Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Thus began a frantic search for a credit-card machine. I looked for a modern one with the magnetic reader and punch pad, but no luck. I dug under the desk to see if there was an old-fashioned sliding contraption with carbon imprints. Nothing. The woman was becoming impatient and only had sixty-eight francs in coins with her. Embarrassed, I accepted her money and rushed her out of the store before George could discover my ineptitude.

  As I sat there wondering how I would handle the next customer, Kurt walked in.

  “Pia is sitting down with a friend at Café Panis. She took you.” He shook his head disapprovingly and announced he was going upstairs to write.

  “Wait! Kurt!” I shouted before he could leave. “Do we take credit cards?”

  He looked at me with a raised eyebrow. “Dude, Shakespeare and Company doesn’t even have a telephone. Of course we don’t take credit cards.”

  A weedy young man arrived next and bought a copy of Love in the Time of Cholera, thankfully proffering cash. I was only slightly staggered when he asked that the book be stamped. Remembering Eve on the day of the tea party, I found the ink pad and pressed the bookstore logo of a kindly eyed Shakespeare onto his page. As he left, a young couple stepped into the store. The woman held a guidebook open and scanned the page.

  “This is Shakespeare and Company. They published Ulysses here and the owner is the son of the poet Walt Whitman,” she said with authority.

  The man only listened with bored eyes. I decided I should probably correct her, but the couple promptly left to see the next featured attraction, Paris’s second-oldest tree, which was held up by concrete buttresses in the park beside the bookshop.

  A half hour after she vanished, Pia returned with flowing apologies. “I had to have a coffee. You can’t believe what’s happening to me. It’s all so exhausting.”

  Assuring me her crisis was far too complicated to explain, she fluttered her eyelids and took her place at the desk. My compassion her slave, all I could do was babble something about replacing her anytime she needed. Then, feeling a deep blush coming on, I hurried away.

  Upstairs, Kurt was assaulting the typewriter again. Amid a savage clattering of keys, he scolded me for interrupting his writing, so I crossed the hallway and knocked on George’s door.

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  He was sitting at his desk with a book catalog, carefully filling out an order form with a dull pencil. He looked up at me as if he didn’t understand my question.

  “Go out and enjoy the city.”

  I stayed where I was. “I’d like to help if I can.”

  “Why don’t you write?”

  “I write at night.”

  He sighed and put his pencil down. “I’m so far behind on work. I want to be downstairs at the desk with the customers, that’s where all the fun is, but instead I’m up here with this.”

  He waved a book catalog in front of me and then motioned me to come closer. “Isn’t that awful?” he said, pointing to a list of books on promotion. “The Art of War listed as a business-advice book. What does that tell you about our society?”

  Brushing aside the catalog, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a red two-hundred-franc note.

  “If you really want to help, there’s a Marks and Spencer across the river that has Cheddar cheese. You can’t get it anywhere else in Paris. Get two blocks of the strong cheese.”

  He scratched his head and thought some more.

  “There’s an Ed’s nearby. It’s the cheapest store in Paris. Olives without the stones. And beer. They have cheap German beer in bottles, fifteen francs for a small case. Make sure you get the strong stuff.”

  The strong stuff?

  “You know,” he chastised. “The strong stuff. It’s the same price as the regular kind. Go on.”

  I easily found the Marks and Spencer store on rue Rivoli near the Châtelet tower, but the cheese fridge was a greater challenge. There were six grades of cheddar, including “strong” and “biting.” The way they were arranged on the shelves, it appeared that biting was stronger than strong. The question was whether George meant strong as a noun or an adjective. It seemed a daunting test, and I circled the aisle three times, trying to recall the exact inflection of his voice. Concluding George to be a man of extreme tastes, I bought two bricks of the biting.

  Around the corner was the Ed’s. It was a discount grocery store in the great global tradition of discount grocery stores. The products were still in their cardboard boxes, there were jumbo sizes and a long line at the checkout counter where you had to pay for your plastic bags. What was so unlike the North American discount stores were the products available: champagnes, no-name foie gras, frozen cuts of duck, seven types of mustard. The gourmet roots went deep here.

