Either way, the arrival of an apartment was a significant indication it was time to leave Shakespeare and Company. I was standing out in front of the bookstore one day when a woman approached me and wanted to know if I was looking for a place to live. As the woman led me through a warren of streets to rue Dauphine in the sixth arrondissement, she explained her situation. She was German and this apartment was the hideaway she and her French lover had shared two decades ago. The two were now married and living in Germany, but they kept the apartment for trysts and rented it out when they needed money. The woman had come to Paris for the summer, but a consulting project had arisen unexpectedly in Berlin and she wasn’t going to be staying after all. In fact, she was leaving the next morning and immediately needed a tenant for four months.
We mounted seven and a half flights of stairs, but I was so pleased by this miracle that I didn’t notice the dizzying climb. The apartment had been decorated in the seventies and featured black-and-silver velvet wallpaper and a mirrored wall beside the bed. The ceiling slanted with the slope of the roof and there were exposed wooden beams, but best of all were the two windows, seven and a half stories over Paris, with red clay chimneys and slate roofs stretching forever across the city.
The woman wanted ten thousand francs for the four months and would accept whatever I could pay up front. I still had a bit of money left from my article on Ireland and it was enough to get me this apartment in Paris.
It was destiny and I didn’t change my mind even when I found out Simon had specifically directed the woman to me, as he knew of my desire to leave the bookstore. With a quiet good-bye to George, I moved out of Shakespeare and Company the next day.
For weeks, I did little but sleep and read. After the scattered emotional existence at the bookstore there was nothing left in me. Once a day, I would gather the courage to descend to the street to buy bread and cheese, then drag myself back up the stairs and into a bed strewn with half-read books, where I would drift in and out of sleep and wonder at the time. Trudie would make the occasional visit to check my vital signs, but aside from that, I saw nobody.
By July, my spirit returned and I found pleasant afternoons sipping beer with Tom and Nick, my old friend from the FNAC scam. The CD exchange business had petered out, so Nick had set up a henna tattoo corner near Les Halles. He’d found cheap powdered hair dye that approximated henna and had entered the business of drawing dragons and flowers on people’s bodies. The price was between fifty and one hundred francs, depending on the size of the tattoo. Alone, Nick could make one thousand francs in a few hours, and with Tom on a second stool, another six hundred could be taken in. The work consisted of sitting in the sunshine and waiting for customers, and I would bring cans of beer by in the afternoon and keep the two company.
With rent payments looming, I, too, needed money and fell into the luxury-goods business. The job involved Louis Vuitton handbags and a niche market that could only be filled by the likes of me—young, white, English-speaking, and financially distressed.
At that time, Louis Vuitton bags were incomprehensibly popular in countries like Japan and Korea. The bags were also several times more expensive there than they were in France, and in limited supply. For the many Asian tourists in Paris, that meant stopping at the Louis Vuitton store to pick up the handbags for a fraction of the price back home, a mere four or five thousand francs for a regular-size purse.
The twist was that Louis Vuitton seemed reluctant to sell its bags to Asian people in Paris. My theory was that the company didn’t want to dilute their image as a European luxury brand, so they made it difficult for certain customers to acquire their products. On any given afternoon, at any given Louis Vuitton boutique, there was an enormous lineup of people waiting to be allowed into the store, and the vast majority of these people were of Japanese or Chinese origin. Not only were they forced to stand outside for hours, but once inside, I noticed the clerks treated them like a virus, sniffing at their accents and allowing them to buy only two items, a handbag and a change purse.
Meanwhile, the richest Europeans were given private appointments to buy their Louis Vuitton apparel, and if you were white and chic enough in dress, you could bypass the line and purchase whatever you wanted. From this disparity grew a raging black market. Middlemen paid people like myself to infiltrate the boutiques and buy Louis Vuitton bags on behalf of their clientele.
My black-market contact was a lovely young woman from Shanghai by the name of Flora. A friend of mine had been introduced to her one day after a French class. The teacher had asked the students to prepare an oral presentation on what they wished for. My friend said she’d like enough money to visit her parents. After the class, a fellow student approached and said she could earn enough for the plane ticket in a single afternoon. This was how Flora got her runners.
It was marvelous job. The first day, I dressed in a blue velvet jacket I’d bought secondhand and waited on the Champs-Elysées to meet Flora. She arrived with fifteen thousand francs in cash and a store catalog. I was shown what bags to buy and directed to a boutique a few blocks away on avenue Montaigne. At first, I thought it incredible that a stranger like me was being trusted with so much money; then I noticed a blue minivan drive slowly past me with its side door open. Three men were filming me with a handheld video camera.
Unsettled, I went to the store and bypassed the eighty or so Asians standing bored in line. Inside, I found the prettiest clerk and explained my problem. I was in Paris for a gig with my band. At this point, I stopped to ask if she’d heard of my group, which I claimed was the Tragically Hip, a brilliant Canadian band just obscure enough in Europe to ensure I would never actually be identified as not being a member. Later on, some of the clerks actually pretended to recognize me.
