GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (18 page)

“It doesn’t happen like that, Seymour. I’m
no expert on the subject but I don’t think it’s something you can
calculate.”

“We could try, couldn’t we? I’m really
trying. You could too, it seems to me. At least make a little
effort. Already I like you,” he says, sincere about it. “Like you
an awful lot,” he adds with exaggeration. He hopes she’ll take it
for understatement.

She takes it for exaggeration. “I like you
too, Seymour. Look, isn’t that a map of Paris over there?”

“What we need is a map of this place, to get
out of it,” he says bitterly, thinking of his French sweetheart,
passionately responsive in his arms back then, and available in
that circular year outside if he can only break free of these
corridors.

Max suffers from periodic fits of despair,
like all of them, except that his are severer and maybe even more
justified. Rigid for hours he stares sightlessly at a wall with the
discouraging graffiti. Then he sobs and occasionally howls. “Helen!
Helen!” the others cry if she isn’t there, and the thin dependable
girl comes and soothes him as she does the others when it’s their
turn to sob (almost never howl, though).

Why does he howl? Sometimes Max believes
what the others say about time out there, that it’s the time of
their twenty-fifth year, time marking time for all time, going
round and round, the same things happening over and over. Sometimes
he isn’t sure. How can he tell with what he sees through the
window: a dead city where nothing at all happens outside of the
trees going from bare to green and back to bare? How can you tell
it’s the same bareness and the same green? Sometimes he thinks the
others see the same dead scene he sees and to torment him invent a
live city with crowds and lovers.

It’s easier, though, for him to believe what
they say about time on this side of the window, their intimate
biological time: that it stands still, that they don’t age here. As
the burned-out bulbs accumulate and Max’s image, bleak but
unchanged, stares back at him in the mirror year after year, he has
to believe he’s still twenty-five and will be twenty-five for as
long as he’s stuck here.

But if you believe them, believe that time
outside, like time inside, has been set back to their twenty-fifth
year then the dead city he sees has to be dated 1975. That means
that all other cities, real live cities, have to be dated 1975 too.
Including Las Vegas, the only real live city that matters to Max.
Which means …

It’s at this point, grappling with the
terrible logic of that version of time, that Max sometimes starts
howling.

Once Seymour is there when it happens. He
searches for Helen but she’s wandering in a distant corridor. So he
has to try to calm Max down himself and ask him what’s the
matter.

The answer he gets is fragmented by sobs.
Finally Seymour pieces it together. If the others have the prospect
of being reunited with a person they’d loved at the age of
twenty-five here in Paris, Max’s only possible return is to Las
Vegas. But Bess hadn’t lived in Las Vegas in 1975 when he was
twenty-five. He didn’t remember in what city she’d lived then. When
he’d met her, and two months later married her, he’d been
thirty-six and she’d been twenty-two.

That means (and he howls again) … means …
means … that even if he escapes tomorrow and finds her, what good
would it do, what good, he aged twenty-five and she eleven?

Hearing him blubber that out, Seymour feels
very sorry for Max but has to stifle laughter at the imagined
spectacle of that grotesque and possibly pedophilic encounter.

Much later, Seymour will bitterly remember
his cruel reaction to Max’s grief.

Chapter 19

Gentille

During the first spring and summer of
outside time, some of the functionaries drop in on them quite
often. Henri, the little middle-aged man in the filthy beret,
sidles up to Seymour and Louis (but not too close) and slyly
formulates questions about women they’d known, biblically, back
then out there. Louis glares and marches away. Seymour tells a
little. The bilingual perfumed young functionary is an even more
frequent visitor. He mainly gazes at Louis and begs them to
describe Paris streets and squares. Sometimes the lower echelon
female functionaries spy on them from the corner of the corridor.
When the guests say hello to them they giggle hysterically and
disappear like a cloud of twittering sparrows.

