GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (19 page)

One of the things she says over and over is
this: “A mistake was made with me I think. I shouldn’t be here. I
don’t know where I should be. Some days I think I see real things
out there. When I’m alone I stand before the window even though
that’s forbidden and I think it’s not all fog. Sometimes the fog
thins and I think I see dunes and the sea with a lighthouse and
even sails on the horizon. I think it’s home. I see those things in
dreams too. Most of the time I don’t remember the dreams but
sometimes I remember dreaming that.”

She gets into the habit of standing before
the window alongside him, careful to maintain distance though. He
goes on wanting her to see what he sees, as though her vision of
that blankness they call ‘fog’ negated the golden domes and the
sidewalk cafés and the river with its barges and quay-side lovers.
Try, he says. Once, finally, she presses her forehead against the
pane and after a while says: “Yes, I think I do see something.
Alongside you I see something. That’s a great gift and I thank you
for it. Yes, yes, I see more too, like you.”

But when he asks her to describe what she
sees, for conformation of what he himself sees, she speaks again of
the sea, here in Paris, hundreds of kilometers inland. He’s
irritated at her for having fragilized his vision of the nearby
place he longs to reach and he almost calls her
‘
Stupide
.’

She goes on. “When you go out there and one day you
visit the seaside remember me and try to find my village. My
village is by the sea. There’s a saint in the name of my village, I
can’t remember which one. If I could I’d pray to him or her. But
prayer is forbidden here because of the hi-hi-er-arch-al chain of
command. There are dunes and breakers and a lighthouse. That’s all
I remember. I often dream about it.”

It’s pathetic the first few times he hears
it. He now understands her rite with the wine-stained map of France
tacked up in the men’s room. Each time she comes to clean up she
closes the door. She wedges a chair under the knob. She stands on
tiptoe in front of the map and beginning at the Belgian border
starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline. Her
nose practically touches the paper. She lingers on Brittany,
exploring the peninsula’s coastal complications. Then her body
follows the plunge of the coastline down to the Pyrenees. As she
goes past Lorient, Nantes, La Rochelle, Bordeaux and finally
reaches Biarritz and the Spanish border, her knees slowly flex.
It’s like a slow motion preliminary to forbidden prayer.

Seymour’s relation with Gentille (all that
moldy chocolate) provides the other men with comic relief, badly
needed here. They often address him as “
Monsieur Saymore
.” Louis refers to the girl as “your
sweetie-pie.” He says over and over: “She’s carryin’ a torch for
you.” Max’s remarks are much more offensive. “Nice piece of ass you
got there” or “Get into her yet?” Each time he sees Seymour and
Gentille together he chortles ambiguously: “Jesus, what a pair!”
Does he mean the ex New York intellectual and the dumb zombie girl
or is he referring jeeringly to Gentille’s barely existent
breasts?

Once, she says: “Monsieur Saymore, when
you are transferred (she’s really
gentille
, she never says “if” but always “when”) could you
take me with you, out there? They all say that the fog is poison
and torture for us but there’s no fog for you so I would be safe by
your side. And, listen, Monsieur Saymore, if they ever try to exit
you instead of transferring you, and they send the Black Men after
you, I won’t let that happen, ever, ever let that happen, oh no.
I’ll hide you in another room nobody knows about with a nice
window. I’ll bring you food and try to find books for you and keep
you company, sometimes, for a short time, if you permit me to do
so.”

Seymour thanks her and to make her happy (it
costs him nothing) says that yes of course he’ll take her with him
if he’s transferred. He says “if,” not “when.”

Gentille helps Seymour with his great
artistic project.

Seymour is finally tempted by creative
expression. It’s a nobler activity, he judges, than stickball and
poker and forging US treasury notes. He longs to reproduce the
street where his sweetheart had lived (lives, still lives, he
corrects himself). He wants to account for all of the details he
remembers from the black-and-white enlargements. The oysters and
heaps of mussels and the mackerel in the fish store. The patterns
of the old decorative dishes in the antique shop window. The horse
head effigy above the horsemeat butcher’s. The carafe with the
legend
Ricard
on an
outdoor café table. Hundreds of other tiny things. Thousands,
even.

