GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (17 page)

Helen whispers: “You’re wrong about me. Why
do you think I’m still here after all this time?”

But Margaret’s breathing is deep and regular
now. She’s asleep. Her face is peaceful. It’s not sure she’s heard
Helen’s confession. Helen hopes she hasn’t. Still unsteady on her
feet, Helen goes back to the Common Room. Slouched in their corners
the others are asleep. Their faces are peaceful now. It must have
all turned out well for them, after all, in their minds.

Normally they should have suffered from a
bad morning-after. They don’t, at least not from a conventional
one. Seymour samples what’s left in the fourth bottle and makes a
face. The vital essence of the wine had evaporated, probably
decades earlier. But their joy had been so great at the discovery
of eternal return out there that they’d got drunk on a
prestigiously labeled placebo. Sober, the others sip and have to
acknowledge that it’s no more than old water. Their joy has
evaporated too.

The merry-go-round, they realize, goes round
and round but they’re not on it, probably never will be.

It’s a terrible morning-after after all,
worse than the worst conceivable morning-after alcohol could have
produced.

They go on trying to kill time while waiting
for the Advocate who’s supposed to find ways of getting them out of
here into a better place.

Sometimes, though, they wonder if the
Advocate isn’t a myth, pure invention to lull them into a sense of
false security. It might very well be that one day (one year, one
decade) the Administrative Review Board would finally meet and a
button would be pressed and without warning, no fuss or bother, the
administratively suspended Five would fall out of suspension into
void or, very unlikely for all but one of them, into color and
sunshine.

In the meantime all they can do is hope for
the best and wait for the hypothetical Advocate.

Chapter 17

Again

Unable to wait any longer Margaret finally
returns to the corridors she’d fled probably years earlier. She
opens more thousands of doors, fearfully at first, still in search
of prayers and implorations for a divinely accredited way out. If
she doesn’t find the Book that contains them in those rooms she
doesn’t encounter anything alarming either and feels safe.

But one day or night
she emerges, empty-handed as usual, from a
room (59257) into a stench like
funeral lilies forgotten for weeks in a vase near a
forgotten occupied coffin.

She turns in the opposite direction from the
stench. It worsens. She turns in the other direction again. In
whatever direction she goes, running now, the flowers rot with
fury.

Turning a corner she cries out, almost
colliding with him standing rigid there in his impeccable white
braided uniform and beneath the braided cap, the immensely long
aristocratic face, expressionless like a white death-mask cast a
week after decease.

From between his motionless lips comes the
cavernous invitation to dance for him.

All this had happened before.

But now something new: the promise of
personal attention on his part to her appeal for transfer if she
will dance for him.

Hearing that, she remains immobile and
irresolute in the dim dusty corridor with visions of the bright
outside world.

But when his long white hand reaches out she
recalls her vow to God and understands or thinks she understands
that she’s being tested, unless it’s a dream, and if so, still
being tested because you can sin in dreams too.

She shuns the corridors again and in despair
goes back to waiting for the bureaucratic processing of her
case.

Chapter 18

While Waiting For Advocate

One of the Five can’t wait. One night the
others are jolted out of sleep by a distant thud and severe
breakage. It goes on and on. They pull on their clothes and, guided
by the racket, find Max two floors below destroying a wall in Room
869. He’s white with plaster. He heaves his sledgehammer high and
bashes a star-shaped hole in the wall. The debris rains down on the
other side.

Seymour and Louis grab him. Louis yells:
“You gone plain crazy?” He lowers his voice to a fearful whisper.
“You want Turnkey should come and report you? You already lost
seven points for smashin’ that dish. You’ll lose a thousand points
for smashin’ a wall. They’ll exit you one second flat.”

Max wrenches free. “I’m gonna exit all
right, but my own way.” He grips the ragged edges of the hole and
sticks his head through it as a preliminary to total exit, his own
way, into what he thinks is the space of freedom.

