Chasing Sylvia Beach

by Cynthia Morris

  She raised her eyes toward the entrance of the patio and was surprised to see Heinrich coming back to her. Lily adopted a bright smile, ignoring Karl’s dark look upon her. Lily’s heart pounded as Heinrich approached. He bent toward her.

  “Lily, I’ll be quick. I’d like you to see the book, since you are so interested. The day after tomorrow, there’s a reception at the embassy. Would you be my guest? If you’d like, I can let you glance at the book one last time.”

  Surprised by this proposal, she didn’t even debate it with herself. She accepted immediately. “Yes, of course. I’d be happy to.”

  “Very good! I’ll send the invitation around tomorrow. Until the ball, then,” he finished, his face revealing his delight at Lily’s acceptance. He hurried back to Karl and they slipped into the tower’s stairwell.

  Lily, shocked, slowly realized that she’d just gotten what she wanted. Sensing the book within reach, a wave of euphoria overcame her. Then she remembered Paul, who surely must be waiting outside for her. Lily rushed through the crowd, eager to escape the pavilion and meet Paul.

  Out on the walkway, she rushed toward the metro entrance. Back on the square in front of the new Palais de Chaillot, she scanned the crowd for Paul’s face. Nothing. She looked more carefully, making a slow panorama, right to left. Suddenly she felt a hand on her shoulder. She shrieked and jumped away. It was Paul, who bent to kiss her, murmuring, “Bon soir.” She relaxed, happy to see him, and he took her hand.

  “I accompany you home?”

  “Oui,” Lily responded. She felt completely different with Paul at her side. The touch of her hand against his felt good. She liked moving through Paris as a couple, even though she knew she should not let these sentiments root.

  They boarded a train and found seats on a wooden bench across from an old woman. Paul still held Lily’s hand. The old woman observed them, a tiny smile on her wrinkled face. At the next station she rose, looked at Paul and Lily, and announced, “Vous faîtes un beau couple tout les deux.”

  The woman disappeared into the crowd on the platform. Lily blushed, embarrassed, but Paul just giggled. Two ladies took the seats across from them. Lily gazed at them, thinking they looked familiar. The pale woman with very light hair caught Lily’s gaze and smiled. Something about her look held Lily, and in her mind she heard the voice she’d heard at the Crédit Municipal, saying again, “You’ll be fine.” Lily shook her head and the woman broke her gaze, turning to her friend to whisper something. Lily couldn’t see the other woman’s face underneath her large hat.

  She glanced down at Paul’s hand on her thigh and squeezed it. Avoiding the eyes of the women across the way, Lily saw herself and Paul reflected in the dark screen of the metro window. She had to agree with the old woman’s comment. They did make a handsome couple. But she couldn’t keep this up. She would be leaving soon.

  As the train slowed and pulled into another stop, Paul asked her if she had a good time at the Exposition.

  “You can say that,” she said.

  “I have not been there yet,” Paul said. “I would love to go with you. Would you accompany me one day?”

  “Sure, why not? There’s a lot more to see.”

  “Next Sunday is possible?”

  Lily, who lived day by day since her arrival here, had no idea where she’d be on Sunday. But she agreed anyway.

  “Yes, maybe.” She didn’t want to talk in the subway. The women across from her were engrossed in quiet conversation, but Lily still sensed they had an eye on her.

  “Let’s change here,” exclaimed Paul.

  They got off when the train shuddered to a stop. Down the hallway toward another line, the flow of passengers moved in both directions, forcing Lily to release Paul’s hand. Then she made sure to dodge the pedestrian traffic in the opposite direction of Paul, to avoid his hand. Yes, she loved the couple she had seen in the reflection. But she also remembered what she had decided at the Expo. She would not mess with Paul by allowing him to believe that anything could be possible between them. Even if every bit of her body and her senses told her otherwise, she would not. She put her hands in her jacket pockets even though it made walking awkward. And in the next train, she leaned against the window and kept her hands tucked away to avoid temptation.

  “Ça va, Lily?”

