GOOD AMERICANS GO TO PARIS WHEN THEY DIE (39 page)

Opposite him in another iron chair an elegantly
attired old gentleman with a flowery white beard is quietly
snoring. He wears a pince-nez and a straw hat with a black band.
His buttonhole displays a decoration resembling a miniature red
fez. The overall impression of dignity is marred by his shiny black
shoes, which stand unlaced to one side of his stocking feet.

Louis is on the point of following suit and
liberating his own aching feet when a big white splotch silently
appears on the old man’s left shoe.

The old gentleman reacts instantly. His head
jerks back, beard jutting out aggressively. His pince-nez catches
the light of the sky in a twin glare as though the lenses were
emitting rays. A few seconds later a pigeon plops down in front of
his stocking feet and doesn’t move. The old gentleman stares down
at it vindictively and mutters: “Pigeons, pigeons, bad mistake.
Doves yes, certainly doves, but not pigeons, terrible mistake.”

Strangely, Louis understands the irascible
old gentleman perfectly, yet he can’t say he’d spoken in English,
or in French, for that matter. Whatever, if Louis understands he’ll
be understood. He knows he wants to ask a question. But his head is
aching and whirling so badly that all he can recall is the quest
for a sloping street.

Why though?

He makes a terrific effort and remembers
the quest for a river, but can’t go beyond it. He doesn’t know why
he wants the river, can’t remember it’s for a bridge to see the
right spire to get to the Embassy to get to the street with the
flower shop
between the
toyshop and the corset shop
to give his sweetheart the gold ring.

He gets up with difficulty and approaches.
The splotch of white has strangely vanished from the old
gentleman’s left shoe. There’s a peculiar smell of incense, struck
sulfur matches and burned feathers. His dizziness worsens. He’s
barely able to bring out: “Sir, please, where is the river?”

“The liver? Where is the liver? Where I
placed it, of course, in the upper left-hand side of the thorax,
between the pancreas and the lung.”

Louis repeats his question much louder:
“River, sir, river, where is the river?”

“Why are you shouting? River. The river. Why
didn’t you speak up and say so in the first place instead of
mumbling?” The irascible old gentleman glares at Louis and then
points at the exit.

“Upon leaving the park, as you shall do
immediately, you will turn right, then right again and a third time
right. Then you will continue straight on, never left, never right,
but straight on until you reach the river. Do you understand?”

Louis nods fearfully. It seems more like a
command than information.

“Straight on, straight on, deviating neither
to the left nor to the right. The way is sometimes narrow but is
true.”

The old gentleman makes a dismissive gesture
and closes his eyes.

Unsteady on his feet, head whirling, Louis
longs to return to his iron chair but doesn’t dare disobey the
injunction. “Thank you, sir, thank you, thank you,” he stammers to
the snoring old gentleman and leaves the elegant public garden,
trying to recall why it’s so important for him to get down to the
river.

In Cubicle 3, time running out, Margaret
tries again to conjure up Notre Dame Cathedral, the most celebrated
and holy of Parisian landmarks. As once before, she manages the
postcard outside, those sooty spires and gargoyles and flying
buttresses, but inside is what she wants, to implore the Lord for
permanent release from the Prefecture.

The image of inside doesn’t come. It’s been
so long since she visited a church that the wellspring of sacred
images has dried up. She’s sure she is going to be subjected to
more distortion and torture.

But when the door buzzes open she steps out
of bureaucratic dust and gloom into religious dust and gloom,
soaring arches, incense, niched saints, stained-glass windows, soft
organ chords.

The presence of the Lord is overwhelming.
Eyes brimming, she halts abruptly and sinks to her knees. Before
she can formulate her supplicating question(s) somebody barges into
her from behind and sends her sprawling. A testy quavering voice
admonishes: “Woman, signal your intention to stop and kneel.
Moreover, the nave is
not
a kneeling
station. There are any number of appropriate kneeling stations
here.”

She picks herself up, robbed of God’s
presence by the impact and the trivial scolding voice. She sees a
white-bearded old man, still muttering, rubbing his thigh, and
hobbling into a side pew.

