Chasing Sylvia Beach (11 page)

Paul held the invitation, inspecting it closely.

“Where did you get this?”

The waiter zipped by, delivering their coffees. Lily took the chance to stir sugar into her cup. “Paul, if you don’t mind, I prefer not to talk about that yet. Now it’s your turn to trust me.”

Paul nodded and set the invitation on the table. But Lily could tell that her reticence only piqued his curiosity and it was politeness that stilled his questions.

“So you will come back to the hotel after the reading tonight?”

Lily sighed. Paul’s hazel eyes were so friendly, his expression generous. She couldn’t believe he was doing so much for her. She told him it was time to get her own room and stop invading his.

“Invade!” Paul snorted. “It’s hardly an invasion, Lily. I like your company.” He ducked his head, then spoke. “But where will you go? It’s not just our hotel that won’t accept a single woman with no luggage. It’s not very, how should I say, correct.”

Lily grimaced. She wasn’t correct in any era. It infuriated her to not be able to move and do as she pleased in 1937. It was all well and good to have met Sylvia Beach and received money for her ring, but she needed to remember her real priority: figure out how she’d gotten here and how she was going to get home. First, she needed to buy a purse to carry the money, her pen, and whatever else she’d buy.

“Surely some hotel or rooming house will take me. Do you have any ideas?”

Paul shook his head. “There are student dormitories for single women, run by nuns, I think, but they’re full until the summer session.” He shrugged. “I can ask around. But you can stay chez moi until you find a room. It’s not hurry. I have to go to class all day. You can come there again tonight, pas de problème.”

Lily was about to refuse when she realized she had no reason to. She had nowhere else to go. She could try to find something today, but she might as well say yes now.

“Oh, Paul. You’ve done so much for me. How can I ever thank you?”

“Stop—you don’t have to worry about that. I am your angel.”

“I guess!”

“What will you do this afternoon?”

“I think I should join you and Claudine and maman for coffee!” Lily giggled and Paul joined her.

“Ah, oui, that would be some scene!” Paul giggled. “But seriously.”

“I want to buy a notebook. I would like to do some writing.”

“You are a writer!”

“No, I want to be a writer. So I must start somewhere, right?”

“Oh, I’d love to read your writing.”

“Bah, non, Paul! It’s not . . . it’s just . . . just journaling, nothing for anyone else to read.” She felt awkward talking about writing that hadn’t even happened yet. Except for the pages she’d hidden in Paul’s room. A flash of panic coursed through her; what if he found them? She’d have to retrieve them tonight.
They parted at the entrance to the café, promising to see each other later after the reading. Paul insisted on coming to fetch her afterward, and while Lily wouldn’t normally worry about walking alone, she acquiesced. Paul said he’d pop by the bookshop at eleven to get her. They made a plan B: if Lily couldn’t get into the reading, she’d go right away to the hotel.

Outside the café, they said their good-byes. “Alors, à ce soir, Lily,” Paul said, bending to buss Lily’s cheeks. “A ce soir,” Lily repeated, and watched him hurry down the street to his class. She felt his absence immediately and regretfully. It had been like this with Daniel—Daniel! A pang of guilt passed through her. They’d only had a few dates, so she wasn’t officially cheating on him. But she wondered what he’d think if he saw her enjoying Paul’s company so much.

In a private residence nearby, a woman stroked the cover of a leather-bound book. Her hands, encased in white archival gloves, moved with tenderness over the tome.

“We’ve got it,” she murmured. “Safe.”

Diana, seated in an upholstered chair, nodded. “One more book secured, many more to go,” she sighed. She rose from her chair, took the book from the other woman, and placed it inside a glass bookcase with care, her movements measured and practiced. Then she locked the case, took the keys to her desk, and put them in the middle drawer. “Now,” she said. “About this reading.”

Adelaide pulled her gloves off and tossed them on a side table near the fireplace. “Yes. Louise and Harold will be there, with a few extras to draw attention away from them. We know that Werden will be there, watching everyone’s last move.”

“Will she be there?”

“She better be. We can only wait and see. That girl is our only hope.”

Diana settled behind the desk and pulled out a ledger. Dipping a pen in an inkwell, she said, “What have we come to that an outsider is our only hope for one of our most coveted manuscripts?”

