GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (35 page)

And next to it, at last, after so long,
separated a lifetime from it, the
porte-cochere
like the entrance to a fortress, badly distorted
but unmistakable. Behind it, he knows, is the paved courtyard and
the shop with the faded scrolled
Tailleur pour Messieurs et Dames
and maybe his sweetheart
waiting for him in front of it.

He peers at the door and recognizes the pattern of
scratches. Everything is intact like the neighing horse head and
the bouquet of white roses. Why marvel at it, though? No time has
gone by. He himself had gone by, unfaithful to it in his first
lifetime, but back to it now, back to that original time,
everything ageless like the things in the mid-century street, no
time for the white roses in the florist’s window to lose a single
petal.

His rigid finger approaches the door button.
Poorly focused, it resembles an excited nipple.

Instead of contact and the massive door
clicking free in welcome, he finds himself back to starting point,
standing on what he’d taken for the chalked church diagram. But the
cold isn’t as intense. The focus is better. The buildings don’t
heave as badly. There’s a hint of color now. Technical adjustments
back there must be improving things here. Finally, he’s grateful
for the replay. He wants Marie-Claude sharply focused and in
color.

He moves forward in the sharpening
Rue du
Regard
, happy at the
sight of the peasant lass bordered by almost-red roses. He goes
past unmistakable eels and heaped mussels with sprigs of
almost-green parsley. The happy cows on the Camembert lids are
visible. Now the golden horse head, not quite true gold yet. Now
the porte-cochere.

He touches the doorbell. The heavy door
buzzes open a fraction of an inch.

Push it and he’s certain to see her there
framed in the doorway with her shiny ponytail and large brown eyes
and gold crucifix and her modest blouse with a round white
high-buttoned collar, long satiny white sleeves buttoned at the
wrists, the bodice covered with black lace.

He reaches out and finds himself back to
the
marelle
again
with no technical justification for it this time. Color and focus
are no better. If anything, a little worse.

It goes on and on like that. He hears the
responsive buzz of the bell and the liberating click of the lock.
His hand moves toward the massive door to push it open on her and
he’s returned to the
marelle
. Then he pitches forward again in diminishing hope past
the blurred antique shop and fish store and
crèmerie
and flower shop and horse head to the door
clicking open. Then back again in despair to the
Marelle.

Finally he decides to stop. He discovers
he can’t, no way to stop the torturing shuttle. He’s lost control
over his body except for a few seconds of freedom in the
marelle
. He
tries to keep standing there. But it’s as though invisible strings
are attached to his limbs and a giant hand manipulating him into
jerky puppet movements forward: antique shop, fish store, boxes of
cheese, white bouquet of roses, horse head, button, door clicking
open, back to the
marelle
.

At what must be the thousandth repetition, going
past the
crèmerie
, less distorted on this trip, he has a
confused memory that somebody back there will do him a favor if he
brings back a nice ripe Camembert. Do me a favor, do me a favor
now, let the door open for me. He grabs the round wooden box with a
cow on the lid.

No favor. The pendular journey to nowhere
and back goes on and on. Before the door he tries to cry out to his
sweetheart: open the door, open the door, I can’t do it. His voice
is tiny and squeaky, the ghost of a voice. The voice of a
ghost?

Everything starts flickering like a silent
film. The time-compressed alternations of night and day? It seems
to him that days then whole seasons are going by in acceleration as
he shuttles back and forth from the
marelle
to his sweetheart’s door. He imagines forsythias
blooming yellow in public squares and fading; July rockets bursting
and fading too; riverside trees rusting; shop-windows celebrant
with tinsel. The neighing horse head comes and goes like an
unmerry-go-round horse.

When he pictures the tipsy imbecilic crowd
celebrating the same old New Year another idea occurs to him (it’s
about time): a way to stop the unmerry-go-round. The idea begins
with questions.

Why is he always plunked down on
the
marelle
?

