GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (32 page)

The following week he repeats the attempt.
He tries again and again, week after week.

Except for Helen, the others harry Seymour for quick
results. Helen doesn’t know about the key strategy. They suspect
that she’d disapprove if she found out. But she’s not likely to
find out. Helen has lost contact with the world outside printed
pages. She doesn’t even glance at window-framed Paris any more.

The chestnut trees outside are bearing
candelabrums of white blossoms, so May, when the cleaning girl
finally reacts to his patient “Bonjour, Gentille.” She raises her
head painfully and looks around for someone called “Gentille.” It’s
true he hasn’t called her that or anything else for years and her
memory is terrible.

He repeats her name. Now she looks at him
quickly and then down at the scrubbing brush. She seems to be
making a terrific effort with her lips as though to break catgut
stitches. Finally she whispers to the scrubbing brush:
“
Bonjour,
Monsieur Saymore.
” Her
memory isn’t as bad as he’d thought. Then she grabs up her cleaning
tools and flees.

The next day she pushes the food cart in
like an automaton. She doesn’t look at him. She doesn’t reply to
his greeting. Her lips move soundlessly, though. He thanks her for
all that chocolate she used to bring him and hasn’t for years. She
still doesn’t answer.

He keeps it up. She ends by a tight-lipped
whispered “
Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore
” to the tray or the scrubbing brush each time he
greets her with his “
Bonjour, Gentille
.”

One day he finds a big lump of chocolate hidden
under the hash. The chocolate is even moldier than before but it’s
a good sign. He gets rid of it in the WC.

Roses are blooming in the public gardens, so
June, when she starts fearfully greeting him on sight.

Shortly after July Fourteenth rockets she
begins telling him things she’d told him a hundred times years
before. She recites the nicknames of the functionaries as if it’s
news to him: “Hedgehog”, “
Pédale
”, “Nasty”, “Little Napoleon”, etc. She tells him again and
again about the ban on direct prayer and gazing out of the windows,
about the hopelessness of love here.

He hardly listens to all that. But he
listens very closely and with growing tension each time she recites
her catalogue of chores: scrubbing the corridor floors, cleaning
the toilets, doing the guest rooms, pushing the food carts, washing
mountains of dishes.

She doesn’t mention the big thing. Seymour
doesn’t dare allude to it and raise suspicions in her mind. Maybe
she’d lost that chore and no longer has access to Turnkey’s
monstrous collection of keys. He feels faint at the thought.

There’s another big thing she doesn’t
mention, a second big thing necessary, he thinks, for the success
of the operation. He dares bring that particular subject up. One
day he asks her if she still sees the sea in the window. She looks
blank and asks: “What sea,
Monsieur
Saymore?”

She’d lost her sea, a vast thing to
lose.

Not basically out of altruism, he tries to
help her recover it. She’d once shared her poor scraps of memory of
the sea with him. Couldn’t the sharer of a deleted image reinstall
it a little? He describes what she’d told him. Each time he evokes
the village with the name of a saint in it, dunes and a lighthouse
and sails on the horizon, she stares past him and then goes back to
work, saying nothing.

But one day she stands on tiptoe in front of
the wine-stained wall map of France, her face almost touching it,
and starts scrutinizing the long Channel and Atlantic coastline.
Her face and her body follow the plunge of the coastline from
Finistère 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.

“Are you looking for something,
Gentille?”

“
I lost something,
Monsieur
Saymore. Sometimes I remember remembering what it
is, a little.
But my
head hurts so bad when I do.”

Fingering the key about his neck, he tells
her that it’s her seaside village of course, the village with the
name of a saint he’d drawn on a wall for her, the sea and the dunes
and the lighthouse and the sails on the horizon, doesn’t she
remember? It’s all in Room 1265.

He hopes she’ll ask to see it again but she
doesn’t. She looks scared.

Maybe she has bad associations with that
room or with the corridor outside it.
Clump-jangle.
Clump-jangle
.