  The olives were easy to find, as was the beer. The strong variety was clearly marked at 6.9 percent alcohol, compared with 4.5 percent for the regular kind. The only question that plagued me was if it was good for an eighty-six-year-old man to drink high-alcohol beer. Remembering how easily he’d swung the plank at me in the morning, I bought a six-pack of the strong.

  When I handed George the bag of groceries with the receipts and proper change, he pulled out a brick of cheese. After inspecting the label, he winked at me in the most gratifying of fashions.

  “I made your lunch,” he said, bringing a homemade hamburger with grilled onions out of the kitchen.

  He opened us each a beer and poured his into a glass half-filled with ice. As we ate, I described how I’d missed Simon the night before and promised to speak to him that day. George nodded approval and repeated that he wanted me to keep the antiquarian room open for customers during the day.

  “Detective novels,” he sighed.

  I also told George of my half hour behind the desk, save for the discount I was obliged to give the credit card–wielding woman. He took a special interest in my tale of the tourists who’d been confused by the store’s history.

  It somewhat bothered George that his Shakespeare and Company was mistaken for Sylvia Beach’s old bookstore, which had in fact published Ulysses. However, the confusion that the great poet Walt Whitman was his father could be blamed squarely on George. The poet is one of George’s heroes, not just because of Leaves of Grass, but also for his efforts as a renegade publisher in Brooklyn at the turn of the last century. Walt Whitman is held in such esteem, there is even a portrait of him anchored to an outside wall to greet visitors. And when George first arrived in Paris in the 1940s, he often passed himself off as the poet’s illegitimate grandchild, even writing a letter to his mother asking her to look into the genealogy. The rumor had even made its way into the pages of papers like the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Independent. As George grew older and his age became more inscrutable, the rumor became bolder and named him as Walt Whitman’s actual son—even though the poet died in 1892, twenty-one years before George was even born. Considering this, it was no great surprise that visitors occasionally asked if there was a family connection.

  “Sometimes I say yes,” George shrugged. “So what? It makes them happy to think he was my father.”

  And, of course, George wasn’t really even lying. His father was indeed Walt Whitman the writer, but the author of science textbooks, not epic poems.

  Finishing my plate, I stood up and thanked him for the meal. He motioned good-bye with his pencil, but before I got to the door, he called out to me again.

  “Wait! Read this.”

  He pushed a dog-eared paperback toward me. It was a copy of The Idiot.

  The rest of the day was spent stationed by the front window waiting for Simon. Dusk set, night fell, then Luke appeared for his shift.

  “Still no luck?” he asked.

  For the next hour or so, Luke and I talked, but every fifteen minutes, I got up to check the antiquarian room to ensure there wouldn’t be a repeat of the poet’s covert return. Around nine o’clock, Kurt came into the store and held out a bottle of red wine.

>   “Eleven-franc special,” he beamed.

  When I told him I couldn’t join him upstairs for a drink because I was waiting for the poet, Kurt shook his head.

  “I’ll take Simon’s things and chuck them onto the road if you want.”

  I assured him this wouldn’t be necessary, and Kurt started to grouse some more about the poet. That’s when I heard a slight scraping sound and dashed to the front of the store. There stood a tall man wearing a black-brimmed hat with a flowered cloth band, a seventies-style brown suede trench coat, and crooked silver-framed glasses. He had a drawn face and wild curls of white hair sprouted from underneath his hat. Startled by my sudden appearance, he tried to cover his distress with a smile. I noted that the few decayed and twisted teeth he had left were indeed very English.

  “Simon?”

  12.

  “Simon?” I repeated. “We were supposed to talk this morning. I’ve been waiting all day.”

  The man was in the process of lifting one of the benches to carry it into the antiquarian room. Returning it to the ground, he straightened his back and brushed his lapels with considerable dignity.

  “Oh … oh, hello, matey.” His eyes were dodging about, as if he were looking for a place to hide. “I was about to go find you. I was closing up first. You know, the weather looks like it might turn.”