And of course the major thing: the heavy door of her
building that had once swung open for him.

His street has to be life-size to work all
that detail into his drawing, he tells himself. Maybe
half-consciously he wants a life-size street so that one day he’ll
be able to pass into it. When the others, alarmed at his long
absence, find the room, he’ll no longer be in it but on the other
side of that massive door next to the butcher’s horse head, golden
now, finally reunited with his sweetheart by the power of art and
madness.

A corridor wall would be ideal, he thinks.
But a corridor is dangerously public. How many points would Turnkey
dock him for large-scale deterioration of State property? Seymour
reduces his ambition and his scale. He hunts for a discreet room
with a bare wall. Hunts and hunts. The best he can come up with is
a dingy bit of free wall in Room 302. How can he get all those
remembered details onto a measly four-foot stretch of plaster?

He sets to work sullenly on his shrunken
inauthentic street. One day Gentille sees it and asks if he would
please draw the sea for her. Seymour has trouble concealing his
irritation. He hasn’t got enough room for a short
6
^th
arrondissement
Paris street, he says. How can he possibly squeeze in the
Atlantic Ocean or even the smaller Mediterranean?

That evening, under the plate of hash, he
finds a sheet of paper with a message in childish scrawl full of
spelling mistakes.

Monsieur Cémaur,

If you please distroy this paper but dont do
that untill you have red this paper its about your street. I know a
better room for your street then Room 302 Skull never goes their
and their are nice big empty walls. Dont worry Monsieur Cémaur
about the dust in the coridor I will clean your footprints their so
nobbody will know ecept you and me.

Jentille

PS I can sign my name because Skull and
Meanie dont know that Jentille is my real name now. I’m so glad you
dont call me “Stupid.”

PS 2 May be you could draw the Sea too?
Theirs plenty of room for the street and the Sea on the walls.

PS 3 I almost forgot! Please turn this paper
over!

Seymour finds a crude map full of arrows going
up and down staircases, twisting about corners to a part of the
Prefecture where none of them had ever been. Room 1265 is circled
heavily. He rummages in Louis’ hoard of salvaged items and comes up
with a small stepladder, sandpaper, rags, a knife and an assortment
of pencils. He sets out.

The corridor floor is very dusty, as she’d
said. He sees tiny footprints, almost certainly hers, going to and
away from Room 1265. Sure enough, it’s practically empty. The walls
are filthy and covered with penciled graffiti but free of
shelves.

He sands the grimy surface down to clean
white. He reduces the penciled graffiti to dust, one of them the
enigmatic
Keep up the Work on Independence Day
! A deeply scratched inscription is still
faintly legible, though:
OUT IS A DOUBLE-CROSS
. He tries to ignore that bitter warning as he
begins blocking out the corner antique shop, the fish store, the
wine-and-coal café, the horsemeat butcher’s with an oval for the
golden horse head, (golden in the abstract knowledge he has of it,
but a shade of gray in his mind’s image and on his drawing). And of
course Marie-Claude’s building with the massive door. The next day
he starts in on the corner antique shop. He knows it will take a
whole season just for the remembered contents of the
window.

The first time Gentille sneaks a visit to
Room 1265 he’s working on a detail of a decorative dish, the
seventh of the thirty-odd roses surrounding a peasant girl. “You
remember all that,
Monsieur Saymore
?” she says. “All those roses?” “Every petal,” says
Seymour.

One day Gentille timidly asks Seymour to
draw the sea, the Atlantic, but not all of it, just a village with
dunes and a lighthouse. She asks him each time she comes. It’s not
persistence but memory failure.

Finally, he does a fast job. He’s not good
at seascapes. A couple of puffy clouds and Vs for seagulls define
the sky. Below, wriggly lines for waves define the sea. He sticks a
lighthouse on a rock. His dunes look more like muffins than
dunes.