  “Ça va,” she said. “I’m a little tired.”

  They said nothing more for the rest of the ride. Paul wore a hurt expression but gave her space. Lily cringed to think of the distance she was creating between them. A few steps from the bookstore Paul turned to Lily.

  “I said something I should not?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then why are you so cold with me? What did I do?”

  Lily dared not look at him, mumbling, “Nothing. I’m the problem.”

  “How is that?”

  “Listen, Paul. You and me, it’s impossible. We have no future together.”

  “You say one thing, Lily. Your kisses yesterday, even your eyes at the Expo, say the opposite. Why you do this?”

  “Because I do not want to hurt you, Paul. There will be no affair between us. That’s impossible. Because I’m going home soon.”

  Paul shook his head, his mouth open in surprise. Lily felt her heart sink.

  “Paul, you’re a nice guy, so helpful. I can never thank you enough for being there for me. You deserve to find happiness and I know you’ll make the right woman very happy.”

  His eyes were red, as if he were going to cry. Lily glanced away. She couldn’t look at him. Doing so put her at risk of giving in, just to allay his sadness. He rallied and questioned her again.

  “Tell me the truth, Lily. There’s another man in this, isn’t there? You don’t just become cold overnight for no reason. I want the truth! You met someone else, didn’t you? That’s why you went to the Exposition!”

  “No, Paul. There is no other man, I swear!”

  “I do not believe you, Lily. Not at all.” He gave her one last, fierce look and then stormed off.

  “Paul!”

  She tried to grab him but he eluded her. Lily watched him disappear around the corner. She slipped into the building’s entry and leaned against the closed door. Catching her breath in a jagged hiccup, she was suddenly in tears.

  LILY PASSED A sleepless night on the thin cot in the back of the shop. Moonlight shining through the courtyard windows played on her bed. She couldn’t avoid the light or her tortured thoughts about Paul. She felt terrible to have hurt him, leaving him with the impression that she cared naught for what had grown between them. Her sleep came fitfully, marked by dreams of Paul, and oddly, Daniel. In all of them Lily felt an uncomfortable urgency, leaving her unable to communicate clearly. Metro stations, airports, and giant spaces that looked like airplane hangars dominated her dreams and she awoke just before dawn, exhausted.

  The dreadful feeling got worse the longer she lay there, so Lily rose and washed at the small basin. The smell of her blouse repelled her; she was loathe to put it back on, but she couldn’t wear the nightdress Sylvia had thoughtfully loaned her. Shrugging on her jacket, she wondered what she would wear to the reception with Heinrich. Surely her skirt and jacket wouldn’t do, and her dress, while nice, certainly wasn’t a fancy dress. She doubted Sylvia would have an evening gown to loan her, too. Brushing her hair into a semblance of neatness, she flashed on Heinrich’s friend’s angry face. Why did she bother him so much? What had she gotten herself involved in?

  She slipped out of the shop and waved at Lucky, who had fallen asleep in the shop window, displacing a stack of books. Lily followed her nose to a boulangerie at the corner, where she bought a pain au chocolate. She devoured it on the sidewalk, then ducked into the Café Danton for an espresso. Huddling over her notebook, fueled by the bitter coffee, she scribbled her thoughts, desperate to ev
acuate her guilt about her lies to Paul onto the page. Finally, she wound down, and after wandering the neighborhood, she returned to the shop, feeling only slightly better about it all. She wouldn’t bother Sylvia with any of this; the bookseller had enough to worry about without dealing with a lovelorn assistant.

  Sylvia was hunched at her desk when Lily came in. She raised her head from a stack of papers, her eyes droopy, with dark circles underneath them.

  “Are you okay, Sylvia?”

  “It’s nothing,” Sylvia said, attempting to put some order to the stack of papers she’d just been lying on.

  “Come on, I can tell you’re not well. You look terrible. Is it your migraines?”

  Sylvia sighed. “Okay! I see I can’t hide anything from you, Detective Lily. It is another migraine. But I can cope. I must deal with this now.” She waved the papers in the air.

