Chasing Sylvia Beach (23 page)

LILY PASSED A sleepless night on the thin cot in the back of the shop. Moonlight shining through the courtyard windows played on her bed. She couldn’t avoid the light or her tortured thoughts about Paul. She felt terrible to have hurt him, leaving him with the impression that she cared naught for what had grown between them. Her sleep came fitfully, marked by dreams of Paul, and oddly, Daniel. In all of them Lily felt an uncomfortable urgency, leaving her unable to communicate clearly. Metro stations, airports, and giant spaces that looked like airplane hangars dominated her dreams and she awoke just before dawn, exhausted.

The dreadful feeling got worse the longer she lay there, so Lily rose and washed at the small basin. The smell of her blouse repelled her; she was loathe to put it back on, but she couldn’t wear the nightdress Sylvia had thoughtfully loaned her. Shrugging on her jacket, she wondered what she would wear to the reception with Heinrich. Surely her skirt and jacket wouldn’t do, and her dress, while nice, certainly wasn’t a fancy dress. She doubted Sylvia would have an evening gown to loan her, too. Brushing her hair into a semblance of neatness, she flashed on Heinrich’s friend’s angry face. Why did she bother him so much? What had she gotten herself involved in?

She slipped out of the shop and waved at Lucky, who had fallen asleep in the shop window, displacing a stack of books. Lily followed her nose to a boulangerie at the corner, where she bought a
pain au chocolate
. She devoured it on the sidewalk, then ducked into the Café Danton for an espresso. Huddling over her notebook, fueled by the bitter coffee, she scribbled her thoughts, desperate to evacuate her guilt about her lies to Paul onto the page. Finally, she wound down, and after wandering the neighborhood, she returned to the shop, feeling only slightly better about it all. She wouldn’t bother Sylvia with any of this; the bookseller had enough to worry about without dealing with a lovelorn assistant.

Sylvia was hunched at her desk when Lily came in. She raised her head from a stack of papers, her eyes droopy, with dark circles underneath them.

“Are you okay, Sylvia?”

“It’s nothing,” Sylvia said, attempting to put some order to the stack of papers she’d just been lying on.

“Come on, I can tell you’re not well. You look terrible. Is it your migraines?”

Sylvia sighed. “Okay! I see I can’t hide anything from you, Detective Lily. It is another migraine. But I can cope. I must deal with this now.” She waved the papers in the air.

“But . . .” Lily pressed.

“I’m fine, Lily. Get to work now, please.”

In the far corner of the bookstore, Lily tidied a stack of books on a table, occasionally sneaking glances at Sylvia, who sat at her desk, clearly struggling against her headache. When Lily came to the desk for another task, Sylvia, one hand on her temple, raised her head and smiled wanly.

“You’re already done? Good!”

“Sylvia, your eyes are bloodshot and I can tell you’re trying to stay upright. I can’t stand to see you like this. Please take a rest. I insist.”

Teddy lifted his head and stared at Lily as if surprised by her raised voice. Sylvia looked at her a moment, then sighed.

“You’re right, nurse. I’m will rest for few minutes,” she said, standing. Teddy followed, creaking up from his spot on the rug.

“Don’t worry. I’ll watch the shop. Take your time.”

“I hope so, Lily. You are my assistant, aren’t you?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Good! Don’t forget. You have some books to prepare for shipping.”

Lily watched Sylvia shuffle toward the back room and disappear behind the curtain with Teddy behind her. The stairs creaked as Sylvia climbed to her apartment above.

At the shipping desk, a couple of books waited to be packed up. Lily set about making mailing labels. More people wrote and asked for books than came into the shop. She couldn’t stop thinking about Paul, and Heinrich as well. In Denver, she hadn’t been this attractive to men. Here, they seemed to relish her outspoken nature. At home, speaking up was normal and maybe not such a winning trait. Daniel came to mind. She imagined telling him all about this. Would he believe her? Would anyone?