A few days after, Gentille complains about
her work again. Finally Seymour dares ask the big question. He’s
rewarded.

“
Oh yes,
Monsieur Saymore
, the keys. The keys are almost as bad as all
those dirty dishes. Skull has hundreds of rooms and the keys hang
on the walls from top to bottom, thousands of keys in every room
and hundreds and hundreds of rooms. I have to climb a tall tall
ladder to clean the high keys. I get dizzy. One day I’ll fall. And
when I finish dusting the last keys the first ones are dusty again.
It’s like the toilets and the corridors. Nothing ever stays
clean.”

But when Seymour asks her to lend him one of
the keys, number 147, she turns her back on him, snatches up her
pail and cleaning things and quickly leaves the room she’s only
half cleaned.

The next day, he says (forgetting that she
has no sense of time) that the loan of the key to Room 147 would be
for an hour or so, no longer. Nobody would ever know. Please.

It’s the first time he’s ever said please
to her. She seems aware of the tremendous honor. She doesn’t run
away this time. She stares down at the floor and it tumbles out
breathlessly: “No no
Monsieur Saymore
I couldn’t do that Skull finds out everything he’d
report me and I’d be punished again the Black Men would take me to
the Hospital it hurts worse than having a tooth pulled and without
a I don’t remember the word a kind of needle so it won’t hurt so
bad they pull things out of your head and no needle O it hurts I
don’t want to lose the lighthouse and the sail on the horizon
again.”

It’s a critical moment. Won’t she remember
that the lighthouse and the sail and lots of other precious things
are stored safely outside her vulnerable brain, on the drawing in
Seymour’s room? Won’t she ask again if she can accompany him to
Room 1265 and look at the sea he’d drawn for her?

Seymour fingers his key, ready to hold it
up, intricately indented like the Brittany coast, ready to say yes,
Room 1265 against Room 147, his key against her key. It sounds like
a fair swop, but of course it’s not. His key opens on an
incompetent sketch of an imagined sea. Her key opens on renewed
life.

It doesn’t happen that way. She goes wildly
beyond his poor key. Like him, after all, she wants renewed life
too.

“
Take me with you,
Monsieur Saymore
.”

Stammering that insanity, she goes over to the wall
map, jabs her finger at it and stammers other things he can hardly
make out with her gasped torrent of words. She seems to be begging
him to accompany her, not to the room with the sketch of the sea,
but to the real sea itself, to look for it with her, protecting her
by his presence, exploring the coastline carefully, on foot, from
Belgium to Spain, every indentation, every island, every estuary
and fiord.

Seymour panics at the thought of it. He
cries out stupidly: no, impossible, impossible. He pulls the key
free from his neck. “Take it, you can have it.” He throws it on the
floor, unconditionally surrendering the one-dimensional sea of Room
1265, maybe in the hope that she’ll be satisfied with that after
all. He practically runs out of the room.

Why did he react like that? he’ll wonder
later. It was senseless.

When he returns a few hours later she’s gone
and the key is still lying on the floor. Max and Louis are there.
Max almost lynches him when he tells them the story, part of the
story, just that she wants to go with them outside, not the
craziness of exploring 2000 kilometers of coast with him there.

“You said no, you dumb bastard?” Max
bellows.

At the uproar, Margaret comes in. “Oh no,
you didn’t, Seymour, you didn’t say no to her!”

Louis takes charge. “Say yes next time
Stein, you hear? Say we’ll take her. ’Course we won’t.” Louis adds
that it’s double good news. First, it means that she can get at the
key. Second, if she wants to come with them – but of course they
won’t let her – it means that the door to Room 147 opens on the
real tunnel and she knows that.

The Lord has answered our prayers, Louis
says. He sinks to his knees and thanks Him at length.

