Time Was Soft There

by Jeremy Mercer

  Another joint lit.

  “It wasn’t easy growing up in my family. My father, he was a special fellow, put me on horses every Sunday, and little Simon went galloping off, terrified for his life, hating the creature that was hurtling through the woods looking for a tree to smash little Simon’s neck against. He wasn’t a bad fellow, my father, but, well, yes, he was. He kept me hidden all those years, so I was living in foster homes and private schools, and not very nice things happen to cute little blond boys in those places. They should hunt down pedophiles, they should be stripped and hung from their toes and flayed.”

  It went on like that for a steady hour, bizarre tangent following bizarre tangent, until I was able to piece together the life of this crazy-eyed poet. He was born in London in the 1940s, the result of a wartime affair between an English military gentleman and a young Scottish nurse. Initially, he was named Rex. Renounced by his father, he was the unwanted child of a single mother, bouncing between foster homes and friends of the family, never sure of his place, never sure of anything.

  After several years of such havoc, his father finally confessed to his wife and agreed to bring his illegitimate son into his legitimate home. Rex was suddenly renamed Simon, and this was actually one of the easier transitions. A new mother, a new brother, a new house, a new school, a new life—it twisted an already tortured head into fresh knots. Finally, when Simon was a teenager, the situation became too much for everyone and his father arranged a job for him at a London advertising agency to get him out of the house.

  Simon had long had a flair for words, even winning school poetry competitions, so the work suited him. Up he rose, a young star making a name in a fanatically competitive business. But he also embraced the excesses of London in the sixties, and there was seldom a night when he wasn’t filling his body with some combination of chemicals and cocktails. When Simon unexpectedly lost his job for designing a campaign that used propaganda footage of Hitler to sell German beer—“Ein Volk. Ein Reich. Ein Bier”—he made the smooth transition from being one who consumed recreational drugs to one who provided them for a growing circle of friends and acquaintances.

  His little business boomed, but along with the ankle-length fur coats and Mercedes sport coupes came a rather unpleasant possession charge. Simon was spared jail, but the affair convinced him it was time to leave England. It was off to France, then Spain, then back to France again, teaching English to businessmen to earn his money, filling endless notebooks with poetry to ease the manic swirl in his head, and always, always drowning himself in drink.

  By the time Simon reached his fiftieth birthday, alcohol had gone from pleasure to habit to disease. He found himself back in Paris with no job, no money, and an increasingly short list of friends. One day, he lost his apartment, and that’s when he remembered Shakespeare and Company and the owner who’d once complimented his poetry. He was sure it would be only a temporary solution, but by January 2000, that temporary solution had been going on for five long years.

  “I beat alcohol here. You don’t know how hard that was. The old man was really good to me,” he said with great fondness, and the mention of George brought us back to our present conundrum.

  If Shakespeare and Company was indeed a writer’s refuge, then this particular poet still wasn’t ready to be jettisoned into the real world. I felt a shiver of disloyalty for not executing the eviction warrant to the fullest, but deep inside I was sure that if George had sheltered this man for so long, he wouldn’t want his things unceremoniously chucked onto the road as Kurt had so boldly offered to do.

  With the briefest of negotiations, Simon and I were able to agree on a plan. After shaking hands with mock solemnity, he showed me to the door and thanked me for the surprisingly enjoyable meeting. Then, just before locking up behind me, he thrust his hand through the crack and passed me one of the folders he’d been shuffling about earlier. It was filled with poems, each written in the most elegant of handwriting, each with faint sketches of animals and trees and birds chasing butterflies scattered in the margins.

  “If you’re interested, you could read this,” he said with lowered eyes. Back in the bookstore proper, Luke shook his head when I told him what had happened. The reaction I was truly anxious for was from George.

  13.

  Polly Magoo’s was a dim tunnel of a bar with cracked orange vinyl booths and scarred wooden tables. Old French movie posters were painted onto the walls, one a flaking silhouette of an Ali–esque boxer, another the bar’s namesake, the William Klein film Qui êtes-vous Polly Magoo? In the back corner stood the counter with bottles of brown liquor lining the shelf and a perpetually out-of-order pay telephone off to one side.

  The bar had, as they say, seen the day. During the heroin rages of the seventies, management drilled holes in the coffee spoons to keep junkies from pocketing them; of the many establishments in Paris that claim to have been graced by Jim Morrison, Polly’s was his drinking spot of preference when he lived at a hotel up the street; and word was the bartenders had bedded an impressive list of French actresses.

  The modern reality was equally impressive. Polly’s stayed open until the last decently paying customer was ready to leave, usually six or seven in the morning. In a city where the only other options for drinks in the depths of the night were discos with too-high cover charges and cafés with too-bright lights, this made Polly’s a rare luxury. Many an evening, the crowd actually swelled out onto the street while pedestrians with the more innocent intentions of bed or late-night television were forced to wade through elbows and burning cigarettes on their way home. Yet despite this, the bar maintained an air of intimacy, a just-between-us feel. Mauro, the bar’s fixer, always shook your hand when you arrived, and he watched over his motley clientele with the gruff love of an older brother. It was the kind of place where at three on any given morning you could enjoy a slow drink in the back corner with a lover or get raucously drunk out front with a friend.