Margaret quits the nave and poses her
questions to the Lord in various appropriate side-aisle stations,
kneeling before stone saints, before Christ on his Cross, before
banks of lighted tapers dedicated to the blue and white effigy of
the Mother of God. She (Margaret) doesn’t dare hope for vocal
manifestation of the Divine. She’s unworthy of such direct
communication, she knows. Moreover, she imagines that God can only
vocalize in thunder. Dreaded “No!” to her question lends itself
more naturally to that mode of expression than yearned-for
“Yes.”

Instead, the message would be transmitted by
subtle signs. Perhaps the hint of a smile on the plaster lips of
the Mother of God. Or a softening of the suffering expression of
Her Son on the Cross, of the stony expression of the saints. Or a
heavenward leap of those static taper flames. She might even be
picked out by a sudden beam of religiously colored light – violet
or purple – from the stained-glass window, the organ swelling into
a crashing triumphant chord.

Any of these signs would signify “Yes” to
the question, “May I stay out here in Paris, not be pulled back to
the Prefecture?” and, failing response to that question, “Yes” to
the next-best question, “Should I dance for the Prefect? Dance in
order to allow Seymour and Max and Helen and Louis to be
transferred into happiness and myself too transferred, not for
selfish happiness but to minister in black to the little monsters,
the halt, the blind, the dying, to save Jean Hussier from despair?
Should I dance for the Prefect for these self-sacrificing things
and more, much more?”

She poses these questions in ardent whispers
over and over in station after station. The saintly visages remain
petrified. There’s no alteration to the lips of the Mother of God,
no abatement of the expression of suffering of her Son. The organ
goes on muttering to itself. The taper flames don’t budge. No
colored beam transfigures her.

Margaret turns back to the nave in search of
the brutally interrupted sense of Divine Presence. She glances
fearfully behind her. Seeing no one, she sinks to her knees and
repeats her imploring questions. She gets no response. No sign, no
voice, no sound except for the introspective organ and a faint
snoring from a slumped figure in a pew.

The organ hushes. Back turned on the tapers
and the stained glass window, she breathes in choking dust. That
and the silence and dank gloom reminds her unbearably of the
Prefecture. Hungering for sunshine, she arises and walks toward the
padded door. A bejeweled lady pulls it open from outside and for a
second Margaret sees behind her a fountain with a jet of water
splashing into the brimming bronze basin and a tree green against
blue sky with a pigeon alighting on a branch, spread wings backlit
and incandescent.

The door closes behind the elegant lady. She
halts before a poor box with photos of gnawed lepers, fumbles in
her purse and extracts a coin, which she holds benevolently over
the box, her small finger crooked as at tea. The coin tinkles into
the box and she enters the merited space of piety.

At the sight, Margaret, in another
illumination, understands her recent failure. Her promises of
selfless acts are just words, undeserving of reply. She’s being
tested and tried here and now for acts, not words.

Margaret acts. She slips a fifty-franc note
into the box, one thousand times the expensively dressed woman’s
stingy five-centime contribution. The residual faces of the lepers
on the photos acknowledge nothing, naturally. Margaret longs to do
good to gratefully responsive flesh-and-blood sufferers outside.
She pulls out of her bag the remaining banknotes and pushes the
padded door open.

Out of the traffic cacophony three
automobile horns emerge and collaborate on a triumphant triad as
Margaret Williams is transfigured by sunlight into real life for
the first time since death. She feels gloriously naked, clothed in
nothing but sunshine. It caresses her offered body to a glow,
quickens her blood, surely red now, past her inner ear with the
sound of the sea.

At the sight of the striking young woman
standing on the church steps with her lovely radiant face and fiery
hair and breasts straining against tight silk, a passing young man
immobilizes into a statue. The handsome statue smiles at her.

Frightened at that wrong sign which
dangerously defines where she is as a space of desire instead of a
space of sacrifice, Margaret censors her heart. Scowling at the
handsome young man and clutching the banknotes, she steps out of
the sunshine into shade.

