Chasing Sylvia Beach (15 page)

“Please, can I help?”

Sylvia sighed. “You again!”

Just then Spender, who’d been signing a book for a woman nearby, caught sight of Lily. “You again!” he cried, but his tone was far different than Sylvia’s exasperated one. Lily brightened.

“Hello,” she said. “I loved your reading.”

Spender mock-bowed. “I’m glad it’s over,” he confessed.

Sylvia put her hand on his sleeve. “It wasn’t so awful, was it? How do you two know each other?” She raised an eyebrow at Lily.

Lily threw a desperate look at Spender, but he just smiled. “Oh, mutual acquaintances, isn’t that so . . .”

“Lily,” she rushed to insert.

“Yes, of course, Lily. We’ve forgotten how we met. No matter.” He smiled again but Sylvia didn’t appear convinced. She nodded toward Lily.

“She insists upon helping me.”

Spender shrugged. “Well, then, why not let her lend a hand? Why refuse help so graciously offered? You certainly can use it.”

Sylvia threw up her hands. “Fine. Quick, then, fold up these chairs so there’s room for the reception.” Turning back to the table, she added, “But leave a few in place.”

“Of course. Done.” Lily said. To Spender, she whispered, “Thank you!”

Moving through the aisles, she folded the small wooden chairs and stacked them against the wall in the tiny alcove at the back of the shop. The room was dark, unused bookshelves towering in the small space. She made out a cot and small sink. But there was no time to dawdle, for now Sylvia was calling her to help serve the guests. In that way Lily became the unofficial, and unqualified, bartender. Sylvia was serving cheap white wine from unmarked bottles and small bowls of nuts. Clusters of French men lingered nearby, discussing the authors and their own publishing efforts.

Lily greeted and served Paris’s literati, filling the tiny glasses and passing them out as fast as she could. She knew she was among some of the great modern writers but luckily did not recognize them by sight. If she knew exactly who they were, she might be too tongue-tied to even smile. Flushed with activity, she had just replenished the wine from a wooden crate in the back when she turned and found herself facing the woman from the plane.

“A glass of wine, please.” The woman spoke as if she had never met Lily.

“Hello again,” Lily replied. The woman cast a bored glance around the room.

“Don’t I know you?” Lily pressed. “I mean . . .” She lowered her voice and leaned across the table, handing the woman her wine. “Didn’t we sit next to each other on the plane?”

The woman pulled back, taking her wine to her lips before responding. The din of the crowd rose.

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you mean.” She made as if to move away.

“Wait!” Lily threw her arm out to stop her. “I need to talk to you.”

But the woman slipped into the crowd, the little face of the fox on her stole the last thing Lily saw before she lost sight of her. “But, but—” Lily sputtered, trapped at the table, able only to watch the party from the sidelines.

A man came over for a drink. It was the woman’s companion. Up close, he was familiar to Lily, but she wasn’t sure how.

“Hello there,” he smiled. He was tall and much older than she had thought. He had dark green eyes and a saucy expression.

“Allow me to introduce myself. I’m Harold Pindale.”

He presented his hand. Lily took it and he flipped his wrist and hovered his lips over her hand. He leaned forward, giving her a faux seductive look. His mustache tickled her hand as he brought his lips to it and planted a firm but delicate kiss on her hand.

“I see you’ve found the only girl in Paris who doesn’t know your tricks,” a woman’s voice interrupted. She had returned without Lily noticing. Lily tried to pull her hand away but Harold held on.

“Oh, no, my dear,” he said. “This is a new friend. This is—”

“Lily.” She yanked her hand away. “And you?” she asked, turning to the woman.

Her eyes, small like a cat’s, narrowed. “Louise,” she replied.

“Didn’t we meet on the trip over?” Lily insisted.

“I don’t think so. Harold, let’s go.”

They moved toward Hemingway, who was recounting a story to Janet Flanner and her companion. The young woman leaned close to Hemingway, and when they laughed together it was clear they’d already done a lot of laughing already. Spender spoke with a French man nearby clutching a book to his chest. The rest of the audience had left and only a few remained, saying good-byes to Sylvia at the door.

Confused by the brush-off, Lily considered following Louise. She was certain it was the woman from the plane, and she couldn’t lose her only lead. Now, Louise and Spender were engrossed in conversation. Lily abandoned the drinks table and hovered near the group that formed around Sylvia. The woman who’d arrived in the limo mentioned wanting to do a reading of her own poetry at the shop. Sylvia nodded politely and caught Lily’s eye.

Sylvia excused herself from the conversation. She grasped Lily’s elbow and steered her away from the group. “Thank God,” she muttered. Lily was pleased to be singled out. “Miss Rubenstein can be quite persistent.”