Why is he always granted two seconds of control over
his limbs before the twitching strings force him forward?

Doesn’t it have a hidden meaning?

By now he knows the
marelle
by heart. First, corresponding to the
entrance of a church, the half-moon marked
Terre
on which he stands for two free seconds before the
puppet strings yank him away. Then the row of single numbered
squares (1, 2, 3) forming the nave. Then two numbered squares (4,
5) side-by-side forming the arm of the cross, the transept. And
then the apse, the part of the church with the altar where the holy
mysteries are performed, capped by an arc marked
Enfer
(Hell) bordering dangerously on
another arc, even narrower, marked
Ciel
(Heaven)

What are the rules of the game? He recalls an old
photo of his sweetheart, heartbreaking at seven, in a summer frock,
hopping serious-faced on her left foot on the
Ciel
segment
of a
marelle
, her thin bare arms flung out gracefully for
balance. He distinctly remembers having kissed the photo, seventeen
years later, and saying to her: “I wish I had known you then.” But
half a century after, he can’t salvage her explanations of the
rules. All he recalls is that you have to hop from square to square
without touching a line, skip over Hell and end up in Heaven.

Jerked away again, his two seconds of free
will on
Terre
over,
pulled past twisted blurred antiques, eels, cheese, bouquets, etc,
he thinks he understands that if he can hop correctly in all of the
numbered squares without touching a line, skip over
Enfer
and land in
Ciel
, somehow he’ll be rewarded by the door opening to
him on Marie-Claude, prelude to the supreme reward of Marie-Claude
herself opening to him. It’s like a parody of one of those
redoubtable challenges testing the mettle of a mythological hero
with a princess as recompense. But instead of coping with
multi-headed dragons or endless shitty stables, he, Seymour Stein,
no mythological hero, is supposed to hop successfully on a
marelle
.

In a way, though, it’s a more daunting challenge
than dragon slaying. The squares, as he can see, had been obviously
traced by a child’s hand, to fit a child’s small agile foot. With
his number 12 gunboats, he’d have no more than a fraction of an
inch leeway between the lines. And he’s weak and dizzy. What’s the
price of failure? He’ll soon find out.

His features intent, elbows jutting out like
chicken-wings, gripping the Camembert, he launches one-footed onto
Square 1.

Miracle! Success!

Arms flailing to maintain balance, he aims
himself at Square 2.

Waterloo.

He’s yanked away from the
marelle
.

Back, he hops and hops and is yanked and yanked.

He tries hundreds, thousands, perhaps
hundreds of thousands of times but he never gets further than
Square 3, not until the miraculous apparition.

That happens maybe years later, for seasons
have gone by, he thinks, marked by the changing bouquets of the
flower shop as he hops and hops, shuttles and shuttles, Square 2,
April daffodils, hop hop, Square 1, the door, Square 3, May tulips,
hop hop the door, the horse head round and round, Square 1, hop
hop, June roses, high summer, no Rs in the months, no more oysters
in the fish store, hop hop, Square 2, All Saints Day
chrysanthemums, hop hop, door, holly-wreaths now, the door, always
the same, the door he can never open, hop hop hop hop, no hope,
hope, hope.

Finally, blubbering and delirious in front
of that heaving door, he begs Marie-Claude to help him, meaning by
Marie-Claude his firm-breasted sweetheart on the other side of the
door, meaning by help that she should open it for him.

That doesn’t happen.

But back on the
marelle
he feels the presence of the earlier version of
her, his bare-armed seven-year-old darling. Now he actually sees
her (the old photo real) standing on Square 2 looking over her
shoulder at him stranded on
Terre
.
She leads him on, encouraging him by her example, hopping expertly
from square to square. Miraculously he follows in her sure
footstep.

She stands graceful and triumphantly
one-footed in the safe middle of
Ciel
, smiling at him, urging him on.

