GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (33 page)

“I have excellent news,” says Advocate,
superfluously. He really tries to force his stiff features into
happiness for them. “The Administrative Board has deliberated on
your cases,” he says, carefully avoiding looking at Max. He pauses
to give emphasis to the great thing to come.

“I have pled your cases with more than usual
eloquence. After careful deliberation, the Administrative Board has
not rejected your petition for transfer.”

They feel like shouting with joy. Even
Helen, who lets her guard down for once.

All this suffering is behind them.

But the letdown is atrocious when Advocate
tells them that the first Administrative Board has declared its
incompetence and has submitted their case to a second
Administrative Board.

A long stunned silence. Most of them are
still on the verge of tears, of grief now. Not Seymour, though. He
has another way out the others seem to have forgotten.
Sarcastically, he asks how many Administrative Boards there are in
all. Five hundred, maybe?

When Advocate assures him that there are no
more than twenty Administrative Boards the others feel like going
beyond the verge of tears. Margaret does go beyond it.

“But!” Advocate exclaims, painfully
producing a joyous grimace. He opens his arthritic rubbered hands
as though revealing a tiny precious gift, a five-carat diamond of
consolation. But! But!! They will soon be outside, for one whole
day. A compatibility test is automatically run on the
Administratively Suspended once the primary Board has not rendered
a negative judgment. Possibly more than one trial run if the
results of the first, duly analyzed, leave room for doubt.

Joy, a little battered and bedraggled now,
returns. One whole day outside! Then an alarming thought occurs to
them. What if we’re not compatible,
Maître
? they naturally want to know. Advocate assures them that
there will be practically no pain involved in the regrettable case
of incompatibility.

He changes the focus of the discussion.
They will emerge wherever they like in Paris,
intra muros
, of course. Good Americans, in the
opening stages of the process, go back strictly to the Paris of the
twenty
arrondissements
.
They must imagine very strongly the place and they will materialize
there. It is useless imagining the Riviera with its white beaches
or Brittany with its bracing cold breakers or … Advocate breaks off
his pathetic private enumerations.

“I strongly recommend safe neutral things
like Napoleon’s Tomb or the Eiffel Tower.”

Also this, he says. He pauses and stares
at them solemnly. His bony forefinger wags warningly. No attempt to
realize a face-to-face meeting with a once familiar individual will
be successful during the trial run. On the contrary, such an
attempt might well have negative results, radically negative.
Events in the trial run are endowed with a certain, shall we
say,
plasticity
.
Hidden fears and unavowable desires might well shape that plastic
material, resulting in … But enough. I trust you grasp my meaning.
A word to the wise!
(
A bon entendeur, salut!
)
He uncaps the bottles and fills
the six glasses with mostly sad-looking foam.

They tilt their glasses to get the beer
beneath the foam onto their tongues and down their parched throats,
prelude to out there. Max spits it back into the glass. Seymour
grimaces and stares at the green label with the small print sans
alcool. Of course no alcohol in it. So little to celebrate. He goes
back to the teetotaler’s beer and tries hard to imagine real beer
with its 6% charge of gaiety. The stuff really tastes awful, like
everything else in this place.

But he’s hours away from that real beer
and (if in season)
Marenne
OO
oysters imbedded in seaweed, and, better than all those after all
trivial things, imbedded himself (O! O!) in his sweet darling
precious Marie-Claude and joining in her love-cries. Already,
Seymour has forgotten Advocate’s warning.

Louis and Seymour and Helen stare at each
another as the idea simultaneously occurs to them. It will be no
trial run, whatever Advocate says. At the risk of punitive void,
once out there they will stay out there. No punishment could be
greater than return here. Margaret, like them, has no intention to
return but she’d determined to do it in a legalistic way. She
intends to materialize in a celebrated church to pray to God for
permission to be a permanent resident in the real world and devote
herself to good deeds there.

They feel sorry for poor Max. Advocate had
privately informed them that Max would not be participating in the
trial run. There can be no return to a place one has never been, he
explains. So they’re leaving him behind forever, for their
determination never to return has strengthened.