  It was the dark cloud of Paris night but otherwise there wasn’t a hint of rain. Still, Simon held out long fingers, as if expecting the first drops of a deluge. Having little choice but to accept the explanation, I properly introduced myself and together we finished closing down the antiquarian room. Luke, standing in the main doorway to better watch the proceedings, gave me an encouraging nod as I followed Simon into his lair.

  Once the door locked behind us and the shutters were secured with iron bars, the antiquarian room felt like a fortress. Tapping the solid wooden panel that protected the door window, Simon assured me he needed such defenses against the miscreants of the night.

  “They’re perpetually screeching and fighting until all hours of the morning. Once a drunk even urinated on the door and it ran in through the crack and puddled on the floor. Talk about a person you wouldn’t mind watching wither away in a gas chamber while standing comfortably on the other side of the Plexiglas.”

  But with the room barricaded like this, there was a terrible sense of claustrophobia, not to mention the tang of musk associated with the cramped living quarters of men. I picked my way through the clutter of boxes and benches that were kept in the room at night and found a place in the stuffed leather armchair. Simon immediately began apologizing for the previous night.

  “You wouldn’t believe what happened. I was walking by the river and a woman on Rollerblades came whizzing along like a demon and knocked me over. Those things should be outlawed. They’re so American. Why can’t a person just walk? Why do they have to put wheels on their feet and go rushing about at a hundred miles an hour, knocking into innocent pedestrians and smashing them to the ground? I could have broken my arm!”

  While he spoke, Simon shuffled papers among a series of orange and blue folders. Though he appeared to be moving items at random, I hesitated to disturb him.

  “Look,” I finally said. George wanted me to talk to you …”

  At this, Simon turned a porridgy gray and put up his hand to stop me. Getting down on his knees, he searched wildly under his bed until he located a green cardboard box. Opening it with an immense sigh of relief, he withdrew a translucent brown glass bottle labeled Neo-Codion.

  “I’m not feeling well, what with the monstrous weather,” he said, nudging his head in the direction of the door. “This helps with the congestion in my chest.”

  He put his hand to his mouth and coughed slightly. It sounded rather forced. Then, hoisting the bottle to his mouth, he took a long swallow.

  “Captain Cody’s Midnight Rangers to the rescue,” he said wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

  I’d heard talk of the wonders of legalized codeine in France, but this was my first direct encounter. In Canada, codeine is a common opium-based painkiller prescribed by doctors after minor surgery or to combat severe toothaches. When I was a reporter, my mentor, Woloschuk, would collect tablets of codeine-rich Tylenol 3 from girlfriends. When it had been a particularly bad day at the newspaper, we’d sit in his apartment, swallow a handful each, and watch the Cartoon Network for a couple of sluggish hours. It was a pleasant relaxant, but nothing extraordinary.

  In France, however, codeine is an industry all to itself. Pharmacies sell six-ounce bottles of sweet codeine syrup or packets of twenty light blue sugar-coated codeine pills for twelve francs, a bit more than $1.50. A single pill or teaspoon has as much codeine as a Tylenol 3, and you don’t need a doctor’s prescription, though there is a state-imposed limit of one box or bottle of codeine a day, and the pharmacist generally scowls if you become too regular a customer. Still, with the flashing green pharmacy cross on almost every Parisian corner, it is easy enough to stockpile the drug, and there are many a surreal story about nights spent under codeine’s sweet spell.

  The theories for this bonanza are rampant. One claims that the government needed to provide a soft fix for all of the workers who returned to France after becoming addicted to opium and heroin in French Indochina. My favorite is conspiratorial: All this discount codeine is a cheap and sweet tranquilizer provided to keep a notoriously revolutionary population happily subdued. Simon certainly appeared calmer now.

  “These Paris winters,” he sighed. “The dampness gets in your bones. The old man doesn’t like me running a heater in here because of the electricity bills.”