In his hurry to join her (but will there
be room for the two of them in
Ciel
?) he slips, on sudden dog-shit probably, and sprawls, body
violating all those lines, his palms and face squarely in
Enfer
.

He calls out to her to help him but she’s gone, her
task completed, he understands, having lured him into
Enfer
with the perspective of reunion with her in
Ciel
.

With that realization he suffers dissociation. One
Seymour Stein remains prostrated on the Marelle while another
Seymour Stein, the unwilling half-block commuter, is yanked to his
feet and manipulated into the pendulum journey again.

He realizes that there’ll be no end to the
approach to the massive door, which will never open on her. He
realizes that Advocate has lied, the Review Board has ruled on his
case and that he’s been exited, not to blessed void, but to Hell.
After a quarter of a century in the antechamber to it he’s squarely
in the inner circle of Hell, a private Hell of course, as all Hells
must be, no communal bonfire affair, but custom-tailored to the
solitary sinner.

He understands
now why he’s made to see the street as through distorted glass and
will go on seeing it that way for all eternity. Yes, the warp is
inner, producing a hyperbolic metaphor of his distorted vision of
things back in that distant first life when he’d sacrificed his
flesh-and-blood darling for shrunken black-and-white reproductions
processed through glass three times: her image belittled and
reversed by the Zeiss-Tessar f3.5 lens of the Voigtländer reflex,
bounced off the flip-up mirror onto the ground-glass view-finder.
He’d left the real Marie-Claude in France to try to peddle her
one-dimensional and colorless to publishers in New York and had
lost her that way. In his memory she’d been reduced to a dead faded
butterfly beneath glass.

The cold intensifies, turns fluid like
liquid nitrogen, penetrating him to the bone.
Absolute zero for an absolute zero.
At any moment won’t he freeze
into a vitreous statue of futility, topple and smash into a
thousand glass fragments?

While one Seymour Stein shuttles to and
fro, the Seymour Stein sprawled facedown on the
marelle
rolls over on his back and appeals to the
empty gray sky for mercy.

An instant merciless voice booms from
above. “
YOU
!”

It is the Almighty Himself, about to give vent to
His ire and pronounce judgment on him. Seymour quakes as the
celestial voice thunders:

“
You! YOU dumb bastard. You’ve
fucked it up
!”

Oh he knows that, knows that! Fucked up everything
in his first life and this one too. But isn’t that peculiar
language for the Almighty? And conveyed by a proletarian Paris
accent.

Now another voice, truly Godlike in
intonation despite a pronounced Corsican accent:
“
Imbécile! Crétin! You are exiting them! Bring them
back instantly!
”

In extreme mental confusion, Seymour Stein wants to
tell the Almighty that yes, he’s an imbecile and a cretin and worse
and that yes he fucks up everything, always has, but that he’s not
exiting anybody, isn’t guilty of that at least, has no power or
will to do that, no cruel power or will either to bring anybody,
not even his worst enemy, back from the enviable dead.

Before he can voice his defense he’s dunked
into void.

Chapter 37

Dead Flies

When Seymour Stein opens his eyes he’s
still flat on his back, not freezing on a
marelle
in a distorted street as in that terrible dream,
but lying on the medical wheeled couch in a big bare room.
Somewhere a leaking faucet goes
pong … pong … pong
at long regular intervals. A dream, he
keeps telling himself until he becomes aware of the throbbing ache
of his right ankle and the box of Camembert he’s gripping. It
stinks.

Next to him are three wheeled couches with
the other voyagers on their backs. He listens first to Margaret and
then to Louis telling their story in a whisper as flat and gray as
the cracked ceiling they seem to be telling it to. They tell it
with long pauses, the silence measured by a pong, sometimes two.
There’s no grief or terror in their matter-of-fact account. It’s as
though they’d been drained of all emotion out there or stunned out
of it. Seymour is able to supply the missing grief and terror to
their stories which are basically his own, just the object of
desire differing.