He remains paralyzed in that position for
long seconds. Then he slowly withdraws his head. He seems to have
aged. But it’s probably the plaster dust in his hair. He sits down
on the floor and stares ahead blankly. Helen looks through the
hole. She sits down alongside Max, places her hand on his arm and
talks and talks to him.

Louis and Seymour can’t help laughing when
they stick their heads through the hole and see the urinals.

Louis and Seymour and Helen spend the rest
of the night pushing filing cabinets in front of the mutilated wall
and cleaning up the toilets on the other side. Max remains seated
on the floor while they do it. Then they pick up the crowbar, the
sledgehammer, the pick-ax and the shovel, his crude map and the
compass. They coax Max to his feet and they all return to their
rooms.

Later they learn his reasons for doing that
crazy thing. From the window in the Common Room they can see that
building they call the Pray-Fek-Toor alongside this one, he
explains. So he’d figured that if he located a room next to the
Pray-Fek-Toor all he’d have to do is make a hole and pass through.
He must have screwed up his calculations.

When they see him scribbling figures on a
piece of paper, at it again, they confiscate his tools and stash
them away in a distant room. They notice something strange about
the compass he’d used. At irregular intervals the needle trembles
and creeps northward and then whirls a second and creeps southward.
There’s no pole of orientation here. It’s not surprising Max
screwed up his calculations.

So Max has to wait too, like the rest of
them.

While waiting for the Advocate and watching
the repetition of their season of long-ago love, their past grabs
them by the throat in unexpected ways. Seymour Stein is
particularly vulnerable.

One day Louis extemporizes a shower out of a
pierced can, a rubber hose and a pair of bellows he’s found in the
corridor rooms. Yankee ingenuity can turn even hell into a half-way
comfortable place Seymour remarks to Helen, half-humorously. Louis
is extraordinarily prudish for a Marine, even an ex one. He wants
privacy for their “ablutions” and ferrets about for the equivalent
of the folding screen the women have. In a room devoted to
artifacts of the French Communist Party, probably confiscated by
the police from clubbed demonstrators, he salvages a long white
propaganda banner of the sort that is tacked to stout poles and
militantly borne down avenues. He nails it from wall to wall in the
men’s room to conceal the washing area.

The slogan on the banner, constantly
visible, often makes Max and Seymour weep:
U.S. GO HOME!!
What else does Max want to do? On bad days
he suspects that the operation, although urged in two-foot black
letters, is impossible.

Seymour’s tears at the sight of that banner have
nothing to do with homesickness. He hadn’t really been a Good
American. He tells the story to all of them over and over and
that’s mainly the times the tears come and they find excuses for
fleeing (as he does when it’s their turn to recount and, sometimes,
weep).

One day way back then, he explains, he’d
been photographing wall graffiti at the
Place de la
République
. Most of the
good graffiti was low (maybe inscribed by militant dwarfs) and he
had to kneel to them. For kneeling shots he used a threadbare hotel
rug, red unfortunately. He’d been caught in a communist
demonstration that had featured an avenue-wide banner bearing that
very slogan:
U.S. GO HOME!!
He’d been minding his business but the flics took his rug
for a red flag and clobbered him.

One of the demonstrators had taken him to
a hospital and then to his apartment where he’d met the boy’s
sister, his darling, Marie-Claude. So the sight of that banner
(maybe the identical one, who knows?) brought it all back
poignantly. The sight of other banners borne by the demonstrators
(such as
RIDGEWAY POISON!
and
OUI AU VIN FRANÇAIS NON AU COCA-COLA
YANKEE!
) would have
stabbed him in the heart the same way, he explains.

One day before the window Helen calls
Seymour’s attention to a shrub with bright yellow flowers in a
distant public garden. Forsythia, she says. Seymour says that he’d
never paid attention to flowers or shrubs before he met
Marie-Claude. She’d taught him all about them as soon as they
flowered. When does this thing flower? What’s the month out there?
March or April, says Helen.

