Chapter 13
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sabine, Aubin, and Yves moved past the busy bookseller who rang up purchases and stamped inside covers with “Shakespeare and Company, Kilometer Zero, Paris,” deeper into the store where there were books floor to ceiling, with ladders to reach the top shelves.
“What’s Kilometer Zero?” asked Sabine.
“It is right across the way, in front of Notre Dame,” said Aubin. “It marks the spot from which the distance of all places in France are calculated.”
“This store is, in many ways, the center of English culture in Paris,” said Yves.
“It is associated with some of the greatest authors who have written in English. Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein … Who else? Ana?s Nin. Henry Miller. James Baldwin …” The man who’d written the quote on the window. Sabine would have to look him up.
“The founder, George Whitman, wanted it to be a landing place for bohemians and wanderers,” said Yves.
“He’d led his own wandering life. There’s a story about him being very ill in an isolated part of Mexico and being nursed back to health by a tribe of Mayans.
And then he opened this store and let artists who were mostly penniless sleep in the store.
During the day, those spots were benches where people could read, but at night, they were beds.
George called these artists ‘tumbleweeds.’ In return for this benefit, he asked three things: to read a book a day, help in the shop, and write a one-page autobiography for his archives.
There are thousands of autobiographies, apparently. ”
Sabine imagined sleeping in a bookstore. There would probably be mice. But also, books.
“I’ve been poor many times in my life,” said Yves. “I would have appreciated a kind soul giving me a place to sleep the night.”
She hadn’t known her father had been poor. She’d always had the impression he was one of those people for whom everything worked out, always.
“Does the store owner still take in artists?” asked Sabine.
“No, he died at ninety-eight. But you can feel him here, can’t you?”
She wished Yves had been one of the guests here, so she could have read the autobiography he’d written for himself. She was so curious about him.
At the back of the main floor, a staffer worked at her small desk amidst the crush of customers. Aubin pointed to three old typewriters mounted on a post beside her.
“Can’t you picture those writers using them to type up their masterpieces at night, after the store’s closed, before they go to sleep?” he said. “Maybe you should write one of your tiny books on one, and become a world-famous author.”
“I’m not an author.”
“You make books that get published on the spot, don’t you?”
“No, I doodle on scraps of paper and fold them up to make a pretend book that I recycle later. Big difference.”
But she got goosebumps. No one had ever called her an author before.
They saw a bulletin board covered in dozens of notes about writing or visiting or to the love of their lives, scribbled on scraps of paper or the back of a train ticket or a candy wrapper.
Sabine read one to Aubin: “Yesterday I turned nineteen! Far from home, penniless, pretending to be confident, trying too hard, terrified, free, living the dream, best birthday ever.”
“That’s me,” she said. “I don’t know what I want. I am all these things.”
“Everyone is these things,” said Aubin.
On the underside of the stairs to the second floor were taped a few pieces of ripped, yellowed paper.
One was ten rules for writers from Elmore Leonard (another author she’d have to look up).
It started with “number one: never open a book with weather,” and finished with “number ten: try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” Good advice.
Sabine stepped up the worn red stairs. On its risers were painted-on words:
I wish
I could show you
When you are
Lonely or
In darkness
The astonishing
Light
Of your own
Being
—Hafiz
“Who’s Hafiz?” asked Aubin.
“A Persian Sufi poet,” said Yves.
On the landing, the wall was covered in framed photos of writers: Truman Capote, Simone de Beauvoir, Maya Angelou … Yves pointed to a photo of Leonard Cohen.
“Awesome Canadian like Sabine,” said Aubin.
“Mais oui,” said Yves. “I saw that photo, and I found a book about him here and sat on that bench and read it. There’s a famous line from a song of his about how light gets into all the tiny cracks of life.
Right there, I wrote the outline for a short film, called my friends from film school, and told them that I wanted to shoot that weekend. Which we did.”
“Can I see it?” she asked.
“Sure. It’s amateur and self-important, but it got me into Cannes for the first time. Thank you, Leonard.”
Yves wandered off.
The next room had a piano, chairs, and another place to read or sleep. Sabine found Aubin a book on music production and pushed him into a comfy chair.
“There. Read and feel some hope,” she said, plunking herself onto a bench, pulling a piece of paper from her notebook, and tearing it in strips, which she folded into a chapbook.
“Making me a book?”
“I don’t know who it’s for.”
“What’s it about?”
“Don’t know that either. That’s what I like. You make a book, and then the idea falls into your brain, and off you go. If you hate it, you throw it out. Super low pressure. Stop talking to me or the idea won’t come.”
Sabine looked around. Photos of writers and artists, yellowed sheet music on the old piano, overflowing bookshelves.
Books piled on the floor of uneven, worn pentagonal orange tiles.
A pentagon was a five-sided polygon. Pentagons, Sabine remembered from math class, were everywhere, in a cross-section of okra (a terrible vegetable with worthy geometry), the part of an apple that held its seeds, a morning glory, a starfish.
On her book’s cover, she drew the tile pattern, then opened it and wrote:
A five-sided message not in a bottle but a bookstore
Away from home, away from people I call home,
adulting, broke, disguised, putting on a smiling face,
trying to blend in, trying hard, excited, enthusiastic,
scared, lonely, free, dreaming.