  The best part of Polly Magoo’s, at least as far as the residents of Shakespeare and Company were concerned, was its location. Leaving the bookstore, it was twenty-three paces to the left along rue de la Bûcherie and then another forty-eight down rue St. Jacques to the front door. The distance was so inviting, it wasn’t unheard of for someone from the bookstore to wander into the bar in their pajamas for a last drink before bed.

  On this night, Polly Magoo’s was the setting for the Gaucho’s last party. He was due to leave Paris in the coming week, so Kurt had played it safe and organized the celebration early. For three months, the Gaucho had been a leading star in the Shakespeare and Company constellation, and most all of the regulars had come to pay their respects.

  Considering the surly treatment I’d received at his hand, I was inclined to stay at the store and read, but Ablimit and Kurt had insisted I attend. By the time I arrived after my encounter with Simon, there was a teeming group around a front table. The Gaucho was at the center, a bottle of bourbon before him. His dark eyes flashed wildly as he told his stories, and for the first time I saw how richly he deserved his nickname: “the Gaucho”—the South American cowboy, the rugged man living on the fringes of society.

  Splurging for a pint of beer, I sat down next to Kurt. As I’d already learned, he wasn’t shy about showing off his tattoo, and that boldness extended to the rest of his body. He had an athlete’s build, and on the slightest pretense of heat or discomfort, his clothes would begin to be shed, usually to the pleasure of some young woman or man in his company. At Polly’s, he was down to his undershirt, feverishly working the table for free drinks. He flirted, he pouted, he flexed, until one after another they relented, their ardor measured by the beverage provided: a half glass of beer from the vaguely amused, a full pint from the ones who felt he was genuinely sweet, and a tumbler of whiskey from those who thought they’d found that night’s answer to their lonely ache.

  Across from this hormonal spectacle was Eve, the girl who’d introduced me to the peculiar world of Shake
speare and Company by inviting me to tea. Her already-pink cheeks were flushed further by the heat of the bar and she pressed a glass to her face for relief. Realizing I now was a resident of the bookstore, she squeezed closer to welcome me properly.

  The bookstore had become her home away, she explained. She was just twenty years old and had come from middle Germany to work in Paris for a year. Fluent in three languages, she’d had no trouble finding a job in the call center of a large European corporation. But the city was another challenge. Paris struck her as hostile and impersonal and she’d felt very much alone until she found Shakespeare and Company.

  After meeting George, everything changed. Eve began taking meals at the bookstore and was gradually absorbed into the strange life among the books. With pride, she told me she now held the position of Tea Lady. This involved arriving at the bookstore every Sunday to boil huge pots of tea, distribute trays of custard cookies, and keep the guests happy. I was not, it turned out, the first to be invited upstairs for tea by Eve; another part of the job was to replenish the party with new faces.

  “I love the bookstore, I do whatever I can to help,” she told me. Then, with the giggle of one unhabituated to the bewitching grip of alcohol, she added in a whisper, “I adore George. He’s the greatest man I’ve ever met.”

  Also there that night was the Italian woman from Bologna. She was my age and had run away to Paris when her marriage began to crumble. A friend told her that Shakespeare and Company was a perfect place to lose oneself, and she decided she wanted to be lost for a while. George welcomed her with his usual hospitality.

  At the far end of the table was Ablimit. He was holding court and getting steadily drunker on Polly’s watery beer. His talk swerved madly. First, he would deride Western culture as a whole. “You were monkeys living in caves when we had Silk Road,” he’d roar. “While China great civilization, your ancestors hit each other with sticks.” Moments later, the insults forgotten, this jaded child of Communist China would bang his fist on the table and declare capitalism the philosophy that would redeem humanity. Around him, the temporary children of George’s neo-Communist bookstore rose loudly to disagree.

  That night at Polly’s, there were Italians and Argentinians, Germans and Chinese, Americans and English, all ablaze with the glories of life, all overjoyed to be in Paris. Between sips of beer and drags on cigarettes, the talk was of voyages to be had, films to be made, books to be written. Everyone had something close to a dream glittering in their eye.

  This was the best of Paris. Dreams, like money, can be accounted for in simple terms of deficit and surplus. My hometown is a bureaucratic capital, the kind of place people leave: to Toronto or Montreal, or to New York, Los Angeles or London for those with a deeper thirst. Such exoduses leave a reduced population of those individuals with an insatiable ecstasy for life and an inexplicable optimism for the future. What is left behind is a lingering sense of compromise. Just like nobody ever dreams of being a payroll clerk at a software company when they are a child, nobody ever dreams of living in my city.

  In a place like Paris, the air is so thick with dreams they clog the streets and take all the good tables at the cafés. Poets and writers, models and designers, painters and sculptors, actors and directors, lovers and escapists, they flock to the City of Lights. That night at Polly’s, the table spilled over with the rapture of pilgrims who have found their temple. That night, among new friends and safe at Shakespeare and Company, I felt it too. Hope is a most beautiful drug.