Seymour stammers, too early, too early, his
face screwed up. Seymour had been a hair-trigger weeper back then.
The tendency has carried over intact. What’s too early? says Helen,
her hand on his arm. Finally he’s able to say: March or April. I
met Marie-Claude in May. I left in November. So I missed out on it.
I didn’t give her time to teach me whaddyacallit. He can’t go
on.

Well, says Helen, now you know what it looks
like and the name, forsythia. She says it apologetically for having
been the one to have introduced forsythia to him and not his
Marie-Claude. She knows his sad story by heart, he’s told it so
often. She can’t help thinking: his own fault if Marie-Claude
hadn’t had time to introduce forsythia to him.

Seymour wipes his eyes with his sleeve.
She’s a very nice girl, he thinks, not knowing what Helen’s
thinking about him. Maybe he could make an effort and fall in love
with her a little. It might liven things up here. A little sex
wouldn’t be bad for his physical and mental tone.

One day, who knows how long after their
whaddyacallit dialogue – maybe years counting by outside time –
they meet in a corridor. That rarely happens. There are just five
of them, motes in the boundless universe of corridors. They’re both
exploring rooms for books. They agree to join their efforts.

Seymour decides the moment has come for a
decisive gesture. It takes effort on his part. It isn’t that he
finds Helen unattractive. She’s a little on the skinny side but has
(as he’d once seen clandestinely through the clown’s eyes) genuine
breasts, nothing explosively sensational like Margaret’s breasts,
but well-perched small witty breasts anyhow. She’s a very kind
person too and cultured as well, in an upper-middle-brow
out-of-town earnest high-school-teacherish way. But she carries
about a perpetual dampening aura of sadness, a force field of
melancholy that does nothing to counter the general atmosphere
here. Sometimes she reminds him of an intelligent version of the
cleaning-girl who had spilled dirty water over his leg so long
ago.

And of course there’s her enviable status as
sole obvious candidate for transfer. Later, Seymour will wonder
guiltily if his supposedly decisive gesture hadn’t been motivated
by an unconscious desire to involve her in transgression, pulling
her down to his own hopeless status.

He begins with a classic ploy, observing
that it’s the first time they’ve ever been alone. She says that she
hadn’t noticed. After a few minutes of silence he observes that
they could easily have met back there in 1951 Paris. She says that
Paris is a big place.

After more silence he tries another tactic,
downplaying her husband’s importance in a sly metaphysical way,
saying that, funny, the way the big things in your life depend on a
million little things and that if just one of those million little
things misses out so does the big thing. Suppose, he said, her
father’s condition had improved and she’d never returned home.
She’d never have encountered her future husband.

She doesn’t reply. He realizes that he
isn’t supposed to know the details of her encounter with her crazy
husband. Margaret had told him the story. He doesn’t break the
silence this time, depressed by the thought that his own great love
had been at the mercy of contingency too. Suppose he’d arrived at
the
Place de
la République
an hour
later with the communist demonstration in full swing. He’d never
have dared photograph that wall and deploy the red rug that had
triggered the clobbering and led to his meeting with his
darling.

They open a door and see the usual files and
administrative volumes. The defective ceiling bulb blinks on and
off at long intervals. In one of the long dark intervals he resorts
to wordless action. He takes her in his arms and kisses the top of
her head (she’s small). In the dark he can imagine her gray hair
back to original color.

She’s absolutely passive in his embrace,
doesn’t return anything, doesn’t even pull or push away, as though,
with her fabulous patience in the face of adversity, she’s waiting
for this too to end. It’s like holding a corpse, Seymour thinks, a
terrible thought. The light blinks back on for another interval. He
releases her. Her sad eyes scan the heap of books as though
nothing’s happened. But something had happened and she should have
at least acknowledged it. He returns to words.

“Wouldn’t it be nice, Helen, if we fell in
love?”