cuff rolled up to just below the knee. He also wore the required white Lacoste baseball cap slightly askew. More importantly, his pockets were filled with bottles of beer and he carried another three or four squeezed under his left arm. The man was drunk and looking for women, friends, or trouble, with no real preference for what he found. We were an obvious stop.

  At first, he was just leaning in, talking to girls, asking their names, and we barely noticed. He tried to sit too close to one woman and she got up and moved, but again we weren’t too bothered. The trouble started when his beers began to slip from under his arm and crash to the pavement. From a distance, it appeared sinister when the second bottle smashed.

  Kurt and I rose to confront him. The young man became offended when we asked him to leave. Another beer bottle hit the ground, this one perhaps not accidentally. Kurt pushed the man backward. The man spat and Kurt swung, striking him above an eyebrow. He came back in a rage and pushed Kurt so hard that he fell against the stone wall. Then all of us were into it, stepping between the two of them to prevent further blows. The man’s neck veins bulged and he strained, trying to break our hold on him. I hate to admit that I suggested throwing the man into the river, thinking the cold water would sober him up.

  It was then two Frenchmen appeared. They were older than the fellow who was giving us trouble, but of the same general character. Track pants tucked into socks, chains around their necks, hash cigarettes waiting to be lit. Perhaps they had a genuine sense of civic duty, because they interrupted us and asked if they could be of help. We explained the situation and they offered to take care of the problem. The last thing we saw was the young man being dragged away.

  The violence of the episode added to the savage feel of the evening. Kurt was talking loudly about his desire to fight while everyone gossiped furiously about the incident. Moving the crowd along, we found a space between two boats about fifteen hundred feet down the Seine. As people sat, Kurt began jostling with another man to see who would start the storytelling.

  Part of me wanted to be up in front of the crowd too, claiming their approval, but part of me wanted to be a long, long way from there. I thought of how beautiful those quiet February nights beside the Seine had been and I saw the decadence before me. Without saying good-bye to anybody, I slipped away, Kurt’s voice fading into the hum of the night.

  I went back to Trudie’s little apartment on rue Daguerre, feeling vaguely depressed. I slept for twelve hours and woke up tired. It was night again when I finally dragged myself back to the store.

  “They’ve got Kurt in jail,” Luke said in an empty voice.

  The police had been by the store. A man had been murdered by the Seine the night before, beaten up and thrown into the river. He’d either been unconscious when he hit the water or couldn’t fight the undercurrent; they wouldn’t know for sure until after the autopsy. Whatever the case, they’d pulled the body from the river and were looking for answers.

  The dead man was last seen talking to a group of English and American tourists. The bookstore had been an obvious place to start an investigation and someone had not only volunteered our names but had also told them we had been in a fight with the dead man. There were now written orders demanding that I, too, report to the police station for questioning.

  When I went upstairs to the library, George pulled me aside and chastised me for being away from the store the night before. Not only was the bookstore now mired in a police investigation but he’d been awakened at five in the morning by people screaming in front of the store. He’d issued a warning to the Shakespeare and Company crowd. He was going to clean house and invoke a midnight curfew.

  “I’m tired of this foolishness,” George told me. “It’s going to have to stop.”

  Slowly, I pieced the night together. After I left, the story time unwound in unruly fashion. No structure, much drinking, and then a large group of people returning to the esplanade in front of Shakespeare and Company. A fellow by the name of Jonny had been staying at the store. He was a writer, with a tattoo of an anchor on one shoulder and his family motto, If Not Peace, War, on the other. He and Kurt ended up squaring off in front of the store to play punches. They took turns, one man standing chin straight while the other landed his blow. Jonny had been knocked down in the third round, but Kurt had his eyebrow cut open and his eye swollen. All of this had been witnessed by George and had fueled his fury.

  Kurt finally appeared late that next night. The police had kept him in a cell or a holding room for hours, trying to make him think he was the suspect. They kept asking how he’d received the cut over his eyebrow and what he was doing fighting beside the Seine the night before. They returned him to a cell over and over to make him worry.

