His Midnight Mezzanine ©

Although he had the habit of refreshing his throat more often than seemed necessary and it was not uncommon that he slurped his soup or cleared his nose at the dinner table, Mr. Casaubon was hardly an unpleasant man. He was easy enough to be friendly with and the lively conversation he offered over copious bottles of wine with his meals more than made up for his occasional unpolished behaviors. He was clean, well dressed, and literate in nearly all things well written.

His tweed jackets with their leather elbow patches, leather patches that were sewn on long before he swore off eating and wearing animals, smelled of dignity and rich pipe tobacco. His breath caught thick within his throat when he smoked. His wine and books came from old stock. His books were shelved on the wall of a well lit mezzanine that circled his coffee colored library. Books filled the walled shelves above and below the mezzanine. They were piled onto end tables, discarded beside reading chairs and stacked onto antique rugs from locations long forgotten.

He was reminded that his edification felt less than perfect when, in the evenings after intimate dinner parties, repairing to his library left him feeling, without justification, under-educated. Nonetheless, before retiring to bed, he spent his evenings in the library where he read with writers long deceased.

“And then the young lady asked whether I had written for any other magazines.” Mr. Fitzgerald continued.
“Oh yes, I assured her, I’ve had stories and plays in Smart Set. – Would you believe the young lady actually shuddered before I could continue and asked, ‘The Smart Set, how could you?’”
Here Scott continued mockingly, in a young woman’s voice.
”’Why, they publish stuff about girls in blue bathtubs, and silly things like that.’ – I then had the magnificent joy of telling her she was referring to my play Porcelain and Pink, which appeared there several months ago.”

Mr. Casaubon chuckled with delight and rose to offer his friend another drink.
Mr. Fitzgerald was already standing, his back was turned, not deliberately, to Ernest and Eliot who were sitting across the library privately pontificating Paris.

“There is never an ending to Paris,” Ernest was telling Eliot, “and the memory of each person who has lived in it differs from that of any other.”

“Yes,” replied Eliot, “and we always return to it no matter how it changes us or how we change it. Paris is always worth it, and you receive from it equally whatever you take to it.”

“Ah, but that is the way Paris is when you are very poor and very happy.” Offered Ernest, “Besides, if you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, because Paris is a moveable feast.”

“A skoal then, to a moveable feast!” Said Eliot as he raised his glass to his friend Ernest.

“Let us go there, you and I,
while the evening is spread out against the sky,
we shall not ask, ‘Where is it?’
But let us go and make our visit.”

“And shall the best of your writing last as long as there is literature.” Answered Ernest as their glasses clinked.

It was nightly that in this way dialogue and theater continued in Casaubon’s thoughts.

The clink from the coin woke Casaubon and stole him from his visitors. The coin clinked, then rattled to rest inside the solid tin cup that rested on the sidewalk. Casaubon emptied the coin into his palm, gathered his belongings from the church doorway and carried himself onward through certain half deserted streets.