Seymour keeps on asking for the key. But on
his terms, not hers: limited escape for her via his key and the
drawing it unlocks, not total escape through the tunnel with them.
Why doesn’t he say yes to her on any terms as Louis had ordered him
to? Because this might be one of the traps? Punishment of his own
making? Say yes to her and be condemned to trudge an endless coast
with this zombie, himself a zombie? Or is it that he’s unwilling to
slam the steel door in her face at the last moment after that great
promise?

Without mentioning her terms any more (she’s
no bargainer) Gentille keeps on saying no, begging his pardon in a
stammer.

Seymour stops talking to her. He ignores
her “
Bonjour, Monsieur Saymore
” when she comes in and doesn’t answer her timid
“
Au revoir,
Monsieur Saymore”
when
she leaves. He gets wild amounts of chocolate with each meal,
including breakfast. He leaves them untouched on the tray. He feels
terrible hurting her like that but she’s holding back the key that
opens a door on real life.

One day, instead of gathering up the dirty
dishes, she sits down on the floor alongside the cart and her body
shakes and shakes. She hasn’t got the safety valve of tears so it
goes on and on. Seymour’s on the point of saying: don’t try to cry,
Gentille, of course I’ll take you with me and of course we’ll
explore the coast line together for that village with the name of a
saint in it.

But before he can lure her with that lie she
looks up at him and says, yes, she’ll give him the key to Room 147
just as soon as she can. She doesn’t mention accompanying them. She
doesn’t even ask for the key to the room with the sketched sea.
Seymour feels lousy at his total triumph.

Then it wears off and he feels a great
surge of energy. He has to expend it or burst. He starts jogging
then running down the corridors, maybe for the last time. He has a
vision of Marie-Claude’s street as he’d never been able to imagine
it here, with a wealth of new-remembered details. A fat cat on a
windowsill. A Delft clock with canals and a windmill in the antique
dealer’s window.
A wall
covered with graffiti: arrow-pierced hearts with entwined initials,
a pencilled scribble, “
Marie, je t’aime!!!
” and a gigantic red phallus aimed like a Nazi V2
rocket at a high-placed constellation of stars in yellow
crayon.

Lots of other things,
a torrent of things for the slightest of which, before, he’d have
got up in the middle of the night and trudged down miles of
corridors to add it to the wall drawing he’d been laboring over for
decades.

It doesn’t matter now. He’ll never go to
that drab copy again. The original is awaiting him.

When he reaches the Living Quarters he waits
for the others to gather in the Common Room in front of the window
on Paris and announces the great news in a casual voice for greater
impact: “Gentille says yes. She says she’ll give me the key to Room
147.”

Strange coincidence, before the others have
time to react (with tears or cheers) Philippe minces in with his
petulant tragic mask and informs them that Advocate will be
arriving any minute now with great news.

“
Great news for you,” he says, staring at
Louis. “Terrible news for me. Try to think of me back here a
little,” he says to Louis. “While you are savoring a dozen
00
Marenne
oysters.
With a minced shallot and vinegar sauce.”

So it turns out that they won’t need
Gentille’s key after all. They won’t have to try to escape
illicitly from this place and suffer the stipulated fatal
consequences if they fail. An official door is about to open for
them on the world of color and love that they can see, startlingly
close it seems to them now, through the window.

Even Helen looks eager, jolted out of her
world of books. It’s an extremely encouraging sign for the
others.

Chapter
35

Prelude To Transfer

Advocate finally comes to the Common Room
where the Five have been waiting for hours at the table. He
advances toward them, lopsided with a heavy clinking shopping bag.
He strains it up onto the table, sluggishly rubs his hands with
satisfaction and then like a magician solemnly produces six
glasses, a bottle-opener and finally six bottles of beer.

Alcohol! It’s a sudden materialization in
this dusty space of a precious attribute of the world outside. Not
alcohol for the sake of alcohol, but alcohol for the sake of
celebration. Only one thing here deserves celebration: an end to
here. Those celebrant bottles with the green label confirm, they
think, Philippe’s hint that they’re on the verge of liberation. At
that thought, they’re on the verge of tears.