Shakespeare & Co.
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by Susanna Solomon
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“No, it’s true, I used to live here,” he said with a grin. “Just upstairs.”
 
“You used to live in a book store?” I asked.
 
“Can you think of better company?”
 
I ran my hands along the spines of the books tucked under a staircase at the back of the Paris’ bookstore, Shakespeare & Company. I was there for a week and it was my second visit.
           
“Name’s Tom,” he said, extending his hand.
 
“They have bedrooms upstairs?” I asked. “An apartment? A studio?”
           
“Of sorts.” Tom laughed. “Sleeps three. Two single beds and a fold-out Murphy. People stay up there for years.”
           
“Windows?” I asked. I don’t like small spaces and was feeling a little too tucked in at the back of the shop under the stairs.
           
“A view of the Seine,” he said. “And Notre Dame.”
           
“Good Lord,” I answered and sat down on a stool.
           
“You have to ask gently, and not be aggressive in any way. It’s like anything – if you make yourself a pest. There’s a fine line. I wanted, I asked, I got in. Took two years.”
           
“And now?” I asked, thinking of the comfort of my hotel room with the ensuite bath.
           
“All you have to do is stack shelves for two hours a day and read a book a week,” Tom answered, making space on a shelf for two paperbacks he held in his left hand. “But there are … stories.”
           
“Ghost stories?” I asked. Sleeping in a bookstore anywhere in the world would be fun. But Paris! “Like Scott Fitzgerald, or James Baldwin, or Hemingway? James Joyce?”
           
“Hardly,” Tom laughed. “A thin ten-year-old in a white nightdress holding a candle.”
           
“You’ve seen her?” asked an American girl to my left. Too many braces, too much hair color, but she certainly had a healthy literary appetite which was good. Her hands were full of books.   
 
“Two years ago. After the shop closed. At midnight. Fernando, the Murphy bed guy, he was out in the Marais, and the other resident,” Tom pronounced the word res-i-dent, “had just moved out. So it was just me. Mostly. I was holding a cup of espresso.”
           
“You drink coffee that late?” I asked, scanning the owner’s picks.
           
“I could drink it twenty-four hours a day. Coffee doesn’t do a thing for me – but doobies do.” He sighed. “But I hadn’t even struck a match when I saw her.”
           
“She was floating by the door?” I asked.
           
“On my bed actually.” He thought a sec. “Not quite under the covers. Standing over it, like apparitions are supposed to do.”
           
“A character from a novel you just read?” I said. “Madame Bovary?”
 
 “When she was twelve, miss?”
           
“Mona.”
           
“Mona. It wasn’t Madame Bovary when she was twelve. No one knows what she looked like then.”
           
“Show me. Show me now,” I asked. “Upstairs. Just up there. Would the owners mind?” I gestured to the front of the store. He towered over me, but still, there were possibilities ….
           
“If you buy at least three books,” Tom answered.
           
“Now?” I asked. I wasn’t really ready to choose a book, much less three. I steered the conversation back. “So, tell me, the ghost – “
           
“The apparition, Cammi? That’s her name, you know.”
           
I nodded, my palms sweaty.
           
“She was crying, sobbing quietly. I asked her why.”
           
“What did she say?” I nudged closer.
           
“’If you’d been stuck in an attic a hundred years, you’d be crying too, buster,’ she said.”
           
“That’s kind of modern language.”
           
“Don’t you think she reads too?” Tom replied.
           
“I wouldn’t know,” I said dryly. “I mean, how can a ghost read a book, much less hold one?”
           
He didn’t take the bait.
 
“She leaned toward me. I was trying to back up to the stairs – those stairs just above my head. Then she stopped, held out her hand, and spoke again. ‘Get me out of here, Tom.’ Hearing her speak my name, I practically fell down the stairs. They’re steeper than you think.”
           
“You’re pulling my leg,” I said.
           
