GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (16 page)

Unchanged youth.

Only Margaret has doubts about that facing
the mirror. One day she asks Helen to use the emergency phone and
request a jar of cold cream. Helen points out that the phone is for
emergencies.

“
But it
is
an emergency. My skin is getting all dry and ugly.
Look.”

In a second Margaret is out of her pajama
top. She turns slowly, hands clasped behind her neck, her face
tragic.

“See?”

“You look all right to me,” Helen says, understating
her feelings. “I’ll try to find something though.”

She salvages a hunk of rotten banana from
dinner and applies it to Margaret’s back in slow circular
movements.

“That feels so good,” Margaret breathes.
“But I must smell awful.”

Helen takes the remark as permission to
approach her face to Margaret’s satiny skin.

“You smell like a banana plantation in
flower,” she says and goes on breathing in Margaret’s fragrance,
which has nothing to do with bananas.

The slow banana-massage becomes a weekly
rite.

But, with that exception, the others are
convinced that, burned-out bulbs to the contrary, time has halted
for good here. Whatever the season outside – passersby mopping
their brows in glaring near-zenith suns or struggling bundled
against snow gusts – the temperature never varies here. It’s always
as dank as a vault, a perpetual unheated November. The cycle of the
sun out there – dawn, noon, dusk and night – is of no help here.
Their suns here are static light bulbs burning overhead. There’s no
night here. The Five sometimes suffer from insomnia. They explore
the corridors and expect to open doors on deserted offices, the
lights switched off, the typewriters shrouded. But the
functionaries are always there, busily typing and filing and
supervising. Do the functionaries ever sleep?

Another question: do the functionaries ever
age? The functionaries look uncomprehendingly at them when they ask
about the date or the day. Time is a fog for the functionaries,
like what they see out of the window. An inscription dating from a
supposed 1929 abuses Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque. Max exited in
2000. Is it conceivable that d’Aubier de Hautecloque has been
prefect for at least seventy-one years? And if it’s at least the
year 2000 here how can you explain the absence of the office
equipment of even the late twentieth century? Why those cliffs of
archaic filing cabinets? Where are the computers? Why those ancient
Underwood typewriters like baroque altars the female functionaries
endlessly bow to?

The one thing that theoretically structures
time here are the meals. Breakfast has to be early morning, of
course. But in that case, why are the shadows outside so long,
marking an afternoon hour? When lunch is served inside it’s dusk
outside. The Five try to believe the meal is supper but real supper
is served at what must be a wee-hour outside: those dark buildings,
streetlights making spaced pools on empty sidewalks, traffic
reduced to a rare car or carriage. Logically, a few hours after
that supper the Five go to bed although the night sky is
brightening with the promise of sunrise.

They end by refusing to conform to this
crazy violation of normality. They let their food wait and match
mealtimes here with mealtimes out there. They go to bed when the
yellow squares of windows outside go black, announcing collective
bedtime for millions out there. They try to get up when the night
sky starts brightening and they bolt their breakfast then. They
synchronize their nauseating lunch with the delectable lunches the
restaurants serve outside. Of course their postponed meals are
cold. But it’s no sacrifice. Those meals are served cold to begin
with. Seymour has to soothe the dim-witted cleaning-girl. She
thinks it’s somehow her fault if they don’t eat immediately.

So their allegiance is to the normal passage
of time outside even if that passage tortures them.

They have a ritual.

A little bit before dusk outside they switch
the lights off in the Common Room. They’re plunged in gloom but the
light, what little there is of it, comes from outside, stingy but
authentic light. When the darkness is complete inside, they sit
waiting for the windows in the buildings outside to light up
yellow. When that happens they switch the lights in the Common Room
back on.

Synchronized like that with the real people
outside, it’s a kind of communion. It provides them with the
illusion of belonging out there.

They even try to introduce measured time to
their timeless space. Louis explores the rooms and comes up with
scraps of metal and wood and wire and rope which he slaps together
to fashion the primitive great-grandfather of all grandfather
clocks complete with weights and pullies. He synchronizes his
tinkered time to guessed-at time outside. But the clacking of the
mechanism interferes with sleep. To Seymour it sounds like someone
hammering nails in the lid of a coffin.