The visitors stop coming when Turnkey
posts a notice on the walls of the corridors leading to their
rooms. It enjoins those whose duties are not directly involved with
the guests to avoid all contact with them on pain of
(“
sous peine
de
”) ZTV3. The guests
don’t know what ZTV3 is but it sounds very painful. They imagine
that the stern-faced iron-bunned woman functionary administrates
it, thoroughly and with great satisfaction. The notice also informs
the guests that, if approached, failure on their part to break off
illicit contact with functionaries will be sanctioned by a loss of
thirty (30) points.

The one functionary they continue seeing
regularly is the young scared girl who does their rooms
inefficiently at long intervals and brings them their atrocious
food. She’s a little different from the other functionaries, her
face less inhumanely frozen. There’s no color to it but it’s not
inorganic, not chalk or zinc or lead or gunmetal. It’s closer to
weak or recent life. There’s less rigidity to her features, as
though a face of flesh were struggling against a stiffening
translucent mask. The features of most of the functionaries seem
frozen in one predominating caricatural mask-like expression. For
Henri, the little man on the ladder, it’s libidinous cunning; for
the middle-echelon female functionary, pitiless severity; for the
perfumed young man, tragic petulance; for Sub-Prefect Marchini, the
exaggerated imperiousness of a would-be or a deposed emperor.
Prefect d’Aubier de Hautecloque, though, seems to bear a perfectly
inscrutable death mask.

There’s nothing inscrutable about this
girl’s dominant expression, which is fear. When she encounters
Seymour in a corridor, she bites her pale lip, maintains
exaggerated distance from him and looks about fearfully before she
asks, in a whisper, about the condition of his leg. She keeps on
asking long after the gray scabs have crumbled off. It’s her only
subject of conver-sation. He doesn’t know what to say to her,
except to assure her that his leg is all right. Small talk is
difficult here. The days are eventless and the weather outside,
theoretically a rich subject for exchange, doesn’t exist for
her.

With the posting of the ZTV3 threat even
small talk becomes superfluous. For a long while the cleaning girl
visibly concentrates on saying nothing to him or to the others.

“What’s your name?” Seymour asks one day,
just to say something. He’s standing in the doorway. She’s
scrubbing the floor out in the corridor. The question startles her.
She glances over her thin shoulder at the corridor behind her and
whispers between stiff pale lips to her scrubbing brush: “I’m not
supposed to talk to you. Stupid.”

With that fearful expression and voice of
hers, Seymour can hardly believe his ears. She isn’t at all the
kind of person (if you can call her a person) who insults. She’s
the kind of quasi-person who’s insulted. That’s confirmed when
Seymour asks her why she called him stupid. She looks up and
stammers:

“Oh sir, not you, never never you. How … how
could I dare? Me, of course. I’m Stupid. You asked my name. That’s
my name here. Stupid. I don’t remember my real name back then.
Maybe it was Stupid back then too.”

Grief tries to break through her mask. Two
solitary tears appear in the corner of her eyes. They haven’t the
vigor to roll down her cheeks. He guesses that back then it would
have been a tempest of tears. Here, in this place of diminished
things, it’s all grief can manage.

To calm her down, Seymour says, “You’re
not stupid at all,” even though he thinks that she is, a little,
more than a little. “I can’t call you that. You’re the first nice
person I’ve met here. I’ll call you “Nice” (
Gentille
), okay?”

Now the tears do roll down her cheeks and to make
her stop he tells her that his name is Seymour.

“Saymore?”

“
Not S
a
ymore,
‘S
e
ymour’. In
English, ‘Seymour’ sounds like ‘see more.’ Most of the time I
didn’t see anything at all.”

“Oh, English. Then you are English. And I
who stupidly thought that you were all Americans and spoke
American.”

He has to explain that they speak the same
language, more or less, in England and America. She
is
a little
stupide
. But also
gentille
in a ghost-like bloodless way.

So each time he sees her he says, “
Bonjour,
Gentille
,” and so do the others, except for Max who calls her
“Dummy.” Of course Gentille doesn’t dare call any of them by their
first name. It’s always “
Monsieur
” and “
Madame
.” But
Seymour is always a whispered “
Monsieur Saymore
.”