  Eventually, the officers admitted they had witnesses who’d seen two men push the Algerian into the river. The police told Kurt that the face of the corpse had been covered in bruises to suggest there had been a fight prior to the murder, which explained why they had taken such keen interest in Kurt’s facial wounds. Once he realized he was no longer a suspect, Kurt started to worry that the interrogation would lead to some problem with his status in France, but the police dismissed this as an issue for immigration and sat him down with a digital artist to try to sketch out the faces of the suspects.

  The next day, I heeded my summons and went to the police station on avenue du Maine. Once the detectives assured me my residency status in France wasn’t an issue, either, I began to enjoy myself. I’d spent many hours speaking with murder police in Canada and I liked to talk about crime. I explained my reporting past and we talked openly about the difficulty of the case. The witnesses had been only able to describe two men in their late twenties with dark hair. This matched about a thousand people on the quay that night and hundreds of thousands in the Paris area. I looked at a few books of mug shots but couldn’t recognize anybody.

  The incident caused a brief stir at Shakespeare and Company. It was written up in Le Parisien with a huge photo of the police boats dredging the river. George even kept a copy for his archives. Kurt spun the tale for a few store regulars and then typed out a short story entitled “Trading Fists with Jonny Diamond.” Ever proud of his work since his return from Morocco, he showed the story to Luke, who took a fierce pencil to it and told Kurt bluntly that it was no good. Kurt was spitting afterward.

  “You know, I’m getting sick of these Shakespeare and Company critics. At least I’m doing it, at least I’m writing. I finished Videowrangler, didn’t I?”

  Ablimit was still in the hospital, Scott was gone, Kurt was thinking of leaving, too. The bookstore wheezed under the strict new curfew, with the residents sweating and chafing while the night hummed on the other side of the window. Shakespeare and Company suddenly felt like a less good place to be.

  At about this time, a criminal lawyer friend of mine wrote and suggested I tour Spain with him. I’d met Will while working the police beat at the newspaper. His practice was successful enough that he’d saved a substantial sum of money and he wanted to do good, perhaps buy land in Costa Rica and open a hospital or some other charitable venture. In order to learn Spanish, Will had enrolled in an intensive language course in Barcelona and we were to drive across the country once he was done. Though I was cleared of any implication in the murder, I still savored the prospect. Like many young journalists, I considered Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to be a touchstone and I enjoyed the fact that, like Hunter, I would be traveling under a rogue criminal lawyer’s halo of protection.

  For three weeks, we took a lazy tour around the country, driving through Valencia and Granada, up to Madrid, and then back to the coast. On the last day of the trip, we found a quiet cove and
went for a swim. I noticed a wasp skim too close to the surface and get swallowed by the sea. I swam toward it and tried to lift it out of the water, but I was frightened I would be stung. Twice, I flicked the wasp into the air, only for it to fall back into the water. I still couldn’t bring myself to cradle it out and I watched the wasp drown before me, its yellow-and-black corpse sinking beneath the waves. That’s me, I thought as I returned to shore. Always well intentioned but never quite doing enough.

  37.

  There was hardly anybody left when I got back to Paris in June. Kurt’s father had suffered a heart attack and Kurt had flown home to Florida to be with his family. Ablimit had left for a town near Dijon and a two-month Christian retreat. Scott was in the south of France.

  Luke still worked nights and Simon still called the antiquarian room home and of course George still tramped about, but otherwise I didn’t recognize the faces when I returned to Shakespeare and Company. It felt strange and dislocating when I saw new people amok among the books and I felt a pang of resentment. It was my bookstore, I wanted to tell them.

  Tom and I once had a long discussion about signs. I argued there was a message to be had in them, that one could determine one’s path by keeping an eye out for omens such as snarling dogs or smiling girls. Tom felt this was an internal process, that every minute of life was surrounded by a thousand potentially meaningful incidents and a person interpreted them as he or she was inclined. With my logic, if one was feeling nervous about an upcoming challenge and crossed paths with a snarling dog, it would be a sign to give up the endeavor; Tom would say that on the same corner as the snarling dog might be the girl, and if one wasn’t so nervous of the dog, one would notice her smile and believe it to be a charmed day.