How on earth could I have let them talk me into it?
The two generals of number 27 Rue Montagnard—Madame Bernard, the owner, and Madame Rosalette, the concierge—had caught Monsieur in a pincer movement between their ground-floor flats.
“That Le P. has treated his wife shamelessly.”
“Scandalously. Like a moth treats a wedding veil.”
“You can hardly blame some people when you look at their wives. Fridges in Chanel. But men? Monsters, all of them.”
“Ladies, I don’t quite know what . . .”
“Not you of course, Monsieur Perdu. You are cashmere compared with the normal yarn from which men are spun.”
“Anyway, we’re getting a new tenant. On the fourth floor. Yours, Monsieur.”
“But Madame has nothing left. Absolutely nothing, only shattered illusions. She needs just about everything.”
“And that’s where you come in, Monsieur. Give whatever you can. All donations welcome.”
“Of course. Maybe a good book . . .”
“Actually, we were thinking of something more practical. A table, perhaps. You know, Madame has—”
“Nothing. I got that.”
The bookseller could not imagine what might be more practical than a book, but he promised to give the new tenant a table. He still had one.
Monsieur Perdu pushed his tie between the top buttons of his white, vigorously ironed shirt and carefully rolled up his sleeves. Inward, one fold at a time, up to the elbow. He stared at the bookcase in the corridor. Behind the shelves lay a room he hadn’t entered for almost twenty-one years.
Twenty-one years and summers and New Year’s mornings.
But in that room was the table.
He exhaled, groped indiscriminately for a book and pulled Orwell’s 1984 out of the bookcase. It didn’t fall apart. Nor did it bite his hand like an affronted cat.
He took out the next novel, then two more. Now he reached into the shelf with both hands, grabbed whole parcels of books out of it and piled them up beside him.
The stacks grew into trees. Towers. Magic mountains. He looked at the last book in his hand. When the Clock Struck Thirteen. A tale of time travel.
If he’d believed in omens, this would have been a sign.
He banged the bottom of the shelves with his fists to loosen them from their fastenings. Then he stepped back.
There. Layer by layer, it appeared. Behind the wall of words. The door to the room where . . .
I could simply buy a table.