Lily finished with the books and went back to Sylvia’s desk. The stack of typed papers sat in disorder where Sylvia had left it. Lily had asked Sylvia once if she wanted to write, and Sylvia had scoffed. A couple of publishers were after her, she said, to write her memoirs, but she wasn’t much of a writer.

“What about those poems and essays you translated?” Lily had asked.

“Translating isn’t writing. I’m not crafting the words, only copying them into English. Or French, for that matter.”

Lily commiserated. She couldn’t imagine having the facility in two languages to leap from one to the other, carrying another writer’s meaning. Sylvia shrugged it off. “It brings in money, so I do it. Which I doubt the memoir would.”

Lily had read Sylvia’s memoir, a book called
Shakespeare and Company
. Based on that, it was true that Sylvia was not a great writer. She recounted anecdotes of people she knew but didn’t succeed in making them full stories. Lily suspected the publisher was interested because of Sylvia’s celebrity acquaintances and because Sylvia was at the center of them all. Perhaps the publisher shared Lily’s suspicion that behind every bookseller or person in the book industry was a closeted writer. She had to admit that was the case for herself, but not for Sylvia.

“I bet you could write great stories. Think of all the people you know, all of the great stories you have to tell.”

“I’m more interested in reading great stories than in writing them. But I’m thinking about it. Maybe some literary criticism. If I ever get a break from the shop, I’d do it.”

You’ll get a break soon enough,
Lily wanted to say.
Just hang in there a couple more years
. The mess of papers Lily held now appeared to be a promotional piece for the bookstore, pages filled with typed single-spaced lines that were heavily inked. Entire paragraphs were blackened out, as though the writer was at war with the content. Lily couldn’t resist digging in. She shuffled through, reading quickly. Sylvia, if she was the author of the mess, was trying to write a piece called “The Successful Bookshop: A Manual of Practical Information.” Lily immediately saw the problem, besides the fact that Sylvia’s bookstore could not be called financially successful. The brochure was dry and stuffy, the ideas formulaic. There were so many misspelled words that Lily wondered if Sylvia was trying to be clever or just didn’t know how to spell. She recalled a conversation she overheard when Sylvia had been on the phone with one of her friends, and it was like she was speaking a language other than French, but not quite English. Sylvia thrived on wordplay, but misspellings? Lily shook her head and pulled out her notebook. Picking up where Sylvia’s best sentence left off, she started writing, drawing on the copywriting she’d done at the bookstore in Denver.

The afternoon’s slow crawl sped up. A few customers wandered in and browsed. No one bought anything, but Lily checked out a few books for them from the library. In the meantime she continued to work on the brochure, crossing out entire paragraphs, scribbling new text.

When the grandfather clock struck five o’clock, Sylvia hadn’t returned to the shop, so Lily decided to take a risk and type up her version of the brochure. She rolled the typewriter stand into the shop from the back room. Positioning it near Sylvia’s desk, she admired the typewriter. Small, black, with the gold letters M.A.P. surrounded by gold embellishment at the top. The ribbons were exposed, the top part black, the bottom red. Her fingers caressed the white keys and she began typing her version of the brochure. The keys’ metallic feel, and the way they resisted her fingers, was so different than the modern clacking of a plastic keyboard. She hadn’t used a typewriter since she was a girl.

One evening, when Lily was twelve years old, she was in her room reading when her mother called her downstairs.

“Lily, we have something for you.”

Lily had a whole list of summer reading and was then in the middle of
Jane Eyre
. She stretched and rolled over on the bed, noticing that the white eyelet coverlet had left tiny round circles imprinted on her thighs.

“What!” Her parents didn’t give gifts unless it was her birthday or Christmas, and it wasn’t time to go school supply shopping yet.

“Get down here!” She heard her mother and father laughing. She marked her place in the book with her tasseled Yosemite bookmark and slid off the bed. She dawdled down the steps.

In the kitchen, her parents stood at the table. They were drinking—her mother a glass of white wine and her father a gin and tonic. That explained the laughing. They huddled close together, hiding something on the table behind them.