Max doesn’t know that, of course. As it is,
he takes what he thinks is short-time solitude very badly. The
flics have to overpower him and lock him up. He bangs on the door
for hours and yells that he wants to go with them. Then, slumped
exhausted on the floor, he whispers through the door-crack with
what’s left of his voice: hey, you’ll all be coming back soon,
won’t you? I don’t mean in a week. Tomorrow, I mean. I don’t wanna
be alone here a week.

They hypocritically comfort him by saying
they’ll be back soon. If not tomorrow the day after maybe. It’s
just a trial run. Then they’ll try the key way out, the cleaning
girl’s key to the tunnel in Room 147. Max calms down at that. He
asks them to bring back a map of the Paris area so he can locate
the airport, also a case of cold beer, real beer with kick to it,
and ten pizzas, mushroom, cheese and anchovy, real Italian pizzas,
not fancy phony French ones.

They promise, guiltily. The
flics
unlock him. Helen almost spoils
things by kissing Max on the cheek violently, her face screwed up
against tears, and telling him to take care of himself.

When Max leaves the Common Room (to
explore new rooms for maps and a functioning compass and maybe to
weep unobserved), Margaret, basically a sentimental person,
suggests that they should all meet the next day at 10:00 pm at
the
Arc de
Triomphe
or some other
well-known place like that and tell each other how it had gone for
them.

Helen reminds her that they wouldn’t be in the same
Paris. Decades would separate them.

“I’ll never see you again? Ever?” says
Margaret in a weak voice, her plural “you” actually singular and
aimed at Louis as they all realize except for Louis himself. She
sees Louis as he was and soon will be again, young and marvelously
muscled.

“Louis, we’ll never see each other again?”
says Margaret in a tiny voice, coming out with it.

Louis mumbles something non-committal. By
this time there’s no room for anybody else in his mind except
Louise in her flower shop.

Seymour looks around for more consolation
for Margaret. “Maybe he’ll catch up with you,” he says, but it’s no
consolation. By 1937, if he gets that far, Louis will be sixty-two
years old.

Anyhow, Seymour has it all wrong. By the
time (thirty-seven years) he gets to the Paris of 1937, Margaret,
also sixty-two, will be in the Paris of 1974.

Now Seymour remembers that he won’t be alone
in his Paris of 1951. More out of politeness than real desire for
it he says to Helen: “We could maybe make an appointment somewhere
tomorrow or, say, the week after.”

“We might,” says Helen indifferently.

Seymour realizes that there’s no room for
anybody else in her mind except Richard. Just as, basically,
there’s no room in his own mind for anybody else except
Marie-Claude. Still, he can’t help feeling a little offended that
Helen didn’t conceal it as he, out of elementary politeness,
had.

Early next morning Sadie claps her hands and
barks out their numbers, all but Max’s zero. He goes on snoring, so
the omission doesn’t matter to him yet. She orders them out into
the corridor where Advocate, Turnkey and Sub-Prefect Marchini are
waiting. Sub-Prefect Marchini’s gunmetal features are cast in the
familiar expression of imperious pride despite (or perhaps to
offset it) the further dilapidation of his uniform. Only two brass
buttons are left now and they dangle badly.

They start a long march. Nobody speaks.
Turning into another corridor they see at the end of it, facing
them, Gentille. She’s on her knees alongside her pail, scrubbing
fiercely. She must have heard Turnkey’s
clump-jangle, clump-jangle
long before he loped into
sight. She lunges forward again and again with her brush. The
movement flattens her down to the floor into what seem to be
groveling kowtows to the advancing figures of authority. The group
goes past her.
Seymour
lags behind.
He turns
around.

As though she’d expected him to turn around
to her, she’d turned around herself, no longer kowtowing but erect
on her knees, somehow triumphant, with her left fist held high like
a demonstrating militant, her right forefinger pointing to her
fist, to what her fist contains.