After a while the clock breaks down, to
everybody’s secret relief. Louis dismantles it. He suspects that,
anyhow, it hadn’t kept very good time.

Seymour often thinks that they’re like
inconsolable exiles, insanely faithful to the ways of their lost
homeland on the other side of the world, clinging to their
ancestral antipodal time-zone, sleeping through the daylight hours
here which are night-hours back there.

Or they’re like British colonial
administrators, stiff and solemn in evening dress in a jungle,
celebrating the Queen’s Birthday, superior to the monkey-shit
raining down on them and the shrieks of copulating natives.

The Five have no Queen but they do have
Christmas to celebrate. It’s an easy day to identify. When they see
kids on brand-new bikes with a little tinsel still in the
wheel-spokes, they guess at December 25.

Each time it comes round Helen says “Merry
Christmas” to everybody, probably not ironically. She’s not a
humorous girl. That greeting is the only gift she has.

New Year too is identifiable.

But at the sight of the tipsy midnight
crowds Helen doesn’t wish anyone “Happy New Year.”

The new years that keep on coming can only
be unhappy for the Five.

Chapter 16

Merry-Go-Round

Time, then, stands still here and grinds on
relentlessly on the other side of the window, they think in
despair, the spiral of seasons like a bit biting into their hearts.
Still, there’s something strange about what’s going on out there.
Or rather about what’s not going on out there.

If so many years have gone past, maybe a
decade or more, why haven’t skirt-lengths and hairstyles changed in
supposedly post-1937 and post-1951 Paris? Where are the new car
models? How come horses continue to monopolize the streets of
supposedly post-1900 Paris? Where are the new motor omnibuses?

Above all, there’s the enigma of what
Margaret continues to see in her terrible decade. Her 1937 is just
two years from war, less than three years from debacle. Why doesn’t
she see German occupation troops? Where are the deformed crosses of
the victors flapping over French public buildings?

The answer to these riddles comes four
burned-out bulbs later.

One rainy day in autumn out there (judging
by the trees) Seymour is sitting by himself before the window
searching for a particular aging face in the crowd. Suddenly he
leaps to his feet, yelling with joy.

Without knocking, he bursts into the women’s
room where Helen is lying on her bed staring up at the ceiling.
He’d done that before. But this time he’s incoherent with joy. She
thinks he’s lost his mind, joy in this spot, and then understands:
he’s seen his Marie-Something, Marie-Claude. For his sake she tries
to share his senseless joy. What use is seeing if there’s no
possibility of being? He practically wrenches her off the bed to
see.

But there’s nothing joyous about what she
sees out of the window. A crowd has gathered about a black
Citroën
Traction
with a
smashed windshield. A smashed woman lies crumpled in front of the
car. Helen looks away from all that blood.

Seymour is joyous at it. He stammers: “It
doesn’t matter for her. She already died. She’ll die again. It’s
all happened before. It’ll all happen again. I saw it all. I’ll see
it all again. It’s the same year, 1951, our year, it goes round and
round. Marie-Claude is there. Your husband – what’s his name again?
– is there too. It must be the same for the others too.”

Sure enough, it’s the same year, going round
and round, not just 1951 but 1900 and 1937 too. That same day,
miraculously (or was it planned that way, they’ll wonder later),
Louis sees the once-witnessed brawl and the bolting white-eyed
horses. Margaret again sees the kissing bickering lovers in the
café and, knowing how it will end, weeps again.

So their lovers are preserved for them in
that unchanging repeated year outside like long-ago dragonflies
perfect in amber.

Max has no cause for celebration. But by a
strange coincidence (or was it planned that way?) that very day,
hours before, he’d discovered four dusty bottles of wine in Room
1452: Pétrus 1922, and Pomerol 1919. Knowledgeable, Seymour
proclaims their excellence. They take Max’s discovery as an
auspicious portent and get drunk. Seymour stands up unsteadily,
toasts the window and extemporizes:

Not a train

No dark funeral express train

But a merry-go-round

Be merry

Be merry

O see how they go round and round

The merry painted wooden horses!

