Ghost Writers is a fragment by Jack Rusher, published here Saturday, July 17, 2004. It is part of Stories.
An old acquaintance re-discovered.
When I met Rob, around two years ago, he was in the middle of an eight week sojourn in the back of a famous Parisian bookshop that serves as a sort of haven for young artists: a free cot in exchange for an hour a day of work, either stocking books or minding the till, and some proof of productivity, for which reading a book each day was sufficient substitute.
Henry Miller, who called the place “a wonderland of books,” had slept on the same cots. In a previous incarnation the store served as Hemingway’s lending library and bankrolled the first edition of Joyce’s Ulysses. George, the proprietor, had then already owned the store for more than fifty years. He called it his Rag-and-Bone Shop of the Heart, after a poem by Yeats, and he painted the wall with his motto, “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.” It is a magical place held together by George’s stubbornness and whatever favor chance gifts it.
Rob was an American writer who had published a number of short stories in fairly well-known literary magazines, then moved into the shop while working on his first novel. He was keen and, from what I understood, talented. There was in him, as in all the residents, a sense of promise, of future potential.
I lived less than a kilometer from the shop and made frequent visits, especially for the Sunday afternoon tea salon on the third floor — formerly a habitual activity of William S. Burroughs and other Beats. Misfits of all description would arrive over the course of two hours, converse in a melange of European languages, eat tiny cakes, and wander home to whatever life each of them had made in the City of Lights. I saw Rob there every Sunday, and we occasionally went to the same parties and musical events, especially if they were cheap or free.
After I moved away from Paris I wondered about the fate of my friends at the shop, Rob included, but I failed to keep in contact with them and my curiosity diminished as they faded from memory.
A few weeks ago, while in Paris on holiday, I made a visit to give my regards to George and pick up a few books for the road. The cast of characters had, as expected, changed completely. The wise-cracking Irish playwright had been replaced by a wise-cracking Irish novelist, the dark haired girl from New York studying to become a public health worker in Africa was superceded by a light haired California girl of the same disposition, and so on.
While standing in queue for the till, weighing the choice between a novella by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a set of autobiographical notes by Italo Calvino, or a copy of Milan Kundera’s Book of Laughter and Forgetting, I spotted a familiar face in the inverse queue, the one set aside for the sale of used books. Rob had shaved his beard, purchased a pair of Joycean spectacles and donned a kind of abbreviated Homberg, but it was unquestionably him.
“Rob?”
“Oh, hey.” His expression was the same one he would have had if we had seen each other the day before, his laconic features showing no evidence of surprise as we shook hands.
“Selling some books?”
“Yeah, a bit of this and that,” and, continuing in a conspiratorially lowered voice, "these days I buy at Gilbert Jeune and sell here, it’s the best way to stretch the euro.”
“Where are you living now?”
“I am back in Paris full time. I have a little apartment.”
Rob’s otherwise pearly American smile showed the gap of a missing canine around which a creeping black decay threatened the fugitive tooth’s neighbors.
“How goes the writing?”
“I am not, really — you know, living is hard enough… I do have some work as a DJ though. What about you?”
“I am living in New York and doing some DJing as well. It’s the catch-all, isn’t it? In every generation there’s a pseudo-profession for those who’re trying to do something else.”
“Yeah, in fifty years the critics will write dissertations about the prevalence of DJs and club culture in early twenty-first century novels.”
“I am sure you’re right.”
He pulled his shoulders up to a cartoonish height, tipped his head to one side, held out his hands with the palms up, and said, “C’est ça.”
“Ouais, c’est ça.”
We nodded to each other in rueful agreement.
A few awkward moments passed in silence until Rob said, “Well, I need to get going.”
“Me too. Good luck with everything.”
“Yeah, likewise.”
We continued to stand there, looking at each other, having already exchanged our goodbyes, but unable to walk away. I felt a pang of something, not regret or nostalgia exactly, but something like both of them mixed with a kind of kinship. He was a mirror in which I saw another version of myself, an unflattering portrait from which I could not avert my eyes. I wanted to say something more, to invite him to lunch, to help him in some way, but there was nothing I could do. I suspected my motives, that by helping my Doppelganger I hoped to help myself, and I started to wonder how far was the fall from my own tenuous existence to one in which trimming a few cents off the value of a used book would be an important part of my survival.
We finally broke eye contact and Rob walked off into a mild spring drizzle. I bought all three books and went for my first drink of the day.