Lily laughed. That was Helena Rubenstein? Lily shook herself. She couldn’t get distracted by celebrities. Sylvia and Lily stopped by the front desk.

“Thank you for your help. I hate to say you were right, but I will. It was useful to have you here.”

“But it’s a pleasure to help you. It’s easy,” Lily said.

“I’d like to talk to you. I have an idea. How long will you be in Paris?”

Lily didn’t know how to answer. “I’m here . . . indefinitely,” she said.

Sylvia asked if Lily could come by the next day, mentioning a proposition. Lily couldn’t believe it. Her usefulness had paid off. Sylvia wanted to offer her something—maybe a job. Lily nodded eagerly. They arranged to meet and Sylvia returned to her guests. Lily watched the bookseller hug a flushed Hemingway. Lily wanted to talk to the famous author, but she needed to stick with Louise. She searched the room, but Louise must have left while she was talking to Sylvia. She had lost her chance. Lily grabbed her bag from where she had tucked it behind the maga-zine racks and rushed out. Outside, most of the people from the reading had dispersed. Across the street, a woman entered a cab. When she turned her head toward the driver, Lily saw that it was Louise. She leaped forward, but the cab driver gunned away. Lily swore under her breath, distraught to have lost her. Shivering, she wondered if she should go back inside to help Sylvia break down the party. Just then, Paul stepped from the shadows across the street.

“Lily! There you are!”

She’d completely forgotten that Paul had planned to pick her up from the reading. A flush of relief passed through her. Paul looked so much younger than the people at the reading, and for all their erudition and savvy, she was more comfortable with him. They strolled back to the hotel and Lily recounted the highlights: fetching Hemingway, seeing Janet Flanner, and finally, having a meeting with Sylvia. He listened and seemed happy for her successes. At the hotel, they went through the now-familiar ritual. He handed her the keys and went back to the desk while she ascended to the room she now considered comforting.

THE NEXT MORNING, Lily hurried through an overcast Paris toward Shakespeare and Company. The façade, the door, and the scent of the shop were all becoming familiar. She hurried in, excited to see Sylvia. Inside the shop, a woman in a gold tweed jacket spoke with Sylvia near her desk. Holding a stack of books, Sylvia greeted Lily, asking her to wait. Teddy thrust his nose into Lily’s hand and leaned against her leg, his paw pressing into Lily’s foot. Smiling, she patted his side. This somehow helped her breathe easier.

The air in the shop retained a whiff of the night before, the reading leaving an invisible but perceptible mark. The tables replaced the chairs, and were once again piled high with books. A tiny vase of daffodils adorned Sylvia’s desk. Lily browsed the displays and came upon a stack of James Joyce’s
Ulysses
. She knew how important this book was for Sylvia. She had made a lot of sacrifices to publish it, pushing her business toward bankruptcy. Lily also remembered the paltry gratitude Joyce had shown Sylvia afterward. She opened to a random page but couldn’t concentrate on the text.

Instead, she fantasized about a future at Sylvia’s side. In this other reality, she managed to make her way through the entire book, and to her surprise, she not only understood it, she liked the modernist masterpiece. She and Sylvia had long discussions about the text, about the choices Joyce had made with language. Sylvia showed her some of the printer’s proofs, where Joyce had blacked out certain lines and scribbled new ones in. Lily gleaned some ideas for her own stories and jotted them down in her notebook, the ink flowing magically over the page.

The women’s conversation broke into Lily’s daydream. Sylvia’s customer reported that she and her husband were going back to New York.

“Our banker told us it would be best to leave Europe now, before things get worse,” she continued. “With the strikes at Le Havre, we’re afraid we won’t be able to leave at all.”

“Hmm,” Sylvia said, writing down the woman’s book titles in her ledger.

“Are
you
going to leave?”

Sylvia laughed. “And go where?”

“Back to the States. Back to your family.”

Sylvia frowned and kept writing. Lily perused a copy of
Transatlantic
, its blocky, deco font and contemporary short stories emphasizing the era she had slipped into. The paper, rough and thick, was nothing like the glossy, sleek magazines back home. She thought about buying a copy. When she traveled, she always wanted something to take home. But would she ever go back home? She replaced the magazine and tuned back into the conversation.

“Constance, my world is here.” Sylvia spread her arms to encompass the shop. Lily ducked her head toward the magazine rack, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping. “I can’t leave my life!”

“But how will you survive?”

Sylvia laughed. “I guess as I always have.”

Constance intimated that Sylvia belonged back in the States with her family. But Sylvia shook that off.