“Something’s not right,” she says. “I don’t
know what.”

Seymour thinks he knows what’s troubling
her. It’s the thing that troubles him with his street.

“The sky should be blue, not gray.”

“Blue?”

“Of course the sky can be gray but it’s
better blue. And the sea should be green. It can be gray too but
it’s nicer green.”

“Green?”

He gives it up. She’s forgotten what color
is, as though she’d been born blind to it. How long has she been
here?

He wonders if one day, still here, he too
won’t look blank at the words ‘blue’ and ‘green.’

Chapter 20

The Sunny Square

Margaret can’t bear solitude in the Living
Quarters while the others explore distant rooms for long hours. So
she ends by returning to the corridors.

For three outside seasons nothing
happens.

Then one day she emerges into a long
corridor that ends with the Prefect standing to one side of a door
wide open on a sunny square. Trees are in full green leaf. There
are children with yellow and red balloons. Jean Hussier is sitting
on one of the benches. He’s holding a small gift package. She knows
what’s in it. She draws closer, fearfully. The Prefect’s attitude
is one of welcome, as usual. His long white hand points to the
sunny square invitingly. But to get there she has to pass him.

At the last moment, with the smell of
rotting flowers and that death-mask of his, fear gets the better of
longing and she turns her back on the Prefect and so on Jean with
his ring and on the twinkling green trees and runs back into the
years of the dark maze, back to the room and her bed where she
wakes up and thinks it was a dream. But not certain.

This time she can’t shun the corridors as
she’d once done. She can’t resist the longing to see that sunny
square again, no fracture-proof glass between it and her, as much
for the children with their bright balloons as for Jean Hussier and
the package with the engagement or wedding ring.

One night Helen comes out of the WC.
Margaret walks stiffly past her with no greeting or even
recognition. Her face is blank, her eyes open but unseeing. Her
arms are outstretched in the conventional ambiguous attitude of the
sleepwalker, a defensive or yearning outstretch, to repel or to
embrace. Helen thinks of all those dangerous staircases and follows
her.

After a while Margaret halts before a door,
closed of course, and murmurs something over and over. Helen
approaches and understands that she’s begging someone to let her
dance for him. She’s acting out a dream. There are just the two of
them, Helen and Margaret, in the corridor.

Careful not to awaken her, Helen guides her
back to their room and her (Margaret’s) bed.

In the morning Helen tells her about it and
insists on the danger. Margaret knows about the danger but it’s not
the danger Helen means, a fall down a staircase. It’s another
danger involving a much greater fall. She doesn’t tell Helen about
those meetings, doesn’t tell the others either, doesn’t try to
analyze the reasons why she keeps it secret.

Helen devises means to combat her blind
wandering in the corridors. Normally they leave their door wide
open because of Margaret’s acute claustrophobia. Now Helen locks
it. Margaret can’t sleep. She suffocates. So they leave the door
wide open again but with Helen’s cot barring the passage. It’s not
Margaret’s idea.

It works for a while. Most of the time
Margaret bangs her shin against the iron framework of the cot,
wakes up and, groaning, returns to her own cot. Sometimes she
tumbles down on Helen, wakes up and after a few seconds gets up and
returns to her own cot.

Once she tumbles and, maybe not awake, stays
with Helen. Helen wakes up, she doesn’t know how much later,
passionately kissing Margaret and being kissed, less passionately
but they’re so unequal in beauty, Helen knows.

A while later Margaret gets up and whispers:
“We mustn’t ever do that again. We’re being tested here.”

“All right,” Helen says. She knows that
desire, like hope, is an unfailing source of suffering. She pulls
her cot back to its original place, leaving the way out into the
corridor free, which is probably what, unconsciously, Margaret
wanted all along and not because of the danger of tumbling into
that kind of minor temptation. She doesn’t really believe that a
little skin-deep pleasure with another woman, particularly if she’s
plain like Helen, counts as a sin. Isn’t it almost an act of loving
charity?