I then explained my dilemma: I had promised to buy my mother some Louis Vuitton bags while in Paris and I couldn’t understand what the line outside was all about.
It was hot knife on butter. That first day, I bought two large handbags for fourteen thousand francs and delivered them to a smiling Flora. My commission was 12 percent of the total bill, so I walked away with more than sixteen hundred francs in cash, almost my entire rent for the month. The game became more difficult, though, as the stores tracked purchases and passport numbers to crack down on the very black market that I now was part of. This meant you could only hit a particular Louis Vuitton boutique once and had to be ready for surprise questions about visits to other outlets.
Over the course of my brief career, I hit all five Louis Vuitton stores in Paris and gained such a reputation that I was sent on the road. On one occasion, accompanied by Tom, who was always looking for money schemes, we were given a car, forty-eight thousand francs in cash, and another twenty thousand francs in traveler’s checks to drive to Lille and Brussels to make buys at the stores there. Throughout the day, we had to stifle the urge to keep driving on to Budapest or Istanbul for a rather comfortable vacation.
My one regret from that run was that I never claimed the bounty of a Hermès bag. The Hermès boutiques were harder to crack than the Louis Vuittons and there was a two-year waiting list for their hypercoveted purses. But legend was that the stores always kept one or two on hand, just in case that suitably celebrated or wealthy client came in to shop. If you could buy one of these bags, it netted you five thousand francs. One time, Tom and I were in the beach resort of Deauville, hitting a Louis Vuitton outlet, and Tom tried his luck at the Hermès. His showman’s swagger worked and the five-thousand-franc bonus was practically in our hands before we realized we didn’t have the money to make the purchase. A Hermès bag went for twenty-seven thousand francs and we hadn’t been provided with enough ready cash. That was as close as I ever got to the brass ring.
At the end of July, there was an E-mail from the man who’d made the threatening phone call to me in December. He wanted to pass along some important news. He was getting married and I was invited to the wedding.
A brief flicker of doubt made me
think it was a trap, but then I read on. He’d fallen in love and moved to Toronto to be with the woman. He’d even taken a straight job, using his hustler’s charm to make a very decent living as an electronics salesman. And amazingly, he thanked me. I had long counseled him to leave the city, where he was so entrenched in crime, and by disclosing his name in that book, I’d put a little more pressure on him to leave. It was a straw, perhaps not the backbreaker, but he wanted to tell me things had worked out. He still wasn’t happy about our misunderstanding, but it was forgotten, or at least pushed to the back of his mind.
A weight lifted, but in its place came a sense of despair. If I was no longer on the run, what exactly was I doing?
Life drifted along that summer, but at times the idleness began to weigh. One humid August night in Trudie’s apartment, she admitted that she was feeling restless and unfulfilled with her life in Paris. It had been a great adventure, a great romance, but she’d never intended to spend her life minding other people’s children. She made inquiries about a university in Italy and found it wasn’t too late to register for the fall term. We left with promises to write and perhaps even visit if our love wasn’t diminished by distance. You could only stretch a daydream so far.
As the summer passed, I started returning to the bookstore to see George. At first, I worked in the office, helping organize biographies and compiling book orders. We also got back to the booklet and George decided to go ahead and publish it once he’d made edits to reflect the loss of the apartment to the hotel baron. One of the new passages even read like a call for help.
When I opened my bookstore in 1951, this area in the heart of Paris was a slum with street theatre, mountebanks, junkyards, dingy hotels, wineshops, little laundries and thread and needle shops and grocers. Back in the 1600s in the middle of this slum our building was a monastery with a frère lampier who would light the lamps at sunset. I seem to have inherited his role because for 50 years now I have been your frère lampier—the lamplighter who is hoping that someone else will come along and carry on his mission.
The booklet was finally published and it had opposite effects on its creators. After raising a glass with George to toast the arrival of the shipment, Luke was encouraged enough by our work to plunge into the world of publishing. He wanted to go ahead with his plans for Kilometer Zero, and we decided to work together. Between my hours at the bookstore and my hours beside Luke as we began our little venture, I had the semblance of a real life.
But with the booklet out of the way, George slumped and became preoccupied by death. Most of his contemporaries were gone and he struggled to stay in touch with the friends he had left. George said that even Ferlinghetti was mad at him because there’d been a mistake with a distributor and the store no longer carried City Lights books.
One afternoon, he told me about Tolstoy dying alone. Locked in a train car, he refused to let his wife, who was weeping on the platform, inside to say good-bye. George then quizzed me about Marx’s funeral.
“How many people do you think were there?” he asked.
I guessed a few hundred, but George shook his head glumly.
Seven.
“I don’t know what it all means.” He sighed. “Nobody has the answers. I don’t like people who pretend they do. Life is just the result of a dance of molecules.”
George even looked different. After Eve left, he became scattered and absentminded, he went to bed earlier, his energies waned. He kept telling me he didn’t know how much longer he could manage Shakespeare and Company, and as if to prove his worries true, he fell tremendously ill in August. His body became so weak, he could barely raise himself from his bed and he began vomiting blood. He couldn’t even keep solid food down, and the protein drinks I brought from the grocery store did little good.