  “But . . .” Lily pressed.

  “I’m fine, Lily. Get to work now, please.”

  In the far corner of the bookstore, Lily tidied a stack of books on a table, occasionally sneaking glances at Sylvia, who sat at her desk, clearly struggling against her headache. When Lily came to the desk for another task, Sylvia, one hand on her temple, raised her head and smiled wanly.

  “You’re already done? Good!”

  “Sylvia, your eyes are bloodshot and I can tell you’re trying to stay upright. I can’t stand to see you like this. Please take a rest. I insist.”

  Teddy lifted his head and stared at Lily as if surprised by her raised voice. Sylvia looked at her a moment, then sighed.

  “You’re right, nurse. I’m will rest for few minutes,” she said, standing. Teddy followed, creaking up from his spot on the rug.

  “Don’t worry. I’ll watch the shop. Take your time.”

  “I hope so, Lily. You are my assistant, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Good! Don’t forget. You have some books to prepare for shipping.”

  Lily watched Sylvia shuffle toward the back room and disappear behind the curtain with Teddy behind her. The stairs creaked as Sylvia climbed to her apartment above.

  At the shipping desk, a couple of books waited to be packed up. Lily set about making mailing labels. More people wrote and asked for books than came into the shop. She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul, and Heinrich as well. In Denver, she hadn’t been this attractive to men. Here, they seemed to relish her outspoken nature. At home, speaking up was normal and maybe not such a winning trait. Daniel came to mind. She imagined telling him all about this. Would he believe her? Would anyone?

  Lily finished with the books and went back to Sylvia’s desk. The stack of typed papers sat in disorder where Sylvia had left it. Lily had asked Sylvia once if she wanted to write, and Sylvia had scoffed. A couple of publishers were after her, she said, to write her memoirs, but she wasn’t much of a writer.

  “What about those poems and essays you translated?” Lily had asked.

  “Translating isn’t writing. I’m not crafting the words, only copying them into English. Or French, for that matter.”

  Lily commiserated. She couldn’t imagine having the facility in two languages to leap from one to the other, carrying another writer’s meaning. Sylvia shrugged it off. “It brings in money, so I do it. Which I doubt the memoir would.”

  Lily had read Sylvia’s memoir, a book called Shakespeare and Company. Based on that, it was true that Sylvia was not a great writer. She recounted anecdotes of people she knew but didn’t succeed in making them full stories. Lily suspected the publisher was interested because of Sylvia’s celebrity acquaintances and because Sylvia was at the center of them all. Perhaps the publisher shared Lily’s suspicion that behind every bookseller or person in the book industry was a closeted writer. She had to admit that was the case for herself, but not for Sylvia.

  “I bet you could write great stories. Think of all the people you know, all of the great stories you have to tell.”

  “I’m more interested in reading great stories than in writing them. But I’m thinking about it. Maybe some literary criticism. If I ever get a break from the shop, I’d do it.”

  You’ll get a break soon enough, Lily wanted to say. Just hang in there a couple more years. The mess of papers Lily held now appeared to be a promotional piece for the bookstore, pages filled with typed single-spaced lines that were heavily inked. Entire paragraphs were blackened out, as though the writer was at war with the content. Lily couldn’t resist digging in. She shuffled through, reading quickly. Sylvia, if she was the author of the mess, was trying to write a piece called “The Successful Bookshop: A Manual of Practical Information.” Lily immediately saw the problem, besides the fact that Sylvia’s bookstore could not be called financially successful. The brochure was dry and stuffy, the ideas formulaic. There were so many misspelled words that Lily wondered if Sylvia was trying to be clever or just didn’t know how to spell. She recalled a conversation she overheard when Sylvia had been on the phone with one of her friends, and it was like she was speaking a language other than French, but not quite English. Sylvia thrived on wordplay, but misspellings? Lily shook her head and pulled out her notebook. Picking up where Sylvia’s best sentence left off, she started writing, drawing on the copywriting she’d done at the bookstore in Denver.