“Paris is my home. I’ve been here for twenty years and honestly, Constance, I have nowhere else to go. When I die, I want to be buried here, near my friends.”

Tears welled up in Lily’s eyes. She’d been to Sylvia’s grave, in Princeton, and had been sad that Sylvia hadn’t been interred in her beloved Paris. Constance handed Sylvia some francs.

“You’re a braver woman than I,” Constance said. She gathered the books in a leather strap, pulled it tight, and paused at the door, giving Sylvia a last plaintive gaze. Teddy, from his spot on the rug by the desk, whined, his puffy tail beating against the floor. Lily wanted to assure Constance that Sylvia would be okay, that she would survive the war, that she would close down the shop herself in a few years, before the Nazis had a chance to. But she couldn’t say anything. Part of her liked thinking that she had information others did not. Of course she had read some science fiction, and she knew about time travel and the noninterfering rules. But that was just fiction; maybe now that it had really happened to her, there were no rules. Maybe she could do what she wanted.

Standing in the middle of the shop, surrounded by books, Sylvia became a real person for Lily, with a real life and real challenges, and not just a story she had read about in the comfort of a book. Caveat lector, Lily thought. Beware of reading books that suck you in and spit you out in a whole other world. She imagined Sylvia moving through the war years, surviving by a thread, made old less by deprivations than by seeing her city overtaken by invaders. And Lily might be there to witness it all.

Constance left and Sylvia sat down, bending her head as if trying to get her bearings.

“Do you get that often?” Lily approached the desk.

“Get what?”

“People telling you to leave Paris.”

“I do. There’s the assumption that I am as rootless as the rest of the Americans who parade through here like it’s a playground. But Paris is my home and really now, there is nowhere else I would want to live.” She paused. “But thank you for coming. I’m sure you have other things to do in Paris.”

“I don’t consider Paris a playground. But I like it here, at the shop. I work in a bookstore back home, so this feels comfortable for me.”

Sylvia pulled a cigarette out and held the pack toward Lily, who shook her head. Sylvia lit the cigarette, clicked the lighter shut, and tossed it on the desk.

“I would like to thank you for last night. You ended up proving quite useful.”

“I was glad to be here, to be part of it.”

“Well, I was a nervous Nellie. That’s the last one of those I want to do.” She blew smoke into an arabesque that twirled up toward the ceiling. Sylvia asked Lily how long she planned to be in Paris. Lily hedged and gave a vague answer. But Sylvia was tenaciously curious about why Lily was in Paris. Lily hesitated, then spoke without thinking.

“I’m here to help with my aunt’s move. She lived in Paris and I’m helping her pack up to return to the States.”

“What’s her name? Maybe I know her.”

Lily could feel the hole she was digging getting deeper and deeper. “Mary Stone. She lives in the 13th. You wouldn’t know her. She’s not—”

“Not what, not a reader?”

“No, not really. I’m the only one with the reading gene in my family,” Lily said.

“Reading gene?” Sylvia laughed. “That’s funny. I’ve never heard of the reading gene.” She stubbed her cigarette.

Lily gripped the back of a chair near the desk. Behind a smile she urged herself to pay more attention to her speech.

“Well, if you’re helping your aunt, you probably don’t have much time for fun. Or anything else.” Sylvia, too, wore a tight smile.

“Anything else?” Like what?”

“Have you read
Ulysses
?”

Lily shook her head at the non sequitur. She wished she could say, “Of course I’ve read it. Twice, in fact. I wrote my college thesis on it and it is being considered by a publisher.” But she told the truth. “Not yet. I’m waiting until I am laid up in bed for months with nothing else to do.”

“Well, don’t wait. It’s a masterpiece and will last long after those piddly paperbacks become rags.”

Lily promised to read it and Sylvia grasped a stack of papers and struck the edge of them against the desk to neaten them. “Much as I’d like to chat about books, I have something else in mind for you.”

Lily leaned forward. “Do you think you can spare some time to help me here? I need someone in the shop while I set up at the Expo this week. Do you think you can mind the books while I deal with that?”

Lily thought about the hours she had put in at Capitol Books and the trade shows she’d been to with Valerie. Hauling boxes of books, long hours in fluorescent-lit convention halls, eating tasteless food during brief breaks from the booth.

“I’m a fast learner. I’m good with people, too.” Lily knew that everyone said that when they were desperate for a job. But to tell the truth, she was desperate, for the first time in her life. She needed to find Louise, she needed something to do in Paris other than wander around worrying. And who knew how long the money from the ring would hold out.

Sylvia sized her up with a dry regard. Teddy stretched out, his black nubby legs reaching in front of him, and Lily bent down to rub his belly. Teddy kept his eyes closed and rolled onto his back.