  It was nearing midnight and the bar was full and sweaty, the people spilling out onto the street like blood from a hemorrhaging vein. When Polly’s was this crowded, the normal lines that divided tables of drinkers were forgotten and people moved about the bar in a staggered version of musical chairs. If someone rose to go to the toilet or left for home, Mauro promptly squeezed a stray body into their chair, and thus our party morphed and grew.

  Throughout, the Gaucho received a merry parade of good-bye kisses and poetic tributes. Simon’s complaints still fresh in mind, I watched with a cynical eye and raised my glass halfheartedly to the many toasts. At one point, the Gaucho rose and strutted around the bar before coming to a stop just beside where I was sitting. He offered a smug grin and then sat down.

  “Maybe you think I was hard on you before,” he began. “Maybe you think I am a bastard. I don’t care. I have to be this way to protect George. You’ll see.”

  He pushed his fedora up on his head so he could press in close to my face. His breath smelled of bourbon.

  “Go ahead. Ask me something. Everyone wants to ask the Gaucho something. Do you want to know about the time somebody tried to burn the store down? Or maybe you want to know if it’s true George used to go to bed with Anaïs Nin? Go on. I’ll answer anything.”

  The Gaucho presented this as a magnanimous gesture, but I didn’t know what to ask. He obviously wanted to prove how much he knew about Shakespeare and Company, but I wasn’t eager to take his bait. Instead, remembering that everyone at the bookstore was writing something, I asked the Gaucho about his work.

  “My writing …” He looked perplexed, his menu of pat answers lost. Reaching for Kurt’s beer glass, he drank heavily before continuing.

  “People usually ask me about George … .” He hesitated again before continuing in hushed words.

  “I was sending letters home to a friend in Buenos Aires and I told him my stories from traveling. They were letters, written like that, but my friend works with a publisher. He thinks maybe I should make a collection of them … .” He shook his head sheepishly. “I’m not a writer, though. I’d never call myself a writer.”

  And at that, he hastened to introduce himself properly for the first time. His name was Esteban; the Gaucho a nickname he’d picked up along the road. He told me how much he respected George, how maybe he’d start a bookstore of his own in Argentina one day, something like Shakespeare and Company, but not with quite so many beds.

  It was as if a mask had dropped and he was Esteban the traveler again, not the Gaucho, the feared deputy at Shakespeare and Company. Our animosity melted in the humid air of Polly Magoo’s, and though it may have been the magic of the alcohol, we raised our glasses to friendship.

  The hour grew late. Some made a sortie back to the bookstore to help Luke close up shop, where a few remained, hoping to get a good night’s sleep. Back at the bar, shoulder still pressed against shoulder, and another round of drinks arrived. Then, like an icy spray, it was Last Metro.

  In Paris, the metro stops running at the early hour of one o’clock in the morning. For those far from home, this makes for painful decisions. One either has to abandon the evening and catch the last train or commit to a night of debauchery and accept a long walk, an expensive taxi, or the dangers of a night bus. At our table, watches were discreetly checked and the gathering lost more of its conservative members.

  By three, the once-strong party was reduced to a handful. Among them was the beautiful porcelain-shouldered woman who’d asked me for a cigarette the day of the tea party. Her name was Marushkah and she’d moved to Paris from Poland after her mother married a rich Columbian oil executive. Though nominally attending university, she was mostly found in cafés or at the bookstore. Much of her night at Polly’s was spent lamenting the fickle nature of Kurt’s affections. She’d bought him a glass of whiskey.

  By five, the bar was near empty, with a few pastis drinkers at the counter and two men vying for one woman’s affection at a booth in the back. Outside, an early-morning dog walker peered through the window at the dregs of the night. Without really noticing how, Esteban and I ended up alone at the table.

  There was nothing left but the leaving. Outside, the streetlights reflected off the damp paving stones, a crescent moon hung over Notre Dame, whispers of mist rose up from the Seine. We couldn’t be blamed for thinking the world revolved around us.

  Still not ready to end the night, we stood together on the esplanade out in front of the store,
and Esteban told me why he was leaving. He’d fallen in love at the bookstore, the real thing, and he was going to marry this woman. They were moving to Italy together; she’d already found an apartment and was waiting for him.

  Then, without any sort of warning, Esteban turned and touched me on the arm. “Did George give you my set of keys?”

  Wondering how he had known, I placed the keys in his hands. He ran his fingers along the ring until he found a tiny ceramic icon. It was the Virgin Mary, red-robed on a blue background.

  “George would have killed me if he’d known I’d put that there. He doesn’t go for any of that.”

  In a melancholy voice, Esteban identified each of the six keys on the ring and explained what doors they opened and how they should be used. When he was finished, he returned them to my hand with a sigh. “I only gave them back to George yesterday … .”

  Again he lapsed into silence. Somewhere, a bird awoke and to the east there were fingers of peach where the sun would rise.

  “I think I’m leaving at the right time,” he finally said. “Now, it’s not too late. Everybody still loves the Gaucho. They’ll remember me well. You, you’ll be all right if George picked you. But take care. This place can change you.”