Back then, in another existence, Seymour had
tried his hand at poetry for a year before he gave it up as a bad
job.

It’s the first moment of joy since their
arrival in this place. They drain three of the bottles dry, even
though this prohibited act can cost them they can’t recall how many
precious points. “I don’t drink,” Helen keeps on saying as Seymour
keeps on pouring and she keeps on drinking, desperately.

Later, Helen sees them slumped in their
tattered armchairs, after the cheers and babble and laughter,
staring at the window in a beatific stupor. It’s clear that, in
fantasy, they’re reunited with their lovers. Don’t they realize
(Helen does in spite of all the wine) that basically they’re simply
back to starting point, the desired year of Paris outside, but no
way to reach it? Now asleep, they mumble, mutter, whisper, explain,
defend, justify, their faces wet with joy.

Helen tries staring at the window, which
slowly rotates, but she sees nothing. She hears Richard’s
reproachful voice: Why didn’t you look for me in the right place?
Soundlessly, her lips shape the answer: I looked everywhere.
Richard’s voice, distant now and fading: Why didn’t you go down to
the Catacombs? Her lips soundlessly form: I didn’t want to then, I
liked sunshine too much, but I’m there now. Where are you? His
answer is an unintelligible whisper. It fades out.

Now the sleepers thresh about in their
armchairs. The tears keep coming but they aren’t tears of joy
anymore. Something has gone wrong. Only half awake, they slowly get
up and march stiffly, each of them, into a corner where they
huddle, not looking at the window. The tears come faster. Sobs
wrack their bowels. Helen automatically goes over, unsteadily, and
tries to comfort them. She learns from Seymour and Louis, in a
moment of guilty confession, that both men had abandoned their
lovers pregnant. She makes an effort and goes on comforting
them.

Despite the comforting, or because of it,
they end by glaring at her, pushing her away and stopping their
ears. She still doesn’t understand that by relativizing their
unforgivable act (pretending to) she seems to be flaunting her own
goodness, emphasizing that she’s the only one of the Five to stand
a chance of being transferred back to that Paris she keeps telling
herself she doesn’t want.

Minutes later she finally learns about the
image they have of her from Margaret. Margaret runs moaning out of
the Common Room. Helen finds her face down on her bed repeating
over and over: “Jean, Jean, O Jean.” Helen mechanically comforts
her, wipes the tears off her face and even kisses her. Margaret
pulls away. “You never cry. You don’t have to. You were good.
You’re going out there. Not like the rest of us.”

No, Helen whispers, that’s not true.
Margaret, sobbing again, hears her say something confused, about
how it’s all a sham, shammed goodness, comforting people in
distress, a kind of reflex from long habit, how as a child already,
an ugly child, she’d been jealous of beautiful people (“like you”),
had never come to terms with her skinny plainness, how she’d
learned very early that niceness, sympathy and forgiveness could be
a lure, a means of attracting men who were in bad need of niceness
and sympathy and forgiveness.

So (Margaret vaguely hears her say) she
specialized in flawed handsome men, dispensing calculated comfort
and sympathy until she became their indispensable drug. There’d
been a dying man, then a cripple, then a homosexual, others. Of
course it never worked out. Couldn’t possibly have. Finally there
was Richard.

She’d been in Paris working on a thesis. Her
father fell ill and she’d returned to Denver. She’d encountered a
startlingly handsome young man standing on a corner, confused and
angry because nobody could direct him to where he wanted to go. She
couldn’t either (it sounded almost like a description of a sewer)
but she spoke to him about Paris and suddenly that’s where he
wanted to go, with her.

Everybody warned her about him, a hopeless
case, cyclically suicidal and perhaps lovingly homicidal too in
that phase. Keep away from him in that downward phase, they warned.
Instead, she married him. She wasn’t afraid when the cycle operated
dangerously. He was much closer to her, totally dependent, in the
downward phase than in the lucid phase. They didn’t understand. In
that lucid phase he was indifferent. Cured, he was sure to leave
her. Secretly she feared the upward phase more than the downward
phase.