“‘I won’t hurt you,’ Cammi said. She was wearing a bright white bow in her hair, like those photos of those Victorian girls you’ve seen. ‘I couldn’t find a brush,’ she said. ‘Pardon my somewhat disheveled appearance, but there are no beauty supplies here, as you can see.’ She ran her hand through the air and sparks flew out of the ends of her fingers. ‘Only guy stuff,’ she said. ‘No good for me. Don’t you guys ever bathe?’”
           
“How could I tell her?” Tom went on, almost in a trance, ignoring my attempts to participate in the conversation. “There’s a sink downstairs, at the back of the store, and a shower at the Youth Hostel down the street, but … But. She scowled, wagged one finger at me, sending sparks. ‘You’re afraid I’ll be seen, if I go out on the Quai?’ I wasn’t sure what to say, so I sat down on the bed.”
           
“Were you afraid, Tom?”
           
“She sat beside me. About four-ten, her legs stuck out as her feet in her blue shoes were too short to set on the floor.”
           
“Did you try to touch her?” I asked. “Did she feel like fog? Or water? Or maybe jello?”
           
I watched as Tom returned to the present. He seemed surprised that a few more people had arrived and were now leaning in doorways, listening.
           
“You have some kind of wild imagination, Mona,” he said, remembering, apparently, who I was and that he was talking to me. 
           
“And?” I asked.
           
“Mist, yes, that’s right. She felt like mist. Cool. Young. Beautiful.”
           
“And sad,” I added.
“From living a few hundred years too long?” I suggested.
           
“No. From people asking her stupid questions.”
           
Oh, that shut me up fast. Stung, I caught my breath. “You’re the one who started it.”
           
He went back to ignoring me. “We spent some hours together. She told me a little about her home in the ninth arrondissement. The walk she took on her way past St. Sulpice, down the alley, the strong hands that grabbed her. She hadn’t planned on being out after dark, but she’d been playing with Sophie – and had lost track of time.”
           
“One of the Rive Gauche murders,” said one of the onlookers. His face was lined, his body thin and wiry. He put one hand on the banister going upstairs. “I’ll protect her.”
           
“No!” Tom cried, pulling up his long form and pivoting so he was at the stairs, his one hand on the stranger’s arm. “She doesn’t handle visitors well.”
           
Just then an ear-splitting scream came from the front of the store. We all ran. Ten to fifteen of us crowded the front of the shop and pushed our way to the door.
           
“Ca n’est rien. It’s nothing. No one. A pickpocket. He was caught,” a gendarme said. I saw the cop cars, heard the woo-woo of sirens, and thought about the ghost upstairs. She could have used a gendarme that night.
 
While everyone was at the front of the shop, I snuck back to the stairs and started to climb.
           
“Cammi?” I called gently, hoping no one would hear the creak of steps. Two, three, four steps. “Cammi?” I pushed open the door, expecting an apparition, a girl not even half my age, a girl who had never had a chance.
 
 “Can I help you?” answered a voice, a gravelly man’s voice, a man with a fashionable two-day stubble. “Customers aren’t allowed up here, miss.”
           
I blinked my eyes. “Tom…he was telling me about … about …,” I felt so strange, couldn’t get air.
           
“Ah. Oui. Thomas. Again,” the man said. “The ghost.”
           
I nodded. “You seen her?” I asked.
           
“Only through Tom’s eyes,” he said, walking toward me. He was very tall and looked down on my face, then took my hand. “You are not the first, dear…”
           
“I should say not,” I answered.
 
His hand was dry and warm, holding mine.
           
“We are in a shrine, a sanctum, of storytelling, miss. A monument for the greats. A place where dreams are made. Did Tom give you a dream? That you believed?”
           
I turned my face. I couldn’t look at him.
           
“Would you expect anything else at Shakespeare and Company? In Paris?” He grinned. “Can I offer you some Kir Royale? Or, perhaps Absinthe? Come take a look from here. You are not the first and you won’t be the last, but you are the prettiest.”
           
How could I resist? I was in a haunted attic above one of the world’s most famous bookstores, standing by the window, while the sun cast its last rays on the spires of Notre Dame.
 
“I’m Georges,” he said.
 
I was about to tell him my name when his lips closed on mine.

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