What is there to discover in France?
Maison Perdue, Sabine, Marlow, Aubin, Yves
Five sides of my pentagonal life.
She caught Aubin watching her. “What?”
“I’m thinking how beautiful you are,” he said. It made her blush.
“Ready?” It was Yves.
“You didn’t show us the cool thing,” she said, following him downstairs, Aubin behind her. So Yves took them to the TV and Film section and showed them a glossy big book called The Art of No-Budget Filmmaking. He was on the cover.
“If you’d told me in film school I’d be on the cover of a book about filmmaking,” he said, “I would not have believed you. Never give up on your dreams. Clichéd perhaps, but still.”
“You assume we know what our dreams are,” she said.
“If you don’t have one now, remember, there’s a crack in everything—that is how your light will get in. Lunch?”
Aubin put down his book. Sabine picked it up again and bought it for him. The bookseller at the front desk stamped it with “Kilometer Zero, Paris.” On impulse, she held out her palm, and he smiled and stamped her skin, too.
“How long do we have?” asked Yves, heading out to the street.
“We’re taking the six PM train back,” said Aubin.
“Then we’d better get going,” said Yves.
Sabine eyed the still-wet, delicious souvenir on her skin, suddenly realizing it was incriminating evidence she’d have to scrub off before they got home that evening.
Luc took Marlow in his little, rusty Renault back to Vittel.
They passed the five-star spa and drove beyond it, leaving the tourist area and turning into an unmarked, weedy gravel lot where they parked the car by three or four others.
He got out, tossed her a bathing suit and started stripping down. Right there. In front of everyone.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Getting changed. You should do the same.”
“Whose bathing suit is this?”
“An old girlfriend’s. I am sure it will fit. And if it doesn’t, no one here cares.”
Everyone cares how a bathing suit fits, thought Marlow.
“Come on,” said Luc. “Unless you are afraid people will see. If you are, stand behind the car door. Here’s the thing. Everyone looks the same under clothing.”
“Not true.”
He turned to give her privacy. She checked to see if anyone was looking. They weren’t. So she hid behind the car door, squirming out of her clothing and into the suit.
He pulled two old towels from the back of the car—towels he no doubt kept in there for just this kind of impromptu dip. If that wasn’t a quality-of-life indicator, she didn’t know what was.
They kept their shoes on and followed others in suits and bathrobes along a well-worn path, down steps carved out of hardened mud, through a gate to a clearing around pools of thermal water made in the soft rock at the foot of a hill and waterfall.
The area teemed with locals: old, young, fat, thin—ordinary people doing something restful.
Towels and clothing were dumped along the shoreline.
Some people chatted in their swimsuits. Others changed in plain sight, their rear ends and naughty bits hanging out for all to see. Luc was right—no one cared.
Some pools were big enough for two people, some for ten.
Salamanders lay on the sunny rock faces, scrambling away when disturbed into patches of tall, woody grasses growing from the crevices.
Luc showed her the way to climb up closer to the water cascading’s source, rock to rock, without slipping.
They settled into a small, shallow pool all their own.
“This place is amazing,” she said.
“Yes. It is as it has always been, here to enjoy and not be sanitized in a spa or poured over you by an attendant who whispers about restorative powers. It is not owned by anyone.”
She floated, thinking about Maison Perdue, how far it had come, and how much of it was due to him. “Thank you for your work on the house. But we’re over two weeks in, and you still haven’t told me how much you’re charging.”
“We will see.”
“We will see? That’s a recipe for disaster. Like, poverty and ruin disaster. I’m already poor, but the ruin I can’t afford.”
“I am not doing anything else at the moment, and I am enjoying myself, even though you are terribly difficult,” said Luc, touching his floating toes to hers in the water.
“I’m not difficult, you are. I could ask anyone, and they’d agree.”
“Who? Lali and Fedir love me. So does Yakiv. Even Babka, chien terrible. And Madame Belleville—I unplugged her toilet last week—she loves me, too. Sends me food like she’s my own grandmother. Has she even smiled at you?”
She flicked water at him. “Not yet.”
“See? It is you who are difficult, and I am the golden boy of Mirabelle. End of story.”
“I’m going to get her to smile at me before the end of the summer.”
“I dare you.” Then he added, “I am not going to overcharge with this work. Trust me.”
The warm water and feeling of well-being swirled around them. “I recorded something on Instagram this morning, so I held up my end of the deal. Now you have to show me a painting.”
“Once I see the movie. Not a moment before.”
“It’s not a movie. And like I said. So difficult.”
He smiled and closed his eyes. She took in his lean, tanned body as he lay there, in the moment, no worries in the world.
Was this what Sabine was talking about—having a situationship?
No. You had to be two consenting adults, agree you were attracted enough to one another to enjoy each other’s time, in bed, no further commitment.
She and Luc were flirting. She was also flirting with Guillaume—in fact, they’d already gotten to kissing.
But with neither man did she have confirmation of status. So she was nowhere on both counts.
Marlow let that thought trickle down the rocks and closed her eyes, too. Floating there, adrift for a moment, she wondered if she truly had to make a decision.