“We’ve come to this,” Adelaide replied. “Who knows? She might be perfect. We need new blood. I don’t think we can keep that dead weight Harold for much longer.” Adelaide paused. “And you know, the choice is not ours. We have to accept it. This mission is her own even if she doesn’t know that.”

“Well, good riddance, I say.” Diana began writing in the ledger.

Adelaide moved toward the door. “I’ll be off, then.”

Diana continued to write, her hand lit by the glow of the desk lamp. The door to the library clicked shut.

AFTER LEAVING THE café, Lily wandered a bit, enjoying the spring afternoon. She felt buoyed by her lunch with Paul, like she was a normal woman in the thirties who’d savored a rendezvous. It also was reassuring to have money in her pocket. Now she needed a purse, and some new clothes would be nice.

Strolling down the street, Lily passed a French bookshop, a
tabac
, and a milliner. She paused briefly in front of the hats, delighting in the bell-shaped ones adorned with feathers and ribbons. At the end of the street she found a papeterie and peered into the window. The floor of the display was lined in blue velvet, crumpled at the edges and giving the impression of a jewel box. A wooden lap desk was adorned with a glass ink bottle in the shape of a tiny ship, the fountain pen astride the bow, tipping away from the bottle like a plank out to sea. Elsewhere, a wrought-iron stand displayed a collection of more ink bottles, arranged in rows like soldiers. Classic fountain pens nestled in velvet-lined boxes.

With delight, Lily took in the notebooks, larger and thinner than American versions, fanned out in a rainbow of colored covers: maroon, navy blue, burnt orange. Her hand reached toward them, already feeling the smooth paper on her fingers, but the glass of the window stopped her. She saw herself tucked into a cozy chair with the lap desk, the ink and its bottle, writing her stories. She trembled with anticipation.

She entered the shop with a rush of enthusiasm, accompanied by the ding of the bell above the door. It was everything she loved: wood and paper everywhere. The shop seemed formal, like a pharmacy. But instead of medicines, there were supplies for people who wrote with beautiful paper and ink. A tall, graying shopkeeper stood at the counter helping a stooped old man in a suit and hat who peered at an assortment of pens in the wooden display case. Lily inhaled, savoring the smell of paper, glue, and possibility. Everyone ignored her, so she plunged in, the wooden parquet floor squeaking under her steps. At the center of the shop reigned a wide wooden table, a spool of brown wrapping paper at one end accompanied by scissors, ribbon, pots of glue, and other miscellany. Lily gasped at the rack of elegant wrapping papers draped one over the other.

“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” the shopkeeper greeted her. Lily nodded, trying to contain her excitement. She knew from experience that you had to slowly warm up to a French shopkeeper. If you were too friendly right away, you’d be disregarded as a disingenuous American.

She wandered around, taking in the ordered charm. Everything had its own shelf, bin, or rack. Here, a stack of green leather account ledgers, there the bin holding a few of the year’s agendas, 1937 embossed on the red covers in blocky gold letters. Lily was delighted to feel so at ease. This had to be where Sylvia got her office supplies, she thought. Lily recognized the kind of notebooks she’d seen in the archives at Princeton. Everything resembled what one might see at a flea market on the outskirts of Paris, but new—not worn at the edges, not sepia-toned.

She approached a table arrayed with purses and pen pouches. Scanning the display, Lily realized she could buy a small satchel here, to hold her pen, her money, and . . . she could buy a notebook, too. She picked up a leather pouch and tested the zipper. She’d need more than one stolen pen to merit a pouch like this. Instead, she inspected the small satchels, falling in love with the buttoned and zippered compartments. She tried a soft brown leather bag, adjusting the strap with its slim buckle. It fit her, nestled against her hip. There was plenty of room inside for notebooks, books, plus slots for pens and pencils. A small price tag hung from a string attached to the strap. Five francs. That seemed incredibly cheap, and with a handful of francs in her pocket, she could afford it. Leaving the bag slung over her shoulder, Lily continued to explore the shop.

Lily paused in front of a shelf of notebooks near the back. Her heart jumped. There, in the corner, she discovered a stack of little black notebooks. Moleskine notebooks! Not wrapped in plastic like in her time. One was even propped open, revealing its squared graph pages held in place by the black elastic band. The notebooks looked dingier, less polished, but they were the same style notebook, the edges of the covers rounded, a fabric tassel tucked in the spine. She peeked at the shopkeeper, who was busy explaining the differences between pen styles to a young man. Picking up one of the elegant cahier notebooks, she stroked the cover, remembering her first fancy notebook.