“We’ve noticed you’ve been reading a lot this summer,” her father started. “And we had an idea.” He looked at Lily’s mother, still clad in her grubby gardening smock. Smears of grass marked her knees. She smiled at Lily. It had been a long time since Lily saw her parents united like this on something.

“And—”

“And we took it as a sign of something budding in you.”

“Mom! I’m not a plant! Come on!”

“Oh, Sedum,” her mother crooned.

“Please don’t start with that nickname again. I’m going back upstairs where civilization exists.” Lily turned toward the stairs, but halfheartedly.

“Don’t get hung up on words,” her father said.

“Dad! Words are everything.”

“That’s why we got you this.”

They parted, and on the pine kitchen table sat a baby blue typewriter. Lily stared at it. She couldn’t believe it. Her parents had actually noticed she wanted to write. How did they know she preferred a vintage typewriter to a new computer? She ran her fingers over the plastic shell, looking for a way to open it. Her father showed her two white buttons on the front of the lid. She pressed them and the lid came up with a clucking sound. She pulled it off and set it aside. The typewriter was adorable, with white keys that bounced back when she hit them. The smooth platen was unmarked by letters.

A stack of paper sat next to the typewriter. She picked up a piece and rolled it in. She let her fingers dance over the keys, not worrying that the letters didn’t form words. Her father coaxed her to type “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog” to make sure none of the letters stuck. Lily couldn’t believe it. Now she could type her papers for school. Now she could write down all those ideas for stories she had. It would be different than in her diary, which was too small and had narrow lines. Now what she wrote would be real, one step closer to a story. She clacked away on the keys while her parents smiled.

“Thank you! How did you know?”

“Oh, I saw the signs,” her father said. “All those books you cart up to your room. Now take this upstairs and have fun with it.”

Lily replaced the lid and, hugging the typewriter to her chest, made her way back upstairs. It wasn’t too heavy, and when she got to her room she noticed that it had a white handle. She could carry it outside and to other rooms in the house if she wanted. She pushed aside a stack of books on her desk and squared the typewriter in the middle. She took the lid off and propped it against the side of the desk. Rolling a fresh piece of paper in, she took her seat. She sat for several minutes with her fingers poised over the keys, trying to remember one of her ideas for a story. The only thing that came to mind was the story she was reading. What was happening with Rochester? She couldn’t stop reading now. She could write later. She flopped back down on the bed and picked up her book.

That summer Lily read the Brontë sisters, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and all of Edgar Allan Poe. The typewriter got a few runs but mostly sat covered, mocking her notion that she could be a writer. When school started, Lily used it for writing papers. Her teachers were impressed that her homework was so neat, but still, she wished she were writing stories. In language arts class she wrote a story that Miss Haring gave her an A for, but she felt it was just luck. Every time she tried to write, she didn’t know what to do. Her ideas started out great, but after a few pages they fizzled out. By the end of the school year she had given up the idea of being a writer and stored the typewriter in the closet.

Now, clacking away at Sylvia’s typewriter, Lily’s thoughts circled around Heinrich. She had to leave aside all the compliments he’d given her and focus on one thing: getting the book. He said he’d send an invitation to her, and now, each time someone passed the shop, she felt a twinge of anticipation. She paused in her typing. Maybe he was interested in her merely as a way to get closer to Sylvia. Despite her matronly ways, Sylvia could be an object of Nazi surveillance. She was the center of a group of international intellectuals. Her shop was, or had been, highly trafficked. A perfect place for dropping off information. A perfect place for sending information, with books, perhaps, in packages. A perfect center for the Résistance. Perhaps Sylvia had been part of the underground movement against the Nazis. Lily hadn’t read anything about that in Sylvia’s papers, but that’s not the kind of thing you publicize. If she stayed, Lily would find out. Perhaps Lily would become part of the Résistance as well. And Paul, too. They’d be a heroic couple in the fight for France. They’d deliver secret messages at night by bicycle. She could help Sylvia convert the storage room upstairs to hide members of the Résistance or British pilots shot down in combat.