  The afternoon’s slow crawl sped up. A few customers wandered in and browsed. No one bought anything, but Lily checked out a few books for them from the library. In the meantime she continued to work on the brochure, crossing out entire paragraphs, scribbling new text.

  When the grandfather clock struck five o’clock, Sylvia hadn’t returned to the shop, so Lily decided to take a risk and type up her version of the brochure. She rolled the typewriter stand into the shop from the back room. Positioning it near Sylvia’s desk, she admired the typewriter. Small, black, with the gold letters M.A.P. surrounded by gold embellishment at the top. The ribbons were exposed, the top part black, the bottom red. Her fingers caressed the white keys and she began typing her version of the brochure. The keys’ metallic feel, and the way they resisted her fingers, was so different than the modern clacking of a plastic keyboard. She hadn’t used a typewriter since she was a girl.

  One evening, when Lily was twelve years old, she was in her room reading when her mother called her downstairs.

  “Lily, we have something for you.”

  Lily had a whole list of summer reading and was then in the middle of Jane Eyre. She stretched and rolled over on the bed, noticing that the white eyelet coverlet had left tiny round circles imprinted on her thighs.

  “What!” Her parents didn’t give gifts unless it was her birthday or Christmas, and it wasn’t time to go school supply shopping yet.

  “Get down here!” She heard her mother and father laughing. She marked her place in the book with her tasseled Yosemite bookmark and slid off the bed. She dawdled down the steps.

  In the kitchen, her parents stood at the table. They were drinking—her mother a glass of white wine and her father a gin and tonic. That explained the laughing. They huddled close together, hiding something on the table behind them.

  “We’ve noticed you’ve been reading a lot this summer,” her father started. “And we had an idea.” He looked at Lily’s mother, still clad in her grubby gardening smock. Smears of grass marked her knees. She smiled at Lily. It had been a long time since Lily saw her parents united like this on something.

  “And—”

  “And we took it as a sign of something budding in you.”

  “Mom! I’m not a plant! Come on!”

  “Oh, Sedum,” her mother crooned.

  “Please don’t start with that nickname again. I’m going back upstairs where civilization exists.” Lily turned toward the stairs, but halfheartedly.

  “Don’t get hung up on words,” her father said. />
  “Dad! Words are everything.”

  “That’s why we got you this.”

  They parted, and on the pine kitchen table sat a baby blue typewriter. Lily stared at it. She couldn’t believe it. Her parents had actually noticed she wanted to write. How did they know she preferred a vintage typewriter to a new computer? She ran her fingers over the plastic shell, looking for a way to open it. Her father showed her two white buttons on the front of the lid. She pressed them and the lid came up with a clucking sound. She pulled it off and set it aside. The typewriter was adorable, with white keys that bounced back when she hit them. The smooth platen was unmarked by letters.

  A stack of paper sat next to the typewriter. She picked up a piece and rolled it in. She let her fingers dance over the keys, not worrying that the letters didn’t form words. Her father coaxed her to type “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” to make sure none of the letters stuck. Lily couldn’t believe it. Now she could type her papers for school. Now she could write down all those ideas for stories she had. It would be different than in her diary, which was too small and had narrow lines. Now what she wrote would be real, one step closer to a story. She clacked away on the keys while her parents smiled.

  “Thank you! How did you know?”

  “Oh, I saw the signs,” her father said. “All those books you cart up to your room. Now take this upstairs and have fun with it.”

  Lily replaced the lid and, hugging the typewriter to her chest, made her way back upstairs. It wasn’t too heavy, and when she got to her room she noticed that it had a white handle. She could carry it outside and to other rooms in the house if she wanted. She pushed aside a stack of books on her desk and squared the typewriter in the middle. She took the lid off and propped it against the side of the desk. Rolling a fresh piece of paper in, she took her seat. She sat for several minutes with her fingers poised over the keys, trying to remember one of her ideas for a story. The only thing that came to mind was the story she was reading. What was happening with Rochester? She couldn’t stop reading now. She could write later. She flopped back down on the bed and picked up her book.