Lily was entering high school when her mother abandoned their school shopping ritual. One Saturday afternoon, Lily approached her to go to the store. But her mother waved her off. She said that she forgot to put the date on the calendar. She was transplanting a near-dead rose bush.

“Go on your own, honey. Take your bike to the store.”

“But Mom, I like going with you. How am I going to decide between college rule and thick lines?” They laughed. Lily’s writing was tight and neat, and each year she lobbied for college rule.

Her mother lifted the plant out of the ground, her gloved hand cupping the dirty roots. “You’ll manage, I’m sure. Go on, now.” She rose with difficulty and carried the plant across the yard to a shady spot by the house. “I’m not sure this one’s going to survive,” she muttered, kneeling before the hole and leaning forward to gently position the bush. Lily got her bike from the garage and wheeled it down the driveway, for once not ringing her bell good-bye.

At the store, she spent a long time cruising the paper supply aisle. She chose each item carefully, putting a well-coordinated combination of spiral notebooks into her basket. Scrutinizing the pens, she weighed the advantages of a pack of multiple colors versus a pack of all blue ink. She finally decided on a two-pack of blue, slipping it discretely into her fanny pack. She rode through the rest of her shopping trip on a wave of adrenaline, buying the items in her cart and leaving the store with her stolen goods. Later, Lily stopped at another store. There, an exquisite notebook with Florentine end papers and creamy, unlined pages tempted her. It was expensive—thirty dollars, something she couldn’t afford and that her mother wouldn’t approve of. She added it to her contraband, slipping it into her shopping bag without remorse. But despite its beauty, she never wrote in it.

That year she mastered shoplifting, prying packets of pens off their hooks in the drugstore, tucking them into her pants. She would walk the aisles, pausing at the magazine rack, the cardboard package pressing against her belly. In college, while in a creative writing course, she stole more fancy notebooks, hoarding a box of them in the closet: marbleized paper, recycled paper, hardback notebooks, even regular school notebooks. She rarely wrote more than a page or two in them. But Lily had stopped stealing altogether when she got a job at the bookstore and was on the other side of the counter.

Choosing a pocketbook-sized notebook, she drifted toward the shopkeeper. A display of pens and ink were arrayed regally behind him. He glanced up at Lily. Taking her pen out of her pocket, she showed it to the clerk, asking for ink cartridges. He inspected it, unscrewing the swirled gray and red barrel and pulling out the cartridge.

“This is a very nice pen. Does it work well for you?”

“I just got it. I haven’t used it yet. I need ink.” They spoke in French and Lily felt a sense of pride at how easily her French was flowing.

He turned to the rack and chose a bottle of black ink. “Voilà.”

“S’il vous plâit, can you show me how to fill the pen?”

He jerked his chin down like he couldn’t believe she didn’t know how to refill her own pen. Lily focused on the man’s hands as he dipped the pen into the inkwell and drew the ink into the cartridge. He explained how she shouldn’t overfill it. He replaced the barrel and gently tapped the pen against a blotter on the counter. He made a few scribbles to get the ink flowing. When he passed the pen to Lily, she uncapped it and pressed the nib to the paper. She started to write her name. Instead she wrote “Sylvia.” The ink burbled out and made a big blob at the end of the
a
. The man demonstrated how to write more slowly and evenly so the ink wouldn’t surge out. It soothed Lily to be taught something. She paid for the satchel, ink, and notebook and left the shop, pleased to have had a successful encounter.

Late-afternoon sun greeted Lily outside the shop. She paused, breathing deeply. Cigarette smoke, a trace of perfume, the fresh air of spring: the familiar mélange of Paris. The shop had been a treasure chest, a far cry from the sterile, wide-aisled supermarkets of her childhood. She felt the urge, the need, to capture everything. Shaken from her malaise in Denver, she now had something to write about. But where to go? Hemingway liked to write in cafés. Maybe she could do as he did and find a café where she could write. Motivated and armed with the materials she needed, she set off to begin her own life as a writer.