There were appointments at the hospital, but George kept forgetting to go to them. And then his eyes started bothering him and he told me he needed a cataract operation. All of a sudden, he really seemed eighty-six years old and I wondered where my friend had gone who had swung planks and gotten me drunk on high-alcohol beer.
As September broke, there was a cold snap and George fell sick once more. Again, he retreated into his bedroom; again, I could hear his cough echoing in the staircase. With the cold damp winter ahead of us, for the first time I worried that he might not make it through to another summer.
My father’s favorite book is A Prayer for Owen Meany. In it, the miniature Owen is driven to practice the same basketball shot, an assisted dunk, where he springs off his friend’s hands to reach the net. He practices this shot manically, perfecting it for no real reason, as he does not wish to play the sport. As an older man, his destiny comes when he is in an airport and a terrorist grenade is left near a group of children. Using this shot, he is able to throw the bomb out of a raised window, and suddenly he knows why he was compelled to practice that shot for so long.
I had spent five years perfecting the skill of tracking people down while working as a crime reporter. Now, what had largely seemed a wasted talent when used to find the ex-wife of a man who’d committed suicide after being charged with drinking and driving, had sudden pertinence.
In early September, I booked a train ticket to London and told George I was going there on business. I didn’t specifically say anything about my mission and he certainly didn’t ask. However, the day before I left, he gave me money for the second time. He put a fifty-pound note in my hand and told me to take somebody out to dinner, then recommended a Chinese restaurant that overlooked the Thames.
38.
The Eurostar is a great experiment in claustrophobia. You whiz along at a startling speed, getting closer and closer to a great body of water that, against all logic, the train is going to pass under. Images of terrorists packing plastic explosives into the body of the Chunnel dance through one’s head as the train descends into the darkness. After twenty very aware minutes, the train emerges in England, clunks onto the lower-gauge rail system, and chugs into London. It gives the sweat just enough time to dry. The grand joke for French riders is the name of the arrival station, Waterloo, one of the unhappier moments in France’s military history.
London is physically larger than Paris, has more houses than apartment blocks, and simply isn’t walkable. Here, one is relegated to the underground, and I noted glumly that it was much better protected than the Paris metro, with guards monitoring the entrances and exits. Precious sterling pounds were spent just crossing town.
The city also felt different. London was all rush and money, like New York or Toronto, with everybody looking past you as they talked, making it clear they had someplace else they’d rather be. Coffees were consumed while walking at a brisk pace and there were no sidewalk cafés in sight.
George had received a card the year before from Sylvia and the return address was a student residence at the University of London. The office at the residence refused to release any details due to privacy concerns, but I chatted up a janitor who remembered the girls on the floor from the year before. He thought that Sylvia was studying in the school of Slavic and East European Studies.
At this school, the secretary also claimed privacy but I managed to find one of Sylvia’s professors. I explained the delicacy of the situation and George’s declining health and he agreed to help. Classes hadn’t begun yet, but he explained students were in and out of the building, registering and preparing for the academic year. I left Sylvia a note with him and then posted small written messages around the building, asking her to contact me. All I could do was leave my E-mail address, so I spent the rest of the day wandering along the Thames and making frequent visits to Internet cafés.
The next morning, I went back to the university, checked with the professor again, and posted another round of notes. I sat in the lobby of the school, watching the crowds for three or four hours before tiring. That afternoon, after pacing the National Gallery, I found a web bar around the corner. There was an E-mail from Sylvia with a number for a cell
ular phone. I sprinted to a phone box and dialed. With her phone cutting in and out, we made plans to meet outside a tube station near Bloomsbury that night.
I arrived at the planned corner half an hour early and started after every young woman, but it would have been impossible to miss her. She was a blonde with a bright smile, but what gave her away were her eyes—pale blue, just like her father’s. I had told her only a little on the phone, so she was curious about the reasons for my visit and was worried about her father. We found a nearby pub and she ordered two pints of beer for us.
“I’m just going to tell you the truth,” I began.
I explained how I’d ended up in Paris and how her father had taken me in and helped me set my life straight again. I said he spoke of her often and missed her terribly. Now he was seriously ill and, with the future of the bookstore uncertain, George wanted Sylvia to visit Shakespeare and Company again and to mend their relationship. I told her that no matter what had happened in the past, it was important to know her father. He was getting close to ninety, and if she didn’t seize the opportunity now, it might be lost forever.
Sylvia was mostly confused. Over the past five years, she’d sent cards and letters, but there’d never been a reply. She assumed he didn’t have time for her, especially as her mother had described the mad bookstore life and George’s habit of drifting away from people he loved. When she was in Paris a few years back, she had mustered the courage to visit the bookstore, but she remembered the encounter very differently from the way her father did. She went into Shakespeare and Company, a little intimidated by the store and the residents. George didn’t seem to have time for her and feeling sad and humiliated, she walked away.
Time Was Soft There Page 25