“Well, Teddy appears to trust you. I don’t know how picky I can get,” Sylvia said. “The Expo is slated to start next week. Though they’ve been putting it off for years. Terribly embarrassing for the French.”

She went on to explain what she’d need from Lily: answering the phone, taking deliveries, preparing books for shipping, and being useful in the rare event that someone came in. It was true. The shop was nearly deserted. No one had come in since Constance had left.

Lily could scarcely believe that Sylvia was offering her a job. To be a girl Friday, to work side by side with Sylvia, might make this whole weird experience worth it.

“I can’t wait!” Lily burst out.

“Reserve your enthusiasm. You’ll see, I’m very demanding and, honestly, I’ve sent many an assistant home in tears. And I can’t pay you a lot,” she said.

“That’s okay,” Lily said. “A little money is always better than none.”

Sylvia invited Lily to put her bag behind the front desk, then gave her a tour of the shop. At Capitol Books, Valerie asked new employees to draw a map of the various sections in order to learn them better. Lily had made funny drawings next to each section: her philosophy section showed a group of stick figures with extra-large heads; her cooking section had a man jiggling a frying pan over a flaming burner; and her sports section showed a man crouching behind home plate while a barrage of sporting gear was thrown at him.

Sylvia escorted her around the shop. The photo gallery of writers on the walls—Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence—all seemed to welcome Lily. Teddy followed patiently, standing behind Sylvia as she explained the order of things. The books, arranged in alphabetical order, of course: essays, fiction, history. There weren’t nearly as many categories as at Capitol Books. The books were mostly hardcover, and some didn’t have dust jackets. No colorful paperbacks with catchy blurbs on the back. No remaindered books or oversized coffee-table books full of splashy pictures. Sylvia showed her a sideboard where she kept the first editions locked up. Lily could tell that Sylvia knew every title in the shop. She also saw the opportunity to sell the more expensive books if Sylvia didn’t have to be the gatekeeper. She nodded when Sylvia showed her how she preferred the books to be shelved—pulled to the edge of the shelves in a neat line. She claimed to be fastidious, yet there were stacks of books on the floor by every section. At Lily’s shop, the extra books were stored neatly in the basement, and replacements for sold books were brought up each morning.

“How do you keep track of which books are sold and which are loaned?” Lily asked.

“I write them down in the ledger at the front desk,” Sylvia said. “I’ll show you.”

Lily chafed at the inefficiency of it. At Capitol Books they processed every sale through the computer database. That made it easy to track everything, and to even sell books online. Still, Sylvia was quite modern, selling and sending books to readers around the world. She showed Lily the back room, where a cot sat next to a vintage black typewriter on a metal cart. Sylvia passed the communal WC, a tiny closet with a Turkish toilet. A sheaf of newsprint hung from a chain affixed to the wall. A black cat that Sylvia introduced as Lucky lounged on a mossy cobblestone in the dim courtyard. Back inside, a wide, dark staircase led upstairs.

“That’s where I stay,” Sylvia gestured. She made no move to show Lily her private quarters.

Back in the shop, the two women sat together near the barely warm stove, working out the details of their arrangement. Lily would come in a few hours a day and help Sylvia with shipping, other errands, and minding the shop while Sylvia was at the Expo. After agreeing to return the following afternoon, Lily left and headed down the street, giddy with her luck. Strolling along, she felt the urge to write. She wanted to chronicle what she’d seen.

The clouds had drifted away, leaving a bright afternoon that lured Parisians outside. The Boulevard Raspail was particularly animated with pedestrians enjoying the spring day. Lily moved with the crowd, energized by her conversation with Sylvia. The terrace of La Rotonde was alive with people, conversation buzzing from all sides. Lily spied an empty table near a giant potted plant at the side. After settling in and ordering a coffee, Lily dove into her notebook, scribbling again and again. She worked on a piece about the Hemingway reading, wanting to document the details of the evening before she forgot them. A well of inspiration sprang free from deep inside her. She was charged up, as she had been in her high school journalism class. She had written a feature on the physics teacher who bungee jumped for kicks. Her journalism teacher nodded his approval, but Lily overheard him in the hallway telling another teacher that he hoped Lily didn’t start snooping around other teachers’ private lives. Lily scooted past, her head down. She began limiting her writing to the strict assignments, not wanting to expose anyone, not wanting to stand out. She got a B–, a grade that brought down her GPA along with her interest in journalism. She focused instead on history, becoming engrossed in the stories of people in the past, histories already written, decisions already made. What good was being able to write if you couldn’t tell the truth?