  He took another guzzle, grimacing slightly for effect, and then replaced the lid and put the bottle back under his bed. With Simon more composed, we returned to the subject of my visit.

  “Look, I don’t know much about the situation, but George says you’ve been at the bookstore too long,” I said. “He wants me to move into this room. I’m supposed to make sure you leave this week.”

  “He said that? George wants to be rid of me?”

  I nodded and Simon leaned back dejectedly, raising his eyes to the ceiling.

  “You have a place to go, don’t you?”

  “I have friends, sure, I can find places to go, but not at short notice like this. I need time. It’s the middle of winter. I can’t just go out on the street. It’s cold out there.”

  Taking off his hat, he smoothed his wild white hair. Gradually, his hand movements became furious and I worried he would rub tufts from his scalp. Finally, he slapped his hand on the bed in rage.

  “You know what’s happening, don’t you? It’s those kids from next door. That Gaucho and his pretty little flunky. What’s his name? It’s so odious. Kuu-rrrt. That’s it. They march around like they own the place, and now they’ve got it into their heads that I should leave. They’ve poisoned George against me. Nobody understands how much I hate this civilization and the people produced by it.”

  Heated now, he thrust his hand back under the bed, rooted around some more, and pulled out what looked to be a can of beer. Prying open the tab, he tilted the contents down his throat. The can was emptied in one long swallow, like a pelican downing a fish.

  “Don’t worry, it’s alcohol-free,” he said, eager to show me the label. “It gives me the taste, but it doesn’t even have one percent. I’ll tell you, though, the stress is going to send me back to the drink. It’s unbearable. You’ve got to help me.”

  Simon was looking at me so beseechingly that I didn’t know what to say. Judging by the dire condition of his clothes and the fact he’d been forced to live in a bookstore, without access to shower or kitchen, for five long years, he didn’t have an abundance of financial resources. And if my brief time with him was any indication, he wasn’t the type of man who could merge seamlessly into the rigors of an everyday job.

  “Couldn’t you just buy me a few days?” he asked with real despair in his eyes.

>   It was at about this point that Simon began fiddling with his black waist pouch and took out a vial with a plastic screw top. He opened it and withdrew a generous lump of hashish.

  “You don’t smoke, by any chance? I usually have a little puff before I go to bed. I think I’ll need it tonight.”

  Thus began a most convoluted evening. A dozen different trains of thought sped through Simon’s head at any one time and he jumped between conversations like a CD on random play. The entire time, he adopted different voices and accents, switching compulsively between a middle-aged American woman, a nineteenth-century colonial officer, a postwar schoolboy, a sixties Rastafarian, a Cockney copper, and even the devil. Instead of listening to one man, I was treated to a throng of cockeyed stereotypes and cameos.

  “I was listening to the BBC World Service the other day and they had this report on what police can do to monitor telephone calls. They could be listening anywhere! Not that I haven’t had a few experiences with police, mind you, I lived in London in the sixties. Two thousand micrograms of acid in one go, it was like a million Mickey Mouses roaring through your head on a million tiny motor scooters. Oh, I knew the police and they knew me, but it was cordial enough. ‘Hello Si. Up to no good again, are you? Oh, Constable Stephen. Out earning a little overtime tonight?’ God, it feels like yesterday.”

  Another codeine swig.

  “Paris has changed since I first knew it, too much noise, too many tourists, too many American people with their Rollerblades. Isn’t it extraordinary those people with their whiny voices—‘Randy, get the camera so I can take a picture of that Eiffel Tower, Randy, isn’t that a sweet postcard of the boy with the baguette’—are descendants of fine English stock? Though the way the Americans cheated and butchered the Indians does old England proud. The apple doesn’t fall that far from the tree. Just look at the atrocities we British are responsible for. We basically went around the world raping and killing and bringing the plunder back to Essex. I’m not immune. Where do you think my family got their money from? Some great-great-uncle who pillaged Burma, of course. Our family still has an execution sword he brought home as a souvenir, two hundred and seventeen notches on the handle for each of the heads it lopped off. You can feel the bad vibrations coming off that thing.”