GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (12 page)

For sex, then, the suspended Five are
self-sufficient, in theory. They’re young, normally equipped for
junction and in perpetual contact. That offers six possibilities of
conventional heterosexual duo combinations. But Helen shows no
interest of that sort in any of the men. Pious dread keeps the most
obvious couple, Louis and Margaret, from coupling. Alone in his
bed, Max possesses Margaret savagely in a variety of postures but
he stammers when he tries to talk to her. Seymour too lusts for
Maggie, even in her breast-bound Margaret disguise, and he isn’t
shy. But she’s retreated into sexless mysticism and hardly knows he
exists when he’s not reciting menus.

Anyhow, even Maggie is a little off-putting,
if you remember (and it’s hard not to) in what decrepit and then
unimaginable state she’d once been before transfer here. As for
Helen, Seymour tries once, much later, but it doesn’t work. Anyhow,
she’s not really his type, he reflects following the failure.

All in all, then, sex is on a par with the
food and the sanitary and entertainment facilities here.

In short, the Five have been resurrected to
a pale imitation of life. It’s maybe a little better than their
recent void but not much. Real life is outside. But will they ever
be transferred there?

Chapter 11

Relationships

So there they are, three men and two women
of different backgrounds, periods, life-styles, political leanings,
religious or irreligious inclinations and diversely strung nerves,
crammed together in a few square yards for how long God alone
knows, and even that’s not sure. They’re forced to tolerate one
another, no choice in the matter. And resist temptation. Margaret
and Louis do their best.

Margaret constantly feels the burning focus
of God’s eye on her. She struggles against carnal burning. She has
made a holy vow of chastity to Him and knows that the slightest
trespass in act or thought on her part can result in instant exit.
Already by a second inexplicable miracle God had spared her despite
her scandalous behavior with the blond blue-eyed beautiful naked
muscular vigorous, incredibly vigorous, man called Louis Forster,
stop thinking of it, stop thinking of him.

Margaret had never confessed in her sinful
first existence. She longs to do it now. But spiritual comfort is
on a par with physical comfort here. No religious services are held
in the Prefecture. No sacramentally empowered ear can relieve her
of the burden of her sins. She turns to Helen for next-best
psychological relief. She doesn’t even get that. Helen prudishly
interrupts the tearful account of her earliest major offence (at
the age of fourteen with a friendly vigorous plumber) even though
her roommate does go on rocking her consolingly in her arms.

Margaret knows her flesh is inflammable and
that the sight of it inflames. So she hides it. She gets rid of her
incendiary knit dress. She extemporizes underclothes out of strips
of a drab French flag, once gay tricolor, salvaged from one of the
corridor storerooms. She converts her bed sheet into a poncho-like
floor-sweeping garment: a hole for her head and two holes for her
arms. She conceals her cascade of hair, no longer fiery but still
sexually potent, in a dust-rag bandana.

Eventually, Margaret abandons the ghost
outfit when she’s docked five (5) points for willful deterioration
of state property. If they’d suspected to what intimate use she’d
put their national banner she’d probably have been exited on the
spot. The Administration issues her a decent gray garment like the
female functionaries wear.

In the meantime, clad in that sheet, she
looks spooky. Sudden encounters with her in the corridors are
unsettling, for her even more than for the other party. At the
beginning, before she’s scared away by her encounters with the
Prefect there (dreamed or possibly not dreamed), she spends much of
her time wandering about in the corridors, trying to put distance
between herself and the men. She doesn’t always succeed.

Once, turning a corridor corner, Seymour
bumps into soft whiteness. They both go down flat on their backs,
which gives him a good view of her breathtaking bared legs, nothing
ectoplasmic about those legs. But her spread thighs converge on
absurd anticlimax: what looks like a scrap of the flag of
France.

Wide-eyed with fear, she scrambles to her
feet and adjusts her sheet. Before she can run away, he says: “Hey
Maggie, I just remembered an old Christmas dinner: roast goose with
chestnut and raisin and oyster stuffing and mashed potatoes and
gravy, let me tell you about that gravy…” He goes on with it. Her
breathing quickens. Her moist lips part.