Margaret wanders about in search of visible
suffering, easy to find, she imagines, in the depression-stricken
Paris of 1937. She encounters nothing but block after block of
cruel opulence: powerful motorcars, distinguished façades, elegant
understated shop-windows, and, in perfect harmony with all this,
impeccably smart men and stylish women.

Finally she catches sight of an authentic
sufferer, thank God for that. Twisted and shabby between crutches,
the cripple swings himself with incredible speed away from her.
Margaret breaks into a stuttering high-heeled run down the
strangely familiar street, trying to narrow the gap between her and
the indispensable object of charity.

The gap widens. She halts, bends down and
removes her hobbling shoes. She runs much faster now in her
stocking feet, holding the shoes in one hand and the banknotes in
the other, but still outstripped by the piston-strokes of those
overcompensated arms. Stared at by the pitilessly well-dressed
passersby, she cries out (in English for she’s reverted back to
pre-mortem ignorance of French): “Stop! Stop!”

Margaret trips and sprawls. By the time she
picks herself up, panting, the cripple has disappeared. She sobs
“Where are you, goddam you?” and resumes her pursuit of salvation
with bleeding palms and soles and wild red hair.

She reaches a side street and sees the
cripple there, working himself into a tiny wooden stall, a lottery
stall, next to, oh God, can it be
l’Assiette Bleue
? The white-and-blue corner plaques confirm that
she’s standing in the
Rue de l’Assumption
, looking down the
Rue du Docteur Blanche
, at the four-star restaurant where Jean
had taken her so often back then, at the corner of his tiny street,
the
Rue
Mallet Stevens
with the elegant private two-story dwelling and its quietly
superior flower-beds and wrought-iron railing.

A sign! A sign from the All High! She
slips her shoes back on and stutters up the
Rue du Docteur Blanche
to the lottery stall, crudely
decorated with garish stars, ringed planets and smiling suns.
There’s also a Wheel of Fortune. She almost throws the wad of bank
notes at the wizened cripple, exclaiming “For you, for you, God
bless you!” and then runs past the restaurant and turns into a
mistake, an impossibly long street with no sign of an elegant
private two-story dwelling and its quietly superior flower-beds and
wrought-iron railing.

The blue-and-white corner plaque
says
Rue de
l’Yvette
. But that’s not
possible. The
Rue de l’Yvette
is the street after Jean’s street.

What’s happened to the
Rue Mallet
Stevens
, Jean’s
street?

The cripple leans out of his stall, brandishing
lottery tickets and yelling incomprehensible things at her as she
hurries away in bewildered search of the missing street.

Chapter 40

What They Find

Seymour can hear the grunts of his pursuers
as he stumbles into the gloomy cover of the first trees, wasting
precious breath – each possibly his last – calling for frail and
perhaps unborn Helen to rescue him. He flounders forward through
the knee-deep confusion of decaying branches. Brambles tear his
face. A giant spider web blinds him. He trips on a root and pitches
forward into stunning encounter with a tree-trunk. Clasping it, he
sinks to his knees in the rotten branches. The guttural jubilation
behind him fades and so does the light above him. The smell of rot
is the last sensation he holds onto before he sinks into
blackness.

When Seymour emerges, he’s still on his
knees, embracing, but embracing the protective iron corset of a
curbside sapling instead of the great tree that had nearly brained
him. The roar of traffic is in his ears instead of his pursuers’
murderous jubilation. He understands that the drunken transfer
technicians had snatched him forward in the nick of time.

Brushing ancient spider webs out of his
eyes, expelling rotten air from his lungs, Seymour pulls himself
erect. He wipes blood, red, not gray, off his face. The passersby
are dressed in mid-century fashion. Mid-century Renaults and
Citroëns rattle past. He limps over to the newspaper kiosk for
confirmation. In the headlines of the
France-Soir
of
June
5, 1951 the Chinese are still counterattacking in Korea, the Viet
Cong infiltrating in Indochina.