Despite the peril of mysterious ZTV3, she
finally overcomes her fear of punishment and talks to Seymour
whenever their paths cross. He learns things about the
functionaries. They nearly all have nicknames. The fat one with the
thick glasses is called “Hedgehog” (“
Hérisson
”). The severe middle-echelon female functionary
with the gray bun is called “Nasty” (“
Méchante
”). “And O she is,
Monsieur Saymore
, she is.” Seymour doesn’t need to be convinced.
The Five already have a name for her: “Sadist,” which they’ve
shortened to “Sadie.”

Gentille goes on. The effeminate young man
who wants to be called Philippe is called
Pédale
. “I don’t know why,
Monsieur Saymore
, but he doesn’t like the name so I call
him “Philippe.” Maybe I’ll ask him to call me “
Gentille
” now instead of “
Stupide
”.” She tells him that the Sub-Prefect is “Little
Napoleon.”

How about the Prefect? Seymour wants to
know. Gentille looks scared. “Oh no, no,
Monsieur Saymore
, no one would dare call
Monsieur le
Préfet
anything
but
Monsieur
le Préfet
.”

As for the Arrivals, they’re referred to
by numbers.
Madame
Williams
is Number One.
Madame
Ricchi is
Number Two.
Monsieur
Forster
is Number Three.
Monsieur
Pilsudski is Zero.
He, Saymore, is Number Four. “But I don’t like calling
people by numbers. I would never call you Number Four,
Monsieur
Saymore
.”

Seymour is surprised to learn that love
exists here (but why shouldn’t it, he thinks bitterly, if this is,
as he believes more and more, a place of torture). Gentille tells
him that Sadie (“Nasty”) is in love with the Prefect but that she
also hates him.
Pédale
–
Philippe – is in love “with … with … someone you know.” She breaks
off. Hedgehog, she resumes, is in love with one of the
lower-echelon women. And so it goes: so-and-so in love with
so-and-so who loves so-and-so who loves … She goes on and on with
her recital of one-way love. Love is never returned, Seymour
learns.

“How about you?” he asks indiscreetly.

“Nobody would love me,” she says. “If
somebody did, of course I would love him in return. How cruel not
to.”

He’s tempted to ask her if she’s in love
with someone. Instead, he asks who the Prefect is in love with.

She stares at him with widening eyes. “It’s not
love, it’s … it’s …” She breaks off and runs away.

One day Seymour asks Gentille to look out of the
window and describe what she sees. “Fog, sir,” she says without
looking. Again Seymour asks her to look. She says that looking out
of the window is forbidden. She looks anyhow and says that she sees
fog, doesn’t he too? Seymour describes what he sees: the couples at
the sidewalk café tables, the barges, the enlaced lovers along the
tree-shaded cobblestoned quays. Can’t she see that? He longs for
shared vision. Only Helen can see his year, which is hers too. But
she seldom bothers looking.

“No. There’s nothing for us out there except
fog. You’re lucky. You’ll soon be out there. I hope you will. If I
had permission to pray I’d pray for you to be out there. We can’t,
ever.”

“Why can’t you?”

“Can’t. Can’t.”

“Why not, Gentille?”

“Nasty says praying is ‘short-cir-circuiting
the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of command.’ I don’t know what that
means. She says it all the time. I don’t know what it means.”

“I meant why can’t you go outside?”

“Can’t. Can’t.”

“Tell me why not, Gentille.”

“They say the fog would torture us something
terrible if we tried to go out there. So that’s the way it is:
can’t, can’t.”

Gentille’s subjects of conversation are
limited and circular. She repeats them like an old record with
eroded grooves. Every time they meet she catalogues her endless
chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning the toilets, doing
guest rooms, washing mountains of dishes, dusting Turnkey’s
(
Skull’s
) Key
Rooms. There are millions of keys hanging there, she says, and she
has to dust them all. At the time, Seymour doesn’t realize the
importance of that last piece of information, even though he hears
it a hundred times. Also hears a hundred times the functionaries’
nicknames, their unrequited love, the nastiness of Nasty, the ban
on prayer. Gentille says the same things day after day as though
her memories were sand castles built at low tide and washed away
hours later by high-tide.