“Maggie,” he says and reaches out.

She backs away, mumbling: “I’m not Maggie,
I’m Margaret.”

Then she runs away from him, those marvelous
legs, rhythmically outlined under the sheet, that sweet darling
bitable wagging butt of hers. He thinks of it intensely for a few
miles of corridors and then returns to the old Christmas dinner,
salivating with desire at the memory of the chestnut and raisin and
oyster stuffing and, Jesus, that gravy.

Another time, turning a corner, Max comes
upon Margaret face to face. He shouts “whaaa!” at the spectral
sight and nearly runs the other way. She does run the other way in
panic, not taking Max for a ghost but for worse: another
flesh-and-blood man here in this solitary place. She desperately
wants to avoid the temptation of flesh-and-blood men in solitary
places, above all Louis. Would she have run away like that if she’d
encountered Louis instead of Seymour and Max?

Temptations assailed even saints, she knows.
She recalls a painting in the Louvre where Jean had taken her long
ago: Saint Somebody in the desert with his eyes rolled up white
toward the heavens, refusing the corrupting sight of a
devil-dispatched lascivious woman. “Me with you,” Jean had
commented, as a joke, maybe. She’d never been sure when he joked
and when he didn’t.

That’s what she should do in the presence of
Louis, look away, like Saint Somebody. But she’s no saint. Whenever
Louis catches her gaze on him he blushes grayly and looks away
himself. She knows he’s made the connection between her and Maggie
kneeling before him in no prayful way. Mortified, she rectifies her
gaze. She tries to concentrate on spiritual things. Sometimes her
eyes brim over. After a while, out of the corner of a wet eye, she
catches him gazing at her with an expression of spiritual love for
the Margaret she is now.

But when he perceives her furtive
backsliding peek at him, she’s back to Maggie for him, that mouth,
that bosom of hers, and he turns his back on her.

For Louis too feels the burning Eye of God
upon him and struggles against carnal burning. He too knows that
the price of transgression in deed or thought can be instant exit.
So he commands himself to stop thinking of that mouth that bosom
that mouth that bosom of hers, stop thinking of it, stop thinking
of her.

Louis and Margaret avoid each other as best
they can. For a long time they don’t exchange a single word.
Margaret tries to keep her thoughts on Jean Hussier but he’s
theoretical, on the other side of time and fracture-proof glass.
Louis Forster is real and close. Louis and Seymour too try to keep
their thoughts on their long-ago theoretical sweethearts but
Margaret is real and close. The pattern of faithlessness has
resurrected too.

Finally Margaret and Louis manage to
establish a relationship. It’s a safely pious one. Margaret wants
to atone and pray for forgiveness but she’s forgotten the wording
of her childhood prayers. Knowing the right formula is a necessary,
if insufficient, condition for salvation, she thinks.

She turns to the others for assistance.
She’s shocked to learn that Helen doesn’t pray. Max either. All
Seymour Stein knows is the opening words of Kaddish, the mourner’s
prayer he’d had to learn by heart at ten for his mother. He refuses
to recite it to her. He doesn’t want to be his own mourner. The
only one of the Five who has prayers at tongue-tip is Louis.

She learns that at dinner time shortly after
materialization. Louis stares down at the hash and mumbles and
mumbles. At first Margaret thinks he’s cursing the poor quality of
the fare, then realizes he’s expressing thankfulness for it. Shyly,
not looking at him, Margaret asks him to teach her the words of
Grace. Shyly, not looking at her, he does.

From then on, Margaret joins in whenever the
Five eat together. It’s a kind of spiritual union with Louis. And
with God too, of course.

Margaret pumps Louis dry of prayers and
still isn’t satisfied. She determines to explore all of the
thousands (maybe millions) of storerooms in quest of a Bible. All
of those prayers and supplications would be precious ammunition in
the campaign for salvation and transfer.
She doesn’t know that the Law of December 9, 1905,
separating Church and State in France, strictly forbids religious
literature in government buildings.

At night Margaret and Louis lie side by side
in their exactly aligned beds (almost a double bed), separated only
by the thin partition. Whenever one hears the other praying inches
away he/she joins in. They do it softly but still it disturbs the
others.