He shakes his head and turns his back on her
and her key, needless now. Then he remembers, turns around again
and throws his own key at her. It looks like a mock lapidation but
he means it as a consolation present of a one-dimensional
black-and-white sea. He joins the others.

They go down the long corridors in silence
for another mile or so. They halt at one of the steel doors.
Turnkey unlocks a panel and presses a button. A distant clatter
starts up, grows in intensity and then grinds to a halt behind the
steel door. Turnkey locks the panel, chooses another key on his
great ring and unlocks the door. It opens on a dusty rusty ruin of
an elevator that looks like Elisha Otis’ first experimental model.
The Four are segregated in one corner of it.

Turnkey locks the steel door from inside.
Like a vertical navigator, he moves the brass floor-selector
switch. A distant whine. The elevator jolts down with a screech.
The single feeble overhead bulb expires, plunging them into total
darkness. The cabin sways, creaks, groans, bucks, accelerates
alarmingly. Then it stops so abruptly that they are almost flung to
their knees.

“Unpardonable neglect,” mutters Advocate in
the dark.

“Elevator maintenance, like so much else,
lies outside my area of competence,” retorts Sub-Prefect Marchini
with his hair-trigger Corsican touchiness.

Advocate placates him. “Of course, of
course, here and in so many other areas, alas.”

They file out of the elevator, still in
strict segregation. Turnkey locks the door behind them. They trudge
a mile until they reach another steel door bearing the
warning
Entry Strictly Forbidden For All But Authorized
Personnel!
Turnkey
unlocks a long sliding panel on one side of the door. He pushes it
open slowly on a panoramic view of a huge disorderly workshop.
Seymour guesses at a trick peep-through mirror of the sort featured
in classy Parisian bordellos. Two small fitted loudspeakers,
obviously wired to hidden mikes, provide sound.

Sadie utters a scandalized gasp at the sight
of four cement-faced men in overalls seated around a table playing
cards. Self-rolled cigarettes are wedged in the corners of their
hard-bitten mouths. Glasses and two bottles of wine stand on the
table. One of the men slaps down his hand triumphantly and takes a
long swallow of wine on the other side of the cigarette. His
partner looks triumphant too. The other pair protest violently.
It’s about to degenerate into a drunken brawl when a voice yells
out from another room with a half-open door: “Hey, can it out
there! I already told you I need a Number 6 wrench. Move your ass,
one of you.”

The four men start arguing who should do it.
Finally one of them gets up and lurches across the room, kicking
out of the way nuts and bolts and scraps of metal and empty wine
bottles. He stops before a wall covered with hundreds of tools and
makes a fast grab for a wrench. His elbow unhooks other tools,
which clatter to the floor. He ignores them and stumbles over to
the half-opened door.

“Catch!” he mumbles and tosses the wrench
inside. There’s an instant smash and a muffled curse.

“Dumb bastard
(
espèce de connard
).
You
took out the XL3 condenser. No more spares either. And with a
transfer coming up.”

The Four look at one another in disbelief. Sadie
gives another of her sharp scandalized gasps as though an elbow has
been jammed into her solar plexus.

“My God,” says Margaret, weepily.

“Another farce,” says Helen.

“It has come to this,” murmurs Advocate,
shaking his white head.

“Transfer too lies beyond my area of
competence,” says Sub-Prefect Marchini.

“As well I know,” says Advocate. “Alas,
alas.”

The enraged voice inside resumes.

“And, hey, this ain’t a Number 6 wrench like
I said. It’s a number 9 wrench. You do everything upside down,
shit-head.”

“Wait a second,” says Louis. “These here
lushes are the ones supposed to transfer us? That the idea?”

“Transfer proceedings will be undertaken
only after the technicians have returned to a reasonably normal
state,” says Advocate.

Her eyes bulging with outrage, Sadie obtains
from Sub-Prefect Marchini permission to intervene and establish
order. The secret spectators behind glass see her storm into the
room and halt, arms akimbo, before the four men at the table.

“
What are you doing! Cease immediately!
Drinking and smoking are strictly forbidden, as you well
know.
You will be
reported.”