One night, Margaret starts reciting the
Lord’s Prayer. She gets as far as
And forgive us our trespasses, As we
forgive those who trespass against us
, but can’t remember the rest.

“Louis,” she
whispers to the partition. “Are you awake?”

He’s awake,
trying not to think of her. He recites the rest of the Lord’s
Prayer to the partition.

And lead us not into
temptation, But deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom, and
the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen
.

They recite the Lord’s
Prayer together, waking Seymour again.

He can’t take
it any more. He gets up and gropes his way to the Common Room. He
sinks into an armchair in front of the dark window. Forgetting
where he is and by what miraculous means he got there, he groans:
“Jesus, Jesus, I’m so goddam sick of religion.”

“What did you say?” comes a voice in the
darkness.

Badly frightened, Seymour replies
automatically: “Praise the Lord.”

“Oh God,” says Helen from a neighboring
armchair, “Not you too, Seymour. I came here to try to get away
from it a little.”

Religion isn’t Seymour Stein’s only
problem. Relationships are tense in the men’s room. Seymour suffers
greatly from the rooming arrangements. How can a late New York
intellectual comfortably room with a Marine and a truck driver?
They have different
Weltanschauungen
as Seymour once points out to Max. But Louis, not Max, is
the real problem.

Louis treats the two of them like Marine
recruits. He bans emotional as well as physical laxness. When they
weep he commands them to stop and they have to sneak to a distant
corridor to grieve in peace. Mental health goes along with physical
health, he says. Stay a minute too long in bed, then it’d be an
hour, then the whole blamed day and you’d end up with the wrong
outlook on things. It starts with little things and ends with big
things, he says.

So there are long sessions of push-ups
(“Keep that back straight, Stein!”), toe-touching (“Don’t bend them
knees, Pilsudski!”), deep knee bends (“Squat all the way down, both
of you!”). The worst is the forced jogging in the corridors. Louis’
sharp voice sounds reveille and rouses them out of bed. He imposes
miles of corridor jogging on them, hun-two-hun-two, wake up, Stein!
Quit draggin’ your feet, Pilsudski!

When they totter back to the room, streaming
with sweat, all three of them collapse on their beds, exhausted.
Exhaustion is the secret reason for the exercises. Louis hopes
that, exhausted, he’ll stop thinking of Margaret’s mouth and bosom,
her mouth and bosom. It does help a little. Cold showers would have
been better but there are no showers here.

Finally Seymour revolts. “This isn’t
boot-camp. I used to have crazy ideas but enlisting in the Marines
wasn’t one of them for chrissakes.”

“Don’t take the name of Our Lord in vain,
Stein!” Louis snaps, his gray, once blond, moustache bristling. He
adds that if Seymour had enlisted in the Marines he wouldn’t be in
the mental and physical shape he is. But they’d never have taken
him. “Anyhow, never seen one of your kind in the Marines.”

Seymour broods over that last crack. Just
his luck to be rooming with two anti-Semites. Back then, Seymour
Stein had been paranoid on that subject. The trait has carried over
in resurrection.

Louis disciplines them even at night. He
can’t see them but he has a sharp ear and nose. The corridor toilet
is a long way off. It’s unhygienic maybe but human to urinate in
the nearby washbasin. (At least Seymour runs the water into the
bowl after. He isn’t sure Max does.) But finally Louis hears Max
relieving himself that handy way. He leaps out of bed, snaps the
light on and barks inches from Max’s scared face: “If there’s one
thing I can’t stand it’s a man who micterates in a washbasin!”
Louis is six foot three and armored with muscles. Max and Seymour
go the long way after that.

Louis censors what little sex-life they
have. It’s restricted to the eyeballs but is better than nothing,
just about. Max makes the discovery. He starts monopolizing the
washing-area. One morning Seymour surprises him standing with his
face pressed against the sinister face of the grinning clown. At
first Seymour thinks Max is weeping and trying to hide it. Then he
discovers that tiny holes had been bored – maybe decades earlier –
in the clown’s pupils, providing the peeper with a restricted view
of the women’s toilette area.